The Potter’s House. Rosie Thomas
a secret smile.
The food on the tray has gone cold. I prod at it a little, then cover the plates up again and slide the whole lot outside the door.
The sky is dark now. I stand at the window and look out at the line of lamps that line the hotel garden, and their broken reflection in the sea. After three days of gazing at it I am familiar with the view. The beach, with a row of beach beds and yellow mattresses under jaunty yellow parasols, now furled for the night, lies just beyond the garden wall. There is the water and a rim of tarnished silver where it meets the sand. Across the water are the donkey-brown humps of some nameless islands in the Greek Dodecanese. Nameless to me, that is – I asked my waiter their names, by sign language, and he rattled off something unintelligible with a dismissive shrug. There is no love lost between these people and the Greeks.
I am surprised by how close the islands lie to the Turkish mainland. Selina would probably have known. Selina would have maps and guidebooks, whereas I, of course, do not. That would be Peter’s role.
Always, I come back to him and how crippled I seem to be without him. And it is exactly because of this infirmity that he is no longer here. At some point – it must have been one day, maybe even one hour, or during the course of one single conversation – the fine balance tipped again, this time coming down against me. My needs from him became greater than his pleasure in me. I was too much to look after. Or maybe we just knew each other too well and the function buttons became worn with too much pressing so the connections didn’t work properly. Is that what always happens, with long-term partnerships?
Whatever you like. I don’t know.
I can’t go on feeling crippled by Peter’s absence or by the things that happened long before I met him, that much I do know after my days alone in this white hotel.
It ought to be possible to rub out history. To start again with a clean piece of paper, to write on it with a fresh and optimistic hand. That’s what I am doing here – making sense of what has happened and needing to work out what shape my life will take from now on. Selina’s absence means that I have to face the definitions and decisions alone and therefore properly.
So I have come out of my room. It is the fourth day and I have ventured down to the beach. With the full complement of yellow beach towels and robes and tubes of cream and magazines and paperback novels, of course. I have arranged all this and myself under a parasol, and I am flipping through Vogue when a shadow falls across the sand beside me. I look up to see my waiter, with a tray balanced on his shoulder. His shabby black shoes look incongruous so close to the lazy waves.
‘Madam, you come to the sun. I am happy. I bring you water and Italian coffee.’
There is a bottle of mineral water, and a cappuccino complete with chocolate powder.
‘Thank you.’
We smile at each other and he carefully arranges the drinks on the little table under the parasol.
‘What is your name?’ I ask him and he flushes a little. His skin is downy, hardly darkened with hair except on his top lip. He is probably even younger than I estimated.
‘Jim,’ he says. With a hard ‘J’ sound that sounds quite un-Turkish.
‘Like Jules et Jim?’ I ask fatuously.
‘I am not sure. But is a good name.’
‘Very good,’ I agree. Jim begins to back away, with the tray hanging flat by his side, and then hesitates. ‘An Inglis man is here. In Branc. Maybe you go for a boat ride?’
I must look desperate, or desperately miserable, or both. However, an English man is the last thing I am looking for.
Very firmly I say, ‘Thank you for thinking of it, but I don’t want to meet anyone here. No one at all, Jim.’ And I put the magazine up in front of my face to shut out the threat.
‘Okay. Good morning,’ he says and crunches away up the sand to the garden wall. I know I have been rude and that he is offended.
When I was first married I thought I might become an actress. Because of the way I looked then and some of the people I knew, I was given small – tiny – roles in a couple of films, but I wasn’t any good at it. And if I wound up hating the scrutiny of the photographer’s lens, I hated the film cameras even more. After a year or so I stopped trying and it was a relief. I didn’t have to earn money, because Peter provided for us both. I didn’t have to do anything except be married to Peter and have a family.
I have always had an ambivalent attitude to my body. Its length and skinniness enabled me to earn a living, but I hated the way people stared. I knew that they were only looking at it, and not into me in order to judge what they saw within, but the knowledge didn’t lessen my discomfort.
Peter used to say that they were looking because I was beautiful and I should be glad.
‘Plenty of women’, he said, ‘would change places with you.’
Up until then, at least, the legs and arms and breasts and backside had done what I wanted them to do. They moved for the camera and showed off whatever garment I was being paid to parade.
But I couldn’t get pregnant.
Not properly pregnant, so the baby stayed inside and grew. I had two miscarriages, very quickly, but the doctors were still optimistic and reassuring.
‘Don’t worry, it happens. You’ll have your family soon.’
Peter took me home and fed me and held me in his arms at night.
Then there was an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured one of the Fallopian tubes. This time there was anxiety. My chances of conceiving were diminished by fifty per cent. I was too thin, they told me, I was anxious and tense and probably depressed. All these things counted against us in our efforts to have a baby. I must relax.
Peter took me away on holiday, to Italy.
Soon I was pregnant yet again and it seemed that this time it might take. I got to four months and we told our friends and dared a celebration. But I miscarried again, in hospital, a sixteen-week boy. It was the last time. The last time I was even able to conceive.
I did hate my body after that, with a cold anger that made me want to mutilate myself. I needed a scapegoat and I turned my womb into one. This reaction was explicable, even logical, to myself and other people, and I used it as an acceptable shorthand.
I do not now believe, however, that my damned body was the real culprit.
It was myself, wherever that reality might be lodged and whatever form it might take. I think I never really wanted a baby because I was afraid of what might happen if I did have one. I was afraid of history, and tragedy.
This is our baby, we love him, he dies, it’s my fault.
That was the reasoning and so every time my body conceived, my mind poisoned it. Out the potential big tragedy came in a wash of blood, only another small tragedy as yet. Not even named.
If you think that’s crazy – believe me, so do I.
‘I will be the judge of that,’ Peter said mildly on the night we met, when I told him that I was mad. And he chose to bring in a verdict of sanity.
It was a strange mistake, for a clever and perceptive man who is usually so accurate in his judgements.
When it became obvious that we were not going to have children, I lodged myself in Dunollie Mansions like a hermit crab in its shell. I loved the screen of summer leaves and filigree winter twigs across the windows. I loved the thick walls and floors, and the almost dreamlike sense of seclusion, and the way Derek soft-footedly took care of the building. I liked the other quiet, discreet couples and the safety of the solid doors. There was no shock or violence or mayhem here, nor could I ever imagine anything of the sort disturbing our calm routines. I became a recluse.
We still gave dinner parties, of course, and went out to dinners in return, and to the opera and weekends in the country