The Potter’s House

I probably do Selina a major injustice. We might well have had a wild time together, sitting on bar stools and drinking lurid cocktails, and then tripping off to discos to enjoy the startled attentions of the local Lotharios, in the absence of any younger prey, like a pair of giraffes displaced from the herd and yapped around by hyenas. The comparison would have drawn one of Selina’s yelps of laughter, before she flicked her lighter to another Marlboro.

In any case, she developed appendicitis four days before we were due to leave. I could have cancelled, but I had somehow got used to the idea of going to Turkey. I was even relieved at the thought of being able to do it alone, and not to have to keep up the pretence of being cheerful and energetic.

And so here I am.

I think about Peter, of course.

I prefer to remember the early days, when we were first married, when he used to drive us off to the country for weekends. We would go to little hotels in Suffolk or Devon, and lie in bed late and then take unambitious walks before coming back for tea, and drinks, and dinner. He was always trying to make me eat, and my evasions became a joke and then a kind of game between us.

‘Scone, darling? With some home-made jam and clotted cream?’

‘Just the cucumber, out of the sandwich, thank you.’

Peter belonged to the National Trust, for God’s sake. Not even my mother was a member. I thought this was funny and delightful, and if we didn’t go for a walk we would look up some local great house or ruined castle in the book and drive in the Jaguar to see it. I remember the smell of warm leather seats and brake fluid.

All of this felt very adult and secure, after the way I had been living – on and off planes, in and out of clothes and studios and hotel bedrooms, with men around me and in me whom I didn’t like or trust. Whereas I loved Peter and I trusted him absolutely, and he had the knack of making me feel loved in return. His love balanced out my guilt: it didn’t take it away, nothing could do that, it just counterweighted it and allowed me to function while still carrying the old burden around with me.

Peter had a conventional exterior, which he enjoyed cultivating, and inside this there was a quirky and clever man unlike anyone I had ever met before. I adored his cleverness, and the way he could weigh up people and problems quickly, and act on his observations and deductions. He was decisive where I was tentative, and generous where I was suspicious.

He was also the most sensuous man I had ever known. He loved food and fine wine and beautiful old cars, and pictures and made-to-measure suits and sex. He was the best lover. In bed, as I noticed the very first time, when he took off the shields of his spectacles there was the different soft face of an alternative, exotic Peter who belonged to me alone. I liked to smooth away the creases hooking his mouth with my thumbs. The stroking stretched the thin skin of his lips into a secret smile.

The food on the tray has gone cold. I prod at it a little, then cover the plates up again and slide the whole lot outside the door.

The sky is dark now. I stand at the window and look out at the line of lamps that line the hotel garden, and their broken reflection in the sea. After three days of gazing at it I am familiar with the view. The beach, with a row of beach beds and yellow mattresses under jaunty yellow parasols, now furled for the night, lies just beyond the garden wall. There is the water and a rim of tarnished silver where it meets the sand. Across the water are the donkey-brown humps of some nameless islands in the Greek Dodecanese. Nameless to me, that is – I asked my waiter their names, by sign language, and he rattled off something unintelligible with a dismissive shrug. There is no love lost between these people and the Greeks.

I am surprised by how close the islands lie to the Turkish mainland. Selina would probably have known. Selina would have maps and guidebooks, whereas I, of course, do not. That would be Peter’s role.

Always, I come back to him and how crippled I seem to be without him. And it is exactly because of this infirmity that he is no longer here. At some point – it must have been one day, maybe even one hour, or during the course of one single conversation – the fine balance tipped again, this time coming down against me. My needs from him became greater than his pleasure in me. I was too much to look after. Or maybe we just knew each other too well and the function buttons became worn with too much pressing so the connections didn’t work properly. Is that what always happens, with long-term partnerships?

Whatever you like. I don’t know.

I can’t go on feeling crippled by Peter’s absence or by the things that happened long before I met him, that much I do know after my days alone in this white hotel.

It ought to be possible to rub out history. To start again with a clean piece of paper, to write on it with a fresh and optimistic hand. That’s what I am doing here – making sense of what has happened and needing to work out what shape my life will take from now on. Selina’s absence means that I have to face the definitions and decisions alone and therefore properly.

So I have come out of my room. It is the fourth day and I have ventured down to the beach. With the full complement of yellow beach towels and robes and tubes of cream and magazines and paperback novels, of course. I have arranged all this and myself under a parasol, and I am flipping through Vogue when a shadow falls across the sand beside me. I look up to see my waiter, with a tray balanced on his shoulder. His shabby black shoes look incongruous so close to the lazy waves.

‘Madam, you come to the sun. I am happy. I bring you water and Italian coffee.’

There is a bottle of mineral water, and a cappuccino complete with chocolate powder.

‘Thank you.’

We smile at each other and he carefully arranges the drinks on the little table under the parasol.

‘What is your name?’ I ask him and he flushes a little. His skin is downy, hardly darkened with hair except on his top lip. He is probably even younger than I estimated.

‘Jim,’ he says. With a hard ‘J’ sound that sounds quite un-Turkish.

‘Like JulesetJim?’ I ask fatuously.

‘I am not sure. But is a good name.’

‘Very good,’ I agree. Jim begins to back away, with the tray hanging flat by his side, and then hesitates. ‘An Inglis man is here. In Branc. Maybe you go for a boat ride?’

I must look desperate, or desperately miserable, or both. However, an English man is the last thing I am looking for.

Very firmly I say, ‘Thank you for thinking of it, but I don’t want to meet anyone here. No one at all, Jim.’ And I put the magazine up in front of my face to shut out the threat.

‘Okay. Good morning,’ he says and crunches away up the sand to the garden wall. I know I have been rude and that he is offended.

When I was first married I thought I might become an actress. Because of the way I looked then and some of the people I knew, I was given small – tiny – roles in a couple of films, but I wasn’t any good at it. And if I wound up hating the scrutiny of the photographer’s lens, I hated the film cameras even more. After a year or so I stopped trying and it was a relief. I didn’t have to earn money, because Peter provided for us both. I didn’t have to do anything except be married to Peter and have a family.

I have always had an ambivalent attitude to my body. Its length and skinniness enabled me to earn a living, but I hated the way people stared. I knew that they were only looking at it, and not into me in order to judge what they saw within, but the knowledge didn’t lessen my discomfort.

Peter used to say that they were looking because I was beautiful and I should be glad.

‘Plenty of women’, he said, ‘would change places with you.’

Up until then, at least, the legs and arms and breasts and backside had done what I wanted them to do. They moved for the camera and showed off whatever garment I was being paid to parade.

But I couldn’t get pregnant.

Not properly pregnant, so the baby stayed inside and grew. I had two miscarriages, very quickly, but the doctors were still optimistic and reassuring.

‘Don’t worry, it happens. You’ll have your family soon.’

Peter took me home and fed me and held me in his arms at night.

Then there was an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured one of the Fallopian tubes. This time there was anxiety. My chances of conceiving were diminished by fifty per cent. I was too thin, they told me, I was anxious and tense and probably depressed. All these things counted against us in our efforts to have a baby. I must relax.

Peter took me away on holiday, to Italy.

Soon I was pregnant yet again and it seemed that this time it might take. I got to four months and we told our friends and dared a celebration. But I miscarried again, in hospital, a sixteen-week boy. It was the last time. The last time I was even able to conceive.

I did hate my body after that, with a cold anger that made me want to mutilate myself. I needed a scapegoat and I turned my womb into one. This reaction was explicable, even logical, to myself and other people, and I used it as an acceptable shorthand.

I do not now believe, however, that my damned body was the real culprit.

It was myself, wherever that reality might be lodged and whatever form it might take. I think I never really wanted a baby because I was afraid of what might happen if I did have one. I was afraid of history, and tragedy.

This is our baby, we love him, he dies, it’s my fault.

That was the reasoning and so every time my body conceived, my mind poisoned it. Out the potential big tragedy came in a wash of blood, only another small tragedy as yet. Not even named.

If you think that’s crazy – believe me, so do I.

‘I will be the judge of that,’ Peter said mildly on the night we met, when I told him that I was mad. And he chose to bring in a verdict of sanity.