by Lily Graham
Downstairs, I shoved my feet into my wellies, opened the kitchen door to the icy exterior and the sound of the surf crashing against the rocks amplified.
I crossed the garden path quickly, following the light from the polytunnel.
When I opened the door, I found Victoria sitting on a concrete slab, touching a green shoot, looking a little forlorn.
‘Smudge?’ I asked.
She looked up. ‘’Lo,’ she mumbled. Even in the semi-darkness I could see that her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen.
‘Oh my goodness, are you all right?’ I asked.
She offered a watery smile. ‘Fine... just fine. Amazing, isn’t it, that even now, as we move into winter, these little shoots defy the odds, don’t you think?’
It was worse than I thought. I sat down next to her.
‘You know, when he said he wanted to do this,’ she said, raising her arms expansively at the polytunnel, taking in the rows of vegetation, and beyond, to Stuart’s now-wintry potager, ‘I thought he was a little mad. I mean, what did he know about gardening? But there was this small part that was... I don’t know, a little envious, I suppose.’
‘Envious?’ I said in surprise. ‘Why?’
Victoria was the most free-spirited person I knew. Someone who from her dress sense down to her career truly seemed to live life by her own rules.
‘It’s just real, I suppose,’ she said, wiping her face on her shoulder, the secretive, almost child-like move making my heart twist.
‘But what you do is real... I mean, you write incredible biographies about people’s lives, you can’t get more real than that.’
She took a shuddery breath. ‘My career? Oh sure, I just meant... this,’ she said, waving an arm towards the cottage. ‘Creating a real home, a base, something solid, for the three of you.’
‘Victoria?’ I said, touching her arm, worried. This was clearly something else... something to do with Mark.
She shook her head. ‘It’s nothing... I mean, no one gets everything they want, do they?’
I thought about what had been happening to me lately... ‘Sometimes they do, maybe just not how they picture it at first...’ I looked at her. ‘Is everything okay?’
‘Yeah... just been thinking...’
‘Always dangerous,’ I joked.
She gave a slightly cracked laugh.
I considered her words then said, ‘You might not get everything you want, but you can come really close sometimes, and then very occasionally, you can get everything that you need.’
She nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s it though... trying to figure out what it is you need, that’s the hard part.’
‘Is it?’
She sighed, ‘I guess.’
I knew better than to come right out and ask if she and Mark were having problems. They didn’t have the most conventional of marriages, but then again, they weren’t the most conventional of couples, yet they seemed to make it work, despite the fact that they both seemed to travel so much and were rarely in the same city at the same time.
It wouldn’t have worked for Stuart and me, but every couple was different.
Over the years as Victoria’s career had blossomed, Mark’s seemed to have stayed the same; he was still successful, but nothing like his wife.
Victoria had a way of capturing people’s lives that drew you in, her writing was rich and beautiful, and her books became must-reads, whereas Mark’s biography style was more suited to a military-loving audience – there was a definite fan base for it, of course, and by all rights he should have been proud of his success, but it was obvious that he felt overshadowed by his wife. Victoria had once confided in me that sometimes she regretted her popularity because it often meant that she spent far less time doing what she loved – which was the research. I’d come to suspect that perhaps that was Mark’s problem – he was more interested in having his name on the spine of the book than anyone else’s.
Things grew worse when the economic downturn occurred, his projects grew fewer and fewer – there just wasn’t as much of a call for his type of books, whereas it seemed every publisher wanted to sign with Victoria – knowing that with her name, they were likely to sell more copies. I think this was what really made him bitter. He’d become increasingly resentful of the time she spent away. We thought that now, with his latest biography of Marcus Aurelius in the works, things would have been better, but perhaps not. It wasn’t that Victoria said as much to us – or perhaps not to me, she may have confided in Stuart – but it was Mark himself who had changed. Whenever we saw the two of them and we asked how they were doing, his expression would change, his eyes would become guarded. It was as if he took pleasure in venting his frustrations with their life to others in front of Victoria, in a passive-aggressive sort of way. Like the time we came past to admire their new home in West London, a few months ago.
Victoria had been excited about the move, which had taken them ever so slightly further away from The Terrorist – their nickname for their mother, Genevieve – making her impromptu visits more infrequent, and therefore the new home thoroughly perfect in location.
I’d admired Victoria’s new study, which was an incredible biographer’s den, a book-lined treasury, with a long desk where some of the materials she was using and transcribing from old diaries and letters appeared on display. It felt like something out of a bygone era. She had a rather impressive collection of Brontë prints and letters that I oohed and ahhed over enthusiastically, then when I noted the gorgeous colours she’d picked out for the paintwork on the walls, Mark had scoffed and said, ‘Oh yes, she started to paint it... but then was called off for an emergency book signing in Prague. I still don’t get how or why there was a “Book Signing Emergency” but apparently there was...’ He gave a dry sort of laugh and said, ‘So off she went and I finished it, didn’t I, love?’
Victoria had looked deeply embarrassed and said that the emergency was only because one of the writers on tour had got into an accident, and the publisher asked her to step in as so many people were already coming.
Mark had given us a fake smile and said, ‘Oh well, and of course they weren’t disappointed because they flew in their best author to save the day. You’re like Supergirl...’ he laughed. ‘Super Writer,’ he sniggered, though it wasn’t funny.
‘Mark,’ Stuart had said warningly, his dark eyes losing patience.
Mark held up his hands. ‘Oh, don’t worry, big brother, I’m all right... I’m happy to be the wagon-hitcher to our little star here,’ he said, throwing his arm around Victoria and giving her a squeeze, while she gazed at the ground. But Mark’s smile didn’t meet his eyes. ‘I’m sure you two are the same,’ he said to us.
It had been an awkward moment. One we’d tried to gloss over as best we could. Stuart made a joke about him being happy to be my toy boy, but still, it had left a sour note behind. On the ride home I’d asked Stuart if he ever felt like Mark, now that The Fudge Files had gained a bit of a following, but he just laughed.
‘It’s not a competition, is it?’ he asked. ‘You’ve got your thing, I’ve got mine, we’re on the same team, right? Lookit, I can’t draw a stick man without it looking like a crime scene, and you can’t make anything in the kitchen without it looking like one either, so we have that.’
‘Haha – very funny,’ I said, rolling my eyes. Crime scene, indeed!
I looked at Victoria now. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t say anything. I touched the small blanket I’d draped around my shoulders; it had been made by one of the founders of Mum’s quirky sewing group, May Bradley. She was Irish, a little offbeat, and fun, and could be oddly profound at times. I felt a small shiver of guilt unfurl. I hadn’t thought of her, or the group, in ages – I’d been trying not to. They’d each called by to invite me over to the club when I first moved here of course, as quite a few lived within the village, but I couldn’t quite face seeing my mother’s old friends all together like they used to be every Thursday growing up – not like that
– not when I knew Mum wouldn’t be there too. I ran into a few of the members in the village every so often, and it was always a bit hard to see them after all this time. Often I found myself making a bit of an excuse to get away, then wishing I hadn’t, that I’d just find a way to be normal.
No one tells you how grief can twist you inside out and make the simplest thing – like seeing a group of women who’d loved the person you lost almost as fiercely as you – an impossibly hard, heartbreaking task. Particularly when, shining in each and everyone’s eyes, was a reflection of what we’d all lost.
Or how much you’d hate yourself on the way home, how much you’d wish you’d turned around, and gone back. Or how much you missed them too.
I opened the blanket and put the ends around Victoria’s thin shoulders, so that she snuggled closer. ‘Did I ever tell you about Colin?’ I asked.
Victoria turned to look at me. ‘Your ex-boyfriend, The Artiste?’ she said, putting on a French accent. ‘Not really, you’d just broken up when you and I met.’
I nodded. ‘Well, we dated all throughout my university years. He studied fine art, pretty amazing really. Postmodern, intellectual. Many of his paintings were beautiful... and brutal. Children in the Sudan. Rhino poaching in Zimbabwe. Mass shootings in schools in America. No subject was left unturned. He exhibited in Paris, Berlin, New York... he was incredibly hard-working too. Kept impossible hours.
‘In the beginning it was wonderful to be with someone who shared my passion for art – though it was always hard for me to describe my work in relation to his as “art”. It’s not that he was unkind, just self-involved, you know. Everything took a back seat to his work. He’d ask me to cancel meetings with potential publishers so that I could accompany him to an exhibition then sulk if I declined. Over the years he started to drink more, got jealous, possessive. Our fights turned from the usual bickering to something far uglier. He became increasingly volatile. It’s funny, but because he was an artist, I made excuses for it. I’d tell myself he just felt things more deeply than anyone else. I’d tell myself things like it was actually sweet that he loves me so much that he’d show up at my parents’ home when my phone died, and maybe it would have been if he hadn’t also been so suspicious about why I’d “let” my phone die. Like I’d done it on purpose. I didn’t see it for what it was.
‘As he began to drink more and more, and his behaviour grew worse, he became increasingly mean and belittling about my work, calling it a cute hobby, or labelling it cartoonish. Over time, his attention turned quickly to suffocation. It got so that it felt like I couldn’t visit a friend, or go anywhere on my own without Colin showing up, suspicious. We were always fighting. I ended it so many times but he’d make sweeping promises to change. To give up drinking. To be the man I deserved.
‘He wrote letters. Drew incredible portraits of me, which he’d leave outside my house. He joined the AA. I’d take him back and for a while everything would be fine, but there was always this shadow hanging over me while I waited for him to slip back. If my phone rang, his whole body would tense. I’d see him physically resisting the impulse to check my mobile to see who it was. I’d see it and think, “Well, he’s trying...” and then one day he proposed.’
Victoria gasped. ‘What?’
I nodded. ‘Yeah.’
‘What happened?’
‘I told him I’d think about it. I mean, in retrospect that may have been the first clue, you know, with Stuart I didn’t need to think. I was like, “Hurry up and ask me.”’
‘Which he did after, like, five minutes,’ she laughed.
‘I know, he took forever,’ I grinned.
Stuart and I met at Victoria’s flat over dinner with friends. I suspect it was a set-up now, but back then I was completely oblivious. I sat down across from one of the most divine-looking men I’d ever seen, with gorgeous brown eyes and a megawatt, toothpaste-advert smile, who was funny. I mean, when are good-looking men funny too? We were talking across our neighbours at the dinner table to their annoyance, then decided to share a bottle of red wine, and carried on talking even after all Smudge’s friends had gone home and she’d passed out on the couch. I’d never laughed as much. By the next morning, when he walked me home, I knew I’d found The Guy. It helped that he was bloody gorgeous, I won’t lie – it also helped that he really was rather oblivious to it.
After that he took my number, and I waited like an idiot for him to call for an entire day, jumping out my skin every time my phone beeped, until finally at eight that evening, he called and said, ‘Ah God, it’s been like bloody forever!’ As if I was the one who was meant to call him and not the other way around. I’d put my phone in the drawer to stop myself from ringing Smudge to demand, ‘Has your brother spoken about me? Does he like me?’ Ugh! Then I’d taken it out just as fast in case I missed his call. I’d thought of around thirteen different ‘reasons’ to call Victoria to ask for Stuart’s number. He’d left his jacket? His wallet? Or the truth: he’d left a big pile of girly hormones behind, who’d forgotten to take down her hot brother’s number? So when he FINALLY called, I was a bit surprised and well, wildly ecstatic really, to hear him say, ‘I’m not good at this – I like you, I know I’m meant to wait, or whatever, and play this cool, but do you want to do something soon, like maybe tomorrow?’ My heart was thrashing about in my chest, but I said, ‘No, I don’t think so. How about now? You busy?’ So he came over and I pretty much never let him leave afterwards.
I waited five months for him to propose; he says it took that long only because it took that long to train Muppet (who had decided that Stuart was her favourite boy in the world too) to carry the ring cushion through to the lounge to the sound of ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby?’ which was what he’d set his ringtone to.
She grinned back, then asked, ‘So, what happened? Did you just tell him no?’
‘Well, the thing is... I wasn’t quite sure, I think I would have said no eventually but that evening I drove to my parents’ place – Colin and I were renting student digs in Falmouth at that time, one of our worst decisions, which was to try living together to see if that would make him less possessive – not a great plan,’ I said with a snort. ‘Anyway, that’s when I found May Bradley, one of my mum’s best friends, sitting outside with a cup of tea, unpicking her sewing.’
Driving over, I’d forgotten it was a Thursday. Which was when my mum’s group got together. To be honest, seeing May there, I was a little annoyed – I’d just wanted to see Mum on her own so that we could chat. But with the group there, I hadn’t wanted to air something like that to half the schoolmatrons of the village. ‘Especially Winifred Jones, the headmistress of the primary school where I went. Stern to a fault. God, she drove me mad growing up,’ I laughed in memory. ‘Especially as a teenager, she was always suspicious of me.’
‘Ivy, weren’t you sort of naughty though... I mean, Catherine’s stories...’
I laughed. ‘Well, yes ... but I mean, having the headmistress over almost every Thursday didn’t make things any easier. But May was different; of anyone she was my favourite.
‘I said something like, “Oh, I forgot it was The Thursday Club today,” and she said, “Will it be a whiskey then?” in that brogue of hers that she had never lost, the kind of voice that you knew was putting an e in the word whiskey,’ I said with a chuckle that Victoria shared.
‘I agreed, not wanting to go inside and have Winifred demand to know why I was there – maybe May knew this too, because she slipped inside to pour us “a wee dram – something to steady the fingers, as well as the mind”, as she put it, and then she came back and gave me this look and said, “Sure you’re a sorry-looking sight... What has he done now?”
‘And I choked on the whiskey, and asked her how she knew. She just shrugged, said something like when yer in yer twenties it’s always about the love life... or the job... No one comes home to their mammies about their job so I figured it was worth a shot...’
Victoria laughed. �
�Wise words!’
I chuckled. ‘She’s a blast! Well, anyway, the thing with May was she wasn’t the interfering one in the group – she was the fun one, the one who made the others laugh when things went wrong. The one who brought the whiskey, you know. So it was really surprising when she just patted me on my knee, and said, “Now, lookit, I’m going ta tell yer something I wish with all me heart me own mam had told me. Sure she would have saved me a whole heap of trouble if I’d have heard it but she didn’t know it... I heard it on the Oprah Show, you know? Feckin’ loved that show, not sure why she gave it in ... Anyhoos, yer listening now?”
‘I must have nodded because she looked at me, her eyes serious, “Love should feel good.”
‘I must have sat there for a while, thinking. Eventually I said something like, “It couldn’t always be good, could it? It’s also something you work at, isn’t it? I mean, everyone says that, don’t they?”
‘Well, May, she wasn’t having any of that... She held up her latest sewing effort. God, it always came down to sewing for them,’ I laughed in memory. ‘It was a jacket for her daughter Jackie. The jacket was lovely, one of those classic sort of Chanel-inspired ones, navy blue with very thin piping down the lapels, which May said would give it that extra something special. May said, “Making this jacket is like love; it isn’t easy but it’s mostly straightforward. And like this piping, when you have love it should only ever enhance your life, it should never detract from it because if it does then it’s best left in the discard pile.”
‘It got me thinking, you know. How if I weighed it up, Colin’s presence never really enhanced my life. If anything, most of the time I felt sort of diminished by him. After that I said goodbye to Colin for the final time. May’s words really helped me. I don’t think I’d realised till then that for the most part, love really should just feel good; sure you can have your problems and bad patches, and those should be worked on, but for the most part love should feel right. If it doesn’t, there’s a problem.’