The Potter’s House. Rosie Thomas
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and she separated when I was about twelve, and he married again and acquired a second family to which he and his new wife swiftly added. The Steps and Halves, my mother and I called them.)
Chalk and cheese Peter and I may have been, but we were determined to have each other. We were introduced by a photographer I knew who gave a drunken Christmas party in his studio, to which Peter was brought along more or less on a whim by the photographer’s agent. I remember looking across the room, through a sea of outlandish people who didn’t at the time look outlandish to me, and seeing his well-cut suit and the lights flickering off the shields of his glasses. He was the one who looked out of place in that company of Mapplethorpe boys and six-foot women. After a little while the photographer’s agent brought him across and introduced us.
‘Cary Flint, Peter Stafford.’
I remember that we talked about our fellow guests and a new book of our host’s pictures, and a Matisse exhibition we had both recently seen in the South of France. I had to work hard to sustain this cocktail party standard of chat. I was very thin at the time and taking a lot of pills, and felt speedy and mad. I was disconcerted by the way this man tilted his head towards me so as not to miss a word of my insane gabble, and I also saw the way that his hair fell forward over his temples and the mildness of his eyes behind his glasses, and my knees almost buckled with lust for him. The party was reaching its crescendo. Two boys were exchanging tongues under the ribs of the spiral staircase that also sheltered Peter and me. A procession of other models’ legs filed up and down past our ears and I noticed that he never even glanced at all this thigh and buttock because his eyes were fixed on me. I began to speak more slowly, although I had to shout over the noise, and all the time he watched my mouth with minute attention. Blood hummed in my ears, drowning the crashing music.
At last Peter took my glass out of my hand and put it down, reaching past the intertwined boys to do so.
‘Shall we leave now?’ he asked.
Outside, the cold air hit me in the face. My tiny party dress also exposed a length of bare leg and my coat didn’t cover much more.
Peter wrapped a protective arm round my shoulders.
‘It isn’t far to my car.’
I couldn’t even remember whether I had come in my car, let alone where I might have parked it. That was how I was in those days.
Peter’s turned out to be low, two-seater, quite old and with an interior of creased leather and glowing wood. I learned later that it was a Jaguar XK140. He always loved old cars and kept a series of them on which he bestowed almost as much affection as he did on me. He took me that night to a French restaurant in Notting Hill, old-fashioned but good, and made me eat whitebait and steak. I drew the line at pudding, although he wanted to order one for me. I hadn’t eaten a pudding or a slice of cake since I was fifteen.
Over the first course I confessed what I believed it was only fair for him to know from the beginning. If, in fact, there was actually going to be anything further, if this start didn’t turn out also to be the ending. There had been a few evenings of that sort, lately.
‘I am afraid that I am mad. Known fact. Crazy. Completely barking.’
He chewed his food, reflecting briefly on this idiotic announcement.
‘I think I will be the judge of that,’ Peter Stafford answered.
I ate as much as I could of my steak and vegetables, without making much of a dent in the portion, and all the time I could think of nothing but how soon we might be able to go to bed together. When he was finally convinced that I wasn’t going to eat tarte Tatin or chocolate soufflé, Peter shepherded me back to the Jaguar and drove me to his flat in Bayswater.
We kissed for the first time under the overhead light in the hallway. In his sitting room, standing beside the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, I reached around to the zip on the back of my dress and undid it. Slowly, I let the folds drop to the carpet. I was naked underneath except for my pants. He covered my breasts with his hands.
I kicked off one high-heeled shoe and then the other. Barefoot, I was closer to his height. He took my hand and led me into his bedroom, and closed the door behind us.
When he took off the last garment he knelt over me and looked.
‘Oh God, oh God,’ he breathed. After a beat of fear I realised that it was in pleasure and admiration, not dismay. I put my arms round his neck and pulled him down on top of me.
When we made love, Peter Stafford made me feel three-dimensional.
I forgot the jut of my hips and my overlong and protuberant spinal column, and the dull grate of bone. In his arms I became languorous and creamy and fat.
Afterwards he held me against him, warming me with his solid flesh.
‘Cary, Cary. Be still,’ he ordered and I knew that he didn’t mean just now, under the crisp covers of his bed, but in my life. No more spinning around and gobbling pills. No more talking nonsense or drinking or dementia.
‘I asked Cecil to bring me over to you,’ he said. Cecil was the photographer’s agent. ‘I didn’t think you would even speak to me, but I made him do it just the same.’
‘I would have come to you, if you hadn’t.’ Maybe I would have done, too.
That was a Thursday evening. I had a job the next day, but I called in sick. It was the first time I had ever done such a thing and my booker was astonished. Peter called his office too. We stayed in bed for the whole of Friday and for the weekend that followed it, except for when we got up to forage for something to eat and drink. I padded around wearing one of his shirts because I had nothing with me but my party dress and we fed each other cold chicken legs or buttered toast.
‘Good,’ he approved.
Another time when we were quietly lying together and watching raindrops on the window glass he asked, ‘Why did you say you were mad? Except for the job you do and the people you do it with you seem exceptionally sane to me.’
I fended him off. ‘No real reason. Drink, nerves, babble. Or I suppose that if someone were to look at you and then at me, they might put you in the sane category and me in the other. Just as a matter of relativity.’
‘Because of the way we look, relatively?’
Without his glasses Peter’s eyes were soft, with creases at the corners. His forehead and the faint lines hooking together his mouth and nose and the curve of his lips were already dear to me. I touched them, stroking the skin with the flat of my thumbs.
‘No. Nothing to do with that. It’s history.’
‘What history?’
‘Tell me yours first.’
He held me so that my chin rested in the hollow of his shoulder. I closed my eyes and listened while he described his childhood. He was the middle one of three boys, children of a City solicitor and a career mother. They lived in a good house in Hampshire and the brothers played cricket in the garden and sailed dinghies, and went to a suitable public school and then on to appropriate universities.
‘Not very interesting, you see,’ Peter said.
‘It is to me. Where are your brothers now?’
He told me that they were both lawyers and both married, and made a joke about it being such a conservative family that his own minute deviations from this norm were regarded as acts of rebellion.
‘No wife, you mean?’
‘No law, no wife. But I have had a couple of girlfriends. I’m quite normal, you know.’
I did know already, but I wanted to know more about his background because he was so safe and rational, the living equivalent of the scent of clean laundry. Everything about Peter Stafford, past and present, was a magnet to me.
Probably after that we started to make love again and so his original question to me was forgotten. I avoided talking about my own