“I had a good time tonight,” Mandy said, lying back. “I don’t get out much, what with the kid and everything.”
“Ah, Lindsey,” said the friend, stirring her soup.
“Do you know what this reminds me of, Wendy?” said Mandy. “It’s like when we used to sit up all night in the kitchen in Blackpool, entertaining Timon, and Timon entertaining us.”
“Does it?” I thought back. “That seems hundreds of years ago now.”
“What’s new and coming true for Timon now?”
“I think he’s given up on Belinda at last.”
“Has he written the book again?”
“A little bit. He says it isn’t the same.”
“Poor Timon.”
“He’s the only one,” said the strange friend, “who isn’t tied down.”
I walked home. I don’t know how I found the way. It was dawn by the time I came back to Greenwich. I walked miles that night and I could have been anywhere. Walking in any of the places where I’d walked through the night.
The Millennium Dome was gone by then. There was nothing to look at but wasteground out of his windows.
In the tender light I traipsed around our house. I looked for the first time, properly, at all the things Josh had been buying. He’d been branching out, spending more, making his collecting a more expensive hobby. Whole rooms were turned over to odd contraptions in silver, bronze and tin. Assorted TVs played video installations around the clock. I looked at his study and he had more things in there, with more books he had never read.
He had the horse’s head on his desk. One of the farmyard pieces in a tube of glass from the Tate, which I’d seen, years before with Serena. That artist had hit hard times, his installations were broken up and sold off, and Josh had snapped up this little beauty, and that had caused a row again. I looked into the horse’s eyes.
I dozed on the bed settee for a while, gazing at the horse’s eyes. And, down amongst the cushions, I found a hardbacked book wedged right in there. It had a cracked red cover and, handwritten inside, I discovered:
Pieces of Belinda. By Timon.
And she was in there, piece by piece, lovingly detailed.
THIRTY-NINE
He’s clingy, isn’t he? I never thought you would tie yourself down with a clingy man. This was Aunty Anne. It doesn’t do to let them get too clingy, you know.
Girl, I’ve got something to tell you.
So listen up and pay attention
to a woman
who knows her way around a man or two.
It doesn’t pay to
let them hang on
to let them hang about your neck
like a trophy a garland of
idle male flesh
medallion
man
because he’ll depend on you
he’ll ride out your wishes
your
I cut Aunty Anne short. I wasn’t buying this. Josh wasn’t clingy.
He wants to be with me
wants my every iota
Oh yes, she said, kicking up her legs
oh yes, I remember that
and dancing
with the men who promised
their all and pledged
their all and worshipped
every scrap of me
and Anne still had this fixation about not living her life to the utmost. In later life utmost was Aunty Anne’s word and she reckoned she was just about getting it now, on her own. Well, good luck to her, I thought, but she shouldn’t criticise Josh.
She had this thing about the Marianne Faithfull song about the woman who never got her utmost. About Lucy Jordan, who at the age of thirty-seven realises that she’ll never drive in a sports car through Paris with ‘the warm wind in her hair’. Aunty Anne would say: listen and weep, and I said, Aunty Anne you’ve been to Paris again and again and you’ve been in sports cars galore. You’ve had that warm wind.
Don’t be funny, she said. And the Paris I’m thinking of is a place I’ll never ever go now.
I said, anyway, riding through Paris in sports cars will never be the same thing again, it’s not the same thing after Diana died. Riding through Paris in sports cars at the age of thirty-seven is no longer just a dream of the utmost, it means closure now, it means—
She said, don’t give me your analysis
girl, don’t give me your Open
University view on the world
because by then I’d started studying
and I was reading things
in a hundred different ways
maybe more like Timon and Mandy read
Aunty Anne would never listen to me
but I was trying to warn her
and tell her I was happy
and I couldn’t live inside her experience
of the things that would make only her
happier and I could never be in that sports car
underpass-bound.
“Hey,” said Mandy recently. “There are these funny bits in your text.”
We were talking again. This was quite recently: our rift was sealed. I even let her read my work-in-progress.
“Don’t you like them?”
Mandy was doing her Womens’ Studies degree at last, she was reading the French feminists at last, she was graduating next July.
“It’s like Kristevan Woman’s Time. It’s like Babble. It’s like a Wild Zone.”
“Oh boy. Is that good?”
“Because woman is eternal and part of nature…”
“Yeah?”
“She exists, at times, in her own time and space. You’re opening up your text to allow her that space. These are like songs in an old MGM musical. When the woman gets to bear her soul.”
I thought about that. “I just set I out how I fancied it.” Then I thought some more. “But it isn’t just a woman’s space. Look at Captain Simon as Uncle Pat’s deathbed. He sings, too.”
“Oh,” said Mandy. “Then maybe you’re confounding blithe assumptions about gender. Men have Women’s Time, too.”
“Don’t men have Men’s Time?”
“Yes, that’s what they have.”
“And is it different to Women’s Time?”
“Oh, yes,” nodded Mandy.
I used to wonder if dogs, cats, insects had a different experience of time to us. Did their minds and eyes move slower to compensate for a shorter, faster life? I hated it that there was no way we could ever know this. And those things, like butterflies and wasps, that only lasted a day or so. They’d
