Other People's Fun, page 14
The dogs (‘silly sausages’) are in kennels: Sookie says it’s strange to arrive without their noisy welcome.
The door opens to a beeping sound, and Sookie goes off to defuse the security alarm, leaving me to bring in the luggage – my tired hold-all, her shiny roller suitcase, a couple of hessian grocery bags – and gather up the post. The beeps stop. I stack the subscription copy of World of Interiors and the Sarah Raven catalogue beside an old blue jug filled with a pretty tangle of poppy seedheads and dried wild carrot. ‘Sookie?’ I call, but there’s no reply so, conscious of trespass, I flip the pages of the visitors’ book, scanning messages from people who sign themselves Jinky and Tiggy and Flea. ‘Heavenly weekend!’ they write, and ‘Sorry M passed out in the dog bed – a tribute to your excellent cellar.’ Somewhere in the house there’s the distant clatter of shutters and the shift in pressure as a window is thrown open.
I find her in a long drawing room full of Persian carpets, clothbound books, heavy tassels swinging in crewelwork curtains. A Jacobean chest is loaded with dozens of framed photographs: christenings, weddings, Ava and Finn with their cousins, people at a polo match chatting to Prince Charles.
In design terms, nothing matches, and yet it’s unmistakable: the room has assembled itself over time, over generations, with such casual confidence that the contradictions are harmoniously balanced and – though I hate to admit it – entirely seductive.
‘What a lovely room,’ I say, and she says, as if resuming a conversation and I’ll know exactly what she means, ‘He had this silly idea of coming tomorrow but I told him absolutely no way.’
And this annoys me as much as anything, because I resent her assumption that I am just as preoccupied with Waxham as she is – as if her circumstances are uppermost in my mind at all times. ‘Who?’ I say, smiling, quizzical, waiting a beat. ‘Oh, right. Silly me – I meant to ask how that’s going.’
I watch her collect herself and decide she can’t do this right now. She comes away from the window, making a small, dismissive gesture with her fingers. ‘Long story,’ she says, moving past. ‘It can wait – cup of tea, then you can take your stuff up,’ and I’m left alone in the beautiful room with the smell of centuries of fires and the sense I’ve taken a liberty, been prurient.
Sookie has wrongfooted me; soon I will discover the house has, too. The impression of its rich and slow-accumulated history is an expensive illusion, rather like the amusing trompe l’oeil niches over the staircase, the urns that cast painted shadows. The drawing room, along with the rest – the games room and boot room and five bedrooms and the vast flagged kitchen, shelves arranged with copper pans and venerable serving dishes – is pure stagecraft, the work of the celebrated dealer-decorator Orlando Juckes, who has a little shop in Pimlico and a royal warrant.
Shortly after the house was completed, Juckes gave a tour to a smart interiors magazine. I find the piece online when Sookie has left me in ‘Lady Elspeth’s Bedroom’. The photographs give the impression that each exquisite room, full of sunlight and flowers, has been captured at the moment when its inhabitants – fascinating people – have strolled away to take an important call, or dress for dinner.
Juckes tells the interviewer about his first visit to the property shortly after its purchase by his unnamed clients (described, in breathless house style, as ‘an advertising tycoon and his vivacious and well-connected wife’). Though the house had ‘great bones’ it had never quite recovered from the 1970s, when it was owned by a legendary music producer, so Juckes’s brief was to ‘consider the way one space might flow into another, and to find the key decorative pieces that would restore a sense of authentic family life’. Very little is original: the drawing room’s marble fireplace came from a Milanese auction house; the pair of crystal basket chandeliers were a lucky find in a Burgundian brocante.
I read this seated on the sofa at the foot of Lady Elspeth’s half-tester, and when I look up from my screen I notice the ornaments and the furniture selected by Juckes, and the effect of his arrangements: the writing desk in front of the window, the Chinese lamps with their pleated shades. It all looks so easy and comfortable, so attractively improvised.
Coming downstairs a little later, I hear Sookie’s voice from the kitchen. I wait by the door, listening, but she’s only checking in with her mother, glad the hotel is comfortable, agreeing to deadhead the roses.
It was rude, the way she mentioned him, then dismissed my question. A power move, a flex. She’ll be unable to stay off the subject for long: why else am I here? She will always need an audience.
Over a supper of puy lentil salad and bitter leaves, she is a little distracted, her mind elsewhere. She reads me a few messages from Ava, who is displeased to find she has been left with inadequate supplies of avocados. As we finish, there’s the sound of Beyoncé and she rises, mouthing, It’s Murray, better take it. Washing the salad bowl at the kitchen sink, I watch her wandering around on the terrace in the twilight, and I am surprised to see how animated she seems, how closely she listens, and how willing her laughter. When she comes inside, she says she’s tired from the drive and wants an early night, she’ll see me in the morning.
I wake early and carry my notebooks and laptop out to the table under the pergola where I spend most of the day, breaking for a scrap lunch and later, when Sookie goes off to the farm shop, a solitary walk along the valley. To my surprise I am fairly productive, as if the semi-performative nature of this work – I’m aware of Sookie moving through the house and garden, occasionally stopping to see what I’m up to – somehow boosts my focus and endeavour. At intervals she appears in running gear or brandishing secateurs or jingling car keys, whispering, ‘Don’t let me disturb you!’ as she passes. Her attitude conveys both respect and mockery, as if it is rather funny to bother with work in this weather, with this view, when she’s around.
At mealtimes she chatters away in a manner that is both artless and circumspect. She has the unselfconsciousness that often accompanies charisma; she shows little curiosity, rarely asks me anything, doesn’t pay much attention to the things I might say.
She does not mention him again, and this becomes an annoyance. Of course I enjoy not having to ask the usual questions, withholding that courtesy; and yet it’s frustrating to be shut out, because I will always want to know more about Sookie’s life, so different to my own. Now that it’s off limits, I’m more interested in her affair than the things she wants to discuss: the ‘Authentic Self’ podcast she has pitched to Jess, her sister’s ex-husband, the tiresome Ava.
‘How are things with you?’ she remembers to ask once or twice. ‘How are you getting on?’ And I give her the benefit of the doubt, telling her a little about Elizabeth, progress with the divorce, the estate agent’s incompetence. I am at some pains to make these stories amusing at my own expense – I describe my irritation with Garrett Wragg, and the mad thing that keeps happening with the lamps – but it’s not enough to hold her interest. She smiles but her eyes wander and I see her suppressing a yawn, and as soon as is decent she reasserts her dominance, bringing the conversation back to topics she finds more fascinating, those involving herself.
Fuck you, I think, leaning forward and nodding as she speaks, because I’m her prisoner, a hostage in this lovely place until the end of the week, obliged to witness her blithe confidence along with the sun salutations she executes on the lawn first thing (after drinking a cup of hot water with a slice of lemon).
The third morning, she is up early. I’m in the kitchen making coffee when she appears, asking if I’m interested in a swim. It’s high tide, which is the best time to go, it’s too rocky otherwise, and look at that sky. ‘There won’t be anyone else there,’ she says. ‘Weekday morning, we’ll have it all to ourselves – we can be there and back in an hour.’ I hadn’t realised the sea was so close.
Once through the village, the landscape opens up: stony fields and the occasional barn, trees bent into claws along the skyline, a bus stop in the middle of nowhere. The road ends at a visitor centre and a chalet-style tearoom, not yet open. On the far side of the empty car park a crooked line of safety barriers marks off the cliff edge.
To reach the water we climb down a rickety metal staircase, handrails dusty with salt. There isn’t much of a beach at the bottom: just a narrow band of shingle being rinsed by a series of ankle-high waves. As Sookie predicted, we are the only people here. The air is still and clear, with the hand-on-heart promise of heat later.
We drop our bags on the stones. While I dig around for sunglasses, Sookie wanders off to take a few pictures: a seagull on driftwood, tufts of sea campion.
Looking towards the lighthouse and the famous suicide spot, I can see fresh white scars where storms and spring tides have torn away chunks of chalk. I’m aware, folding up my clothes, of those great drifts and heaps along the shoreline, the weight of the crumbling wall behind us.
Sookie steps out of her dress and snaps her hair into an elastic. Olive bikini, yoga stomach. ‘Shall we?’ she says, glancing over at me, and then looking more closely. Too late I remember the sunglasses. I pull them off and tuck them into my bag. ‘After you!’ I say. She won’t be sure. They aren’t that distinctive.
The shingle is sharp as knives, the water greenish, clouded with chalk, winter-cold. I stumble in over rocks and through patches of weed. Knees, thighs, arse, stomach, tits, each step an ordeal, my arms finally raised in surrender. At last I’m forced to commit, and there’s the shock of the water coursing over my shoulders and neck, smacking my mouth. I swim fast into the swell, moving to stay alive, and within a minute my breath steadies, my body starts to sing. The sun is hot on my face.
The sea lifts me and shows me things – Sookie’s tidy progress; a sail on the horizon; hikers on the cliff path – and then hides them again. I swim out after Sookie, thinking of sunlight filtering down towards mussel beds, swaying forests of wracks and kelps, a silvery shadow of tiny fish vanishing into darkness. I imagine the flash of our pale legs as viewed from far below, the signal of our activity, and feel a pulse of panic, an urge to get back to shore.
Sookie bobs towards me. ‘The kids don’t like the swimming here, they’ve been spoiled by Abroad, but sometimes I think I prefer this,’ she says, and then she tips back and lets herself float, her head lifting and then her toes, the water lapping at her hair, her throat, her arms. I’m reminded of the sway of her body when Waxham picked her up from her swoon, that small twist of the foot.
She talks to the blue sky. The water is in her ears, so it’s very much a monologue. She lies there, holding forth while basking, trusting me to listen, just as she trusts the sea’s tilting embrace. She describes being out here with her sister and one of her nieces. They were treading water and chatting about this and that when they realised they had become a party of four. A seal had joined them, so close they could see its whiskers.
I am familiar with this story: she wrote it up on Instagram. In ordinary circumstances I would feel obliged to pretend the story is news to me, but she can’t see my reaction, so I roll my eyes. Whatever.
We are quite far out. No one can see us. No one knows we are here. Anything could happen.
When I look back at the beach, it takes me a moment to locate the marker of our towels. We’ve drifted a hundred feet to the east. I think of the water around and below me, fathoms of it, black, full of strong, cold currents. ‘Sookie,’ I say, and then, louder and more urgently, ‘Hey, Sookie.’
She rights herself, taps her ears to clear the obstruction, starts to swim back. There’s a bit of a pull sometimes, she says, but it’s not normally a problem – nothing like the sea off Cape Town, for instance. Still, you have to be careful. When the kids were small she was out here alone, everyone else was picnicking on the shore, and she realised something was wrong, she was being pulled out to sea, steadily, very fast. But she remembered the rules and it was all OK. When she came out of the water, no one was any the wiser.
I say I don’t know the rules.
There’s only one, really, she says, and that’s don’t fight it – if you feel yourself being dragged out, don’t waste your energy trying to swim against it. The current is too strong, you’ll get exhausted, that’s what kills people. They fight it, and it’s hopeless, and they wear themselves out, and then they drown. Save your energy, float, wait for it to spit you out. It’ll let you go in the end, and at that point you’ll still have the strength to swim back to shore.
To someone else, Clare perhaps, I might say, ‘That sounds like the end of my marriage.’ But I keep that comment to myself, and take satisfaction in not saying such a thing to Sookie, not wasting it on her.
We are close to the shore now. As my foot touches rock, she mentions Double You. She didn’t want to get into it on the first day when the subject came up; she knows she was a bit offish. The thing is – well, she’s not sure what’s going on there.
She thought things would cool off if they weren’t able to meet at the flat. It didn’t work out quite like that. Double You wanted to see her anyway, for a cup of tea, a walk. He suggested the South Bank or the Barbican: public backwaters where they were unlikely to bump into anyone during the afternoon. She had her doubts but things were not easy at the mews, and when the day came, she was glad to have a reason to leave it for a few hours.
To her surprise the encounter was not awkward in the way she had feared. They’d agreed to meet at the Kyoto Garden in Holland Park because the weather was fine, and his manner was old-fashioned and courtly in a way that suited the setting. They walked over little bridges and watched koi carp stirring in the reflections of branches. He was cheerful and amusing, very attentive. Until this point, keen to keep him at arm’s length from the rest of her life, she hadn’t told him much about her children, ‘but I ended up talking about the situation with Ava, and he gave me some advice, very good advice actually’, and I think: I bet he did. An expert in the field of teenage girls.
Wrapping herself in her towel, Sookie squeezes water from her ponytail. ‘I’m a bit freaked out, to be honest, Ruth. I think he’s investing too much in this.’
‘What do you mean?’ I say.
‘He’s saying some things that are a bit… scary.’
‘What kind of things?’
‘Just – serious things. About the future. Our future.’
‘And that’s worrying you?’
‘Absolutely!’ she says. ‘The last thing I want is people saying they’re falling in love with other people.’
I’m fastening my wristwatch and, standing there in the full glare of the sun, I suddenly feel cold, a little weak and sick. My fingers tremble as I thread the strap through the clasp. The effect of cold water and exercise on an empty stomach, I expect.
‘Heavens,’ I murmur, putting my water bottle to my mouth, and she shrugs, and perhaps she’s reflecting on her enduring irresistibility, her heart going out to him because, really, who can blame him.
The stones clack and roll as we pick our way back towards the steps, and she grabs my arm to steady herself. So yeah, maybe she and Double You are no longer on the same page. ‘I was under the impression,’ she says, ‘that we’d both signed up for this crazy fun thing, which had nothing to do with Real Life. That was the whole point! I thought he got that. But now I’m not so sure.
‘He tells me things,’ she says. ‘And OK, they’re nice things, things that no one else is telling me, you know? He says the rest of his life looks so, so…’ – she scrunches her nose, summoning up the tribute – ‘so flat and neat and colourless. You know: he was half-asleep, and I woke him up. Blah blah blah. He shouldn’t say that kind of thing to me, really, should he.’
When she mentioned coming down here for a few days, he said he’d invent a reason so he could join her, just for a night. He had various commitments to rearrange, ‘and he made such a song and dance about it, about his feelings, how he couldn’t wait to spend a whole twenty-four hours with me. I was going along with it and then suddenly I just thought: Sookie, what the fuck are you playing at? Because this wasn’t meant to happen. So I invited you. He couldn’t come if you were here.’
‘Why on earth not?’ I ask as we reach the steps. This is a difficult question for her, requiring her to switch between realities; she hasn’t got her answer ready, and when it comes it’s halting, half-lost in the turns as she climbs the tower ahead of me, her ring chiming on the metal handrail, though I catch the familiar line about wanting ‘to keep things separate’.
This is the moment when she could have shared his identity with me. But she decides against it, resisting the thrill of revelation, the full confession. She’s being discreet. Or possibly she allowed herself, just for a moment, to view the affair as I might: a sad hook-up with a corduroy phantom; a reckless exercise in midlife nostalgia. Held up to the light, there’s no doubt the affair might look rather embarrassing – sordid, even. She doesn’t want to be associated with something like that. Neither of them comes out of it well.
‘That’s a pity. He should have come,’ I say.
No way, she says.
‘Where’s the harm? – let him! I’d like to meet him,’ I say, wheedling a little, starting to enjoy myself. We’ve reached the top of the stairs and are standing on the platform, looking down at the expanse of water, the thin line of white drawn again and again on the shingle. ‘After all,’ I say, ‘he’s been to my flat, used my mugs – my towels, even!’ Sookie looks a bit wan herself now. I feel my strength returning. ‘Anyway, you’ve told me so much about him – I feel like I know him in a funny sort of way.’
