by Emma Morgan
And yet, and yet, in spite of the things that were difficult and that she didn’t like, there were so many that she did. The shape of her hands, the smell of her shampoo, the way she bit her toothbrush into nothing, the dip of her back, these were the things that made her love Sam so why should it matter that there were things they didn’t agree on? Sam sometimes farted very quietly in her sleep – you could find it funny or you could find it disgusting. Grace found it endearing. Wasn’t there ultimately a level of choice involved in being with someone? This was what love was like for real, not the fairytale love, but the real, deep love that she had longed for; it was a weighing up of the good and the bad and deciding that the good won hands down. You chose to be with somebody because you accepted them as they were, faults and all, just as they accepted your foibles. And she knew that despite the things that didn’t work, she loved Sam, and that now it would be impossible to be without her. And so she asked Sam about living together. Not marriage like Manfred had suggested, just living together. It was surely best to take things one step at a time. It took days to find the right words. They were sitting on Grace’s sofa after a weekend that had involved so much sex it had left Grace worn out and longing only for a box set and a cup of tea.
‘I was wondering if you might consider us living together?’
‘Not my thing,’ Sam said, and started to bounce her mug on her knee.
‘Why not?’ Grace asked.
‘I like my own space,’ Sam said and bit at the side of her thumbnail as though that was more interesting than the place this conversation might be going.
‘You could move in here? You like this house, don’t you?’
‘I don’t want to move in here,’ said Sam.
‘Or I could move to yours if you’d prefer that, sell this,’ said Grace.
‘No,’ said Sam, looking at the bookshelf in front of her. ‘I didn’t know you had Great Expectations.’
‘It’s your copy. You left it here. Or we could buy somewhere else. We could have a garden perhaps and you could grow flowers. Or vegetables. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You could even have a room of your own if you wanted to put all your stuff in. A retreat from me.’
‘No,’ said Sam, and she got up and went over and picked her book off the shelf.
‘Could you tell me why not?’ Grace bit her bottom lip.
‘I just told you,’ said Sam, flicking through her book, ‘I like my own space and doing my own thing. It’s not a criticism of you, Grace, it’s just the way I am.’
‘Don’t fence me in?’ asked Grace.
And Grace laughed but it was a nervous laugh. And then Sam laughed too and came back over and sat on the sofa and pulled Grace down on to her so that they touched in as many places as possible. Which was her inoffensive way of shutting Grace up. It worked well. Grace didn’t mention it again, but in her head she was in for the long haul and hoped that at a point in the indeterminate future Sam might change her mind. After all, Sam always liked her little house and the fact that it was a house and not a flat. She used to sit on the stairs to read and Grace would bring her up a cup of her grim tea and set it down on the step next to her feet, which Grace badly wanted to lay her head down on as though she too was an offering. The Catholicism must have stuck after all.
It was only a week later, and they had gone into the Co-op on the way back from the cinema when Grace saw that a furniture shop had opened next door. She looked in the window. There was one of those big kitchen clocks that imitate the old-fashioned ones in railway stations. She had always wanted one of those.
‘Do you like this clock?’ asked Grace.
‘Sure,’ said Sam.
‘I might get it,’ said Grace.
She went into the shop and Sam followed her and by the time she left she had the clock, a blue lamp, and two plaited rugs. Grace loved those things with a love disproportionate to their real value because she thought of them as ‘ours’. Every time she stood on a rug or looked for the time she felt a glow of satisfaction and yes, hope. Maybe she will come and live with me. Maybe she will change her mind. Shadows of her early unrequited longings must have stuck with her and carried over so that she was once again grasping at someone out of her reach, except that this time the object of her affections was so near.
She had read once, she didn’t know where, that in a relationship there is always one person who loves more than the other, there is a loving one and a beloved, an adoring and an adored, and she came to believe that this was true and at the time, she didn’t care that she was on the losing side. She was glad to be allowed to adore Sam. She would have paid money to be able to do so.
This is Violet and gaiety
They never seemed to make it out of the house, but Violet didn’t mind that, it always felt safer for her to be inside and she didn’t know what the etiquette of being with a woman in public might be anyway.
‘Have you always been a lesbian?’ asked Violet as she stood swinging the kitchen door back and forth watching Sam make tea.
‘Yes.’
‘How did you know what you were?’
‘I always did,’ said Sam and shrugged.
‘You’re lucky, I think.’
‘You don’t have to define yourself if you don’t want to, you know,’ and Sam put her arm around Violet’s shoulder. ‘It’s not necessary.’
‘Isn’t it? I don’t really know what I am.’
‘And does it matter?’
This conversation was making Violet uncomfortable and so she changed the subject.
‘What do you like about your job?’
‘It’s good for my body and my mind.’ Sam took her arm away and put some glasses in a cupboard. ‘I like being outside. I like being knackered at the end of the day. I like plants and mowing the grass. I like all of it. What do you like about yours?’
‘The shop’s warm I suppose. And most of the time I can sit down on a stool behind the counter. And it smells of lavender essential oil which I don’t mind.’
As Violet heard herself speak she realized how pathetic this sounded. She was supposed to have found something she wanted to do by now, wasn’t that what people did? Found a career, whatever it might be. Stick to it. Like Sam, like Annie. God knows what Annie would have said to that list but Sam didn’t ridicule it.
‘Fair enough,’ she said and went back to the kettle.
Violet liked sex with Sam, much more than she had expected. Which led her to believe that either she must be a lesbian, or bisexual, or that Sam must be really good in bed or that they were especially compatible. Or all of these things. Who was to figure that out without Annie’s help? Sam didn’t suggest things to her like men did, or worse still, produce stuff from under the bed; there were no requests to wear nurse’s outfits or lingerie, there were no rough words during sex, she was not made uncomfortable by being ogled, it was no longer a matter of what fitted where. Sam’s cheeks did not abrade Violet’s or her fingers scrape. Sam was careful with her, there was nothing rough about it. For the first time in her life Violet felt caressed. Not as if, because of her size, she was so tiny as to be easily breakable, which is how some men had behaved with her, but carefully, because that was how Sam seemed to do everything, carefully and with focus. Violet watched Sam care for her plants with tenderness and felt like she was being treated the same way. She reviewed her past experiences and realized how much she had had to tolerate being touched by men before. How they had always been too big or too heavy and how she had often felt her pulse race when she was with them, not out of desire, but out of fear. You are going to squash me, she often thought, and sometimes even, I am going to suffocate. It was such a basic thing to be afraid of. She was shocked by this realization. Even though Sam was tall she was not heavy, she was what Violet’s mother would have described as ‘willowy’, and it never felt as if she was pressing Violet down, instead Violet felt like she was being held and yes, it felt like she was being appreciated and wanted and even perhaps loved. If only there
was someone to tell this to apart from Annie, because Annie still wasn’t talking to her apart from basic instructions such as ‘Take the bin out. It’s your turn.’ This had never happened between them before and Violet was shocked. If Annie was upset, she would normally be forthright about it in a way that could be wounding. She had thrown things before, if not directly at Violet, then in the vicinity. She had no British reserve. She liked to say that even though she came from Lancashire there was Italian in there somewhere, and to look at her olive skin this might be true. Violet couldn’t think of what to do apart from start a direct confrontation and she was incapable of that. Who was she going to tell about Sam though if not Annie? She thought about ringing her mother but couldn’t face it. She had always protected her from her encounters. Her mother might be embarrassed or not know what to say and that would be awkward. Plus how could she describe it to her? The mere thought made the sex talk she had had with her last time look easy. She thought about trying to bring it up in an average conversation, in the shop for example, she could drop it in while talking to Starchild, ‘Oh yeah, my girlfriend and me,’ but felt too uncomfortable about that. It didn’t seem a suitable subject for those of her friends who were of older years, even if they might well be more liberal than she imagined. Is she my girlfriend? Is that even the correct word? She had no one else to ask then but Sam and that seemed stupidly circular.
Violet was standing in the art gallery looking at a painting by Paula Rego and marvelling at the stance of the artist that was portrayed. She sat with her back against a table and with one elbow on it, and she was smoking a pipe, but it was her legs that amazed Violet, which were wide open in a masculine way and completely covered in a long bright red skirt on one side. On the other side, you could see her leg encased in a knee-length black boot. She had always liked Paula Rego, her scary fairytale fantasies, but there was something about this woman that she loved. Maybe because women are never painted like that. The woman was confident and relaxed at the same time; she was the opposite of many of the women in paintings by men who reclined erotically before the male gaze. Violet remembered how she had made Sam lie on her side the first time they had had sex and she blushed to remember it. This woman wasn’t reclining because she wanted to be looked at, she was lying back because she owned her world and everything in it.
Violet loved the art gallery and always came by herself. Annie wasn’t much into art and so had never come with her; Sam liked the Impressionists but she hadn’t asked her to come yet. Going there had become a private thing, just for her. She could stand in front of one painting for an hour or two if she wanted. She could spend all day. Often she brought one of her sketchbooks and copied something. It was always a part of the body or clothing. An elbow. A neck. A shoe. It was a calm, contemplative place where no one bothered you, hushed and low-lit, safe from the world. It was where she came to think.
She thought about the letter she had received this morning, together with a note from her mother. ‘Got this yesterday,’ said her mother’s note, ‘and thought you should have it straight away. I’m sorry for not having phoned about it but I’m so busy,’ and this seemed, after Violet had read it and the letter, even more extraordinary than the letter itself which was extraordinary enough on its own.
Dear Violet
I hope this letter reaches you, I have only your grandmother’s address. I am writing to you but I do not know if you are aware that I am your biological father. I hope your mother told you so that this will be less of a shock to you. I do not want to interrupt your life but I have things I need to say to you. I am dying, I have cancer, and I don’t want to be dead before seeing you. I live in St Malo and it is not so hard to reach from England. Please ring this number and you can speak to my wife. She will arrange things for you. I’m sorry I cannot speak on the phone, I am not having very good days at the moment. Please phone. I would like so much to see you.
Jean Claude
She thought about her dad. The letter included a photo, as though for evidence; she had never seen one before, always assumed that none existed. In it he was holding a baby-shaped bundle which must have been her and he seemed small, which would explain a lot, and was skinny and wore a tight T-shirt and tight jeans and a leather hat. He looked like a hippy. She knew next to nothing about him, only the bare details she had wheedled out of her mother when she was younger. Her mother had said that he had been an antiques dealer but she obviously didn’t know if he still was. She had met him on a French exchange trip. She wasn’t happy in France and she had come back to England for a visit when Violet was four months old and that was that. It was easy to lose touch then, before the internet, her mother had said, and I was too worn out to protest when I got back home, and I was only nineteen and anyway your grandmother didn’t want me to stay in contact and so I gave in and I never saw him again. He stopped writing and phoning and that was that. But then a neighbour from next to Violet’s grandmother’s old home had passed on this letter.
He might be dead by now of course. ‘I’m so busy,’ her mother had said, she hadn’t even phoned to warn her the letter was coming. Violet couldn’t understand that, and she couldn’t work out what she was supposed to feel or do, and she couldn’t work out either why she couldn’t talk about this with Annie, with whom she always talked about everything. Should I think about going to France? Shouldn’t I? Should I? Shouldn’t I? She looked at the artist in the painting and wished that was her, she didn’t look like a woman who had any problems deciding anything. She felt a wave of anxiety that she normally was cushioned from by the paintings. ‘The fear’ had been only intermittent and therefore easier to cope with since she had met Sam. She had thought she was getting on top of it and was pleased about that because she hadn’t needed help to do so, not even Annie’s. She hadn’t even needed to warn Sam about it. Perhaps, if she was lucky, it would go away completely. She sat down on a bench.
Annie. Annie. Annie. Come back to me, Violet thought, please, please come back. I really need to talk to you.
These are Sam’s parents
It was a lovely thing about Grace’s family, she believed, that no one had ever had the least bad thing to say about her being a lesbian, in fact no one had ever said anything at all. Eustacia has a low tolerance for dirt and enjoys needlepoint. Bella wants to grow up to be ‘a muse’ like Beatrice had once been and is the local area’s best clay pigeon shooter. Tess is good at knitting ugly jumpers and has a crystal collection. Grace is gay. It was merely one more fact. She had had no closet to fall out of, no skeletons to reveal. Even her mother had never said anything offensive, which was probably a sign less of her openness and more of her complete disinterest in any other human being apart from herself. Grace had long taken this for granted, although she knew most people were not as lucky and she saw this first hand with Sam.
‘I’ve got to go and visit my parents. Want to come?’ she said to Grace, and Grace was shocked. Her next thought was, but why should I come? You don’t want to see my family, I’ve asked and asked, and you’ve refused every time. She remembered the moment when she’d asked Sam to go with her to Ravel Corner and how callous Sam had seemed. ‘Sure,’ she said and took Sam’s hand, deciding to be magnanimous and hoping that Sam would return the favour she was giving her. After all, she would meet Sam’s family, it was exciting. She could find out all sorts of things about Sam that she didn’t already know.
‘It’d be better if you didn’t touch me while we’re there,’ Sam said.
Grace let go of her hand. Good God, what would happen if they did? Would they be thrown out of the house? Tarred and feathered on the front lawn?
‘It’s a long way to go to Shrewsbury and back. Aren’t we going to spend the night?’
‘No,’ said Sam, but didn’t explain.
The house was a semi-detached at the end of a cul-de-sac, the tiny front lawn manicured, net curtains in the windows, and a Neighbourhood Watch sticker on the front door. Inside it was too hot and the décor was overwhe
lmingly chintzy; Grace felt as if she was in a greenhouse and sweat started to build under her arms. Sam’s mother was a small woman with hair lacquered into a helmet; her father was tall and ex-army and had a ginger moustache. Sam looked like neither of them. They shook hands with Grace – Sam’s dad’s handshake was a tight grip, almost painful. Sam and her mother went into the kitchen to make tea, leaving Grace sunk into soft upholstery while marvelling at the number of porcelain dog ornaments. If you liked dogs that much, then how come you didn’t have one? Grace realized that Sam’s father was staring at her.
‘Have you ever been up to Leeds?’ she asked him.
‘No,’ he said.
Grace waited for a further comment but nothing was forthcoming. He continued to stare.
‘This is a nice house. I’ve never been to Shrewsbury before. Have you lived here long?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
I know what’s wrong, she thought, I’m asking closed questions.
‘What was Sam like when she was little?’
Sam’s dad stared at her.
‘Little,’ he said.
I can play rude too, thought Grace. I can play unfriendly if that’s what you want. They sat in silence, Sam’s father staring at Grace, Grace staring at the dogs, until Sam’s mother bustled in with the tea things, Sam trailing her.