Bread and Chocolate Read online

  ‘I’ll do you a deal,’ I offered. The anger in my voice was quite hidden.

  ‘What’s that?’ He was relieved. He thought he had got away with it. He had wanted this ever since he had started his love affair with Helen, and now he had it. He had to struggle to keep his excitement out of his voice.

  ‘Let me take your picture,’ I said. ‘With my old camera.’

  He laughed. It was such a little thing. He would have sold his soul to sleep in Helen’s bed in her Docklands flat, and party with her smart friends all week, and then come home to me, complaisant, ignorant, in the country at weekends.

  ‘Now?’ he asked.

  ‘Now!’ I said gaily.

  I fetched the heavy camera and saw the firelight reflected in a hundred little points on the brass fittings. I ducked under the hood and looked at Mark through the glass window. His image was inverted but I could recognise his expression. He looked like a little boy who has broken into a sweet shop at night. He looked ready to eat himself sick.

  I slid in the treated glass, and pulled out the metal slide. I took off the lens cap and counted to sixty – there was only one lamp on, and the firelight. Then I capped the lens with that little half-turn and pushed in the slide and took the glass to develop.

  ‘Will you be long?’ Mark called. I heard the chink of the brandy bottle on his glass. ‘Are you coming to bed?’

  I checked, I could not believe it, but it was true. He wanted to celebrate by having us both, both in the same day. He wanted to kiss me, and caress me while his skin still remembered her touch. He wanted to taste me while his tongue was still furred with the alcohol he had drunk in her bed. He wanted to come inside me, while his body was still sticky from her wetness. He was greedy for us both.

  ‘Don’t wait up,’ I said from my darkroom.

  I printed two pictures. One for me and one for George Cozens. I pegged them on the line, and I looked, in that safe red light, from the picture of Mark to the pictures of the other two: of my baby and my dearest friend. Both dead.

  Then I went to the sitting room and closed the door as quietly as Mark used to close it. I dialled George Cozens’ number and when he answered I said I was sorry to ring so late, but it was about the camera. His grandfather had taken very few pictures of people – did George know why that was?

  He chuckled, a late-night whisky laugh. ‘Because they thought it would steal their souls, you know,’ he said. ‘Primitive peoples, odd superstitions.’

  I nodded. ‘I thought so,’ I said. ‘And one more thing … What was the name of the tribe of Indians he photographed? When he did manage to get them to pose?’

  George hesitated. ‘Let me see, they were called the … the … Ekondo tribe. But there’s not much about them in the books,’ he said. ‘They’re all dead now. They died soon after my grandfather’s visit.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said softly, thinking of the three pictures pinned in my darkroom. My baby, my friend, and now, beside them, the picture of my husband. ‘I thought they would be.’

  The Garden

  My husband is a great one for his garden. He never will let me touch a thing. His garden shed is as he wants it – just so – and he has a greenhouse too, with little plant pots made of orange plastic marching in rows down the staged shelves, which he paints with creosote. The smell of the chemical is like illness. It is coloured a bright green, like toilet cleaner. His greenhouse smells like a morgue.

  Every winter he takes the motor mower to be serviced and the blades to be sharpened and made ready for the onslaught of the springing grass when the season opens. He prepares for it like a gamekeeper prepares for a pheasant shoot. All his winter season is directed to the moment when he can get out into the garden and cut it back. He checks the scything whip of the strimmer; he oils and sharpens the crocodile bite of the hedger. Then, on the first sunny day, he tells me he will be gardening all day.

  ‘I can’t wait!’ he says with his sharp little laugh.

  He goes out with his blades and his sprays to work in the garden until teatime. When he comes in for his tea his hands are stained green with sap, like a butcher’s palms are reddened with blood. The soft new grass on the lawn is crushed down, the damp earth churned up, the hedge at the front of the house is split and torn, and the soft little corners of the garden where unexceptional plants had taken root and started to grow are laid bare: strimmed and whipped down to the root.

  When he sees the devastation he has caused, even he can see that the garden looks a little bare. Then he seeks to fill the vacuum he has made.

  ‘What about one of these swinging chairs?’ he asks, showing me a catalogue full of bright plastic.

  He thinks to buy me with toys.

  ‘For the patio?’ he says. ‘This one’s nice, and I could get these ornamental urns to match.’

  He likes his garden furniture, does my husband. He likes things in the garden that do not loll or sprawl or fruit. He likes plastic statues coloured to look like stone, his flower pots as red as the original terracotta. He likes moulded concrete pots painted to the colour of sandstone. He likes wooden barrels that were never made to hold beer. He does not mind that nothing is what it pretends to be. He does not mind that nothing is real.

  Last summer he bought a dinner table and six chairs for the patio. They looked as if they were made of wrought iron, forged and hammered by a man working with iron and fire, cooled in a hissing trough of water. But they were not metal, they were no element at all. At the first wind they were bowled over and blown across the lawn, breaking buds where they rolled, tossed about like a child’s discarded toys. They were plastic, they were all but nothing. Now, before he comes in from his garden, he stacks them one upon another like Tupperware boxes on a shelf, and he puts a stone on top to weigh them down.

  I remember when he had no garden, when he was nothing more than a lad with an allotment. He took my eye when I stepped off the bus to go home. I was a young woman then, I worked in a shop that sold cards and pens and writing pads. A nice shop, as my mother pointed out to me, with nothing dirty to handle and nothing heavy to lift. Every evening when the bus dropped me at the stop and I started to walk home he would cycle past me, going from his allotment to his own home, where his mother was cooking his tea. Some days he wobbled unevenly with a bouquet of leeks clasped to his shirt. Some days he had a wickerwork basket brimming with new potatoes with the soil still clinging to their skins. In midsummer he embraced a marrow, in autumn he had his arm around the golden globe of a pumpkin. I noticed him because he seemed like a boy from the land itself, as if the allotment had grown him, brown-haired and brown-eyed and muddy-fingered, just as it grew these lush vegetables. And I thought, day-dreamy shop girl that I was, that his kisses might be sweet and strong like vegetables grown in good earth. That to love him might be to put down roots of my own.

  It was me that first called out to him. He used to wobble slowly past me, as if he was thinking what he might say, how he might start a conversation. But it was me, a bit of a brazen girl perhaps, who said pertly enough: ‘When are you going to grow some flowers then?’

  He stopped at once. ‘I don’t grow flowers,’ he said humbly. ‘I don’t see the point. You can’t eat flowers. Would you like some carrots?’

  I laughed at that, but he did not mind. He smiled at my laughter and still he held out for me the earth-stained brilliant carrots with their thick green heads and their long slim orange roots. ‘I don’t cook,’ I said, inspecting them.

  ‘You can eat them raw.’

  He took one and rubbed it carefully on the sleeve of his jacket. He held it to my mouth. I nibbled it, like a tempted rabbit, nibbled it gently and tasted the flavour, as sweet as fruit, and the delicious cold chunky texture. ‘It’s nice,’ I said, surprised.

  ‘I’ll bring you some peas tomorrow,’ he promised me, and then he was back on his bike and gone into the early summer twilight, leaving me with a carrot in my hand, which I ate on the way as I walked slowly home.

&nbsp