by Emma Morgan
‘I think it’s too early for that,’ said Grace.
‘Not by the way you look, you’ve got that glow. I’m pleased for you, love. I think you should celebrate with some tinned peaches.’
She drove the hundred metres home and parked but didn’t get out of the car. She sat clutching her tin. Marriage? She had never even considered it. But maybe it was possible. Maybe everything was possible.
This is Violet’s discussion with Annie on the nature of sexuality
‘What are you then?’ asked Annie.
They were having lunch in the local Italian, outside which very optimistic people were on the pavement pretending that they were somewhere European with sun. Annie had said she would treat her and Violet reckoned this was because Annie felt bad for shouting at her the other day. It was the first time in a long time that Violet had eaten a meal in a café and she was impressed with herself for being in a venue designed for the purpose of social interaction for the second time in a week. Hopefully it meant that ‘the fear’ was in abatement, albeit temporarily, or perhaps it just meant that Annie’s ‘forcing her out of the house’ technique was finally working. Whichever one it was, she didn’t feel too bad and didn’t want to hide under the table as she had been tempted to do in the past.
‘What am I what?’ asked Violet. Pizza or pasta, she thought, pizza or pasta. It was a perennial problem and the portions were always too big and then she’d feel guilty about leaving half of it. Plus, Annie was paying, and would therefore feel obliged to eat the leftovers to get good value and complain that she had eaten too much.
‘Easy choice, I would have thought, easier than trying to work out which salad is best. Straight or gay? You choose,’ said Annie.
‘I didn’t know they were salads.’
‘That waiter there or the girl with no hair in the corner?’
‘How do you know she’s gay?’ said Violet, looking up at the girl, who had short hair and big black glasses.
‘I didn’t say she was gay, that was your presumption because she looks like she could possibly be, based on your assessment of what a gay woman looks like. Neither was that the question I meant, as you well know. Are you hetero or homo?’
Annie crossed her arms under her bosom so that the waiter would pay them attention. It didn’t work. Violet knew that Annie would now be convinced he was gay.
‘Um. I haven’t thought about it yet,’ said Violet, who was lying because she had of course, although not in such a worried way as might have been expected, but she didn’t want to tell Annie this, although Annie probably already knew.
‘Don’t dither. It’s unbecoming. Are you a lesbian?’
‘I hope not,’ said Violet.
‘I don’t think that’s the right attitude. Don’t let the thought police hear you saying that,’ said Annie.
‘No, I don’t mean it like that, I just don’t like that word. I wish that Sappho had been from another island. Do you know the names of any other Greek islands?’ asked Violet.
‘Corfu. Crete.’
‘Corfucian.’
‘I think you’ll find that’s “Confucian”.’
‘That’s a religion. Cretan. I’ll have to get out the atlas,’ said Violet, trying to concentrate on the menu again but only getting as far as prosciutto.
‘You haven’t got an atlas.’
‘No, but I wish I did have. Why haven’t you got one? Do you want to have a dessert as well?’ said Violet.
‘Are you having one?’
‘That wasn’t my question.’
‘As if you ever give a proper answer. You haven’t even answered my first question properly.’
‘Which was?’ said Violet, who had completely forgotten. This happened to her all the time – her mind wandered off, even in the middle of important or pressing conversations. At least, she thought, I’m not losing my memory, I never had a good one in the first place.
‘You mean you can’t remember? I despair of you.’
‘You despair of me frequently. And you know what my memory’s like,’ said Violet. ‘It’s a pathetic memory, it’s like it’s a toy poodle puppy and yours is a Great Dane.’
‘I asked you if you were a lesbian and you started off about Greek islands. I’ll change the terminology if you prefer. Are you gay? A dyke?’
Violet tried to think about it properly. At times being with Annie was like an exam and she wanted to try her best.
‘Gay’s all right. Sounds happy. I suppose because that’s what it means.’
‘And dyke?’
‘It reminds me of that bit in Good Morning Vietnam where Robin Williams is reading the news and he goes something like “A river broke through a protective dyke today.” ’
‘Are you going to see her again?’ said Annie.
‘I don’t know,’ said Violet.
‘You could phone her. Do you have her phone number?’
Annie’s inability to stop her questioning techniques was often exhausting. Violet wanted to lay her head on the table.
‘No, but I know her surname,’ said Violet, who had seen it on a letter. Not that she had been looking.
‘Then why don’t you look her up, see if she’s got a landline. What’s her surname? I’ll do it,’ and Annie got out her phone.
‘I can’t,’ said Violet.
‘Why not?’
‘I just can’t.’
‘Why not?’
Violet bit her lip and considered the question.
‘I’m thinking. I’m a slow thinker, you know that.’
‘Perhaps you are bisexual,’ said Annie.
‘Dunno,’ said Violet.
Violet was uncomfortable and had started to fidget with her cutlery in a way that she knew made Annie want to slap her hands. Annie sighed and put her phone back down on the table and looked at the menu again. Violet stared out of the window. She saw the borzoi she liked but decided not to point it out to Annie. She would have the pasta; there, a decision.
On their way home Violet stubbed her toe on the pavement because she was distracted by a man cycling down the road with juggling clubs sticking out of his knapsack. She mostly bought her shoes from a children’s shoe shop that sold Startrite, the old-fashioned kind where they would still measure your feet with that sliding machine. It had a rocking horse that she always wanted to get on. Violet’s feet were what she considered to be an embarrassing size two, embarrassing because whenever in the past she had mistakenly entered an adults’ shoe shop and asked for that size, she was greeted by reactions ranging from a fetishistic interest in a salivating salesman to complete indifference from bored shop girls counting the minutes to home time. ‘No two, we haven’t a two.’ ‘But you haven’t really looked,’ Violet had tried beseeching. ‘Couldn’t you go in the back and look a bit?’ ‘We haven’t got any. We never have.’ Then Violet would give up and leave the shop with her head hung down, feeling ashamed for being so minuscule. I wish I was Annie, she’d think, then I could tell them to eff off, or at least ask to speak to the manager. Or even shove them aside with my bum. Violet had never complained about anything in her life. She wondered what would have happened if she had grown up in China years ago and had her feet bound. What size would they have been then? So small she would have been walking en pointe, like a ballet dancer? And the crippling pain. She stopped and put her hand on the wall next to her.
‘Annie! I’ve stubbed my toe!’ she called out but Annie was way ahead of her by now, wincing at every step like the Little Mermaid because her expensive shoes were too tight as always. Violet limped down the pavement towards her.
‘What the heck have you done?’ Annie called out to her.
‘I stubbed my toe! Didn’t you see the man with the juggling clubs? I nearly fell into the road.’
‘Hurry up,’ said Annie as Violet came towards her and, with unexpected solidarity, linked her arm with hers, and together they hobbled home like a pair of old ladies.
Back in the flat Violet went to her room. She
had already found what she thought was the woman’s phone number in one of the plastic-wrapped phone books she had discovered on the top of the electricity cupboard in the downstairs hall. She had forgotten such paper evidence of your whereabouts even existed in this digital age. But she hadn’t dialled it. Did she like her? Was it possible to like a woman the way she had sometimes liked a man? Was it allowed to call her? And what, what, she wanted to know, was it like to have sex with a woman? Would it be very weird? What if halfway through she didn’t like it and wanted to stop? She could hear Annie making coffee with her complicated Italian coffee maker and found the noise as reassuring as she found Annie herself. She looked at the drawing of Sam’s mouth that was lying on her desk. She put her finger on it.
This is Grace not taking Sam home to Ravel Corner
Great Aunt Beatrice rang her. Cyril had had a fall. Could they come? Grace said yes of course, straight away. It would never have occurred to her to refuse Beatrice or Cyril anything. She considered things. She and Sam had been going out for three months now; was it too early to ask Sam to come with her? She dithered. Her family were mostly nice. Sam was nice too and so why shouldn’t they get on? But what if they didn’t like her, how would that make Grace feel? And what if Sam didn’t like them; there were so many of them, and all so full on. She decided in the end to be a grown-up about it and let Sam decide.
‘No thanks,’ said Sam, who was washing up in her flat while Grace stood behind her. Why have I chosen to ask her now, thought Grace, and therefore miss the chance of seeing her face. Now what am I supposed to say? I don’t want to grill her on why she doesn’t want to come, I don’t want to show her how disappointed I am, maybe it is better that I’m standing behind her.
‘Are you busy this weekend?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘Then come, they’re nice, you’ll like them.’
‘I don’t do family.’
‘Oh. Why not?’
‘I just don’t do them.’
‘Will I meet your family?’
‘They’re a long way away, so probably not.’
‘Right,’ said Grace. ‘Well, you’ll like my sisters, I think, they’re great. Well, Eustacia and Tess are. Bella not so much, she’s an acquired taste but she’s entertaining at least. Please come.’
‘No thanks.’
‘OK,’ said Grace in a way she hoped didn’t sound passive aggressive. ‘I might be a couple of days. It depends on how my grandfather is.’
‘OK,’ said Sam. ‘Do you want some tea?’
‘I’m pretty worried about him.’
‘Yes, I expect you are. Tea?’
Grace didn’t understand. Sam wasn’t a callous person, she was nothing but kind. Grace had seen her helping children in the park to find their lost mittens.
‘He’s very old, you see, and unsteady, and this isn’t the first time he’s fallen. And Beatrice is very old too and she shouldn’t really be caring for him on her own. And so I’ve got to go.’
‘Sure,’ said Sam.
Would you just listen to what I am trying to tell you, thought Grace; she decided on directness, none of this pussyfooting around.
‘I would like you to come. It would help me.’
‘Sorry, Grace,’ said Sam, turning towards her at last, ‘I’ve got things to do.’
Grace fought back a sudden urge to take Sam by the arms and shake her. Why the hell wasn’t she listening properly? Instead Grace put her hands in her pockets.
‘OK, well, I’ll ring you.’
‘Fine,’ said Sam.
There wasn’t any more that Grace could do or say, it seemed, but it was the first time that she had ever felt angry with Sam.
It was funny going ‘home’. Everything was the same, a time warp. The long potholed drive the car struggled along that they had used to swerve down in the Land Rover. The first view of the house, the gothic nightmare tacked on to the seventeenth-century main house. She tried to look at it subjectively; it looked as if bats might fly off out of the chimney at any moment. It looked like there were mad women in its attics and that the threshold shouldn’t be crossed, that there were beasts within.
Beatrice answered the creaking front door after Grace and Eustacia had rung the bell for ages and ages. She was wearing jodhpurs and slippers and pulled over her dowager’s hump what looked like one of their school lab coats and over that a filthy apron. In her hand was a grey stringy mop dripping water. The wrinkles on her face were etched in deep to her papery skin and there was a hint of a beard on her chin.
‘I’ve been mopping!’ she said and shook the mop and they were sprayed with dirty water and they stepped back but she didn’t notice. ‘I thought I would make an effort for your arrival, dearest girls.’
They made their way slowly upstairs. The banisters were shaky, the wood panels on the walls were splintering, and, as they emerged into the upstairs corridor, a plume of smoke drifted towards them.
‘Oh dear,’ said Beatrice, not now able to move at any speed, ‘I was perhaps over-enthusiastic with the fire. Do run please, girls.’
They ran to the room at the far end and opened the door. The grate was full of smoke but luckily it was such a big room that it hadn’t spread far. Cyril was sitting up in a four-poster with shabby curtains half hanging off around him, calmly eating a boiled egg off a tray.
‘Girls!’ he said.
‘Had you not noticed, Cyril,’ Grace said, ‘that your room was on fire?’
Eustacia was trying to damp down the grate.
‘I was otherwise engaged,’ he said, and Grace noticed that the bed was covered with a layer of books and papers. He was even older than Beatrice, in his late eighties as far as they could work out because of his vagaries, but his eyebrows were still startlingly black and abundant in comparison to the lack of hair on his freckled head.
‘You could have gone up like a torch,’ Grace said.
‘Never mind, dear,’ said Beatrice, who had hobbled in behind them. ‘Let’s open the windows.’
Cyril, as it turned out, was healing better than anyone might have thought. He was now Emeritus professor and only went to the university for the occasional lecture or to go to the library, and seemed happy at home writing in bed.
‘Like Descartes,’ he said. ‘This being bedbound isn’t at all bad. I’ve got through a lot of work, Grace. Only it’s a strain on Beatrice with the stairs. I’m thinking of moving to the drawing room.’
‘Girls,’ said Beatrice, ‘could you possibly help with the bed? I think there’s a portable jobby in the attic.’
Once they had found their way through the large cobwebs and the alarming examples of stored taxidermy up there and got the mildewed camp bed downstairs, they went back for Cyril and moved him down to the dark drawing room, which looked like it hadn’t been used for years. They piled his books, many of which were frangible, on the imposing sideboard. The green William Morris wallpaper looked mouldy.
‘You haven’t sold this then?’ Grace said, patting the sideboard, because during her childhood every so often items had disappeared to auction, and, in the case of the Ming bowl used for putting used tea bags in, to Sotheby’s. ‘Needs must,’ Beatrice used to say, sadly waving goodbye to whatever it was. ‘Is it teak?’ asked Grace.
‘Ah, we came into some luck,’ said Cyril, in his camp bed, tucking down his army issue blanket that had probably been inherited from some distant relation in the Bombay Boxers. Everything in this house had a story about where it came from. His pyjamas were from Harrods, monogrammed of course, but were about fifty years old and fraying at the neck.
‘Wonderful,’ said Beatrice, ‘wonderful.’
Eustacia, who couldn’t help herself, was swiping at the furniture with tissues. ‘You know that Jeremy and I would be glad to help you out if you need us to. I mean that.’
‘It’s all right, dear. Two thirty at Catterick. Go Baby Go,’ said Beatrice. ‘Simply awful form, hence the odds. Always been pulled up. But I saw him
in the paddock and his ears were pricked and his tail was up, and I thought, aha, and rang my little man.’
‘Paid for the electricity,’ said Cyril. ‘We were in danger of falling into permanent Stygian gloom.’
‘What were the odds?’ asked Grace.
‘Ah,’ said Beatrice, tapping at the side of her nose, ‘a lady never reveals her age. I think I hear a car.’
Tess arrived first, battling up the incline of the drive in her disintegrating Land Rover and stopping before nearly taking out one of the stone dogs on the front steps.
‘That was a good stop,’ Grace said to her.
‘At home, it’s better because it makes the gravel spin and once she broke a window,’ said Rowan, climbing out of the car.
‘Well, she didn’t exactly break it but there was a big crack,’ said Linden, getting out the other side.
‘Who’s she, the cat’s mother?’ asked Tess, hauling a huge canvas hold-all out of the front seat.
‘You’ve started saying that way too much lately, Tess,’ said Linden.
‘Yes, it’s irritating and not at all necessary,’ said Rowan.
‘It’s supposed to show that we are being rude calling her she,’ said Linden.
‘Well, why doesn’t she say that then?’ asked Rowan.
‘I have no idea,’ said Linden.
‘Is Bella here yet?’ Tess asked Grace.
‘If she was here, her car would be here. Obviously,’ said Linden.
‘Is Sam here?’ said Tess.
‘No, she couldn’t come,’ said Grace.
‘Shame. How are the oldies?’
Up the drive then came Tess’s car’s antithesis – a Range Rover with tinted windows.
‘Ah, here we go,’ said Grace.
Bella threw herself out of her car and rushed towards them, stopping only to kiss them both on either cheek. This always surprised Grace and they bumped noses. Bella wiped lipstick off her aggressively with her thumb. She swept her long dark brown (fake from Russian virgins apparently) hair off her beautiful face. Cheekbones that could have sliced cheese. One of those spindly figures that turns out to be a marvel of yoga stretch. Clothes so understated and uniformly grey and black that they reminded Grace of East Germany but probably cost more than her entire wardrobe put together.