Love in a Mist Page 9

  We liked each other at once – well, it was impossible not to like Gus, but as the youngest members of staff we immediately had something extra in common. The problem was that because he was handsome, sweet and interested in me, I didn’t realize that I didn’t find him attractive. If that sounds odd – well, I was naive in lots of ways.

  We began ‘seeing’ each other – that’s the common expression, but the trouble was that I didn’t see Gus, not properly. We went to the cinema, and the pub, ate inexpensive ethnic meals, played tennis and took long walks on the beach, the cliffs and around Maiden Castle. I learnt a bit about him. His family were in Norfolk, he had an older sister who was a nurse and a younger brother at Wellington. His plan was to complete a year or two at Holland House and then take off travelling again. Conservation and ecology were his things, but he was a practical idealist. He had been saving and had also applied for a grant to help with a long-term project in Borneo to do with orangutans and deforestation.

  With Gus, I occasionally had an out-of-body experience, like a scene from a film, when I seemed to be watching the two of us, a nice, energetic young couple having fun, discussing plans, possibly with a shared future ahead of them. I had to admit I found these fleeting mind’s-eye pictures unsettling. I was completely inexperienced, both romantically and sexually, but I was also independent-minded and self-sufficient and secretly relieved that he would be off to the other side of the world next August so our relationship had a natural arc.

  I suppose I assumed that Gus felt much the same – that we’d been thrown together by circumstance, easy come, easy go – and it was in this spirit that I had sex with him. I badly needed to cross that one off my list and, thus grown-up and freed up, move on. The earth remained resolutely unmoved, although the relaxed intimacy afterwards was nice. So it was disconcerting to discover after the third time that he and I had apparently had two completely different experiences.

  ‘Would you be shocked to learn,’ he asked in bed in his room in the staff house, ‘that there’s a real danger I’m falling in love with you, Flo?’

  His tone was that typically British, circuitous, half-joking one that left me unsure about exactly what he was telling me.

  Not for the first time in my life, all I could think of to say was ‘No’ – meaning No, I wouldn’t be shocked, but also a more emphatic No to the falling-in-love thing. The second implication shot straight past him.

  ‘Well that’s good,’ he said. ‘Because I am.’

  He put his arm across me, took hold of my shoulder and rolled me towards him on my side, so that our faces were mere inches apart. I could see the tracery on his pupils and a stray eyelash on his cheek.

  ‘Because you are just the most wonderful woman I’ve ever met.’

  He kissed me so there was no need for me to respond to this. But two things occurred to me while we kissed. One was that he had called me a woman which, while correct, was not something I thought of myself as. A girl, maybe. A ‘latency girl’, certainly. The other was the implication that he had met lots of women and I had won some kind of competition which I had never entered. But hey, I had been handed a compliment and was happy to receive it. I didn’t return it and he seemed not to mind.

  Almost unprecedentedly, Zinny took an interest in me at this time. Some instinct – I’d call it ‘maternal’ but that word never suited her – prompted her to question me about my colleagues at Holland House.

  ‘Are they all like Mr Chips?’

  ‘No, actually.’

  ‘But mostly men.’

  ‘Well, yes, apart from Matron.’

  Zinny laughed. It was autumn half-term, Nico was out having off-season drinks at the cricket club and we were having a rare moment à deux, sitting in the living room at four o’clock with the pale sun melting into the sea as our backdrop. I was more at ease with Zinny these days, now that I had my own life.

  ‘And there are several wives,’ I added.

  ‘Are there?’ asked Zinny, as though this was a particularly striking fact.

  ‘They’re not monks, or eccentrics. It’s just a normal job.’

  A pause stretched, sank, and became a silence, but not an uncomfortable one. Zinny sat with her stockinged feet curled up beside her on the sofa; she wore loose, high-waisted trousers and a pale cable-knit sweater, her reddish-brown hair slicked back from her high forehead. She must have been in her mid-fifties. She didn’t so much look young for her age – her style of beauty had always been grown-up and sophisticated – but that she looked like Katherine Hepburn, timeless. I may have inherited (or perhaps learnt) my self-possession from her, but nothing in the way of looks. Any physical family traits – my scrubby hair which I now successfully wore short and spiky, my square-tipped hands, my slightly downward-sloping eyelids – were all from my father and looked better on him than on me.

  ‘Is there anybody young there?’ Zinny asked. ‘I mean apart from the boys.’

  ‘Quite a few.’

  She looked at me directly. Her arms were folded. ‘Anyone to be friends with?’

  ‘They’re a friendly bunch.’

  ‘All right. Good.’

  She dropped this line of enquiry for the time being, but at Christmas it resurfaced. I stayed on at Holland House for a couple of days, ostensibly to get some paperwork done but mainly to be with Gus. We exchanged presents – I gave him a book about the people and ecology of Borneo (coals to Newcastle you might think, but I wanted to show I’d been paying attention) which he opened right away, and he gave me a tiny, clumsily wrapped parcel with instructions to ‘keep it till the day’.

  ‘You opened yours,’ I pointed out.

  ‘I know, but I want to imagine you seeing mine for the first time.’

  ‘If I open it now, you won’t have to imagine.’

  ‘I want to be there at your family Christmas.’

  I thought about this as I drove home on a grey, damp day, the one before Christmas Eve. I pictured Gus’s Christmas in Norfolk as the full seasonal monty – stockings, church, champagne cocktails, blazing fires, chestnuts, turkey – no, goose, they’d have goose – and a spherical, holly-topped pudding blazing merrily … They would probably be amongst those who still watched the Queen, and then there’d be a long muddy walk with a couple of Labradors, followed by games, and tea with cake … an evening round the fire with tumblers of scotch and crusty sandwiches. They probably had a seven-foot tree in the hall, real greenery garlands festooning the pictures, the mantlepiece and the banisters, and more Christmas cards than we had people we knew …

  I wasn’t envious; I could never have hacked it. I liked our small, elegant Christmas. It suited us and it was what I was used to. I was looking forward to a few days of quiet with no demands on me of any kind. There would be silver branches by the verandah windows, candles in the fireplace, and a side of smoked salmon with the Cava in the fridge. Tomorrow my father would make the only thing he was good at – rare fillet of beef with baked potatoes and petits pois. Zinny would do her lemon syllabub. We would get up late, I a little earlier than my parents, and I’d take a walk on the beach. We’d eat at four o’clock. Like all households, we had our way of doing things – we would never have used the term ‘traditions’.

  When I got home, Zinny was still at work, and my father was in the living room watching horse racing on the television. He often had a flutter, and now he greeted me with studied absent-mindedness, proffering his cheek with his eyes fixed on the screen.

  ‘Hold on, this bloody horse could be about to do us an enormous favour!’

  Dutifully I stood beside him, watching. ‘Which one?’

  ‘That one in the front – yes! Come on you little darling! One last heave – watch out – aargh! Hell and damnation, bastard! Broke away too early, you see?’

  ‘What a shame.’

  ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ He got up. ‘Like Zinny. I haven’t lost much, but if it weren’t for a couple of whiskers on that thing’s nose I might have made us a Christm
as bonus.’

  ‘Try not to think about it.’

  ‘Easier said than done. Let me give you a hand.’

  He went up the stairs ahead of me. I may have imagined it, but he seemed to pause for a split second at the top, as if he’d forgotten which room was mine. What I did notice was that there had been some redecorating up here – all the woodwork, including the doors, was a fresh white.

  He opened my bedroom door, and it was the same in there, with new gloss on the window frame and sill, the skirting boards and the cornice.

  ‘Everything’s looking very nice,’ I said.

  ‘Well, about time. Downstairs is always up to scratch but it’s easy to forget about this floor. When you’re away Zinny and I never come up here.’

  ‘Thank you, it’s lovely.’

  ‘Not too smelly? We left the window open.’

  I sniffed. ‘No, not at all.’

  I was on the verge of asking if anything in particular had prompted them to come up now, and who had stayed in the spare room over the years. I watched as my father put my bag down by the bed and went to the window.

  ‘Want me to close this now?’

  ‘No thanks, it’s good to have the fresh air.’

  He remained standing there, looking out. ‘It’s pleasant up here, isn’t it – to feel halfway up the hill but still at ground level. More or less.’

  ‘I always liked it.’

  ‘I bet.’ He turned to me with a grin. For the first time I felt that I was closing on him. That the time was approaching when I might discover the secrets.

  ‘Did you ever go out and lark about out there? I mean on the grass – at night when we were downstairs, when you should have been asleep?’

  ‘Actually no.’

  That wasn’t true. I had once used my chair to climb out, and slipped over the parapet on to the hard slope with its thin covering of grass. I’d walked about a hundred yards up the hill until our house was below me, the two back windows looking back at me like eyes over a fan. I remembered how weird it was to think of my parents even further below, sitting out on the verandah, not knowing I was here. But that we could all three of us see the same sea, a wrinkled grey fretted with dabs of white. Suddenly shocked at myself I hurtled back down the hill, only to discover I couldn’t get back over the parapet. A three-foot drop was nothing, but to get back over the stone wall was beyond me. I had to skulk down to the road and run, crouched over, up the alley to the kitchen door praying that it would be still unlocked (it was) and there would be no-one in there. They were still out on the verandah and didn’t hear me, but moments after I was back in bed I heard Zinny’s long, soft, barefoot stride come in and cross the hall, pausing for a second at the foot of the stairs before moving on to the kitchen.

  There was no real reason to deny this childish outing, except for my impulse to have a secret from my father.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said cheerfully, patting my arm. ‘I’m sure I would have done. Anyway, I’ll leave you to it. Come on down when you’re ready and we can have a sharpener. Zinny will be back soon.’

  He left, leaving the door open, and trotted down the stairs. I closed the door quietly and put my bag on the bed. It didn’t take me long to unpack my few things, including my ready-wrapped presents for my parents: a hand-painted glass tray for Zinny and a notoriously uninhibited cricket autobiography for my father. They were easy people to buy for; we didn’t set a lot of store by presents and generally expressed astonishment that I should have bought them anything at all. It was the same with birthdays: they were cagey about dates and made nothing of them except for mine which was always properly if simply acknowledged.

  I came to Gus’s little package, tucked in amongst my underwear, and undid it at once, in spite of his admonition. I could still tell him that I’d opened it at home and a white lie wouldn’t hurt him. The blue leather-trimmed box provoked something I told myself was excitement, but which was really trepidation. There was a small card accompanying it – he had cut it from a larger gift tag, to fit the box. His loose, generous handwriting started large and grew cramped and crooked to fit the tiny space.

  To my darling Flora, to wear at Christmas, for happiness always, all my love Gxxx

  He had given me a necklace – or more accurately a pendant – and I’m ashamed to say that my first reaction was relief that it wasn’t a ring. On the fine thread of a chain hung a tiny silver bird – a bluebird – in flight. It was quite different from anything else I owned, for the good reason that I owned almost no jewellery, and no necklaces at all. Hadn’t Gus noticed that I never wore them? Or had he perhaps thought that I was deprived, and secretly longing for one to wear?

  I laid it on the bed, and turned my attention to the card, studying the message. ‘Darling’ was nice, in an old-fashioned kind of way, and ‘all my love’ was how people often signed off – relatives, or even just good friends. Nothing special could be read into either of those. To wish me happiness was also unexceptionable. It was the ‘always’ that bothered me ever so slightly. Was that an ‘always’ that involved both of us, or a sort of send-off? For some reason I felt a thump of sadness, worse for being hard to interpret.

  Poor Gus. Poor me. When it came to self-knowledge I was living my life armoured in a sort of exoskeleton that helped me to go through the moves but insulated me from authentic feelings. This lack of understanding wasn’t my, or anybody’s, fault, but there were reasons for it, which I had yet to identify.

  I wasn’t wearing the right clothes (I was by no means sure I even owned them, whatever they were) but I put the pendant on right away. The clasp was horribly fiddly but I managed by doing it up in front with the aid of the mirror, and dropped the little bird inside the collar of my crew-neck. I didn’t want to let Gus down; on the other hand to put it on for the first time on Christmas Day would be to draw attention to it.

  My father would never have noticed, such things simply weren’t on his radar, but I’d reckoned without Zinny. We were putting plates away after supper and she wasn’t even looking at me when she remarked casually, ‘That’s pretty.’

  ‘What?’

  She closed the cupboard door, still not looking. ‘The little bird.’

  I glanced down. The bird must have popped out of the neck of my jumper when I was bending down. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Not your usual thing.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ I fingered it and slipped it back inside.

  ‘Is it new?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She leaned back on the worktop, arms folded. ‘A present?’

  ‘Actually yes.’

  ‘M-hm.’ To my surprise she didn’t immediately pick up on this, and we went back into the living room. But when they went to bed – I was going to sit up a little longer – she came over and I thought she was going to give me one of her vanishingly rare kisses, not always a good sign. Instead she sat down next to me on the sofa, but on the edge and facing towards me. I couldn’t remember when I’d last been so unmistakably and entirely the focus of her attention.

  ‘A word of advice …?’

  If this was some sort of mother–daughter moment, it was unprecedented. I couldn’t begin to imagine what she might say.

  ‘Go ahead. By all means.’

  ‘“By all means” – you are funny sometimes.’ She must have seen me bristle slightly because she added, ‘I just mean about your necklace.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Can you take it off so I can show you something?’

  ‘All right.’ I fiddled rather crossly with the catch, and handed it over.

  ‘Oh, isn’t that sweet.’ She held it up admiringly between her fingers and thumbs. ‘But you probably noticed, it’s not quite the right length.’

  So there was a right length?

  ‘I hadn’t noticed, no.’

  ‘Well, in that case you may not agree of course, but if you were to try …’ She was wearing a black shirt, and now she held the necklace in place so that the blueb
ird hung in the hollow of her throat, just above her collarbones. ‘A squeak shorter and it would be here …’ She turned her head this way and that. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Or it needs to be a little longer, so …’ She brought her hands to the front of her neck and let the bird dive into the shallow valley just below the top button of her shirt. ‘See what I mean?’

  ‘Not really.’ I did, but I was disabled by embarrassment and awkwardness. I had never felt so thoroughly put in my place. On reflection, I don’t think she meant to have this effect; it was just that she couldn’t help it. Zinny was suddenly in her element, as I was out of mine.

  ‘Anyway …’ She handed the necklace back. ‘Obviously it doesn’t matter, and it’s none of my business. But if you did want to get it altered it wouldn’t be a big job. That rather strange man in the jeweller’s in Salting could take out a few links or put a few more in as easy as anything.’

  I could see that she was probably right, but I couldn’t concede. ‘To be honest I’m happy with it as it is. And I don’t want to …’

  I stopped there but she said as she got up, ‘You don’t want to offend whoever gave it to you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t be offended.’ There was no hesitation about the ‘he’. ‘He’ll be flattered that you want it to be right.’ She made a kissing face. ‘Good night, sleep well.’

  I closed the door and turned on the television, but not because I wanted to watch. I simply needed the distraction, the flickering coloured light and the chatter of voices. The necklace lay next to me on the side table. Any special significance it had held for me was spoiled. At least before, whatever my gut reaction, the story had been mine, to make what I would of, and to process as I wished. In a couple of minutes Zinny had unintentionally robbed me of all that. She had put her finger unerringly on all my insecurities – about myself, my taste, my instincts, about Gus. I was once again the child, the outsider. Not in on the secret.