that in any future conversations with Jacqui and Alison she might have to wheel in another imaginary lover. She had even thought of a couple of names. It was getting ridiculous. There was only one way to stop it: do it for real.
That wasn’t the only reason she wanted shot of her virginity. It was a total embarrassment, like a pimple that never burst. It was so unmodern. She felt she might as well be going about in a bustle and having the vapours. She had to do something. She didn’t know what but she had the vague idea that if she kept putting herself in promising situations it might happen to her before she could stop it. That was one reason she wanted to go to Willowvale. At least it would offer possibilities. A lot of men and a lot of bedrooms. Like her father’s lotto card. Permutations there. But she needed Jacqui to go with her. It might give her the nerve to put herself about a bit more. It would open up the possibilities.
‘And there’s David Cudlipp, of course,’ she said.
She noticed Jacqui and Alison exchange a glance she didn’t understand. Jacqui seemed to become more thoughtful. Kate took it as a hopeful sign. Perhaps she was considering David Cudlipp …
… who was standing in his flat looking through the window down into the street, where one teenager was pushing another along in a supermarket trolley. Both seemed to be shouting some incomprehensible challenge to the street’s residents. David drew back from the window a little in case he became the focus of their marauding arrogance. He remembered a thrown stone coming through the window about a year ago, for no other reason he could see than that the room was lit, with the curtains undrawn, and must have looked like a warm and pleasant place.
We’ve lost the streets, he thought, as he watched the two careen out of sight, bellowing like berserkers. The propriety of home no longer extends outside to walk the pavements sedately. The roughness of the roads invades the house, estranging us from each other within our own walls. Was that really his wife sitting on a chair and using a magazine she wasn’t interested in like a stage prop?
‘So you’re definitely not coming?’ he said.
‘There’s so much to do tomorrow.’
‘We did promise Andrew Lawson.’
‘But what difference does it make? The room will still be taken. It’s just that it’ll become a single instead of a double. At least, I hope so.’
She was smiling at him. He ignored the implication.
‘What do you have to do that’s so important?’
‘My own work has fallen behind in the library. I have to go in. Anyway, it’s not as if I have any significant contribution to make. I’d just be a spectator.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Suit yourself.’
He didn’t want to pursue it in case she changed her mind. He thought of Veronica Hill …
… a thought that seemed to be troubling Jacqui.
‘Veronica Hill?’ I thought you said there wasn’t much competition.’
‘There isn’t,’ Alison said.
‘Veronica Hill? She looks like a L’Oréal advert.’
‘But she disqualifies herself. She’ll hardly look at anybody. Let alone talk to them. She doesn’t just come to uni. She makes royal visits.’
‘That’s true.’
‘It’s more people like Marion Gibson and Vikki Kane.’
‘Listen,’ Jacqui said. ‘Vikki Kane could really look something special. She’s got a lovely figure. Good bones. It’s just the clothes she wears.’
The idea of Vikki Kane gave Kate comfort. There was somebody else who didn’t seem to belong in a modern context, so demure and reserved. She was so uncertain of herself it was hard to believe she was in her thirties. Maybe she wasn’t the only Lady of Shalott, Kate thought, as she held in her mind the image of Vikki Kane …
… who was studying herself in the wardrobe mirror.
The white Lycra top and the black jeans looked good on her. The shop assistant had approved in the passing, saying the jeans made her look like one of those photographs where they’ve painted an outfit on somebody. ‘Know what Ah mean. Robbie Williams did it. All he wore was his underpants. And somebody had painted blue jeans on ’im.’
The Lycra moulded itself to her breasts. They had hardly sagged at all. Maybe that was one advantage of having had only one child. Her bum looked firm in the jeans. Maybe her half-hearted visits to the gym, before she abandoned them two or three months ago, had done some good after all. Maybe it was the supportiveness of the cloth. It wasn’t just that clothes could accentuate your good points and minimise the bad ones. Used carefully, they could amount to a kind of temporary cosmetic surgery. These jeans not only made her look more attractively tensile from the back, they also made it hard to imagine the cellulite underneath. Still, if this weekend fulfilled the promise she saw in it, she might have to take them off in company. Love me, love my cellulite. But perhaps by then the shadowy, faceless man would be too preoccupied to notice.
The thought returned her to the glass of white wine on the dressing-table. She took another sip, fully aware of what she was doing. She was keeping her recently acquired sense of abandon topped up. She was grateful now that she had hardly ever drunk. It meant that it didn’t take too much to shift her mood from brooding to carefree. There must be a lot of bottles of self-confidence she could take before any physical damage caught up with her. Whatever she died of, it was unlikely to be cirrhosis of the liver, she thought bitterly.
The idea released her from any self-criticism she might have felt in sitting here, watching herself in the dressing-table mirror as she took the wine. She toasted herself in the glass. If she was going to free herself from dead behaviour, she would have to uncork a few more bottles in the process.
She was missing Jason already. But her worry about him was diminished by the realisation that he seemed perfectly happy to be away from her. When she had phoned for the second time tonight, under the pretence of reminding him that he had forgotten his football boots (although she had known already that he wasn’t going to the training tomorrow), he had seemed impatient with her interruption of his evening. It was almost as if he knew she was just fussing and felt she was an embarrassment to him in his different context, spending the weekend with Alan and his new wife.
There was a strange emotional law in broken marriages, she thought: the one who spends less time with the child or children is the one who is valued more. Wasn’t that a swine of a law? The more time you spent ironing clothes and making packed lunches and helping with homework and nursing colds and delivering them to mud-caked playing-fields on winter mornings, when the wind chafed your cheeks to soreness, the more you merged with the furniture. You became an incidental fixture in their lives, about as sensitively treated as the doormat they usually failed to wipe their feet on. But vanish for weeks at a time and you were much thought of. The rarity of your appearances turned them into greatly appreciated events.
There had been stretches of many months in the three years since they had divorced during which the occasional phone-call from Alan was his only presence in Jason’s life. He had maintained his alimony payments, it was true. But direct contact had been subject to his personal whim. He turned up only when he chose, like a wayward uncle who had so many other things to do. He always arrived with the air of someone doing them a favour. The incredible thing was that Jason seemed to agree with him. He made excuses for his father, no matter how many times he had promised to come and didn’t turn up.
Now Jason seemed to think Christmas had come early when his father suggested they all spend some time together, Alan and Maureen and Jason, to get to know one another. The enthusiasm with which Jason welcomed the idea had hurt her and she was surprised at the jealousy she felt for Maureen. But she had bartered her misgivings in exchange for the time the arrangement gave her to come to terms with the new sense of herself she wanted to find before it was too late. It also gave her next week free for what she had to do.
She