The Windsurf Boy, page 7
‘It was all very well,’ she thought now, frowning at the glass, ‘to sneer at vanity when I was thirty, but now when I’m faced with a sexy woman of about thirty in the village shop, I sit here wishing I had smiled less when John came home late for the fourth night in a row with long hairs on his suit, and refrained from laughing aloud when that twenty-year-old girl rang hysterically to say she was in love with him. Just think how I might have saved my face, in more ways than one.’
She pinched her own forearm. As age creeps upon you the pinch stays there, just for a second, the skin losing its elasticity and retaining the touch, just as the thighs relax into puckers of mirth. ‘God, it’s disgusting,’ thought Anna, all humour gone, and picturing for a second those muscular brown legs that had walked past her without a pause, throwing her own white limbs into dreadful contrast. She waved a mocking finger at her own reflection and said aloud, ‘Lady, you are getting old, and that’s all there is to say. Next thing, you’ll be lusting after younger men, to try to recapture your lost youth.’
She had not noticed Tom standing in the doorway.
‘What are you doing, Mum? Why are you talking to yourself? What does “loosting” mean?’
She felt foolish. ‘Oh, I’m just telling my face in the mirror how pretty it is. Now go back to your film!’
At six Anna dragged an unwilling Tom up the hill. When he complained that he hated going to see people he did not know, she assured him that she hated taking him, but had no choice. She felt tense, uncomfortable. The blue cheesecloth, John’s matelot sweater knotted round her neck in the current style, and a good mask of make-up (by her own modest standards) gave her confidence. At the gate of ‘Hacienda’ they paused. Anna warned Tom not to say that she had laughed when they had first seen the house.
‘Why not?’
‘Because they’ll be hurt.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Tom!’
Valerie Paul opened the door and held out an arm in a theatrical gesture of welcome. Anna observed the tight, white jeans and purple silk blouse, adorned with a heavyweight amount of gold chain. Then she looked over Valerie’s shoulder.
The house was open-plan, so that from the front door she could see immediately that there were only two or three people in the room. It was a long space, with sliding patio doors along one side, and a low ceiling, intersected by the sort of track lighting Anna always expected to move on its own, pursuing its prey. The floor was covered with a thick gold carpet; split ranch-style doors led into what Anna assumed must be the kitchen. The long sofa was covered in material the same colour as the carpet, with the subtle, shiny finish of good synthetic pretending to be velvet. The low back of this sofa was punctuated by hard little cushions, patterned in brown zig-zags; their colour was picked up by the huge leather armchairs with arms the shape of saddles. An elaborate brick-and-copper fireplace was filled with an arrangement of orange dried flowers; glass shelves each side held an assortment of chrome objects and sea shells. In the centre of the room a large square coffee table, smoked glass supported upon chrome legs, displayed a fanned arrangement of Yachting World.
‘How old are you?’ asked Valerie, patting Tom’s head. He ducked. Without waiting for a reply she went on, ‘You’ll be able to talk to my little boy in a minute, though he’s not so little now! He doesn’t like his mum’s friends.’
A tall fleshy man in a crumpled, cream lightweight suit was advancing across the room towards them, shirt buttons straining across his stomach. The hand that held Anna’s was damp, and clasped for just a moment too long. ‘Hello, I’m Adrian. Heard about you from Val. Now, before I introduce you, let me get you a drink. What’ll it be? G and T?’
Anna asked if she might have some wine.
‘Of course! Red or white? Sweet or dry? You name it.’
Valerie steered her to where three people stood; two men in well-pressed denims that looked as if they might have been bought yesterday, and a woman in a clinging dress of pink cotton jersey. The shorter man wore a red cotton neckerchief; the other, whose face was pale and thin, had a yellow golfing sweater over a white shirt.
‘Anna, this is Jasper and Susan Herbert, who’ve got a holiday cottage here too. And Tony Keene, who’s an old friend down for the week. This is Anna – she’s been coming here for absolutely yonks.’
Jasper, the one with the jaunty neckerchief, looked at her with interest. ‘Super spot, isn’t it? I came on business to Synemouth, drove out here, fell for the place, bought a cottage. We bought at just the right time too, and converted the old place for a song. ‘Course it pays to be in the know.’
‘What do you do?’
‘He’s an estate agent, of course, wouldn’t you know!’ laughed Susan, looking at her husband with some pride and fingering her silver chains.
‘Did you buy a house here yourself?’ asked Tony, offering Anna a cigarette, which she refused.
‘Well, no. It was my parents. They bought a cottage here when I was ten.’
Jasper whistled, ‘Must have been dirt cheap then. When would that have been, the ‘sixties?’
‘Jas!’ said his wife, frowning, and he covered his mouth in mock confusion. ‘Oops sorry! Wasn’t meaning to guess a lady’s age.’
‘Did you have a lot to do to the place, like we did?’ asked Susan, when Anna said nothing.
‘Not really, though I suppose it needed it badly. We liked it as it was. It’s terribly scruffy.’ Anna was surprised at how much she resented ‘Ahoy’ being brought into the conversation, as if an old and intimate friend’s faults were being discussed.
‘We gutted ours,’ Jasper said with relish. ‘You know, knocked through, new kitchen, proper bathroom, downstairs toilet, shower, the lot.’
‘It’s very smart now,’ said Valerie. ‘Oh, and I meant to ask you, Sue, do you have a proper cleaner?’
Susan frowned, ‘Well, Mrs Edwards is supposed to come in once a month whilst we’re at home, just to keep it nice. But honestly, dear, when we arrived this time it was in an awful state. The dust! I had to tell her.’
‘I know the feeling. The hours you spend standing over them, when it would be quicker to do it yourself.’
‘And cheaper, Val!’
‘Right! But I asked you because that old lady from the little green house on the front won’t come any more. Says it’s too much for her. And I can’t find anybody to come in. Honestly, they go on about the unemployed …’
Tony was waggling his glass. ‘Hey Adrian, what is this, a dry house?’
‘Sorry. G and T again?’
‘Now Anna, tell us all what you do.’
‘I work in publishing.’
‘Gosh, that sounds intellectual,’ said Susan, with a nervous laugh.
Anna knew that her face was set into that acutely interested expression she could always assume when her heart was sinking and her feet telling her to leave. She heard herself asking fatuous questions about the price of land and the state of interest rates (Tony was a bank manager) and she altered the mask to one of frank disbelief and concern when Adrian, who was a dentist, informed them that his private practice had started to slacken off because of the economy. ‘When it comes to the crunch, people put their teeth last,’ he said with disgust. Anna thought she was supposed to laugh, started, then changed her mind.
John would have left, she thought, with a sudden searing regret. In the politest, smoothest way imaginable he would extricate them both from boring parties, and they would collapse with laughter outside the door, then find the pub. ‘Alone, I’m hopeless – ‘I’ll stay here and get drunk because there’s nothing else to do.’
At that moment she felt Tom (who up till then had been staring from the window at the patio, sipping his orange juice) pulling at her dress.
‘Oh good, here’s Matthew,’ said Valerie.
Anna bent down. Tom’s face was radiant, as he pointed behind her and whispered, ‘Look, Mum – it’s that windsurf boy. He must live here! This is his house!’
The boy Anna had seen on the pontoon shuffled into the room, and scowled when Valerie flung an arm around him. ‘Here’s my little boy, Anna. Shake hands, Matthew.’
The hand that held hers was dry and hard, clasping for a fraction of a second, before it dropped.
Anna was astonished. Her covert calculations about Valerie’s age must be wrong, she thought, if this huge teenager was her son. As if she could read the thought Valerie giggled with self-conscious pleasure. ‘Don’t be taken in by him, Anna. I know he looks about seventeen, but he’s still only a fifteen-year-old baby, aren’t you?’
‘Must you, Mum?’ He was scowling.
Anna said, ‘I’ve seen you windsurfing. At least, Tom saw you first. You’re very good at it.’
Tom was looking up with open hero-worship. The boy said, ‘Yeah, I go out most days, even if there’s only a bit of wind.’
Adrian clapped his son upon the shoulder, spilling some of his gin upon the carpet, where it was soon absorbed, ‘I should think you do go out most days, sonny Jim. Do y’know, Tony, he pestered me and pestered me to get that thing, and guess how much I had to pay for it?’
‘Oh, Dad.’
‘There he goes again! If I pay good money for your windsurf board I don’t know why I can’t tell my own friends about it. Five hundred, it was, give or take a pound or two. So I told him, you make sure you get my money’s worth or I’ll sell the damn thing!’
The bank manager nodded, turning to Matthew. He looked reproachful and the boy scowled all the more. ‘You kids have got it made. When I was your age I thought I was lucky to get a bike, no kidding.’
Jasper nodded, whilst Adrian beamed. ‘That’s right. Me too. This one – he’s got a TV in his bedroom, and the new music centre we gave him last Christmas. Millions of tapes. The lot. And his school fees will have me bankrupt before long.’
‘I hate it.’ The boy was sullen, his face crimson. Anna felt sorry for him.
‘The trouble is, somebody I know spends more time doing sport than concentrating on his school work. It’s O levels next year and all he thinks about is windsurfing.’ Valerie wagged a finger at him.
Abruptly Matthew turned to Tom, who had been gazing at him all this time. ‘Wanna come and play a TV game?’ Tom nodded, speechless at the honour, and the tall boy led the small one across the room, as if he were leading his own army safely away from the enemy.
For ten minutes more Anna bore the renewed chat, but when Susan and Valerie were absorbed in a conversation about a new range of make-up, she turned away and followed the boys into an alcove off the main room, in which there stood an enormous teak television set. Tom was happily missing the flying white shapes, and yelping now and then when he gained a point.
‘Seems a good game,’ she said, sitting next to Matthew.
‘You always say you hate them, Mum,’ said Tom.
‘You seem really good at windsurfing. Did it take you long to learn?’
Matthew looked at her, directly, in a way she found discomfiting. Then he grinned, all trace of the sullenness gone. ‘Do you know much about it?’
‘No.’
‘Well, how do you know I’m good at it?’
‘Good question. Well … you don’t fall off.’
‘I do if there’s a high wind and I don’t gybe fast enough.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Turn the thing round. You have to swap sides. What happens is – you go forward on a beam reach, rake the sail forward sharply and bear off. If you don’t spill wind by sheeting out you can be thrown off balance by a sudden gust. So you pull on the boom to drive the stern around, then let go so’s the wind can flip the clew the opposite way. Then you pull the sail round, grab the boom, and get under way.’
She smiled. ‘Clear as daylight.’
‘Don’t you sail?’
‘No – I’ve been coming here for years, but I was never very keen on messing about on the river. I was nervous, I suppose, and all those ropes confused me. I just like watching.’
‘But it’s easy.’
‘Easy for you, not for me. You look at home on the water.’
‘Yeah, I am really. More at home there than anywhere else.’
When he smiled she noticed that his teeth were even and healthy.
Tom stood up, placing himself between them to regain Matthew’s attention. ‘Will you teach me? I’ll be good at it. Then I could teach Mum!’
It was easy for Matthew Paul to condescend to one so much his junior, so he gave Tom a soft rabbit-punch and said, ‘Oh, I might. If you behave yourself. But only on dry land.’ Then he looked at Anna with level confidence, wrinkling his eyes in faint mockery, ‘I’d like to teach you. It’s about time you learnt about the river.’
Absurdly pleased, she looked away across the room to where the others still stood talking and laughing. By now, the voices of Valerie and Susan were shrill; Anna felt the wine working in her, too, and longed for some food. In that bare, golden room, with all the objects suspended, as in aspic, Adrian and Valerie, Jasper, Susan and Tony looked like models placed in a room-set for an advertisement, one that would be dismantled afterwards; the glasses washed, the lights turned off. Already there was a sense of finality in the air, and the voices faded into longer silences as the pleasantries ran out, and each became dimly aware of the emptiness in the stomach and beyond. Anna watched them, beckoning her, offering ‘one for the walk home’. They seemed puffy and insubstantial in comparison with the boy Matthew who stood beside her, just taller, with his hard, clean lines and that honesty of expression which refuses to smile when a scowl is more natural.
‘Look at them all – they’re pissed,’ he said.
‘I’d better go. I hope we’ll see you, Matthew,’ said Anna.
‘Course you will, stoopid. You’ll see me on the river.’
She joined the others, suffered Adrian’s heavy arm around her shoulders and smelt his sweat, faintly. Tony recounted an interminable joke, and glanced at her from time to time with that sidelong predatory look which announces that, since there are two ‘singles’ in the room, they must be destined for each other. Adrian saw. ‘Now then, Tony, you’re not to go paying midnight visits to her cottage. You might bump into me!’
‘You are awful, Ade,’ said Valerie, smiling.
Jasper held out his hand. ‘We’ll keep in touch Anna, Nice to meet you. Come round for a meal, or something.’
‘That would be wonderful,’ she said, and called Tom.
Looking back for Matthew she saw that he had slumped upon the sofa, watching the television, and did not observe their departure.
Chapter Eight
Anna approached the telephone as if it were an enemy, feeling as she had long ago, when her parents insisted that she arrange a visit to her elderly aunts. She dialled the number quickly, in case she should change her mind.
Molly Black’s voice sounded fragile and distant, but her pleasure was unmistakable. Anne winced at the word ‘kind’, because it was not, she well knew, kind of her to telephone, nor was it kind of her to promise to visit that morning, before going to ‘The Park’. Old people delight in twisting a knife, very gently, in your wounds, she thought, only half-listening to the fluttering sounds down the line. They choose to imagine kindness and abase themselves before it, so that you will drown in their tears of gratitude. There was a sour taste in her mouth.
‘You have an antique shop, don’t you?’
‘Goodness me, no, not now. Not for ages. It was too much for us to manage in the end, so we sold it. Didn’t Barbara tell you? Now we’re at 26 ‘The Batch’. It’s that row of cottages on the left as you drive down Cove Road. Do you know it? Don’t worry about time. We’ll be pottering about, as usual.’
Afterwards, still feeling the unaccountable anger, Anna decided that her mother must have told her about her friends’ sale of their shop. But when? Two weeks in the summer, perhaps – until those packages abroad; a day or two at the end of December, with Tom to look after and John to appease; a phone call here and there … what time had there been to absorb the little details of her mother’s life, still less remember what happened to her friends? The phone calls had been functional: did Anna know what Hilda might like for a birthday present, or could she discover when Richard was due back because he had not written, or else Barbara was ‘just wondering how Tom likes school?’ and Anna consciously closed her ears to the quietness behind her mother’s every word, its crackling emptiness carried quite clearly by the GPO. So, in this way, months passed and then years, and Anna slowly realised that her mother meant far less to her without her father, but shied away from the truth by refusing to involve herself in the life that was lived, as it had to be, without that centrifugal spirit.
Anna left Tom with George, both of them happy at the prospect of a morning chugging to and fro across the river, which sparkled in the morning sunlight. She drove off to Synemouth along narrow lanes fringed with tall, tangled hedgerows which hid the view of the river and, later, the distant sea. They were like tunnels, some of those lanes, with the trees linking overhead and the road curving downhill, as if you could drive on and on, through the soft warmth into the centre of the earth, and wait there defying autumn and winter, ready to burst upwards and outwards in the spring.
Anna amused herself by distinguishing between those passing drivers who lived in the area and those who were strangers. The first group (with whom she identified, as her father used to do) backed up without hesitation when there was only room for one car to take the road, and waved confidently at another driver who gave the same courtesy. But the strangers were nervous, hating to back and back to find a passing place, driving with hands high upon the wheel and gripping too tight with concentration to be able to wave a thank you. Little signs from time to time promised a ‘Passing Place’ ahead, and Anna smiled to herself at the ambiguity, ‘It’s not the places that pass, but the people, and yet the skin of the world is flaking too, passing and changing with us.’
