Muddy Waters (10 page)

Toby was sitting by himself at a table laid for four and studying the menu intently as if he really couldn't choose between the leek pie and lasagne. An empty beer glass sat beside him, so he'd obviously been there for some time.

‘How did you know he was here? You couldn't possibly have seen him in the dark and round this corner.' Stella accused Abigail, who simply shrugged and smiled with a mysterious ‘who knows?' kind of look.

‘Hi Mum, I hear you're buying lunch,' Toby greeted her.

Stella sat down. ‘Actually Abigail is,' she told him. She looked round to see Abigail's honey-coloured jacket weaving its way towards the loo at the back of the bar. What on earth was she up to, Stella wondered. ‘She arranged to meet you here then? Why didn't she tell me, and when did you fix it up?'

‘I don't know why she didn't say anything. Probably thought I wouldn't come. You know how it is with us
young
people.' He shrugged with a distinct lack of interest and ran a finger down the menu, obviously far more concerned that he should be fed. ‘This morning on the stairs she just asked me where would be good for food and I said this place and she said if I was here about one-ish I'd be OK for a free lunch.'

‘Haven't you heard, there's no such thing,' Stella warned quietly as Abigail returned.

‘Now, isn't this nice?' Abigail said, sitting down and bringing with her a fresh cloud of expensive scent. She looked admiringly at Toby as he studied his empty glass with the one eye that wasn't obscured by his hair. ‘I do envy you, Stella,' she sighed, ‘I'm so looking forward to my boy being old enough to have grown-up lunch out with his ageing mummy. If he'd want to, that is. At the moment James and Venetia are still at the awful burger-and-chips stage.'

‘So's Toby, usually,' Stella told her truthfully.

‘In that case, it's all the more sweet of him to turn up here and indulge us,' said Abigail, reaching forward and patting his oil-streaked arm, at which he did not, Stella noticed with amazement, flinch. ‘I'm not your godmother or anything, am I?' Abigail suddenly asked him, ‘I mean if I am, I expect it'll take more than a portion of moussaka to make up for not taking you to
Peter Pan
or the circus and all that.'

‘We don't have godparents. Mum and Dad were going through their pagan phase when they had us,' Toby told her, putting on a mock spaniel-sad face. ‘We've been deprived.'

‘Oh, you poor boy! Stella, how dreadfully remiss of you!'

Stella had an uncomfortable feeling she was being ganged up on in a joke she wasn't quite seeing. ‘He does OK,' she said, ‘he's never gone short of the usual treats. And he was never that keen on circuses.'

‘Sorry for the animals?' Abigail asked Toby with an expression of tender sympathy. Stella felt irritated by Toby's look of lazy satisfaction at being the centre of attention.

‘No he was, and is, absolutely terrified of clowns,' she answered for him. ‘Now, shall we eat?'

Stella trudged home alone carrying the new dress and Adrian's boxes of paper which she delivered to the summerhouse. ‘Abigail's picking up your jacket from the cleaners – I left her cruising the High Street.'

‘Really? I wonder what else she'll pick up. Thanks for the paper,' he said vaguely, refusing to be distracted. Stella plugged in his kettle and clattered around making tea, also refusing to defer to his intense concentration. She felt aggrieved, somehow, done out of the chance to do her own work while everyone else around her went about fulfilling exactly what they wanted to do as if nothing else could possibly be expected of them. She'd worked herself into such a state of resentment that she'd decided she didn't even like the fact that Abigail had volunteered to collect Adrian's jacket. She didn't want her handling his clothes, even securely bagged in opaque polythene – it was all too intimate. Yesterday, any other day, she was sure she wouldn't have felt like that but then yesterday she hadn't seen Abigail pawing at Toby. Abigail had reminded her then of the sleek little Siamese cat which had sat on her lap that morning. It had purred ecstatically and kneaded lovingly at her leg, with its needle-sharp little possessive claws digging and hurting.

‘Something wrong?' Adrian asked, suddenly sensing a cloud.

Stella looked at his face where an expression of dutiful concern was in place, but his hands were still over the keyboard, all ready poised to form the next sentence the moment he'd said the right thing. She squeezed his shoulder, ‘Nothing I can quite put my finger on.'

Perhaps next time, and if not, he could find himself another bloody model, Ruth thought glumly as she walked into college the next morning, already ten minutes late for the class at which she'd have to sit with Melissa and confess to failure. Melissa, waiting for her on the steps, stubbed out her cigarette on the scarred trunk of the sycamore tree and ran to join her as she saw her by the gate.

‘Well?
Did
you?'

‘No. He just painted away as bloody sodding usual,' Ruth sighed. ‘I'd poured the geranium oil in the bath too. It's supposed to be irresistible. And I used my passionflower body lotion. What a waste. He did say I
glistened
and he seemed to like that but he still didn't touch me – not unless you count prodding my bum with the sharp end of the paintbrush and telling me to roll to the left a bit. He hardly even looked – it's so
insulting.
Christ, he's
old,
you'd think he'd be grateful.'

Melissa giggled, ‘With all that oily stuff on your body, it's probably the best thing. You must have been like a skating rink. He'd have slid off.'

Ruth scowled at her. Into her highly visual imagination came a ridiculous and unwelcome cartoon of plump and naked Bernard skimming like a gold-medal skater off her body and the velvet-strewn sofa, out through the balcony window and plummeting heavily into the river. ‘It's not
funny.
I want to have sex with him
now
, not after the painting's all finished and done with and framed and hung up and it's too late for all the
passion
and the excitement.'

‘Passion for you or the painting?'

‘Both, I suppose. I want people to look at this picture and be able to
tell
that there's more to it than me sprawled on the sofa reading
Marie Claire
and hoping.'

‘He might just be a lousy shag,' Melissa pointed out, ‘and then there wouldn't be much use in that either, would there?'

Stella knew she was wasting precious working time. The rainbow pile of envelopes still waited in a basket next to the computer. She had just two more days to get next week's column done and faxed. Abigail had gone up to her room for a rest after lunch. ‘I do occasionally have a little sleep in the afternoons. Or a little read,' she explained, waving a glossy magazine at Stella when she asked if she had a headache. Contrary woman, Stella thought, remembering Abigail protesting she wasn't
ill
the last time Stella had suggested she might want to rest. Imagine claiming a whole afternoon just for sleeping, claiming it as a
right
. She strolled idly along the path towards Willow's house, imagining having so little to do that time could be found in the middle of the day for a ‘rest'. Surely it was only frantically busy people who needed one, not people like Abigail who could fill or empty their days as they chose. From when she was a small child, she remembered her mother having what she called ‘a little lie-down' after lunch, dozing in her coffee-coloured nylon and lace petticoat under the pinky blue shot-satin eiderdown on her bed while her small daughter, far too big to need sleep in the afternoons and longing to get back to running around in the garden, lay bored on her own bed peeling tiny strips of rose patterned paper off the wall and dreading the smack she'd get for it later.

‘It would do you good too, you know,' Abigail had recommended, ‘it's so refreshing, you'll be ready for anything afterwards.' There'd been a suggestive gleam in her eyes that Stella recalled only too well from the days when the ‘anything' Abigail had always been ready for had consisted of an over-excited fellow student eager to remove his trousers.

Willow's garden gate was of twisted, tortured iron work made as an experimental free sample by Enzo the sculptor who, when he and Giuliana first came to live on the island, had thought Willow might be useful, both as a source of bodily comfort and for the neighbourly borrowing of cups of brown rice. The gate, which was head-high with bent and lethal spikes and took a great deal of pushing to open, creaked and wobbled alarmingly but Willow refused to allow Enzo to rehang it on the grounds that its noise deterred burglars and the casually nosy. If he fancied a second go at romancing her, perhaps by sneaking in and surprising her in the night, his slapdash workmanship had scuppered his own chances. Willow, who despite her fey and fragile appearance, could whip up perfectly symmetrical pots the size of half-barrels with skill and ease, thought of Enzo as a flawed artisan, beneath notice – and besides, he was
terribly
fond of his sister. Willow and Giuliana kept a war-by-proxy going on, represented by Willow's cats and Giuliana's chickens, with Giuliana demanding that they wear warning bells on their collars and Willow arguing that the hens wouldn't hear them over the racket of Enzo's ludicrously giant wind chimes.

Stella shoved hard at the gate and its squeal was echoed by a chorus of interested miaowing from Willow's three black cats. She was reminded of Ruth's opinion that Willow was a witch by the absence of the fourth cat, a mottled, kipper-coloured, long-haired stray, the shades of whose fur more than slightly resembled Willow's own peculiarly blotchy hair. ‘You never see that cat and Willow at the same time,' Ruth had told them all during supper one night, ‘so the cat must be her familiar. Willow
is
that cat.'

‘Transmoggyfied, is she?' Toby had mocked.

‘Over
here
! Stella!' Stella looked round the rampantly overgrown garden, half expecting to see the kipper-cat calling down to her, grinning from the branches of Willow's elder tree. Willow, in pink dungarees and a rainbow T-shirt was weeding her oil-drums where tobacco plants, outsize nasturtiums and marigolds already ran riot.

‘They're surely not this season's, not at that size,' Stella commented admiringly.

‘Well, they've hung on and reseeded themselves over the winter. No frost this side, you see, in the shelter of the bank. Almost tropical,' she sighed, looking dreamy as if she was seeing not the cottage garden flowers of England but banana trees and bougainvillaea. ‘They grow like weeds. I've been thinking of filling the garden with herbs and having a stall to sell them. Perhaps for next year's open day I could make some herb pots too. Marjoram, rosemary, applemint – such romantic names, names for angels' children . . .' Her eyes gazed musingly into the distance as she spoke and Stella watched her closely, seeing for the first time the grubby black flecks of mascara lumped on to the rather stumpy eyelashes, grey eyeliner applied thickly as if it had been loaded on top of yesterday's make-up. She's quite a raddled old slut really, Stella thought, not without some fondness.

‘I've come to buy a pot,' Stella prompted, ‘I need something suitable for quite large salads, any colour as long as it's not purple or green. Have you got anything suitable, do you think?'

‘Oh, you've come to
buy
something!' Willow's attention flew back at last. ‘I thought perhaps there was a party going on or something jolly and fun like that.' She looked just like a little girl who'd been told the tooth fairy was fresh out of cash, Stella thought. It also crossed her mind that having a few people round, say the next night, would be something else she could do towards entertaining Abigail. She told Willow, instantly inventing, ‘Not a party exactly, but tomorrow we're having a small supper gathering, seeing as we've got Abigail staying, just the islanders, so yes, do come at seven-ish. That's partly why I need the bowl.' She felt limp from lying and from the thought of the effort she'd just gone and landed herself with but Willow's face was lit up like a birthday child's.

‘A party
and
a sale! Wow!'

‘Is selling something so unusual?' Stella laughed.

‘Only among the neighbours,' Willow told her as they went into the house. ‘This island's supposed to be a close-knit artistic community, right? Support each other, right?
Wrong.
Enzo and Giuliana's place is full of their old grandmother's Italian antiques so they won't even
look
at anything under a hundred years old unless it's got a useful bit of bendable metal. The MacIver's don't trust anything that doesn't come in a flat-pack and most of the others think they should get a neighbours' discount so enormous it isn't worth selling. Of course, there's you and Adrian though,' she smiled as they walked through the cluttered and colourful kitchen to the studio. ‘And there's Bernard.'

‘He buys things from you then? That's good,' Stella said mischievously, bending to look at some unfinished pots waiting for their turn in the kiln. Bernard's loft contained many of Willow's best pieces, bowls for his fruit, jugs, mugs often carelessly piled into his sink or left out for days with mouldering dregs of coffee on the balcony ledges. No one imagined he'd had to pay for them.

‘Er, now and then he does. What about this one? Or this?' Willow pulled from a shelf a scarlet bowl streaked at random with thread-like wisps of pale gold and put it on the table by the window where the sun beamed in on its soft gaze. ‘It's exactly the colour of the inside of lips, don't you think?' she half-whispered to Stella as if suggesting something deeply secret – perhaps she didn't mean mouth-lips. Stella nodded uncertainly, though the idea did rather put her off using the bowl for salad. It would be like spooning leaves into someone else, at one end or another of them, which made the thought of spooning them out again slightly repulsive. She imagined cherry tomatoes falling through the layers of rocket and lettuce and never being seen again.