Unnatural Order. Liz Porter

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СКАЧАТЬ she didn’t say she found his friends boring. But she was rude enough to say that the afternoon tea had made her nostalgic for people like Steve and Vicki.

      She didn’t attempt to explain that she had left university determined to collect as many experiences as possible; good and bad. A mixture of caution and cowardice had kept her from allowing Steve or Vicki to stick one of their well-used syringes into her arm, although she had eagerly swallowed the many pills they offered her. It wasn’t until she became a journalist that she realised there was a safe vicarious alternative to trying every possible experience yourself.

      After three days in Gellingen she still hadn’t written a word in her diary, although she had managed to get some time alone.

      Karl had two school meetings on successive mornings, so Caroline decided to visit the local pool. It was, as he had told her proudly, Olympic-size, outdoor, set in parkland and heated. She walked there and back, breathing deeply as she strolled along a tree-lined path that hugged the river and trying not to make comparisons with the way she got her exercise in London: the walk through polluted air across crowded Waterloo Bridge and along the Strand to Covent Garden; the overcrowded dressing room; the exercise class in an overcrowded gym; the rush for the queue for showers; and the dash to a crowded Tube back to the office.

      At the swimming pool itself, spacious, state-of-the-art and spotless, she thought of the smell of mould that pervaded the local baths in Holloway, only 25 metres long so you had reached the other end before you had a chance to think.

      In the long, empty lanes of the Gellingen Freibad there was too much opportunity to think. Too many ideas floated into her brain, unsought, as she swam up and down, watching the black lane-lines slip past below and repeating to herself, mantra-like, the number of laps she’d swum.

      Mostly she thought of Karl and how much more appealing he seemed now. Was it only that he was more confident on his own home ground? She was still at a loss to explain the speed with which he claimed to have fallen in love with her. But she had started to accept it, even to respect his honesty.

      Before, she had taken his premature talk of love and relationships as a sign of weakness or desperation. Now that she had had a chance to see how he lived, it was clear that he had not turned to her out of loneliness. There were women queuing up to visit him. And there’d be no shortage of tea and sympathy for him when she went back to London.

      But what did that mean? Did the existence of competition make the prize more worthy? Did his popularity mean he was any less neurotic?

      She could identify one sensible reason behind her change of heart? Her knowledge that Karl had a good life in Germany had made her respect him more. In Portugal she could only assess him in terms of his relationship with her. Now she could see him with others and he seemed to be both kind and easy-going.

      The day before Caroline was due to fly back, Karl insisted on showing her around Stuttgart. He carefully avoided mentioning future plans as he showed her galleries, bookshops and theatres. He didn’t need to. Everywhere they went Caroline tried to imagine herself as a local, and was shocked to find herself enjoying the game.

      Life with Karl would be comfortable, she thought, as they drank coffee at an outside table on the paved mall of the Konigstrasse. It would provide the intimacy and home life that, for years, she had envied from the outside looking in. But what about friends? What would she do without Anna? And Jane? All Karl’s neighbours appeared to be old. There would be nobody to nip downstairs and have a quick coffee with.

      Of course there would be Karl. But only Karl. Yet how long, as Karl had asked the night before, would she have Jane?

      He certainly had a knack for homing in on her vulnerabilities, and for plying her with enough wine to make her talk about them.

      The night before, over a beautifully cooked meal of veal with mushrooms, she had been in tears describing her street in London and how depressed she felt sometimes as she walked past her neighbours’ lit windows and saw vignette after vignette of family life. Bookshelves bulging with happy domestic clutter; a plump infant sitting in a highchair waving a spoon in the air while a six-year-old practised piano. Miseries and frustrations also lurked behind these tableaux vivants, but she couldn’t see them from the street. All she could feel was a sense of shared warmth – of meals cooked together or for one another. Of cups of tea in bed.

      ‘You could have all that here,’ Karl had said. She knew. But what else would she have?

      On the plane back to London, she finally opened her diary. But by then so much had happened she didn’t know where to start.

      August 7. Am I making a big mistake? she wrote in large letters on a new page.

      It had to be a mistake, she told herself, as the plane bumped down at Heathrow. And none of it would have happened if she hadn’t been so damned open with him.

      Why on earth had she ever told him that she envied Anna and the security of her life with Christopher? Or that the selfish, rotten part of her (or was that her entire personality?) would be devastated if Jane fell in love with someone because then she’d have no-one to stay home and watch Katharine Hepburn movies with. Or that there were really only two things she loved about her job: her colleagues and the unlimited access to private movie previews, and that what she wanted was to stay home and write fiction.

      She had made it so easy for Karl. She had said she wanted to settle down, and that she envied her married friends their loving partners. So there he was, offering her an opportunity to settle down and be constantly adored. He said she didn’t have to work if she didn’t want to.

      ‘Just stay home and write short stories, write novels, write kids’ books. Whatever makes you happy,’ he had said.

      The evening TV news had been on as they were talking. They had both looked up as an item came on about a woman arrested for the murder of her own small son. The woman, a slight figure with long unkempt blond hair and huge red-rimmed eyes, was being led away in handcuffs while a small crowd of onlookers jeered. The voice-over had been too fast for Caroline to catch all the facts, but there was plenty of editorial detail in the movement of the camera as it lingered on the woman’s tear-stained face and then panned across the vindictive expressions to be seen in the crowd around the police car.

      ‘First they arrested the husband, now they’ve let him go and they say she did it,’ Karl translated.

      ‘Couldn’t you write a story about her?’ he asked, when the segment was over.

      ‘Probably not,’ she had replied, suddenly irritated by the fact that she had to explain that English papers and magazines were far too parochial to care about a murder in another country unless there were some absolutely extraordinary circumstance – and, ideally, a British citizen involved.

      Non-journalists never had the slightest idea about the themes that made saleable magazine articles and Karl was no exception to the rule. He missed the terseness in her tone. He was too preoccupied with a small piece of paper on which he’d been doing a series of calculations.

      Not to bore her with details, he continued, but he had worked out exactly how much he had left from his salary after expenses. His conclusion was that he could definitely afford to support her while she wrote, although he wasn’t sure if he could manage to keep her in that beautiful Dior talcum powder that she always spilt on the floor after her bath.

      Had there been anything he hadn’t thought of, thought Caroline, absent-mindedly signalling the steward for another glass of wine. Why hadn’t she simply said, ‘It’s so lovely of you to ask, but it’s СКАЧАТЬ