Scissors, Paper, Stone (6 page)

‘You sound tired,’ Janet was saying now on the phone. ‘Was it a terribly draining day?’

‘No, no,’ said Anne. ‘It was fine.’ A mini-van stopped suddenly in front of her without warning. ‘Oh, bloody hell.’

‘Anne? Are you all right?’

‘Yes. Just a van driver who doesn’t know his highway code.’

Janet tittered on the end of the line. ‘So is there any update from the doctors?’

‘Much the same. They never really want to say anything in case they get sued. In any case, they’ve got to wait for the brain swelling to go down before they can be sure.’

‘Sure of what?’

‘Of whether there’s any permanent . . . well, you know, brain damage.’

There was a self-consciously dramatic intake of breath on the other end of the line.

‘They said that if he’d been wearing his bicycle helmet he might have walked away unscathed. I kept telling him to wear it,’ Anne said, rather pointlessly, she thought.

‘Are they any closer to finding out what happened?’

‘No. The police say there were no witnesses, which frankly I find hard to believe, but they never care much about cyclists, do they? The doctors think his bike was clipped by a passing car and he was thrown off. He was lucky to have landed on the road. If he had fallen into the path of a moving car, then it could have quite possibly been fatal. As it is . . . well, he’s in this coma.’

‘Goodness, Anne. How horrific.’

‘I suppose it’s just something we’ll have to deal with,’ Anne said, her impatience breaking through. ‘He might wake up tomorrow and be absolutely fine.’ She found she was unable to muster the requisite good cheer that this thought should have provoked.

‘I think you’re being a tower of strength, I really do.’

Anne stayed silent for a beat too long.

‘And you needn’t worry about Paris. Because we cancelled more than forty-eight hours in advance, the hotel has very kindly reimbursed our deposit, although it took quite a bit of doing, I tell you. My schoolgirl French isn’t what it used to be.’

Another tinkle of forced laughter.

‘Anyway, Anne, I should let you get on if you’re driving. Did you see Charlotte at the hospital?’

‘Yes, she came after work. Turned up late, obviously.’

‘Oh . . . well. That was nice of her to make the effort.’

‘Mmm,’ said Anne, non-committally. ‘I think she had a nice holiday in France with the man, although she never really tells me anything.’

‘Well, it’s a tricky one, isn’t it, Anne?’ Janet cleared her throat, preparing to take a leap into dangerous territory. ‘Perhaps she feels you might not approve.’

‘I don’t approve of him. He’s married, for goodness sake.’

‘I thought he was separated?’

‘Separated, maybe, but certainly not divorced from what I can make out.’

‘Well, Anne, these things do take time, after all.’

‘How would you know?’

There was a small, offended pause.

‘Sorry, Janet. I’m rather at the end of my tether at the moment.’

‘Of course,’ she said, the words sounding strangulated. ‘Well, look after yourself, Anne, and I’ll call tomorrow.’

‘Thank you. Bye.’

‘Bye.’

Janet hung up and Anne sat still for several minutes, hands on the steering wheel in a precise ten to two position, glaring at the traffic jam in front of her. Then, after a few minutes, she turned on the radio and rotated the volume dial until it was almost too loud to bear.

Anne; Charles

So Charles and Anne became an item, inevitably, irreversibly and without much questioning on either side. Anne had never slept with anyone before, had never even had a boyfriend, and was always mildly astonished if a man expressed that sort of sexual interest in her. It hadn’t really crossed her mind that her friendships with boys could be misinterpreted and this made for several uncomfortable exchanges when news of her alliance with Charles trickled down through the college hierarchies.

‘But I thought you liked me,’ said a second-year undergraduate called Fred, with meek desperation. Anne could not conceal her bafflement.

‘Fred, we’re friends,’ she said, shaking her head at the sudden impossibility of it all. ‘Can’t we just be good friends?’

She couldn’t understand why her relations with men were suddenly constrained, punctuated by pockets of conversational difficulty and unease. Charles laughed at her when she told him.

‘Can you really not see the effect you have on men?’

‘But I’ve only ever been nice to them,’ she protested, feebly.

‘That’s the problem,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be too nice. It’s easy to misinterpret.’

For the first few weeks, being with Charles had been a glorious bubble of shared experience – of kissing and hand-holding and staring meaningfully at each other across a restaurant table; of buying roses and eating sticky buns for tea-time; of sitting next to each other in lectures and giggling under their breath at some inexplicable mutual joke. The sex, when it came, had been perfectly nice. It had not been the cataclysmic cymbal-clash that Anne had secretly anticipated for years. Nor had it been a painful, brutal semi-disaster of fumbling and not-quite-knowing. It had been a fleshy clasping of two bodies, a swift exchange of fluids, a brief glimpse of half-shut eyes and then, for a few seconds afterwards, a sense of tenderness, of having achieved a closeness that seemed secret from the rest of the world. He enjoyed it more than she did, if enjoy was the word. He seemed to view it as some sort of necessity or duty: a task to be performed to his best ability, without much concern for the pleasure it could bring the other person.

But, at last, Anne felt she had gained access to a tantalising adult existence that had only ever been hinted at. She assumed that other people had sex just like they did, the same physical bargain struck swiftly under the blankets. She never questioned Charles, given that he seemed so much more experienced than her. He knew what to do. She let him get on with it.

As if to compensate for the lack of physical passion, she became gently obsessed instead with the trace and curve of his body: the downy plump cushion of his earlobe, the unexpectedly ticklish patch behind his knee, the twisted purple of veins running down his forearm. She liked to kiss him awake in the mornings, starting at the tip of his forehead and running down past the fragile skein of his eyelids, meeting his lips at the last moment, the exhalation of his breath metallic against her tongue.

‘Morning,’ he would say, blue eyes lazily opening.

Frieda was unconvinced and sulky about the burgeoning relationship. ‘You spend all your time together,’ she said at dinner in hall one evening. ‘I never see you any more.’

Anne found she had no answer to this and no desire to give one. It was true that she increasingly spent as much of the day with Charles as possible, returning to Newnham only when she had to, swaying into bed with a sort of tired happiness. She could not understand Frieda’s angst or the constant background hum of her friend’s strained anxiety. Nothing in Anne’s life had ever caused her to question good fortune: it was simply there to be taken for granted and not to be worried about or overly analysed. Later, she would look back at her earlier self and be astonished by how guileless she had been, how improbably arrogant to assume that contentedness was a gift that everyone was given. She had been sheltered all of her life. By her parents, her privilege, her cleverness and her beauty.

Because although she liked to believe she never thought about it, Anne knew instinctively she was beautiful. She knew it, and yet she had no idea how to deploy it, how to use it to get what she most desired or how to subtly craft it into a knowing sort of charm. At nineteen, Anne was a girl-woman. Her sophistication was a pretence; her maturity unfinished. She was an innocent with the looks of an older woman, ill-equipped to recognise her own fatal power. She found herself on the edges of situations that she did not fully understand – with Fred, with countless other men who felt she led them on with her teasing, unwitting flirtation. Yet she was not courageous enough to admit the shortfall of her knowledge. And once she was able to, she found that she was too trapped to do anything about it.

At the start of her relationship with Charles, she ignored any faint intimations of disquietude, pushing them to the far corners of her mind and telling herself not to be so ridiculous. She spent the days in a library haze, surrounded by the open pages of books, making half-hearted notes underneath the strip-lighting of the History faculty. At nights, she would occasionally sneak him into her room to stay over, squashed into the rickety single bed, his feet barely covered by the sheets.

Once, she had woken up as the sun was creeping in through the curtain crack to find that he was no longer beside her. She put on her dressing gown and tiptoed across the uncarpeted floorboards, opening the door a crack in case the porter discovered she was entertaining an illicit male guest. She peered up and down the corridor but Charles wasn’t there. Then she heard the gentle rumble of his laughter. It was coming from Frieda’s room. She knocked and heard a sudden scrabbling and the sounds of Frieda shushing briskly. The door opened.

‘Anne,’ said Frieda, her face impassive. She was wearing a silk nightgown over a grey cashmere cardigan pulled tight around her breasts. Her hair, slick and dark, fell straight to her shoulders. Her angular face seemed to be faintly powdered and there was a smudged bruise of red lipstick on her mouth, despite it being just past seven in the morning. ‘Come in.’ Anne had immediately felt out of place in her dressing gown and thick blue pyjamas and her uncombed tangle of hair.

Charles was sitting on the end of Frieda’s bed, fully clothed and cradling a green mug of coffee. There was a deep-blue Indian throw slung artfully over the sheets, with intricate patterns sewn on it in thick red thread. ‘Hello there,’ he said, a familiar sheepish grin on his face. The sun lit up the back of his head so that he appeared silhouetted against the window. ‘Frieda offered me some of her Turkish coffee and I couldn’t resist.’

‘Do you want some?’ Frieda asked, eyebrows raised.

‘Um, no thanks,’ said Anne, sitting down beside Charles on a small corner of the bed. He did not move to make room for her, she noticed, nor did he touch her as he usually did. ‘I might try and get back to sleep, actually.’

Frieda laughed. ‘It’s amazing to me how you manage to sleep for so long, Anne. I love this part of the day: the freshness of the air. It feels more, more . . . alive, somehow.’ She swept up her long hair and pinned it back in front of the small mirror on the back of the door. ‘I can’t imagine dying in the mornings.’

Anne rolled her eyes imperceptibly. Frieda was always so unnecessarily dramatic, so unrelentingly dark and solemn. She thought it was something to do with her exotic upbringing – her father was a diplomat and Frieda had grown up in various far-flung countries, never settling in one place for long. She had once, in a rare moment of confession, admitted to Anne that this made it difficult for her to keep friends.

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ said Charles. Anne looked at him with undisguised surprise. He hated mornings, she thought. He could quite happily spend the whole day in bed, reading newspapers and eating toast. But she didn’t say anything.

There was a strange little silence. The room felt shrunken and airless, infiltrated with a creeping sense of awkwardness. Anne looked at Charles sideways. He was staring straight ahead, his eyes resting on the nape of Frieda’s exposed neck, sipping his coffee quite calmly.

‘Well, then. I might go back to bed,’ she said in a final desperate attempt to stem the flow of silence that oozed between them. She got up and reached an arm down towards him.

‘Charles?’

He looked up at her. ‘Yes?’

‘Are you coming?’

He smiled at her, a touch of condescension in his eyes. ‘Actually, I might stay here and finish this,’ he said, lifting up his mug. ‘If that’s all right with you,’ he added, and she felt he was making fun of her.

‘Of course.’ She tied the flannel belt tight around her waist and walked out, closing the door behind her to the soft murmur of their voices.

A bit later, when she was fitfully dozing back in her own bed, Charles came in and snuggled up beside her. He put his arm along her waist, his fingers gently stroking her hipbone. ‘Hello,’ he whispered, holding her tighter, and Anne smiled to herself and thought she’d been overly sensitive about the whole thing. She’d probably still been half-asleep. She took a deep breath. Nothing to worry about, after all.

‘Hello.’

So then everything was all right again, at least for a while.

Charlotte

Charlotte was at the office when her mother rang.

‘Charlotte?’

‘Yes,’ she replied, trying to keep her voice low so that none of her colleagues would hear it was a personal call. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing important, just thought I’d catch you if you weren’t too busy.’

Charlotte clenched her jaw. Unthinkingly, she started scratching the tender patch of flesh just behind her earlobes. Her mother’s insistence on calling her at work was a source of constant irritation. She had told her several times not to do it because it was an open-plan building and she was conscious that everyone could hear her murmured replies to Anne’s familiar litany of daily complaints – workmen who hadn’t turned up, weeding that had yet to be tackled, a brand of washing powder that the supermarket had discontinued for no reason, and so on. At least when Anne called on the mobile, Charlotte could recognise the number and choose to ignore it. At work, there was no escape.