Scissors, Paper, Stone

‘How do you know I’m pretending?’

‘I don’t know . . . something about the tilt of your head. When you’re concentrating on a lecture, I’ve noticed that you sit very upright. And when you’re chatting to friends or whatever, your hair sort of bobs from side to side. But when you’re pretending not to notice me, it’s neither one nor the other. You stand very still and you stare very intently at something you’re meant to be concentrating on, but there’s a slight . . . well, I suppose it’s a tremble, for want of a better word.’

‘A tremble?’

‘Yes. Like when you pretend to be asleep, but other people can tell that you’re not. Like that.’

She couldn’t say anything much for several seconds and he just kept on looking at her, gravely and with such intensity she couldn’t help but think it meant something. He seemed irrevocably in control of the situation, silently directing its progress according to some plan he had already formulated and would not be diverted from. His calm, focused insistence was intimidating but also oddly flattering. She was disarmed by his attention.

Then, just as she was preparing to say, yes, take me for a drink, I’d like that, he smiled at her, lifted his right hand so that it was just level with her cheek and quickly, so quickly she wondered afterwards if it had actually happened, brushed a tendril of her hair behind her ear, letting his fingertip graze against the nape of her neck. She breathed in, sharply. Then he turned and walked away.

So then, inevitably, she was smitten too. A week later, she ran into him again in the library, sitting at one of the long wooden desks in the reading room, rolling a cigarette.

‘Hello, Charles.’

He looked up and a grin spread slowly across his face.

‘Anne Eliott,’ he said, licking the cigarette paper. ‘When are you going to come for that drink with me?’

They cycled to a pub in Grantchester on a windy, grey day with the flat, grassy meadows spreading out beneath them like wet brushstrokes. Swans dotted the riverbanks, patches of white set with angular elegance against the murky brown water. Charles led the way, with Anne following breathlessly behind. She looked at his back, the dip and rise of his shoulders as he cycled over the ruts and bumps of the path. She saw the way his hair was just long enough to be ruffled by the breeze. She noticed that he kept checking she was keeping up, head turning just far enough to catch her eye. It felt entirely as it should.

Later, after her half shandy, he kissed her briefly on the lips and said she tasted of sherbert. Later still, he took her back to Newnham and pushed her gently against the red brick wall, taking her face in his hands and, without speaking, kissing her lips, her cheeks, her eyelids. Then, because male visitors were not allowed to stay the night, he left and she went up to her room, tingling with the quiet fizz of joy.

When she took him home two months later her parents were predictably charmed.

‘Darling, he’s wonderful,’ her mother said in a theatrical whisper, almost as soon as her father had shown him upstairs to his room. ‘What a catch!’

At supper, Charles complimented Mrs Eliott on the perfect pinkness of the roast lamb, and her mother, suffused with pleasure, let the gravy boat slip in her hand so that it almost spilled its contents all over the embroidered linen tablecloth. He engaged Mr Eliott in a lengthy and considered conversation about the American civil rights movement without ever proffering an opinion that might have been deemed overly controversial or uncomfortably radical. He seemed a perfect cut-out of everything her boyfriend should be.

‘He’s a damned sound chap, Annie,’ her father said in the drawing room the next morning, folding away his newspaper and leaning forwards to stab at the fire with a long brass poker.

‘Archie!’ said her mother, whose unnecessary horror at her husband’s language had become a sort of fond family joke.

‘I’m only saying, darling. I like him. Like his drive. You could do a lot worse, you know.’

‘I’m sure Annie knows her own mind.’ Her mother lifted her dark-grey eyes from her sewing. ‘Don’t you, darling?’

She smiled. Yes, she did. She knew her mind. But, as she was about to find out, she couldn’t have claimed to know his.

Charlotte (#ulink_b2977762-ef9a-5e3a-a20d-e1fc641baf9f)

Charlotte was late again and although her lateness had an inevitability about it, this was never the comfort that it should have been. You’d imagine, she thought as she wove perilously in and out of the dense London traffic in her small blue car, that knowing I was going to be late would make me prepare more thoroughly in advance so that I would end up being on time. But she never quite managed the crucial leap between thought and action. Her lateness was now one of her defining features, an aspect of her personality that was gently tolerated and jovially referred to with affectionate exasperation by almost everyone who knew her. She had friends who would deliberately factor in a delay of half an hour when Charlotte arranged to meet them. But her mother was different: she could never be late for her.

She was dreading seeing her, a cold, dank dread that lay fetid and heavy across her chest. Recently, she found that she could not even pretend to relax in her mother’s presence: every time she saw her, the whole situation felt so stilted and unreal that their conversations had become defined more by the gaps between what was said than by the words themselves.

It had all stemmed from the time a few months ago when her mother turned up unannounced on the doorstep in the early morning. It was Charlotte’s thirtieth birthday, a date that she had been determined to ignore, and she recalled opening the door of her flat and being unable to disguise her horror. She had literally taken a step back, as if recoiling from her mother’s presence, attempting to get away from her.

‘Anything wrong?’ her mother said.

‘No!’ Charlotte replied, the forced jollity jarring in her ears.

‘Well. Good. Thought I’d surprise you. Happy birthday.’ And, still standing on the threshold, she had passed her a square, neatly wrapped package, the action appearing unnatural and false.

‘Thanks.’ Charlotte did not invite her in. She was still in her pyjamas, and her boyfriend, Gabriel, was splayed across the bed in a tumble of duvet and sheet. She became aware that she wanted to get rid of her mother as quickly as possible, for some reason she could not grasp. She hastily tore off the wrapping paper to reveal a shiny dark blue box with a small gold clip at one end. When Charlotte opened it, she saw a familiar silver ring, topped with a small, oval ruby set in diamonds.

‘Mum . . .’

‘I want you to have it.’

‘But, Mum,’ Charlotte felt sick. Her heart started thumping. ‘What are you doing?’

Her mother cleared her throat. ‘It doesn’t fit me any more.’ She smiled oddly. ‘Besides, who else would I give it to?’

‘It’s your engagement ring.’

‘Yes.’ And her mother had turned and let herself out of the front door without another word. There had been no time for Charlotte to say she didn’t want it.

She braked too suddenly at a set of traffic lights and her handbag fell off the front passenger seat, scattering a motley assortment of hair clips and old postage stamps into the footwell. A necklace with a broken clasp that she had been carrying in her bag for weeks had started to unravel and several tiny purple beads were rolling on to the fuzzy grey carpet. ‘Bugger,’ she said out loud, although there was no one else to hear her. She scrabbled around to put everything back inside and then the lights changed and the looming double-decker bus behind her started beeping its horn. ‘All right, All right.’

Thinking about her mother generally had this sort of effect on her. It wound her up, made her tense and simultaneously guilty for no real reason. She felt somehow responsible for her mother’s happiness and yet resentful that the burden weighed so heavily on her. She hated that she still cared enough to try to be the dutiful, supportive daughter. After all, Charlotte thought, her mother had never once said that she loved her. It wasn’t her way. Instead, she seemed perpetually disappointed: by Charlotte, by herself, by life and its accumulated disenchantments.

Her parents had never been ones for hugging or good-natured arguments around the dinner table or the rambunctious rough-and-tumble that characterised those large, semi-aristocratic families she was always reading about in period novels. There had, instead, been an unspoken friction, a constant and wordless atmosphere of slights perceived and grudges held.

Supper-times had been the worst. They would sit round the pine kitchen table, straight-backed and solicitous, with wariness in their eyes. Her father would speak first, his comments punctuated by the metronome click of his jaw as he chewed. What he said was never as bad as the way he said it. He would start off with a bland observation, usually aimed at her mother.

‘Another new top, I see.’

There would be a pause, pregnant with the electric possibility of disaster. Her mother would make a great show of looking down to see what she was wearing before assuming an unnatural informality.

‘Oh this? Yes, I bought it the other day . . .’ She trailed off, aware of his uncomfortable stare.

‘How . . . extravagant,’ he said, administering each word as if it were a drop of acid pressed from a chemist’s pipette.

‘Not really,’ her mother rallied quietly. ‘It was in the sale.’

‘Oh, I see.’ He gave a dry chuckle and wiped the corners of his mouth with the edge of a table-napkin. ‘You’re saving me money. Well, I suppose I should be grateful.’

Sometimes that would be the end of it. Sometimes her father would keep pushing and pushing until her mother would leave the table, sliding her chair back so abruptly that it would shriek discordantly against the tiled floor. On those occasions, Charlotte would be forced to stay at the table in silence until he had finished eating.

After the dinner plates had been cleared away, there would be no television because every single programme apart from the news appeared to annoy her father, darkening his moods until it seemed all the air had been squeezed to the corner of the rooms and pushed through the cracks in the walls. He would never shout, but the repressed fury of his controlled breathing was somehow worse than anything else.

The tension would be so unbearable, the need to apologise for whatever she was watching so constant in her mind, that the whole thing ended up being horribly unrelaxing. The only time she found she could watch television with impunity was just after she got home from school and just before her father returned from work, a golden period of two hours where she could sit herself on a beanbag in the front room with a slice of Battenberg cake and with the luxurious prospect of an uninterrupted session of Grange Hill and Blue Peter stretching out in front of her. Her ears were finely tuned into the precise sound of her father’s car engine. When she heard the first growling rumbles of his BMW, she would leap up, switch off the television and sprint upstairs, closing the door to her bedroom and opening her school exercise books so that she would not have to talk to him.

Sometimes, he would knock on her door on his way upstairs.

‘Charlotte?’ He waited until she replied before he pushed the door open, but even then he refused to walk over the thin metallic strip that separated the dark red hallway carpet from the light, beige tones of her bedroom floor. It always felt awkward, his standing there as if on sentry duty, casting his wordless eye over what she was doing.

‘Busy day?’ he asked.