You Don't Have to be Good Read online

  ‘Goodbye, my beautiful girl,’ she said. The tears rose up in her then and she concentrated on not sobbing. Laura brought her arms up and gave her aunt a fierce squeeze. Hair slides and clips pressed painfully into Bea’s cheek.

  Laura pulled away and looked at the ground, her mouth tugged downwards like a clown.

  Katharine’s voice sailed out of the car. ‘Absolutely not. Absolutely out of the question.’

  ‘Say goodbye to your mum for me.’

  Laura spluttered a laugh. Bea smiled and turned away.

  Rip

  FRANK SAT back on his heels and admired Wanda’s bottom. She lay face down on the couch before him, naked apart from her blouse. He had the letter from Lancashire Arts in one hand and a glass of Scotch in the other. Joy flooded his body, chased by a riptide of fear. Joy that his literary career might be about to be resurrected; fear that, like his early success, this moment in the sun would be just that, a moment. He looked again at the letter. There was to be a performance of his play by the Burnley Amateur Dramatic Association as part of the council’s Winter Arts Retrospective. Lancashire Arts would be delighted if he would attend the first night and take part in a short question-and-answer session on stage beforehand. Wanda was impressed.

  ‘You must be very clever,’ she said, raising herself up on her elbows and flicking through the pages of The Seagull in the Cherry Orchard. He had written it in his final year at university, and his parents had spent their holiday money getting five hundred copies printed and bound. It was a gesture that Frank had appreciated, although the cover had always irked him. An enormous seagull, sketched by Lance, had been pasted on top of a cherry tree (found in his mother’s gardening catalogue). Frank had, not very kindly, explained that the title was not literal; the play was not about a seagull in a cherry orchard, it was an exploration of the Chekhovian understanding of all our sorrow – that neither love nor work will rescue us. This comment was lost on his parents because love had indeed rescued them – for the time being.

  Wanda said, ‘What is the seagull sitting on?’

  Frank raised his eyes to heaven and took a slug of Scotch. He felt the spasm in his back relax a little and asked whether she would like a signed copy. He had four hundred and seventy of them in a box under the couch. Wanda was delighted and tried to turn over but Frank told her to stay as she was because, in all honesty, he found the front of a naked woman rather – what? Offputting? Intimidating? Demanding was the word he was looking for. Roughly he took the copy of the play from her, rested it on her bottom, and began to write an inscription. ‘For Wanda,’ he wrote, then hesitated. Thank you for cleaning my house? Don’t be ridiculous. My Masha? No, she’d probably never read Three Sisters. The pearl in my oyster? He was getting sentimental now. Hastily he signed his name, ‘Frank Pamplin’, and handed it back to her.

  ‘Your father drew the seagull!’ she cried. ‘Oh, your parents must love you very much.’

  He nodded and watched with satisfaction as she turned the pages of his play. Oh yes, he was loved. As a child, he was stuffed with love, loved half to death by his mother, who smothered and cosseted and fussed and pressed him. Like his clothes that she ironed every evening in front of the television while he got on with the time-consuming business of being clever and winning a place to Cambridge. But once the play was performed at the Cambridge Arts Club in his final year there, once he had decided that his future was to be a glittering career as a playwright, things hadn’t quite panned out the way they were supposed to. Wanda giggled.

  He drank more Scotch and let it roll, burning a little, across his tongue. Cambridge. He was the first in his family to go to university, and that wasn’t nothing either. Not like where Wanda grew up. In Poland everyone went to university and everyone was clever. But in England it was different. People said he would go far and he had. People expected him to get a First and he hadn’t.

  Frank put the bottle down. He wouldn’t drink any more because, on top of the painkillers he took for his back, it wasn’t helping with the potency issues he had been experiencing lately. Sad to say, where Bea was concerned, this was largely a case of a loss of desire. Hence, Wanda. The life cycle of a man was complicated, something that Bea failed to understand. Wanda was what he needed at this stage in his life. There was nothing wrong with it; all great artists required a younger woman at some point. Look at Picasso, Dickens, Tolstoy . . . He glanced over at Chekhov. Well, he shrugged, not all perhaps.

  Wanda was impressed that he had been a Cambridge student. She was turning the pages while swinging one leg up and down at the knee so that her bottom shuddered. Frank looked away. He felt perplexed. Why had his viva for a First gone so terribly wrong? He had nursed the scene of this missed opportunity for decades. He saw it now as the crucial moment when his life took a wrong turn and he still felt the sting of it. The whole interview had been awkward, like talking to a girl. In the Senior Tutor’s study he had faltered and strained after the finer points of Milton’s Paradise Lost, he had mouthed platitudes about the Age of Reason and then dried up altogether while the clock on the wall ticked the slow minutes away. The tutor had said, ‘Well, I think that is all,’ and pressed a brown bell in the wall by the fireplace. Frank sat and stared stupidly for a moment until the green baize door opened and a short man dressed like a waiter said, ‘Thank you, Mr Pamplin’ and held the door open for him. He got clumsily to his feet and tore the silence with the cry of his chair leg on the parquet floor. His crêpe soles squeaked the long clown’s walk from the window overlooking the quad, away from his future, his past and into the cramped and dimly lit anteroom that smelt of dust and leather.

  ‘And will your parents be at the performance in December?’ asked Wanda, turning on to her side.

  Frank got off her legs then and sat on the edge of the couch and picked up the letter again. He shook his head.

  ‘My mother died the year I left university. It was a shock. The last thing I was expecting.’

  Wanda put her hand on his back and stroked it. That was what Bea had done when he told her all those years ago, stroked his back tenderly.

  Wanda asked how she died but Frank didn’t answer because he didn’t really know. His mother had hidden her illness and he had never asked for the details. He knew it concerned the dark female interior of her, the unspoken secrets lodged inside her woman’s body. Lance told him she ignored the signs for a long time, carrying on with her secretarial job and running the home until the pains became agonies that made her lie down in the day and sit up all night.

  ‘What else you write, Frank?’

  He cleared his throat. He told her about the radio plays and the brief stint on the television soap Brookside. He told her that in those first years after his mother died he had written a lot; there had been a flurry of interest, enquiries from agents, the occasional invitation from theatre groups. He pulled down a file of cuttings and read some out to her. ‘Frank Pamplin has an original voice’; ‘Could this be the Chekhov of Burnley?’

  ‘And women, Frank? I bet the girls go crazy for you.’

  It was true that every time a play of his saw the light of day, a woman appeared with it. He told her about Sandra from the BBC and Valerie from Northern Arts, both relationships that managed to make it to three months, but his heart was never in it and after a while they would take the hint and that would be that. The most difficult part was telling his father. It mortified Lance to think that his son might never marry and have children of his own. He couldn’t understand it, and in truth nor could Frank.

  ‘And Bea?’

  ‘Be what?’

  ‘Then you met Bea! I like Bea very much.’

  Frank hardly felt it was appropriate to be discussing his wife. It was even less appropriate for her to like Bea. But of course she did. Everyone liked Bea.

  ‘Bea is a good woman,’ said Wanda.

  ‘She wasn’t very good when I met her.’ Carrying on with a married man was hardly exemplary behaviour in Frank’s book, after a
ll. ‘I made her good,’ he heard himself say.

  ‘Like God?’ Wanda had a smirk on her face that he didn’t appreciate. She erased it. ‘Where did you find her?’

  ‘On a boat. En route to Tobago or somewhere.’

  ‘How romantic.’ Wanda held her hand out for the Scotch bottle. ‘What were you doing on a boat?’

  Frank told her. He had learnt to explain his cruise ships story as a rite of passage. He avoided the details of those ten soul-sapping years on board the Oriana and Island Star. Once he moved out of his father’s house, and after a few years in London – flatshares, bedsits, the YMCA – he found himself, despite three more plays, staring thirty in the face and without enough to pay the rent on a decent place to live. He was too proud to go on the dole or into teaching, so when he saw an ad for cruise liner work it seemed like the answer to his problems. An income and a place to live, a chance to see the world and time to write. As ‘photographer’ on the Oriana, all he had to do was snap the passengers on Polaroids, then take their money.

  ‘How romantic,’ said Wanda again.

  ‘Oh yes, plenty of that. Now lie down.’

  Wanda did as she was told and Frank wondered about taking off his trousers. Sex was the very last thing he felt capable of right now, but perhaps if he just sat on Wanda’s legs again and took photographs . . . God, he had taken some depressing photos in his time on board those ships, and that was just off duty. Nameless encounters with numberless passengers and staff in his tiny cabin below the water line where it smelt of oil and sewage and was unbearably hot.

  ‘Lucky Bea,’ giggled Wanda.

  He didn’t tell her that when Bea stood before him as the pianist blanded it out on the baby grand, he was at such a low point that it was enough that she looked him in the eye and smiled. She was a good listener too, and at that time she appeared interested in his work. What was more, he soon discovered she had a house and a job and she wasn’t bad looking for a woman of forty. He had begun to feel doomed to a life on the ocean wave, ploughing pointlessly from port to port and unable to get off. Every ridiculous voyage seemed to take him further away from the distant promise of his youth. He was getting old. He needed to feel the ground beneath his feet and a roof over his head. He needed someone, to have and to hold, just one. He needed a wife.

  Frank sank his thumbs into the dimples either side of Wanda’s lower spine. Wanda turned and reached for his thigh. Frank hesitated. He didn’t want this to go anywhere. His back was bad today and one shoulder was stiff. He resolved to keep his clothes on and just take photographs. He took the front of her blouse in his hand and gave it a tug. She pulled away in mock alarm and he heard the fabric give a tiny tear and rip.

  ‘Oops,’ she said and tipped her head on one side.

  He watched her through the viewfinder as she lay down on the couch again and looked up at the ceiling, a distant smile on her face. Her body looked damn good in a photograph, but in real life it was almost too masculine. She was so lean and long that if it were not for her breasts, she could almost be a boy. Wanda stretched and yawned and closed her eyes. Frank raised the camera to his eye and took a shot. The great thing about this digital camera was that it didn’t really matter what you pointed it at, it always looked tremendous. Clear as a bell. Too clear if you happened to point it at anything over the age of twenty-eight, of course. Wanda squirmed and made a mewing noise. She claimed to find the sound of the shutter arousing. Wanda claimed to find just about everything arousing, especially when she’d been at his Scotch.

  A sad, small voice nudged the corner of his mind. It told him he was beginning to tire of her no-nonsense Polish promiscuity. He ignored it and rubbed at the pain in his shoulder. He didn’t want to stop just yet. He was using her to sort out this difficult period with Bea. And, he burped discreetly, he had no qualms about using Wanda, seeing as Wanda was using him. She was building up a portfolio of very professional-looking photographs—

  A noise from the hallway made him stop and listen. Bea had said she was taking the children somewhere and wouldn’t be back till later. He turned to look at the door and felt a draught of cool air on his feet.

  Wanda raised her head and met his eyes, pouting. His heart was beating fast. He looked at the letter again and thought that perhaps, after all, he might be capable of some mild erotic moment. Just concentrate, he told himself, concentrate on those astounding half-moons joined by a narrow waist, the long ridge of the spine, the shoulders and neck . . . He put his hands either side of her legs and moved his groin up towards her bottom, then sighed and rubbed the top of his head. It was no good; these days he barely felt anything at all. Even lust was deserting him now, and this too he felt was not unconnected to Bea. Something had happened to the woman. He had seen it that ghastly night four weeks ago. Some retreat in her, some duplicity. He had seen it before, or rather he had sensed it creeping up on him, laughing behind its hand. It had always been there. And it had a name. Oh yes, it had a name all right. He reached for the bottle and swallowed a good long mouthful. Patrick Cumberbatch.

  Wanda twisted round, sat up and kissed him on the lips. Frank wondered what on earth had possessed him to put on Beethoven’s String Quartet in B Flat Major. It didn’t begin well, with its grinding dissonances and unresolved themes. It was a piece that was best described as ‘unusual’. What torture must the old man have endured to compose something like this? A jarring, jangling dance of discrepancy blended with an impossible yearning sweetness. Wanda giggled. He was tickling her foot. He tickled it some more and she prodded his groin with her other foot. Actually, that hurt. He grabbed her instep and gave it a little twist. She squeaked and lay still. The thing about Wanda was that she showed respect and she never laughed at him, not the way that Bea did. Bea had a way of looking at him and just laughing. He took Wanda’s other leg in his hand, heard her sigh and parted her legs a little. How uncomplicated Wanda’s body was compared to Bea’s. God alone knew what was going on with Bea’s body right now. She was leaking, spreading, boiling, melting – really, it was the stuff of nightmares.

  He slapped Wanda on the bottom, hard this time so that she shouted something in Polish into the pillow. He wanted to extinguish Bea, flatten her and turn her to stone. And so, bit by bit – when was it now? two years ago? three? – he had begun.

  Van-da.

  He took a long drink and grimaced. What had surprised him was how hard it was to stop. The thing was, having turned away from Bea, he wasn’t entirely sure he could find his way back any more.

  Suddenly Beethoven was silent and they heard the kitchen door slam. Frank leapt to his feet and set the Scotch bottle spinning across the floor. Wanda raised her head. She had a rather stupid expression on her face, a wide-eyed silent movie calamity face.

  She said, ‘Oh no!’

  He recognised Bea’s footsteps in the hall. What the hell was she doing back so early?

  ‘I forgot,’ said Wanda.

  ‘What?’ he said, recoiling now at the sight of her pale sprawl. The female body was so indiscreet, with its mounds and gapes and sudden eruptions of hair. ‘Forgot what?’

  He stood up and threw Wanda’s bra at her so that it hit her in the face. Good. She looked at him dangerously and wrapped herself in the tartan rug, his mother’s rug.

  ‘Get dressed,’ he said.

  ‘I meant to say.’ She shook with silent laughter. ‘Your wife rang!’

  ‘But she was taking the kids to the cinema.’ He pulled the rug from round her and pushed a pile of her clothes into her arms.

  ‘She rang to say she was coming back early.’

  Frank stared at her and realised she was drunk. He shook his head in disbelief. If he wasn’t very careful, this was all going to explode in his face. Wanda held her blouse up to the light and frowned at it as if she couldn’t remember which way to wear it. What was she playing at? He felt the familiar ground of their betrayal lurch and shift.

  He needed to take control of the situation. The important thing wa
s for him not to act like the guilty philanderer. What he did in his workroom was entirely his business. Anyway, Bea was in a world of her own, and that, he told himself, looking in vain for one sock, was half the trouble.

  Wanda gathered her hair back in an elastic band. ‘Okay, I’m going now.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Frank.

  He listened by the door and watched Wanda apply lipstick in the mirror. He could hear Bea in the kitchen, then heard her come into the hall, heard the chink of a tray and a small, timid knock on the door. Wanda spotted her lacy red knickers draped on the lampshade and dropped them into her bag with a giggle and a shrug.

  Frank put his finger to his lips then listened some more. He heard Bea’s heavy tread on the stairs and the bathroom door shutting.

  He nodded at Wanda and unlocked his door. ‘Come on, hurry,’ he said, putting Beethoven back on.

  Wanda slipped out of the house, said a quiet ‘See you,’ and was gone into the darkness.

  When

  BEA CAME downstairs in her dressing gown and found Frank standing in the hall. He had the sort of surprised expression on his face that looked as though it had been applied a little before any actual surprise.

  ‘You’re back early,’ he said. He put his hands in his pockets, pulled them out again and peered at a patch of wall. ‘Been in long?’

  He was standing in the way. From the open door of his room Beethoven could be heard shaking his fist at the world.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  Frank gave the door of his room a push to open it further, as if he wanted to show it was empty. She rarely looked in there and she avoided looking in there now.