A Perfect Life Read online

  ‘So you’re a chef, are you? Well, that will have to stop. No call for that here.’

  ‘Nick wants to open a restaurant, Daddy.’

  Nick had never seen Angel so meek as she was in the presence of her father. He rather liked it, though he didn’t like Lionel. But his breathless bullying made Nick all the more grateful for Dawn’s acceptance when he met Angel. That was a long time ago, a million light years from now and jet lag and Angel’s bloody lunch party. Nick has drunk four cans of Coke and feels that his eyes may pop out of his head at any moment. Too bad, Dawn needs his attention. She walks across the lawn to the shade of the lunch table and the nearby arrangement of deck chairs and rugs, moving slowly, reminding Nick that she is widowed and arthritic. Her face is still beautiful, but her eyes are opaque with gin and bitterness. Nick hasn’t seen her smile for ten years.

  Angel says she is sure her mother must have smiled since Lionel died. ‘But now you come to mention it, I haven’t any proof,’ she said last time Dawn came to lunch, adding after a moment’s thought, ‘I have begun to notice that the only events Mum likes to go to now are funerals and she’ll travel a long way for one.’

  This thought, along with a determined effort not to grind his teeth, is uppermost in Nick’s mind when he rises to greet Dawn in the garden this hot summer afternoon. He takes her to a chair in the shade and pours her a glass of Pimms. Angel hasn’t even noticed that her mother has arrived, her bottom in a red skirt visible behind a low rose hedge, her head out of sight.

  ‘I suppose she’s picking flowers or weeding or something,’ says Dawn, looking for a second towards her daughter before turning back to her drink.

  Ruby appears at her side, waving a silver fan. ‘Hello, Granny, shall I cool you? Mummy’s making nasturtium salad. It’s disgusting, you have to eat flowers.’

  Dawn lifts her face, presenting her cheek for Ruby to kiss, but gives no other sign that she has seen her.

  She continues to address Nick. ‘It’s almost August. I wonder what will happen this year? Through the years I have noticed that August is full of endings.’

  ‘Really?’ Nick wishes he had placed a bet on how long it would take her to start talking about death, and scans the gate eagerly. He never thought he would be glad to see Peter Gildoff because he is giddyingly boring, but the sight of him and Jeannie, she in a bright yellow dress with a pink hat as if she is attending a garden party, is very cheering.

  ‘Nick, hello.’ Jeannie kisses him, and he shoots her a glance to see if she is in the mood for any suggestive gesture. There has been the odd occasion over the past five years when they have slept together. Nothing serious, though the emptiness Nick felt afterwards did not stop him doing it again. Jeannie is not available today. She switches on and off a smile of greeting, but she is more interested in who is coming to lunch and what Angel has cooked. Close up her skin is browned by a thousand freckles joining up to create a colour, and she reminds Nick of a lizard – a beautiful, cold creature, narrow-limbed and white-bellied. He has to stop an enjoyable scaly fantasy about her to greet Nat Rosstein, the company accountant. This ends when Jake arrives in his open-top car wearing shorts, and lopes across the lawn to where Angel is emerging from the kitchen with a tray laden with different blooms, a glass full of Pimms and borage, a bowl full of nasturtiums, a vase of mint and tiny wild strawberries. Jeannie is the first to exclaim at Angel’s cleverness.

  ‘Oh do look, the vase has got the things we might eat in it and the bowl has got the decoration – that’s a charming trick, Angel.’

  Angel smiles. She is hot and disarrayed and at her most sexy. Or so Nick can see Jake thinks. Nat Rosstein, sitting between Angel and her mother, has only to lose concentration for a second when he pulls a red spotted handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe his forehead, and Jake is away, both elbows on the table, leaning towards Angel, making her laugh and throw her napkin at him. Dawn could do with a handkerchief herself. On her other side, Nick passes his napkin to her, hoping she will take the hint. She wipes the condensation of her glass with it and takes a swig of white wine. Nick feels drunk from inhaling the alcohol seeping out of her pores and into the ether. He would love to sneak away and watch the cricket, but there is no chance. It is not worth pissing Angel off; he would never encourage Jem to do that so he shouldn’t either, and anyway, it will be over soon. Come to think of it, where is Jem? Nick can guess. Bugger it. How can he leave? Pudding arrives, a few strawberries, and the jelly made by Foss and Ruby is greeted with applause. Foss has left the table and returned to the dank corner by the waterbutt. He waves but does not move when Angel calls him. Ruby, standing on Angel’s chair, is happy to have all the limelight. She grins and curtseys.

  ‘We made it with Mummy this morning. Actually, we did it ourselves because Mummy was busy.’

  ‘Marvellous,’ mutters Nat Rosstein, as Ruby sits down next to him.

  ‘Do you like cooking?’ he asks her.

  ‘Yes, if I can sell it,’ says Ruby, her eyes dreamy as she spoons heaped green dollops of jelly into her mouth.

  Nat sits up, properly interested. ‘You like selling things, do you? Good. They need you at Fourply, or they will. As your family accountant I am very pleased and rather relieved to meet you.’

  ‘I love sums,’ adds Ruby, batting her eyelashes at him and enjoying being taken seriously.

  Good for you, Ruby, thinks Nick, overhearing his daughter, and he turns to his mother-in-law with renewed optimism and energy. If Ruby can do it, he can. Surely?

  ‘Have you caught any of the cricket?’ Nick says hopefully to Dawn. After all, you never know people’s hidden passions, and he might get lucky and have a racy interchange with her about the scorching West Indies innings yesterday. Dawn’s mouth purses slowly, and she shakes her head.

  ‘I loathe cricket,’ she says, and then, breathing her mouth big again on an exhalation of cigarette smoke, she continues with her own train of thought.

  ‘When Angel has time, I’d like you to come and bring the children to Great Dunham. I’d like to show them the church again. It’s important they know Lionel’s grave.’

  ‘Yes,’ agrees Nick, and feeling that it is important, too, that he knows the cricket score, he shakes his empty Coke glass, mutters, ‘There is more in the fridge, I think,’ and leaves the table.

  Angel

  How does it reach this stage? Is there a moment for every woman in her situation when she is turned on by her husband that is followed by the next moment in which she no longer wants him, never again desires him? Or are there a thousand moments in between these two states? Moments when the eroticism between two people can be reclaimed, when attraction has not burnt out but requires just the fan of focused attention to bring a spark, to ignite a flame. If there are a thousand of these moments, does Angel have to find the enthusiasm tonight? Can she leave it for a day when she might feel less exhausted, less distracted, or will even the possibility of passion go cold if it is left unattended?

  Angel sits down on the edge of her bed. Nick is in the bathroom. He has been up here for most of the evening, watching cricket on the bedroom television. Flicking it off with the remote control, Angel remembers her friend Jenny insisting that a television in the bedroom is the kiss of death to passion. Angel doesn’t like to add up the many times she has been grateful to it for buffering her from intimacy with Nick.

  Getting into bed, the sheets are cool, and she lolls, limbs naked, stretching so she is right in the middle, arms and legs spread. It is such an effort to find all that erotic feeling, and bring it to bed when it has been buried deep beneath years of familiarity and resentment, unmet needs and frustrated expectation. The only reason she is thinking about sex at all right now is that, while Nick was up here with the cricket, she and Coral watched a French film downstairs about a libidinous sixteenth-century queen. It was quite arousing and reminded her that somewhere, locked up inside her, was a small flame of desire, and though she had not even noticed it for months, it lived.
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br />   A sudden thought of Jake, his flat stomach visible when he stretched to reach Foss’s balloon from the apple tree earlier at the lunch party, shoots through her and lands, quivering, in her. Angel almost gasps, shocked by the volt of sexual feeling surging in her body. She remembers feeling like this years ago, but not since she had children. It is exciting. She wriggles in the bed, her nipples hard against the ironed linen. She pushes her forefinger into her mouth and rolls her tongue around it. She shuts her eyes, and slides her wet finger in between her legs, now scissored together tight and hot. The thump of desire in her slows as she opens her legs again, and quickens when she slides her fingers deep inside herself. Nick comes out of the bathroom, pulling off his T-shirt over his head. His chest is broad, barrel-like, thrust forward, his stomach round but not fat. He is not in bad shape, and in the semi-darkness Angel stares at him, bites her lip hard and holds the pulse between her legs. With her other hand, also hidden by the sheet, she rubs her thumbnail across her nipple. Her hips begin to move and the sheets are smooth and sensuous against her thighs, her arse. She closes her eyes and lets her breath come faster. Nick has his back to her; he pulls off his underwear then sits down on the bed, turning the light off as he lies down. In the dark Angel does not move away from the middle of the bed, so Nick’s body meets hers all the way down one side. Angel stretches her foot down as far as she can, and gasps, taut excitement in every nerve. She rubs her leg against Nick’s thigh and hears him catch his breath as she moves on top of him. She shuts her eyes and leans forward to kiss his mouth. In her mind, Jake’s mouth opens to hers and she thrusts her tongue deep inside, her lips soft, her jaw relaxed. His mouth tastes of peppermint and sex, giving and also wanting. She still has her fingers inside herself, pressing hard between her body and Nick’s. She rolls her pelvis and gasps with the bolt of a fingered orgasm, lying along him now, so all the front of her body is soft, yielding to his hardness as he turns her over and lies on top of her, his breath in gasps, his hands around her hips, on her breasts. And he doesn’t stop moving, stroking her along the curve of her back, thrusting hard against her, running his hand around and under her, caressing her, holding her close and never still.

  ‘This is hot, this is good,’ breathes Angel, arching against his thigh between hers, her hands on his back, her nails tracing a path to the hollow in his back from where he begins to thrust, wanting his cock inside her. She opens her eyes and the room is velvet-dark, the man on top of her is whoever she wants him to be. She begins to breathe faster, pulling him in, guiding his cock and pressing splayed hands across him.

  ‘I want to feel you hard inside me, I want you hot and holding me, fucking me gently, fucking me slowly,’ she whispers, and her tongue touches his ear between each word, her mind full of words whispered to someone else, her mind full, her body flexing, wanting. Angel’s hips begin to move in a rhythm like a slow drum beat, all of her throbbing towards him, sweat on her breasts, her neck, licked off his shoulder when she presses her lips to suck the taste of him from his skin. Nick’s cock is hard inside her but in her mind it is not Nick, it is Jake, and the hands moving on to the flat of her back, strong and sure, pushing her towards him, the fingers moving down over her arse belong to a man she hardly knows.

  She moans. Jake in her head whispers, ‘Tell me what you want,’ and she whispers back, ‘I want you to bite me, on my neck, and on my breasts, I want you to lick me.’ And she pushes her finger into his mouth then rubs herself and him together, faster. Nick gasps, Angel groans and comes, shudders rolling over her. Nick thrusts harder and the hot centre of them together is wet with both of them spent and gasping. Angel’s eyes are open in the blackness of the room, and she sees Jake’s green-speckled gaze looking back at her in the dark.

  Nick

  On goes the summer. Party time for all the family. Nick’s jet lag from New York lingered for a few days but has now been submerged by a sense of walking through quicksand. The game of tennis this afternoon with Jem was the moment he felt he broke through to the real world, for the first time in weeks, and since then Nick has noticed smells and sounds as though he has had his senses peeled. Coral came home this afternoon with love bites all over her neck. Lucky her, was Nick’s first thought, but Angel went mad.

  ‘You are not valuing yourself. And if you don’t, how can you expect anyone else to?’ she screamed.

  Nick, safely hidden behind the Sunday papers, swallowed and rubbed his hand through his hair when Coral yelled back, ‘Well, Mum, you are a fine one to talk about valuing yourself. How happy are you these days? Or any of us, with this crap atmosphere in the house? You should sort your life out before you get at me.’

  ‘That will do.’ Angel’s dignity was palpable. Nick lowered the paper and Angel was radiating strength in a way she didn’t normally. Her clenched hands were the only sign of tension as she walked right up close to Coral and said, ‘In the end, Coral, we all choose the lives we lead. That’s all I want to say.’ Angel walked out of the room.

  Coral raised her eyebrows and opened her mouth. Then she shut it again and flicked on the television, watched it for a moment then, flinging the remote control on the sofa, she said, ‘I’m going to have a bath,’ and departed upstairs.

  Rather to Nick’s surprise, she appears in the hall as Angel, Jem and he are leaving to go to the Gildoffs’ for supper.

  ‘Are you coming, Coral?’ Nick knows it is a foolish question before he has finished asking it. She throws a withering glance towards him and sweeps out of the door, her arm hooked into Jem’s.

  ‘Am I under arrest?’ Jem teases, and he and Coral start scuffling and play-fighting in the back of the car as they did when they were small.

  It is a rare experience, Nick muses, to be going out with his wife and family – not counting the little ones who are at home with a new human monosyllable, apparently named Gosha, who comes from Poland.

  ‘This is a treat,’ he says to Angel as they accelerate away from home. She smiles back at him. ‘Yes, it’s nice.’ They both face the road and the windscreen again, and Nick wants to hit out at the emptiness between them, the nothing that this small exchange evokes.

  The Gildoffs’ house is mostly a backdrop for their pool, and the curved concrete walls and suburban tidiness as well as Peter Gildoff’s big iced tumblers of whisky always remind Nick of The Graduate. Arriving with Jem and Coral heightens this sense and Nick leans against the mosaic wall, looking across the humming blue of the pool at Peter, a little red-faced with pink oven gloves on at the barbecue. Jeannie bustles up with a jug of elderflower cordial.

  ‘Here, Nick darling, I know you won’t touch alcohol, so we made this for you,’ she says, licking her lips and flashing her eyes at him.

  Raspberry lips in her tanned face, a white linen shirt loosely buttoned so there is a glimpse of coffee-coloured lace underneath. Mmm. Mistress clothes. The linen outfit, which includes shorts, reminds him of an animal nurse in Daktari, a TV programme he used to watch as a child. Even better, a mistress in a nurse’s uniform. Very sexy.

  There is a splash, and Coral and Joanna, the Gildoffs’ daughter, dive like synchronised swimmers into the pool, followed by Heath, the son, who does a flashy somersault and lands flat on his back.

  ‘Christ, that must have hurt.’ Nick holds out his glass to Jeannie for a refill and looks round to see if Jem is next in. Jem, though, is lurking behind Angel, staring at the ground, hands pushed deep into the pockets of his shorts. Angel whispers something to him and he shakes his head. She rolls her eyes. Nick feels a stab of disappointment for himself as well as for Jem.

  ‘Coral is so pretty these days, isn’t she? She’s a most exotic-looking creature.’ Jeannie waves her sunglasses towards the girls, now chatting and dripping on the edge of the pool. Coral’s bikini is silver and green, her black hair drips iridescent, drops of water cling to her black eyelashes and she looks like a dragonfly or a paradisiacal bird, her limbs so long and slim, her hands fluttering as she explains something to Joanna.
Nick wonders if the comment is barbed. He wonders how many of the people they know speculate over Coral’s paternity, and why it has gone so far without him and Angel deciding something about it. Even Jem doesn’t know, unless Coral has told him. Exhaustion washes over Nick, a grey sensation, and he can’t see the point of anyone knowing, or the point of anyone not knowing. This is the kind of thing that erodes the joy in life, and right now he could do with a lot more joy. In fact, it was probably their unconscious desire to keep their family joyful that stopped him and Angel ever deciding on a moment, or a day to come out about Coral. Life has a way of smudging and blurring the need for confession, confusing memory and myth until there is no truth, just a story it is easier not to tell. Nick finds it better by far to think about Jeannie’s flesh, a little reptilian, perhaps, because she has spent too much time in the sun, but eager. Jeannie has always been available for urgent, secret sex; it turns her on to do it standing up and somewhere where she could be caught. Nick has cautiously enjoyed this over the years, though he has no desire to be caught with her. He remembers her bush, red like her hair. Were they both natural or dyed?

  ‘I like your underwear, Jeannie,’ he says. That is a safe bet, as she is practically flaunting it now. She has put down the jug and is standing close to him, one leg forward, hands on hips and her elbows well back so her tits thrust forward. She is up for something, most definitely.

  ‘Good,’ she says and walks away, smiling. Nick follows her, his curiosity roused.