Primrose Part Two
Episode 10 | Still There
She began writing things down when Paul was at work or playing cricket, never in a room with a security camera, and often on a dust-covered table in the studio. The room seemed ever warmer as the days passed, as though the springtime sunshine were having an aggregate effect day on day, thawing the bones of the disused building.
Every day, she hid the sheaf of paper somewhere different. A particularly boring-looking hardcover art book. Under a cardboard box with a painting in it, in the climate-controlled room. Rolled up and secreted at the very back of a drawer filled with half-spent and hardened tubes of paint.
Eleanor had said timeline, and at first, she dutifully drew a long horizontal line, putting notches along it and writing the years on top and events or names below. But in the end, she fell into simply writing, haltingly at first, then so quickly that her handwriting degenerated into a scrawl as she tried to keep up with her thoughts. She hadn’t recalled this period of time in years, those early days with Paul, and each memory seemed to birth a dozen connected ones, her memories proliferating and spreading like the unfurlings of a spider plant.
On a very un-English-feeling hot weekend, she lay lazing with Olivia by the rooftop pool of Hackney House, their cocktail glasses frosted with ice and, like them, starting to sweat even though the sun was on its way down. Neither of them had money, much less expensive private-club memberships, but her friend could always be relied upon to be dating someone who had both. Olivia, her radar always finely calibrated to detect potential men for her friends, spotted him first. She tilted her head to the next table, the arch of her eyebrow telegraphing the presence of a possibility.
Cassandra put her sunglasses on to check out their mark with greater impunity. He was her type, all right: tall and thin, raffish, bohemian. Dark brown wavy hair, close-cropped beard and moustache, rather exotic looking, North African? But the accent was English. Monied, probably, but wearing the fact lightly. She shifted the sunglasses atop her head again, gave Olivia a nod and shrug.
Listen, Olivia mouthed. They both shifted almost imperceptibly to the right, tuning in, communicating their reactions to one another with their eyes.
‘Yeah, it’s the nuclear option, I’m not stupid,’ said the possibility. ‘I'm supposed to trust her judgement. I’m supposed to say, sure, fine, whatever you think. But I wrote the goddamn thing and I am telling her and I am telling you that this is a disaster. If she insists on going with him, well...I've got my finger on the big red button, William, and I am not afraid to press it.'
He shook a stack of loose papers at this William, who glanced over at the two women with a nervous, apologetic smile. His increasingly volcanic companion slapped the papers back down and hunched, worrying his hair with both his hands.
'Andrew, listen,' William said, unctuously. 'I'm on your side. I'm inclined to agree with you. But this is a big deal. The Young Vic is...'
'You know what?' Andrew said, throwing his hands into the air. 'FUCK the Young Vic! And screw the director, A ND the horse-faced ass of a creative director she rode in on.'
William studied his drink while Cassandra and Olivia struggled to contain themselves. Horse-faced ass, Olivia mouthed. Stop, Cassandra mouthed back, her diaphragm trembling with suppressed laughter.
The frustrated playwright leapt to his feet and flung his marked-up script into the air. The sheets of paper scattered, descending softly through the balmy air. Most of them came to rest in the pool, where they floated a while before being pulled under by the water. One landed on Cassandra and Olivia's table.
Andrew stood for a moment with his eyes closed, his chest heaving and his fingertips to his temples, as though he were trying hard to conjure something.
'I'm sorry,' he said. Snapping his eyes open again, he dropped his arms and turned to Cassandra and Olivia like a solider at the Changing of the Guards. Stiff quarter turn, heel click, back straight. 'Ladies. I am so sorry. I am terribly upset.' His eyes, startling green, caught and held Cassandra's gaze for a moment. Something in her twitched, pulled. Ratcheting round a further quarter turn, he squared his shoulders and marched off.
'I never would have realised he was terribly upset,’ Olivia said, bursting into peals of her trademark cascading laughter. 'Sorry. Thought he was a possible. I guess not!'
Someone arrived with a net on a pole, long enough to scoop out most of the pages before they clogged the strainers, and William motioned for the bill. Cassandra picked up the sheet of paper from the table and scanned the script. Years later, she still remembered: page 7.
'I'll be right back,' Cassandra said, scraping back her chair and heading in the direction that he'd gone.
‘Cassandra, don’t!’ Olivia called out as she went. But she didn’t turn around.
She was 19, too young to move in with a man so quickly. In the two years of ups and downs that followed, Andrew proved to have the most artistic of temperaments, far worse than any of the visual artists Cassandra worked alongside at the Slade. If his play were enjoying success, she would bask in the sunshine of his attention and good humour. If his writing were going well, he adored nothing more than supporting her in whatever she did. When the reviews were bad or his creative muse was paralysed, he was jealous and insecure.
In both bad and good moods, he was rather unforgivably selfish in bed, although Cassandra's previous inexperience in this department had meant that her friends, listening to her accounts of their lovemaking with unimpressed, raised eyebrows, had needed to point this out to her. Cassandra's tearful summits with Olivia and Verity over the state of her relationship became weekly affairs.
‘I was there when you first lay eyes on him,' Olivia reminded her. ‘I supposed you were going to sleep with him, but move in with him?...I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be critical. You couldn’t know. It’s too bad that he’s not more attentive. Maybe you could talk to someone, work it out?’
'Who said that thing?' Verity chimed in. 'I can never pronounce his name. "When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished." Or something like that. Be glad you haven't had a family with him. And for fuck's sake, don't get pregnant!'
She stepped off the Andrew rollercoaster a fortnight before Olivia's degree show. Managing her boyfriend's delicate ego while producing her own work had been a juggling act she could no longer perform. She was weary of buying dishes to replace the smashed ones, embarrassed about their neighbours having to put up with the noise of fights and makeup sex that must have penetrated the thin walls of their flat. When she'd asked him to leave, he'd put his fist through one of her canvasses on the way out.
When Verity came and pounded on her door - you're coming to Olivia's show with me, fix your face, let's go - she'd been crying for days.
Olivia, looking flushed and exhaling Prosecco, had been thrilled to see her. She seized Cassandra's arm and dragged her with her, unsteady on her feet but still surprisingly strong. They were headed towards Tomas, Olivia's man of the moment.
Tomas’ housemate, towering over most people in the room, was like a man mountain. His hair was wavy and blonde, and a close-fitting short-sleeved shirt showcased the kind of arms that must have taken hours upon hours a week in the gym to build and maintain.
‘You’ll think he’s not your type,' Olivia whispered as she pulled Cassandra along. 'But Paul’s lovely, he really is, if a bit posh in a way that’s not always so interesting. Give him a chance. I get on quite well with him, he’s charming if a bit of a philistine. He's...actually, I don't know what he does. Finance, or law. One of those. But he's not a creative, which is good because you don't need any more of that nonsense right now, and I want you to meet him. And he’s got money, so you can have some nice dinners.’
Verity appeared at her other elbow. ‘And the thing is, babes, the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else.'
‘No, no!’ Olivia said. ‘I don’t mean that. Don’t listen to her. He’s a nice man, Cassandra. As far as I know. He’s always been nice to me. He’s not silly like Andrew, anyway. No drama. Just a regular man.’
Paul did seem nice, as nice as Olivia had said. Being with him was like sinking into a warm, relaxing bath after a walk in a cold windstorm. Over the next few days, she learned that he was studying to become a solicitor, that he’d been born in Dorset but grown up in a toney eastern suburb of London, that he’d gone to a boarding school back in the county of his birth and played cricket, and that he was really, really into her.
Soon after they met, he was sending her flowers and gifts nearly every week. When her impassioned ex showed up to cause trouble, Paul literally threw him out, Andrew’s gangly body splatting against the wall opposite the front door like a mayfly on a windscreen.
Verity and Olivia seemed surprised that the match seemed more serious than anyone had intended but were still pleased for her, except for complaining that they never saw her anymore. Within three months of dating, they went to visit her parents. Paul unveiled a two-karat solitaire after dinner, with her mother and father sitting in suspense and apparent delight on the edge of their seats.
Verity and Olivia came to the wedding, of course, looking like town mice, as though they hadn't both been born and raised on nearby lanes, in sight of the church steeple. Verity was chic and rebellious in black, smoking fags at the reception at the town hall; Olivia was resplendent in a sari she'd brought home from Goa.
They moved in with Paul’s parents for a while, the idea being that it was a stop gap, somewhere to stay while they figured out where to make their grown-up home. Paul and his father renovated an outbuilding in the garden for her to use for her art, and although Abbeygate Lane did start to feel like home, she didn’t dream that they would never leave.
When Paul’s parents decamped for a sunnier old age in the Algarve, when they finally had a house all to themselves, things started to go off the rails. Perhaps the signs had been there before, but she had interpreted them as love. He’d always been unhappy when she wasn’t available, overly protective where other men were concerned, sometimes petulant when she had things of her own going on, especially when they interfered with her attentions to him.
Gradually, she realised that he didn’t even really want her to work at all, although for whatever reason he was happier with her tutoring than her painting. Perhaps it was because of the money, or tutoring was a kind of work he could understand — not vocational, just a means to an end.
One morning she realised that she had lost it all, all of herself, bit b y bit, and she didn’t know how to get it back.
She was not successful in finding a red pillar postbox still in operation, and it seemed a long time until her next scheduled session. There was only so long she could feel comfortable with this history hanging around in black and white for anyone to see, in her house or studio.
And so, without an appointment, she delivered the envelope through the letterbox of Eleanor’s door where it would be safe. Her hand still ached from the unaccustomed movements of so much longhand writing. But there was still much that she was not yet willing to commit to paper.
‘Third session?’ Paul said, when she came home. ‘I saw you were on Eleanor’s road.’
For a moment she’d forgotten about the fictitious first session, and she nearly slipped by betraying her confusion.
‘Ye-es, third session. Only the second PCP, though,’ she said, shaking off her jacket and hanging it in the hall. ‘Physically co-present meeting. See, I’m getting it.’
‘You’re a funny thing,’ he laughed, kissing her. ‘And how was it? What did you talk about?’
‘The painting,’ she said. ‘We set some goals. More like coaching, really.’
‘Ah, coaching!’ Paul said. ‘Sounds more sensible, really. Tea?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I’ll make some.’
He slid onto one of the stools at the kitchen counter and watched her while she boiled the kettle and extracted mugs from the cupboards.
‘So! You think you might be embarking on a bit of a project, then?’
‘Mm,’ she said. ‘Starting with cleaning all the spiderwebs and muck out, of course, and then getting it fit for purpose. A lot to do.’
He shifted in his chair, tapping a staccato on the counter. What was bothering him? She tried not to betray her tension.
‘So, my darling, a bit of a funny one, but I have a proposal. We’d talked about Florence in April, of course. Our weekend away.’
‘Mmm,’ she nodded, pouring boiling water into the pot.
‘Well, the thing is, as it happens there’s a Fiorentina match that very weekend,’ he said. ‘Serie A. Very important. Total bloody coincidence, but…well, to be brutally honest it will be utterly mad there, and to be even more brutally honest, I’m afraid I’d be ever so slightly distracted if I weren’t at the match myself. I wouldn’t want to do that to you. Would I be an absolute bastard if I suggested we postpone our just-us trip, and I go along to Florence with Richard instead this time? For the match?’
A windfall. She hugged him. ‘Of course, honey,’ she said. ‘That sounds lovely for you and Richard. I wouldn’t want you to miss out. We can have a just-us any time. Just postpone – not cancel, yes?’
‘God, how lucky am I to have a wife like you?’ he rejoiced, jumping up and smacking her full on the lips. He sat down again, shaking his head in wonder. ‘You really are an absolute star.’
‘You are,’ she laughed. She took a sip of tea, then another. ‘By the way, I’m organising a new fibreoptic link-up to the studio so I can do my tutoring out there once it’s all cleaned up.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘There’s not even a computer out there.’
‘Eleanor and I discussed that today,’ she said lightly. ‘I have some money put by from tutoring, for a new one. I’m going to get it all set up.’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Happy wife, happy life, I suppose.’
She kissed him again on the way out of the kitchen with her cup of tea. ‘I’m so glad you and Richard are going to have fun in Florence at the match. It’s a good plan.’
In the next episode, Cassandra reconnects with Alex.
Click the button to subscribe, restack this post, and/or tell a fiction-loving friend about Still There. The more the merrier as the story unfolds.
About the Author
Elaine Kasket ventures into new territory with Still There, her first novel. Known for her nonfiction work, she's now exploring the boundaries between memory, technology, and human connection through fiction. This serialised novel is being released exclusively on Substack, with new installments dropping every Tuesday and Friday. Join the journey from the beginning, and subscribe to make sure you don't miss a single episode.
