Aphrodite's Hat by Salley Vickers

James’s clients had decided to have a family rather than a refurbished house, so we ended up having lunch together, which went on rather longer than we both intended. And then at the end of it there still seemed more to say. Slightly awkwardly, we arranged another lunch and found we didn’t want to stop. Funny, how much more passionate it was than at nineteen.
    I looked again at the painting. It would have been fun casting Aphrodite. Her long, tilted, small-breasted body was undeniably erotic, and that hat on top of all that blatant nakedness …
    We moved on to look at the Uccello of St George killing the dragon. I like this painting because it looks as if the princess has the dragon on a lead rather than her being held captive by him. ‘Poor dragon,’ I said, as I tended to. I’ve always been on the side of the beast in fairy stories.
    James didn’t say anything but he was never a great talker. I was the one who rattled on, and he liked me to do so because it allowed him space to think. His wife, Diane, tended to question him rather too much. So when he told me there was something he wanted to say, I guessed that all wasn’t well.
    We walked, as we did on such occasions, to the Italian restaurant where they suppose we are married. Or, they pretend they suppose. I don’t know how many married couples in their late forties still hold hands. But these are Italians, and I cling to a sentimental notion that the Italians still look at things differently when it comes to matters of the heart.
    â€˜It’s Diane,’ James said, once he’d ordered the wine. ‘She’s not well.’
    I’ve noticed that I only have to be working on a film for it to begin to resemble my own life. Or, more scarily, for my life to begin to resemble it. The film I was casting just then was called
Misdemeanour
and was about a middle-aged couple who have been childhood sweethearts and meet after twenty years and fall in love again. But the husband (at the time it was the husband but the director was toying with the idea of making it the wife instead – anyway, one of the lovers’ partners) gets MS. It’s a kind of ghastly pun, you see, MS demeanour = what is the correct ‘demeanour’ with which to meet multiple sclerosis? From which you will understand this is a supposedly arty film: one with a moral to it.
    â€˜Yes?’ I said, carefully. It was implicit between us that we never put pressure on each other. Instinctively, I drew back.
    â€˜She may have, well, almost certainly has got, cancer.’
    â€˜Oh hell,’ I said.
    I could just as well have said nothing. ‘You could always try saying nothing,’ my husband, Pete sometimes remarks, when at times I have, untruthfully, suggested that I do not know what to say. I like Diane, you see. That’s the hell of it. In another life she and I might have been friends, though not close friends. We aren’t enough alike.
    The wine arrived just then so we had the usual courtesies of drawing the cork, which meant the conversation, too, was drawn, to a temporary pause. When James had tasted the wine and pronounced it ‘fine’, I asked, ‘What kind?’
    â€˜Bladder,’ said James briefly. I had guessed it might be breast, which of all the cancers, I have been given to understand, is the least bad. Diane had good breasts; mine were meagre affairs by comparison.
    â€˜Shit!’ I allowed myself to say this time.
    The starter arrived now, seafood salad for me and a pasta for James. Again we expressed fake enthusiasm and began to eat in silence. A silence that I broke: that was my role.
    â€˜I suppose it makes you feel badly about me,’ I suggested. I didn’t say ‘us’. Even with James, ‘us’ is a term I fight shy of.
    He didn’t have to reply; I knew him so well. Sometimes I wondered why we even bothered to speak, except that I like to talk and he liked to hear