A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon [17]
They met at Betty’s wedding.
There was something formal about him, almost military. Handsome in a way that young men no longer were these days.
Everyone was being rather silly (Betty’s brother, the one who died in that horrible factory accident, had made a hat out of a napkin and was singing “I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts” to much general hilarity). Jean could see that George was finding it all rather tiresome. She wanted to tell him that she was finding it all rather tiresome, too, but he didn’t look like someone you could talk to, like that, out of the blue.
Ten minutes later he was at her side, offering to get her another drink, and she made a fool of herself by asking for a lemonade, to show that she was sober and sensible, then asking for wine because she didn’t want to seem childish, then changing her mind a second time because he really was very attractive and she was getting a bit flustered.
He invited her out for dinner the following week and she didn’t want to go. She knew what would happen. He was honest and utterly dependable and she was going to fall in love with him, and when he found out about her family he was going to disappear in a cloud of smoke. Like Roger Hamilton. Like Pat Lloyd.
Then he told her about his father drinking himself into a stupor and sleeping facedown on the lawn. And his mother crying in the bathroom. And his uncle going mad and ending up in some dreadful hospital. At which point she just took hold of his face and kissed him, which was something she’d never done to a man before.
And it wasn’t that he’d changed over the years. He was still honest. He was still dependable. But the world had changed. And so had she.
If anything it was those French cassettes (were they a present from Katie? she really couldn’t remember). They were going to the Dordogne, and she had time on her hands.
A few months later she was standing in a shop in Bergerac buying bread and cheese and these little spinach tarts and the woman was apologizing for the weather and Jean found herself striking up an actual conversation while George sat on a bench across the street counting his mosquito bites. And nothing happened there and then, but when she got home it seemed a bit cold, a bit small, a bit English.
Through the wall she heard the faint sound of the shower door popping open.
That it should be David, of all people, amazed her still. She’d cooked him spaghetti Bolognese on one occasion. She’d made small talk about the new conservatory and come away feeling dull but thankfully invisible. He wore linen jackets and roll-neck sweaters in peach and sky blue and smoked little cigars. He’d lived in Stockholm for three years and when he and Mina separated amicably it only increased the sense that he was a little too modern for Peterborough.
He retired early, George lost touch with him and he didn’t cross her mind until she looked up from her till in Ottakar’s one day and saw him holding a copy of The Naked Chef and a tin of Maisie Mouse pencils.
They had a coffee across the street and when she talked about going to Paris with Ursula he didn’t mock her, like Bob Green used to do. Or wonder how two middle-aged ladies could survive a long weekend in a foreign city without being mugged or strangled or sold into the white slave trade, like George had done.
And it wasn’t that she was physically attracted to him (he was shorter than her and there was quite a lot of black hair protruding from his cuffs). But she never met men over fifty who were still interested in the world around them, in new people, new books, new countries.
It was like talking to a female friend. Except that he was a man. And they’d only known each other for about fifteen minutes. Which was very disconcerting.
The following week they were standing on a footbridge over the dual carriageway and that feeling welled up inside her. The one she got by the sea sometimes. Ships disembarking, gulls squabbling over the wake, those mournful horns. The realization that you could sail off into the blue and