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She glanced at the faint reflection of herself caught on the TV screen with Rupert the weatherman gesturing blindly behind her, almost as if he were trapped behind the glass. Phoebe was a curvaceous blonde of average height, with a wild mane of hair and even features that were unremarkable except for her intense green eyes, which she always dramatically highlighted with blue eye shadow and thick black mascara. She had the kind of prettiness that was pleasant but not in the least exotic or sophisticated, and this had been a source of disillusionment for Phoebe, who, at the age of sixteen, had changed her name by deed poll from the very plain Mandy to Phoebe (after a character in a novel). She’d wanted to be glamorous and dramatic, but growing up with an alcoholic mother on an estate on the edge of Acton hadn’t really allowed for such ambitions, and it was indicative of Phoebe’s strength of character that she had escaped home as soon as she could—marrying Alan had been the greater part of that escape.
It wasn’t as if she lacked self-esteem or sexual confidence, Phoebe thought, wondering how and exactly when her husband had fallen out of love with her. It certainly wasn’t something she’d done deliberately. If anything, she suspected that Alan, a control freak, had lost interest once he realized he had won her—or, more sinisterly, now had control of her. A sudden excited utterance from the weatherman pulled her out of her reverie.
“. . . a glorious abundance of cumuli coming in from the northeast will be followed by a darker patch of cumulonimbus, rain clouds to us mortals. . . .” Cumuli. Cumulonimbus. The words seemed to drop from his mouth like an overripe plum, and again his body arched in a gesture that seemed to ripple up from his hips, traveling with a shudder down to his fingertips. Cumuli. Phoebe found herself imagining that she was riding naked, sprawled on a bank of fluffy white clouds as they drifted across the English countryside. It was a sensually pleasing vision and Mr. Rupert Thornton was a sexy weatherman, Phoebe decided, smug in the knowledge that out of the three million viewers watching the six o’clock news, there was no doubt she alone had come to that conclusion.
Part of Phoebe’s grand plan to reconstruct her persona was to think herself capable of exclusivity, of originality, of finding qualities in others that no one else had noticed. A less generous person might have called it imaginative projection on her usually fairly innocent subjects—obsession, even—but Phoebe saw herself as a liberator, someone who could burrow into personalities and discover aspects unknown even to the individuals themselves. There had been some unfortunate incidents in the past—the milkman who was forced to place a restraining order on the then seventeen-year-old Phoebe, a school janitor she used to follow home—but all those were in the past, long before she’d married Alan, and besides, she still liked to think she’d seen qualities in these men that even they were not aware of. And so it was that she now relished thinking of the unwitting Rupert Thornton in a way that she imagined nobody else had ever thought of him—as a kind of sexual weather god.
The timer over the stove pinged, jolting her back to domestic reality. It was Alan’s way of reminding her that he’d be home in an hour and she should start preparing supper. The sharp sound also brought into focus the more immediate consequences of Phoebe’s imaginative embellishment of others. It was partly responsible for her marrying Alan in the first place, she reminded herself somewhat bitterly as the six o’clock news finally ended and the program cut from Rupert’s slightly uncertain smile to the closing credits.
Phoebe had met her husband at the insurance company they both still worked for. Alan was an actuary and Phoebe was a clerk in the accounting department. Alan was involved in calculating risk—his speciality was acts of God: storms, floods, lightning strikes—and his clients ranged from farmers to owners of vulnerable historical buildings. In her role Phoebe was little more than a glorified secretary, filing, typing, and taking dictation—a tedious job that led to much daydreaming.
She’d been only twenty-one when she noticed the way Alan kept wiping and adjusting the objects on his desk so that they were kept both clean and orderly. His precision was intriguing, quite the opposite of the violent chaos of the dysfunctional home she’d grown up in. Now, five years later, she recognized Alan’s need for control as compulsive, perhaps even mildly pathological, but back then she’d thought this sense of control was both urbane and inspired. And she had loved the fact that he was so much older than she and owned his own house and a nice car, as she had worried she might end up impoverished and on benefits like her mother.
It had been an easy seduction. The way she’d originally got Alan to notice her was to incrementally mess up his desk, starting with small details. She moved his pencil sharpener, swapped his paper clips for the stapler, and left his phone off the hook, all of which seemed to throw the man into confusion and then a rage (seeing him so suddenly animated turned her on). When her strategy climaxed with her “accidentally” spilling a small pot of ink over his desk, she had his complete attention. Before he could explode into irrational rage she’d asked him out—which totally disarmed him. To both their surprise he’d said yes.
“It wasn’t like he wasn’t a passionate man,” she spoke out loud, startling the cat, who dived under the kitchen table. It was just that sex had to be on his terms, and this meant a lot of ritual and preparation. The bed had to be folded down exactly right, they both had to have had a bath beforehand, he couldn’t make love on a full stomach but not on an empty one either, and so on. It left absolutely no room for spontaneity and as the marriage had gone on Alan’s prerequisites had become more and more inflexible until he appeared to lose interest altogether. Phoebe was reduced to furtively pleasuring herself while clinging to the cold edge of the bed, hoping the bed springs wouldn’t squeak and wake him. It was, as her mother used to say with a great deal of relish, a miserable state of affairs.
From the other side of the house came the sound of the front door opening. Knowing that would be Alan returning from a late session at work, Phoebe hurriedly placed his plate of fish fingers and creamed broccoli on
his place mat, adjusted the wineglass so it was exactly central to the place mat, pulled the chair out for him, and switched the radio on to Classic FM. She then stood waiting beside her own chair. Alan, a short man a little squashed by life, entered the room, kissed his wife on the forehead, then without a word sat at the table. Phoebe followed suit.
“Lovely broccoli,” he said after five minutes, a comment he made every Tuesday—their fish day.
“Thanks, sweetie,” Phoebe responded—it was her standard reply. Outside it began raining, droplets of water splashing against the windowpane in a sudden fecundity. Cumulonimbus, Phoebe remembered, and something inside her started to moisten.
• • •
That night Phoebe dreamt she was tied spread-eagled to the TV weather board, and her body had become the weather map Rupert Thornton was reading from: a relief map with mountains, gullies, lakes, and river all jutting out ripe and ready for him. Every time the weatherman mentioned snow sweeping in from the northern peaks of Scotland, his long, elegant hands would inadvertently brush against her nipples. Then when he said a warm front was moving up from France, his fingers would wander blindly across her wet lips and clit. She quivered with pleasure, but it wasn’t just the touching that was erotic; it was the fact that he had to ignore her and play to the camera. She was both his prop and at his mercy, and yet she knew she was invaluable to him. And Phoebe so wanted to be invaluable to someone.
She woke to discover that Alan had pulled the bedclothes off her in the night. Aroused by her dream, Phoebe crept her hands around the soft hairy circumference of his belly and found his nestling penis.
“We’ll be late for work,” Alan mumbled, pushing her hands away. He sat up, his broad shoulders slumping forward. The vulnerability of his chest—the hair graying and the slight curve of his stomach—clenched at Phoebe’s heart. The trouble was she still loved him. Fighting a sense of profound rejection, she sat up and they both swung their legs around to the opposite sides of the bed, naked back facing naked back. Staring out the window, Phoebe noticed the rain had stopped, and suddenly she found herself wanting to cry.
• • •
The day passed intolerably slowly. All that Phoebe had to occupy herself with was a new box of insurance claims to file and several reports to type up. Several times she found herself wondering what the weatherman might be doing now—talking to the Meteorology Board, checking barometers and weather gauges himself?
The day was unseasonably warm even for the end of July, a sultry, overcast day that threatened thunder but didn’t quite deliver. The silk of her blouse stuck to her back and as she swiveled around in her desk chair she was aware of the way her underpants chaffed against her sex. Neglected, I am neglected, she thought, her gaze falling upon the young intern, a pimply lad of about nineteen. But despite her frustration, it was hard to muster any sexual enthusiasm for her young colleague, who was paralyzed with shyness every time she spoke to him. No, it had to be the weatherman.
Her mind wandered back to the BBC weather report the night before, the way Rupert Thornton had his fingers outstretched when describing rain, like he was running them through hair, her hair. Again, she glanced hopefully at the window. If only the perfect blue sky would suddenly manifest a light shower or two—then she would see him do the same tender caress on the TV that evening. That would give her something to look forward to.
The ticking of the wall clock seemed to bore through her skull and it was only three in the afternoon. Bored and frustrated, Phoebe glanced back down at the report. The mundane sentences describing a small fire that had destroyed part of an old tower attached to St. Leonard’s Church, Heston, had a certain poetic rhythm to them. It was an old seventh-century church building that was historically listed, and the report mentioned that the botanist Joseph Banks was buried there. The damage included several statues, some of which were accidentally damaged by the overenthusiastic firemen engaged in putting out the fire.
One outstretched stone hand broken off at wrist
One grinning gargoyle lost nose
Nymph’s arms upheld toward heaven now missing
Breasts of Virgin smashed
Phoebe read the clipped sentences out loud, her mouth shaping the consonants, mimicking Rupert Thornton’s rounded vowels. Again she thought of the weatherman’s sensual gestures. He had moved as if he lived in the air, as if he were deeply aware of his own physicality and fluidity, as if the small gestures mattered. This had made him beautiful and it made her want to touch him, to absorb through some strange process of osmosis that particular grace of his.
It was the total opposite of the way her husband moved: a man who aggressively bustled his way through life, as if angry at the very fact of his own existence. If Alan was a building that got burnt down no one would really notice because he would be replaceable, but if Rupert Thornton were a building he would be a thing of both architectural grandeur and sensual beauty; the weatherman would be memorable—he would be listed, Phoebe thought wistfully as she doodled on her notepad. She noticed the doodle had become a large penis that was ejaculating not sperm but droplets of rain.
By the time she’d finished typing up the report she was in love.
• • •
