Short Story - Size one, all fits
The car that took them the short distance from the Airport to the hotel centre of the City was a Lexus and Ursula was admiring the inside of it but saying nothing when he said to her, “It is the little enhancements that make the difference in the decision of which company to fly for. Assuming you are offered the choice. This is one.” He looked at her, expectantly. “KLM must like you very much,” Ursula told him. “Though I’d rather have diamonds,” he said smiling, broadly. Ursula felt regret. “Stifle it,” she thought, “and go with him”.
He had, or had affected, a sympathetic face and Ursula thought, “well, why not,” when he appeared from nowhere to offer a share in his lift to Dam Square, on condition she was “heading somewhere interesting”. Flight crew. He was on a stop-over before flying on to the United States the next day. Ursula, he decided, looked stranded at the Airport doors. “Well,” Ursula thought, “I was at a loss having woken up to practicalities of quitting the folly of husband-hunting during the approach to Schipol.” She also needed, to be truthful, to get off the plane. As soon as she did, the world moved uniquely again, freshly and slowly. She was, perhaps, saved.
Ursula considered his question about where she was headed and heard herself outline something totally out of character; a most individualistic rejection of her normal one size fits all approach to conversation, where she would have normally have borrowed a lie heard five minutes earlier in a queue of gossiping twitterers. “I am going to pick up a diamond ring,” she told him, “a present from my husband.” Was she indeed? This may have been a drunken lie but as yet – like most drunk lies – it had not been played out. And now the crammed drink from the lounge and the plane was wearing off.
He had opened to car door and pointed to the interior with an open ring-less hand of fanned fingers, palm towards her. She passed by him, noticing. He was neatly groomed. He must have stopped somewhere in the Airport. At staff facilities. Half curled in the back Ursula noticed her own clothes, impeccably chosen and a little crumpled. That, belt, rejected all those years ago, had four 1 carat flawless diamonds embedded of the square of the buckle. She looked now at her tan leather belt with its brightly contrasting embroidered poppy flowers. Back then Ursula knew she would not cross that line even if she could and now she new she could not cross another. What did it matter, really, if her husband had a certain and half plastic red-head on his pillow in a hotel in Milan? Why worry now? Nothing of her earlier conclusions was changed by the knowledge – even if proof of it were on offer.
She had heard an American lawyer outline it at an unbearable dinner that she and David had hosted earlier that year. “The Ladyman” Ursula had christened her in a whisper to her husband when she called him to the kitchen to sort out some small problem with the caterers.
“You need categorical proof,” the lawyer was booming,”ca-te-gor-ric-cal,” she continued in New York staccato. It was no use, it seemed, having suspicions or even confrontations about hearsay. It just leads to mud, and doubt, and loss. All or nothing. The lawyer had belief, or projected belief. Ursula had been riled and pursed. Then the lawyer was off again. On defending a man against the death penalty for murdering his wife who had had an abortion. “The Southern State values the right to life,” the Ladyman forked into the air.” “Very sensible,” Ursula did not say for fear of upsetting the finance deal in the offing, “so the right to life ends with birth.” Ursula wanted dress up the Ladyman in more feminine clothes, to kiss her, and then throttle her.
Evidence of fidelity then? None. “My husband is still the same,” Ursula thought, “and I won’t gain any.”
But she had gone, metaphorically if not literally, half way. Although how far really was Schipol between London and Milan? “No matter,” she thought. She stretched out her hands and looked at them, “there is a third line too sitting alongside me,” she thought, “can I cross that?”
When Ursula joined the man for a clichéd drink in the Hilton Bar there was a large mirror at the end of the yellow Georgian ball-room where she could look at the shape and aspect of herself together with the man. What did the portrait look like; painterly, Hopper? They were relatively anonymous. An air of almost-intimacy. His hands were in motion a lot. Seemingly weaving her in. Pretty obvious what he was trying to conjure. “Where were the smiles coming from?” she pondered. Ursula saw automatic reactions, and was a little annoyed.
She took a healthy amount of her drink. From that distance she looked like her eldest daughter, Andrea. Ursula placed her in the far corner of the room, smoking. A quiet and clever young woman. A reader. One of those. In black. Ample, though that was not the right way to put it. Not at all confident really. But no sign of it. She never fussed. She always ran from fights. One time at ten years old running into the house from the garden, “Mummy, why is nana so angry? Ursula’s mother in a tirade at not undoing a jar. That fire could be in her other daughter Victoria, Tori, two years younger who would stand for nothing, who dropped men “knowing they had a future that was definitely without her” and could shimmy up a mountain side. Seated in the other corner of the room Tori had surpassed Nana and could open mixers with her teeth.
She had been avoiding his gaze and now he touched her arm as if to wake her back to their casual chatter that had been crossing between them. The “where are you staying?” All that . Ursula acknowledged him but feeling a quick pang of sharp guilt, placed two dead twin daughters from thirty years ago into the final corners of the room and left them there. They had died at eleven days and Ursula carried the secret potential of them everywhere. All four of the girls now watching her. Her mouth was dry. Ursula thought of an old poem from school. You have put a fish-hoot in my chest behind the breast-bone. The blood eddies around the metal. 'It pulls,' she said, softly aloud.
Ursula looked at his hand on her, his thumb placed at the right-angle of her elbow and his fingers with their neat nails covering the outside of her forearm. The game had clicked into life properly; here was the line. She was telling him then about her fitting, that the ring would be ready in two days, that it was one of a kind, unique to her.
The weather on the Thursday evening following her return home was beautiful. It was the middle of summer. Almost her birthday. The sunny afterglow of the hot day was reddening in the cooling sky as the wooden studio at the end of garden gratefully retained the heat. Ursula was comfortable and warm in the atmosphere. In this unreal light the easy brush stroke swept across the canvass to recreate from her minds eye the yellow bar of the cornered women. “Almost a name there,” Ursula murmured. She looked at her hand. She was of course, going to have to explain the ring to David, she knew that. There was no covering up four thousand pounds. “You did what?” he might say. She was trying to imagine his reaction as she began a sketch of the man at the bar.
James A Bullion - November 2008
