by Emma Morgan
‘Oh, it’s you, you should have called first,’ she said, ‘I’ll get the door.’
Grace heard Sam come down the hall. She opened the door.
‘There’s someone else, isn’t there?’ Grace said.
‘You’d better come in then,’ said Sam.
Inside Sam didn’t offer her a cup of tea like she always did, she didn’t suggest that Grace sit down. She stood by the door calmly.
‘What do we do now then?’ asked Grace.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Aren’t you at least going to deny it? That’s what people do, isn’t it?’ Grace heard herself use a voice she hadn’t heard before. It was a roller derby voice.
‘I am seeing someone else,’ said Sam.
‘And that person’s name is Violet,’ said Grace.
‘Yes, it is. How did you know that?’ said Sam and she looked vaguely interested but not that much.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Grace, ‘is this conversation boring you?’
‘It’s not very interesting,’ said Sam.
Grace found her fists bunching.
‘I can understand that you might be angry, Grace,’ said Sam.
‘Might be?’
‘But I never had any commitment to you. I thought you’d accepted that. I haven’t made any promises. I haven’t broken any vows. We’re not married. We don’t even live together.’
‘Which is your fault!’ said Grace.
‘What is?’
‘That we don’t live together! You said you didn’t want to!’
‘I’m sorry, Grace,’ said Sam. ‘That’s all I can say.’
She didn’t look ruffled at all, she looked as if she was apologizing for having run out of milk.
‘Why? Why? If you wanted to be with this other woman, with this Violet, then why didn’t you dump me?’ asked Grace and she was aware that her voice was getting louder and louder.
‘I didn’t want to hurt you,’ said Sam.
‘And you thought this wouldn’t hurt!’ shouted Grace.
‘I think we are going round in circles, Grace, I said I’m sorry,’ said Sam, continuing in her reasonable tone. ‘Maybe we should just leave it there. We’ve been in different places for ages, if you’d admit that.’
Grace moved towards her. She wanted to hit her. She wanted to put her elbow into Sam’s face and knock her down to the ground. She wanted to kick her in the shins. Sam stood her ground.
‘Grace,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry if I hurt you.’
‘Too bloody late,’ said Grace and stopped and started to cry. Sam stood looking at her, even though Grace was now crying so much that she had hiccups. What Grace felt was mostly shame, she felt like a child whose parent was ignoring it for a very good reason. She sobbed into her hands and Sam did nothing. After about five minutes Grace turned and walked out of the door, down the stairs and out into the street. She stood in front of her car, still with hiccups, and the feeling overtook her that if she drove away now she might never see Sam again. She turned back to Sam’s house and walked back towards it but then she turned around again and went back to her car. All she wanted to do was go home and hide but she’d have to drive home first, and she didn’t see how she could see to drive because tears were coming out of her eyes at an alarming rate. She rubbed her eyes with her sleeves and then she remembered the first time she had ever seen Sam. How she had had tears in her eyes. She should have known then and there that she would love Sam and that Sam would never love her back. She should have known that when Sam turned her back on her. Stupid. She knocked her head against her palm. She heard a person coming up behind her and tried to breathe deeply in order to pretend that she was a normal person and not a hysteric wailing in the street.
‘I’ve called you a taxi, Grace,’ said Sam. ‘It’ll be here in a minute. I don’t think you should drive if you’re like this, it’s not safe.’
There was part of Grace that wanted to scream, ‘Well, I’m not safe, am I! And whose fault is that!’ And there was a part of her that appreciated the thoughtfulness and wanted to say thank you.
‘Have you got a tissue?’ asked Sam.
Grace shook her head and mucus slipped out of her nose. She wiped it away with the back of her sleeve.
‘Here,’ said Sam, and she handed Grace not one tissue, but a whole box. They were value tissues, Grace saw, so at least she would be crying cheaply. She blew her nose.
‘Do you want me to wait with you or not?’ asked Sam.
Grace shook her head.
‘OK,’ said Sam, but didn’t go. ‘I’m going to ring you later to make sure you got home OK.’ She leaned into Grace and said, ‘I’ve never been good at saying goodbye.’
She walked away from Grace and Grace wanted to slump on to her knees and press her forehead on the ground but then a car approached, and it was the taxi. She took a deep breath and got in. The taxi driver was a woman. Was that good or bad? But she said nothing to Grace, just pulled away from the kerb, and Grace looked back towards Sam’s house but Sam had already disappeared.
This is Annie breaking glass
‘I’ll ring you tomorrow,’ he had said last night, but he hadn’t. If there was one thing that Annie hated more than anything, more even than the sight of women whose underwear lines you could see under their too thin leggings, it was people who didn’t do what they said they were going to do. Surely Laurence knew her well enough to know this. Even the most junior person in her law firm knew it. Well, she wasn’t going to phone him, that’s for sure. She would get on with paperwork. An hour went by, then two, and he still hadn’t phoned. If her father had ever done that to her mother she would have gone plate-throwing level insane, but then her father never had done that to her mother in her recollection. Thinking about her mother put her teeth on edge. She wished that she had reacted better to her visit, been cooler about things. Or been in any way calm and collected. She looked back at that day with nothing but embarrassment. She hadn’t spoken to her since. She wished that she had the kind of mother you could sit down and confide in, like a friend. But she did have someone to confide in, didn’t she? She had Violet. She didn’t even know if she was home, Violet was so quiet these days. Ignoring weeks and weeks of silence, she went and knocked on the door but there was no answer and so she didn’t open it. I wish you were here, she thought, and then, pull your socks up, Annie, and she phoned Laurence but there was no reply. Now she was very annoyed. She found herself grinding her teeth. She went to the bathroom and put on a face mask. Even if he did ring now, she wouldn’t answer the phone. But he didn’t ring all evening and Violet didn’t come home and Annie went to bed in a flat whose silence was oppressive.
When she woke up in the morning Annie felt enormously sad, and if Violet had been there she would have gone straight to her and, for the first time ever, asked for a hug.
Her phone rang. It was Laurence. She didn’t pick up. Why should she? She steadied her hands on the kitchen counter until the ringing stopped and then she listened to his voicemail.
‘Oh, hi Annie, been busy, forgot to call. I was wondering, could you lend me another few thou? Five maybe? If you can spare it, that is. Anyway, I’ll try and get hold of you later.’
Annie found that the screen of her phone was cracked, and she found that she was the one who had cracked it against the marble. She dropped it on the floor and resisted the urge to grind it under the heel of her mule.
This is Violet and her father
She sat next to his bed in the hospice. Violet had only ever been to Paris before; she hadn’t been expecting the sea and the way it made things feel bigger, including the sky which was today the colour of zinc to match the grey waves. The receptionist in the hotel had said it was better to come in the summer when everything was blue but then, she said, there were so many tourists. Violet was grateful that she didn’t have to fight through hordes. The receptionist told her it was a two-mile walk or she could take a taxi and Violet decided to walk along next to the beach. The
wind was so strong that her scarf blew sideways and nearly strangled her but she liked it, she felt like she might fly away. She fought her way along wondering why she was here and why she had been so impulsive. She had got up yesterday, and, because she didn’t have the money, borrowed it off her mother.
‘Do you want to come?’ she had asked her mother on the phone.
‘No, I don’t think I need to. Anyway, he didn’t ask to see me.’
Violet could hear a tone in her mother’s voice. Did she feel rejected?
‘Are you quite sure?’
‘Yes.’
She didn’t even tell Annie she was going. She didn’t tell Sam either. Instead she had rung the woman who was her father’s wife. Luckily, she spoke some, if stilted, English. She seemed pleased to speak to her and told her that Jean Claude was in a place that was not a hospital and not their home and that could Violet come quickly if she was going to come at all. Violet flew to Paris, a surprisingly calm journey that only involved her praying not to crash on take-off and landing, and then took a train to Brittany on which she discovered a better quality both of sandwich and of seat covers. She didn’t speak any French but it turned out to be easier than she had expected, you could always communicate with gestures that seemed more abandoned than those in England. Part of her had wanted it to be hard, an epic adventure, a journey into the unknown, but it was only France after all, not the end of the world. Her anxiety level was no worse than it was at home, it was if anything better because the differentness of everything distracted her. She drew all the way and was very pleased with the fact that the extreme version of ‘the fear’ didn’t seem to have accompanied her. Maybe it didn’t speak French.
‘It is going to rain,’ said the man who was her father.
‘It looks like it, yes,’ said Violet.
His hands were on the top of his blanket. Was she expected to grasp one of them? She had no idea about the etiquette of this situation. Surely there was more to talk about than the weather?
‘Have you ever been to Brittany before?’
‘No, never.’
‘And what do you think of St Malo?’
She had always liked the French accent. San Marlow. ‘It’s beautiful. I mean I like the idea of it too, it’s like a hidden city. I like the walls around it.’
‘Yes, a city of pirates,’ he said. ‘We are always either hiding from the law or being the law,’ and he laughed, and it was a raw laugh that sounded like it hurt his throat. He coughed.
‘Do you need a glass of water?’ she asked.
‘No, no,’ he said, and he smiled faintly. ‘Your mother and I,’ he said, ‘do you know how we met?’
‘At a disco, at least that’s what she told me.’
‘And it is true. My sister was there, she was not allowed to go on her own. All the English girls, we thought, they were so, their jeans were too tight. Too much lipstick on girls that young. But not your mother, not with her lip,’ and he gestured at his mouth. Violet had only seen her mother’s hare lip in photos, she had been operated on when Violet was two. Now her mother always wore pink lipstick the colour of the inside of a mouth. She had never considered that before. ‘I liked her. Pretty but not knowing it. That is the best way to be. And then we, you know, it was the beach.’
Not another sex conversation, thought Violet.
‘And then your mother she wrote me. I remember the paper, little hearts. I am pregnant. I was in a lot of shock. But you knew about this, yes?’
‘We’ve never talked about it.’
‘If you cannot talk about these things now, then when can you? We married so quick and we came back here and then … well, it didn’t work.’
‘Why not?’
Violet’s throat was tight too. Her father gestured towards the water and she gave it to him. He took a long sip.
‘She was nineteen, I was twenty-two. We did not know each other. And the baby, I mean you, you screamed. A lot. All the time. It was not easy. I was trying to make money, you know, buying old things and selling them, but then it was not so profitable. And your mother, she was alone a lot, she was very lonely. Now I know that it was the depression after birth but then … I was not helpful, I know. I shouted. At her. At the baby. You. I did not have patience. I should have been a kinder man. A better man. And then your grandmother came and took you away, that quick, like the wedding, so quick, and your mother said maybe she would come back later, I mean your mother and you would come back, but she never did, you never did.’
Her father seemed exhausted by the effort of speaking. He closed his eyes and his eyelids had faint blue veins on them like deltas. Violet didn’t know what to say. She tried to work out if she looked like him. He was certainly smallish but perhaps he had shrunk being ill. He had dark brown hair though and not black like hers. Something about his eyebrows? She had always had thin eyebrows that didn’t need plucking. The colour of his face was too pale, as though he was afraid and had blanched. He opened his eyes again and looked at her.
‘I am sorry. That is what I wanted to say to you. I am sorry not to be your father. I know you had another father and that is good, I am happy for your mother about that. For you. But I am sorry I did not try more.’
‘You were very young,’ said Violet, and realized that she did think this.
‘No excuse,’ he said and reached his hand out. She took his, it was icy. Before she knew what she was doing she put it up to her mouth and blew on it. Her mother had used to do that to her. Her father did not seem to think that was strange but smiled, even though it was the tiredest smile that she had ever seen.
‘What do you do with your life?’
‘I work in a shop.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘Not much.’
‘Then what do you like?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then this is my advice to you, Violet, and you should listen. Not because I am your father, your father is Steve, and not because I am dying, but because what I will say is true. You need to find something good. Something that you like and that you think is important. Me, you can say, what did he do, he sold antiques, pah, what is that. But to me they were beautiful things and I sold them to people who I thought would treat them well. I gave beauty and I think that is a good thing, to do that. I would recommend that, if you need my advice, I would like to give you that one thing. What is that? In all your life, what is beautiful?’
‘I … I don’t know.’
‘Then find your most beautiful thing,’ said her father, with his hand on her hand. ‘And hold on to it tight.’
This is Grace when it’s all over
Sam was sitting on the sofa and Grace was sitting in the chair. They were in Grace’s house; Sam had rung and asked if she could come to get the coat that she had left behind last time she was there. Grace looked at the dying cyclamen on the windowsill, it needed watering, but she had not noticed her plants for weeks. Anyway, they were Sam’s plants if you looked at things properly. All the fight had gone out of Grace in the last two days. She had taken the time off work and stayed in bed, eating only shortbread and drinking only water, like some medieval penitent. Alternately crying and wanting to shout and scream and bang on the walls. She rang Sam several times but always put the phone down after she had heard Sam’s voice on the voicemail. And then she cried some more, until her face felt waterlogged in the way that your fingers do when they’ve been too long underwater. She hadn’t washed. She hadn’t even brushed her teeth. Eustacia had phoned and left a message asking if she wanted to come over. My sister is a good person, thought Grace, I don’t know if I am. And is Sam? What is Sam? Am I supposed to hate her? Because I do and then I don’t. And this Violet girl, Annie’s friend, but then Grace felt her guts begin to twist up and she wanted to be sick. She wondered if it would have been better if she had learnt to meditate in the past and so would now be able to enter a zen state, but it was too late now. The only thing that kept her from complete despair was mini reveng
e fantasies. She would go round to Sam’s and steal all her books and burn them in her yard. She would go to the park and cut down all of Sam’s beloved trees with a chainsaw purchased specially for the occasion. Unfortunately, the sensible part of her kept coming up with objections to these ideas. There were a lot of books, how would she get them in and out of her car? She had never used a chainsaw and the thought of doing so scared her. She would need to buy those Kevlar trousers. And what if she changed her mind? Would B&Q take the chainsaw and the Kevlar trousers back? Would they give her a full refund or only an exchange note? She could do with a better drill. This is the way her brain went round and round.
‘I like you a lot, Grace,’ said Sam. ‘I think you’re a great person but I’m not the person you want me to be. You need somebody like you, somebody who wants to settle down and I’m not that person. I’m happy with my life as it is but you want more, and I can’t blame you for that. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
‘I’m not a child,’ said Grace.
‘Of course you’re not,’ said Sam. She sighed, and she crossed her legs, and Grace looked at her foot swinging and there were so many things to say that she said nothing. There was a script for this but she’d forgotten the lines. Grace didn’t want to look at Sam’s face because she was so beautiful that she couldn’t believe, she didn’t want to believe …
‘Everything is shit,’ Grace said, and was surprised that the words were said out loud since they echoed round her head most of the time.
‘It’ll get better,’ Sam said, and crouched by Grace’s chair, near enough that she could smell her hair and it hurt so much having her there, knowing she was going to go.
‘Don’t go,’ Grace said.
‘I have to. It’s for the best. Otherwise this will get worse and worse and you’ll end up hating me.’
‘I already do.’
‘I know.’
‘But I don’t really.’
‘I know that too.’
‘Will I see you again?’ Grace asked.