Muddy Waters (18 page)

‘It's a terrible motif, don't you think?' Stella said to Abigail when they met later for their sumptuous calorie counted three course lunch.

‘What? The chameleon?' Abigail asked, squinting down at the embroidery on her own towelling pocket.

‘Horrible scaly things with bulging eyes and lumpy bodies. Do you think that's what we'll come out looking like?' Stella hesitated with her tray at the temptingly loaded buffet, her hand hovering between white wine (100 calories) and a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice (50 calories, though if she left the decorative cherry-and-mint leaf-on-a-stick it might be only forty).

Abigail (200 shameless calories of white wine on her tray, next to a salmon salad and mushrooms plus rice in filo pastry) giggled and looked around the room. Identical white bathrobes sat around, topped by various shades of pink and brown faces, some with their hair wrapped in towels, two wearing sunglasses. Conversation was at a low level. In the peach rag-rolled dining-room there was a long communal table for visitors who had come to Chameleon by themselves, but mostly those who had seemed to prefer to sit at tables alone either with a glossy magazine or the simple meditation on ideals of toned slenderness and silken skin. There were only two or three men among the many women, all of them seeming to be in attendance as companion/minder, pouring wine, arranging napkins and generally cosseting their various beloveds. Abigail eyed one of them speculatively, ‘Perhaps you get one of those if you pay extra. Must be a special tariff,' she suggested, adding cattily, ‘I mean, he'd hardly choose to be with her for free now, would he?'

The room, as Stella commented, couldn't even begin to qualify for its old nickname of the ‘piggery', especially given the discreet dolly's-tea-party portions of the food. A soft slap-slapping could be heard as Chameleon-issue towelling flip-flops crossed the floor, backwards and forwards from the buffet table. Some people, Stella noticed, were making several quiet visits, collecting many more gourmet delights than the prescribed three courses.

‘I think the idea is that we change from being grey and unnoticeable to something bright and stunning and
gorgeous
,' Abigail said.

‘You've been reading the brochure. All that stuff about the precious jewel of beauty.'

‘Yes I have, especially the bit about being pampered. I always enjoy being treated like a prize pet poodle. It makes a change from feeling as miserable as something that's been dropped off on the Battersea Dogs' Home's doorstep.'

Stella bit into a perfectly round Jersey potato (20 calories?) and frowned. ‘I'm not so sure about that bit. It seems sad to think that people have to come and pay this kind of a fortune for the chance to feel treasured. They should be able to get all that at home, just a general feeling of being valued. Well, we all should.' She stopped and thought for a moment and then continued. ‘In a way this reminds me of the fringe areas of prostitution, the sort where men pay to dress up as babies and be mummied, that kind of thing. The paying is for the pretence of being cared for, nothing else.'

‘Oh, I don't know,' Abigail grinned, ‘the men at
those
places are paying for a lot more than that. There's no point being prissy about it either. If you can pay for it, any of us can have more or less anything we want, don't you think?'

Stella thought for a moment. ‘Well, surely most of the things worth having, love and contentment and all that aren't for sale.'

Abigail came out with the kind of amazed laugh that had the rest of the diners turning their heads in the hope of sharing the joke. ‘Of course they are.
Especially
love and contentment. How do you think Martin got me? If you offer people enough, a new lifestyle, cash, whatever it is they want, I bet there's not many who'd not swop lives with someone else. What could be easier or more
adventurous
. Don't tell me the idea doesn't appeal – I just
won't
believe you.'

‘Well, it would take an awful lot to make me give up what I've got,' Stella replied, wondering if Abigail had gone mad.

‘Oh, come on, don't be so boring,' Abigail argued. ‘Suppose someone offered you, say, your own peace and quiet Caribbean island, rather than the suburban Pansy one with all its dull old English weather, in exchange for, well, not so much really.'

Stella could see her glossing over the details and smiled, ‘Well, no one's going to, are they. They'd be crazy to want to take over what I do.'

‘Not so crazy, I've already told you I envy you, not that it's that believable. Now, what have you booked in for this afternoon? I've got a gym session, facial and a leg-and-pussy wax.'

‘I'm down for seaweed wrap, Aqua-splash and a sunbed.' Stella sipped at her wine and wondered about the possibility of falling peacefully asleep, bandaged in bladderwrack or kelp, whatever the seaweed was. It might not be very comfortable; it might be slimy and gritty, like a Cornish beach after stormy days and a spring tide. She looked at the other women in the room and wondered if those who'd been there for several days actually looked any better than when they'd first arrived.

‘They should take photos of us,' she suggested, ‘when we get here, I mean. So we can have before and after shots and see the difference.'

‘We might want our money back,' Abigail said, ‘and then they'd say that the difference can't be measured in mere physical appearance.'

Stella giggled, ‘Oh yes, like it says in the brochure – “a profound and lasting feeling of well-being”. I'm looking forward to that.'

Toby shoved the last hubcap into place and stood up. It just needed another wash and a final polish and then the car was done, all the months of hard work and being flat broke finished. He took a clean J-cloth from the pack on the workbench and polished the VW badge on the bonnet, suddenly feeling worryingly at one with all those elderly men who lovingly polished the silver badges on their ancient Rover bumpers and yearned for the days when the AA men stood to attention in lay-bys and saluted their members. Badge-burnishing was the sort of thing Fergus MacIver would do.

‘It's
very
pretty,' Giuliana, black hair gleaming like the Beetle's paintwork, was standing next to him holding a cat basket that contained a very cross-looking chicken. She was
very
pretty too, he thought, the complete, uncluttered Italian-ness of her, the plain yellow linen dress, simple gold bracelet and her sheer cappuccino skin almost taking his breath away.

‘Why have you got a chicken in the basket?' he asked, wiping his hands on the cloth and wishing he was clean enough even to think of touching her. ‘In England that's something you get to eat in a pub.'

She laughed, her small teeth showing one gold filling in a pre-molar, like a carefully placed extra jewel. He could imagine her biting quite ferociously into something on a bone, a drumstick or a chop, tearing at meat. He wouldn't mind her biting into him.

‘Willow's cat hurt her wing, see?' she pointed through the wire door and the chicken squawked nervously. ‘I took her to the vet. I think he thought she should be cooked in a basket in a pub too. But she's a good layer. I told him and so he gave her an expensive injection.' She smiled guiltily, and put her hand on his arm in a friendly, confiding way. ‘I could have bought a lot of eggs for that – don't tell Enzo, please.'

Toby laughed. ‘I won't tell, I promise.' His arm had the electric feeling it had had when Abigail had touched him but didn't leave him with a terror of being savaged alive. Though she must be inundated by offers – perhaps she'd even laugh at him. ‘Sweet boy!' he could imagine her laughing if he asked her out. She'd be kind but direct with her ‘no', and she wouldn't get tangled up in a transparent selection of excuses like an English girl who didn't fancy him would. But it would, he was sure, still be no.

‘Your car is finished, will you take me for a drive in it?' She suddenly asked him. ‘Not now,' she added, indicating the chicken, ‘tonight perhaps?'

Toby looked round quickly and rather stupidly, as if thinking she must be actually asking someone else, some god-like stud, a passing Brad Pitt or Patrick Swayze.

‘Sure,' he said, smiling more broadly than he could possibly help. ‘We could get away from here for a bit, out towards some fields and a country pub.' She wouldn't, he guessed, much like being taken out clubbing like the college girls, but he hoped he hadn't suggested something too cornily, romantically middle-aged. He couldn't think why he'd even said it – unless it went with the polishing of car-badges. At this rate he'd end up hankering after string-backed driving gloves. To his amazement she was actually looking as delighted as if he'd suggested dinner at the Ivy.

‘OK. A nice night,' she said, pointing at the clear blue sky. ‘Till later – but, please, we don't eat the chickens in baskets.'

Abigail paced up and down her room after lunch and thought about phoning Martin's office. It wasn't good enough, she'd decided, that he should keep himself so utterly and irresponsibly out of touch. Suppose something happened to the children at school? Suppose James had one of those awful cricket ball accidents and was lying in hospital in a neck brace, being asked if he could wiggle his toes. She'd be all alone dealing with it, comforting and organizing and sleepless and trying to convince him that Daddy was coming, honestly, it was just that it was a terribly long way from America. She felt such anger with him for opting out so completely just for the sake of sex with a new person.
She
wouldn't do that. She'd always been far more considerate and had even made sure that any lovers understood that it was term time only, so that she wouldn't have to make complicated arrangements about the children. If he couldn't be more responsible than this, she was definitely better off without him. It almost helped, feeling like this. It meant she would be right to move on. She picked up the phone and dialled Adrian's number, hoping he'd forgive her for interrupting his work. A man's point of view was important; women friends were fine, but they did tend to try to find the
good
in everyone, including the errant man. Men had a different outlook on things, more lateral, brutally analytical even, which was very satisfying. It was time to remind him how wonderful it was when it was just the two of them together. They had, after all, once been such good friends.

Stella was disappointed that it didn't actually look like seaweed. She'd quite fancied being swathed, Ophelia-like, in fronds of sodden, clammy leaf. Instead she was coated all over, except for the bit modestly covered by paper knickers that reminded her of being in hospital having the children, with a brownish-green mudlike substance that smelled faintly of a polluted beach.

She sniffed suspiciously. ‘If I was sunbathing near this stuff,' she remarked tentatively to the girl applying the gunge (the name-badge this time was “Tanya” and the hair a pale, thin, ginger ponytail) ‘I might actually wonder if there'd been a dog . . .'

There was a horrified gasp from Tanya, who'd had, like Charlene, a sense of humour by-pass. ‘Oh no! You see it's an
algaeic
formula,
totally
sterile and absolutely beneficial for your skin,' Stella was told firmly.

Stella thought it would be hurtfully patronizing of her to point out that seaweed
was
algae and so she settled back, just as she had in the hair salon, to enjoy her own thoughts and to wonder if the speed at which the seaweed wrap dried would be any use in indicating the sort of weather that was to be expected for the following few days. If her whole body caked quickly to the texture of a parched riverbed, they might be in for a heatwave. Perhaps, though for that kind of thing, she'd need to be hung out of the window in a stiff breeze. Given the torturous nature of some of the treatments offered in the brochure, that didn't seem too far out of the question.

‘How do we get this stuff off?' she asked Tanya, who smiled happily at client ignorance.

‘You go in that shower over there, Madam, with a loofah,' she said, indicating a doorway in the corner of the room. Stella felt quite relieved, having imagined a nineteenth-century Baden-Baden scene involving a sadistic hosing down with storm-force jets of freezing water.

Once she'd completely painted her with mud, Tanya left Stella alone in the room, turning down the lights and turning up the music that was meant to be restful and soothing. Stella lay still and hoped she wouldn't get an itchy nose and concentrated on trying to find some sort of tuneful pattern to the music. It was probably something to do with whale-song, she decided, failing to identify a rhythm. Beneath the paper blanket, the edges of the paper knickers were beginning to disintegrate and reminded her rather disgustingly of an infants school lavatory accident. Ruth would love this, she thought sleepily, as would any teenager who'd still got a hankering after playing mud-pies.

Adrian drove fast for the first five miles and then slowed down considerably and started hoping he'd get lost enough in the rustic lanes to make himself thoroughly late. He couldn't imagine what he'd been thinking of, well he could if he was scrupulously honest, agreeing to meet Abigail. She'd been horribly clever, using just the right words to get him to come out to play – appealing to him for help (as a friend), all that stuff about a man's view of things, how much she wanted Martin back, true love and all that garbage. How awfully late in the day to have suddenly
discovered
love, he thought cynically.

She certainly hadn't had much of an opinion of it when
he'd
been briefly besotted about her. Not even so much as the equivalent of an agnostic about it, just bluntly, cruelly as dismissive as a dyed-in-the-wool atheist. Now he had a long evening ahead of him, miles from home, with a woman who terrified and attracted him and without even being able to drink himself into blame-free carelessness.