Contrary to conventional wisdom, Judith has found that what men like best is not to be asked about themselves (especially when there’s a risk of saying things they might regret) but to be entertained. As the first selection of delicacies is set before them – pastries sucré and salé, fruit juice in thin goblets, smoked salmon wound in spirals on Melba toast – she assembles a series of anecdotes to amuse him. Being locked into Notre-Dame after a VIP visit when she was here, five years ago, for a conference. The school French trip in the fifth form, when two teachers had an ill-concealed affair under the scandalised eyes of their charges. Her mother’s French penfriend who still keeps in touch, from the château in the Tarn where she lives with her fourth husband.
Jonty eats more than her, listening while she talks, but from time to time (she doesn’t want to give the impression that she’s working too hard: the effusion must seem spontaneous) she pauses to give her full attention to the food.
‘Good, eh?’ He watches her hesitate between a tiny pain au chocolat and a chausson aux pommes. ‘Have them both. They’re only small.’
‘You’ll make me fat.’
‘You could stand to be a little fatter. It suits you.’ And then, before she can launch again into the amusing saga of the penfriend and her marital adventures, he says, ‘I hope we can see each other in London, Judith. If you do that sort of thing.’
*
The news of her mother is mixed. She’s been entered in a clinical trial, double blind, but she’s pretty sure from the side effects that she’s getting the new experimental drug.
‘Is that a good thing?’ Judith asks, on the phone.
‘It is if the phase one results are borne out.’
‘But it’s making you feel worse than the other one would?’
‘Who’s to say worse.’
Judith says nothing for a moment. She could go down this weekend, she thinks, but . . .
‘You had a good time in Paris, anyway?’
‘Very good.’
‘Did you meet a glamorous Frenchman?’
‘No.’ Judith hesitates. ‘An Englishman, actually.’
‘Married?’ her mother asks – and then, without waiting for an answer, ‘Of course he’s married. All the good ones are married.’
Judith smiles. It’s a joke between them, the Jewish-mother act. It’s supposed to cheer her up. But what really cheers her up is being reminded of her mother’s uncanny intuition, where Judith is concerned. Abigail Malik, mother and clairvoyant.
‘Married and a former client,’ she says. ‘Very bad idea.’
‘You don’t want me to get better, Judith,’ says her mother.
‘Of course I don’t. I’m coming down this weekend to make sure you’re not getting better.’
‘Don’t do that. I’ll be growly this weekend. See your man, if he’s got time for you.’ There’s a cough at the end of the phone – probably nothing, Judith thinks, probably just a cough, but even so she feels a clutch in her chest. ‘Does this mean you’re getting rid of the other one?’ Abi asks.
‘I’m planning on assembling a whole football team, actually,’ says Judith. ‘But not this weekend. This weekend I’m coming to visit you, growly or not.’
There’s a brief silence. ‘Your father’s coming on Sunday,’ says her mother. ‘Do you want to see him?’
*
This was the deal when her parents split up: Judith was on her mother’s side. No matter that they were both at pains to explain that it was a joint decision. Sharing herself between them was too difficult for Judith, and since her father’s adultery had triggered the separation, the choice was straightforward. The irony of her harsh judgement of her father didn’t escape her, but her own behaviour, she tells herself, hasn’t undermined a marriage. If anything, it’s helped Arvind’s marriage, offering him something he needs and demanding precious little in return.
But her ostracism of her father has caused some difficulties. Judith doesn’t do things by halves, and they are both too proud to offer olive branches. I see him, her mother says, from time to time. If I’m friends with him, why can’t you be? They have met occasionally – at her mother’s sixtieth birthday party, a cousin’s wedding, an uncle’s funeral. Never, since the divorce, à trois.
*
On Friday, during a tedious day in court, Judith wonders about the weekend: about how she will find her mother, what they will do. It would be nice to take her out, she thinks, but nowhere too strenuous, and nowhere with crowds, either. Her mother has explained the risk of infection. If they stay at home all weekend, will there be enough to say?
But of course her mother has a plan. Why did Judith imagine it would be down to her to organise the entertainment?
‘I thought we’d go to Wildwood tomorrow,’ she says, that evening. ‘A friend of Drusilla’s is exhibiting at the moment. I liked her work when I last saw it.’
‘Great,’ says Judith. ‘How’s Drusilla?’
‘Doing better than me,’ says Abi.
Wildwood is a farm on the way to the Quantocks which has nurtured artists rather than cattle for the last forty years – a favourite haunt of Judith’s mother, run by an old friend of hers. The thought of it makes Judith unexpectedly happy. It’s the kind of place, she thinks, where things never change, and no one seems to get any older.
‘It’s good of you to come, Judith,’ Abi says. ‘I know you have better things to do.’
‘Never,’ says Judith. Now she thinks she might cry, and where would that get them? ‘What did you teach me? Nothing is more important than looking after your mother.’
Abi laughs, and there’s that wheeze that turns into a cough again. ‘It’s nothing,’ she says, hearing Judith cluck. ‘It’s a cough. Don’t make that sound.’
*
They get up late on Saturday morning. Her mother looks better, Judith thinks, a little more colour in her cheeks. She’s never been good at breakfast, though: together they pick at a slice or two of toast and drink the herbal tea which seems to have replaced the rooibos in Abi’s kitchen.
Looking out of the window, Judith notices that her mother’s Mondeo isn’t in the drive.
‘Where’s the car?’ she asks.
‘At the garage,’ says Abi. ‘Being patched up, just like me. We can take the little black car.’
‘My little black car?’ asks Judith. ‘The old Fiesta? I had no idea you still had it. You don’t keep it taxed, do you?’
‘Just recently,’ Abi says. ‘They gave it the once-over. I thought I might sell it. Or, you know – if I needed someone to run an errand, it might . . .’
She shrugs. Judith stares at her for a moment, recognising with a chill her mother’s first admission of vulnerability. She wants to ask why the errand-runner couldn’t drive the Mondeo – why they wouldn’t have a car of their own – but she understands that it’s a need for safety nets, for security – and besides, who is she to argue, when she’s not here to run errands?
‘Well,’ she says, ‘this’ll be a trip down memory lane, then.’
The car is parked in the garage beside the house. It looks, Judith thinks, like a tin box – and when they open the door, she wonders what her mother can be thinking.
‘It stinks,’ she says, as she slides reluctantly into the passenger seat. (Abi, it seems, is determined to drive.) ‘It smells as though something’s died in here.’ And then she catches herself, and the last word is almost lost in a kind of hiccup.
Her mother pats her hand. ‘You don’t have to mind what you say,’ she says. ‘They’re familiar, those words. I’ve used them my whole life.’
Judith blushes then, like a child reprimanded for swearing. While her mother starts the ignition, she wonders whether she means that the vocabulary of illness and death is familiar to her as a doctor, or simply as a human being. Is that one of the things that happens when you get cancer: that part of your language is withdrawn by well-meaning friends and relations, just when you need it?
As the
y head out of the city, Judith rolls her window down and the smell is diluted by a rush of cold air.
‘Too much?’ she asks, and her mother shakes her head.
‘It goes well, doesn’t it?’ she says. ‘The car?’
Judith smiles. She wonders how much it cost to get the Fiesta back on the road, and how much it’s worth. But that’s not the point, she knows. It’s the same satisfaction as finding an old coat that’s survived the moths and come back into fashion; finding that you’re still here to enjoy it.
‘Are you doing any singing at the moment?’ Abi asks, a little later.
‘Not really. Just the Bach Choir.’
‘There must be other groups you could join. Smaller groups.’
Better groups, her mother means. She knows Judith finds it frustrating being in such a big chorus; that it’s a step down from the glory days of the chapel choir. Judith ran into Deep Patel at the Coliseum a few weeks ago – he runs a semi-professional chamber choir these days, alongside his other jobs, conducting and playing and teaching. Come and sing for me, he said. We could do with another sop in the Leighton Singers. There’re a few faces you’d recognise. Judith smiled, as though she was really too busy for all that. She’d heard the Leighton Singers on Radio 3 the week before. She didn’t tell him she wouldn’t dare audition for him.
‘They’re all too good or too bad,’ she says now. ‘I wouldn’t get into the ones I’d like to join.’
‘You have too low an estimation of yourself, Judith,’ says her mother.
Judith laughs out loud. ‘Only you could possibly think that about me,’ she says. ‘Only my mother.’
‘Only your mother could know it’s true,’ Abi says.
Judith doesn’t reply. After a moment her mother glances at her. ‘You were so talented, always,’ she says. ‘All that music.’
They both know that isn’t what she meant, just now: that she had shimmied in a blink from singing to men; to marriage, specifically. Among many things on which they disagree – often with relish – it is the only topic that hurts them both.
‘You’re always so busy, I know,’ Abi says now. ‘I suppose they ask too much, those choirs.’
This is a peace offering; it wrenches at Judith’s heart. It’s not that her mother doesn’t have the strength to argue, she knows, but that she doesn’t want to waste precious time on it. Or perhaps, even worse, that she’s given up hope: not just of a wedding, but of recalibrating Judith’s life.
‘I should look around,’ Judith says, trying to keep her voice steady. It’s important to sustain the charade, she thinks. Who knows where they might end up otherwise. ‘You’re right: it would be good to do some more singing.’
Her mother brightens. ‘You’ll find there are opportunities,’ she says.
Abi herself has never cared for music. She encouraged her daughter to practise – drove her to it, in fact – because she saw it as an accomplishment, a garnish, and because people said Judith was good, and she believed you should make the most of your talents. Her own passion is for art. If she hadn’t been a doctor, Abi might well have been a painter. The house is filled with her canvases: the early watercolours and the tentative oils, the bright post-divorce acrylics. Looking at the row of defiant nudes along the landing last night, Judith wondered what the chemotherapy series would look like. Whether her mother would ever dare to solicit her own show at Wildwood.
Drusilla comes out to greet them, her welcome conveying the delight of a surprise as well as the satisfaction of a pleasure regularly renewed. Judith thinks, not for the first time, that they could hardly be more different, these two women of the same age and the same upbringing. Drusilla is as broad and unruly as her mother is neat and trim; her greying hair blooms around a tie-dyed bandanna.
‘Do you want tea?’ she asks. ‘Do you want tomatoes? I have a glut.’
‘I want to see the paintings,’ says Abi. ‘First I want to see the paintings, and then we’ll drink some tea.’
Some of the paintings are huge and some much smaller. Abi moves at once towards the far wall, where a gigantic triptych hangs against the bare stone. Judith drifts from one picture to another, half an eye on her mother, and comes to a halt in front of an unframed canvas about a metre square. The label beside it says Continuum III. It looks like a close-up of the sea on a stormy day, overlaid with a loose filigree of copper wires. She stares at it, self-conscious, as she always is when faced with art in the presence of her mother. The painting is restful, she decides. That’s what she’ll say if she’s asked for an opinion.
‘I like this one best too,’ Abi says, joining her. ‘The bigger ones aren’t as successful, are they?’
She puts a hand on Judith’s shoulder, and Judith feels a charge of comfort and consolation course through her. She remembers her mother taking her hand as they walked to school when she was five, hugging her when a teenage romance floundered. She’ll buy the painting for her, she thinks. Secretly, before they leave: a memento of the day.
*
On Sunday morning she makes up her mind about her father’s visit.
‘I’m going to head back this morning,’ she says. ‘You’ll have company today, and I’ve got lots to do.’
That’s true, anyway. She’s got a case starting on Monday morning, the kind of case that might advance her a little along that arduous path to silk, if she does well enough. But her mother’s not deceived.
‘Next time, maybe,’ she says, her eyes resting on Judith’s face.
‘Sure,’ says Judith. ‘Next time.’
She leaves a card propped up in her room with the receipt for the painting inside. She hopes her mother will find it before her father arrives.
On the way back to London she gazes out of the train window at the rush of the countryside. Perhaps this is how artists look at the world, she thinks: seeing it as it comes at them, not leaping always to what they know is there. A phantasmagorical swirl of green rather than a pattern of trees and fields. And then, with a sudden fanfare of conviction, she decides that this week – this evening, even – she will break off her twelve-year-old arrangement with Arvind, and her one-week-old fling with Jonty. Perhaps she’ll even screw up her courage and audition for the Leighton Singers. A few faces you’d recognise, she hears Deep saying again. Not, of course . . . But who knows? Who knows what Fate might deliver, if she dares to take the first step? She feels a thrill of excitement, of resolution, of ambition. Jumping off the train at Paddington, she jogs along the platform towards the Tube, as though the rest of her life is waiting impatiently.
When she gets back to her flat the landline’s ringing, and she can see the answerphone light flashing. She lifts the receiver, blissfully ignorant.
‘Judith?’ Her father’s voice. ‘Judith darling, I’ve been trying to get hold of you. I’m very sorry; I’ve got some bad news to tell you.’
Her mother is dead. Judith listens to the medical detail without hearing it; hearing only that it was a freak occurrence, perhaps a complication of the experimental drug. Out of the blue, her father says, with his characteristic habit of using stock phrases in a way that jars a little. ‘She wouldn’t have felt a thing, not for more than a second.’
‘You can’t know that,’ Judith says. It’s the first time she’s managed to speak – the first thing she’s said to her father for months. She’s understood already that he wasn’t there; that he arrived to find Abi crumpled in the hall.
‘The cancer was worse than she admitted, Judith,’ her father says now. ‘I’m not saying she would have chosen this outcome, but it isn’t the worst way to go.’
Judith shuts her eyes. None of it makes any sense: it’s only a few hours since she was pouring tea for her mother. She knows it’s not her fault, that there was probably nothing she could have done even if she’d been there, but even so those optimistic plans she made on the train feel shameful now. She’s filled with hubris, with the enormity of wanting more for herself, a fresh start, a clean slate, when her mo
ther . . .
Her father goes on talking for a while, and then his voice falters.
‘Shall I phone back later, Judith?’ he asks.
She wishes he wouldn’t keep using her name.
‘OK,’ she says. They will have to talk, of course. And she’ll have to go back to Bristol at once: her mother would want the proper Jewish rites, secular though she was in life, and her father can’t be trusted with those. She thinks how odd it is to feel indispensable to her mother now, when it’s too late. And that the one person she needs to talk to, who would understand, will never be available to her again.
She sits down, then, on the corner of the sofa. The one person . . . Terrible, terrible, she thinks, for her thoughts to fly so swiftly to someone else; to another source of succour, so long ignored. The shame and the hubris come flooding back – and although she can hear her mother’s voice behind them, scoffing at her overwrought scruples, she shakes her head, willing herself to resist. She should, she must, bear this alone. What would she say, anyway? What could she say, even if . . .
But she can’t help it. Before she can think any more, she grabs her laptop, googles phone book, types in the name and location.
There’s only one result: W Devenish, Middle House, Emscott, Shrewsbury. It’s three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon: perhaps he’ll be out. That thought tightens her resolve. If she rings and he’s out, she tells herself, she won’t call again. She has just enough self-possession to dial 141 before the number, and then it’s ringing, ringing, and she’s imagining the house, Middle House, and Bill in the garden, perhaps, or sitting with a newspaper –
‘Hello?’
Judith freezes. A woman’s voice.
‘Hello?’ it says again.
‘I’m sorry,’ Judith says. ‘I think I have the wrong number.’
Every Secret Thing Page 20