FIVE
Douglas Brown switched on the answerphone and checked his watch against the digital clock. Mary had given him the watch – which would have been fine if she had not also had it inscribed TO MY DARLING DOUGLAS THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING. And then wept when he laughed. Apparently this was wrong. It was not amusing, it was serious. He had not laughed cruelly, as he explained. It just felt a little sugary, a little adolescent. Which is possibly what you got for having a girlfriend so much younger. Her thirty-two had stars in her eyes. His forty-four had not. He liked the age difference at the beginning. Something new. But it soon palled. Next stop children and domesticity. No thanks.
He went back into the bedroom and pulled up the blind; his flat was six floors up. Below him the sunny September morning washed over the grey, densely packed buildings around Chelsea Harbour, and there, just a couple of miles away and proud on the skyline, was his office. Nearer to, he could see his gym, his favourite restaurant, the best place to have a suit made and Mary’s accessory shop, all reflected in the watery light. He liked living at the heart of things. He was certain to get bored if it were any other way.
Immediately below his window he watched clones of himself or Mary getting into spunky little cars and driving off to their hives. To be style-conscious was fine nowadays, but it was done without flamboyance. That went out with the eighties. You should be seen to glory in nothing, to just proceed in a quiet and orderly fashion along the path of the cult of the individual. He had written something like that in his last editorial. It sounded pompous, but that was the tone of things now, even government. No one minded. Part of him cared so little nowadays that he almost willed the finding of himself as an entry in Pseuds Corner.
He turned away from the window, smiling. Once he might have opted out of all this – gone to live in the country with hens and baggy cords and actually needing a Range Rover. It was a silly temptation – thank God he had not succumbed – but coming at the beginning of the nineties, when everything was in the melting pot, it was seductive for a while. Or she was. He looked at his watch again, with irritation. Not sentimental Mary. The other one.
He had not seen Pamela for years. For some reason he had started to think about her again just recently. As dissatisfaction with Mary grew, he supposed. Odd, because Mary was exactly the sort of woman you would expect him to want, on paper, and the other one was a complete aberration. Such an aberration that when they met he felt safe from her, entirely safe and in control. Intrigued by what he took to be just another suburban woman waiting for her friends in a bar. She wore chain-store jeans and her handbag looked like something from John Lewis. He spilt a drink on her. Apologized. Bought her a glass of champagne to amend. Her friend was late. And the rest was very crazy and uncharacteristic history.
He wooed her, she was reluctant. He pretended to like what she liked, and ended up doing so. He hid his sense of superiority when he found she had her own business, and came to be both pleased and annoyed, in equal measure, about how successful it was. And then he took her to a charity ball at the Albert Hall and she astonished his table by discussing how the rotunda was built. The engineering facts. He just sat back and smiled as his guests floundered. Pamela never had to act style. From then on the balance between them changed. For the first time he began to think about a future that was based around a relationship. He dared to think the unthinkable. That this was someone with whom he might spend the rest of his life.
His sister Zoe, independent as he was, voraciously socially conscious and proud of her stylish brother, was horrified at the change in him. She advised him to get out while he could, but by then it was too late. He was in love. He looked at the watch again. After that, Mary sweetheart, no one stood a chance.
Zoe complained of Pamela’s bourgeois ways and took him to Barbados for Christmas. All he did was lie around wanting to be back in London. He took an early flight and joined her for the last couple of days of the holiday, he and teenaged Daniel glaring at each other across the festivities. She was the first woman in his life to have a child and he felt a terrible jealousy.
The only time she was really his was when he took her away, and she began to need no encouraging. Daniel stayed with friends or occasionally with his reluctant father. At first she worried about appearing to dump her son, then she exalted in the freedom. All he cared about was having her to himself. And he worked at it.
With her yen for the Cambridgeshire Levels, which he thought were exams until she took him there, he could get her out of London whenever he chose. She stood on the edge of that broad space, gesturing at nothing, laughing up at endless sky and down at seemingly infinite flatness – and he was almost persuaded that he wanted them too (but not, it was true, her son). And that was the picture that lasted – her, the sky and barren, brown flatness. After a couple of years he made the mistake of suggesting that Daniel should be sent away to sixth-form college. She refused. She would follow him to the ends of the earth, she promised, teasing him with that smile of hers, keeping it light, but she would not give up her son.
Well, neither, in the end, made it. Not to the Levels, not to the ends of the earth. Not together. That was all over four years ago. He took the phone off the hook for a month and steeled himself. Zoe saw him through. Kept him firm. Removed the telephone from his hand when he wavered, organized engaging things to do.
He survived. Never again.
He knew exactly where she was, living in the same house, working from the same shop. He had caught a glimpse of her a couple of times during the years. He had no desire to know if she had met someone new and had never spoken to her since. When Zoe asked him recently if he was completely over her, he said, ‘Yes, of course.’ And to prove it some imp in him suggested she use Pamela’s services for her new flat. Why not? She might get a discount. It was a bravado that he regretted now and he hoped his sister had forgotten the suggestion. Zoe was right. She cost him too much.
He pushed his mobile into the Jesse briefcase and rescued a fountain pen rolling around in its depths. Pamela bought him this, though thankfully she had the good sense not to carve anything into it. All she said as he unwrapped it was ‘I’ve bought it so you will think of me several times a day. . .’ No laughter from him that time. In this, as in many things, she had been wise. Most times he took it in his fingers he remembered her, even fleetingly. And the oddest, and maybe the saddest, thing was that the years he had feared would crawl along, had flashed by. The teenaged son would be in his twenties. Still at home, no doubt. Still filling up the space like an unbudgeable cuckoo.
Ah, well. Not his problem. He threw the pen back into the briefcase, a gift from one of the women in between her then, Mary now. Imaginative, these women, he thought wryly. Or was it just that he was no more than a watch, pen and briefcase man? Well, if he was, he was also a free one. Touch and go that month of phonelessness. But he got through it. He was lucky she went so quietly. She was four years older than him and she used to say, ‘Do you realize that when you were born I was grown up enough to read and write?’ After she went, it seemed to him, looking back, that they had never closed that gap.
He picked up his car keys and jangled them to dispel the past. The hall was lined with photographs by Helmut Newton. She hated Helmut Newton, which presumably, a shrink would say, was why he had chosen them. Naked women in moody black and white doing strange things in cluttered rooms. Chic and vaguely S&M – not that he was, really. It made him look more dangerous than he was. Which he liked. Next door he could hear the flat-sharers laughing, talking, preparing for the day. It was a fresh lot, just moved in on a new lease – and one of the girls wasn’t bad.
He ran a brush through his greying hair. Grey was OK. And put on the dark green Armani – also a present from Mary, though not, thankfully, inscribed. He checked his teeth in the mirror, ruffled his hair to fall more rakishly over his forehead, and pulled his cuffs straight. He would be forty-five next month. Mary was an infant. Time he traded her in, really, given that inscription. The wedding bells and babies couldn’t be far off. If he had learned anything about himself and women, it was to stay on the move, not risk boredom.
He legged it down the stairs and grabbed his mail. Out in the day he felt restored. He always did. London. Great place to be. He pressed the remote and the car coughed itself unlocked. He slid into his seat, threw the mail down on to the passenger side, and revved. He glanced in the mirror and saw the girl from the adjacent flat just emerging. Dark suit, good legs, bright smile, VW Polo. Standard issue. Maybe in a week or two? Ask her for a lift. It was a good line. Mary would be away at the Fashion Fair in Köln.
He sifted through his mail at the lights. He opened a letter with an Irish postmark. From an hotel in Dublin. He had stayed there with someone last year. All very brief. The new owners offered him a discount weekend during the Winter Arts Festival. Presumably the new management did not know who he was. He remembered it as a nice, shambolic hotel of ageing grandeur. Maybe he could do an Irish issue? He tossed the letter on to the back seat as he turned the corner of Marsham Street. And maybe not. Dublin in winter did not sound that good. Truth was, nothing sounded that good at the moment. He needed a change, a lift, something new. He smiled. Maybe what he needed was what Pam Pryor used to call Fun?
He turned the car into the underground car park. Above his space was a notice saying RESERVED. STYLE AND CITY. EDITOR.
When he reached his desk Mary had already rung, ‘Just to say hallo . . .’
She’d be talking about moving in next.