The Grass Memorial Read online

  ‘You’re so kind to everyone,’ said Gordon as they stepped out into the street. ‘Too kind.’

  ‘One ticket doesn’t exactly qualify me for canonisation.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘It’s called PR and God knows I don’t do much of it. Shall we walk?’

  As she asked she had already begun walking, and he had to take a couple of long, bounding strides to keep up with her, almost stumbling into the path of the oncoming traffic as he took up his position on the outside.

  ‘Sorry! Got to keep my sword arm free.’

  She took no notice of either the stumble or the apology but kept moving briskly, quite near the edge of the pavement so that Gordon had to keep putting one foot in the gutter, bobbing up and down like a latterday Long John Silver.

  After a few hundred yards they came to the junction of Alma Road, the turn off for Victoria Mansions. She put her hand on his sleeve.

  ‘Hang on.’

  ‘What?’

  She didn’t reply, but looked up, so that he did the same. The late-evening crowd flowed round them impatiently on the littered pavement, the traffic surged and fretted, and lighted shopfronts, pubs and restaurants pulsed with irritable energy. But above them the rooftops dreamed, forming Disneyesque black silhouettes against the sulphurous urban night sky, with beyond them a pale sprinkle of stars, distanced by light pollution, and the steady wink of a plane on its descent to Heathrow.

  ‘Nice,’ said Gordon.

  And so is he, thought Stella. More’s the pity.

  * * * * *

  Even had it been his intention, or if Stella would have allowed it, Gordon’s regular and infrequent visits left no trace in the flat in Victoria Mansions. His briefcase contained, among other things, his toothbrush and electric shaver, and a spare pair of boxer shorts. In the beginning it had also held a packet of Featherlites but Stella had an aversion to condoms as too calculating.

  ‘But what about safe sex?’ Gordon had enquired cautiously.

  ‘We’re much too old to worry about that. And the last thing sex should be is safe,’ she told him.

  On this, as on most things, Gordon deferred to her. He considered her somewhat unwise, but his desire for her far outweighed his inclination to be sensible.

  Tonight she instructed him to make himself at home while she had a bath. It was an instruction with which he couldn’t possibly comply. He had never felt at home in 21 Victoria Mansions except for those times when he was clasped by Stella’s thin legs, being gulped down by her insatiable, energetic body . . .

  He put down his briefcase and sought out the Jack Daniel’s bottle in the kitchen. He wasn’t a spirits man but it was the only kind of booze she kept so he’d adapted. With a glass in his hand he returned to the living room and sat down on the sill of the uncurtained bay window.

  You couldn’t have described Stella’s flat minimalist because its emptiness was not due to design. She had got as far as getting it painted white and having beautiful beechwood floors laid throughout, and then lost interest. So her small store of studenty possessions, enlivened by a few impulse-bought pieces, lay about in the vast mid-nineteenth century space like vagrants in a cathedral. Books stood in staggering uneven piles. Music and magazines lay in scattered drifts. In the Japanese kitchen were two mighty cast-iron saucepans, a milkpan and a microwave; in the bedroom a brass bedstead and a pine chest of drawers with a copy of Spotlight replacing one missing ball-foot. The room where Gordon now sat was cavernous, with a twelve-foot ceiling, a fireplace (Stella had filled it with pine cones but ruined the effect with sweet papers) and twin bay windows looking south towards Lord’s and the cheery beacon of the Post Office Tower. You couldn’t have called it a drawing room, or a living room. The flat was a place to work, with other basic functions permitted space round the edges. The only furniture in here was a sagging sofa with William Morris loose covers, a white oval table surrounded by odd chairs and, in pride of place, a piano. There were dozens of pictures – paintings, photographs, prints, posters and programmes – but only a few of them had found their way on to the walls. This was not a place to sink into, unlike Gordon’s own home in Hatfield which had a soft, squashy texture, sound muted by fitted carpets, outlines padded by cushions, walls enlivened by sconces, fitted bookcases and family photographs.

  But the difference satisfied him in that it was a metaphor – he could no sooner become part of this than he could own even a part of Stella, He was an outsider, and content to be so. On very rare occasions he had a dream in which Stella suddenly declared herself his, and his alone, ready to live a shared life – and it shook him to the core. Gordon knew his limitations. In the wholly unlikely event that this avenue were to be opened up, he feared he would turn and walk away, though every step were agony.

  Stella returned in her Black Watch dressing gown. It was the sort of dressing gown Gordon used to have in prep school, right down to the cord with tassels (there were cords like that on the curtains back home), and he sometimes wondered if part of Stella’s ferocious attraction for him was her boyishness – her knuckly hands, the nape of her neck, her narrow hips and the fragile rib cage on which her shallow breasts sat like a couple of fleshy raindrops trembling on a window pane.

  ‘You got a drink.’ It was a statement, as she crossed into the kitchen. She came out carrying a tumbler half full of bourbon, no water, no ice. In the middle of the pale pond of polished beechwood she stopped and undid the tie of the dressing gown.

  From out of nowhere, against the flow of the evening, she had the urge to cherish him. A sweet tenderness overcame her, a usually hidden part of herself that bloomed in the half-light of the bedroom like the brilliant, long-withheld flower of a desert cactus. She stroked and whispered, licked and kissed with petal-lightness, she moved over and about him with silken fluency, so that he scarcely knew where she was nor which part of her he touched. She tuned him and strung him out until he was all hers to do with as she liked, and then she in turn became all his, lifted and carried by the volcanic overflow of his desire.

  Afterwards he was tearful with gratitude.

  ‘God, Stella, that was astonishing . . . you have no idea how much ... how much ...’

  She pushed back his damp hair from his forehead. ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘I wish I could give you more.’

  She hated this kind of exchange, and removed her hand impatiently. ‘It’s not a trade-off, Gordon.’

  ‘Just as well.’

  Yes, she reflected, pulling the quilt up to her armpits and staring at the ceiling, just as well. Because he was about to get the shitty end of the bargain.

  Gordon left at one a.m. He never stayed the night, it wasn’t part of the deal. He cleaned his teeth, changed his underwear, freshened up and bade goodnight to the comatose Stella before closing the door behind him. But his heart was fabulously light as the lift sank to the ground floor, and it was no surprise to him that a cab with its flag up manifested itself in Alma Road almost immediately.

  Once he was back in his own car and on the Finchley Road going north, in the direction of tomorrow’s appointment in Luton, he put a Sorority tape on – it was an old one, before the advent of CDs – and listened to Stella as he thought about her.

  For the first time he dared allow himself to think that she cared about him. Perhaps, in her prickly combative way, she even loved him. In all the years of their liaison he had asked nothing of her, allowed her to call the tune, been only positive and passionate, never whinged. He had kept and defended his secret with tigerish intensity – his wife knew nothing. And Stella was an unusual person, her love would not take the form of other women’s love – would not envelop or enmesh him (though he would willingly have been both enmeshed and enveloped), nor want anything in return. All of that he could cope with. Tonight she had been unimaginably different, they had both been transported. If sex were the conversation of souls, the sweetest and most meaningful of words had been spoken tonight. He felt light, drained,
as though the tired old molecules which made up his body had been mysteriously reordered. The drive north was like a flight, his reactions were diamond-sharp, he seemed to have a heightened sensory field through three hundred and sixty degrees. He slipped past other cars but never broke the speed limit, made it through lights without ever crashing a red, threaded between lanes and on to roundabouts with a charmed facility.

  Nothing would change, he told himself, except that now she loved him.

  ‘ “Back to the front”,’ she sang, with that courageous throb in her voice that brought her face instantly to mind. ‘ “Back to the old campaign . . . cover the scars, and back to the war again”.’

  At four a.m. Stella woke up. She often did this when a man had left, when the beautiful stillness of her flat lapped gently around her, all hers once more.

  It was odd to think that this had been her last time with Gordon. She searched her heart and mind for some other feeling, a more emotional reaction. But there was none. She wished him only well, but she was about to make a leap into the unknown and to carry even the smallest burden might cause her to drop like a stone.

  The second night at the Curfew, the Friday, was if anything even more warmly received. The Friday-nighters were generally a responsive bunch, brains still sufficiently in gear from the working week to pick up on the detail, and hearts lifted by the prospect of the weekend to come, a sensation dulled by domestic reality by the time Saturday night came round. Sorority performed the same programme and were taken to their audience’s hearts.

  No one would have dreamed of saying ‘I told you so’ but Helen approached Stella with a level look and thanked her for the concession she had made to honest, old-fashioned sentiment.

  ‘It’s scarcely a concession,’ Stella pointed out sweetly. ‘I write the songs that make the couples cry, remember?’

  ‘Thanks anyway,’ said Helen, who was much too sensible to argue the point.

  On Saturday Stella took her soon-to-be-eighteen-year-old godson Jamie out to lunch at the Six Bells near Regent’s Park. Her relationship with him was one in which she took a keen, though entirely secular, interest.

  ‘I’m looking forward to the party,’ she said. ‘What do I wear?’

  ‘Just come as you are,’ said Jamie.

  Stella watched him fondly as he wolfed garlic bread. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yeah. Anything goes.’

  He was massively built – a natural for the rugby front row at school – and dark, with brown eyes; non-designer stubble, slept-in clothes; a black elephant-hair bracelet on his left wrist, above his watch. Sweet.

  ‘How’s the love life?’ she asked.

  ‘All right, yeah.’

  ‘Anyone special?’

  ‘I try to spread it around.’ He gave her a hot look beneath flue-brush lashes. ‘You know, present a moving target. But I met this woman in a club in Manchester . . .’

  ‘Nice?’

  ‘Really nice. But we’re taking it easy.’

  He began on the lasagne. It was one of the great delights of taking him out to lunch, the steady voraciousness of his appetite, the sense of fuelling a mighty engine. Stella’s involvement extended only to raids on the double portion of chips.

  ‘Mind if I smoke?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ll join you in a mo’. How’s yours then?’

  ‘Love life? Non-existent.’

  ‘I always thought famous people could send out for hot and cold running sex whenever they felt like it.’

  ‘Even if that were true it wouldn’t constitute a love life, would it?’

  He pulled a rueful face. ‘I keep forgetting you’re a romantic.’

  ‘It’s the only way to be.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  She tapped ash. ‘What’s this woman’s name then?’

  ‘Ingrid.’

  ‘Is she Scandinavian?’

  ‘No, but she looks it. Tall, blonde – and the rest. Like Ulrika’s sexier younger sister.’

  ‘No wonder you like her. And she lives in Manchester?’

  ‘Roehampton.’

  ‘At school?’

  ‘She’s a beautician.’

  ‘Right.’ Stella nodded, considering this. Jamie gave her a look tinged with quiet pride. ‘Yeah, she’s twenty-three.’

  ‘An older woman!’ Stella tipped her head back and gave her rasping laugh. ‘That’s my boy, Jamie baby. Does she know she’s a cradle-snatcher?’

  He began to laugh too. ‘She likes it.’

  ‘And will she be at the party? I want to meet her.’

  ‘It’s a tough one. Haven’t decided yet.’

  ‘You have your reputation to consider.’

  ‘Sod that. It’s her feelings I’m considering. I’m not sure what she’d make of my relations.’

  Stella leaned forward, prodding the air with a chip. ‘That’s quite enough of that.’

  ‘You’re not a relation. She’s heard of you, by the way.’

  ‘I’m delighted to hear it.’

  She realised she’d walked on to his punch as the grin sneaked across his face. ‘Her parents went to one of your gigs.’

  After lunch Jamie declared a laddish assignation with his flatmate and the latest blockbuster in Leicester Square, and Stella walked to the top of Primrose Hill. The sky was blue but the wind was icy and she swathed her Dr Who scarf several times round her head and across the lower part of her face. At the top of the hill she sat down on a seat, huddled inside her wrappings, the still centre of a weekend web of couples, kids, buggies, rollerbladers, kites and dogs.

  She had warned Jamie’s parents that her role in their son’s life would be that of the Scary Godmother. Her acceptance had carried one condition: that there should be a full complement of appropriately religious godparents so that she was effectively a spare, able to write her own job description. It was a simple one – she’d never pretend to be other than she was, nor ask her godson to be other than he was, and from this acceptance they would forge a mutually educational and rewarding relationship.

  In this spirit of openness, Stella only knew what she thought when she heard what she said. Like her affirmation of being a romantic. No one privy to her behaviour over the last couple of days would have believed this, and yet saying it had made her realise it was true. Romanticism was not an excuse for her conduct, but it was a reason. A fierce desire for the band to accord perfectly with her original vision of it was the cause of her fury over its present shortcomings. And her occasionally cavalier treatment of the men in her life was because she had yet to find the man who could make her pulses race by simply appearing. There were a few – even Gordon, last night, though for all the wrong reasons – with whom she could achieve that state largely by her own efforts, but none as yet who could accelerate the pulse without effort on either side.

  She was thirty-two – no age, she knew, at a time when fifty was being hailed as the new thirty, and thirty-somethings ruled the world with their brilliant careers and their fat incomes and their brittle sexual consumerism – but much of the time she felt old as the hills. And was she perhaps old-fashioned as well? She wanted no truck with a white fence, a cake in the tin, a baby at the breast and one on the way, but she did aspire, passionately, to a free, equal and all-consuming love.

  That was all, she told herself wryly. But that wasn’t such a bad example to pass on to one’s godson, as long as he didn’t begin to see her as sad and thwarted, and there was no fear of that at the moment. Quixotic, perhaps, but not sad. She liked the idea of Jamie with his older woman, and approved his attitude that it was her he was protecting and not either himself or his friends and relations. It might not be true, but it showed the right spirit.

  After about half an hour the afternoon began to cloud over and she grew cold. But her lunch with Jamie and her analysis of herself made her feel calmer, as she walked back down the hill, than she had done for some days.

  Saturday night abounded with the warm fuzzies that Stella so string
ently disparaged. The slightly less perceptive audience were more sentimental, they even attempted to join in a couple of choruses. Stella could feel the glow of gratification rising off the other women, they were revelling in it. If one of them had even for a fraction of second encouraged the joining in, she would have walked off the stage, but they knew when they’d achieved a famous victory, and were generous.

  They assembled behind the table in the lobby to sell tapes and sign programmes, an activity for which they traditionally remained in their stage clothes and full slap, a farrago of feathers, rhinestones and exposed flesh. Stella scrubbed her face and changed into her antique market mufti – a rag, a bone and a hank of hair among the glitz.

  The burbles were soupy, the fans were out in force. ‘It sounds soppy,’ said one woman, ‘but I’m going to say it – you made me cry tonight.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘That is the idea, I assume,’ said the woman’s denim-shirted husband, smiling collusively at Stella to show how unsoppy he was, and how he understood the mind of the professional entertainer. The pillock – she could always see the join.

  ‘Pretty much,’ she agreed. ‘Would you like a dedication on this?’

  ‘Please – Roger and Pat.’ The woman tilted her head to watch her write, as if she might get the spelling wrong. ‘We’ve been with you from the beginning.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes!’ said Roger. ‘We can honestly say we knew you when you were nobody.’

  I was never nobody, sweetheart, she thought, looking over his shoulder at the next person. But you always will be.

  Afterwards she felt detached from the celebrations, but if anyone noticed they certainly didn’t comment, they were used to her moods. They were however avoiding her eye. They seemed to look at her as they whooped and kissed and chattered and drank, but their great silly smiles slipped over her as though she were invisible, leaving only the faintest snail-trail of pity. Pity! Poor bitches, she thought – save your pity for yourselves.