I am half-way down the stairs when I hear him say, ‘Your theme tune.’ He says it lightly, without irony or reservation.
Glancing upwards, I see that he is already busy again; absorbed.
I love the word grace, how it seems to elude definition. I would love to be graceful. Perhaps I would be, if not for the dead weight of my left foot.
Coming down into the hallway, I sense the house recovering from the presence of Annie, living poltergeist. She had said that she would pop over, but she never pops, she takes root. Arriving on Saturday afternoon, she stayed overnight and until mid-afternoon yesterday. A whole weekend. Just as she did on the weekend before last. The current problem is the break-up, a month or so ago, with her latest: someone called Pete, who, she told us, had been around for three or four months.
When she arrived, she laughed, ‘No one as beautiful and talented as I am should have to stay home alone on a Saturday night.’
While she was upstairs, unpacking, Philip said, ‘She’s harmless.’
He could have said, She’s your friend.
He says that we should have her to stay because she has a flat in London; we have a Victorian terraced house with a garden, close to the countryside, and she has a ‘sixties studio on an estate in a backwater of Edmonton. Perhaps, to Philip, this counts as a kind of homelessness; perhaps I misheard, perhaps he said homeless rather than harmless.
When she had unpacked she came downstairs cooing to Hal, ‘How’s my favourite, then?’
I said, ‘I’m fine, thanks.’
‘Oh, you,’ she derided.
She likes Hal, and Hal likes her. But Hal likes anyone who likes him.
As she passed me, I detected the usual pot-pourri of cosmetics: perfume and deodorant, soap and shampoo, lotions and fabric conditioner. As ever, her breath was scented with garlic, alcohol and chocolate. Perhaps she breathes harder than other people. Perhaps she stands closer.
With the slightest turn of her head, her long, sleek brown hair becomes a blade. On the rare occasions during her visits when she moves from my settee, the cushions are more crushed than anyone else would leave them. In her pillow, in the mornings, there is a hollow of awesome proportions and duration: eerily suggestive, somehow, of a catastrophe. And for days after she has gone home, I come across crockery in unnerving places: a cup in a soap dish, this morning.
All weekend I worried that she would stay and call in sick this morning. She takes lots of sick leave – a couple of days every couple of weeks – despite burgeoning health. In her manager’s office is a folder labelled The sick and late book, in which she stars. She works in her local library, on general desk duties, but also with responsibility for activities, which is ironic in view of her own stupendous inertia. She organises occasional storytelling sessions for children, and a talk or two each month with a display of books on a subject chosen by the Chief Librarian. Alpines last month. She has had this job for a while now – six months or more? – so she is due for the usual dismissal or resignation. She has had so many jobs during the twelve years that I have known her. Once, for almost a year, she was a croupier, and this is the job which she cites whenever complaining of her current situation: Look how I’ve come down in the world.
When we met, fourteen years ago, we were working in a garden centre on Saturdays. Most of those Saturdays are boiled down in my memory to one never-ending queue of customers and an overloaded till drawer. There were days which were different, though, during the few months of the year when business was slack. We had two winters of Saturdays, when we were stationed alone together in the chillier of the two vast greenhouses, a crystalline enclave which smelled of old, cold water in potted soil. With our hands idle but ostensibly ready for work in fingerless gloves, we spent the empty days speculating on the excitement of the coming evening, the coming years. Whenever the screech of the sliding door signalled a customer, Annie would turn, slowly, stately, so that her face was visible only to me, and complain in a fervent whisper, ‘Bastard, bastard, bastard …’, an incantation which would continue until she turned back around with impeccable timing and a winning smile. She was as irresistible to me as to those hapless customers. I would never have stuck those winters of Saturdays without her.
Of all my friends, she is the only one who has always been utterly uninvolved in her work, having always purposefully chosen utterly uninvolving work. All that she ever takes home of her work is her name badge, which she tends to forget to remove: Rhiannon Ritchie. We both revelled in her disaffection when we were seventeen, but she has become too old for this. We both know that this lassitude is bad for her. But if and when I find a job, how will I be any different from her? How unlike Philip, who lives for work: in all the years that I have known him, he has never taken a day of sick leave. His stated reason is that someone else would have to cover for him. He is needed; nothing is more important to him.
This weekend, he and I were Annie’s audience once again. We spent most of our time in the garden, Annie and I sitting in sunshine and shade respectively, while Philip was weeding, digging, planting, pruning. Annie’s sunburn was slapped with strap marks and cropped by hem lines. Her skin swelled around the straps of her sandals, her watch strap, the shoulder straps which were in turn shadowed by black bra straps. On her thighs, a strip of pallor blazed beneath her hem whenever she slithered lower in her chair. She looked frighteningly robust; the chair, worryingly less so.
For a while, early on the Saturday evening, she talked about her latest ex-, concluding, ‘He thinks with his cock.’
Philip was crouching on the far border of the lawn, snipping with a pair of shears, and the rhythm was faultless, crisp: either he did not hear, or he was lying low.
‘And that’s fine,’ Annie boomed, ‘when you’re on the receiving end of his attention. The problem is that the attention span of that kind of bloke tends to be short …’
The regular chirp of the shears’ blades sounded like a slow walk on stiletto heels.
‘What am I saying? All men are like that. Slaves to testosterone, and they have the cheek to imply that we women are heavy on the hormones.’ She added, ‘Men are dogs.’
‘Annie,’ I countered, ‘dogs are loyal.’
‘You’re thinking of Hal, and Hal’s a eunuch.’ She reached to stroke him. Even her hands provided no rest for the eye, demanded attention: her fingernails were scarlet. ‘Ah, Hal,’ she purred, ‘life is simple, for you, eh?’
‘But short,’ I qualified.
‘But sweet,’ she enthused.
‘And of course: with only twelve years or so to live, he should have nothing but pleasure.’
‘Hal, you hear that? Don’t you have a good deal.’
‘Twelve years is a good deal?’
Suddenly, she said, ‘You’ve had a bad couple of years.’ And then, looking across the garden at Philip, ‘You’re so lucky, to have him.’
He was lunging into the long grass with each snap of the steel jaws as if he were trying to catch something.
‘I know, I know.’
Closing my eyes, I detected the scent of the honeysuckle that Philip had planted for me. The white wisteria had finished flowering; Philip planted that for me as well. Opening my eyes, I saw the pastel Icelandic poppies that were mine too. And behind, indoors, at the south-facing sash window, my terracotta-potted banana tree: a present from Philip. I had wanted that plant not for bananas, of course, but for the leaves: the broad, thick, bottle-green leaves typical of a tropical plant, but with irregular marks that look so endearingly artificial they could have come from brushstrokes.
It was midsummer’s eve, but suddenly I was thinking of its shadow, the winter solstice; some lines from a Donne poem: