A Dry Spell Read online

  ‘Etchells?’ he hissed.

  ‘Bromelow? I’m in here,’ came the familiar accented voice from the occupied cubicle. ‘They’ve got my clothes.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They’ve taken my clothes. You’ll have to find me some.’

  ‘What are you wearing?’

  ‘My shoes and socks.’

  Guy was seized with pity. He could imagine Etchells’s flabby form, clad only in shoes and socks, perched on the toilet seat, helplessly awaiting rescue.

  ‘Are you, you know, all right?’

  ‘They didn’t beat me up if that’s what you mean,’ said the voice.

  ‘Don’t worry, Hugo.’ He had never used his Christian name before, and couldn’t think what had prompted him to do so then. ‘I’ll get you some clothes.’ If only you weren’t so fat, you could have borrowed some of mine, he couldn’t help thinking.

  ‘Guy,’ said Hugo as he was leaving.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Would you mind shutting the window. It’s a bit cold.’

  It was while engaged on this errand that Guy came across most of Hugo’s clothing, screwed up and stuffed on top of the cistern in one of the empty cubicles. He climbed on to the toilet seat and retrieved it, brushing off the dust and cobwebs as best he could. Hugo’s trousers were still missing – in a bin somewhere, no doubt. ‘Here.’ He shoved the bundle under the locked door.

  ‘Don’t look!’ yelped Hugo.

  ‘I’m not,’ Guy protested. ‘Look at what?’

  ‘Me. Nothing,’ Hugo mumbled. And then, ‘They’ve taken the photograph. It’s not in my blazer pocket.’ Guy could hear the fury in Hugo’s voice beginning to dissolve into self-pity. Any minute now he’d be in tears.

  ‘Wait. I’ll find it.’ He dived back into the cubicle where he’d turned up the clothes: there it was on the floor, face down in a pool of – well, best not to think about it. Guy picked it up and wiped it on the roller towel beside the basin. The edges looked a bit soggy and stained, but the image was still intact. He passed it under the door and felt Hugo take it gently from his fingers.

  ‘I’ll go and find you some more trousers now, okay,’ said Guy, but there was no reply.

  It was only later that evening as they were undressing for bed that Guy discovered what it was Hugo hadn’t wanted him to see. Through a gap in the curtains dividing their beds he caught a glimpse of Hugo’s bare back before he pulled on his pyjama jacket. They had drawn all over him with a black marker pen: dotted lines, like a butcher’s diagram of a pig, showing the different cuts of meat.

  Hugo was more inclined to take Guy’s advice after that, though he retained a dangerously sociopathic streak. It wasn’t that he went looking for trouble, but he seemed to lack the ability to read situations correctly, and couldn’t scent confrontation until he was in the thick of it. He was by far the cleverest boy in the class, but made no attempt to disguise it, in fact became openly impatient with the others for not keeping up. Guy, on the other hand, who had no problem with academic work, made sure his achievements were less ostentatious.

  Being with Hugo put Guy in mind of trips to the park with his parents’ plump, aggressive Jack Russell, Porky. One could never quite relax in case he suddenly decided to take on a Dobermann or a couple of alsatians. Guy couldn’t count the times his father had had to wade into the middle of some affray and beat off half a dozen vicious dogs to rescue that unrepentant mutt. That was how it was with Hugo – you got no thanks for imperilling yourself. He was loyal like a dog too; having latched on to Guy he showed no inclination to exert himself to make other friends. If Guy was otherwise occupied he was just as happy on his own, digging up worms from the margins of the field or conducting bizarre experiments with equipment filched from the labs. One lunchtime Guy found him in his favourite spot, as far from the school building as possible, in the out-of-bounds area between the sports pitches and the fence, holding one of the lenses they’d been using in physics to study parallax, above a pile of dried skeleton leaves. A white dot of winter sun was focused on the centre of the leaf, which presently began to smoulder and then burst into flames.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Guy asked.

  ‘Just practising,’ said Hugo. ‘For when I burn this place to the ground, and everyone in it.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Guy, somewhat slighted by this remark.

  ‘Not you, of course,’ Hugo conceded. ‘Everyone but you.’

  ‘You’ll need more than a lens and some dead leaves,’ Guy laughed, trying to lighten the tone. Hugo’s fantasies often involved an element of violence, like slipping some deadly toadstools into the school mince, or dispatching his enemies with an icicle through the heart. Guy knew better than to say ‘Go on then: you wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘I know,’ Hugo said seriously. ‘I’d need petrol, or some other inflammable solvent.’

  Fortunately for the other five hundred or so pupils and masters, Hugo’s dreams of arson didn’t translate into reality: the following term he had so far outstripped his classmates in academic performance that he was moved up a year. And soon after that his father enjoyed a reversal of whatever financial predicament had put Winchester out of their reach, and Hugo was duly transferred to that establishment, and vanished, temporarily at least, from Guy’s life.

  13

  There were dozens of books about sex in the reference section of the library – how to do it better, more interestingly, everything you ever wanted to know about it, but nothing at all about giving it up. The fact that all this information and advice was to be found in the Health section troubled Jane. The inference that she was the one who was sick, while the exhibitionists, sadomasochists and reckless experimenters, whose case histories she had just been reading, were normal, fit and flourishing, was galling in the extreme.

  She hadn’t always felt this way: there was a time, at the beginning of any new relationship, and particularly when she had first met Guy, when sex had seemed like a Good Thing and she had been quite the enthusiast. But her pregnancies had subtly changed her attitude to her own body – she had fallen out of love with herself, even if Guy hadn’t. Once her reproductive duty was done she couldn’t help feeling that further, purely recreational sex was an irrelevance – an imposition, even, when she was so tired and so put upon. Unfortunately Guy didn’t seem to be similarly disposed, and Jane’s increasing physical aloofness, far from discouraging him, only seemed to have made her more desirable. There were avoidance tactics, of course: going to bed considerably earlier or later than Guy, or making allusions to migraines, exhaustion or protracted and heavy periods usually did the trick. As an absolute last resort she might engineer a mini-quarrel before bedtime. There was generally plenty of material. For example, his unilateral offer to put up this long-lost friend, Hugo, for an indefinite period over the summer.

  ‘He can sleep in the spare room,’ Guy had said, dismissing her look of outrage.

  ‘We haven’t got a spare room,’ she replied. ‘It’s a room full of boxes. In constant use. What’s wrong with a hotel?’

  ‘Well, they’re expensive for any length of time.’

  ‘How long is he staying, for God’s sake?’

  ‘I don’t know. Until he finds a place. I felt sorry for him. His contract at the university hasn’t been renewed, his wife’s kicked him out . . .’

  ‘You could have consulted me first. From what you’ve told me about him he sounds a completely undesirable house guest. His wife may have had good reasons.’

  ‘All right, all right. Next time he phones I’ll tell him to doss down on the Embankment.’

  The Hugo affair wasn’t entirely resolved by that little exchange, but it had got her out of having sex.

  Jane often wondered whether her problem might have resolved itself early on if only there had been someone she could have talked to about it. Guy himself, who was her confidant and adviser in most matters, was out of the question. The one time she had experimented with sexual honesty and told him sh
e sometimes wrote the weekly shopping list in her head while they were making love had been a terrible mistake which she was forced to retract immediately and pass off as a joke. Her parents, dead for some years, would never have been contenders for a heart-to-heart on this subject. And her oldest friend, Suzanne, who was frequently on the end of Jane’s bellyachings about the children or the in-laws, was far too indiscreet for this sort of confession, and was in any case a nymphomaniac and unlikely to empathize. Only the other day Suzanne had phoned to invite her to what Jane misheard as a ‘Laundry Party’, but which turned out to be a ‘Lingerie Party’. Once this error was cleared up it hadn’t cost Jane a pang to invent a prior engagement. She could well imagine the minute shreds of scratchy lace which they would be encouraged to snigger over and ultimately buy. ‘Besides,’ she’d added, testing the water, ‘it’s like asking a teetotaller to a wine-tasting.’ Suzanne had evidently taken this as further evidence of Jane’s self-deprecating style of humour, as she had merely guffawed, and said, ‘Yeah. Right.’

  It was a shame that she had to refuse really, thought Jane, because they hardly saw one another now. Suzanne was single, with a career in the City and plenty of money; there wasn’t much common ground between them any more. Bars, clubs and restaurants were Suzanne’s natural habitat – all places where Jane felt uncomfortable nowadays. She found herself oppressed by crowds and noise, shocked and humbled by the prices at the establishments Suzanne considered reasonable, and overwhelmed by the heat and racket of nightclubs. It was in any case hard to pin Suzanne down in advance. She had this irritating tendency, Jane had noticed, to avoid committing herself to a date until the very last minute, in the hope that something more promising might arise in the meantime. On the rare occasions she did venture into the suburbs to visit she would fawn over the children for five minutes, shower them with sweets and presents, introduce them to some boisterous new game, whip them up into a frenzy of hyperactivity and exhibitionism, and then collapse into an armchair with a bottle of wine and wonder why they wouldn’t silently melt away to bed and leave the grown-ups to get drunk. Whenever the two women made their farewells they professed vehement envy for the other’s lifestyle.

  ‘You’re so lucky, Jane,’ Suzanne would say, climbing into her new, red sports car. ‘You’ve got it all sorted out: husband, kids, house, garden. And’ – complacently checking her appearance in the driver’s mirror – ‘I’m just an old maid.’

  ‘I wish I had a fraction of your freedom,’ Jane would reply.

  ‘I bet you have such a brilliant time at Christmas with the children, opening their stockings at the crack of dawn.’

  ‘Yes we do, but that’s only one day a year!’

  In spite of these protestations each woman felt a sense of relief to return to her own existence. We’re a modern fable, Jane thought. Town mouse and country mouse rewritten. She’d always found it an oddly unsatisfying story, though it was a favourite with the girls. With most of those Improving Tales the protagonists tended to learn a valuable lesson from their experience, but in this case the mice returned home with all their prejudices reinforced.

  This train of thought led Jane away from the reference section of the library and towards the children’s lending area, where she picked out a couple of books each for Harriet and Sophie for the week ahead. She was heartily sick of the selection they had at home; she could almost recite them in her sleep. Sometimes just to enliven proceedings Jane would attempt to abridge them as she went along, or replace the odd word with a nonsensical alternative, just to see if anyone would notice, but the girls caught her out every time, and were most indignant at any tampering with the original. Jane looked forward to introducing them to proper books, books full of incident and plot and reversals of fortune, with just the occasional line drawing, and cliffhangers at the end of each chapter. Something like The Silver Sword or the Narnia stories which she had enjoyed as a child. But that was all still years away.

  She didn’t linger in adult lending. Aside from the fact that she no longer had the time or concentration for reading, it would be just like the Health section. She would be made to feel a freak and an outsider. Even a cursory glance at the jackets and the blurbs was enough to tell her that Sex was king here. Desire, Pursuit, Conquest, Fulfilment, The End: the same old story in a thousand different guises. Jane picked out The Joy of Woks from the Cookery shelf instead. She would do a stir-fry tonight. Strip down that chicken carcase and use up those old vegetables in the bottom of the fridge before they went any softer.

  At the desk someone had left a pile of books on the counter. The top one caught Jane’s eye: My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin. It had been her favourite novel as a teenager – a turning point, really, in her relationship with literature. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d read it, or the number of people she had bought copies for over the years. Whenever she came across one in a second-hand shop she would buy it because she couldn’t bear to think of it stuck on a shelf unread. She would have called Sophie Sybylla, after the heroine, if Guy hadn’t vetoed it in the strongest possible terms. The other books on the pile were two crime novels of the mortuary-slab tendency, an Iris Murdoch, and a DIY manual. Jane was just thinking what a bizarre and eclectic brew this was, and trying to put an age and sex to the imagined reader, when a dark-haired woman in jeans and a suede jacket slapped a copy of A Beginner’s Guide to Astronomy on the pile and said, in a familiar but not instantly placeable voice, ‘It’s you again.’

  Jane looked up and gave a false smile of recognition. The face rang a bell, but a distant, muffled one. Out of context like this Jane had no hope of identifying her. One of the mothers from church, perhaps, or school? Or just someone who worked at the bank?

  ‘You haven’t a clue who I am, have you?’ said the woman, through a mouthful of nicotine chewing gum, and then Jane remembered that Scottish accent and was able to reply. ‘Yes. Erica. But you look different.’ It was the hair, Jane realized. Now worn long and loose, it hid all that grey that had been exposed when swept up. But this wasn’t something that could be offered in mitigation. The woman was rummaging in her bag for her ticket while the girl behind the desk waited with the barcode scanner poised.

  ‘Where’s your baby?’ asked Jane, looking round for the pushchair.

  ‘Oh, my husband’s over,’ Erica said, emptying her bag out on the counter. This struck Jane as a peculiar remark. Over what? ‘Oh, where is this bloody ticket? I’ve only had it a week.’

  ‘Are you interested in astronomy?’ Jane asked, looking at the topmost volume. ‘My husband’s turned our loft into a sort of observatory.’

  ‘Really?’ Erica started on her wallet, picking out and discarding the contents, piece by piece. A queue was forming behind them. ‘Mine’s just bought me a star for my birthday, so I thought I’d better look it up.’

  ‘Bought it from whom?’ Jane asked. It had never occurred to her that bits of the cosmos might be for sale.

  ‘Not bought it exactly. Had it named after me. Somewhere out there is a ball of burning gas called Erica Crowe.’ She laughed.

  Jane could sense the queue starting to fidget. Sighs of impatience rippled along its length, and one old man slammed his book down and walked out in disgust. Erica waved everyone past her, scooping her mound of trash along to the end of the counter. ‘I’m determined to find this card,’ she said to Jane, whose Joy of Woks was being scanned and stamped. ‘I’m going on holiday tomorrow and I’ve got to have something to read or I’ll go mad.’

  ‘You can put them on my ticket if you want,’ said Jane, wanting to make amends for the stolen newspaper, and scenting a potential convert to Miles Franklin. ‘If you promise to return them on time.’ She laughed, to indicate that she was only joking, which she wasn’t, of course. The state of Erica’s handbag and her inability to keep tabs on a library card for more than a week didn’t give Jane great hopes.

  ‘Really? That’s kind,’ said Erica, pushing the pile towards the librarian, who l
ooked rather sceptical at this arrangement. ‘Now when are these due back?’ she went on, checking the front flap. ‘May 11th. How on earth am I going to remember that?’ she said, as though the invention of diaries and calendars had entirely passed her by. Jane’s heart sank. ‘Of course!’ Erica smote her forehead. ‘It’s Salvador Dali’s birthday.’

  I’m going to regret this, thought Jane, already totting up the possible fines in her head.

  14

  Nina was in her room plagiarizing whole paragraphs of Topophilia for an essay due in the following day. Smoke bloomed from a patchouli joss-stick on the desk, a cigarette smouldered in the ashtray and a pleasant fog settled around her shoulders as she worked. Every so often she would get up and put a new LP on the record-player. She always wrote to music: the task took longer but felt less of a chore, and besides, if you didn’t have your own record on you ended up listening to somebody else’s through the wall instead. She couldn’t work in the library; the sight of all those heads bent over books, and the sound of scratching pens and discreet throat-clearing made her fidget. And in any case she could never find the books she needed: they were either out on loan or down in the stacks somewhere, awaiting excavation. She was in a hurry this evening because Martin and some of the people from his house in Cromwell Road were doing a long-distance pub-crawl from the George in Southwark to the Prospect of Whitby, and she was hoping to intercept them somewhere along the route. As it was now ten o’clock and they had earlier hinted that the itinerary was open to last-minute alterations, her chances of finding them were slim. I’ll just finish this page, then I’ll go, she bribed herself. Her handwriting expanded across the page, as this thought solidified.