Gillian turned on him. ‘I’ve really had it with you, Colin,’ she snarled, ‘with your silly, affected, old-fashioned car and clothes and everything.’
From her bag Gillian drew out her Swiss Army Knife and applied it with gusto to the plentiful elastic on her G-string. Then she tied one end to the second wiper and pulled the rest around and through her window. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘start up the engine.’
Colin Kip did as he was told. Gillian manipulated the wipers manually; left, right, left, right. All superior and rhythmical and practical and dour-faced.
Mr Kip was very impressed. He couldn’t help himself. After several minutes of driving in silence he took his hand off the gearstick and slid it on to Gillian’s lap.
‘Watch it,’ Gillian said harshly. ‘Don’t you dare provoke me, Colin. I haven’t put my Swiss Army Knife away yet.’
She felt the pressure of his hand leave her thigh. She was knickerless. She was victorious. She was a truly modern female.
Jack had won Carrie’s heart with that old three button trick.
At the genesis of every winter, Jack would bring out his sturdy but ancient grey duffel coat and massage the toggles gently with the tips of his fingers. He’d pick off any fluff or threads from its rough fabric, brush it down vigorously with the flat of his hand and then gradually ease his way into it. One arm, two arms, shift it on to his shoulders, balance it right—the tips of the sleeves both perfectly level with each wrist—then straighten the collar.
Finally, the toggles. The most important part. He’d do them one-handed, pretending, even to himself, some kind of casualness, a studied—if fallacious—preoccupation, his eyes unfocused, imagining, for example, how it felt when he was a small boy learning to tell the time. His father had shown him: ten past, quarter past, see the little hand? See the big hand? But he hadn’t learned. It simply didn’t click.
So Jack’s mother took over instead. She had her own special approach. The way she saw it, any child would learn anything if they thought there was something in it for them: a kiss or a toy or a cookie.
Jack’s mother baked Jack a Clock Cake. Each five-minute interval on the cake’s perimeter was marked with a tangy, candied, lemon segment. The first slice was taken from the midday or midnight point at the very top of the cake and extended to the first lemon segment on the right, which, Jack learned, signified five minutes past the hour. ‘If the little hand is on the twelve,’ his mother told him, ‘then your slice takes the big hand to five minutes past twelve.’
Jack wrinkled up his nose. ‘How about if I have a ten past twelve slice?’ he suggested.
He got what he’d asked for.
Jack was born in Wisconsin but moved to London in his early twenties and got a job as a theatrical producer. He’d already worked extensively off-off Broadway. He met Carrie waiting for a bus on a Sunday afternoon outside the National Portrait Gallery. It was the winter of 1972. He was wearing his duffel coat.
Carrie was a blonde who wore her hair in big curls, had milk-pudding skin and breasts like a roomy verandah on the front of her body’s smart Georgian townhouse frame. Close up she smelled like a bowl of Multi-flavoured Cheerios.
Before Jack had even smelled her, though, he smiled at her. She smiled in return, glanced away—as girls are wont to do—and then glanced back again. Just as he’d hoped, her eyes finally settled on the toggles on his coat. She pointed. She grinned. ‘Your buttons …’
‘Huh?’
‘The buttons on your coat. You’ve done them up all wrong.’
He looked down and pretended surprise. ‘I have?’
Jack held his hands aloft, limply, gave her a watery smile but made no attempt to righten them. Carrie, in turn, put her hand to her curls. She imagined that Jack must be enormously clever to be so vague. Maybe a scientist or a schoolteacher at a boys’ private school or maybe a philosophy graduate. Not for a moment did it dawn on her that he might be a fool. And that was sensible, because he was no fool.
Carrie met Sydney two decades later, while attending self-defence classes. Sydney had long, auburn ringlets and freckles and glasses. She was Australian. Her father owned a vineyard just outside Brisbane. Sydney was a sub-editor on a bridal magazine. She was strong and bare and shockingly independent. On the back of her elbows, Carrie noticed, the skin was especially thick and in the winter she had to apply Vaseline to this area because otherwise her skin chapped and cracked and became inflamed. The reason, Sydney informed Carrie, that her elbows got so chapped, was that she was very prone to resting her weight on them when she sat at her desk, and also, late at night, when she lay in bed reading or thinking, sometimes for hours.
Sydney was thirty years old and an insomniac. Had been since puberty. As a teenager she’d kept busy during the long night hours memorizing the type-of-grape in the type-of-wine, from-which-vineyard and of-what-vintage. Also she collected wine labels which she stuck into a special jotter.
Nowadays, however, she’d spend her wakeful night-times thinking about broader subjects: men she met, men she fancied, men she’d dated, men she’d two-timed, and if none of these subjects seemed pertinent or topical—during the dry season, as she called it—well, then she’d think about her friends and their lives and how her life connected with theirs and what they both wanted and what they were doing wrong and how and why.
Carrie appreciated Sydney’s attentiveness. If Jack had been working late, if Jack kept mentioning the name of an actress, if Jack told her that her skin looked sallow or her roots were showing, well, then she would tell Sydney about it and Sydney would spend the early hours of every morning, resting on her elbows and mulling it all over.
Sydney had a suspicion that Jack was up to something anti-matrimonial and had hinted as much to Carrie. Hinted, but nothing more. Carrie, however, took only what she wanted from Sydney’s observations and left the rest. In conversational terms, she was a fussy eater.
Jack walked out on Carrie after twenty-one years of marriage, two days before her forty-fourth birthday. The following night, after he’d packed up and gone, she and Sydney skipped their karate class and sat in the leisure centre’s bar instead. Sydney ordered two bottles of Bordeaux. She wasn’t in the least bit perturbed by Carrie’s predicament. In fact, she was almost pleased because she’d anticipated that this would happen a while ago and was secretly gratified by the wholesale accuracy of her prediction.
‘You’re still a babe, Carrie,’ Sydney whispered, pouring her some more wine. ‘You could have any man.’
‘I don’t want any man,’ Carrie whimpered. ‘I only want Jack. Only Jack. Only him.’
‘That guy Alan,’ Sydney noted, ‘who takes the Judo class. I know he likes you. Sometimes it seems like his eyes are stuck to your tits with adhesive.’
‘Please!’
‘It’s true.’
‘Jack only walked out yesterday, Sydney, probably for a girl fifteen years my
