A New Map of Love Read online

  Possibility swirled before him. Life. It meant walks holding hands in meadows freckled with buttercups. It laid before him dishes of ripe peaches, carafes of wine and evenings swimming naked in the river . . . It swept him across grand landscapes; it meant riding bareback over the plains . . . No, maybe it didn’t . . . His imagination stalled for a moment. He found horses utterly terrifying. But it did mean seeing a wider world. And a world in which he could share a bed with a lovely woman, a woman who would fizz and leap and undulate and make him laugh and – without malice – laugh at him.

  He felt so lost, and his longing was in such crazed collision with anguish and remorse that he folded forward under the force of it until his head touched the steering wheel. His body heaved. For the first time since a summer morning in 1944, on an Italian hillside, he wept. Eyes closed, his sobs rumbled up and overcame him; tears ran onto his hands. Only gradually he became aware of something wet and whiskery and faintly liquorice-scented nudging at his ear.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. Still weeping he sat up, extricating himself from Monty’s concerned nose. ‘You sit down – that’s it, boy.’ His arm round the dog, comforted by Monty’s stinky warmth, he looked out at the darkening afternoon. ‘We should just drive off over the hills, and never come back. Are you game, Monty? You and me?’

  The dog gazed gormlessly at him. George wiped his face and blew his nose, cold reality settling on him again. What the blazes was he thinking? He had only just taken leave of his wife. It was no good doing something rash. He had to get his bearings – and in the meantime he had a business to run and a dog badly in need of a tin of Winalot.

  He started the engine and let it idle for a few moments before letting off the handbrake.

  3.

  He had to face the house. Even now it seemed inconceivable that Win was not coming back. If he were to walk in and find her in her apron by the cooker it would not feel strange. Her sickness and death would fade like a dream. Life would go on. Existence, anyway.

  Closing the front door, he paused in the hall, listening, just in case. Monty’s toenails clacked ahead along the tiles, then stopped. He turned with a baleful glance as if to say, ‘Well come on.’

  George felt the dark silence weigh on him. As he passed through the house, he found himself switching on all the lights. The front was devoted to the business. His office was to the right of the front door. He did not go in there, but stepped into the showroom on the left and clicked the switch. Light gave the large room back to him, the sheen of polished walnut and rosewood, the sweet smell of Antiquax polish. Leaving it lit up, he went along the hall.

  Their living quarters were at the back, the sitting room the most private refuge. Customers occasionally strayed into the kitchen at the end of the hall to the right. They seldom got as far as this room. It was extraordinary the way people felt entitled to wander and poke about in your house. They had resorted to a sign at the bottom of the stairs saying PRIVATE, after Win once met a man coming out of their upstairs bathroom. At weekends when it was busy, they even hung a rope across the stairs.

  Turning on the kitchen light, the sight that met George took him aback. The humped feast was gone and instead there sat one white plate overturned on another. Beside it, a dish containing a whole, enormous pie. A note in careful, looped handwriting was tucked under the edge of the dish:

  Dear Mr Baxter,

  Here’s a bit of supper for you. Just pop it in the oven about 25 mins, not too hot, say 150. No one touched the pie so I thought you’d like it. I’ll be in tomorrow.

  Vera

  PS. We all understand.

  George looked under the top plate. Beneath lay a generous portion of liver and onions, mash and sliced rounds of carrot. Only now, seeing the food, he realized he was famished. Replacing the cover, he slid both plates into the oven and switched it on. He peered at the bevelled edges of the pie. A give-away seepage of pink juice confirmed his worst suspicions.

  ‘Rhubarb – dear God – in February.’

  Vera was a great preserver and bottler. Plums, gooseberries, rhubarb, apples and pears were to be had at any time of year at the snap of a Kilner jar lid. Win loved rhubarb. What she had never got round to mentioning to Vera was George’s violent aversion to it. Monty, who could never be described as finicky in this regard, came in for a lot of leftovers.

  ‘It’s such a waste, George,’ Win would tut as Monty golloped down yet another slice. ‘And heaven knows what’ll happen if he eats too much rhubarb.’

  ‘Well it’s just as wasted inside me, I can tell you,’ he would reply. ‘At the least the dog gets some enjoyment out of the darn stuff. He only eats the pastry anyway.’

  ‘She means well,’ Win would insist.

  As this oft-repeated conversation ran through his head, George sank onto a chair by the table. Monty’s collar rattled against his bowl as he scrabbled for the last scraps of food. George stared at his hands, which looked huge things against the pale blue Formica. Women. Why did they always make him feel so helpless? With women he felt like a scrap of cork being borne along by a prevailing tide. Yet how bleak and inconceivable to live without a woman in his life. Tears muddled his vision again.

  Once he had eaten, he washed up the plate, knife and fork and left them on the rack to drain. Worried in case the lit-up state of the place might encourage people to call on him, he quickly went round turning lights off again. In the sitting room, he sank into his baggy green chair. Monty settled beside him. Two other dogs, in chipped, Staffordshire earthenware, regarded George with a melancholy air from alcoves each side of the fireplace.

  The quietness of the house pressed in on him. Was this how it would be now, night after night, always? He lit his pipe, packed with St Bruno, comforted momentarily by this aromatic ritual. His mood tilted this way and that. For a time, he was filled with desperation as he looked into the void of his emotional life. Win had been a wonderful woman – everyone said so. But their marriage had become a delicate balance of habit and avoidance. There had scarcely been a day over the past twenty years when he had not thought, is this all? Looked at other couples – happy, laughing, physically close, it seemed – and twisted inside with longing. And that longing, the desolation of those days when Win was so ill that she was no longer herself, had led to Maggie, to . . . Oh God. Thank heaven Win never knew.

  But that was then. Now, he scarcely knew who he was, which way he was facing to begin this uncharted path into grief, into a new life. He could not think straight about anything.

  Reaching over the side of the chair he found Monty’s warm ear and sat stroking it.

  4.

  It was late when the phone rang. George had dozed off in the chair, jacket draped over him, and found himself jangled awake, chilly and discombobulated. He flung off the jacket and moved automatically to the hall telephone. It did not cross his mind that he could leave it to ring.

  As he picked it up the ringing stopped. More silence came down the line. Then he heard someone take a sharp breath.

  ‘George?’

  It was her. Maggie.

  ‘Um?’ A strangled utterance forced its way out of him.

  ‘Sorry it’s so late.’ She was speaking very quietly. ‘I had to wait for John and Rick to go to bed. I just . . . I didn’t want to come to the funeral . . . Not when – well, you know.’

  He could see the flinty track up to the farmhouse, himself walking up it, Maggie Wylde’s arms opening to him. An ache spread across his chest.

  ‘I just wanted to make sure you’re all right, lovey. You must’ve had such a terrible day . . .’

  ‘Yes.’ He cleared his throat, attempting to sound in command. ‘Quite all right, thank you.’ There was a division, like a wall, between how things were in bed and not in bed. He couldn’t talk to her now.

  ‘I could come down . . .’ But she sounded doubtful.

  ‘No!’ He tried to soften this abrupt refusal. ‘Don’t do that. It’s late. And you mustn’t.’

&n
bsp; ‘No. I suppose not.’ He heard her sigh. ‘All right, Georgie – as long as you’re OK.’

  The silence went on so long that he was about to put the receiver down. Her voice came again in a desperate burst. ‘George? I want to be with you . . . Properly . . .’ She sounded tearful. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry – I wasn’t going to do this.’

  For a second his being leapt with hope. A woman in the house! Lovely Maggie. She would only have to move down the lane. He need not be alone after all. A second’s further thought brought disaster crashing round his head. John Wylde, their three grown-up children: divorce, shame and disaster.

  ‘No, Maggie.’ He spoke sadly, but with a firmness that surprised and even impressed him. ‘You know that’s not right.’

  A stifled sound came down the line. Eventually she said, ‘I know. Really. But . . .’

  ‘Maggie – don’t. Please. I’m going to put the phone down. Goodbye, my dear.’

  ‘Bye,’ she just managed.

  He replaced the receiver. For the first time he noticed the cold from the tiles seeping through his socks.

  ‘You mustn’t,’ he instructed himself. ‘Never again.’

  ‘Come on, Monty.’ In the sitting room, the dog was sitting up, eyeing him in a guilty, sidelong manner. There was a black tinge to his jowls and in the middle of the floor, near his jacket, lay the torn remains of a yellow and white box.

  ‘You bad boy . . .’ Monty cringed theatrically, showing the whites of his eyes. ‘You’ve polished off the lot!’ He hadn’t the energy to be properly cross. He was too taken up with Maggie. He gathered up the torn remains of the liquorice allsorts box. ‘Come on, you wicked creature – out.’

  Two

  1.

  Waking the next morning, the first thing he felt was the heaviness of the blankets, pressing down on his own sadness and disorientation. He was also lying awkwardly on his left arm. As he turned onto his back, opening his eyes, he was filled with a momentary rush of excitement. It felt as if everything should be different. The snowy hillside – his revelation.

  All subsequent moments confirmed that things were not different. At least not in terms of the possibility of ripe peaches and swimming with naked abandon. Nor, he realized, in terms of the prospect of amiable and available women flocking to his door. Bleak days of sadness and loss – they were what lay ahead.

  But things were altered. For one thing, the room was full of an eerie, almost visionary light from the snow. And the guilty sense of freedom was still there. He stretched, toes pushing against the winceyette sheet with a sensation of spreading out to inhabit all of himself. He imagined this was how you would feel when washed ashore after a shipwreck; limp, mortally exhausted, but full of a maddening sense of hope.

  He stepped out the back into a glittering morning. Frozen spiderwebs sagged from the washing line. Monty cavorted across the snowy back garden like a pup. Narrowing his eyes against the glare, George watched this portly vision in brown and white lumbering back and forth, ears flying, giving off ecstatic woofs.

  ‘Silly old fool,’ George muttered. ‘You’ll do yourself a mischief. Come on – got to open up.’

  It was a comfort, getting back to business. He walked round the house, out of their private flower garden. Win preferred that no one could see their smalls hanging out, so this was well screened by a wooden lattice sprawled over with honeysuckle and climbing roses. Beyond, at the side of the barn was his vegetable patch and a space for a rusty iron table and chairs where the men ate their sandwiches when it was warm.

  In the yard he knocked snow hats off the stone dogs by the barn door and turned the key. Inside he breathed the building’s musty wood smell. To the right, behind a partition, was the workshop, with windows facing over the vegetable garden. The rest of the barn was the overspill showroom.

  George looked across the array of furniture. Both showrooms were carpeted in a deep, blood red. The house showroom was set out more like a proper room, but the barn lent itself to a selection of small tableaux. He arranged things as if on little stages from which the players had temporarily strayed for a cup of tea. To his left a collection of chairs – a Windsor in yew, two French rococos with rose and cream upholstery and an upright farthingale – encircled a mahogany Sheraton tripod table as if awaiting the seated bottoms of social occasions. The farthingale had sat in someone’s shed for about thirty years, the wood dry as bone. The lads had done a marvellous job. It had a sheen on it now. Beyond that was a mahogany dining table, a set of Regency Trafalgar chairs tucked round it and on top, a silver candelabra. This seemed off-centre to George and he went over to move it.

  Antiques were not mere objects, in his view. Nor dead museum pieces. Hands had fashioned them with effort, with mood and feeling. He knew this by the life in his own hands, from the years he spent at the bench, learning the skills of restoration. And the more you arranged things to support an understanding of their vitality, the more life they embodied. Even in the barn he never just crammed things in the way some dealers did. Like that philistine Lewis Barker over near Twyford with that warehouse of his – everything shoved in anyhow and dusty as hell. Lewis had a good eye all right, but visiting his place was the most cheerless dealing George ever did. That lumpen fool might as well be selling second-hand lawnmowers.

  In the house showroom he gathered the lighter woods, the walnut, rosewood, satinwood. The room was a feast for the eyes with the morning sun streaming in across their warm grain, catching the gleam of porcelain and glow of ruby glass which he displayed on the furniture. Sometimes customers gasped with pleasure at the sight. That was the best sort of customer: someone who would enter into the spirit of things, not just see a cold profit in the making.

  For the moment the tools in the workshop lay silent. He had inherited two of the three men who worked there from Arthur Bagnold when he took over the business after the war. The place had been in a right state then. Arthur had grown old and wandery in his mind. When George bought the property so that he and Win could settle here, he had to start almost from scratch, repairing the house and outbuildings and getting the business going again.

  Like George, the two more senior men had been away to war. Clarence, two years older than George, returned from the Royal Berkshires and Alan, Vera’s husband, from RAF Coastal Command. Both had begun their working lives with Arthur Bagnold. Arthur had trained Clarence, who in turn instructed Alan. Six months ago, now things were busier, George had taken on another lad. Kevin, the seventeen-year-old apprentice, had the features of a faintly animated potato and a naturally gormless demeanour (adenoids were a problem). But he did profess eagerness. ‘I’m ever so keen, Mr Baxter. Keen as mustard. Honest I am.’ And keenness, George thought, was to be encouraged.

  When he himself had first been apprenticed to Old Man Arkwright in their Suffolk town, no one had had many hopes for him. His father packed him off to Arkwright when everyone, George included, despaired of his schoolwork. He was a great, floundering boy with a physique that looked fitter for lumberjacking than the painstaking restoration of wood. Old Arkwright eyed him up and gave him a chance. Those joint-of-meat hands were found to be dexterous, his nature sensitive to the grain of wood, the rightness of curve and angle.

  ‘Well, bor,’ Arkwright told him in broad Suffolk, after six months, ‘I reckon you’ve found your pond.’ And a happy duck he had been.

  Kevin, also belying appearances, had hands sympathetic to wood as well as a willing nature. He seemed to be finding his pond too. Every so often those vegetable features launched themselves into a smile of bemused satisfaction.

  George strode out into the snowy yard again. ‘Come on, Monty!’ He stamped his boots on the front step. ‘Breakfast – before the troops get here.’

  2.

  Since Win became too ill to get up, he had got into the habit of making breakfast alone. It made him feel manly, as if he was back in the army. He was no longer using the silver toast rack on which Win had always insisted. Today, extraordinarily h
ungry, he fried three eggs, four thick back rashers and threw in a handful of mushrooms. After downing this with a pile of toast like a block of flats and a pot of tea, he began to feel ready to face them all.

  ‘Keep busy, that’s the thing,’ he said to Monty. ‘Keep the business up to scratch.’

  The dog gave a long, dozy grunt.

  ‘If you didn’t agree, you’d say so, wouldn’t you?’ George said, stepping over him. Monty had forever to be stepped over as he was forever right in the way.

  He stacked the plates in the sink, musing on the business. Win had always been the one to help out with the accounts, taking telephone messages and dealing with customers on days when he was out and about. Unofficially they had been in it together. During her illness, Vera had mucked in and helped where she could. Now he had to face up to it: he was going to have to take someone on – a book-keeper at least. In his fragile state this felt like a mountainous task.

  He was beginning to consider that he might wash up, when he heard, ‘Coo-eee? Hello? Mr B?’

  ‘In the back, Vera!’

  ‘Righty-ho.’ There was a small kerfuffle as she took her coat off. Vera and Alan lived only a few minutes’ walk away on one of the roads down into the village. The house, opposite one of the pubs, was a new bungalow which, after prolonged deliberation, Alan had decreed should be called The Bungalow.

  The untouched pie was still on the table. George whisked it away and into the back of the refrigerator with a second to spare. Vera’s face arrived round the kitchen door. A roll of hay-coloured hair loomed over her forehead and a similar wide-bore kink bounced each side of her face. Clearly Vera did something with hair rollers. Whatever it was, it was different from what Win did with them. Vera had honest blue eyes and square, widely spaced teeth which made her look amiable the second she parted her lips. Her shapely body could achieve a great deal of activity very fast – especially on the pie-making front. She reminded George vaguely of a very clean pit pony.