The Love of My Life (17 page)

We stopped on the crest of the hill which overlooked the town. You couldn’t see much of it from this point, just the ferry terminal where Georgie and I had loved one another all those years ago, and the roofs of the houses and shops at the top end of the town, and the church spire.

‘This is the only road in and out, so Marian Rutherford must have approached this way,’ said the professor. ‘I need a photograph.’

He undertook the laborious business of extricating himself from the low seat and then faffed around for some time with the camera.

‘Olivia,’ he called after a while. ‘Do you know anything about digital cameras?’

Sometimes, I swear I thought this technological naïvety of his was an affectation. I squinted up at him through the windscreen.

‘I can’t make it work,’ he said helplessly.

It took me about thirty seconds to show him how to operate the device, and then I breathed the air and enjoyed the view down to the sunlight on the waves, and the white birds which ballet-danced in the sky around Seal Island while he took his pictures.

‘So how long did you live in Portiston?’ he asked, back in the car.

‘All my life until I was eighteen,’ I said.

‘Then you left for university?’

I smiled, and manoeuvred the car round a hairpin bend with which I was intimately familiar.

‘No, no, I didn’t go to university.’

‘Oh.’

He didn’t ask any more, and there was a longish silence as we drove down into the town. I had no intention of filling it.

‘So where now?’ I asked as we pulled into the main street. ‘Andrew Bird’s house?’

‘You know where it is?’

‘Of course I do. Every primary-school-age child in Portiston knows where it is. Honestly, professor, it’s about the only famous building in the whole town.’

‘There’s also that very unusual art deco restaurant.’

I ignored this.

‘It’s listed, you know. If there’s time, we could go in for a snack.’

Andrew Bird’s house was one of six fine Regency buildings in the terrace at the northern end of the beach. If Marian Rutherford had crossed the Atlantic expecting a romantic encounter with her long-term, long-distance literary correspondent, she was to be disappointed. As we sat in the car outside the house, the professor read Miss Rutherford’s own description of the publisher, who had probably suffered a stroke while she was
en route
from America.

‘She called him a “poor bent, pale, old creature, wheezy of chest and rheumy of eye, more slumped than seated in a bath chair in the shade of a fine plum tree where he could enjoy the scent of the roses”,’ said the professor.

‘Not exactly a sex god, then.’

‘No. She was sure that he didn’t even know who she was and, apparently, confused her with his servant girl and scolded her for asking him questions.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘Poor Marian.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t feel too sorry for her,’ said the professor, opening his car door. ‘If she hadn’t come to Portiston, she would never have written her best works and she wouldn’t have found her true love.’

‘I thought she died a spinster?’

‘Ah hah,’ said the professor, giving me one of his rare and beautiful smiles. ‘You haven’t reached the end of the story yet.’

Andrew Bird’s former residence had a long, narrow front garden mostly laid to tarmac, and a blue plaque on the wall beside the front door, but it was now, like its neighbours, a bed-and-breakfast establishment. The landlady had been expecting us and was proud to show us all the Rutherford/Bird memorabilia she had collected over the years. As well as several valuable and rare first editions in a glass-fronted bookcase, she had framed photographs on the walls of the long, narrow hall, from celebrity attendees of the literary festival.

I drank a cup of tea in the kitchen and listened to the landlady’s anecdotes while the professor took his photographs in the garden where the two literary giants first met. I looked through the kitchen window, past a ledge where plastic flowers jostled for space with vases of pencils and novelty memorabilia, and watched him as he nosed about, clearly enjoying himself, examining the contents of the flowerbeds and then looking up the cliff which towered above the garden. I suspected he was wondering if any of the existing plants had witnessed the arrival of Marian Rutherford. I couldn’t see anything that looked like a plum tree.

When he had finished we drove back into the town and the professor took photographs of the pretty little house that Marian had lived in, on and off, for the rest of her life. Now the Rutherford Museum next to the fudge shop on Church Street, this was where she had written her best-loved and most famous novel. This took some time, because we’d happened on one of the rare out-of-season days when the museum was open. The curator, a fierce and fearsome woman called Miss Scritch whom I remembered from my schooldays, saw us malingering outside and emerged, anxious to find out exactly what the professor was up to and to put him right on several important facts.

‘Just wait,’ said the professor, back in the car and rubbing his hands with delighted anticipation. ‘Just wait until the book comes out. She won’t like it one bit.’

‘You have a shocking revelation?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There’s some work to be done, but I believe I do. Now, do we need to rush back or can we go and have a look at this restaurant? I’ll treat you to a coffee.’

I had been hoping he’d forgotten.

‘I’ll take you down there,’ I said, ‘but you’ll excuse me if I stay in the car.’

The professor glanced at me sideways. He could have asked any one of a million awkward questions, but all he said was, ‘Well, we should be getting back anyway. I have more illegible crap to write in order to keep you employed putting it back into English.’

I smiled at him.

That was what I liked about being with him. He let me be. And I never asked him any questions either.

twenty-eight

When Lynnette was at home, she used to be in great demand as a babysitter. This was because her reputation for honesty, reliability and common sense travelled before her. In a small town like Portiston, everybody is connected to everybody else in one way or another and everything a person ever does or says is stored in a kind of communal memory bank, to be retrieved at the appropriate occasion. So after Lynnette had looked after our immediate neighbour’s granddaughter one Saturday night, and coped admirably, this achievement was duly noted and soon whenever anybody needed a babysitter Lynnette would get the call.

Once she had left for good, there was a big babysitter vacancy in the town. It was a vacancy that I was keen to fill.

I had learned from Lynnette that Portiston’s parents were exceptionally grateful to anyone who was kind to their children and simultaneously managed to get them in bed, and asleep, before the parents came home. I also knew that the parents felt disproportionately guilty if they weren’t back at the time they said they’d be. If they promised to be home by 11.30 and didn’t roll in until 1 a.m., then they were likely to double or even treble the agreed fee. These unexpected bonuses happened quite a lot.

Unfortunately, my reputation in the communal memory bank was nowhere near as glowing as my sister’s. While a little of her glory inevitably rubbed off on me, there were still doubts about my moral fibre. However, needs must, and soon the young parents of Portiston realized that any babysitter was better than no babysitter and I gained much useful employment during the winter months before Marinella’s reopened full-time and I could go back to the job I liked best.

I had three or four regular clients, but there was one family I particularly liked.

The Parkers lived in one of the big new detached houses that were clustered around the road out of the town. They were brick-built, with bay windows at the front, integral garages and paved driveways. They were the very height of luxury and sophistication and didn’t leak, let in draughts, creak and groan or smell slightly musty, all of which were common phenomena in the older houses in the rest of town.

The Parkers’ house was also beautifully furnished. The carpets were thick and soft, the complete opposite of the dusty, threadbare versions we had at home. Their settees were big and soft and squashy, their bathroom was warm and scented, the central heating was so efficient that there were none of the cold and warm patches with which I was familiar: you didn’t have to huddle round the fire in the living room to feel comfortable, everywhere was warm. The children could pad around in their pyjamas even in the middle of winter.

There were two little Parkers, Jessie and Cal, and a third on the way. The children were adorable little poppets, all big eyes and dark lashes and silky hair. I, of course, always arrived at bedtime when they were bathed and smelled of baby shampoo and Johnson’s powder. They would snuggle up, one on either side of me, on the cushions of the voluptuous settee, dressed in flannelette pyjamas, Jessie’s with pink bunnies and Cal’s with yellow ducks. Sleepy-eyed, their thumbs clamped between their little rosebud lips, they would gaze at the pictures in the book as I turned the pages and read them a story. When I took them up to bed, there was never any complaint or rebellion, but then their bedrooms were each so beautiful, warm and welcoming that it was small wonder really.

Mrs Parker was, at least in my eyes, the embodiment of femininity. I aspired to be like her, while not exactly wanting to be her. She was small and curvy and very pretty. She had the nicest nails I’d ever seen and her honey-coloured hair was always shiny and smooth. She had a collection of shoes in her wardrobe, and the most beautiful clothes. It was impossible to imagine Mrs Parker shaving her armpits or plucking her eyebrows, yet she must have done so because she was always so immaculately groomed. She once confided in me that she got up before her husband every morning so that she could wash, clean her teeth and do her hair and make-up.

‘It never does to be complacent when you’re a woman, Liv,’ she used to tell me. I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by this but I never saw her in a bad mood; she was always smiling and patient and kind. Mrs Parker used to buy shop cakes and leave a selection out for me. We never had these sorts of cakes at home and to me they were sophistication on a plate. Mrs Parker used to say, ‘Call me Annabel,’ but I never did, although I rolled the name around on my tongue and practised it.

It was Mr Parker, however, who charmed me most. He would have been in his mid-thirties, I suppose, and he wasn’t like the other men I knew. The male teachers at school were all, to a man, ugly and vaguely unsavoury. They had hairs in their nostrils and the veins bulged on the backs of their hands and they were either bony and knobbly with dandruff flakes on their shoulders, or sallow, moist creatures with bellies that tested the seams of their pullovers. The only other grown-up men I dealt with regularly were the awful Mr Hensley, Maurizio, and my friends’ fathers.

Mr Parker was not like them at all.

He had the widest smile, which he used as a gift to bestow on anybody who wandered close enough. He laughed easily and often, tipping back his head and chuckling, so that his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in the most fascinating way. He lacked any of the disgusting physical habits that so often put me off grown-up men, like sticking their fingers into their ears and probing, or scratching their crotches. Most importantly of all, when his attention was focused on me, he had a way of making me feel like I was the only person in the world.

I knew he flirted with everyone and I also knew that he could be cruel. This was a combination that made him devilishly attractive. It was the secret of his success. I had heard him on the telephone, one moment friendly, the next ruthless, without ever changing the timbre or tone of his voice. He worked in the entertainment industry and there was a gold disc framed in the downstairs cloakroom. It was rumoured that Mrs Parker had once been a singer and that she had had a number-one record in the charts back in the early seventies, but I never found out if that was true. Mrs Parker used to scold Mr Parker when they came back tipsy and he launched into one of his charm offensives.

‘Now, William, don’t tease the girl, she doesn’t know how to take it,’ she would say, fishing in her purse for the money to pay me.

‘But Olivia, you are, without doubt, the best and most beautiful babysitter in the entire UK,’ Mr Parker would continue. ‘No, I take it back, in the entire northern hemisphere.’

‘William, stop it. Now is ten pounds enough, Liv?’

‘It’s plenty, thank you, Mrs Parker.’

‘No, it’s not enough. Not for an exceptional babysitter like Liv. Give her another fiver.’

I would shake my head and Mrs Parker would roll her eyes and sigh as if she was bored with this routine. I would shut the door behind me and walk back down the hill into Portiston with his glorious adjectives still ringing in my ears.

If it was raining, Mr Parker would drive me home in his Range-Rover, even if he had had a few drinks.

‘The bastard police won’t be out in this, they’ll be sitting in the station with a cup of shitty coffee and the
Sun
crossword,’ he would say. He pronounced it ‘poe-lease’, with the emphasis on the first syllable. I took to imitating him.

The car was always already warm from the Parkers’ journey back from wherever they’d been, and it smelled intoxicatingly of alcohol and cigars and Mrs Parker’s perfume. I knew what it felt like to be Mrs Parker as I sat beside him, up high, in the dark, watching the familiar road go by in the glare of the headlights. I used to feel sexy and adult. I would glance at his handsome profile illuminated by the blue dashboard lights, and wondered what I would do if ever he were to put his hand on my thigh. Just the thought would make me tingle with anticipation. I sort of knew that one day he would.

In the car, Mr Parker would ask me about my life.

‘So do you have a boyfriend, Liv?’

‘Yes. He’s at university.’

‘What do you do for male company when he’s away?’

‘Nothing.’