A Love Story for Bewildered Girls Read online

  ‘You can,’ Annie said and yanked again so that Violet was pulled towards the edge of the bed. It looked likely that she would soon end up on the floor.

  ‘Why must I?’ asked Violet through teeth gritted with effort.

  It was becoming a tug of war with an inevitable conclusion because the difference in size between them made them a comedy pairing. Violet like a miniature Snow White, with swinging black hair that she hid behind to avoid direct contact with the world, as pale and small and delicate as a doll, Annie with the proportions and the colouring of Sophia Loren, all curves and attitude, ‘stacked’, as she liked to describe herself. Before meeting Violet, Annie had always felt towards small women what she felt towards chihuahuas, that she would quite like to kick them, and it was a testament to their friendship that Annie never had. She had made allowances for Violet because, on their first ever outing to a Manchester student bar that smelt of marijuana and slops, Violet had confided in her that she hated being small.

  ‘Men pick me up given the smallest opportunity. And women say to me, “You’re so tiny. What size do you take?” Like it’s a compliment.’

  ‘But come on, there must be some advantages. You’re teeny tiny, you’re pretty, men love that. I’m sure you’ve got plenty to pick and choose from,’ said Annie.

  ‘You are really beautiful, Annie,’ said Violet, who was nibbling on an ill-advised sausage roll to try to sober up.

  ‘I know, but I have far fewer to pick from,’ said Annie. ‘I’m more of a specialist taste. But you, you’re a pocket Venus. Everybody loves you, I’ll bet you.’

  ‘Men who want to protect me, yeah. Men who want to look after me and have me sit on their knee and be their little girl.’

  ‘That’s disgusting. No one ever asks me to do that.’

  ‘I mean, why would you want to sit on their knee? Unless you were a ventriloquist’s dummy.’

  More of a problem for Annie was that Violet’s fashion sense was non-existent to the point of being embarrassing, as she would only wear clothes from charity shops; she found it comforting to wear things that someone else had already worn. Annie disapproved of this because it resulted in Violet wearing scout’s jumpers and Hello Kitty T-shirts and dungarees, as she could still fit into a twelve-year-old’s garments. Annie disapproved of trousers on women, apart from for exercise purposes, let alone of anything that covered your cleavage. If God had given you it, why the hell not show it, was her rationale, but all attempts to persuade Violet into something more suitable or even new had failed.

  Annie managed to get the duvet off at last and threw it on to the floor. It had hardly been a fair contest; she had at least a four-stone advantage. Violet curled up into a ball and wrapped her little hands around her little knees.

  ‘Come on, shift your arse,’ said Annie, remaining by the side of the bed. ‘If you get up I’ll tell you my favourite word.’

  ‘I should think it’s probably “litigious”,’ said Violet.

  ‘If you don’t get up now I’m going to carry you into the shower and turn on the water! And then you’ll be bloody sorry!’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’ asked Violet, who had hooked one hand around the bedpost.

  ‘That was not a threat. That was a statement of intent. Don’t slander.’

  ‘That’s libel.’

  ‘You know it’s not libel.’

  ‘I just wanted to make a point,’ said Violet.

  Annie knew that she was wishing the duvet wasn’t so far away so that she could crawl to get it. Annie took the opportunity to kick it behind her.

  ‘And what,’ Annie asked, with the increasing exasperation and the hands-on-hips gesture that might normally have roused Violet into action, ‘is your point?’

  ‘That I really don’t want to get up and I really don’t want to go to the party either,’ said Violet.

  ‘Why I put up with you I do not know,’ said Annie. ‘By the way, this room is a complete tip,’ and Annie threw something at Violet which turned out to be a dress she had been looking for. She clutched it to her chest.

  ‘Are you by any chance my mother?’ asked Violet.

  ‘Your mother’s got no tits to speak of. So no,’ said Annie. ‘Get up. Going to the party might do you good.’

  ‘I’m not coming,’ Violet said and turned her back.

  Annie didn’t do inertia or depression or anxiety or whatever the hell this was herself. She had no truck with it, just like she had no truck with knickers that cost under twenty quid, dirty bathrooms, integral spotlights, cars made by Ford, washing up without Marigolds on, shower gel or speed bumps. She should have known that this assertive approach was not going to help. Violet, normally so pliable, became intransigent in this state. Why did what Violet called ‘the fear’ suddenly come upon her, seemingly out of nowhere? Dunno. What about going to the doctor? No. Why not? Dunno. She’d been having these episodes ever since Annie had met her and it was best, Annie had found with years of experience and irritation, to leave her be until she came back out of her snail shell. The leaving of things to come to fruition on their own did not come naturally to her but she had learnt to bite her lip. More or less.

  ‘I’m not coming,’ said Violet again.

  ‘You could have said that before!’ Annie said, and she picked up the duvet and threw it back at Violet, who slid under it with a sigh.

  Annie stood as the party milled around her, looking at the therapist’s card that Dolores had given her when she had apologized for Violet not coming, yet again, to one of these parties. Dolores had told her that this was the obvious solution to Violet’s ‘sad shyness’ as she called it and that the therapist was a friend of hers who was very good. Perhaps it was the solution? She considered the likelihood of Violet going to therapy. Her heels were hurting her, her shoes were always too tight, and she tried to alleviate this by wiggling her toes but that didn’t work. ‘You have to suffer to be beautiful,’ her mother always said, and in Annie’s experience she had found this to be true. Annie liked a bet but on her own skill set rather than racing. Drinking men under the table. Arm wrestling. She wouldn’t have taken the bet on Violet going to see someone because the odds were non-existent. Not a long shot but a dead horse. She had tried to tell Dolores that it was pointless giving her the card but she had failed. Annie admired Dolores’s tenacity, it was almost as strong as her own. She looked up to see a man entering the room who looked as if he could easily bump his head on the door lintel. Six two, thought Annie, but no rugby player, too thin, and with shoulders not meant for the scrum. There were a lot of props in her family. He wouldn’t have lasted a minute. The man had a blond short back and sides and looked freshly laundered. He was dressed in a way Annie always went for, Levis and a well-ironed expensive shirt. Not designer, proper clothes. She reckoned that he was older than her by about ten years. He approached her. Across a crowded room, she was aware of the cliché. He had good posture and beautiful oxblood brogues.

  ‘Penny for them,’ he said. ‘Can I get you a drink? There’s not much choice I’m afraid. Warm white or warm red or a bowl of red liquid that looks suspiciously like sangria.’

  ‘My gran always used to say, “Spend a penny,” when she went to the loo and I used to look down it to see if she’d dropped one,’ said Annie. ‘Do you iron your own shirts?’

  She reached forwards to stroke his sleeve. He seemed to like that.

  ‘No, I have a man who does it for me.’

  ‘Your boyfriend?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said, coughing, ‘I have a man who comes in and does that kind of thing for me. I pay him.’

  ‘A cleaner,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think that Pike would like to be called a cleaner. I think he would be mortally offended.’

  ‘Well, a housekeeper then? Will that do? What is his job title?’

  ‘Factotum perhaps.’

  ‘Facwhat? That sounds like a disease of the rectum,’ she said to see if it would make him laugh, not because she didn
’t know the word. It did make him laugh and his laugh was charming because he crinkled his long nose before he tipped his chin up, not a weak chin Annie was pleased to note, but later she realized that the whole outcome of their relationship hinged on that moment. He laughed at what he believed to be her ignorance. He had taken her as someone different from the person she was, right from the beginning.

  People always judged her by her voice. When she went to London for meetings they mimicked her behind her back, she knew they did. They talked about Coronation Street and flat caps. When pissed the arseholes doing their articles asked her if she had had a privy out t’back. When she was younger she had once asked a man to step outside with her when he had said that, and he had had the sense to look scared. Now she only smiled in a way that didn’t go as far as her eyes and didn’t bother about it, knowing that she was better than all of them. And yes, she had grown up in a tiny terraced house in a Lancashire mill town but so what? Her dad had made enough money in the building trade to buy them a brand-new house in a suburb, complete with five bedrooms, a conservatory, and a utility room. Both of her brothers were engineers like their mother had planned. Her highest aim in life was to make sure that her children would never have to get their hands dirty at work. They’d all done well. But was that ever good enough? Her dad would always be a builder at heart, even if her mother did say ‘property developer’. They’d always be money that had been made. She could tell instantly that if he didn’t have a trust fund now, his parents would do anything to avoid inheritance tax. They probably had money offshore and perhaps even a town house and a country house. She bet his dad never had to scrub his hands with Swarfega after a day at work. Should any of it matter? Wasn’t that outdated now, positively Victorian, that distinction? But it was underneath everything like soil under tarmac. You fancy me, she thought, but you think my voice is amusing. You think I’m common. Sod you. When he came back to her and gave her a glass full of a liquid that was supposed to be wine she downed it in one.

  ‘Got to be going,’ she said.

  ‘School night? What do you do?’

  ‘I’m a lawyer.’

  ‘That’s interesting. I’m in advertising myself.’

  ‘How fascinating,’ she said.

  ‘Are you being sarcastic?’

  ‘It’s only I think that’s daft for a man. Poncing around with adverts about cars and that. Washing powder. Cat food. Or whatever you do. You don’t look like the hipster type. Where’s your beard?’

  ‘Would you like to go somewhere nicer?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Why not? Am I so terrible?’

  She could tell that he thought himself charming; she expected that he always got what he wanted, or rather who.

  ‘You’ve got a voice that sounds right up yourself, to be honest.’

  And he laughed again, and she still liked the way he did it.

  ‘Would you at least give me your number? Then I can take you out and impress you massively at a later date. I’m Laurence, by the way.’

  ‘Larry? Like in Olivier?’

  ‘Just Laurence.’

  ‘Like I said. Up yourself.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘078461114789. And if you can remember that off the top of your head I might even take your call, just Laurence.’

  She knew as she walked away that she made an impressive back view, that her arse was like soft cushions you wanted to lay your head on and that she swivelled her wide hips like Marilyn in Some Like It Hot.

  She knew he would phone.

  This is Grace’s profession

  It was five to four. Grace had one eye on the clock and the other on the woman in front of her. Clock, woman, clock, woman, clock. It was rhythmical and more a matter of habit than need. It was soothing. She had good time management skills. This was an acknowledged fact in her office. She had been complimented on it and asked for her secret in the same way that people ask how you stop your meringues from collapsing. It was hardly a talent to boast of but it made life easier. She managed not to tap her foot. Clock, woman.

  At school, the nuns hadn’t given them much career advice. There was a nun called Sister Maria Concepción who was Spanish and had a lovely soft accent and she called Grace into her office and asked her about her future vocation. Grace sat looking at the bad quality reproduction of The Light of the World on the wall opposite and tried to think about it. She knew that Sister Maria Concepción wanted her to say nun or missionary but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. To broaden their spiritual horizons her grandfather Cyril had given her and her sisters the outlines of all the world’s major religions that the nuns had ignored, and Grace had decided that atheism was the way to go; it seemed simpler and she didn’t fancy any of the others, despite the temptation to be able to say, ‘I’m a Zoroastrian.’ She gave up religion immediately and easily, completely unlike the efforts it took to avoid chocolate at Lent, and never went back. She sat in the office looking at Jesus and it suddenly came to her like a vision of the divine. Psychology, she could study that. Why not? True, she couldn’t spell the word very well but no matter.

  ‘Psychology,’ she said, ‘I want to be a psychothingymagig.’

  Sister Maria Concepción sighed deeply and held out her small hand and brushed one of Grace’s with it.

  ‘And you such an intelligent girl,’ she said.

  This Grace considered to be the best decision of her life so far but it wasn’t until she started having therapy herself that she realized why it all appealed to her so much. Her upbringing had been what might be labelled ‘eccentric’, if not ‘downright odd’ or possibly ‘dysfunctional’. No wonder she had wanted to try and figure things out. She had lived with her sisters and Cyril, a Classics professor, and their Great Aunt Beatrice, who still rode to hounds, although she was unsteady and had to be tied on to the saddle with red baling twine. They inhabited a rotting manor house with twelve bedrooms and no central heating on the edge of the North Yorkshire moors which was falling down around their ears day by day. Every so often their mother would come home, have a baby, and abandon it to Cyril’s hands which were stained yellow by pipe tobacco. It seemed that her diaphragm was only useful for short periods. She stayed a month or two, hardly eating anything and doing her ballet exercises for eight hours a day, until she got back into her lithe shape and then she was off again on tour. It was Cyril who dealt with the croup and the cradle cap, Cyril who stirred the Mr Matey bubbles in their baths and frightened them with bloodthirsty stories about the battle of Marathon and, when they were not much older, taught them to drive the Land Rover so that they could come and get him after the lock-ins in the local pub. Cyril named them after the heroines of Thomas Hardy novels: Arabella, Grace, Eustacia, and Tess. They were just grateful that he hadn’t gone for ‘Bathsheba’.

  ‘Arabella, darling, or one of you,’ was how their mother referred to them when they were children. ‘Arabella, darling, or one of you,’ was the story of her approach to rearing her daughters. As a result they didn’t think of her as a parent but as a reluctant Father Christmas who appeared sporadically during their childhoods clutching black market cigarettes and vodka for Cyril and Beatrice and snow globes and dolls for them. And of course, there was the father/fathers issue. There were no photos, no evidence, and when, as teenagers, they decided to ask her, en masse, she waved her fingers airily at them all.

  ‘Oh, you know darlings, men,’ she said, and they could get nothing more out of her.

  When picked apart Grace’s early life provided years of material to work on. She, although it seemed somehow wrong to admit it, loved all the attention that the therapist focused on you. After all, although Cyril and Beatrice had coddled their foibles, there were always so many of them that they became a single entity – ‘the girls’. To have one person sit and listen to you for hours and months and years was such a luxury and she knew that her clients enjoyed this too. After all, what is more interesting to us, when it co
mes down to it, Grace often thought, than our own weird stories; that didn’t stop her however from sometimes still being surprised by the things her clients were happy to divulge to her.

  She had been seeing this morning’s client for three months. There were extensive notes about her in the folder on her desk. Denise. Dentist. Aged fifty-six. Married to Arthur for thirty years. Three grown-up children. Could probably be described as ‘still an attractive woman for her age’, which Grace presumed translated as ‘slim’. Grace frequently wondered why straight women were so obsessed with their looks in comparison to the lesbians she knew. Not that they were without standards – they washed for example, they had their hair cut, they wore deodorant – just that their standards didn’t seem to be so very stringent. She had looked in Vogue once and found it bizarre, the worshipping of things as ephemeral as stupidly expensive dresses and bags and shoes. And the strange adolescent models with their sticking-out bones. It must be such a burden to have to keep up with that sort of rubbish, such a waste of money and effort. She wondered if this was all to do with the male gaze and having to submit yourself to it, of having to morph during adolescence from tomboy to sexy. She had always looked upon men as equals but perhaps that was because she didn’t have to conform to their idea of pleasing and attractive. It was interesting, she should read up about it. She looked down at her plain grey shirt and plain black trousers and was relieved that at least they had no toothpaste or mud on them. She looked at Denise’s make-up and wondered how she got it to stay on her face and how long it took her to put it on in the mornings.

  ‘We’ve been pretending we’re horses again,’ said Denise, pressing her thin lips together but speaking in a very matter-of-fact voice.

  Grace nodded. At the beginning of her training she might have wanted to say, ‘Excuse me, you’re what?’ but she had long ago accustomed herself to these sorts of confessions.

  ‘Not just in bed any more,’ said Denise, ‘it’s kind of spilled over. We have horse names now. And when we go for a walk we like to pretend we’re trotting and when we’re going faster we call it cantering. That might be going too far, don’t you think?’