The Potter’s House. Rosie Thomas
tried hard to be less demanding, as if that might win his approval again. I embarked on some redecoration in the flat, and discussed colours and finishes with the painters. I went out looking for fabrics and spent time putting together colour boards for Peter’s approval.
‘Very nice,’ he said, pressing the rim of his glasses against the bridge of his nose with the tip of his finger, an indication of stress that I had learned to recognise long ago.
‘You like the green, then?’
‘Yes, if you do.’
I didn’t care about the green and I knew that he didn’t either.
Once or twice I had a cup of tea upstairs with Lisa in her flat.
There was no reason to refuse her invitations, nothing I could have identified except the thin squeak of hostility between us, and I was ready to think that that might be a product of my imagination, the murmur of my own madness. Peter apparently didn’t hear the sound, although he always had done so up until now and been able to take the right reassuring steps. He was too busy, or maybe he was simply tired of listening out for it.
Lisa didn’t choose to come again to my flat, Peter’s and mine, although I always invited her. We went upstairs instead.
Each time I saw her she seemed younger and warmer and more bursting with life. There were signs that she was making a home of Dunollie Mansions, but they were fairly limited ones – an armchair of steel and cowhide stood in the living room, with its paper and corrugated wrapping only partly removed; a patch of wall in the dark hallway had been experimentally striped with different paint colours.
‘What do you think?’ Lisa waved a hand as we passed on the way to the kitchen.
‘Pink?’
‘You’re right. Too sugary. Much.’ And then a sigh. ‘I’ll never have time to get this place together.’
We drank tea, sitting next to the big red refrigerator.
‘What’s happening about Baz and the girlfriend?’
She shrugged. ‘Idyll of delight, I suppose. I don’t care. Fuck ’em.’
Fuck my husband.
Was she doing it then, or did that come later?
There is someone at the door. Room service, with some meal I have ordered and will not eat.
The waiter is the one who always comes, day or night. He never seems to go off duty. When he takes the trays away he looks under the dish covers and sees that I have barely touched the food, and he sighs in reproach. He is very young, perhaps only fifteen or sixteen.
He puts the latest tray down on the low table, and makes a big show of displaying the food and unfurling the napkin for me.
‘Is good,’ he cajoles, ‘is very nice.’
I smile at him.
‘It looks delicious.’
‘I close the blinds?’
The light is fading over the sea. The sky is mushroom pink and the water is the same colour as the inside of an oyster shell.
‘No, leave them open. I like to look at the night.’
‘You need something else maybe?’
He hovers protectively and I am touched by his concern for me.
‘No, thank you.’
We wish each other goodnight.
The plan, if it was ever as conscious as that on my part, was for Selina and me to take this holiday together, a late-season two weeks on the Turkish coast in a pretty resort called Branc. Selina is an expert on hotels and she promises me that this one is good – Swiss-owned and run, but with a proper local feel to it.
‘The pool will be clean, the food close enough to authentic but without poisoning you.’
‘Why Turkey, Selina?’
She shrugged. ‘Why not? It’s fashionable. I’ve been everywhere else.’
Selina is currently between husbands. She has had three, or maybe four. I have known her since our modelling days and we have always kept in touch. It was her idea for us to make the trip.
‘Two women on their own, darling? Free and independent? We will have a fine time. You get out of London and you’ll feel better, believe me.’
I agreed that we should go. It was autumn again in London, the time last year that Lisa Kirk arrived, and she and Peter had now been living together for five months. I had started to wonder how much longer it would be before she was pregnant. The child Peter had always wanted.
I didn’t look forward to the holiday with much enthusiasm. When I thought about it at all I imagined it would be like the holidays my mother and I took together, after my father left us and went off to the Steps and Halves. Two women consoling each other, solicitous about sun cream and making sure that the other was comfortable, but still locked inside themselves with separate, clamorous voices in their ears. Maybe my mother would put it differently, if she were here, but I can still see the white triangle of her face and the misery in her eyes. Nothing I did ever rubbed it out for long. Of course not.
I probably do Selina a major injustice. We might well have had a wild time together, sitting on bar stools and drinking lurid cocktails, and then tripping off to discos to enjoy the startled attentions of the local Lotharios, in the absence of any younger prey, like a pair of giraffes displaced from the herd and yapped around by hyenas. The comparison would have drawn one of Selina’s yelps of laughter, before she flicked her lighter to another Marlboro.
In any case, she developed appendicitis four days before we were due to leave. I could have cancelled, but I had somehow got used to the idea of going to Turkey. I was even relieved at the thought of being able to do it alone, and not to have to keep up the pretence of being cheerful and energetic.
And so here I am.
I think about Peter, of course.
I prefer to remember the early days, when we were first married, when he used to drive us off to the country for weekends. We would go to little hotels in Suffolk or Devon, and lie in bed late and then take unambitious walks before coming back for tea, and drinks, and dinner. He was always trying to make me eat, and my evasions became a joke and then a kind of game between us.
‘Scone, darling? With some home-made jam and clotted cream?’
‘Just the cucumber, out of the sandwich, thank you.’
Peter belonged to the National Trust, for God’s sake. Not even my mother was a member. I thought this was funny and delightful, and if we didn’t go for a walk we would look up some local great house or ruined castle in the book and drive in the Jaguar to see it. I remember the smell of warm leather seats and brake fluid.
All of this felt very adult and secure, after the way I had been living – on and off planes, in and out of clothes and studios and hotel bedrooms, with men around me and in me whom I didn’t like or trust. Whereas I loved Peter and I trusted him absolutely, and he had the knack of making me feel loved in return. His love balanced out my guilt: it didn’t take it away, nothing could do that, it just counterweighted it and allowed me to function while still carrying the old burden around with me.
Peter had a conventional exterior, which he enjoyed cultivating, and inside this there was a quirky and clever man unlike anyone I had ever met before. I adored his cleverness, and the way he could weigh up people and problems quickly, and act on his observations and deductions. He was decisive where I was tentative, and generous where I was suspicious.
He was also the most sensuous man I had ever known. He loved food and fine wine and beautiful old cars, and pictures and made-to-measure suits and sex. He was the best lover. In bed, as I noticed the very first time, when he took off the shields of his spectacles there was the different soft face of an alternative, exotic Peter who belonged to me alone. I liked to smooth