It was the way Ros moved that had got her first. The way she sashayed about as if completely in control of her life, herself, her glorious body that even in her late forties hadn’t lost the look of a thirty-year-old. Clare opened her front door, felt for the light, stumbled over a boot, chucked her keys on the kitchen table, and put the kettle on. She felt like she’d been drunk from the minute she’d met her.
She wasn’t drunk, not in that moment, though she felt like drinking. She’d waved goodbye to her vaguely, her hand out of the window as if she didn’t care, they often walked their dogs together even though Clare’s spaniel was on constant exercise at the yard, but Ros didn’t need to know that. Whenever she texted, walk? Clare would make out like that was a great idea. So that morning she’d done the same, sure smiley face, even though she didn’t have time. She’d left the mucking out, gone over to Ros’ when she was supposed to be mending a stable door, parked outside her cottage, waited for Ros to put on her boots. She felt like an addict. Or a thief. She felt like she was betraying something. A couple of friends, out for a walk, just casual, but nothing to do with Ros was casual for Clare. After she’d waved goodbye vaguely, pulled away slowly, as soon as the cottage and Ros were out of sight, she’d put her foot down and raced back to the stables to carry on shovelling horse shit and straw, before teaching a class of beginners and taking out two hacks. In the rain she’d fixed the stable door that had lost its bolt, and in the tack room, electric heater on, jackets steaming, she’d interviewed a new stable girl, young and enthusiastic, prepared to work almost for free. Clare used to be like that, anything to be around horses, now it was anything to be around Ros.
Clare’s kitchen was tiny, her cottage miniature, it was shoved on the end of the stable block like an afterthought. A two up two down with a Raeburn that sometimes worked, a gas boiler that often didn’t and creaky stairs to her bedroom with the floor which sloped one way, and Nancy’s, which sloped the other. She threw her Barbour on the hooks by the warped front door, eased off her boots toe to heel, mud fell on the uneven cobbled floor as she picked up Nancy’s Doc Martins and tidied both pairs onto the boot rack. The kettle hissed. She padded to the Raeburn in her socks and held out her freezing hands to the heat. It wasn’t fair. Why did it have to be Ros. She put a potato in the oven, chopped the worst off the broccoli, and turned on the water for a bath. Everything ached.
It was etched into her cells, the moment Ros had walked into Diane and Peter’s enormous, well-lit kitchen, and Diane had said, “You must meet Peter’s sister. She’s just arrived. I want to introduce her to everyone.” Diane had called out Ros’ name, and from in amongst the red corduroy trousers and knee-length skirts, the dresses from Linea and suits from Hugo Boss, this beautiful dirty blonde had turned around, smiled, walked over, and held out her hand. It had been Christmas time then too.
Clare stripped off her jumper and chucked it on a chair. Thinking of Ros always made her hot. She’d sweated through t-shirts for twelve months, gone for walks, met at the pub, come home stinking of something she couldn’t have. For a year she’d thought of nothing but her. All that she knew of her, she’d learnt from Ros herself: an actress, divorced, a bastard ex who used to hit her. Her brother had bought her a house to get her out of London. Legs that went on forever. A daughter who didn’t eat. Another who didn’t seem to like her much. A laugh that made Clare want to fuck her, a lack of inhibition amongst strangers and an aloofness up close that made Clare shiver, and mostly, especially, the thing that Clare knew worst of all about Ros was that Ros was in no way interested in her.
She took her tea to the tiny sitting room where she knelt on the settle and tried to light the fire. It hissed and spat, the kindling damp, but eventually a small flame gave way and Clare turned around, her back to it, and rested her cup on her knees. A two-seater sofa, its cover loose and faded green, a small and spindly rectangular table beside it was all the room could cope with, a door in the corner led upstairs. Nancy had stuck her artwork up on the rough white walls, she was obsessed with drawing hands. Clare looked at her own and picked dirt from beneath her thumbnail. Ros was all about men, how could she not be? She played them like instruments, the touch of a string here, a stray note when least expected, a clash of cymbals and innuendo. She’d watched her sing a duet with Brian at that first Christmas party a year ago when Ros knew only Peter and Diane; such confidence, it had made some raise their eyebrows, but Clare had been transfixed. Baby it’s cold outside, given all the sexual gusto of a seedy Paris revue, an audience immediately, completely submerged, embarrassed and cheering, it had been Ros’ opening fling at their society, a bullet shot amongst them, a fire bolt crackling with heat, a reason for some people to say well really, and distance themselves. She’d watched Peter laugh, and Diane mouth she’s an actress and shake her head, but a divorcée who looked like that was never going to be invited to the dinner parties of fragile marrieds, and all marriages, it seemed to Clare, were fragile.
Clare, on the other hand, was safe. None of them had met Nancy’s father, and her Caribbean blood made most of them white and saving; Nancy rolled her eyes, but Clare didn’t correct their soft pity, the unconscious bias that assumed she’d been left in the lurch shut down other questions, too. She and Nancy were considered unusual enough without gay being thrown into the mix. Why should she explain? She didn’t want people knowing her business. Their assumptions were their problem, and Sussex society had got to know Clare as a single mum, private, hardworking, not interested in meeting someone, they drew their own conclusions as to why. Everyone approved of Brian being in love with her, and some with her refusal of him. It made her solid, trustworthy, nice. She’d taken the lease on the old stables and built a business. She and Nancy got along fine. Tessa had moved back a few years later; they’d both grown up in West Sussex but hadn’t known each other then, it was at Manchester University that they’d found the connection and been friends ever since. Ros had said to her once you’re so In. Everybody loves you and she remembered thinking, not you, though.
She hauled herself upstairs and into the bathroom; an old claw foot bath, stains from the overflow and a cold tap that was stiff. A chipped sink, and red tiles on the windowsill patterned with cracks. She turned on the hot tap. Nancy was staying at Ros’s tonight.
It had been a devil throw, that they had daughters the same age, and that those daughters would become such friends. It had brought Clare into contact with Ros in ways she couldn’t have dreamt of on that first night in Peter and Diane’s well-lit kitchen. It had made it more painful. Every time Ros touched her, she’d think please don’t. Like when she’d fallen out of the wine bar on Clare’s last birthday and Clare had helped her up, she’d leaned on her all the way to the taxi rank and fallen asleep on her lap. Clare had almost carried her into her house. She’d pulled out the sofa bed while Ros directed drunkenly from an armchair, pointing and laughing, and when it was ready, Ros had crawled into it instead of going to her own bed upstairs. Clare hadn’t known what to do. She’d lain beside her not breathing, not touching, keeping as far and as curled as the uncomfortable mattress would allow, and woken, sometime later in the dark to notice Ros had gone. The next morning Ros was contrite and beautiful. They’d hung their heads over coffee and Ros had told her about Harold, finishing with God it’s so good to talk. What happened with yours? and Clare had shaken her head and said Oh it was a long time ago. We were too young which was half true. The other half was that Nancy’s dad had been Clare’s best friend, still was sort of, though these days he was married and lived in London, and they saw each other less now that Nancy was grown, but one drunken night long ago he’d said maybe you just haven’t met the right man and Clare had thought, maybe? and tried it with him, just for a laugh, just to see, but no. No man was the right man. Nancy was a gift out of something she hadn’t wanted twice. Men, with their bits and rough edges, men with their lack of knowledge. Her body wanted soft; her body wanted dark; her body wanted Ros.
She stripped off and climbed into a shallow bath of tepid water. Shivering she splashed her face and rubbed the worst of the dirt from her arms and feet. No lingering for Clare, she stood dripping and grabbed a towel, aware she shouldn’t be ashamed, yet she was. There’d been pashes at school, the intensity of feelings strung up in hormones that confused her. There’d been fumbles at parties, girls trying it out on each other with laughter. She’d had a girlfriend at Manchester that she’d kept quiet about, separate from her crowd; an on-off thing that had lasted a year or so. She’d been older than Clare, not a student, they’d met at a club, she worked behind the bar. In the end she’d snapped at Clare what are you so afraid of? and left her for someone else. Clare still hadn’t answered the question. She’d told Tessa casually one day, as if it wasn’t something hidden, and added just as casually it’s not a secret, it’s only that I want to keep it private. But that wasn’t the truth.
She ate her baked potato and broccoli in front of the fire, crouched on the settle again, the flames built up to give a lasting heat. Her dressing gown over her pyjamas, they were light blue with small flowers, a present from her daughter, her dressing gown, towelling and grey, was man’s size, and old. The time Ros had given her the pig skin phone case and touched her face with the tips of her fingers, and Clare hadn’t known where to look, how she’d pulled away as if she wasn’t grateful. The time Ros had tried to vault a barbed wire fence and Clare had had to cut her free, reaching between her legs to unhook the barbs from her inner thigh. Was God joking? It had felt so. She gave her broccoli stalk to Ben who curled at her feet. The thing about winter, she thought as she put her plate in the sink and turned off the kitchen lights, was that you could go to bed at seven, which she did, putting up the fire guard and climbing the creaking stairs to her sloping room. She cleaned her teeth, rubbed Nivea into the dry pores of her skin, she’d been in Ros’ bathroom, and it was nothing like this; every ointment and toner under the sun, every cream for younger skin, and why shouldn’t she be that kind of woman, attentive to every line? It paid off, it showed, Ros’ skin was flawless except for the flaws that made her human. She’d asked Clare to check a mole on her neck last time she’d stayed over, and it had almost made Clare faint.
Cold in bed, the sheets and duvet not yet warm, she turned off her bedside light and lay in the dark, her eyes open. All she could think about was Ros, and her hand drifted between her legs as she thought of how Ros moved, how she laughed, how she looked at her. Even as she breathed, she knew it was never, even as she closed her eyes, she knew this was as close and as real as it would get. Sleep would find her after, and as she drifted off to calm, she wished Tessa would come home, dilute the three that had become two, the friendship that would not leave her alone.
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Poor Clare I remember that pain and longing ... Oh oh happy to be free of it now !
Oh so good, this new insight into Clare - layer upon layer of personalities. I had a "Ros" in my life, once - "Ernesto" - maddening. 🙃