Chapter 4 - Toni's hippie sister approves

Jez has no sense of time. She has little sense of anything, but she does have a wildly fulfilling relationship with the earth. She lives in West Wales because, according to her, Wales is a very ancient land. When she shared this with me I couldn’t help but suggest that all the earth was much the same age, which didn’t go down well.

She rang at about five to twelve on a Tuesday night from their local pub. It should have been closing time, only there was no such thing in that place in the back of beyond, where Jez and Steve stayed behind in the bar several nights a week until two or three in the morning. There was no great reason not to – it wasn’t as if either of them had jobs to go to, and the tepee didn’t take a lot of cleaning, especially as they rejected all cleaning preparations on ecological grounds, so that all Jez could do was wave a decaying duster at the mould. Steve didn’t help. His sense of social responsibility didn’t stretch to housework. Or tepee-work. Jez didn’t seem to mind.

“Can I bring my washing over this weekend?”

“Jez, if you truly believe that having a washing machine is wrong, doesn’t it seem a little hypocritical to cross the Severn to use your sister’s?”

“You can just say no. No need to get all superior on me. Anyway I’m coming over to a craft fair, so it’s a two birds with one stone thing, like.”

“I’m not going to say no. You know that. I’ve never said no. Do you want to stay the weekend?”

“Could I? That’d be great.”

Fine. Come on Friday. I’ll be home about six thirty. How’s Steve?”

“Gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Cornwall, I think. Met some girl at Glastonbury and buggered off.”

“Oh, you poor thing! How are you holding up?”

”It’s cool. Things had been a bit tough for a while. We’re better off out of it. It was never supposed to be long-term anyway. Casual. You know.”

It had been casual for six years.

“You poor thing! How are you bearing up?”

“Ok. Yeah, fine. I’ve been doing lots of stuff. Pete paid me to decorate the pub and I’ve started making some wild jewellery.”

“Jewellery?”

“Yeah. Ethical. Reusing. Recycling – that’s the sort of thing. The feathers the hens leave around. I’m dying them and mixing them with clay beads. You’ll love them.”

“Great.”

“I’ve got a pair for you and one for Mum. Which she’ll never wear.”

“Well, feathers and beads. Not really her thing, is it?”

It wasn’t really mine, either.

When I told Simon she was coming for the weekend he groaned.

“Bloody vegan food for forty eight hours then.”

“You don’t have to. I’ll put some sausages in the back of the fridge for you. If you can handle the disapproval.”

“It’s not the disapproval so much as the forgiveness which I find so hard to handle. Being in the presence of goodness is difficult for lesser mortals like me.”

“No Steve though. He’s left her for another woman.”

“I didn’t know tepee dwellers did that sort of thing.”

“Well, this one did. Anyway, you never know. It might have been the tepee and not Jez he left. The other woman might have a cosy semi in Newquay.”

“She’s better off without him. She confuses being committed with being bright. God, wasn’t he the most boring man you’ve ever met? I always wondered what they talked about in the evenings. It wasn’t as if they could watch TV and ignore each other, was it?”

“You mean, like we do?”

“Exactly. Like all normal people do. They couldn’t even read books in winter. Enforced conversation.”

“They went to the pub, silly.”

“Not all night every night. They haven’t got the money. Anyway, I’m glad he’s out of the picture. She might find someone nice now. She might even do something with her life.”

Jez had brought Steve to stay with us on a number of occasions. He had surveyed the house with gloomy disapproval, self-consciously averting his eyes from the television when Simon watched the news, showing no interest in sport and questioning the provenance of every ingredient in our catering. He refused my carefully made lentil curry because I’d used commercial vegetable stock cubes which, he assured me solemnly, was almost certainly “contaminated”. He reluctantly accepted raw celery and carrots even though they weren’t organic, mainly because he would have starved otherwise. We didn’t think he’d ever actually used the bath or the shower when he had visited, and unlike Jez, he foreswore even the washing machine which he regarded as the devil’s invention.

The only time we visited them was for her thirtieth birthday. Anything less significant wouldn’t have merited an invitation. We were invited to bring sleeping bags and doss down on the floor of their tepee but Simon pleaded an old rugby injury and we stayed at the pub in a room with pink nylon flounces, a washbasin and sachets of coffee and tea.

The party at the tepee village was a gentle gathering. People sat around with plates of curried vegetables, children ran wild with snotty noses and joyous shrieks, an old dog slunk around the fire nuzzling in our laps for scraps before walking round itself three times and collapsing into a small circle. Their friends were pleasant and highly pierced, and I wondered what had possessed Jez to choose Steve when there were so many equally committed people with the humour and respect for other people’s lives which Steve so signally lacked. After quite a lot of cider brought by a kindred spirit in an ancient ambulance from an encampment in Somerset, people started playing folk music on recorders and guitars and the less self-conscious among the guests danced. Jez closed her eyes and allowed herself to drift on a cloud of music, cider and spliff. She had exchanged her habitual grey for something floaty and orange, and she wore earrings which jangled tinnily. Normally I count myself as quite an extrovert but here Simon and I were completely out of our depth. We enjoyed ourselves more than we expected to, though, despite the peeing uncomfortably in the woods with serried ranks of others so close that you could hear the hiss and see the steam rising from the earth. But we found the sense of shame of our materialistic lives overwhelming, and on the trip were wholly convinced of our personal responsibility for the ills of the planet. After a couple of days the feeling abated.

It hadn’t always been so. Jez at twenty-two had been quite ordinary, although she’d always held fairly ecologically sound views. Mum was surprised when she came home one day in 1975 and announced that she was vegetarian. Jez (or Jessica as she then was) ate cheese or eggs with her potatoes and veg for ages while we tucked into chops or sausages or mince. Then several years ago she decided that she was vegan and Mum muttered to herself that it was a good thing that Jez was moving out and how long would she keep this up when she had to fend for herself with these funny ideas. She was even a fruitarian for a couple of weeks once, but in the end even Jez wasn’t that committed.

Jez thinks she’s very mystical, although usually when she’s offers some proof of this she’s spectacularly wrong. On Friday night when he arrived Simon had already gone to bed. We sat down with cups of earl grey in the kitchen and she brushed a dirty fingernail over my cheek and said softly,

“You’re hurting, Toni. What about?”

“Nothing major,” I shrugged, “work problems, marital snits. You know. Normal stuff.”

Her face darkened with concern.

“Is he hitting you?”

“God, no! Why?” I looked at her with concern, “Steve didn’t hit you, did he?”

“No,” she shook her head, “Well, not seriously. He has a temper. Sometimes when we were pissed we’d end up having rows and thumping each other, but we were both as bad as each other.”

“My God! I thought you were gentle people!”

“Come on, it’s healthy! We didn’t bottle anything up.”

I watched as she reassured herself of this with a silent nod.

“I can’t imagine Steve showing any sort of emotion.”

“You didn’t like Steve, did you?”

“No, well, we didn’t really inhabit the same planet, did we?”

“You didn’t make it as obvious as Simon though.”

“You don’t exactly hide the fact that you’re not Simon’s greatest fan.”

Her face was a mask of resentment.

“Simon likes you. He just thinks you could do a great deal better than Steve. One of the many up-sides to Steve’s being off the scene is that Simon can get to know you a bit better.”

“Couldn’t be bothered to see me tonight, though, could he?”

“You arrived at eleven. He’s got to go in to the office early tomorrow. Give the man a break. You’ll see loads of him over the weekend when he gets back.”

She nodded, unconvinced and took another sip of tea. Brightening, she smiled at me.

“I can’t believe I haven’t seen you in such a long time!”

“Well, you haven’t been over regularly for ages. We guessed Steve wasn’t too keen on your coming over here.”

“I don’t know. He never really saw the point of leaving the village, except to go and get loaded at the pub. He hates cities. Too many people.”

For a moment she looked wistful, then she smiled.

“So where have you been on holiday since I last saw you? Don’t let me down; you’ve always been somewhere. Photos.”

“Prague, and I’m sure you’d love it. All sorts of Karma.”

She laughed and I went to the dresser to rummage in the drawer which held six years of photos which had never made it into albums. The Prague ones were lying on the top.

As we were flicking through them, she grabbed one and peered at it closely.

“Toni!” she shrieked, “Have you seen this?”

She shook the photo of the little girl on the bridge in front of my face.

“Look! Its whatsisname! The film guy. The one you should have married. What was his name?”

“Marc.” I said.

She peered again.

“It’s a sign.” She said.

“No, it’s not,” I said, “It’s a coincidence. Or, more likely, it’s someone who looks like Marc.”

“Bollocks! It’s him.”

She looked at me, all big mystic eyes.

“You must find him. It’s your destiny.”

As she gazed at me intently across the big solid kitchen table I was torn between a desire to laugh and an inclination to agree.

Chapter 3 - Toni gets hypercritical about her husband

I wandered around in the garden picking up plums from under the tree, putting the good ones in a bucket and throwing the others across the lawn onto the compost pile. Some of them were covered with a shiny film which looked glamorous until you realised it was slug track. It was a clear still day. None of the neighbours were in their gardens and I was singing loudly to myself “I am Woman, hear me roar…” and reflecting that I still had a decent voice. I paused, imagining a head appearing out of a neighbouring window.

“Hey, you over there! What’s that you’re singing?”

“Who? Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“Oh, it’s Helen Reddy’s ‘Woman’. Great song, isn’t it?”

“Yes, and you have a fantastic voice! Look, I’m a record producer and we’re looking for new talent to appeal to the more mature market. Why don’t you come over to my studio and we’ll talk about doing a demo?”

I was embarrassed to realise that I’d actually stopped singing in order to devote myself to my fantasy. I looked around. No sounds apart from a police siren and children somewhere in the next street. At thirty-six I was too old for such thoughts. One’s dreams of being discovered ought to die a graceful death somewhere in the mid-twenties. As I started singing again, I reflected that if a head appeared at a window, I shouldn’t get too excited – its owner would probably be telling me to keep the noise down.

When my bucket was overflowing I took it into the house. I ate seven of the softest plums in quick succession, letting the sticky sweet juice run down my chin and onto my T shirt. I savoured the taste and then splashed cold water onto my face to wash away the evidence. From the sitting room I could hear the strident sound of sports commentary. Simon was sitting in front of the television. The rugby was on and he was asleep. I have never met anyone who sleeps as much as Simon. It is the most irritating thing about him. When I see him sleeping I don’t want to stroke his cheek or tiptoe around him. I want to bring down a heavy object on his head and scream “Wake up!” into his ear. I don’t, of course, because I know that that would be a step too far. And deep down I know that my annoyance has nothing to do with him.

“What’s the score?” I said loudly, slamming the door behind me.

“Uuuh. Don’t know.”

He peered obviously at the tiny score line in the corner of the screen.

“England are winning.”

He straightened himself casually, trying to look as if he had been absolutely engrossed. As if I hadn’t noticed.

“I’ve got the plums in.”

“Oh, good.”

The rugby was the most important thing in his life.

“Do you want some tea?”

“Mmm. That’d be nice.”

The match was too gripping to allow him to glance away for a moment.

“Well, why don’t you go and get some then?” I said ungraciously, and picked up my book.

“Oh, Toni, for God’s sake! Can’t you se I’m watching the rugby?”

“Yes, I noticed. I noticed while I was mowing the lawn, weeding and picking up the plums. I could hear it blaring out of the bloody window. I think you were also watching the rugby while I was making lunch. Oh, no. Silly me. That was the golf.”

No reaction. I hated myself.

When I feel like this about him it’s hard to look at him and believe that sometimes I find him irresistible. It seems unlikely that I should ever slide my hand between his legs as we sit on the sofa and nip with my teeth at his earlobe until he turns to kiss me. I find it unpleasant to think that sometimes we make love there and then because we don’t want to delay for the time it takes to go upstairs. I don’t remember all the times when I look at him while he’s reading and interrupt him to tell him that I love him, or when I find messages on the answer phone telling me he’s going to be late and he misses me. I forget all those companionable, compatible times of our lives and I just see him as something totally foreign to me. It’s at times like this that I make bookings for travel on my own.

Just then, all I could think was that he was utterly, utterly boring, and my marriage was a tragic sham.

“Do you know, I congratulate myself on this relationship. I’m so pleased we decided to make it permanent. It’s so rewarding being with you.”

I was muttering in an ostentatious fashion. He tried stoically to ignore me but it was becoming too difficult even for him.

“What?” he asked patiently.

I looked at him coldly. He is what my mother calls ‘handsome-and-knows-it’. He likes corduroy and brogues. He is gentle and stable and good. He wears a kilt to weddings. He is the kind of person I always imagined I’d marry, totally different to all my other boyfriends. I knew that he’d be a good father when and if the time came.

“I’m bored with this relationship,” I said, and was slightly surprised to hear the words.

He sighed. He does that. His sighs are eloquent. This one was tired and irritated at the perceived needling into a fight and expressed the belief that it must be that time of the month again.

“Why’s that then, sweetie?”

With a monumental effort he angled his body away from the television to face me square on. He put his elbows on his knees and his head on his hands. He looked like a TV psychiatrist. I couldn’t be bothered to have the conversation; I didn’t even feel up to having a proper fight.

“Oh, never mind.” I said, getting up and leaving the room. As I closed the door behind me I heard the TV volume increase.

I didn’t mind. Some days I minded desperately when we argued. I would stage elaborate exits to make a point. The idea was that he should chase after me, should be all solicitude, asking for forgiveness for his perceived misdemeanours, begging me to come back to bed or wherever the row had taken place. If he didn’t I would be all knotted up and would end up going back to hug his sleeping body if it was night or apologise profusely if it was day. Now, though, I genuinely didn’t mind.

I made jam. I never, ever make jam. It’s too homely an activity – doesn’t strike the right note for the image of myself which I wish to cultivate. But I had to be away from him. I couldn’t get my book, because it was in there with him. I know myself – I would have been forced to launch another barb in his direction and then I’d just get even more irritated. I could have gone out but I had no money because my bag was in there too. And there was the basket of plums on the kitchen table. It held more than I could use for stewing, pies or crumble. So I made plum jam. Rather horrifyingly, I enjoyed it. The hot, syrupy smell of the bubbling fruit tasted better than the jam ever would. As I put my face over the pan and closed my eyes to sniff at my creation, the steam condensed on my face.

I went into the garden and lay on the grass. The wood pigeon in the top of the oak tree next door bridled and cooed and the leaves shuddered as he launched himself into the air. The ice-cream van’s jaunty tune came closer and then faded away. I concentrated on all the other sounds but I could still hear Grandstand.

Chapter 2 - Toni meets Marc

I saw him outside a bar. There was a basketball hoop on the wall and he and a friend were shooting at it. As I passed by he threw the ball straight in.

“Nice shot!” I said, and I smiled.

Later he approached my friend and me at the bar and asked if he could sit with us. There was a soccer match on the TV set in the corner. I can’t remember why I’d gone to watch a soccer match in a bar. It’s not really my thing, but there you go. Karma. There was a crowd of us and it was very rowdy. We drank a lot and became quite flirtatious.

He was a kind of a challenge. I’d seen him around the college, brandishing his little cine-camera, absorbed in observation. He was quiet and preppy, whereas I was revolutionary in style if not in substance. I sang in a rock band back home and my image involved a lot of smoking and drinking; I had to be seen to be unhealthy. He was always surrounded by Scandinavian ice-maidens, tall, cool blondes with flawless skin, restrained and elegant. I wasn’t elegant, nor did I have the potential for elegance. I was aware that everything I wore was slightly wrong. I thought I had a certain unconventional charm, but I didn’t think he would see it.

After the match and quite a lot of beer we did our shopping in the local supermarket and he bent me over the crème fraîche and kissed me. From that day we were inseparable and our international band of friends boasted another couple. It was a happy time and we enjoyed ourselves as cheaply as we could for several months, by the end of which I was flamboyantly in love. He said he was too. We told anyone who’d care to listen that we were going to get married when we left our respective universities. In different countries. On different continents.

On day, about four months into our love affair, we took books and bottles of water to a park in the centre of town. It was a blazing sunny day and we lay shoulder to shoulder listening to the birds and the play of the fountains, reading and trying to survive our hangovers. We barely spoke. I dropped off and when I awoke, it was to the whirring of his camera.

“Smile,” he said. “I want to have a record of your waking forever.”

Later in the afternoon, when the breeze raised the hairs on our arms, we rose to go. Hand in hand we walked along the town’s main drag, looking idly around, until he pulled me to a standstill.

“Look,” he said.

I looked. The registry office was stately and solemn, heavy with ivy. A tiny fountain dribbled over mossy stone on a lawn in front of its honey-coloured pillars. The life of the citizenry was chronicled within, their births, marriages and deaths, each spidery entry in every old ledger redolent of joy and despair.

“Why don’t we go in?” he said.

“What, now?”

He nodded. “Why not?”

I looked at him. His sunglasses were pushed up over his hair and sweat had dampened his hairline turning his mousy locks glistening brown. His blue eyes looked into mine with amusement.

“No,” I said.

I watched as the amusement died away and disappointment took its place.

“No. Not now. Not yet.”

I tugged his hand. He didn’t move so I kissed him lightly, smiling encouragingly.

“Soon.” I said, “Soon. Just not yet.”

He allowed me to pull him on. We didn’t discuss it further.

He wanted to be a filmmaker, and we went to the cinema two or three times a week. He would give me his critical analysis afterwards in the bar. Whatever his views were he would express them passionately, waving his arms around maniacally. I would listen and watch like a star-struck acolyte. He read voraciously and in three languages. His mother was a writer, French and terrifying. In her twenties she’d had supporting roles in a few French films where she’d played unattainable beauties. As mother-in-law material she was a nightmare. When I’d first met her she’d dragged her perfectly manicured talons through my hair and purred at me.

“Marc! Comme elle est mignonne, la petite!”

She made me feel very small. She treated me more as Marc’s pet than as his girlfriend. His father flattered me in an unflattering way, pointing out my homely qualities as a none too subtle rebuke to his wife, to whom kitchen and supermarket were unfamiliar territory. Not that it mattered; in his capacity as diplomat, they invariably had help.

My sole claim to the domestic high ground was that when we’d gone to visit I’d been broke, so I’d baked some biscuits and presented them in a box I’d decorated for the occasion. Looking at it, I was uncertain. I could see that it resembled something that a five-year old makes for her mother’s birthday, but it was too late. Better than nothing, I thought. It’s the thought that counts, I thought. Marc said they’d love it. I realised later that he had never been able to read his parents.

“Cookies!” said Mr Larsen, “Great! Look, honey, Toni’s baked cookies!”

Mrs Larsen inclined her head in my direction and her lips split open in something resembling a smile but less friendly. She took the box between those highly burnished nails, exclaimed theatrically and dropped it casually onto a coffee table. We went out to La Coupole for supper and the biscuits weren’t seen again. We didn’t mention getting married to his parents. It didn’t seem politic.

All in all I was grateful when we left their pied-à-terre in Paris and went back to our idyll in the Midi.

When he visited my parents in Basingstoke Mum and Dad were a bit in awe of him. This was partly because he was foreign, partly because he was so obviously clever, and partly because of his glamorous, expensive looks. Mum cooked frantically for him; full English breakfast, lunch, cake for tea, supper. The four of us played Scrabble and we went out to the pub in the evenings while they settled down to the telly. There was no reproach. He liked them. They seemed more like proper parents than the living challenges who had borne and reared him. When we told them that at some time in the future we were thinking of getting married, they were enthusiastic and Dad shook his hand warmly and patted him clumsily on the back. Mum daringly suggested that they break open the Bristol Cream.

We had nine months in which we were barely ever out of each other’s sight. At parties we would separate briefly and talk to our friends, but watch each other warily. He said that he couldn’t imagine that anyone who danced with me could fail to fall in love with me. I couldn’t think that any girl at whom he smiled his lopsided smile as he bent slightly to whisper in her ear would be immune to his charms.

When we both returned home we worried constantly. We rang each other in the middle of the night, just to check. He sent me long letters full of poetry and exotic descriptions of what he was going to do to me when we saw each other again. We had short phone calls full of frustrated whines and sighs. We saved up enough money for three holidays together on neutral territory. I missed him. We were faithful for months.

Bu then one day someone tried just that little bit harder and I was led astray and we split up. When I talked to him on the phone, Marc cried. I cried too, but the separation had taken its toll. There was no prospect of seeing each other in the near future. My someone was a factor for a short while and then he too was supplanted. Marc and I saw each other only once more. He sent poetry sporadically, presumably every time he was between relationships, which was invariably when I was in the middle of one, and then without warning, utterly predictably and unnoticed, the letters stopped. But because we never had a real row, never tripped over an obvious problem apart from distance, I never really considered it over. It seemed like a very long suspension of relations. I never really stopped loving him.

Chapter 1 - Toni sees Marc in a photo

It wasn’t that I knew he was there. It was more that I had an overwhelming sense of him. So much so that more than once I turned around and fully expected to see him there, planned what I would say as I approached him. All I would find on turning was another quietly beautiful street, lined with gracious old buildings which seemed to bless my whimsy, and my own breath crystallising in the cold sunshine.

I explored alone the over-embellished baroque churches, their interiors weighed down with fat gold cherubs simpering at the ceiling, cracking under the weight of the plaster draperies they held. I admired the clock whose maker had had his eyes gouged out by the burghers who had bought his labour, just to ensure that he never again repeated the feat. I gazed up at the window where the famous defenestration had taken place, and wrinkled my brow at St Agatha, patron saint of unhappily married women, carrying her severed breasts on a platter. My eyes were strangely dry as I looked at the tattered photos in Wenceslas Square, protected by plastic bags from the January weather, tethered by sticks to the ground and fluttering sadly, placed there by relatives mourning the loss of their loved ones to the Communist state apparatus. Everywhere I went I took photographs, although even as I framed them I knew they would make an inadequate record of the experience. And I chewed stringy meat in the newly privatised restaurant, wondering that such a tranquil place could have so turbulent a past.

I also thought about him. I had never really stopped thinking about him, but I thought about him in a more immediate, more intense way than the wistful memories that drifted through my mind in a more or less daily basis. I remembered how it felt to be with him, tried from our ancient familiarity to work out what his life would be like, what he would be doing, accepted with some reluctance that he would have moved on, that his life would probably now include a wife and possibly some children. I tempered my planned greeting in the light of this.

Maybe it was the winter sun. Prague in January was much as I remembered Stockholm in September. Wrapped up in the comfort of coat, hat and boots, the warmth of the sun on my face was magical. It was not a feeling I was accustomed to in the dismal grey British year round. Maybe it was as simple as that – sunshine on my face recalling an old love affair that was never really put to sleep. Or maybe it was the fact that I had left my husband behind, and was taking a break while I still could, before we made the big and unavoidable decision as to whether to have children, a decision which would direct us into an indissoluble future together. I did still love him in an abstract way, but it seemed to me that when we took showers together it was to save time rather than for any sexual frisson. In the evenings, tired from work, we watched TV together, or worse, separately. We ate off trays and only held hands in the cinema. We were bored. Maybe that’s why here, alone, I had the sense of my old love hanging about me.

So when I was at home showing my husband the photos from my holiday, and I came to the picture of a little girl and her grandfather feeding the seagulls on the Charles Bridge, her little face enraptured, the birds irreverently standing on the outstretched hands of a statue, I wasn’t entirely surprised to see the figure in the background. My stomach still turned over and my throat was still suddenly dry, but I wasn’t entirely surprised.

The same but older, just as I am probably the same but older; he was still handsome. He still smiled in the same way. He had a little goatee beard; a sad, wispy thing. He’d never have worn it back then, but fashions change. It suited him. His baggy coat billowed out behind him. The disconcerting thing was that he was looking directly into the lens, into my face behind it. Just on the point of turning, he was waving, smiling that still boyish, mocking smile. Could it have been that he hadn’t seen me? No, surely not. The combination of the turn, the wave and the smile was a full stop. The photo shook in my hand a little as I described the little girl and her shrieks as the birds plucked lumps of bread roughly from her hands. My husband Simon laughed, sharing the moment. I put the picture, face down, on the pile of other snaps.