Sarah suppressed a laugh. Love, that many-splendoured thing, to be avoided at all costs, especially with this wretched man of Jessica’s who, even from brief misdescriptions, sounded like everything that Sarah herself would dislike. She imagined him as large and carnivorous, a man who might take a bet on a gifted girl like Jessica who was good enough to grant an opportunity, plus a few introductions, until he grew tired of her demands and dumped her. Such was life: Sarah knew that round of that particular carousel all too well and knew you had to jump off. He owned or managed a restaurant: that was probably part of the appeal, as in something to talk about. Sarah halfway understood the in-between bits, such as Jessica working for him or with him once, briefly, until he did not need her any more. She knew only a fraction of it: the information came out in gulps between rapid changes of subject as Jessica veered away from and then towards self-indulgence, shame for it, and sudden fits of secrecy. Despite her gratitude, Sarah could feel herself beginning to yawn. Such all-consuming passion for a lost cause of a man made her weary and glad to be beyond it.
‘Well, making a scene isn’t going to do it, is it?’
Echoes upon echoes. A revving car, urban voices, someone shouting
See you, bye,
sounds of the bleep, bleep, bleep of a pedestrian crossing, then Jessica’s own clickety-click heels crossing to the other side and that heavy breathing of hers which indicated hesitation.
‘So you don’t think it’s a good idea, then?’
‘No.’
Sarah looked at her watch. Early London lunch hours. Jessica’s threat was probably an empty one, like so many of them were. Sarah could hear her reaching the same conclusion,
as if Jessica had only just thought of how a big gesture might be ruined for lack of an audience. Jessica could vomit by a sheer act of will.
‘You told me I was magnificent when I was angry,’ Jessica said.
‘So you are, but I doubt if it’s universally appreciated,’ Sarah said sharply. ‘And if you love him,’ she went on into the ensuing silence, ‘doesn’t that mean you want him happy? With or without you? Isn’t this just selfishness?’
That was a long sentence in the circumstances. There was a lot more to say, such as you’re a beautiful, spoiled child, and there will always be someone else, as there has been before, will be again, and all the blah, blah, blah she herself might not have believed when she was twenty-three, plus other platitudes, such as look, go to work on yourself; no man is ever going to cure those insecurities, especially if you pursue him beyond the grave.
Beyond the grave?
Where did that come from? She’d been reading too much and she shivered as she listened and stayed silent, waiting for the sound of gears turning in Jessica’s mind. She was not going to sound like a wise old aunt telling Jessica to concentrate on what she was good at, like food and artless generosity, grow up.
‘I always know where I can find him,’ Jessica said. ‘If he doesn’t love me, and I’ll die if he doesn’t, I could almost wish he was really dead.’
‘Maybe, love, but you don’t want him wishing
you
dead, do you?’
Another pause for silence and the click-clack of heels before Sarah spoke again, trying to lighten the tone.
‘So what’s with the rest of the day? Everything else going OK? I can hear all those London noises. It’s so quiet here.’
Jessica seized upon the change of subject with suspicious speed as if she had overstepped the mark, revealed too much. Giggled. Crisis over.
‘Quiet? Is it really? I don’t remember that, I remember all sorts of lovely noises. Anyway, I’ve got these prats to cook for this evening, twelve of them. Fucking stockbrokers in W12 on a tight new budget. Oh, shit, almost forgot. Must go, got things to collect. You’re right, no time to be mad. Look, if you’re homesick that makes two of us. I’m riddled with it, keeps me awake. I miss you. Hey, what are you doing down there, anyway? Lots of lovely walks? Has spring been springing? You don’t notice it here.’ Then, ‘Have you met my mother yet?’
‘No. Not yet. I’ve seen her in the distance. She looked well – and rather elegant, I thought.’
Sarah did not quite know why she was being economical with the truth: that Mrs Hurly had left a distinctly unpleasant impression when Sarah had seen her in the vicarage. Or why she didn’t add in the fact that she was apprehensive and did not want to know Jessica’s mother at all.
There was a sudden trill of Jessica’s infectious laughter and Sarah felt her shoulders relax as if some small danger point had been passed.
‘That’s all right, then. As long as she’s well. She
is
elegant, isn’t she? I’m proud of her really and I don’t blame her for not being proud of me, but I’ll make her proud of me. As long as she’s well. I’ve been writing to her a bit. God, I miss her shouting. You can always catch her in the butcher’s shop. She owns that, too. She just goes in there to torment them. She can be awful, got a temper like mine, doesn’t mean it. I love you, Sarah. I want to come home and show you everything.’
She would finish the call before she started crying. Sarah knew that, because there were some limits to what Jessica would do in a public street and crying was one of them.
‘So why don’t you just come home?’
‘You know why.’
‘No, I don’t. You keep saying you’ll tell and you never do.’
That much was true. There was plenty that Jessica wanted to say and couldn’t or wouldn’t. Jessica had a love–hate relationship with the place where she had grown up and it was her descriptions of this village that had lured Sarah to it.
Oh God, Sarah, if you want a picture-book village hidden between cliffs, I’ve got the one. My mother owns four houses there. It’s the most perfect hell-hole if you like sea and greenery; greenery gives me vertigo.
There was more to her love and loathing of the place than that, but it had never been fully explained in their long, meandering, constantly-changing-tack conversations over Sarah’s kitchen table. Sarah had never known if this was withholding information or simply forgetting to include it. Or wanting Sarah to find out for herself, without prejudice. Or not wanting it, or not knowing quite what she wanted. That last guess made sense. Jessica did not know what she wanted about many things.
‘I can’t come back. They want to kill me.’
Overdramatic again.
‘Nonsense, love,’ Sarah said, soothingly. ‘You’re far too beautiful for that.’
‘I am, aren’t I? Am I? So why doesn’t he love me? Oh, shut up, Jess. Where are you, Sarah? I can hear seagulls, oh my God, I can hear seagulls. I adore them. I love the seagulls. They’re brave and shameless. They scavenge for a living, like me.’
‘Like me,’ Sarah echoed.
The gulls were still crying on the roof and Sarah held out the phone so that Jessica could hear them better. They did not sound musical to her own ears, only plaintive and haunting. Then she held the phone back to her ear, listening to Jessica’s footsteps, now free of the crowd and moving faster.
‘I’ll do it,’ Jessica was saying, excitedly. ‘I’ll do it, I’ll come home. I can do it if I know you’re there. Maybe I can bring him back. No, why do I have to wait? I can sneak in under cover of darkness and sneak away before dawn. I can stay with you, can’t I? Just to look. Listen to those bloody seagulls and look at the sea. Make me a really long recording of the seagulls, will you? Send it to me.’
Sarah was smiling at her excitement.
‘Why do you have to come under cover of darkness?’
‘I burned a lot of boats,’ Jessica said airily. ‘But I’ll do it, I’ll come back.’
‘When?’
‘Soon. Any day now. Why should I wait? Soon as I can. Let me hear those seagulls again.’
Sarah looked up to the roof. The gulls had flown. The phone call ended.
S
arah had forgotten to buy anything to eat and listening to Jessica reminded her of food. Left to herself, any variation on the theme of eggs and toast would do, but not when she thought of Jessica’s standards. Jessica demanded fine oils and herbs and fish more exotic than any that were available here: town fish, like tuna, swordfish, scallops and wild salmon. Fish was her speciality: Jessica really didn’t like meat. Sarah picked up the phone and asked for a taxi to take her to the little town three miles away down the coast. Jessica unsettled her: there was definitely something wrong with
Sarah if she wanted to see the inside of a big supermarket. Besides, she needed more paint. Classical grey for the vicarage, best not to let the vicar have the choice.
It would be dark by the time she got back, and it was even nicer coming home in the dark. Maybe she would always be an urbanite: maybe the city was locked in her. Then she thought of urban dinner parties and shuddered. On the way to the next town, in the back of a battered taxi with a taciturn driver, she thought of the first time she had met Jessica Hurly.
W
11, environs of Holland Park, long after dark. Huge house, Lansdowne Road or somewhere. No supermarket food allowed. Mine host already flushed. Purpose of dinner party: to show a degree of financial prudence and showy-offishness, as well as a fat torso. Look, guys, just look at this house. See the furniture? Clock the design features? And why are we having this party? Think on. Because I’ve had a bloody good bonus and rather than ram it down your necks with a party in some old-hat costa-bomb place like the Ritz I’m having it here in my own home, and I scarcely know some of you, but you’re all guys I need to know, like my dentist and possibly some whose noses I want to rub in it. I’ve got a wife, her over there; I’ve got a kid with a nanny in the upper regions of MY house and all’s well with the world, thank you. There’s even a fucking pedigree cat. No credit crunch here for me. So let’s raise a toast to me and all the megadeals that got me this house that no one else could afford and all this vintage champers. Shall we sit? (At MY table, with the Villeroy and Boch china. I really wanted you to see that: not dishwasher-proof, but the cook will see to that. Cheers!) Pity it’s too wet for you to see the garden at the back. Designed by
. . .
What the hell’s happened to that bitch of a cook? Had to have a
word with her earlier. She isn’t cheap, bit of a looker, though she said we couldn’t eat the starter with spoons! Well, I mean, I need to use these very fine spoons we got as a wedding present and I thought I’d ordered soup, but she said I’d chosen foie gras with figs, silly cow, so I said change it, I want to use the spoons, surely you can knock up a soup? And I’m sure I said meat rather than fish.
Are we seated? Did you like the canopies, sorry, canapés? Looked lively, didn’t they? Jolly well served, too, those tits of hers are like kittens in a basket. Who? No, she comes highly recommended by that bloke who runs DK, Das Kalb to us, that little place near Smithfield, does meltdown steak, he kills it himself. No, not cheap, either, this cook, but not nearly as much as taking all you unimportant little fuckers out to a slap-up meal there. Plus wine, of course – do you like the glasses? Ah, here she is, does it all on her own, you know. Clever girl.
Y
es, I am a clever girl sometimes, Jessica said afterwards in another kind of taxi. So sharp I could cut off my own nose to spite my own face. I’ll never get paid, but it was worth it. Don’t you see? I knew what he was thinking. He was one of those who can only feel big by making everyone else feel small. He didn’t know that it’s never money that makes a man.
The clever girl came in with the cucumber soup, stood poised in the doorway that led from there to the kitchen, framed in light like an avenging angel in perpendicular heels. Nigella Lawson, eat your heart out. She teetered towards him, coquettishly and steadily bearing a huge silver salver that looked too heavy for her slender arms to lift. Chairs scraped back for men to take it from her, but lift it she did, to a great enough height from which to pour it all over his head. Blue nails, virulent green soup. It wasn’t the action,
Sarah decided: it was the wholehearted cheer that followed that dealt the mortal blow to his pride.
It was cold soup, Jessica said. I wouldn’t have done it with hot. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. It just felt like something that had to be done. If I was like him and made people squirm for fun I’d want someone to teach me that I couldn’t get away with it.
H
alfway down the supermarket aisle, blinking in the artificial light and hating every minute of it, Sarah wondered if this was the kind of episode that Jessica in her current mood might well repeat this evening or another evening without the same moral justification. Whether Jessica’s anger was always in response to genuine provocation and outrage, or whether it was the formless, destructive sort that came from being angry with oneself, Sarah was not sure. Now that Jessica was six months older, she hoped there would be no repetition and she loaded the trolley with an abundance of everything so that she would only have to return later rather than sooner. Then she moved on to the only part of this vast store that she did not actively dislike, which was the Do It Yourself section. Paint. Three times seven-litre cans, heavy stuff. Presumptuous of her to choose for him, but instinct told her he might like it that way and it would save time.
It was early-evening dark when she got home and lugged it all into the porch: wine, fish and paint. She had forgotten herbs, but Sam the Butcher said he could get them any time, him or Jeremy would. Jeremy, that plain lad, could collect whatever she needed from the herb beds at the back, and any time soon she would be able to collect wild garlic and fennel from the beach herself.
She was not that close to Nature. Nature could take care of itself.
The phone rang. This time it was the vicar. Call me Andrew.
‘Do you really mean it? About painting the vicarage? The main room, anyway? Only I thought I’d give you a chance to change your mind. I’ve got masses of white paint. Do you mean it?’
‘Yes, but not white.’
He laughed with relief.
‘Oh, good. Not white. So sterile and godly. Marvellous – er, when did you think you could start? I mean
we,
only I’m busy all day tomorrow, then it’s Sunday, and Monday’s difficult with meetings and things and . . .’