How Do I Love Thee? (27 page)

‘First of all, I’m sorry I ran away. It was childish.’

‘And so you should be. It was very embarrassing. The guy at the next table asked me what I did to you. Also, you should have let me walk you home. It’s dangerous out there in the universe.’ A car whizzed past them outside, its lights dancing over the room like Tinkerbell’s flight.

‘I’m perfectly capable of walking home by myself. I do it every night. Sheesh.’

‘Yeah, I could see that. You can take care of yourself—with a bit of help, of course. We made quite a team, didn’t we?’

‘Yeah. The frigging Dynamite Duo.’

‘Dynamite Duo. Hey, that’s catchy, but I think it’s been used before.’ He was pouring her a big glass of wine and holding it out. ‘Here—drink this and you’ll feel better.’

She took one huge gulp, then put the wineglass down on a nearby table. ‘Look, I had to be alone for a while to get my thoughts straight.’

‘And did you?’ He looked ready for bad news. His head hung down and his mouth was grim. He looked like Boris the Barbarian, slayer of the wicked, about to face a deadly battle.

‘Yes. I know what I want now.’ She took a deep breath and straightened her backbone. ‘I’ve decided to tell you that I care about you too. I don’t know if it’s love, but I’m willing to find out.’

‘I knew it,’ he whooped, raising one arm in the air, then bringing it down in a gesture that said, ‘Yes!’ She had to laugh—no choice. Brad always made her laugh.

Picking her up in his arms, he twirled her around as if they were on stage, the floor lamp acting as a spotlight. Then he kissed her, ravenous as a starving man. She gave in to the rush of sensation, content to fall under his power.

‘Jeez. We’re illuminated,’ he said, coming to his senses and pointing to the open curtains. ‘Don’t want to put on a free show for the neighbourhood, do we? Especially not if your ex-friend Roland is out there.’

‘Too true.’ The thought of Roland watching them kiss was enough to make her gag.

Brad’s eyelids were half closed, as if he’d just been roused from a deep sleep. He stumbled over to the curtains and drew them shut. ‘We could stay right here in the living room to chat and finish our wine—or I could give you the grand tour of my flat, starting with the master bedroom.’ He held up one palm in the stop position. ‘No pressure either way.’

‘Are you a good tour guide?’ So much for not appearing eager.

‘Why don’t you come with me and find out?’ He extended his hand to her and she grasped it willingly.

Hand in hand, she walked with him down the hallway, and it seemed right—destined, as if they’d been doing this since caveman days. She felt a bond grow between them, silky but strong like Arachnid-Man’s web.

It was an auspicious occasion, she decided. The world had just been promoted from half mad to half sane. Perhaps a small distinction, but surely an important one.

The superheroes would be celebrating tonight.

D
APHNE
C
LAIR

‘I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life!’

A leafless tree stands against the grey sky outside the window. The news is over and it’s too early for bed. Violet starts to pull down the blind, and decides that, despite the cool air outside, she will sit for a while on the park seat under the old oak.

She finds her jacket and her walking-stick, and after closing the door on her small room traverses the long corridor, passing other doors—some open, some closed—then crosses the empty reception area and the carpark outside to step onto the lawn and reach the wooden seat.

The slats are hard under her bony frame, but she likes it here, with the smell of grass and the quietness of the tree in its winter nakedness.

Violet never liked her name. As a child she was gangly and thin with a face too big for her body. In her teenage years she shot up more like an uncontrollable weed than the flower she’d been optimistically named for. Her schoolmates called her Beanstalk.

She had developed breasts before leaving primary school—a further embarrassment—but they never grew beyond a modest A-cup, while her hips remained boyishly narrow. Her friends, some of whose busts would have made them eligible for the weekly cheesecake photograph in the Sunday paper, professed to envy her long, elegant legs. Violet had looked at herself in the mirror, trying to believe in elegance, posing in her mother’s clothes when her mother was out, but before she was fifteen she’d grown too tall to fit into them, and her mother, with metaphorically wringing hands, hoped loudly and often that Violet would stop growing before she reached six feet. Somewhere below six feet was apparently the limit for any girl to lay claim to elegance, or indeed to normal womanhood. Above it, one became a freak of nature.

Violet gave up squashing her short rust-red corkscrew curls down to the top of her head and measuring herself against the doorframe of her bedroom, and never admitted to any
more than five feet eleven. As soon as metrics came in she converted her height to centimetres; no-one of her generation could work out what that was in feet and inches anyway.

As her body grew into the long face and haughty nose, she began reading women’s magazines to study how to Make the Best of her Assets and Conceal her Figure Faults. They told her that good posture was necessary at any height, and that hunching her scrawny shoulders would do nothing to conceal her excess inches. She persuaded her mother to buy her a dress with horizontal stripes to disguise her thinness and to let her grow her hair, but even when patiently ironed by her best friend, the curls refused to be disciplined, stubbornly springing back into a rusty frizz.

After leaving school with a second prize for geography and a final class photo that showed her, as always, in the very middle of the back row, she secured a job as the local library’s most junior assistant, and began experimenting with make-up, faithfully using a different shade of foundation on her nose to mask its size and cover the freckles, and coating her ginger-tipped lashes with mascara. There was nothing she could do about her weird pale-brownish eyes, but when one of the many hairdressers she consulted in her search for someone who might miraculously tame her hair commented admiringly on their ‘sort of golden-amber’ colour, she blinked
twice, studied herself in the salon’s mirror and decided to keep the description in mind.

In her last year at school she learned to dance the waltz and foxtrot in preparation for the annual ball; later she even learned rock’n’roll, though wisely ignored the short crinoline skirts that went with it, sticking to flares and tubes, and was never tempted by the advent of the miniskirt. When flat ballet shoes went so out of date they were unobtainable, she reluctantly invested in a pair of medium-high heels, even though it meant she physically looked down on nearly every man she met.

Meeting men was a priority with most of her friends throughout her teens and early twenties. Saturday nights were spent with a gaggle of girls lining the walls of large, cold halls, waiting for one of the young men congregated near the door to approach her. Some failed to hide their dismay when she stood up to accept an invitation. Their eyes would glaze as they pushed her round the floor while she stared over their heads.

The one characteristic Violet had that matched her name was shyness. Carrying on a conversation with a stranger was agonising to her. A voracious reader, when she talked about books young men tended to lose any faint interest they might have shown.

‘You frighten them off,’ her best friend scolded. ‘Boys don’t like intellectual women.’

‘I’m not intellectual,’ Violet protested. The geography prize had been her only notable achievement at school. She hadn’t even been good at sport, including what is now called netball but was basketball in her youth. Despite having the right build to throw goals she lacked coordination. ‘I just like to read,’ she said.

‘Well, don’t tell everyone!’ her friend advised. ‘And don’t say you’re a librarian.’ Leaving Violet very little with which to carry on a conversation. An only child whose conception had surprised her parents in their forties, she didn’t have siblings to complain about or make the subject of amusing stories; and rugby was a mystery to her.

One night she watched a dumpy, balding man, out of place among the youthful crowd that frequented the dance halls, being turned down by three girls in a row, and prayed he wouldn’t ask her.

When he stopped in front of her and said, ‘May I have this dance?’ she desperately wanted to say no, but her parents had impressed good manners in her. Torn between embarrassment and sympathy, she reluctantly rose and placed her left hand correctly on the man’s shoulder, let her right be taken in a firm grip and tried not to notice the stifled laughter that followed their progress about the floor.

The man was an energetic dancer, taking swooping steps and pulling her unexpectedly into complicated turns. His eyes were level with her breasts, which she’d augmented with a modestly padded bra, and which he stared at stoically while circling other couples until Violet began to feel dizzy. She considered claiming sickness and bolting for the ladies’ room. But abandoning her unsuitable partner in the middle of the floor would unforgivably embarrass him. She looked down at his thinning hair, greased with Brylcreem and hopefully combed across his pink scalp, and said the only thing she could think of. ‘Do you come here often?’

His head jerked up. Blue and bloodshot under thick brows, his eyes met hers. ‘Now and then, you know. I like dancing. Do you?’

Come here often or like dancing? Violet wondered, in a panic in case she gave the wrong answer. ‘Um,’ she said, ‘I’ve been here a few times. I quite like it.’ Which was a lie, she realised, as the words left her mouth. She didn’t like having to sit and pretend she was enjoying herself while her friends danced with boys half a head or more taller than they were. She hated it when one who might have equalled her height strode confidently in her direction but then veered to ask another girl to be his partner. And she hated almost equally being handled by sweaty strangers whom she loomed over
like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and who could barely conceal their relief on returning her to her seat.

Apparently encouraged by her answer, her partner whirled her into another turn, and she stumbled trying to follow him, almost bumping into a boy standing in a bunch with others puffing cigarette smoke into the air. His thick black hair was combed into an Elvis style, and he wore stovepipe jeans and a fake-leather jacket. Violet muttered, ‘Sorry,’ and as she was whisked away distinctly heard the words ‘baboon’ and ‘giraffe’, and a collective guffaw from the group.

When the music mercifully ended, the little man steered her back to her place, gave a jerky, old-fashioned bow and said, ‘Thank you very much, you’re a nice girl.’

Violet knew he was aware she hadn’t wanted to dance with him. ‘I’m not very good,’ she said impulsively, ‘at dancing, I mean. I’m sorry.’

His smile was sad and strangely sweet. ‘Don’t be sorry. Never be sorry for a gift.’

‘It was kind of you to ask me,’ she told him. ‘Not many men do.’ Then she blushed, afraid he would take that as an invitation to ask for another dance.

He smiled again, and she watched him disappear into the crowd, blocking the doorway of the hall until he was hidden behind men almost twice his height.

She never went dancing again and in time her friends stopped asking her to join them.

Over the following years Violet attended a dozen or so weddings. She was even a bridesmaid once, wearing green satin and with her hair styled into a topknot wreathed in artificial flowers. People she knew told her in surprised tones that she looked beautiful. She supposed they meant she didn’t look as plain and gawky as usual. The best man was good-looking and tall, and a faint flutter of hope and excitement entered her heart as they danced the opening waltz at the reception, following the bride and groom. It turned out his girlfriend was also at the wedding—a petite girl with a pretty kitten’s face, and a tiger’s smile when she claimed him after the bridal waltz.

Violet smiled back and retired to a corner where she was found by the bride’s uncle and merrily coerced into an energetic three-step that produced dark sweat stains under the arms of her satin dress and sent her hairstyle tumbling askew. She spent the remainder of the evening listening to the groom’s grandmother complain about the volume of the music, the unseemly depth of the bride’s neckline, the quality of the wine provided at the wedding breakfast, and the neglect the grandmother suffered from her family.

By the time she was twenty-seven, Violet had given up any pretence of wanting to meet men. Although she had no particular affinity with small children, finding them puzzling and frequently alarming, her married friends seemed to feel her childless state was a deprivation, and introduced her to their screaming, snot-faced and smelly offspring as an unofficial aunt. Occasionally she would be invited to dinner.

She would buy small presents for the children when she visited, hoping the teddy bears, colouring books and jigsaw puzzles were suitable, and exchanged stiff chit-chat with the latest tallish male acquaintance their parents presented for her inspection. A few of them were readers and she was able to keep up a semblance of sociability until she dried up and became tongue-tied. Fortunately, unlike her, tall men seemed full of confidence and most were happy to talk about themselves for as long as she was willing to listen.

Usually they were divorced or widowed. Some had children, and nearly all of them were boring. Violet felt guilty about being bored, considering she was probably the most boring female the men had ever been subjected to, leading a narrow but satisfying life.

An independent life. Being able to please herself without reference to anyone else was a luxury her married friends didn’t have. She could read in bed until midnight or sleep in on a Sunday, take a weekend trip on impulse without
hunting for a babysitter, and afford small indulgences that family budgets didn’t allow. Watching without envy the sometimes turbulent relationships around her, the couples and families navigating petty crises and occasional wrenching tragedy, she was rather bemused by their efforts to find her a man of her own.