Wise Follies (14 page)

I pick up a snail that is munching on a nasturtium and think of James Mitchel. Maybe I was hoping that James Mitchel would bash down that door and find me. Find me the way Aaron did when we played hide and seek. Aaron always managed to seek me out, even in the most unlikely places. I don’t think anyone will ever search so hard for me again. Search to see the truth of me. Who I really am. I put on so many disguises these days only a keen eye could see through them. Sometimes they even fool me.

Eamon does not know any of this and I will never tell him. He is in such deep disguise himself that he wouldn’t really understand. If I ever speak to him of James Mitchel it will be as an anecdote. I’ll describe what happened in a way that would make him laugh. You know you’re getting older when you bear your scars as funny stories. You try to laugh and laugh at the things that once made you cry. You even dress up the details for dinner parties, digging into your store of broken dreams, finding the comic detail that will twist them into absurdity. And yet every time I do this I know something very precious is getting lost. That it is watching, anguished, as it sees itself misrepresented. I suppose one of the things I fear is that one day it may turn away and not watch at all. That it will leave me, and only the laughter will remain. Many of my dreams are already beginning to seem silly, but what is there to replace them? And how did they start anyway, where did they come from? I dearly wish I knew. Maybe that is why I sometimes dip into the past for clues, try to see the clear beginnings. And yet more often it feels like I am walking through a wood of memories, completely lost.

I run my hand over the wet part of my T-shirt. I must go inside and change. I’m getting far too introspective lately. Eamon wouldn’t approve of it at all. He doesn’t believe the unexamined life is not a fully lived one. He seeks distraction like Mira. Maybe they’re both right. In fact if I do marry Eamon it is just possible that I’ll take up golf. Eamon says trying to get small balls into tiny holes in the distance is very therapeutic. And then of course there’d be the gin and tonics later in the clubhouse with men in brightly coloured jumpers. I wonder what the women wear. Slacks, I suppose, not jeans.

I used to be so dismissive of golf, but I’m not so much anymore. I used to see it as a kind of emotional bunker, but maybe we all do feel stuck in some bunker in a way. We get out our sand wedges and try to soar on to the green. The grit flies, but the ball often doesn’t move that far. Maybe there is a certain wisdom in accepting the situation. Trying to make the best of it.

I leave my container of slugs and snails by the door for relocation to the park later. Then I go inside. I see that Mira is busy in the sitting-room. She’s making a ‘grass skirt’ for her South Seas Club meeting. She is using green crepe paper and seems very contented. In fact she’s smiling.

‘Why are you smiling, Mira?’ I ask.

She looks up at me cheerfully. ‘I was just remembering how Frank used to sniff.’

‘Did he? I didn’t know that.’

‘Oh, yes, when he got excited about something, he’d sniff most persistently.’ She’s started to giggle. ‘There was no need for it. It was just a habit. It sounded so funny.’ She’s started to laugh. I try to join her. She’s turning Frank into an anecdote. Soon he’ll be a story she tells at dinner parties. Not her lost love at all.

After I’ve chortled with Mira about Frank’s sniff for the appropriate length of time I go into my room and change my T-shirt. Since I seem to be in a rather Cyril mood this evening I decide to distract myself by doing something practical. It’s high time I got rid of some of the clutter that’s been accumulating under my bed and I might as well do it now.

I thought it was all files of old newspaper clippings I’d kept as background research for articles, but it turns out that it isn’t. Because among the first things that I find is a picture of Aaron and myself eating sticks of candy floss. I recognize the location immediately. It was taken when we were on holiday with my parents in a small seaside village. The time we stayed in the ‘B&B with the bouncing bedsprings’.

I tear it up and put it in the bin along with a review of a book called
Nasty Men: How to Stop Being Hurt by Them Without Stooping to Their Level
. There is no way I want to be reminded of that seaside holiday, even though it spawned numerous family anecdotes in later years. There came a point at which my mother was even able to laugh about meeting Gilbert, her first love, as we walked along the strand. ‘Do you remember, Alice, you thought he was wearing a dress?’ she’d say and my father would look at her warmly and we’d all have a little giggle. But I don’t want to think about all that now. I toss out a feature called ‘Are Men Necessary?’ and another about sperm banks. I pause briefly to look at an article about why an English dictionary dropped the term ‘New Man’ from their listings. They decided there weren’t any. I could have told them that.

By the end of the evening the clutter under my bed has filled up one large black rubbish bag. I look at it smugly. Throwing out things you don’t need can be so satisfying. Of course next week I’ll probably find that I need one of those clippings, but you can’t hold on to everything. You have to make space for things. Maybe you have to make space for new dreams as well.

It’s time for bed. I wash and undress quickly, then I curl under the duvet cosily. The cat is lying at my feet and I feel rather privileged. This is a new thing for him. He’s definitely getting tamer. He doesn’t jump off the bed when I move, like he used to. His deep contented purring is very restful. I wonder if he will ever let us pet him. It would be so nice. I close my eyes, intent on drifting off to a deep and dreamless sleep, but I start to doze instead. And as I do so the picture I tore up, the picture of Aaron and myself eating candy floss, starts to float in front of me, stubbornly intact. It’s awakening memories I wanted to forget. I turn over, trying to shake them off, but they will not go away. Half asleep, I am drifting back in time, even though I do not want to. I can see Gilbert and the way my mother looked at him. I can feel the seaspray as Aaron and I scampered on the sand. I can see Posy and Tarquin looking deep into each other’s eyes. In fact the memory of that seaside holiday is now so startlingly clear that I can almost hear the bouncing bedsprings.

They were ‘at it like rabbits’ – the couple who ran the B&B in the coastal village we’d all gone to for a ‘bit of peace’. Aaron had come with us. I was eight at the time and I shared a bunk with him in a small room. The couple in the next room, Mr and Mrs Allen, the B&B’s owners, fascinated us. They bounced up and down on their bed far more than Aaron and I had ever done. And they speeded up real fast before they stopped. Mrs Allen made great big yelps in the middle and Mr Allen grunted. ‘They’re having sex,’ Aaron said.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘I’m not sure, but I know it’s noisy,’ Aaron replied. It became clear that my parents had also heard the sounds of passion from the flinty look Mum gave Mrs Allen when she asked her how she liked her egg.

Mr and Mrs Allen seemed to like each other a lot. Sometimes, when Mrs Allen was going upstairs with a pile of clean washing, I’d see Mr Allen giving her bottom a quick pinch and she’d squeal with indignation and delight. When I told my father about it he said that kind of thing happened when you were newly married. Romantic love only tended to last about four years, he said. You had to find a new kind of love after that, if you could, but it didn’t tend to be ‘so giggly or obvious’.

‘What is romantic love?’ I asked him. ‘That,’ he’d said, pointing to the cover of a slim novel my mother was reading. It was called
Moonlight
and the cover featured a man and woman who looked like they wanted to eat each other. He was handsome and she was beautiful. Their skin was tanned and they were staring deep into each other’s eyes. There were foreign-looking flowers in the foreground.

Mum only read that kind of book on holiday. I turned it over and read the big bright words on the back: ‘When Posy first met Tarquin Galbraith, the dashing millionaire oil tycoon, she disliked him immediately. With his thrusting arrogance and glinting dark eyes he…’ Then my mother appeared and said, ‘Give me that, Alice,’ rather brusquely, so I never found out why Posy had obviously come to find Tarquin Galbraith less repellent.

We had some sunny days on that holiday, but there were some damp grey drizzly ones too. The kind that can make one traipse off to places and then, having traipsed there, sit down and stare out of cafe windows for rather too long. Aaron and I would, frankly, have been far less fidgety if we had been allowed to stay in the B&B’s cheery sitting-room and watch TV, but my parents did not approve of that kind of aimlessness on holidays, so we had to go along with their adult type of aimlessness instead. It was on one of these days that we met Gilbert, my mother’s first love.

It happened after Dad had poured himself four cups of tea from the Seaview Restaurant’s capacious cream teapot. When he tried to extract a fifth just a dark brown stewed dribble emerged. Aaron and I had long since finished our fizzy orange drinks and had started to campaign for candy floss. ‘Oh, all right,’ Dad had sighed, lifting his mac wearily off the back of a bentwood chair.

My mother, who had been reading ‘Stress. Ten tips to help you relax’ in her women’s magazine, also rose and then we spent some minutes hunting for a bag of pot-pourri she’d bought and which eventually turned up in Dad’s pocket.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d taken it?’ she’d demanded. ‘Why didn’t you?’ And, as we trudged along the seafront her words seemed to follow us and generalize, until I began to wonder if our neighbour was remembering to feed my tortoise. Then Aaron shouted that he thought he’d seen a humpback whale, and we didn’t wait to hear someone say that this was most unlikely, but scampered over to where the sand was wet. And standing there with him it suddenly didn’t matter that the day was wet and damp and drizzly and that though we stared for ages we didn’t see a ‘cetaceous mammal’, as it was called in one of Aaron’s big books. The wind was fresh and was blowing all that didn’t matter from us. It was full of lovely sea smells and helping to turn the waves into white horses with flying manes.

I wrote ‘Alice’ and he wrote ‘Aaron’ in the wet sand with a stick. We found a huge rock pool and stared in at the anemones and crabs and shrimps and fish. We’d almost forgotten we weren’t on our own when my parents called us.

‘Did you see the whale then?’ my father smiled. We didn’t answer. I looked at my mother. Her face seemed frozen. She was staring at a man who was walking towards us. Then she turned around and started to scurry off in the opposite direction.

‘Frances,’ Dad called after her. ‘Frances, the B&B’s this way.’ She didn’t seem to hear him. She darted into a concrete shelter, which I knew from my explorations contained a long wooden bench.

‘Did I say anything?’ Dad addressed me perplexedly. ‘What on earth made her rush off like that?’ And then, looking up at the man who had now almost reached us, he knew.

‘Hello – er – Gilbert,’ he said.

‘Hello – er – Benny,’ the man replied.

The interesting thing about Gilbert was that he seemed to be wearing a brown dress. I could just see the hem of it peeping out from under his big grey mac. He had a long serious face, windswept dark hair, big eyebrows and eyes as brown as my father’s fifth cup of tea. They grew even darker, yet somehow more shiny, when they looked past us and saw my mother, who was now emerging from her concrete shelter and approaching us with an expression I suspected she’d been practising. Even though I was only eight I knew that, sometimes, one needed to go away and prepare a face for certain situations, such as being called upon to explain why one had scrawled ‘Monsieur Thibaud is a nit’ on the underside of one’s desk. But I couldn’t work out what it was about Gilbert that had made this necessary.

‘Hello, Gilbert,’ Mum had said, holding out her hand in a jolly fashion. ‘How strange bumping into you here. Are you on holiday?’

And the conversation went on like this for some ruthlessly cheerful moments until Mum said, ‘Well, Benny, we’d better be off, if we’re going to – you know…’

‘Yes, indeed,’ my father agreed forcefully.

‘Bye then,’ Gilbert said.

‘Yes, bye then,’ Mum replied. And we set off at such a brisk pace away from him it began to feel like a getaway.

‘Why are we rushing?’ I asked.

‘Be quiet, Alice,’ Dad replied. And when I looked at Mum I saw her eyes were shiny, but not in the way Gilbert’s had been. My mother wanted to cry. She looked so sad. So full of yearning. Once she looked back quickly, wistfully, at Gilbert as he walked away in the opposite direction. ‘She doesn’t want him to go,’ I thought. ‘She wants to be with him. With him instead of us.’ I reached out and held her hand tightly.