Eventually, the sky darkened completely, and so did the kitchen, but Eve did not switch on a light, although she did stand and scrape the remains of the cereal, the powdery oats and crumbly brown bits of toasted wheat, into the smart waste bin in Izzy’s kitchen. Then she went into Izzy’s pretty sitting room and sat in the alcove where Izzy had spent most of the day before and watched as lights came on, slowly, in the other buildings along the road. Not many did. It was an area where young, working people lived and the street didn’t get busy with girls in their winter boots, and young men with their coats flapping, and taxis, and people hunting for keys until well after six.
Izzy came home at 7:15. When she switched on the light and saw her mother, still as death, she screamed.
“I’m sorry, Izzy.” Eve’s voice came, flat and faraway, from across chasms.
“I didn’t…I didn’t think you’d still be here.”
Izzy had left her coat and handbag in the hall, but she still wore a long black scarf. She clutched its fringed tails across her chest, although it was not cold in the flat—the heating had come on automatically. Eve had heard the boiler click and stir.
“If you would like me to leave, I will,” Eve said.
Izzy did not answer. She was still standing in the doorway. She looked very tired. The black of the scarf drained whatever color there was in her face and the bruised half-moons that had accented her eyes these past months had sunken to dark semicircles.
“But I would like to say something first. I’d appreciate it if you’d let me.”
Izzy sat, as if involuntarily, on a chair in the corner opposite her mother and waited.
“Thank you,” Eve said. “I want to say that I know that I was not a good mother to you, that I wasn’t a mother to you. I cooked for you and clothed you and that was about the extent of my involvement in your childhood.”
Izzy did not speak, but looked at Eve with eyes that endorsed what she had said.
“I let a series of nannies and schools and…Gin-gin, my mother, raise you because I felt inadequate to it. I felt from the moment of your birth that you were too…vigorous for me, and that, anyway, raising a child would be impossible for someone with my limitations.”
Izzy looked cross, but only so much as her exhaustion would allow, when she said, “What limitations, Mummy? You had plenty of money. You’ve never really worked. I know you were on your own, but you could have managed.”
“Yes, all of that is true.”
Izzy’s emotions were firing more strongly now; she sat up. “You missed prize-giving,” she said evenly. “I was head girl and you missed prize-giving. Gin-gin was there. Gin-gin was there in the front row, all dolled up and cheering madly and clapping like a seal, but you weren’t there and neither was my bloody father. And now the pair of you can’t say a good thing about her. You two want to play happy families at my wedding when all I want is Gin-gin. I don’t want to get married without her. I want her to help me to choose my dress, and tell me what lipstick to wear, and insist that Ollie’s not good enough for me.”
Eve leaned forward so that her elbows rested on her knees. “That’s exactly what she would do.”
“Yes, she would.” The air began to seep from Izzy again. “She would,” she said with a final, accentuating puff.
There was a long pause. When Eve spoke again, her voice was very soft. “When I was sixteen, a boy called David Pelham asked me out. He was tall and rather good-looking, and he was the brother of a friend of someone I knew at school. We went to the pictures. It was all very chaste, he was as shy as I was, but I liked him. When he brought me home, Gin-gin and her friend Dodo were watching out of the window and I saw them. David leaned forward to kiss me good night and I was so worried that they would tease me about it that I pushed him back. I ducked away and tripped on the front path and landed on my knees. I heard them laughing. If I had been like you, confident like you, I’d have just kissed that boy and then sauntered in and asked what they were staring at. But I wasn’t like you and so I ran. And I didn’t go out with anyone again until I met Simon in my final year at Cambridge, and he seemed not to mind that I was shy. Not at first anyway. And I was so determined to keep him that I slept with him on our first date. And next thing you were on the way and Gin-gin told him he had to marry me. And he did. But not for long, as you know. After that, you were my excuse not to leave the house, and the shyness grew. It grew into something bigger, and more monstrous, and soon I was unable to go anywhere at all without feeling a sense of…terror. Absolute terror. I have these panic attacks. I can’t predict them, they just overwhelm me. They leap out from nowhere and knock me senseless.”
“Like at the pub that day?” Izzy said with sudden understanding.
“Yes, like at the pub that day.”
“And that’s why you didn’t come to prize-giving?”
“Yes. And several other things that you’ve probably forgotten about, or things that didn’t seem remarkable—birthday parties and such—when you were young.”
“You’ve been having, what are they—attacks?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve had this all these years and you’ve never done anything about it.”
“No, at least, not until now. And that’s what I want to say sorry for. I should have—for your sake.”
“Can you, can’t you get it fixed, cured by psychiatry or something, or drugs?”
“There is a lot of help, yes. But it doesn’t get cured, this kind of thing, or at least not in the way a broken arm gets cured. You learn how to deal with it. I thought that I had at your engagement party.”
“You were fine. You seemed fine.”
“Yes, that’s why I thought I had overcome it, but I haven’t. Yesterday on the train it happened again.”
“Perhaps you just need more help.”
“Yes, I think perhaps I do. But, Izzy, I am not telling you this to burden you with it. I’m telling you because I want to explain why I haven’t been much use to you. Or at least, some of why I haven’t been much use to you.” Eve looked away, out through the still-open curtains at the yellow lights of other houses, other rooms, some of which were no doubt entertaining their own dramas, spectacles, or dragging hardships, between the pea boiling and television watching, but then, shutting off any avenue of escape from frankness, she looked back again, directly at Izzy. “The anxiety doesn’t account for everything,” she said plainly. “After a time it became another excuse, but I was an inadequate parent in other ways, for other reasons. I know that.”
Izzy held her gaze, but did not respond.
“But I will start there, with the obvious thing, and I want to assure you that I will get on top of it because I can see that you do need me. I am not sure that mothering will ever be one of my skills, but I will support you in any way I can. And if you decide to marry Ollie, or not to marry Ollie, I will stand by you. You are my daughter and I love you dearly. I love you so much that I feel sincere gratitude to my mother for having given you some happiness.”
There was a pause. Eve was cognizant of the rise and fall of her breaths, and Izzy’s.
“I can see that to other people she might have been a bit overpowering,” Izzy said, looking down at the rug. It had belonged to Virginia and was quite lovely, teal blue.
Eve, who had been looking at the rug, too, raised her eyes. “Yes, but she wasn’t to you, and you loved her and you have every right to miss her now. And as to the rest—your father, your stepfamily or whatever the term is, you must choose for yourself how you want to approach that. I know it’s a disconcerting situation, but it’s not such an unusual one these days. I don’t think any of us wants to spoil your wedding.”
“I know that really.”
“Do you?”
Izzy sighed. A deep, letting-go sigh. “Yes.”
They looked at each other properly for a moment.
“Would you like a drink?” Izzy asked.
“Yes, please.”
Izzy brought the
bottle and a bowl of olives and some potato chips and handed a glass to her mother.
“You’re so poised, Izzy.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. I know I probably seem like I’m not paying attention, but I do notice a lot about you, and that’s one of the things.”
“I don’t feel poised now,” she said, but she smiled thinly and swept her hair back with her hand.
Eve stayed with Izzy until the end of the week, and on Friday, Izzy called Ollie and told him not to worry—that everything would be fine and that she was going to spend a few days with her mother. They traveled back on the train together, Izzy treating Eve the whole way like something porcelain. Eve was glad of it, although the train was not busy and she felt calm enough. She had called Beth from London and arranged to see her on Monday, and Izzy had said she would stay and drive her to her appointment.
At home they ate a shepherd’s pie that Gwen had taken out of the freezer.
“I still don’t think I really understand,” Izzy said.
They had elected to eat in front of the fire on trays. Izzy pulled a table across the front of her chair and rested hers on it. “I mean I can understand that being shy can be…paralyzing, I suppose, but I can’t see how it can make you pass out.”
“It’s the fear,” Eve said slowly. “The fear of what might happen. I don’t know, I think I’m only just beginning to understand it myself.”
“Does anyone else know? About these…about your…”
“Gwen. And I think Geraldine suspects.”
“At the shop.”
“Yes. It doesn’t often get busy in there, but when it does, I always slip away, out the back. And then, some weeks, I’m not up to it at all.”
Izzy nodded, absorbing this, and lifted a bottle of Worcestershire sauce and shook it over her meat.
“Click,” she said softly.
“Click?”
“All the pieces got broken up, but now some of them are clicking back into place.”
“It will be a different picture when it’s finished.”
“Yes.”
Some old friends of Jack’s had wanted to come out for a few days, and he had let them. Now, at the two-thirds point of the two-day invasion, which was what it felt like to Jack, Andy Berkow was standing with him in the kitchen saying, “So, I read you might kill off Harry Gordon. Watcha planning to write next?”
Jack had not been holding a meat cleaver at the time, which from Andy’s point of view was a good thing.
Such was the stuff of social life, he thought later—meaningless crap. And yet the house felt quiet and forsaken after Andy’s, and his wife Sue’s, departure. He had, despite his desire to see the backs of his guests, urged them to stay on for coffee. In the void they’d left, he called Dex.
“I’m gonna go out in the woods, like a man, and find myself.”
“Men don’t find themselves, Jack. Women do.”
“Yeah, well, maybe they know a thing or two.”
“That may be, brother. But listen, don’t go all flaky on me, will you. Don’t come back chanting or nothin’.”
“I’m not promising anything, Dex. But if I get any urges to disrobe and sit cross-legged for long periods, I’ll call you.”
“There’s bears, Jack. There’s bears and guys who can talk without movin’ their jaws, there’s people married to their own grandmothers in them thar hills.”
“When I gits back, I’ll call ya.”
Dear Eve,
I am going away for a while and I won’t have a computer. I’m going to a cabin that belongs to a friend. I am going there to try to finish this book. No, I am going there TO finish this book. And make a decent job of it, without distractions. Then I’m going to come back and learn to how be fifty with a bit of dignity and style. The friend who owns the cabin, Henry, has a lot of both. I’m hoping some will rub off. I leave on Tuesday. I’ll ask Henry if there’s a postal address. I only have directions—mostly they say: Keep driving.
J
Dear Jack,
I have been struck lately by how exhausting mental work is. Physically exhausting, I mean. It’s strange that the body can become so overwhelmed by the activity of the brain. I dare say there is a scientific explanation involving adrenalin or something, but in any case I think you should be aware of it. Because, if you’re going to tackle this great book-writing feat, you’ll need strengthening sustenance.
I’m sending you a recipe for Scotch broth, it’s warming, nourishing and benefits from re-heating. The preparation takes time, but after that it makes itself. Perhaps that’s how it will be with your book.
Good luck,
Eve
I am going to make this broth, and if the aroma of it is so powerful, pungent, and flavorful that an assortment of bears comes forging out of the woods and makes supper of me—on your conscience be it.
J
P.S. If they leave a thigh bone, not too gnawed, use it for stock.
Are there really bears?
Yes.
Chapter Twelve
“Is it…like a relapse?” Eve asked.
“I suppose that’s one way of describing it,” Beth said. “Is that what it felt like?”
“I’m not sure. At the time it felt the same, the clammy palms, the difficulty breathing…the fear.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But afterwards it was different.”
“Yes.”
“Afterwards, the next day, I felt an absolute determination not to let it happen again. To confront the thing honestly and not just convince myself, like I did before, that I’d beaten it.”
“Do you still feel that way?”
“Yes. Yes I do.”
Eve,
When I was a kid, I was afraid of snakes. I don’t mean nervous of them. I mean afraid, deeply, gut-wrenchingly afraid. I refused to go camping with my father because of it. I loved camping.
And so, one night, he took me aside and got it out of me. And after I’d told him, he explained that plenty of people are afraid of things that there is no rational reason to fear. He said that it was on account of some ancient part of the brain that makes even city dwellers start at the sound of a twig snapping. And that’s why, he said, sometimes you just gotta make friends with the fear. Because you may have to live with it for a while.
Jack
No bears yet.
Dear Jack,
I knew that if I told you, you’d understand. How did I know that?
Eve
Are you still afraid of snakes?
From time to time, and plenty else besides. But I go camping every chance* I get.
*It is fair to say that these chances have been sporadic to the point of nonexistence since about 1987.
I have begun to understand that I am not afraid of people, or of Life. What I’m afraid of is my reaction to them. What I am afraid of is myself.
Eve
That’s why it’s so important to do the making-friends part. By the way, I’ve baked a ham. It does the same thing as the broth, beckons to me when my hands leave the keyboard. But I think it is better to eat than to overedit at this point, so I answer her calls. (Definitely a she—sweet and fatty.)
J
Look up 2 4 6 8 cake. When my brain won’t leave me alone, I am sometimes able to divert it from a full-on attack by reciting the recipe. You could try it when your hands leave the keyboard.
Eve
It works. The demon was on me at 11 a.m.: “You will never finish this book. You will never finish this book.” But I fought back. 2 eggs, I said, and take 4 ounces of butter and 8 ounces of flour, too, you fucker. (You will excuse the vernacular, I am being faithful to the tenor of the scene.) Then I put my hands back on the keyboard and stuck at it for another hour.
You are a marvel, Eve. Your letters, which I have to walk half a mile to collect, are even more of a highlight out here. And you seem happy. Celebrate. Make a batch of these Parmesan Biscuits and knock a few back with your sherry. Because
if you don’t recognize the good times, friend, they pass you at a dead run.
You are right about celebrating happiness. I have never thought of it that way before. I wonder why the negative patterns have been so much more accessible to me. Self-pity, for instance, has always come easier than elation. Easier, but more expensive.
Eve
I made the parmesan biscuits. They were divine.
There’s sadness and there’s misery, Eve. Misery’s that bitter stuff you cook up yourself. Your burden is sadness, an oppressive sadness that I’m glad to hear you chipping away at, but misery is not your style. You’ve reminded me not to make it mine. Thanks.
Jack
Izzy picked up the book from the pile of things that Eve was wrapping, sitting on the floor with the rolls of paper and tape beside her.
“That’s the guy Ollie likes so much.”
“Yes. It’s for him.”
“I think he’s already got them all.”
“This one is signed.”
“Oh, he’ll love that,” she said, lowering herself to sit on the floor, too, stretching her legs out and leaning back against the base of a chair. Her color had come back. She looked herself again, but warmer, more comfortable in her skin.
“I bought that toboggan for Ed and Felix,” she said quietly.
Eve looked at her. “That was very kind, Izzy. Very kind.”
Izzy tossed her head, deflecting the praise, but she was pleased. “And this.” She reached into a bag and handed Eve a man’s leather stud box. It was engraved in gold with Ollie’s initials. “It’s my wedding present to him,” she said.
“You’ve decided then?”
“Yes.”
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