Other People's Husbands (3 page)

Sara didn't much enjoy weekends in London. She went to clubs with her college friends because she didn't want to be unsociable, but the music wasn't the sort she'd have chosen; she wasn't much of a drinker and her drug days had added up to a brief summer sharing her sister Lizzie's home-grown cannabis supply and wondering what the fuss was about. During the empty weekend days she'd go to a gallery or to junk shops looking for clothing treasures, or if it was warm she'd lie in the park reading. London boys who were her contemporaries seemed silly and young and too much into how they looked and how much money they needed. They were forever telling her what they were going to be, in the great future One Day. It annoyed her, this lack of
now
: she preferred people who were already grown-up – people like . . . well, she quite fancied Conrad Blythe-Hamilton, but then didn't everybody?

It seemed an extra-unfair example of ‘wrong' to have your bag stolen at a CND rally. It was October and Sara was in Hyde Park, where the 200,000-strong anti-nuclear march ended. No one else from the flat had wanted to go so she was there alone, trying (and failing) to catch the words of Neil Kinnock on the stage. She'd only put the bag down for a second while she searched her pockets for some chewing gum. The police would tell her, with seen-it-all resignation, that a second was all it took. Realizing it had vanished in that moment almost made her give up on humanity. Who would do that, here, where everyone was linked in support of a cause for peace and justice? Furious and feeling decidedly let down, she pushed through the crowd to the Hyde Park Corner gate and wondered how she was supposed to get back to Earls Court with no money and no Tube ticket.

That was when she collided with Conrad. The police were right: some things do only take a moment. Robbery was one; falling in love came a close second.

Conrad sat on a storm-blown tree trunk that lay alongside the path through the bracken and brambles and waited for his dog to catch up. If he still smoked, this would be the perfect moment for a cigarette. He could relax and puff away contentedly, while gazing into the split and shredded oak bark at the metropolis of insect life and the oozing fungus growing on the sodden, crumbling wood fissures. Idly, he wondered if he was now old enough to have got to the point where he might as well take up the horrible smoking habit again. Even after twenty smoke-free years he missed it now and then. Was there an age where you were allowed to think, oh bugger it, drink/eat/smoke/be what you want because it really won't make a difference any more? Had he done enough by now with the good diet, the moderation of drink and the general health awareness to allow himself some sin-time?

In a couple of months he would have hit the biblical three-score-and-ten. He murmured it out loud. Seventy. Not good. Sara wanted him to have a big party: friends and family from all over. Caterers. A marquee. The house all tricked out with flowers like a bloody wedding. Sara would do it beautifully – she was good at organizing. She was good at everything. That was one of the first things that had struck him about her, how efficient she was, even at only twenty. Right from the off she'd been such a grown-up for someone so young. She'd never played the girly card and expected him to make the reservations, fix up the minicab. When she'd had her bag stolen at the rally she'd been perfectly prepared to hitchhike back to Earls Court rather than sit on a bench and cry till some rescuer took pity. And in the years since, not once had he set out for an airport wondering if the travel arrangements were properly sorted or if the girls' passports were up to date.

Back at the start, it had taken a while to work out that she really,
really
liked him, so cool and un-needy as she was. This was something he wasn't used to – the usual exchange rate for enjoying the bodies and beauty of youthful women was that they had immature minds to match. Sooner or later he'd find they would squeal over a broken fingernail or sulk for hours because he hadn't noticed their shoes.
Shoes
, for heaven's sake. Sara simply didn't do this. She was serene and sweet and instead of being some accessory to his life, as other girlfriends had been, she seemed to complete it. The anxiety that she might calmly vanish from his existence had given him worrying palpitations, enough to send him for a medical check-up.

Gerry, his agent, currently had various magazines lined up to do ‘celebration pieces', whatever they were, but the thought made him feel moody, like a stroppy toddler. How to tell Sara NO to a party without hurting her feelings? How to turn down publicity that would get his name profitably more prominent in the public eye? The current art aristos were a hell of a lot younger than him, but all the same, was there anyone left in this nation who
couldn't
say, ‘Oh, that's a Blythe-Hamilton' when they looked at one of his paintings? When did he (and Hockney, and Allen Jones, Peter Blake et al.) become almost brands rather than painterly individuals? Not that he was quite up there with that lot. He never would be now – well, not till he was dead, anyway, and even then only if some arts wallah in the media made a big enough song and dance.

Still, whichever way you dressed up seventy, it was quite
old
. Not
venerable
yet – that started at least ten years further on, surely – but you couldn't go round any longer pretending it was late middle age. In the mirror he could see exactly what was meant by ‘long in the tooth'. He had to get up in the night to pee (occasionally twice, depending on wine intake), his left hip was iffy and it was a long time since he'd even considered doing anything more physically demanding than a few idle lengths of the pool. He had become mildly afraid to have sex lately too, ludicrously superstitious that you were only allowed so much of it over a lifetime and that he had to eke out what was left. Shame, because he didn't fancy it any less frequently, it was just another illogical fear, like the dreams where all his teeth fell out or his hair vanished overnight. He didn't feel particularly unfit – but you became content with that, rather than testing if you were right to feel that way in case you weren't. Being mildly vain and stylish (long and plentiful white hair, firm body, good posture, one-time Gap old-celebrity denim model of choice) helped too. But he couldn't pretend the Reaper wasn't out there now, pacing the floor not too far away and looking at his watch. Now and then, especially in the pre-dawn hours when he woke and contemplated the lack of time ahead, Conrad thought he caught the distant sound of apocalyptic hoofbeats. When he'd mentioned it to Sara she'd been dismissive, told him it was trains going over the Thames bridge.

Floss was, in dog years, even older than Conrad, and deserved patient consideration. She was slowing. This familiar circuit (field–towpath–field) now took at least twenty minutes longer than it had done the year before, and Conrad knew he wasn't the one needing the extra time. Floss surely couldn't carry on much longer, being fourteen and having gone well beyond a spaniel's normal lifespan. Did she also see a doggy Reaper in the corner of her eye? How lucky they were if they didn't have that apprehension of their own demise. Who could think that being an animal, and not knowing the things that humans know, could be an inferior deal? Floss would be his last dog. This decision came from out of the blue to Conrad as he waited for her to finish snuffling round the base of a hawthorn tree. He added it to the secret Last Things list that he'd recently started mentally compiling. It had begun with New Year's Eve, when he'd realized he absolutely didn't want to kiss everyone at the party just because it was suddenly January 1st. Any woman who wasn't Sara, however stunning she was, seemed to taste of old cheese. So that was it for New Year's Eve – an early night from now on, in bed and asleep and let the year turn itself round without him.

He'd also decided he'd had his last trip to America. If Americans wanted to buy his paintings he would plead age and infirmity, and they could come over here for them. He wasn't going to exhibit there again – he hated the travel, the food, the ‘have a good day', the overwhelming niceness (and
so
nice. It made him long for British surliness), the smiley, smiley teeth. They could do a retrospective after he'd gone and someone else could deal with it.

In all honesty he didn't much want to paint again, either. That was another thing, one that had crept up recently. He'd done his stint. Those youthful idealistic days when he'd imagined he actually had something to say in paint were long over. He'd run out of art conversation. He couldn't talk about ‘exploring' and ‘discovering' any more, not without thinking surely someone would find him out, catch on that if he painted a stripe of blue down one side of a canvas, it was exactly that – a stripe of blue in a pretty shade. It didn't have any more meaning than that it was the colour and shape that the whim of the moment suggested. How naive were people that it never occurred to them to call his bluff? Hadn't they noticed the emperor had slowly stripped off his clothes and was now naked?

So, four things now on a list that could only grow: kissing strangers, America, work and pets. Even if Sara
did
get another dog he wouldn't really get to know it, not the way he knew Floss. He no longer had the energy or time to train up a puppy. A rescue dog was a possibility, but they took a long while to settle and get to know you. They were wary and lost-looking, like eleven-year-olds having their first frightened days at secondary school. You saw the dog-thing all the time out here on the fields by the riverbank – he could tell a newly homed Battersea mutt a hundred yards off.

Floss shuffled closer, sniffing at the path, telling him it was time to move. Conrad got up to follow her and the two of them ambled along, turning left on to the Thames towpath where the view was of riverfront gardens on Eel Pie Island. Occasional cyclists whizzed past but it was the jogger who caused the trouble. Conrad idly threw a long, fat stick for Floss and she lolloped after it, giving him a backward glance as she ran. ‘It's OK, girl,' he called to her. ‘If it's demeaning to chase it, don't bother.' Floss took no notice but picked up the stick and started bringing it back to him. The collision was initially between dog and runner, who, overtaking man and dog, sidestepped the long stick that protruded from Floss's mouth and managed, at the same time, to crash into Conrad. As he tripped and slid uncomfortably down the steep riverbank, he heard a muffled ‘Sorry!' as the jogger hurtled onwards, iPod blasting, pedometer clocking up, no thought of looking back.

‘Fuck and bugger.' Conrad swore in the direction of Floss, who stood above him as if wondering what she should do. She gave a couple of uncertain barks. He tried to shift himself towards a handhold but the nearest shrub was just out of reach. Instead, alarmingly, he felt himself slip closer to the water. There had been a lot of rain lately and the river was running fast and high. He could let himself slither down to a cold watery death or he could sit like a helpless baby and wait for rescue. What a choice. An old man's choice – and not really one at all.

‘You all right love?' There was a cackle of witchy laughter from above him and Conrad warily risked looking up, to see a pair of women of similar age to himself. One of them he'd seen a few times before – a cheerful egg-shaped sort in a lilac beret and the inevitable beige mac, who always addressed the good-morning greeting to Floss rather than to him. Fine by him – he appreciated peace and privacy. Dog-walking didn't
have
to be the social event that so many liked to make it. You had to decide on the why and if, when it came to mid-walk conversation

He couldn't move. Conrad was stuck and felt strangely remote in his realization that he wasn't physically capable of getting himself out of this position. A younger, fitter man would have no trouble scrambling up the bank. A younger, fitter man would have power in his limbs, flexibility, strength. He'd had those, rather assumed they were still there in some kind of emergency pack – where were they? Somewhere along the years they'd been used up without him really noticing. What was it he'd just been thinking, only minutes ago, about feeling much the same as usual (apart from the hip, the night peeing, the sex expiry, the longer-teeth thing)? Now he didn't feel remotely youth-strong. When he needed it, the vitality bag proved to be empty. This was vile. Demeaning.

‘You don't want to be sitting down there, dear,' Lilac Beret's companion called, ‘you'll catch a chill. Here, have a hand.'

The two women, holding on to branches of elder, reached down and gratefully he allowed them to haul him up the bank. They were surprisingly powerful.

‘At our age we have to look out for each other. No one else will,' Lilac Beret told him. ‘Bloody runners, that girl never even looked back.'

‘You could sue,' her friend ventured, looking eager at the idea.

Conrad thanked them, brushed mud from his jeans, called to Floss and slowly, heavily, conscious of his fast-thudding heart, retraced his steps to the path through the bracken towards where he'd left his car. At our age, he thought miserably. These could be the people he would one day be sitting alongside, parked in a care home to endure an incontinent future of wipe-clean chairs and endless blaring daytime TV. They were kind, friendly, cheerful and sweet, but he wouldn't want to share the rest of his life with them. Would they think him a miserable git because he didn't want to join in the sing-songs of ‘White Cliffs Of Dover' and ‘Roll Out The Barrel', or might they too prefer to listen to Bob Dylan and John Lee Hooker? No, he didn't think they would. Something about the lilac beret on one and the turquoise satin jacket on the other said Cliff Richard to him – back in the late fifties they'd have thought Cliff racy but a Nice Boy, safer than Elvis. Before him they'd have been keen on Frank Sinatra.