47 #2
His phone actually rings and they both jump, and burst out laughing. Then Janey’s starts ringing too. They have some very annoyed, frustrated dog-lovers out there. It appears somebody has been crocheting dog jackets, from Janey’s messages.
Al calls. ‘Did you get a dog for Essie and not for me?’
‘I’ll call you back,’ says Janey, and turns her phone off.
Lowell comes towards her. ‘I just wanted to explain . . . what it was. With . . . marrying a younger woman.’
‘You don’t have to,’ says Janey.
‘No, I do . . . Janey, it’s the optimism.
The hope. That everything might be alright.
And I am so sad and battered by the wars of love, and midlife, and getting older and everything that means, and I wanted someone who still believes in happy ever after, and the future.
And older women can be just so sad. And that makes me sad.
Because they’ve been let down by horrible men.
Men just like me. And it makes me feel ashamed and shabby. That’s why.’
Janey takes this in for a moment and looks out of the window.
A moment of quiet sadness settles on the bonny garden, teasing them in all its brightly coloured young beauty: the first blush of the slowly ripening strawberries; the straggling, laughing daisies; the tentative, unfurling rosebuds, the poppies gradually standing higher, waiting to puff out into their full summer crimson beauty – then fade, then die, like everything else, as everything must. Janey looks around the garden for a long time, and at the hangdog shape of the large man in front of her.
She doesn’t know how to answer what he’s just said.
Because it is true. And she doesn’t want to be sad any longer.
‘Even if they know all the lyrics to that song by Sharpe and Numan?’ she asks, finally, tentatively.
At first, he looks confused. Then he glances up and there is a twitch, just the tiniest twitch of a smile at the corner of his mouth.
‘Change Your Mind?’ he says.
‘Well, it’s not an instruction,’ says Janey. ‘I just really love that song.’
‘I really love that song too,’ he says. ‘I thought nobody else remembered that song.’
‘Not if they were born in the year they made that song.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’
He looks at her and pulls one of the roses out of the simple vase he keeps on the table. ‘Here,’ he says quietly.
‘Oh, goodness,’ says Janey, looking at its perfection and beauty.
‘I’m sorry I hurt the rose bush.’
She strokes the velvety soft petals and holds it to her nose. It smells so fresh and sweet and new. She closes her eyes.
‘I feel like the Queen Mother,’ she says. ‘I shall put it on a hat and be eccentric.’
‘No, you shouldn’t,’ he says. ‘You don’t understand what I’m saying. I’m saying what I used to feel like. Before I met you and realised that was rubbish. And I’ll be away a bit but not all the time, and oh, for God’s sake, Janey, let’s just pretend that getting older doesn’t matter.’
And, gently but firmly, he cups her face with his large hand, and kisses her hard on the mouth.
And Janey, who has feared and worried in her deepest, most solitary moments that she might never be kissed again, feels an extraordinary wave of happiness; relief and joy crash over all at once; gives herself a moment to just feel it.
And then another, to realise, with joy anew, that the person kissing her is Lowell and that there is no one in the world she’d rather be kissing.
He towers over her, cradling her face with his large hand and, suddenly, he stops.
‘What?’ says Janey, panicked.
‘I can’t kiss you if you won’t stop smiling,’ he says. Then he frowns, that characteristic little line on his brow she has grown so familiar with. ‘Unless you’re laughing.’
‘I’m not laughing,’ says Janey. ‘It’s a happy smile.’
He grins back at her.
‘I . . . good,’ he says.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, terrified she’s going to giggle, nervously. ‘It’s . . . I’m out of practice.’
‘We weren’t very practised at eighteen either.’
‘True.’
‘Shall we discover it together?
She has never been to his bedroom, of course. He takes her small hand in his huge one and leads her upstairs. It is on the mezzanine, metal and glass lining the deep, soft wooden steps. The window looks out over the fields behind the house, so they don’t have a view of any dog-deprived rioters.
Even his bed is beautiful: simple wood, pale grey sheets. What an interesting man he is, she thinks. What an interesting person he will be to discover. And then she starts to panic again.
‘Oh, goodness,’ she says. ‘Why aren’t we drunk?’
‘Because we’re too old and we have to drive places and it makes us feel really terrible the next day.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ says Janey. ‘Well, is it too much to ask for dim lighting?’
‘We don’t have to do this, sweetie.’
‘No,’ says Janey. ‘I’m just wittering because I’m nervous. Can you shut me up, please?’
And he absolutely can. Just to kiss him is a delight; she loves the warmth and bulk of his body. She was right: he does have a hairy chest to go with his thick hair, and she runs her fingers through it, inhaling the wonderful scent of him.
And he, she notices, doesn’t ask if she minds a hairy chest, or apologise for his large girth which she doesn’t mind a bit, finds comfortable, in fact. He is perfectly happy, she can tell, just to be there, in the moment, on a golden afternoon in spring, alive in that moment, with her.
And she tells herself that she can do that too. Step out of her scrubs, her job, her divorce, her worries and work and friends and family and care and concern. Live like a rose. She boldly pulls her shirt off in front of him and he is delighted.
‘Look at you,’ he says, happily, and sits down on the side of the bed. ‘Can you come here, please?’
‘You’re very polite,’ she says, walking towards him.
‘Oh, you’re about to find out how wrong you are about that,’ he says, and pulls her towards him until she is sitting astride him.
She looks up at his face, terrified, excited, turned on, joyous, everything at once cascading through her brain. She smiles. ‘We’re not too old.’
‘I haven’t got my glasses on,’ says Lowell.
‘Me neither,’ says Janey.
‘But I can tell you I want you as much as . . . Kelly LeBrock in The Woman in Red .’
‘Really?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Well, then, I want you as much as Patrick Swayze in Ghost and also Dirty Dancing but not Road House .’
‘Do I have to dance?’
‘Not at our age!’
He grins, and then he kisses her, and pulls her abruptly closer to him, then closer still, and everything is bliss.
*
Afterwards, dazed and stupefied, astounded that it is even the same day, astounded that it has taken her until she was fifty-five to have sex like that, Janey sits downstairs, languid, unable to move, like a happy cat, a sleepy puppy under each arm. Lowell has put some Bach on his record player.
‘What happened to Gary Numan?’ she asks. He is dressed again – in clean trousers – and is making them omelettes, which makes her very happy because she is unbelievably hungry.
‘Well, you change as you get older. I like this too now.’
She listens. She doesn’t know much about classical music. It is a piano, that’s about all she can tell.
‘Is this sexy?’ she says. ‘Because if you were planning on seducing me later, I think that horse has bolted.’
‘I am planning on seducing you later,’ he says, tossing up the omelette, and the straightforward way he says it makes her shiver. ‘But also, this is very sexy! Listen!’
She does.
‘Do you hear how one hand picks up the tune and the other repeats it and turns it round? Total equality. Neither partner is dominant. Balance.’
She listens for a while until she can hear it.
‘Beautiful, yeah?’
‘I thought Bach was all, like, churches and stuff.’
He comes over with the pan and kisses the top of her head. ‘He had nineteen children,’ he says. ‘Sex is all he knew.’
‘And this,’ says Janey, ‘is why you are so very useful on a pub quiz team.’
And she gets up to join him at the kitchen table, wondering where he stands on giving large dogs small titbits.