Wild Mountain Thyme Read online

  “I thought you’d be going out.”

  Sally’s private life was both complicated and lively. She had a string of men friends, none of whom seemed to be aware of the others’ existence. Like an adroit juggler, Sally kept them all on the go, and avoided the embarrassment of inadvertently muddling their names by calling them all “darling.”

  “No, thank God. How about you?”

  “I’m meant to be going out to have a drink with some friends of my mother’s. I don’t suppose it will be very thrilling.”

  “Oh, well,” said Sally, “you never know. Life is full of surprises.”

  One of the good things about working in Beauchamp Place was that it was within walking distance of Pendleton Mews. The flat in Pendleton Mews belonged to Victoria’s mother, but it was Victoria who lived there. Most of the time she enjoyed the walk. Down shortcuts and narrow back roads, it only took half an hour and provided a little pleasant exercise and fresh air at the beginning and the end of the day.

  But this evening it was so cold and wet that the prospect of a trudge through icy wind and rain was almost more than she could bear; so, breaking her own rule about never taking taxis, she succumbed, without much resistance, to temptation, walked up to the Bromptom Road and finally flagged down a cab.

  Because of one-way streets and snarled-up traffic, it took perhaps ten minutes longer to reach the Mews than if she had made the journey on foot, and cost so much that she simply handed the driver a pound note and let him count out the meagre change. He had set her down at the arch that divided the Mews from the road, so there was still a little way to go, across the puddles and the shining wet cobbles before she reached at last the haven of her own blue front door. She opened the door with her latch key, reached inside and switched on the light; climbed the steep, narrow stairs, carpeted in worn beige Wilton, and emerged at the top directly into the small sitting room.

  She shed umbrella and basket and went to draw the chintz curtains against the night. The room at once became enclosed and safe. She lit the gas fire and went through to the tiny kitchen to put on a kettle for a cup of coffee; switched on the television and then switched it off again, put a Rossini overture on the record player, went into her bedroom to take off raincoat and boots.

  The kettle, competing with Rossini, whistled for attention. She made a mug of instant coffee, went back to the fireside, pulled her basket towards her and took out Sally’s evening paper. She turned to the item about Oliver Dobbs and the new play in Bristol.

  I was eighteen and impressionable, she had said to Sally, but she knew now that she had also been lonely and vulnerable, a ripe fruit, trembling on its stalk, waiting to fall.

  And Oliver, of all men, had been standing at the foot of the tree, waiting to catch her.

  * * *

  Eighteen, and in her first year at art school. Knowing nobody, intensely shy and unsure of herself, she had been both flattered and apprehensive when an older girl, perhaps taking pity on Victoria, had flung a vague invitation to a party in her direction.

  “Goodness knows what it’ll be like, but I was told I could ask anybody I wanted. You’re meant to bring a bottle of something, but I don’t suppose it matters if you come empty handed. Anyway, it’s a good way to meet people. Look, I’ll write down the address. The man’s called Sebastian, but that doesn’t matter. Just turn up if you feel like it. Any time; that doesn’t matter either.”

  Victoria had never had such an invitation in her life. She decided that she wouldn’t go. And then decided that she would. And then got cold feet. And finally put on a pair of clean jeans, stole a bottle of her mother’s best claret, and went.

  She ended up in a top floor flat in West Kensington, clutching her bottle of claret and knowing nobody. Before she had been there two minutes somebody said “How immensely kind,” and removed the bottle of claret, but nobody else said a single word to her. The room was filled with smoke, intense men in beads, and girls with grey faces and long seaweed-like hair. There was even a grubby baby or two. There was nothing to eat and—once she had parted with the claret—nothing recognizable to drink. She could not find the girl who suggested that she come and was too shy to join any of the tight, conversational groups gathered on floor, cushions or the single sagging sofa that had curly wire springs protruding from between arm and seat. She was, as well, too diffident to go and get her coat and leave. The air was filled with the sweet and insidious smell of marijuana, and she was standing in the bay window, lost in nerve-wracking fantasies of a possible police raid, when suddenly somebody said, “I don’t know you, do I?”

  Startled, Victoria swung round, so clumsily that she almost knocked the drink out of his hand.

  “Oh, I am sorry…”

  “It doesn’t matter. It hasn’t spilled. At least,” he added, generously, “not very much.”

  He smiled as though this were a joke, and she smiled back, grateful for any friendly overture. Grateful too that out of such woebegone company the only man who had spoken to her was neither dirty, sweaty, nor drunk. On the contrary, he was perfectly presentable. Even attractive. Very tall, very slender with reddish hair that reached to the collar of his sweater, and an immensely distinguished beard.

  He said, “You haven’t got a drink.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you want one?”

  She said no again, because she didn’t and also because if she said that she did, he might go away to get her one and never come back again.

  He seemed amused. “Don’t you like it?”

  Victoria looked at his glass. “I don’t exactly know what it is.”

  “I don’t suppose anybody does. But this tastes like…” He took a mouthful, thoughtfully, like a professional taster, rolling it round his mouth, finally swallowing it, “… red ink and aniseed balls.”

  “What’s it going to do to the inside of your stomach?”

  “We’ll worry about that in the morning.” He looked down at her, a frown of concentration furrowing his brow. “I don’t know you, do I?”

  “No. I don’t suppose you do. I’m Victoria Bradshaw.” Even saying her own name made her feel embarrassed, but he did not seem to think that there was anything embarrassing about it.

  “And what do you do with yourself?”

  “I’ve just started at art college.”

  “That explains how you got to this little do. Are you enjoying it?”

  She looked around. “Not very much.”

  “I actually meant art college, but if you’re not enjoying this very much, why don’t you go home?”

  “I thought it wouldn’t be very polite.”

  He laughed at that. “You know, in this sort of company, politeness doesn’t count all that much.”

  “I’ve only been here for ten minutes.”

  “And I’ve only been here for five.” He finished his drink, tipping back his remarkable head and pouring the remains of the noxious tumbler down the back of his throat as easily as if it had been a cold and tasty beer. Then he set the glass down on the window ledge and said, “Come on. We’re leaving.” And he put a hand under her elbow and steered her expertly towards the door, and without making the vaguest of excuses or even saying good-bye, they left.

  At the top of the dingy staircase, she turned to face him.

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “What didn’t you mean?”

  “I mean that I didn’t want you to leave. I wanted me to leave.”

  “How do you know I didn’t want to leave?”

  “But it was a party!”

  “I left those sort of parties behind light years ago. Come on, hurry up, let’s get out into the fresh air.”

  On the pavement, in the soft dusk of a late summer’s night, she stopped again. She said, “I’m all right now.”

  “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  “I can get a taxi, and go home.”

  He began to smile. “Are you frightened?”

  Victoria became embar
rassed all over again. “No, of course not.”

  “Then what you running away from?”

  “I’m not running away from anything. I simply…”

  “Want to go home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well you can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’re going to go and find a spaghetti house or something, and we’re going to buy a proper bottle of wine, and you are going to tell me the story of your life.”

  An empty taxi hove into view, and he hailed it. It stopped, and he bundled her in. After he gave the taxi driver directions, they drove in silence for about five minutes, and then the taxi stopped and he bundled her out again. He paid off the taxi and led her across the pavement into a small and unpretentious restaurant, with a few tables crowded around the walls and the air thick with cigarette smoke and the good smells of cooking food. They were given a table in the corner without enough room for his long legs, but somehow he arranged them so that his feet didn’t trip the passing waiters, and he ordered a bottle of wine and asked for a menu, and then he lit a cigarette and turned to her and said, “Now.”

  “Now what?”

  “Now tell me. The story of your life.”

  She found herself smiling. “I don’t even know who you are. I don’t know what your name is.”

  “It’s Oliver Dobbs.” He went on, quite kindly, “You have to tell me everything, because I’m a writer. A real honest-to-God published writer, with an agent and an enormous overdraft, and a compulsion for listening. Do you know, nobody listens enough. People fall over themselves trying to tell other people things, and nobody ever listens. Did you know that?”

  Victoria thought of her parents. “Yes, I suppose I do.”

  “You see? You suppose. You’re not sure. Nobody’s ever sure of anything. They should listen more. How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “I thought you were less when I saw you. You looked about fifteen standing there in the window of that crumby joint. I was about to ring the welfare and tell them that a tiny junior minor was out on the streets at night.”

  The wine came, uncorked, a liter bottle dumped onto the table. He picked it up and filled their glasses. He said, “Where do you live?”

  “Pendleton Mews.”

  “Where’s that?”

  She told him and he whistled. “How very smart. A real Knightsbridge girl. I didn’t realize they went to art college. You must be immensely rich.”

  “Of course I’m not rich.”

  “Then why do you live in Pendleton Mews?”

  “Because it’s my mother’s house, only she’s living in Spain just now, so I use it.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser. Why is Mrs. Bradshaw living in Spain?”

  “She’s not Mrs. Bradshaw, she’s Mrs. Paley. My parents divorced six months ago. My mother married again, to this man called Henry Paley, and he has a house in Sotogrande because he likes playing golf all the time.” She decided to get it all over in a single burst. “And my father has gone to live with some cousin who owns a moldering estate in Southern Ireland. He’s threatening to breed polo ponies, but he’s always been a man of great ideas but little action, so I don’t suppose he will.”

  “And little Victoria is left to live in London.”

  “Victoria is eighteen.”

  “Yes, I know, old and experienced. Do you live alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t you lonely?”

  “I’d rather be alone than live with people who dislike each other.”

  He made a face. “Parents are hell, aren’t they? My parents are hell, too, but they’ve never done anything so definite as divorcing each other. They just molder on in darkest Dorset, and everything—their reduced circumstances, the cost of a bottle of gin, the fact that the hens aren’t laying—is blamed on either me or the government.”

  Victoria said, “I like my parents. It was just that they’d stopped liking each other.”

  “Have you got brothers or sisters?”

  “No. Just me.”

  “No one to take care of you?”

  “I take very good care of myself.”

  He looked disbelieving. “I shall take care of you,” he announced, magnificently.

  After that evening Victoria did not see Oliver Dobbs again for two weeks, and by that time she knew that she was never going to see him again. And then it was a Friday evening, and she was so miserable that she compulsively spring-cleaned the flat, which did not need it, and then decided to wash her hair.

  It was while she was kneeling by the bath with her head under the shower that she heard the bell ring. She wrapped herself up in a towel and went to open the door, and it was Oliver. Victoria was so pleased to see him that she burst into tears, and he came in and shut the door and took her in his arms, then and there, at the foot of the stairs, and dried her face with the end of the towel. After this they went upstairs, and he produced a bottle of wine out of his jacket pocket, and she found some glasses, and they sat by the gas fire and drank wine together. And when they had finished the wine, she went into her bedroom to get dressed, and to comb out her long, fair, damp tresses, and Oliver sat on the end of the bed and watched her. And then he took her out for dinner. There were no apologies, no excuses for his two weeks silence. He had been in Birmingham, he told her, and that was all. It never occurred to Victoria to ask him what he had been doing there.

  And this proved to be the pattern of their relationship. He came and went, in and out of her life, unpredictable, and yet strangely constant. Each time he came back, she never knew where he had been. Perhaps Ibiza, or perhaps he had met some man who owned a cottage in Wales. He was not only unpredictable, he was strangely secretive. He never spoke about his work, and she did not even know where he lived, except that it was a basement flat in some street off the Fulham Road. He was moody, too, and once or twice she had seen a terrifying flash of uncontrollable temper, but this all seemed to be an acceptable part of the fact that he was a writer and a true artist. And there was another side to the coin. He was funny and loving and immensely good company. It was like having the kindest sort of older brother who was, at the same time, irresistibly attractive.

  When they were not together, she told herself that he was working. She imagined him at his typewriter, writing and rewriting, destroying, starting again, never achieving his own goals of perfection. Sometimes, he had a little money to spend on her. At others, none at all, and then Victoria would provide the food and cook it for him in the Mews flat, and she would buy him a bottle of wine and the small cigars that she knew he loved.

  There came a bad period when he went through a slough of despondency. Nothing would go right and nothing seemed to be selling, and it was then that he took the night job in a little café, piling dirty dishes into the automatic washer. After that things began to get better again, and he sold a play to Independent Television, but he still went on washing dishes in order to be able to earn enough money to pay his rent.

  Victoria had no other men friends, and did not want them. For some reason, she never imagined Oliver with other women. There was no occasion for jealousy. What she had of Oliver was not much, but it was enough.

  The first she heard of Jeannette Archer was when Oliver told her that he was going to be married.

  It was early summer, and the windows of Victoria’s flat were open to the Mews. Below, Mrs. Tingley from number fourteen was bedding out geraniums in her decorative tubs, and the man who lived two doors down was cleaning his car. Pigeons cooed from rooftops, and the distant hum of traffic was deadened by trees in full leaf. They sat on the window seat, and Victoria was sewing a button onto Oliver’s jacket. It hadn’t fallen off, but it was going to, and she had offered to sew it on before it did. She found a needle and thread and put a knot in the thread and pushed the needle into the worn corduroy when Oliver said, “What would you say if I told you I was going to be married?”

  Victoria pushed the needle right
into her thumb. The pain was minute but excruciating. She pulled the needle carefully out and watched the red bead of blood swell and grow. Oliver said, “Suck it, quickly, or it’ll drip all over my coat,” and when she didn’t, he took her wrist and thrust her thumb into his mouth. Their eyes met. He said, “Don’t look at me like that.”

  Victoria looked at her thumb. It throbbed as though some person had hit it with a hammer. She said, “I don’t know any other way to look.”

  “Well say something then. Don’t just stare at me like a lunatic.”

  “I don’t know what I’m meant to say.”

  “You could wish me luck.”

  “I didn’t know … that you … I mean, I didn’t know that you were…” She was trying, even at this ghastly juncture, to be rational, polite, tactful. But Oliver scorned such euphemisms and interrupted brutally.

  “You mean, you never realized that there was anybody else? And that, if you like it, is a line, straight from an out-of-date novel. The kind my mother reads.”

  “Who is she?”

  “She’s called Jeannette Archer. She’s twenty-four, a nicely brought-up girl with a nice flat and a nice little car, and a good job, and we’ve been living together for the past four months.”

  “I thought you lived in Fulham.”

  “I do sometimes, but I haven’t just lately.”

  She said, “Do you love her?” because she simply had to know.

  “Victoria, she’s going to have a child. Her parents want me to marry her so that the baby will have a father. It seems to matter to them very much.”

  “I thought you didn’t pay regard to parents.”

  “I don’t if they’re like mine, complaining and unsuccessful. But these particular parents happen to have a lot of money. I need money. I need money to buy the time to write.”

  She knew that she wouldn’t. Her thumb still ached. Her eyes were filling with tears, and so that he shouldn’t see them, she dropped her head and started to try to sew on the button, but the tears brimmed over and rolled down her cheeks and fell, great drops on the corduroy of his coat. He saw them and said, “Don’t cry.” And he put a hand under her chin and lifted her streaming face.