Another Woman (9781468300178)

by Vincenzi, Penny

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To my flat.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She sat in silence for a minute, then with a sickening thud remembered Susie, Susie sick and frightened and going to hospital. ‘Shit, Rufus, I’m so sorry. I’d forgotten about your mum. Is she going to be all right?’

  ‘Yes, thank God,’ he said, sounding more normal suddenly, more himself. ‘Well, we think so. The surgeon is – what shall we say? – cautiously optimistic. Anyway –’

  ‘And she didn’t say anything about it before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Brave lady.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rufus briefly.

  His jaw was very tightly clenched, his eyes fixed determinedly on the traffic ahead. Tilly put her hand tentatively on his knee.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said, ‘don’t do that. I can’t stand it.’

  ‘Rufus, I’m not at all sure I want to go to your flat. With you in this mood.’

  ‘You’ll do what I decide,’ he said. ‘For once. I spend my life doing what you say, having to abide by your decisions. And I’ve decided we’re going to my flat.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Tilly meekly.

  Rufus’s flat was in Brook Green, ten minutes’ drive from Chiswick Mall. Tilly had often teased him about being tied to his mother’s apron strings. It was a very nice flat, charmingly furnished by Susie, kept spick and span by Susie’s cleaning lady; for the hundredth, the thousandth time, looking round at the furniture (Victorian), the pictures (watercolours), the photographs (family groups, silver-framed), the gleaming wooden floors, the flourishing plants, Tilly wondered how Rufus could possibly imagine she could be moved into this world that he inhabited so easily and unquestioningly, its tribal customs so clearly defined, its tribal members so carefully initiated; and she decided also for the hundredth, the thousandth time, that she absolutely couldn’t.

  ‘Rufus, I really must phone Felicity. She’ll be so cross with me.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ He was still tense with rage. Tilly looked at him and then went to the phone. This was proving an extremely uncomfortable morning.

  Felicity was cross: so cross Tilly was quite startled. ‘The Rosenthal people have a reception committee laid on for you, and an incredible programme. It’s appalling, Tilly, what am I going to tell them?’

  ‘Felicity, I don’t know. Tell them I got sick or something. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s so unprofessional. So unlike you, Tilly. I just can’t think what’s got into you.’

  ‘Felicity, I said I’m sorry. Anyone can make a mistake.’

  ‘People being paid two million dollars don’t make mistakes, Tilly. They just don’t. Look, I’ll see if I can organize a flight for tomorrow. Can you get your passport back by then?’

  ‘Yeah, I – I think so.’

  ‘OK, I’ll call you later. Where are you?’

  ‘Um – in Rufus’s flat. You have the number. I’m really really sorry, Felicity.’

  Felicity had put the phone down.

  ‘I’ll make some coffee,’ said Rufus, ‘but first I’d like to call the hospital again.’

  ‘Of course.’

  He made the call, looked at her slightly more cheerfully. ‘She’s fine. I said I’d go in later. She sent her love.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Tilly. Then, ‘She’s great,’ she said carefully, ‘I really really like her. I can see why you love her so much.’

  ‘Yes, well. I –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Is your dad there with her?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rufus briefly. Then he said, ‘Actually, he’s not my dad.’

  Tilly was silent; she didn’t say anything, anything at all, just looked at him, her face carefully blank.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘I’ll just get that coffee.’

  He was a while; he came back looking suspiciously moist-eyed, sat down on the leather chesterfield by the window.

  Tilly went over, sat down, took his hand. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and for the first time that morning he looked at her without hostility, without anger. ‘Yes please, Tilly, I do.’

  He told her: how he had heard his mother and James Forrest talking late the evening before, how he felt, shattered, betrayed, totally bewildered.

  ‘I just can’t believe it, Tilly, you know? I can’t. She’s always been so lovely, so perfect –’

  ‘Nobody’s perfect,’ said Tilly evenly.

  ‘She was. For me. And now – I just feel so disorientated. As if everything I thought, everything I knew, was wrong. I think if you told me the earth was flat I’d believe you today. And my father – I mean Alistair – oh God, I don’t know, Tilly: how must he feel? Such a fool, so betrayed, how has he stood it all these years? I hate it all so much, it’s so different from everything I thought – oh God, I’m not making any sense, am I? I’m sorry. But, oh Tilly, I needed you so much, to tell me what to think, what to do. And you weren’t there for me, and I couldn’t stand it.’

  He stared at her, his eyes full of such bewilderment Tilly’s own filled with tears. She reached out, touched his face very gently, leant forward, kissed him lightly on the lips; and all the time her mind was racing, flailing around, trying frantically to work out what to say, what would best help him.

  ‘Listen,’ she said carefully, finally, ‘listen. This is what I think. Which is not telling you what to think. I think your mother is just great. OK, so she’s been unfaithful to your dad. That’s not the biggest thing in a marriage. Not really. Your dad isn’t a fool, he must have known. Don’t tell me he didn’t, Rufus, that really is like thinking the earth’s flat. He must have known and he must have decided she was worth it. Which I think she most certainly is. It hasn’t made her less good to you, has it? It hasn’t suddenly meant all these years she hasn’t loved you and cared for you and changed your shitty nappies – although I suppose Nanny did that for you –’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Rufus with a faint smile.

  ‘OK, and she wiped your snotty nose and drove you to your poncey school every day, and read you bedtime stories and made sure you knew the facts of life, and laughed at your jokes and listened to your troubles, and furnished this bloody place for you and made it so perfect it scares the fuck out of me. Didn’t she, Rufus? It didn’t stop her being brave enough not to tell you all about her cancer, and not making a fuss yesterday when she must have been shitting herself, sorry, Rufus, and it didn’t stop her being out of her head because she didn’t know where you were this morning. She’s still the same person, nothing’s changed –’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, it has changed, of course it has.’

  ‘Only if you let it. Listen. This time yesterday you were the nicest, cleverest, best-adjusted most – fuck it, sorry, Rufus, but I have to say it – most decent person I ever met. Has that changed? Has it? Not at all. You’re still that person, and it was your mother made you that person. Don’t be too hard on her, Rufus. You don’t know what made her do what she did. But she’s never let you down. You or any of the rest of that spoilt tribe of yours. Which includes your father. Yes, your father, he’s your father, he raised you, as they say where I come from, not that self-important, jumped-up –’

  She stopped. Rufus was looking at her oddly.

  ‘You don’t like him, do you? James?’

  ‘No,’ said Tilly flatly, ‘I don’t. But I like him a lot better now I know he’s your dad. How’s that?’

  ‘That sounds – interesting. Oh God, Tilly, I wish I could think it was all as simple as you make it, but –’ He got up, walked round the room in silence. He seemed filled with a feverish distress. Tilly watched, wishing as she had never wished for anything that she could help him, do, say something positive, something healing. He sat down again, took her hand, sighed, looking down at it. ‘Maybe I will in time. Right now – oh God, I don’t know, I just can’t. See it that way. I can’t have it h
ow I want it, how I thought it was, and that’s that. It’s so bloody hard to come to terms with. I wish I had your pragmatism. Maybe you can teach it to me.’

  ‘I would if I knew what it meant,’ said Tilly.

  Rufus laughed suddenly; he looked better, the colour had come back into his face. ‘Oh Tilly, Tilly, why couldn’t you have done this for me last night?’

  ‘Because I’m a self-centred bitch,’ said Tilly cheerfully. ‘Rufus, could we possibly go to bed?’

  She fell asleep briefly afterwards, worn out with love, with care, with soaring, singing, wonderful sex. She woke to see him sitting on the bed looking at her.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘I love you too.’

  ‘Tilly, what happened yesterday? What happened, for God’s sake, that you suddenly felt it – us – was so impossible? You’ve got to tell me, we’ve got to talk about it. It wasn’t – it wasn’t the contract, was it?’ He gazed at her, his dark eyes full of pain; it was clearly what he most dreaded.

  ‘No,’ said Tilly, ‘no, it wasn’t the contract. Honestly.’

  ‘Well, what was it then?’

  Tilly looked at him. She thought of James Forrest, of how she had hated him for as long as she had been able to understand what he had done: of what he had put her mother through, of her grief and pain, her guilt and her ruined health, and what James Forrest could have done to make their lives easier, with a little compassion and generosity and honesty. She thought of her mother, toiling in the sweatshop, sewing sequins onto dresses for twelve hours a day, and she thought of the small plaque with ‘Beatrice Mills’ on it, all the result of bungling, of incompetence, of dishonesty and cowardice. And she thought of Rufus being the son of this man, and she hardly knew how to bear it.

  ‘Well, Rufus, you see, it’s very complicated,’ she said. ‘There’s something –’ And then she thought of how much he must have endured himself, making the discovery about his mother, his father and the man he had always thought to be his father, the man he adored and idolized, and how he would feel if she added to the knowledge of his beloved mother’s adultery by telling him that the man who was truly his father had done this awful thing to her and her family. And she knew she could never tell him, that it would be the depths of cruelty, brutal, awful cruelty, to tell him, she must not, could not do it; she sat there, staring at him, at the bewilderment, the pain in his eyes, and love held her silent, love helped her to lie.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said carefully and truthfully, ‘I suppose I panicked. You know. I’m so frightened of getting married, Rufus, of having to totally belong to anyone, it isn’t just that it’s you, although a lot of it is that it’s you –’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, amusement and hurt mixing on his face.

  ‘Please, Rufus, listen, try to understand.’

  ‘I am listening, I am trying to understand.’

  ‘OK. I just get so scared when I think of that degree of handing over. You know?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Look,’ she said, taking his hand, ‘look. It’s all right now. I love you, you love me, we have a great time, we have wonderful sex, it’s all perfect. What could anyone want more than that?’

  ‘I want to know you’re there for me. Always. I want you to know I’m there for you. That’s what marriage is, in my book. A commitment. A total commitment. It’s saying look, everyone, we’re an entity. Not just two people having a good time.’

  ‘That’s what I’m scared of.’

  ‘But why? What can go wrong?’

  ‘Life,’ she said, ‘and if it does go wrong, I want to decide how to put it right.’

  ‘And why can’t we do that together?’

  ‘Because I want to deal with life my way. It’s so important to me, Rufus, to be able to do what I think best, and not have to ask, fit in, say “would it be all right if”. I need to be in control. Of everything. To be able to run my life on my terms. I suppose it’s seeing my mum all those years, not in control, forced to do awful demeaning things –’

  ‘Tilly,’ said Rufus gently, ‘you’re not seeing this thing straight. What took your mother out of control of your life was the sort of person she was. Not her situation. If you’d been in her position, you’d have got it all sorted in no time. You wouldn’t have been doing demeaning things, as you put it. Whether you’d been on your own or not, had me, had a baby to care for or not. You’d have been running the dressmaking business or whatever it was, no time at all. And I’d have been standing on the sidelines cheering.’

  ‘No, no, you don’t understand,’ said Tilly. ‘You’re being dense, Rufus.’

  ‘Maybe I am. Try again.’

  ‘Listen, you might not have wanted me to run the dressmaking business. Or you might have wanted it run differently from how I was going to do it. That’s what I’m scared of. Having to fit in, compromise. Surely you understand that.’

  ‘I do understand,’ said Rufus, ‘and it’s you being dense. Stubborn. Stupid. And besides, Tilly, where does all that leave love? If you love someone, surely you have to fit in and compromise anyway. Because you care about that person, what they think, what they need. Is it really worth being able to run the whole world your way if you’re doing it on your own, with no one to turn to when things get tough, no one to talk to at the end of the day, no one to care about, to care for? I just don’t see the connection.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t,’ said Tilly crossly, ‘you’re in control of your life, always will be.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ he said. ‘You say that to me now, when I’m falling apart, when I have all this wretched situation to cope with? Do you really think I can sort all this mess out on my own? Of course I can’t. Maybe I can with your help. But not on my own.’

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ she said in an agony, ‘I don’t want to be dependent. Even emotionally. Even on you.’

  ‘But you have to be dependent when you love someone. You can’t take them out of the equation, by refusing to commit yourself to them. Not if they’re there at all. You can cut them completely out of your life, but that’s the only way. And where’s the sense in that, the happiness, keeping them at arm’s length, not letting them near you? It just doesn’t work. The only way you can be independent is never to care for anyone. Where’s the joy in that, Tilly? It seems pretty sterile and miserable to me.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said again, growing angry now. ‘You just don’t.’

  ‘All right, I don’t. Let’s leave that one for now. Let’s look at the other nonsense, shall we? About this obsession that you’re not good enough for me.’

  ‘Not not good enough,’ she said indignantly, ‘just terribly different.’

  ‘Wonderfully wonderfully different. That’s good, it’s healthy. I don’t want to marry a clone. Which is what you seem to think. I want to marry you, Tilly. I love you and you love me. That’s what matters.’

  ‘No, Rufus, it isn’t. What matters is what you are, how you are. And however I’m going to fit into all this. You need a proper wife, Rufus, someone who’ll say all the right things, in the right accent to the right people. Not a jumped-up black girl from Brixton.’

  ‘You are amazingly bigoted,’ he said, smiling at her, ‘and you’re sounding so terribly out of date.’ (Someone else had said that to her, what seemed like years ago: who was it, who was it?) ‘You’re not a jumped-up black girl from Brixton, you’re one of the most beautiful women in the world. No contest, as you would say. And I have somehow managed to make you fall in love with me. You could have any man you wanted, and for some inexplicable reason you’ve settled on me. It’s me that should be feeling panicky and scared. Not you. Now get real, Tilly, as you would also say, I think, and stop talking this bloody prejudiced rubbish.’

  Tilly stared at him. ‘But Rufus, you don’t’ – she said, and then she remembered who’d said these things earlier that day, her mother: ‘We’re in the nineties, Tilly, you’re sounding very out of date.�
�� And she remembered something else her mother had said, that she should try to drop her obsession about James Forrest and what he had done. She sat there, thinking, very carefully and clearly, thinking about what Rufus had said, knowing it was quite possibly true, all of it, that love, real love as she knew she felt for Rufus, was worth giving up her independence for (albeit not without a fight, lots of fights, probably), that love could maybe even teach her somehow to be a good, supportive wife to him, even persuade her to give a dinner party once in a while, say the right important things to the right important people; but thinking too about the greatest reason for her inability to commit herself to him, the one she hadn’t even known about twenty-four hours earlier, about James Forrest, who had dominated her life for so long; and she didn’t want to let that go, let him go, let him get away with it, this monster of a man. It hurt, the very thought of it, it was like giving something away that had been important to her ever since she could remember. But then, she thought, was her mother right, saying that it was no longer important, that it was in the past, that no good could come of her pursuing him? Would it really help her, help any of them, publicly to humiliate James Forrest, castigate him in the press? Wouldn’t it just hurt Rufus further, and her mother, and indeed herself? But – well – maybe – if – ‘Shit,’ she said aloud. ‘Oh shit.’

  ‘Tilly,’ said Rufus, very gently, ‘Tilly, please, please, Tilly, will you marry me? I love you so very much. And I need you so much too, more than ever now. You can’t not marry me. And you can go on smoking and saying fuck and listening to that dreadful music and you can stay independent, go where you like, do what you like, make all the important decisions in our lives if you really want to, and you needn’t have any babies, but please, please marry me.’

  Tilly looked at him, in silence; and still she couldn’t quite do it, couldn’t quite give it all away. And after another moment or two a terrible sadness came into his eyes and he stood up, visibly withdrawing from her.

  ‘You’d better go,’ he said, ‘I really think you’d better go.’