Love Is a Four Letter Word Read online

  LOVE IS A

  FOUR LETTER

  WORD

  Claire Calman

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781407095141

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  LOVE IS A FOUR LETTER WORD

  A BLACK SWAN BOOK : 0 552 99853 2

  First publication in Great Britain

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Black Swan edition published 2000

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Claire Calman 2000

  Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye

  Words and Music by Cole Porter

  © 1968 Buxton Hill Music Corp

  Warner/Chappell Music Limited, London W6 8BS

  Reproduced by permission of International Music

  Publications Ltd.

  Girl From Ipanema by Antonio Carlos Jobim and

  Norman Gimbel © 1963 MCA Music Ltd.

  Reproduced by kind permission.

  The right of Claire Calman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Condition of Sale This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Set in 11pt Melior by County Typesetters, Margate, Kent

  Black Swan Books are published by Transworld Publishers, 61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA, a division of The Random House Group Ltd, in Australia by Random House Australia (Pty) Ltd, 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, NSW 2061, Australia, in New Zealand by Random House New Zealand Ltd, 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand and in South Africa by Random House (Pty) Ltd, Endulini, 5a Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193, South Africa.

  Reproduced, printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  For my sister Stephanie, who told me to

  Get On With It

  Claire Calman decided to write a book when she discovered that it mainly involved drinking cups of coffee and looking out of the window. It was some time before a real writer friend pointed out that if she were to select an assortment of words and arrange them in some kind of order, this would speed up the process no end.

  Before she got on to daydreaming full time, Claire Calman spent several years in women’s magazines, then in book publishing, editing and writing. She is also a poet and broadcaster and has written and performed her comic verse on radio, including for BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and the comedy series Five Squeezy Pieces.

  Love is a Four Letter Word is her first novel. Despite popular demand that she should go back to magazines, she is now working on another book.

  Claire Calman cannot decide whether she lives in Kent or London, but then it also takes her nearly an hour to order from any menu with more than three choices on it. Astonishingly, she is unmarried.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks and appreciation to the following for support and encouragement:

  My late father, Mel, who had faith in me.

  My mother, Pat, who also writes v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.

  Stephanie Calman, Richard McBrien and Joanna Briscoe, who wrote rude but helpful comments on the manuscript.

  Paul Allen, who was there at the beginning.

  Trevor Dry, who bullied me into finishing it.

  Vivien England, who provided shepherd’s pie and peace and quiet in Devon from time to time.

  The Arvon Foundation writing courses, which got me started.

  Insight Seminars, which helped boost my confidence.

  Anna Russell, my former English teacher, who suggested I could be a writer.

  Jo Frank, my agent, who knows when to be nice and when to be tough.

  The dynamic and friendly team at Transworld/Black Swan, especially my editor Linda Evans.

  Prologue

  She sees herself fall in slow motion, the toe of her shoe catching on the edge of the paving-stone, her arm reaching out in front of her, her hand a pale shape like a leaf against a dark sky. The pavement swims towards her, its cracks the streets of a city seen from a skyscraper, the texture of the concrete slabs suddenly sharply in focus.

  It is not a bad fall: a swelling on her left knee destined to become an outsize bramble-stain bruise, a stinging graze on the heel of her hand, a buggered pair of decent tights. Back at home, Bella balances half a bag of frozen broad beans on the knee and sips at a glass of Shiraz. She tells herself it is not a bad fall, but when she wakes the next morning it is as if a switch has been thrown, draining off all her energy in the night. She leans against the kitchen worktop to drink her coffee, not daring to sit down because she knows she will never get up again.

  Overnight, London seems to have become a grotesque parody of a metropolis, no longer bustling and stimulating but loud and abrasive. Litter flies up from the gutters. Grit pricks her eyes. She feels fragile, a rabbit caught in the target-beam of headlights. Buses loom out of nowhere, bearing down on her. Cyclists swerve to avoid her, bellowing abuse. She tenses each muscle in her body when she crosses the road, imagines she can hear the thud-thudding of her heart. When someone bumps into her in the street, she thinks she will splinter into tiny fragments. In her mind, she sees her body shatter and the pieces shower through the air like the explosion of a firework, tinkling like glass as each one strikes the pavement. She imagines them coming to sweep her up so they could painstakingly reassemble her, but shards of her are left behind, unnoticed in the gutter, hidden by a litter bin or a lamp-post.

  Her doctor is unsympathetic, sighing through his nostrils as she answers his questions. Months of overworking, he says. Prolonged stress. What else did she expect? Did she want to have a serious collapse? If so, she was certainly going the right way about it. No tablets, he says, no prescription. Time off. Rest. Rethink your life. That’s it? she asks. That’s it.r />
  Her boss is unsurprised.

  ‘You’re no use to me half-dead,’ he says. ‘Sod off to the Caribbean for a month. Drink Mai-Tais till dawn and shag some waiters.’

  The Caribbean? She is so exhausted she’d be lucky to make it down the road to the travel agent. Perhaps they could administer her Mai-Tais via a drip.

  Visiting her good friends Viv and Nick in the Kentish city where they now live, she wanders at convalescent pace through the web of narrow streets, past lopsided houses and ancient flint walls. She focuses on one task at a time, as if she were a stroke victim learning afresh each skill she had previously taken for granted. Then, meandering down a quiet side street near the river, she sees the For Sale board.

  Compared with the London flat she had rented with Patrick, no. 31 is a delight. Sunny. Spacious. With a proper garden rather than a sad, overshadowed strip of concrete. Yes, says Viv, a fresh start is just what Bella needs. Plenty of companies would jump at the chance to have someone with her experience.

  She seems to enter a trance then, dealing with the solicitor, the building society. Writing job applications. Forms, paperwork become a welcome distraction, tangible things to focus on – things she can solve. You take a pen, fill in the spaces in neat block capitals. The questions are straightforward: Name. Address. Bank Details. Current Salary. You do it all properly and you get the result you were aiming for. It feels like magic.

  She moves smoothly through the weeks on automatic pilot, gliding through her notice period at work, her smile efficiently in place, her projects on schedule. Now that she knows she is leaving, she cuts down on her hours, and fills her evening with paperwork and planning, even relishing each hitch and setback – the vendor’s pedantry about the garden shed, the surveyor’s discovery of damp – as something she can get her teeth into.

  In her neat ring-binder, sectioned with coloured card dividers, she can find any particular piece of paper in an instant. The rings click closed with a satisfying clunk, containing her, keeping her life in order. She transfers her accounts, her doctor, her dentist, sends out exquisitely designed change-of-address cards. This is easy: making phone calls, folding A4 letters into three and sliding them into envelopes, measuring for curtains. And it fills her head. She needs it to hold her, as if each stage of Buying the House is a sharp staple grasping together the sections of an ancient cracked plate.

  1

  Now that she was here, this didn’t seem like quite such a brilliant idea. Around her, on all sides stretched a cubist landscape of cardboard boxes. The removal men had thoughtfully set them down in such a way as to make traversing the room an epic expedition, necessitating the use of ropes, crampons and teams of huskies. And the heating had decided not to work. Of course. No doubt the vendor had extracted some vital organ from the boiler the moment they had exchanged contracts. He had taken the art of pettiness to new heights – or was it depths? – arguing over every fitting and fixture, frequently phoning Bella, his manner swinging between smarmy and covertly aggressive. He was sure she would like to buy his wrought-iron wall lights; they were practically new. No, she said, she wouldn’t. The built-in shelves? She had assumed they were, well, built-in. What about the curtain tracks? The stair carpet? It still had plenty of wear in it, he insisted, hanging on in there like a dog unwilling to relinquish a bone. ‘Mmm,’ she agreed non-committally, deciding its durability was a disadvantage unless you wanted to design your decor around a theme of khaki ripple. He was obviously attached to it, she pointed out, clearly he must take it with him.

  * * *

  Now, sitting on the stairs, trying not to catch her jeans on the exposed gripper strip, she stretched out one foot to flip open the lid of the nearest box. Loo brush, bubble-wrapped mirror, squeaky rubber crocodile. Oh-oh. She checked the label on the side: BTH. Marvellous. That was supposed to be upstairs. In the bth. How much clearer could she have made it? Evidently, she should have written BOX FOR BATHROOM (THAT MEANS UPSTAIRS – THE ROOM WITH THE BATH IN IT). Something else to add to The List: lugging downstairs boxes upstairs and upstairs boxes downstairs.

  Her gaze fell on the puckered and peeling paintwork above the skirting board. The only house in the street with psoriasis. The damp. That ought to be top of the list – certainly above getting the sash cords fixed or redecorating the bathroom or Polyfillaing the crack in the study or painting a mural on the end wall of the garden or … In her mind, The List stretched out before her, a rippling paper path, unrolling itself to infinity.

  There was a banging on the front door.

  ‘Why didn’t you use the bell, you old bag?’

  ‘I did. It obviously doesn’t work, slag-face.’ Viv gave Bella a hug and pushed a gold cardboard box into her hands.

  ‘Just what I need. A cardboard box. I was running dangerously low on them. How on earth did you guess?’

  ‘It’s cakes. Emergency rations. My God – are all the rooms as full as this?’ Viv waggled her head in disbelief, sending her precariously pinned carroty hair lurching from side to side.

  ‘I seem to have more stuff than I thought.’ Bella shrugged.

  ‘What’s in them all?’

  ‘I don’t know. Books. Paints. Kitchen things. Families of refugees. You know, stuff.’

  Viv opened a nearby box.

  ‘Old exhibition catalogues?’

  ‘I’ve been meaning to go through them and weed out the ones I don’t want, but I haven’t got around to it yet.’

  ‘Is that the Kreuzer family motto: Dulce et decorum est procrastinati …?’

  ‘Thank you for those few charming words. Make yourself useful, can’t you? Help me look for the kettle. It’s in a box marked KTCH, which stands for kitchen not kitsch before you make any smart-arse comments – it’s probably up in the BTH.’

  That first night in her new home, Bella left a light on as she always did – she’d had to dash out to the latenight corner shop to buy light bulbs because the vendor had removed every single one of them. She lay awake, looking at the slit of light under the bedroom door. I ought to be feeling excited, she told herself. New house. New job. New city. I mustn’t be so negative. So what if I’ve only got one week to sort out the house before I start at Scotton Design? So the house needs a few things seeing to? That’s why it was so reasonable. A counter voice cut in: Are you completely clueless? As if you didn’t have enough on your plate without turning your entire life upside down. Now you’ll be living in mouldy chaos for ever and you don’t even know anyone here except for Viv and Nick and you can’t expect to see them all the time. They’ve got each other. They don’t need you.

  As her eyelids drooped, she thought of Patrick. If he’d been here with her now, what would he be doing? Snoring, probably, she reminded herself sharply. He’d have liked the house, she decided, yawning and snuggling down under the duvet. That was the bugger about not having a chap around the place. He would have got the damp sorted. And the boxes. No, she thought, he wouldn’t: Patrick would have stepped over the boxes, saying, ‘We really must sort these out.’ But at least he would have rubbed her cold feet to warm them up.

  Bella bit her lip. Enough with the self-pity, OK? Consider the plus points: lovely house of her very own, with loads of potential especially now Mr Petty had stripped it of his beloved wall lights and nauseating carpets; near Viv so her phone bill would plummet because they wouldn’t have to have their epic longdistance calls any more; no longer having to hold her breath every time her colleague Val (known as Valitosis) came within exhalation range; interesting new job that should be less stressful. Yes, she comforted herself, less stress, that was the main thing. No more having her face stuffed into someone else’s armpit on the tube. No more spending a fortune on taxis to get home safely late at night. No more dingy flat where she had to have the lights on even in the daytime. No more thoughts of Patrick confronting her every time she opened the front door to a flatful of silence. She made herself do her Pollyanna voice – Golly gosh, wasn’t she just the luckiest girl in
the whole wide world, a fresh start. Gee, it sure was exciting. She could hardly wait.

  2

  Right. Pens, briefcase. Shoes polished. Lipstick. Hair. Oh, bollocks. It wasn’t supposed to do that. It made her look like a sheepdog that had been lolloping through the undergrowth. She stuck out her tongue and panted to complete the effect. Perhaps her hair would be better pinned up? She scooped it up off her neck and made what she hoped was an elegant face in the mirror. Tremendous – now she resembled a coiffured poodle. She had a hat somewhere. Out There, in the Box Zone, there was definitely a fetching little item of headgear. The question was: which box? She kicked the nearest one as if it might make a hat-containing-type noise. A look at her watch. Now was not the time to start hunting for hats. And what would she do with it anyway? She could hardly keep it on all day. Perhaps she could claim to be Muslim. Or having chemotherapy. She stood at the kitchen sink and drank a glass of water to settle her stomach. Good grief, this was worse than going on a date or preparing for her first day at school. You’re thirty-three for God’s sake, she told herself. They’re not going to pick on you or try to nick your pencil case.

  ∼ ∼ ∼

  Mummy stands talking to Mr Bowndes, the headmaster. She lays a hand on his arm and tilts her head back as she laughs. Bella looks down at her own feet, at her new shoes. They are navy blue with shiny silver buckles and straps that are still too stiff to do up herself. It is September but she is wearing pristine white ankle socks with neat blue anchors around the cuffs. The other girls, she sees, have knee-length grey socks. Autumn socks.

  Through her new blue felt hat she feels a pat on her head. She looks up.

  ‘So nice to see a pupil properly dressed with the correct school hat,’ says Mr Bowndes, leaning towards Mummy, ‘So few parents bother now.’ He laughs as if he is making a joke, but Bella supposes it must be a grown-up joke because she does not know what is funny.