Miss You

TWENTY Tess

Anyone would think the UK population doubled over the Christmas period. I don’t know how people find the room in their fridges for all those ceramic pots of chicken liver paté with shiny jelly and a cranberry on top. And if Stilton’s so delicious, why don’t we eat it all year round? How come families can survive quite happily with a single packet of Jacob’s Cream Crackers for the rest of the year, but suddenly, everyone has to have this great big tin of them? Who is daft enough to fork out twelve pounds for a chocolate Swiss roll with some fancy icing on it? Does anyone in the country actually like Christmas pudding? And, on that subject, why pay more for one with an orange in the middle, when, at that time of year, you can get two bags of Navelinas for three pounds?

There’s not a lot of seasonal goodwill in a supermarket, with the crowds and the queues and the expense. I’d been promoted to supervisor, so I spent most of my time on the customer service desk dealing with relentless moaning and occasional incidents of pudding rage.

“MissCostello to Aisle Four, please.”

Next to the bakery counter, two men were arguing over the last box.

“Why do you have the bloody television adverts if you’re going to sell out?” the loser shouted at me, his face alarmingly pink.

Is it worth the high blood pressure, I wanted to ask him? You’ll give yourself a heart attack before you’ve even started on the brandy butter.

“Could I offer you a complimentary stollen with our apologies for your disappointment?”

“Do I get one too?” his opponent demanded.

“If you’re willing to hand your pudding over to this gentleman...”

Not a sentence I’d have ever imagined myself saying.

I’d discovered that the most efficient method of dealing with problems was to grovel and offer compensation wherever possible.

“It defuses the situation,” I explained to the deputy manager, who was more inclined to justify than hand out freebies. “This way, they go away with a free cake and something nice to tell their family and friends. So they’ll come back to us instead of seeing what Marks and Spencer has to offer.”

“You should really be thinking about marketing,” he said.

I was reluctant to take up the career-development opportunities offered, partly because I suspected they’d find out that I didn’t really possess “people skills” or “leadership qualities” or anything other than a bit of common sense. I didn’t see my future in a supermarket, although as time ticked by, I sometimes wondered what I was waiting for. I’d given up any mad idea I’d had of writing for a living when a short story I’d written about a shop assistant who makes up lives for customers from the contents of their trolleys hadn’t even been acknowledged by the magazine I’d sent it to. Perhaps I should just accept that it wasn’t going to get any better than retail. Sometimes, the best things are staring you right in the face, Doll used to say.

It had worked for her. She was on the local news, switching on the town’s Christmas lights.

“Maria Newbury, North Kent’s entrepreneur of the year!” said the reporter shoving a microphone in her face. “Or should I say, entrepreneuse?”

“I don’t know, should you?” said Doll, flirty as ever.

“There’s a lot of talk about glass ceilings for women in business. How have you managed to break through?”

“At The Dolls House, there’s no glass ceiling,” Doll told him. “Because it’s like, well, I’m sitting on the roof, aren’t I?”

He’d loved that.

“Maria Newbury, founder of The Dolls House.” He turned to the camera. “Where the sky’s the limit!”

When I asked Hope what she wanted for Christmas, she said a grand piano, because Martin had one in his flat above the shop.

She and Martin—technically Martin Junior, because his dad, who owned Martin’s Music, had Parkinson’s and had gone into one of the residential care homes on the Esplanade—had developed a sort of rapport. It was a bit like the friendship she’d had with Dave, based on having similar library-like brains as far as music was concerned, and I was really pleased about it because I suspected Hope missed Dave.

“I don’t like Doll,” she’d said, when she’d seen the wedding photo in the paper.

At twenty-one, Martin was pretty young to be running the business on his own, because it wasn’t just the shop—there was also a workshop out back where he repaired clarinets and re-strung guitars and stuff like that. He’d initially given the appearance of being cross with us for disturbing him when we went in to buy Hope a Teach Yourself Keyboard book, but I think it was more social isolation than deliberate rudeness. His mum had run away with a jazz saxophonist when he was a child, so that probably accounted for a lot. And when we kept returning for more and more advanced books, he was so impressed with Hope’s talent that he gave her the occasional lesson for free.

It was just me and Hope for Christmas because Dad and Anne had gone to Anne’s timeshare on the Algarve, and I’d had to work right up ’til the store closed on Christmas Eve. We spent the morning in our pajamas, eating chocolates. Hope seemed pleased with the full-size keyboard that I’d bought and hidden under Dad’s bed. She immediately wanted to start on the book of classical pieces that Martin advised me would be the right level for her. The keyboard had a much better tone than the school one, and sounded just like a proper piano, or organ, or harpsichord, whichever mode Hope chose, as she hesitantly picked out tunes you hear all your life on adverts without knowing their names, like “Für Elise” and the “Moonlight Sonata.”

It was nice just to relax with her, knowing that our dinner was only going to take four minutes to cook whenever we felt like it, because I’d bought us microwaveable Christmas ready meals with turkey, vegetables, little sausages, the lot.

“Why are there three?” Hope asked, when she looked at the packets in the fridge.

Knowing Hope’s appetite, I’d thought she might like a second, and it was Christmas after all, but I wasn’t going to tell her that up front.

“They were on three-for-two,” I lied.

“Can we invite Martin?”

It was nearly four o’clock in the afternoon by then and already dark outside.

“I expect Martin’s got plans of his own,” I said.

“He’s seeing his dad,” said Hope. “Then nothing.”

“If you want to invite him, you’ll have to give him a call,” I told her, amazed when she went straight to do it, because Hope never liked using the phone. I think the uncertainty of the process disturbed her.

In my heart of hearts, I’d have preferred not to have to go upstairs and get dressed and tidy up the wrapping paper, but I was thrilled at the idea of Hope having a friend to the house, even if it had more to do with the asymmetry of three ready meals in the fridge than her thinking about Martin being on his own on Christmas Day.

He turned up half an hour later with a present for her: a music book called Songs from the Musicals, unwrapped, because he’d obviously picked it from the rack on his way out of the shop.

I sat on the sofa watching him play and Hope sing, with the silver tinsel tree behind them, thinking it was a bit like Christmas in a Victorian novel when families used to entertain themselves around the piano.

When Hope sang “Defying Gravity,” Martin said, “She should have singing lessons. She’s a coloratura soprano.”

I didn’t know exactly what that was, but I mentioned it to Dad when he rang up to say Happy Christmas.

“Singing lessons? She can already sing, can’t she?” he shouted above the noise of the bar.

I’d bought a box of the most expensive Christmas crackers because they were practically giving them away on Christmas Eve afternoon, so Hope, Martin and I sat at the kitchen table with gold crowns on our heads. I noticed that eating was something Martin did very solemnly, as if it was an end in itself, not just a means to an end, exactly the same as Hope. We had a raspberry pavlova for our dessert, which was still a bit icy because I hadn’t taken it out of the freezer in time, but instead of asking for seconds, Hope sprang straight up when she’d finished and went back to the keyboard.

Listening to the two of them as I washed up, I suddenly thought of a solution to a problem that had been preoccupying me. All the pupils at Hope’s school had to do “work experience” for two weeks that spring. Most of her peers chose to help out in the old people’s homes, but nobody could see Hope being much good at that. Other kids, who were thinking about a career in teaching, did theirs at primary schools.

Hope’s tantrums were few and far between nowadays, but you never quite knew what was going to set her off, so even if a school had taken her, they’d probably have to have someone looking after her, and that wasn’t exactly the point of work experience, was it? It had been looking like Hope would have to spend two weeks at home, but what harm could she do in Martin’s Music? She would know the location of every piece of sheet music and every book within a morning of working there, and it would save Martin the hassle of putting down his cloths and waxes and screwdrivers to serve customers.

“Do I have to pay her?” Martin asked, when I floated the idea as he was leaving.

“No,” I said.

“OK then.”

After Hope had gone to bed, I sat in the living room staring at the lights on the tree, thinking how happy Mum would be to see Hope with a friend. It suddenly struck me that it was our tenth Christmas without her. Ten years was twice as long as Hope had known Mum. In that time she had gone from a little girl to a young woman. But everything else, even the twinkling tinsel tree, had stayed the same.

I never took Hope to the grave when she was little, because I knew the idea of Mum in the box underground would frighten her, and Mum wouldn’t want that, but I decided we’d go on Boxing Day, buying a bunch of glitter-dipped carnations from the gas station we walked past on the way to the cemetery.

“‘Devoted wife to James and beloved mother of Kevin, Brendan, Teresa and Hope,’” Hope read out the inscription on the headstone. “Who’s James?”

“It’s Dad’s full name.”

“Is Dad still married to Mum?”

“Well, yes...”

“Mum’ll never stop loving us, Tree.”

“No.”

“I don’t remember Mum, Tree.”

“Sssh,” I whispered. “Don’t say that here.”

Not that I really believed Mum could hear us.

I left Hope standing behind the counter with Mozart playing through the speakers and Martin whistling along in his workshop. As I opened the door on my way out, the bell jangled and Hope did a kind of shooing motion with her hand, as if to say, Go! I don’t need you any more!

It was one of those January days with almost blinding bright sunshine and a bitter edge to the wind. That’s probably why my eyes were smarting as I walked down to the seafront, because there was no reason at all to cry. I was actually incredibly relieved because it suddenly seemed possible that Hope would find her path in life. Wasn’t it great that she had found a niche for herself? There was nothing I wanted more than Hope to be self-sufficient.

Sometimes happiness does make you cry though, doesn’t it? Like when Mum was smiling and waving and crying all at the same time when we saw Kev off at Heathrow.

Wasn’t enabling Hope to be independent what the last ten years had all been about?

But, I couldn’t help thinking, what was the purpose of me now?

New Year is normally an optimistic time, with the days getting longer and the shops full of Valentine’s cards and heart-shaped chocolates and Prosecco with pink labels, but I couldn’t seem to cheer up. The ten-years thing seemed so significant somehow, which was ridiculous because it was only a few days different from nine years, and I’d been all right with that.

I felt so low, I decided to give the first writing class of the new term a miss, but the following Monday evening, Leo appeared in the store. I noticed the contents of his trolley first. Dog food was on buy-one-get-one-free but sometimes the promotions didn’t register at the tills.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“I certainly hope so!”

The voice, then the face, clean-shaven, bearing out my shaving theory.

“I didn’t know you had a dog,” I said.

“I like to maintain some semblance of mystery,” he whispered, flirtatiously.

“Sometimes there’s a blip in the software,” I told him, concentrating on pressing buttons on the cash register, hoping he wouldn’t notice the blushing. “If you give me your receipt, I’ll sort out a refund.”

“That’s not the problem,” he said. “Look, when do you get off work? I need to ask you a favor.”

For the fifteen minutes until I finished, my brain invented all sorts of stories to explain his request, none of which turned out to be accurate.

In Caffè Nero, Leo paid for his espresso and my latte and brought them over to the table.

“I’ve got a bit of a problem because I’ve got tickets for Much Ado about Nothing at the National next Friday. My wife was supposed to be coming, but she forgot to write in the diary that it’s her departmental dinner...”

I nodded.

“...so she said, ‘Why don’t you take that girl you’re always talking about in your creative-writing class?’”

It took a moment for it to dawn, because I was thinking that he really was going to ask me a favor, that this was his charming way of offering a treat.

“Me?” I asked, and was rewarded with the full amused smile.

When I got home, I put all my nice clothes out on the bed and tried on outfits. Smart-casual was how I thought Doll would describe the occasion. Eventually, I decided on a duck-egg blue cardigan from the fifties that I’d bought from the Oxfam shop but never found an occasion to wear. It was embroidered with beaded flowers in pastel colors and lined with silk. Teamed with new skinny jeans, I felt it struck exactly the right balance of glamorous enough for the theatre, but practical for sitting on a train. Catching myself pouting at the mirror, I gave myself a talking-to: this was not a date; Leo was just a wonderful teacher who took an interest in his students. And he was a married man. Any attraction I sensed between us was purely in my head and I must not make a fool of myself. But I still couldn’t quite quash my excitement.

You’d think being in the south of England, the weather would be milder than the rest of the country, but for some reason if there’s snow forecast, it usually falls in Kent. The weather meant Hope’s bus was delayed coming home from Martin’s Music, so I was worried about her, and shouted at her when she finally got in, which was unfair because it wasn’t her fault, but I was sure I was going to be late.

“Why are you carrying on like this?” Hope said, which is what I said to her when she had one of her tantrums. So that made me feel bad.

“I had to wait for Hope...,” I apologized breathlessly to Leo for almost making us miss the train.

“Hope?”

“My sister.”

I’d never mentioned Hope in class, which now felt a bit disloyal, but it was really more to do with having a corner of my life that wasn’t defined by her.

“She has Asperger syndrome.”

“Isn’t that the thing in that novel?” Leo asked.

“Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time? Yes.”

A lot of people had heard of it now because of that.

“Have you ever thought of writing from Hope’s point of view?” Leo asked.

I laughed. “I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to see things through the prism of Hope’s mind, and I’ve never got anywhere close,” I said. “I don’t know what it’s like to be Hope any more than I know what it’s like to be you!”

“It might be interesting to try...”

“Maybe I will one day. At the moment, I’m trying to find out what it’s like to be me!”

The snow was falling heavily by the time we arrived in town, the air thick with snowflakes dancing in the orange aura of the lamps along the South Bank.

“It’s like being in one of those Monet paintings of the Houses of Parliament,” I said, trying to demonstrate a knowledge of culture. “Except with snow, instead of fog, obviously.”

Leo gave me the amused look.

“Did you know that Monet was actually in exile here in London, because of the Prussian war in France?” I continued.

“I didn’t,” said Leo.

“You can get a lot from art-gallery websites.”

“Is that so?”

“Isn’t it amazing that nobody liked the Impressionists when they started?” I asked.

“A true artist isn’t concerned about his popularity.” Leo finally shut me up.

We got to the National Theatre in time for a drink before the curtain went up and sat, with gin and tonics, listening to the jazz band that was playing in the foyer. My outfit was fine. Some of the women were in dresses and heels, but some of them were just in jeans. The blizzard outside made everyone look a bit windswept and blotchily pink, however much time or money they’d spent on their make-up.

Although I’d seen the film of Romeo and Juliet and we’d read Othello for A level and watched the DVD, I’d never been to a live Shakespeare play before. As the lights went down, my pulse quickened. I’m not sure whether the nerves were for me or the actors, but I needn’t have worried because they looked like they were really enjoying themselves. I’d expected it to be a more formal and reverential experience, but it was really funny, not just nod-at-each-other-and-smile-smugly funny, but laugh-out-loud hilarious.

During the interval, while Leo went to the toilet, I leaned against a wall with my second gin and tonic, trying not to look like I was eavesdropping on the conversations going on around me. I noticed London theatregoers talked much louder than people coming out of the multiplex, almost like they wanted people to hear their opinions.

Next to me, two middle-aged men and a woman were standing with a younger woman, who was very much the center of attention. The clever comments she offered about the play made me think that she might be an actress herself. She was beautiful enough, with long, dark hair and a way of holding herself like she should be at a cocktail party with a cigarette in a long holder, even though she was only wearing plain black tailored trousers and a black cardigan, probably cashmere, I thought. One of the men was particularly attentive. He had a slight foreign accent and was talking about a recent production he’d seen.

“You never have been to the Salzburg Festival?” he asked, surprised. “Mountains and opera, you know. It’s quite special.”

“Sounds blissful,” said the woman, her green eyes shining at him.

Maybe it was a blind date set up by the other two? He seemed rather old for her. Old but rich. Definitely rich. You wouldn’t wear a black polo neck under a light brown tweed jacket unless you were.

“Shall we go back in?” their host asked as the ten-minute bell rang.

“Such a shame my husband’s missing this...,” said the beautiful woman.

“So lucky for me,” said her admirer, in a low whisper. His hand hovered a fraction of an inch from the small of her back as he stood aside to let her go first.

“Ready?” said Leo, reappearing.

“Yes,” I said, snapping back into my own narrative as I followed him back into the auditorium.

Outside, the snow had turned into a blizzard. We managed to trudge through the drifts along the river and up over the Charing Cross footbridge, but by the time we reached the station, all trains back to Kent had been canceled.

I was anxious about Hope spending the night on her own, but when I rang Anne, she’d already gone across and collected her.

“What will you do?” she asked.

In my imagination, a film was running about a young woman and her professor stuck for one magical night in the sparkling city, reciting lines from Much Ado about Nothing on the steps of the National Gallery, making snow angels in pristine white drifts in the parks...

“Shall we try the Premier Inn?” said Leo.

They didn’t have any single rooms left and no twin rooms either; in fact we got the last double. I negotiated a folding toothbrush and tiny toothpaste from the reception desk and when I came out of the bathroom, Leo was already in bed. My jeans were wet from the snow and the beaded cardigan was too fragile to sleep in, so I made the decision to sit on the bed, strip down to my knickers, camisole and bra, then duck straight under the duvet, without ever looking at him. I turned off the light on my side.

“Shall I place a pillow between us?” Leo breathed gin and tonic against the back of my neck.

“No need.” I giggled. “I’m not going to pounce on you!”

I meant it as a joke, to show I wasn’t even thinking about that, but it came out sounding more like an invitation.

“Not even if I do this?” he asked, planting a feather-light kiss on the nape of my neck, sending a current down my spine that made my whole body spasm.

I didn’t dare turn, in case he was joking, and I’d find my nose an inch away from his amused face.

“Or this?” he asked, slipping the heel of his palm under my arm and gently cupping my breast.

Then I turned and he was looking at me with great seriousness. We kissed, tentatively, then ravenously. The stubble was scratchier against my skin than I’d imagined.

Leo said I possessed the earnest innocence of Audrey Hepburn in the body of Claudia Cardinale. I treasured the description even more after googling her. I was constantly aware of the contours of my body under my shop uniform, as if the very top layer had been ripped from my skin, exposing my nerve endings to the slight catch of the polyester fabric. I stood at the customer service desk staring down the frozen-food aisle, with his voice slowly repeating the four syllables of the word “voluptuous” in my head. I kept my mobile phone in my top pocket, so when he texted, it vibrated next to my heart.

After work most evenings, Leo took me to country pubs where no one would recognize us and talked to me about poetry and made love to me in the car after.

“You’re a breath of fresh air,” he said. “And I can’t get enough of your body.”

I listened to his compliments, silent and passive, unable to find evocative-enough vocabulary to describe the overwhelming feeling that I had been waiting for him all my life.

I told no one about our affair. I didn’t want Shaun’s opinion. I didn’t allow myself to consider what Mum would think. The memory of her face blended with the features of the painted statue of Our Lady the two of us had prayed in front of when I was a little girl, her skin smooth and radiant, her lips pursed in a little strawberry smile, her eyes gazing distantly beyond me. She wasn’t there, so it didn’t matter what she thought.

Secrecy strengthened the delicious illusion that Leo belonged only to me.

I think I must have persuaded myself that his wife had tacitly instigated the relationship. Although he rarely mentioned her, I assumed she’d gone off sex with the menopause. I fell on every crumb of information like a scavenging seagull.

The two of them had met as students at Oxford, playing opposite each other in a garden production of Look Back in Anger.

I ordered the play on Amazon and was dismayed by Jimmy Porter’s tirades.

“Were you an Angry Young Man?” I asked Leo.

“I was a working-class Welsh boy who had stumbled over enemy lines into the territory of the middle classes,” he replied. “I shared his existential despair.”

“But you’re middle class now...,” I said.

“You consider that an improvement, do you?” He frowned at me, then suddenly laughed, flipping irritation to indulgence.

His unpredictability was exciting. I constantly felt as if I was tiptoeing along a tightrope of adoration in peril of plunging to disfavor, but I’d always known that real love would be terrifying and precipitous. Weren’t all great love affairs, from Doctor Zhivago to The English Patient, about stolen moments of agonizing ecstasy? Wasn’t suffering what the word “passion” actually meant?

If Leo was a romantic hero from literature, he was Mr.Rochester. Not just because of his age and marital status—not that his wife was insane or he locked her up, obviously—but because there was a dark, brooding side to him. His creativity had been stifled by the compromises of work and family obligation. I told myself we were soulmates. Just as his love completed me, mine would complete him. As Jane Eyre found, the challenge of cheering a troubled soul is compelling, each fleeting smile worth a hundred hours of a lesser suitor’s happiness.

One afternoon, when I’d worked the early shift, Leo drove me to Whitstable. We walked along the concrete path beside the beach. As the sun faded, the silver surface of the sea dulled to pewter; the wind blowing across the water was bitterly cold.

“Close your eyes,” he suddenly ordered.

As his footsteps receded, I began to tremble with an irrational fear that he was going to abandon me there.

“Don’t look!”

I heard metal scraping on metal, the click of a padlock, then footsteps returning towards me, a warm hand taking mine, and guiding me, still obediently blind.

“Down these steps! Duck your head!”

A door closed behind us. Lobster pots and creosote and the stale, almost sweet, smell of damp towels.

“You can look now.”

We were in a hut. Surrounded by boxes of books and bits of broken furniture, two canvas chairs and a table were set up with a candle, two stemmed glasses, a bottle of Rioja and a small dish of almonds.

“Bought this place with my first advance,” Leo told me. “A space to write, you know? Never got around to doing it up. I’m told they’re worth a fortune now...”

“Do you write here?” I asked.

“Too bloody cold. But perhaps, now you’re here...”

I was overjoyed by the idea of being his muse. The wine was soft and warming, like blackberries in summer, the almonds sweet and salty. Leo took my hand and we climbed up a splintery ladder into the cramped roof space where he undressed me carefully, staring at my pale skin in the light of the guttering candle, as I lay on the cold, damp mattress.

“You are my odalisque,” he whispered. “And now I’m going to fuck you so hard, you’ll feel me for days.”

He climbed on top of me, entering me straight away and riding me until our bodies smacked together with sweat and I was obliterated by his need. Spent and satiated, we flung apart, chests heaving as we stared up at the bare wooden boards of the pitched roof. Then he put an arm around me and drew me roughly against his chest, stroking my face with infinite tenderness.

When the candle died, we felt our way down the ladder, locked the door behind us, then stumbled back to his car in the darkness, my burning skin stinging in the freezing air.