Purveyor of Enchantment Read online

  Clementine marvelled at how he maintained the formality of speech, sitting there locked in the attic with a burglar rummaging through his house. Of course, Toby Scott had been a missionary. He was an old hand at passing the salt whilst mortar shells crashed through the wall and men with large knives waited at the door. Whatever was going to happen that night, there was some comfort that she was spending it with a man who was not only the father of the only man she had ever truly been in love with, but also a man of impeccable manners.

  ‘If you walk down the High Street in Aldringham you’ll find a left turn just after you’ve passed Lloyds Bank. That left turn takes you into North Street. North Street is flanked on both sides by large red-brick Georgian houses, homes to dentists and lawyers and the odd affluent shopkeeper. As you walk on up the street though, you’ll find a little terrace of odd houses. The first three are of Elizabethan origin. An elderly woman, cat-ridden and hard of hearing, lives in the first. The second one stands empty, spurned by its owner who is said to be settled abroad. The third one is mine. The house next to mine is the end one. As yet, I do not know who lives there, but it’s a funny-looking house, tall and narrow, as if its creator had tried to squeeze it in, and yet there’s a full ten yards between that house and the next.’

  ‘What are you doing day-dreaming,’ Ophelia said. ‘You’re meant to be finishing unpacking. It’s almost ten o’clock. I’m starving.’

  ‘I wasn’t day-dreaming. I was writing a letter to a very dear friend in Sweden.’

  ‘So where’s the pen and paper?’

  ‘I was writing it in my head,’ Clementine said. ‘It saves postage. Anyway, you’re always hungry. I thought being in love was meant to stop you eating.’ Ophelia had recently become engaged to William, who ran an art gallery in Winchester. At the moment though, he was travelling round South America, collecting native sculpture.

  ‘Concentrate,’ Ophelia hissed as Clementine broke an egg, complete with bits of brown shell, into the mixing bowl. She paced round the kitchen, stopping now and then to peer over Clementine’s shoulder as she was scrambling the eggs. ‘You’re overdoing them,’ she said finally.

  ‘Salmonella,’ Clementine explained.

  Ophelia groaned but Clementine ignored her, stirring the mixture in the pan until it was pale yellow and crumbly, just the way neither of them liked it.

  ‘Salmonella can be very serious, as well as most unpleasant,’ she said, defending herself against Ophelia’s glare. Wanting to be loved, even by Ophelia, she added, ‘Let’s have some wine,’ and she brought down a bottle from the wine rack on top of the china cupboard. Ophelia had to stand on tiptoe just to get the glasses from the middle shelf. She was twenty-seven, a waif with blond urchin hair. Clementine had been tempted to have her own hair cut in the same way but, thankfully, she had stopped herself. It would never have worked. She was altogether too large, too milk-and-meat fed to make a decent urchin. No, the best Clementine could hope for was a large mermaid. She handed the wine to Ophelia who uncorked it expertly.

  ‘It’s two years since the divorce and I bet you haven’t seen anyone. What you need is a new man in your life.’ Ophelia took her plate and raised her glass to Clementine.

  Clementine winced. ‘I loathe that expression.’

  ‘What?’ Ophelia paused with a large forkful of eggs halfway to her lips. ‘What expression?’ Clementine looked at her and marvelled at how such a tiny mouth could accommodate such a large amount of scrambled eggs all in one go. And there weren’t even little dribbles of crumbs down her chin.

  ‘ “New man in your life,” that expression,’ she said. ‘I also hate, “Can I introduce you to the new man in my life.”’

  ‘Have we finished ranting?’

  Clementine had swallowed a large gulp of wine the wrong way and spilt some more down the front of her white shirt. ‘You remember the story of Prince Hat Underground?’ she asked, dabbing at the stains with her paper napkin.

  ‘Can’t say I do,’ Ophelia said, picking up the wine bottle. ‘One more for the shirt?’

  Clementine put her glass out. ‘It always was my favourite of all Aunt Elvira’s stories. Prince Hat is blind, and he lives in his kingdom underground, hence the title Prince Hat Under . . .’

  ‘I got that.’

  ‘Well, Prince Hat sits by a stream in a garden full of lilies and roses. Larks perch in the branches of the lemon trees, and kingfishers, their tails cobalt-blue flashes, dive in the sweet water below.’

  ‘Underground?’

  ‘Underground,’ Clementine said firmly. ‘This is a fairy tale, after all. So Prince Hat sits by the stream and plays his lute, and his playing is so sweet that the birds themselves pause in their singing to listen. A lock of dark hair falls across his forehead which is high and as smooth and white as alabaster. And his eyes, sea-green and luminous, are the saddest eyes you ever saw.’ Clementine lifted her glass to her lips and drank from it, slowly, dreamily.

  ‘They wouldn’t be, you know,’ Ophelia said. ‘If he was blind, his eyes wouldn’t be luminous.’

  ‘You have the soul of a French merchant,’ Clementine said, putting her glass down with a little bang. ‘And by that, I mean a very tight little soul indeed.’

  ‘So tell my tight little soul, what has this luminous Hat got to do with whether or not you get laid this year?’

  Clementine frowned at her. ‘Would you care to rephrase that?’

  ‘So what has it got to do with anything?’ Ophelia said obediently.

  ‘Everything,’ Clementine answered, getting up and putting her plate in the sink.

  It was midnight by the time they had unpacked the last of the boxes. Tired but satisfied with the evening’s work, Clementine looked around the little sitting-room. She stiffened. What was this now? Her things looking so at home amongst Aunt Elvira’s Sanderson chintz curtains and sofa. In fact, the room looked just the same as before, just more crowded. Even the indolent nude sprawled on a day bed, a bunch of white roses placed on her rounded belly, looked just right above Aunt Elvira’s walnut bureau. Had Elvira been right? Was Clementine really the very image of her, the woman known as the sheep of the family because, Clementine’s father had said, she was not interesting enough to earn the prefix black.

  ‘You’re not keeping those?’ Ophelia pointed to the shoebox filled with letters and cards sitting on the coffee-table.

  ‘Gustaf’s letters,’ Clementine sighed and shrugged her shoulders. ‘I just can’t seem to bring myself to get rid of them.’

  Ophelia’s pointy little face softened and she padded across the rug in her stocking feet, reaching up to put her tiny hand on Clementine’s shoulder. ‘You loved him a lot didn’t you?’

  Clementine’s big brown eyes softened in response. She looked down at her hands, inspecting her long fingers, counting the ones on her left hand first, then those on the right. It would be a lie to say she was surprised to see them adding up to ten. She rested on her heels and wiggled her toes. She gazed across the room.

  ‘No,’ she admitted finally.

  The small wooden squirrel Ophelia had picked up from the table slipped from her hand and rolled across the floor, coming to rest under the embroidered piano stool.

  ‘No, I don’t believe I loved him nearly enough,’ Clementine said, kneeling down on the floor to retrieve the squirrel. A sound as if something heavy had fallen, came from the other side of the wall, followed by a man’s voice, cursing. There was a moment’s silence and then the soft tones of an old ballad played on the guitar reached Clementine, who was still kneeling by the piano.

  Standing up she said, ‘Our neighbour? A schizophrenic obviously.’

  ‘Don’t change the subject,’ Ophelia threw herself onto the armchair, the way you can when you are petite. If Clementine threw herself onto an armchair, all five feet eleven and three quarters of her, it would probably collapse. ‘Did it just not work out, or did you never really love him?’ Ophelia looked at Clementine, her head cocked to one side, her
eyes alert.

  Clementine sat down neatly on the sofa. ‘It worked out fine for a long time. Gustaf wanted a wife and I don’t think he was particularly fussy about what kind, and I … ?’ Her voice drifted off into silence.

  ‘Can’t you ever finish a sentence?’ Ophelia snapped.

  ‘He didn’t sing “Oh my darling Clementine” at me,’ Clementine said. ‘It made him stand out from other men.’ She closed her eyes, trying to summon up a picture of the man she was married to for thirteen years. The best she could do was a view of his back, the way she had first seen him. He had been browsing round the fiction section of the bookstore where she was working during the holidays; a tall, fair, slightly stooping figure. He had turned round, scanning the shop for assistance, and there she had been, Clementine, perched on a set of library steps. She had tripped as she came down. She always was clumsy; pretty, she knew that now, but clumsy. Until she met Gustaf, it had not seemed an irresistible combination. Her family had done their best, trying hard to boost her confidence. Take her thirteenth birthday dance. Juliet had been determined to make her little sister feel good about herself, so she paid three of the boys a pound each to fight over Clementine. Being fought over was all the rage at the time. The group of friends, all from the same progressive weekly boarding-school some ten miles outside Aldringham, had been having parties – what their mothers embarrassingly insisted on calling dances – at each other’s houses for some time already. The fashion was for the boys to go up to the most popular girls and jostle and shove and posture until all but one gave up. The remaining boy got to dance with the girl. Those parties had made Clementine understand what her father meant when he talked of, ‘man’s incurable optimism’. It was all about turning up to horrible party after horrible party because you still believed that one day Prince Charming would arrive with a size-eight slipper. And there she was, even giving a party of her own. She was wearing a cream trouser suit with flares. Her mother had chosen it, oohed over it and bought it. Clementine had been seduced by it. She knew the moment the first guest arrived that the suit had been a mistake. In their group there were girls who were fashionable and girls who were not. Clementine was not. Nothing good would come from trying to change. Then, suddenly, there were three of the most popular boys standing right in front of her, shoving and jostling, asking for a dance. Her mother had been right about the trouser suit after all. And about other things. Had she not told Clementine that one day she would grow into her features? Clementine had just not expected it to happen so quickly. Still, she had read more than enough novels to know how to cope with rival suitors. She had the words all prepared; gracious but commiserating for the loser, gently encouraging for the lucky winner, when the boys withdrew, each one trying to shove the other one forward. ‘You have her.’

  ‘No, you take her.’

  ‘Nah, it’s OK.’

  ‘Bloody hell, that was three quid I gave you,’ Juliet screeched as the boys scurried off to help themselves to cheese and pineapple cubes and cauliflower florets with Mexican dip. Clementine remained on her chair, sitting very still, scuffing the toes of her loafers against the soft-pile emerald carpet (not even her mother had been able to persuade her to wear platforms, not at five feet ten).

  By the time she was fifteen she had reached her full height of five feet eleven and a bit. The bit was most probably an inch, but she tended to be a bit vague on that point. Her hands and feet were well-shaped, but not small. No boy could hide her hands in his, but she could lend them her gumboots. But in the end, her mother had been proven right, as mothers usually are. Clementine had turned from large and plain to large and pretty. Well, pretty on the outside. On the inside she was still plain. The wicked fairy had nothing on young boys when it came to lifelong curses, she thought. How many pretty women got up each morning and grimaced into their looking-glass. ‘Mirror mirror on the wall, I really haven’t changed at all.’

  She played make-believe. She picked out a boy, decided she was in love, charmed him, because now she found she could, and then she stayed determinedly in love until she got bored. The boys got confused. No sooner had they congratulated themselves on how much that sweet shy girl adored them, than that sweet girl flittered off. Maybe drifted, was a better word, Clementine thought. She was too big to flitter. She had meant no harm. She was just so stuffed full of romance and unfocused affection that she had to have someone to love or she feared she would explode and spill all over the shiny school corridors and the tidy small-town streets of Aldringham.

  In the summer of ’79 when the tarmac got so hot that the dogs walked on tiptoe, she loved her sister Juliet’s boyfriend. She watched Robin from her bedroom window on the second floor as he strode up to the front door to collect Juliet for a party or the cinema, or a weekend away. Then she would hurry downstairs on some trumped-up errand, and when he passed her in the hall she wanted to tear her heart from her chest and present it to him like some Aztec sacrifice. What she actually did was smile.

  Robin smiled back, giving her a little pat on the bottom as he passed. ‘Always happy aren’t you, Clemmie?’

  In August Juliet went away to Israel, but Clementine still watched for Robin from her bedroom window. She sat cooling herself in the evening air, brushing her hair that was long and light brown, when any fool knows that the princess who gets her prince is invariably fair, like Juliet. But one evening Robin’s maroon Renault pulled up outside the house and Clementine flew downstairs to greet him. She was wearing a swirling cotton dress and she could feel the beads of sweat trickling down between her breasts. She stood in front of him, and then and there she decided to stop fighting the wantonness that she had kept locked up inside her like a high-security prisoner ever since she had been told that girls were good. She flung her arms around his neck and pressing her lips against his cheek she wept, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’

  If only she had waited a few minutes she would have found out that Robin had arrived to tell her mother that he and Juliet were engaged and that he was on his way out to join her in Israel. As Clementine’s father always said, ‘timing is all’.

  A week later Gustaf had walked into the Treasure Trove Bookshop.

  ‘I was so utterly unsuited to youth,’ Clementine confessed to Ophelia who had just returned to the sitting-room with two mugs of hot chocolate. ‘I simply had no idea how to go about being young and carefree. Nights at the disco, backpacking holidays, parties that go on until dawn and end with breakfast in a nearby inn; Gustaf rescued me from all of that.’ Clementine fell silent, before adding, ‘And all-absorbing, turning-the-world-upside-down passion.’

  A month after their first meeting Gustaf proposed to Clementine. Clementine accepted. Her parents were surprised; it was all so sudden, she was so young, only twenty-one, but Gustaf was a good man and an artist. Clementine’s father approved of Gustaf being a painter in much the same way as other fathers might approve of a stockbroker or a doctor for a son-in-law. Six weeks after their engagement Gustaf returned to Sweden, his mother’s country, to finish his work for a planned exhibition. Clementine remained in Aldringham, enjoying the attention given to a bride-to-be. Even her stepmother, Grace, looked at her with new interest and gave her a copy of Bride magazine. During the two months that Gustaf was away Clementine loved him like she had never loved him before and never would again. It was November now and she was teaching music at St George’s, the local kindergarten. In her spare time she lay on her bed in her mother’s house and thought about Gustaf. She had not realized until he left, quite how warm his smile was or how kind the look in his blue eyes. He was taller than her, fair and really quite good-looking, especially in profile. She decided that she could hardly wait to start her life with him in his house in the village of Abbotslea, some miles outside town. Her passion lasted right through to the day of their wedding although she did begin to wonder, as she sat in the car with her father on their way to St Andrew’s church, why she was not feeling happier. They spent their honeymoon in St J
ean de Luz. The first morning, the hotel porter had called their room to wake them. ‘Bonjour, Madame Hope,’ he had twinkled down the line. His voice had carried such expectations of fulfilled young love, and annoyingly her eyes had filled with tears. Tiredness, Clementine had told herself. She got plenty of rest during the next three weeks. She spent hours lying on the large brass bed in their little hotel room, a model for her husband’s work rather than an object of his desire, but that was all right. She lay still, she was good at that, and dreamt a lot.

  ‘You know Ophelia,’ she said, ‘those early years of marriage were the happiest of my life; all cosy and chintzy and rosy.’

  Then came the move to Sweden and the grey and white painted wooden house on the edge of a lake. It was a beautiful house, old, low-built and with tall windows facing the lake. Clementine continued to teach music. For her own pleasure she played for hours every day, seated at the large black grand piano by the French windows. Sometimes, reluctantly, she took part in local musical evenings or performed in small concerts. But Gustaf painted less and less, spending most of his time lecturing to the art students at Uppsala.

  ‘Those tiled stoves,’ Clementine said; ‘I really miss them.’ The tiled stoves were indeed beautiful, each room housing a different one, blue and white, pink and white, green and white. ‘Very Carl Larsson,’ she said. ‘I think Gustaf wanted to be Carl Larsson actually, and when he couldn’t be, and when we couldn’t have children either, well I suppose that was more disappointment than he could take. “Just carryon trying,” that doctor said. ‘Relax and enjoy yourselves. Eat a good dinner, drink some wine, but not too much mind, put on some music.” It was all very well, but then poor Gustaf slipped a disc to the strains of Schubert’s Wiegenlied. It made him feel old, I think, all that hobbling around. All things considered I really can’t blame him for falling in love with that student. She told him he was greater than Carl Larsson had ever been and she was just a child herself; no, I can’t blame him.’