by Juno Dawson
‘Fine!’ Already a plan is hatching in my mind.
‘Hi. Is that Danny?’ I sit on the bottom step, cradling the big old beige handset and twisting the cord around my wrist.
‘Fliss? Hi! What’s up?’
‘Are you eating?’
‘Yeah, but it’s just a packet of Wotsits.’
‘Oh, OK.’ I have a sudden craving for Wotsits. ‘You know the crappy old dance studio above the takeaway?’
‘I do.’
‘Does your dad own that?’
‘He does … Where is this going?’
‘Well. Here’s the thing …’
On Sunday afternoon I step over a heap of unopened bills to follow Danny up the narrow, leaf-strewn stairs that lead up to the Stepz studio. A second key lets us into a damp-smelling, fusty room. Newspaper over the windows only lets bleak, grey light in and there’s literally nothing sadder than a broken disco ball in a bin.
‘Yikes,’ I say.
‘Did something die in here?’ Danny says, covering his nose. ‘Other than good taste?’
The lights stutter on and I realise, although it needs a good clean, and the sprung floor is covered with boxes of prawn crackers, MSG and ketchup sachets, it’s actually a good size studio. The wall opposite the windows is all mirrored, even if one panel is cracked. The barre is still attached and seems able to take my weight. ‘Actually, this is OK. I can make it work. Do you think your dad will mind?’
‘Fliss, it’s been about a year since anyone even asked to see it. He uses it as an extra storeroom. I doubt he’ll even notice.’
‘Cool.’
Danny performs a (deeply wrong) pas de bourrée before the mirror. ‘I’m so excited that you’re doing Chess Club Presents! It’s going to be the shiz.’
I raise an eyebrow. ‘I’m not doing it out of choice, believe me. I’m a ballet hostage.’
He executes a passable arabesque. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘Not a clue. I figure before I attempt an actual dance I should probably train a little so I don’t accidentally dislocate my hip or something.’
Danny pauses. ‘Don’t you think it’d be next lev if we put a pole in here and did pole dancing? Like in Showgirls?’
I give him a very firm NO look.
Later I rummage in the back of my wardrobe. I know they’re here somewhere. I find a box of old cassettes I should probably bin – although I think there are some pretty cool mixtapes in there somewhere – and some old pleather dance pants and leg warmers.
‘Where are they?’ I start pulling things out indiscriminately until I find them under my old wellies. They’re in a black satin bag, which I take over to my bed. I sit down and open it.
My old ballet slippers. They look more battered than I remember: the pale rose-pink almost grey. The toes are hardened and scuffed from pointe work. Even in my comfy knee boots, my toes flinch, remembering the agony. On the inside, sure enough, is a brown layer of dried blood. I sigh, but a little voice deep, deep down asks, Can you still do it? I wonder if I can.
I’m so busy inspecting the shoes, it takes me a few minutes to even notice that the diary is back on my pillow.
London, 1952
Enduring the demonic biting and hair-tugging of Edmund Crawley-Smythe brought an unexpected bonus. After I had graduated from Oxford, Jean Crawley-Smythe arranged for me to work as an assistant at the BBC. Predictably I was set to work on some very demanding coffee and tea duties and had to pretend I didn’t notice how some of the older executives patted my bottom or brushed against me in the lifts.
I was lucky to work under Charlie Palmer, a lovely, visionary news producer who soon made me a research assistant. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. I won’t lie, Felicity, it was tough. I had to work twice as hard and speak twice as loud to be heard over the Old Boys Club. I hope things will be different for you.
I can’t say things got any easier when I left the BBC and went to the newspaper as a junior reporter. It was largely understood that the women writers didn’t have the capacity to report on politics, crime or finance. For many years I wrote wedding announcements and obituaries. Sometimes there’s a quiet strength in simply biding your time. When the boys burned out or fell down drunk, I was still there, ready to break the big stories; on spec and on time.
Anyway, I digress. Andrew and I wrote to one another sporadically throughout university – he went to Cambridge on an army scholarship after the war. Quite unexpectedly, in the summer of ’52, he called me out of the blue and asked if he could take me to tea.
We met one afternoon at Claridge’s – I still vividly remember a Victoria sponge as light as air – and then took a stroll around the Serpentine. The sky was cloudless, cyan blue, and we fed the swans and ducks. He suggested hiring a rowing boat, but I wasn’t in the mood. Then he said, ‘Margot, I need to talk to you,’ his voice shaking.
‘I suspected there was something. You’ve been jittery all through tea. You hardly bothered your scone.’
‘Margot, I’m in trouble.’
I remember how pale and fraught his face was. I thought he must be dying. ‘Andrew, are you all right? What kind of trouble?’
‘The very deep sort, I’m afraid to say.’ He explained that one of his university ‘friends’ had become entangled with a suspected spy ring – accused of colluding with the KGB. ‘They can’t pin spying on me,’ he said, ‘but the army are livid. Margot, they want to … castrate me.’ He whispered the penultimate word, checking no one was listening in.
‘I beg your pardon?’ I said, aghast.
‘It’s that, or discharge and jail. Those are my options. It was either admit we were lovers or have them think I’m a defector. What was I supposed to do?’
I stopped walking, the seriousness of his situation sinking in. You have to understand, Felicity, as ridiculous as it seems now, homosexuality was a crime back then. Men were being sent to sanatoriums. ‘Andrew, you can’t let them do this to you. It’s monstrous.’
‘I know! There’s only one solution I can think of.’
‘Which is?’
He paused and took a deep breath. ‘If I take a wife, I think I can convince them I’m reformed and it was all a momentary lapse in judgement. A blip.’
My eyes almost fell out of my head. ‘Are you seriously suggesting …?’
He got down on one knee right there by the lake’s edge. ‘Margot Stanford, will you do me the honour of—’
‘Oh, get up right now, you twit’ I said. ‘Of course I’ll marry you, but spare me the amateur dramatics.’
He stood up. ‘Oh. I got a ring and everything.’
‘Let’s be having it then.’ I held out my hand. He produced a little black velvet box. I’ll say this for your grandfather – he had exquisite taste in jewellery. Square-cut diamond, platinum ring. Classic, simple and beautiful.
‘Margot, are you sure? I know I’m asking a lot.’
I slid the ring on my finger and admired it with my cherry-red nails. ‘No you’re not, not in the grand scheme of things. I can help … so I will.’
I didn’t hesitate. After Christopher, after everything that had happened in Llanmarion, it seemed like a very small favour.
And so we married the following summer. Everyone thought I was marrying a nice, sweet man I’d met in Wales – a childhood sweetheart. The army was satisfied I’d cured him of himself and my parents were delighted their fallen daughter was now an honest woman.
You’ve no doubt seen the wedding photos. What a beautiful young couple we were. That’s the thing with mantelpiece pictures; they’re all lies: we all play our parts in public like good little puppets. To the rest of the world we were Mr and Mrs Andrew Hancock, but to him and me, it was something else. A private joke.
That’s not to say we weren’t happy. We were, blissfully so. Andrew left the army for the civil service and we bought the house in Hampstead village. Imagine living with your best friend. We read Salinger and Nabokov and Bradbury together and discu
ssed them over dinner. We played chess and backgammon in front of a crackling fire. We took a French cookery class. He was very good at it; I made several small fires and huge amounts of mess.
The trick with love is to stop expecting it to look like the cover of a romance novel. I had had that three-ring circus with Rick and it brought nothing but heartache. You see, I think love is like mixing paint: everyone brings something different to a relationship, so you never get the same colour twice. It seems foolish to cherish one shade above others and yet that’s what we seem to do.
Down the years, naturally, given our sitation, we had our other loves outside of the marriage – that was part of the deal. For much of the seventies, your grandfather lived in New York with a young photographer called Rodrigo, and I was involved with a married man, not to mention rival editor, for the best part of twenty years.
After Rick, I wasn’t sure I’d love again, but it does creep up on you when you least expect, or need, it. I met him (he shall remain nameless) at an awards dinner at the Dorchester in ’68. Well, didn’t he look a picture in his tuxedo. I remember he was smoking the most ostentatious cigar, puffing out a plume of rich, loamy smoke like a gangster. I was there with Andrew and he was there with his wife, but from the second we clapped eyes on each other, there might as well have been no one else in the ballroom.
Our affair was inevitable. Together we were atomic. Sometimes, Felicity, you just meet someone you are, against all reason, magnetically drawn to. I couldn’t resist him and I didn’t want to.
We would have exquisitely sordid liaisons in five-star hotels, spend whole weekends in hot tubs, sipping champagne. We’d ‘work away’ and escape to the countryside or Riviera for gloriously indulgent weekends. We’d sunbathe and drink spritzers on yachts off Cannes or go skiing in St Moritz. I knew he would never leave his wife and children, just as he knew I was committed to Andrew and Julia. They were happy, exhilarating times.
It was definitely, undeniably, love, just not the sort you ever see validated on television. He never did leave his wife – they never do – but he will always be in my life in some capacity. I remain very fond of him, just where he is.
When homosexuality was decriminalised in ’67, Andrew and I briefly discussed divorcing, but we didn’t see the need. We had such a lovely life, and being married took the pressure of scrutiny off both of us. Julia was still a little girl and it seemed a shame to put her through the hassle of divorce too. And so we stayed married – not a marriage of convenience, I hasten to add. It was a marriage of wonderful friendship and love.
I should explain, as you’re no doubt wondering, that Andrew was most definitely your biological grandfather. Few days went by when I didn’t think about Christopher. I had my day-to-day life at the newspaper and with Andrew, but I thought all the time about the alternate existence I’d have had as a lone teenage mother.
I once reported on a mother-and-baby home in Brighton run by the Salvation Army. Oh, it was a bleak house, quite literally, and yet the unwed mothers didn’t seem to regret their choices. They were a hard-faced lot, and they lived in terribly basic conditions, but the love they had for their babies shone through. It could so easily have been me.
People who lived close to the home regarded the girls snottily, ‘spoiled fruits’, but the mothers were too busy with their babies to pay them much heed. I wondered if my life would have been so very awful, cut off from the Stanford name on the coast with Christopher.
My rumination grew so intense, I decided the only thing for it was to replace one child with another. That the void wouldn’t shrink unless I filled it.
I brought it up with Andrew over a splendid Sunday dinner of roast lamb and mint sauce he’d prepared, telling him I wanted a child and asking would he be happy to raise it as his. He took a sip of Merlot and agreed at once. ‘I’ve often thought about having a child,’ he said. ‘I suppose I’d rather ruled it out, but if you’re willing, I’m certainly up for giving it a go!’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Margot, you have saved my neck on more than one occasion and this is the first time you’ve ever asked for anything in return. Of course we can have a child! It’ll even be fun! Just think … you and I, Mummy and Daddy!’
And so it was. I shan’t go into details, but Andrew made good on his promise (after a few false starts) …
Gross.
… and I soon fell pregnant. This time around it was a very different experience: walking on the Heath with Andrew, feeling the sun on my bump, swimming in the pond. Of course, this time I was an honest woman. Even Mother and Father were thrilled. My previous pregnancy, naturally, was never spoken of. To the rest of the world, I was a first-time mother.
I adored your mum from the second she was placed in my arms. She was a difficult baby, colic and cradle cap, she screamed and screamed, but I couldn’t have cared less. I loved her, and so did Andrew. Becoming a father completely changed him; from that moment on he was more focused than ever before. He endlessly doted on her and created quite the daddy’s girl.
I do believe that love is not about the individuals but rather the connection. As much as I loved Julia, and she loved me in return, it was not the same love I would have shared with Christopher. I found very early on, that even while bursting with love for Julia, I still keenly felt the severance from her big brother. I accepted, with deep sorrow, that he was gone and the wound would never heal.
I set about the difficult task of forgetting, or at the very least ignoring, the pain. As I said to you on the landing, Felicity, you train yourself out of feeling. The problem, I suppose, is that by bricking up all that guilt and regret and hurt, I sealed off everything.
I think, from that point, I felt everything less. I could feel everything or nothing. I chose nothing.
I realise I am not always easy to be around. I apologise for some of the things I said to you when you first arrived in Llanmarion. I wholeheartedly disagreed with Julia’s decision to keep you in the dark regarding her illness, but felt I had to comply. I found being around you awkward, if I’m honest. I wanted you to be strong, to be ready for what lies ahead.
I set impossible standards for myself and expect others in my life to match them. I am old and calcified, but I promise, for Julia’s sake, I shall try my very hardest to adjust.
You know the rest. I think that neatly brings us to the cul-de-sac at the end of Memory Lane. It’s funny, but reading it all back now, at such a distance, it’s like a story that happened to someone else.
Chapter 33
I close the diary and just stare at it in my lap. I don’t want it to be over. But, whether she knows it or not, in fluid, cursive strokes Margot has joined up the girl in the book and the woman in the kitchen.
As gross as it is to think about Margot getting her sexy on in five-star hotels, I’m glad she found love, real love, again. Even if it was with a married dude. I was worried the Rick saga had finished her off. Maybe there’s hope for me post-Thom.
I shove the diary into my satchel and go to listen at my bedroom door. The TV is still on, but I think Mum’s in bed. I creep downstairs, not sure if I’m feeling brave enough to ask the question that’s now stuck to my brain like matted chewing gum. Stalling for time, I carry on past the lounge and into the kitchen. I put the kettle on and rummage at the back of the cupboard for the jar of mint Options.
‘Tea?’ Margot says, materialising behind me. I bump my head on the cupboard shelf.
‘Ow! No, I was looking for the hot chocolate.’
Margot purses her lips. ‘Oh, you don’t want that instant muck. Let me make you some proper hot chocolate.’
Out of habit and principle I can feel an argument about to launch off my tongue but hold it back. ‘OK. Thanks.’
‘Pass me that saucepan.’ I do as I’m told and she fetches milk. The only light is coming from the lounge, so when she opens the fridge she’s illuminated and, just for a second, she looks exactly the same as the girl sitting on the fence in 1941. S
he sets the milk on a low heat and retrieves a tin of cocoa powder. She pops the lid off with a teaspoon. ‘What is it you want to say, Felicity?’ she asks, stirring the milk. ‘I can tell there’s something.’
There is. ‘I finished the diary.’
‘I assumed as much.’
I bite my lip, thinking about how to word it. ‘It’s about Grandad. He didn’t die of cancer, did he?’
Margot takes her time. She pours the milk into mugs and stirs in cocoa and sugar until all the lumps are gone. She carries the mismatched mugs to the table and sits opposite me. ‘No, he didn’t,’ she says. ‘How did you work it out?’
‘New York in the seventies.’
‘Ah yes.’ Margot’s face loses its steel and goes slacker than I’ve seen it. She looks so sad. ‘Oh, Felicity, it was the most awful time. He didn’t want Julia to know. He … we … come from a different time. A prouder, more private time, perhaps. It wasn’t like it is now with gay chaps all over the television, and he kept that part of himself a secret, even from his own daughter. Especially from her.’
‘But he died of AIDS. I mean … how did you hide that?’
She blows steam off the top of her mug. ‘That was the year your mum was making that documentary in Cape Town. By the time you both got back, he was almost gone. It happened so quickly. One day he found a strange black spot in his armpit and within months …
‘He made sure she saw him only at home, never on that infernal ward.’ For a moment she says nothing, just staring down into her mug. ‘In the beginning we bought the best private care money could buy, until I realised a lot of the prim, ignorant, idiot nurses were refusing to treat him. We moved to the AIDS ward at St Mary’s, where they at least knew what they were doing.’
‘I’m sorry.’ I try the hot chocolate and it’s at least six million times nicer than the ‘instant muck’. Damn. I hate it when she’s right.
‘I truly hope you never have to witness a plague like that, Felicity.’ She rubs her mouth with her hand. Her eyes unmistakably glaze over. ‘To see those men, those tall, tanned, Adonises, wither away and shrink until they looked like living corpses. God, that ward. It was like being back at the old asylum during the war. A great long room of dying men all lined up like dominoes waiting to fall. Partners side by side in adjoining beds. So many of them couldn’t tell their families. Some of them didn’t have a single visitor. I always made sure I brought extra magazines and the like when I visited Andrew.’