An Irresponsible Age

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  ‘Transistor?’ queried Rogen.

  ‘Little radio,’ Juliet pushed on. ‘So there he was, crunch-crunch-crunch, and just as the footsteps got closer, and whoever it was got nearer, Fred shot in the air and roared,’ at this point Juliet began a spluttered laughter which made it hard for her to continue, ‘he roared “Got you this time, you bastard!” Only … it wasn’t one of the students, it was our 80-year-old gardener!’

  ‘Gardener,’ Terence pointed out.

  Juliet slumped. ‘Yes, gardener. So?’

  ‘Well, it’s all a bit,’ he ground out his cigarette, ‘middle class.’

  ‘Of course it is. That’s what we are.’

  ‘Dessert? Rogen?’ urged Merle.

  ‘Just a minute, I like this story,’ Rogen said. ‘And by the way, we are not children. We have some grasp of nuance and irony, also sarcasm, and we do know something of your country.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Terence. ‘It’s one of the joys of being elsewhere: insisting on type, one’s own as well as other people’s.’

  Rogen fetched dessert and Merle fell into conversation with Terence. Eventually, Juliet took a breath and said, ‘I haven’t finished the story.’ Rogen nodded but neither Merle nor Terence seemed to have heard her.

  ‘You see Fred was so embarrassed,’ she began in a quick monotone, ‘that he looked round for something to blame his outburst on and there was his radio, so he began, you know, smacking it, the radio, you see, and saying, as if the gardener weren’t even there, “You bastard radio! Why can’t you stay tuned, you bastard!”’ Her voice was getting higher and louder, ‘And the gardener, he just, he just, wandered on and began weeding the artichokes or whatever, as if nothing had been said.’ Who was she talking to?

  ‘Coffee,’ Merle stated as she rose from her chair.

  Rogen was smiling at Juliet. ‘What an extraordinary family,’ he said. His true warmth caught Juliet out and she blurted: ‘They are. They really are!’ and in order to stop her bursting into tears, Rogen suggested that she tell them about her other brother.

  ‘Tobias?’ she wondered.

  ‘Let me help you out,’ said Terence, who was feeling a little ashamed. ‘Your elder brother, bass player in Vermin Death Stack, despatch rider, architect, baby girl who punches everyone and a girlfriend called Mary who walks on water and who was nearly drowned by the village madman. Didn’t she jump through a window or something to escape a fire?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did I miss anything out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What? I thought I’d got your family off pat.’

  ‘Perhaps he made a fortune and lost it all,’ suggested Rogen.

  ‘No that’s Fred,’ said Juliet.

  ‘Perhaps he’s a brilliant artist with an attic full of paintings, waiting to be discovered,’ said Merle, warming up.

  ‘That’s Clara,’ put in Terence.

  They waited.

  ‘There was a bomb. They closed down the east side of the city.’

  Rogen shook his head. ‘Why don’t people just leave?’

  Juliet thought about this. ‘You think you would, but you wouldn’t. In London, if something happens a mile away it doesn’t feel close; there’s so much in-between and it takes so long to get there.’

  ‘And where would you go?’ put in Terence. ‘The country is so small, you can never really get away which is why we come here, where you can go on getting away without ever leaving home.’

  Bad things must happen in Littlefield, Juliet had decided, only people didn’t talk about them. Instead, the gossip was of scandal and tragedy that might have occurred in the next county or in Malibu or Nebraska – places equally firmly outside the town line. Her colleagues spoke of Venice or Cambridge with more familiarity.

  ‘My brother Tobias was out on his motorbike. When there was that bomb.’

  ‘You mean he was killed?’ said Terence, too astonished to stop himself.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The bomb?’ said Merle.

  Now she had their full attention: ‘Yes.’

  Mary George was also thinking about Tobias. It was months since he had been killed and while she felt empty, she did not feel lonely. It was enough that each morning Bella was there, pushing her sticky face against Mary’s and muttering endearments. When Mary felt the loss of Tobias it was as an absence of substance and at such times, Bella’s emphatic physicality rescued her. The child was there to be washed and dressed, fed and held; she was all the presence, all the contact, Mary needed.

  She ate and slept according to Bella; dropped her at nursery, went to the bookshop, collected her and came home again. Other than when she sang, Mary remained within her part of the city, a knot of railways and streets that was neither central nor suburban, and which contained enough to balance its changes. If a corner shop closed down, a supermarket opened. If one road was pedestrianised, a bus lane was built elsewhere. There might not be anywhere left to get your shoes mended but there was a new café, which would pass through several owners and names before closing down again.

  For Mary, life on the Hugh Carmodie Trust Estate was an undemanding existence because neither she nor Bella belonged. She felt safe because she knew the people around her, and they would not want to know her better. She thought she understood the fights and the deals, but she was a foreigner and had little idea of the meaning of what she saw or heard said. Once, three young men moved into the flat above and introduced themselves to Mary as students. She passed on this piece of information to her neighbour, who scoffed, ‘Students? We heard that. They’re police. Look at their shoes.’ Mary had scurried back to Tobias, where she could allow herself to be thrilled. Sometimes she and Tobias had a long talk about whether or not to dial 999 and once or twice, they did.

  Children who went to Bella’s nursery began to knock on the door and ask if she could come out to play. There was usually someone’s older sister, of maybe eight or nine, with the group, but even so Mary was fearful. Once, she let them take Bella because she didn’t want to appear a snob, but then followed them and the next time, ashamed of having made a decision about her daughter’s safety based on what people might think of her, she would refuse. She knew the other women would think less of her for being indecisive than they would had she just said no.

  For now this was alright but soon, it would not be. And something else was wrong, with her, which she tried to solve by taking Bella to Allnorthover. She wanted to speak to Tobias’s father.

  Mary sat opposite Dr Clough in his study and tried to begin.

  ‘It happens when I go through doorways and sometimes when I turn corners. I know that I’m about to walk into glass and my body stops. It’s such a shock. It would be alright, I mean it’s just a moment’s hesitation but the shock is such a … well, such a shock.’

  Mary smiled at her own awkwardness, while Dr Clough did not. He leaned back in his narrow chair and regarded his empty desk. Mary looked around. She had been coming to the Clock House for fourteen years and had lived there the first winter after Bella was born when she and Tobias had still been on the housing-trust waiting list, but could not remember having been in this room. Once, her friend Billy had stayed there after a party and the house had been so full that he had slept on the doctor’s examining couch and dreamt that he told the doctor all his secrets.

  What struck Mary now was how coherent and well-kept this room was compared to the rest of the house. It was small, with one low window draped with mustard velvet curtains. The wallpaper was a fibrous apricot design which gave the impression of an ancient arbour. She was surprised by the antiquated medical instruments: the paediatric scales with their wicker basket, the ceramic and glass pharmaceutical bottles like the ones in which the doctor’s wife kept her oil and vinegar in the kitchen, the leather apothecary’s case left open to show a selection of squat, mysterious jars. She had not thought of the doctor as a romantic man.

  ‘Walking into glass.’ He said it so plainly.

  �
��Not into, through.’

  ‘Through?’

  ‘Through, like the window.’

  The doctor looked blank. Was he pretending not to remember? Did she have to say? He looked ill among the warmth and polish of the room. It smelt of pipe tobacco, no, not so rounded, more like ash.

  When Mary was seventeen, there had been a fire. She had jumped through a window, landed in snow and had been found by Tobias.

  Dr Clough said nothing, which Mary understood to be the way patients were encouraged to speak, so she continued. ‘It’s not as if I think it’s going to smash. It’s a feeling of being caught, of being stopped but not like when I did do it because then I ran and jumped and was midair when the glass caught me, and the extraordinary thing was that it curved and held me, it billowed, and there was a moment of being still and held …’

  The doctor looked so steeply down that Mary could not see his face.

  ‘Only it’s not like that now. It’s not a feeling of being held but of walking smack into glass that will not give. I’m being stopped.’

  The doctor leaned back in his chair. The afternoon darkened. Mary was surprised by the sense she was making of herself.

  ‘The problem is that I’m frightened again.’ As she said it, she felt it, a fear so pressurised that to allow it would be to permit the end of everything. ‘Tobias made me safe and now …’

  ‘That wasn’t his job.’ The doctor’s voice was a dry variation on his son’s.

  ‘No, of course not, it’s just that –’

  ‘You are a grown-up, a mother.’

  ‘Yes, I know, only –’

  ‘We are each of us our own –’

  ‘I didn’t mean … it’s just the glass … the shock.’

  ‘Tobias didn’t help you jump through the window.’

  ‘No.’ He had found her in the snow, and had lain down and held her.

  The doctor switched on a desk lamp and leaned forward into the light so that the surface of his face was rendered in extremes. Mary looked. She had never given him much thought.

  ‘I feel alone,’ she managed to say, and the doctor smiled a kind of welcome.

  Since Caroline had gone to Hong Kong, Fred had volunteered to babysit when Mary sang. She would put Bella to bed, make him supper and then change into her long black dress and apricot-coloured sandals, and set off for The Glory Hole. On this particular night Bella had woken and had just gone back to sleep on Fred’s lap. Mary was about to leave when she stopped and sat down beside them.

  ‘I don’t know if I can face it,’ she said, running her hand up and down Bella’s back while looking around the room as if for some excuse to stay. ‘I don’t feel like singing at all any more.’

  ‘Sing something else, for once,’ said Fred in a peculiarly tight voice.

  ‘Like what?’ She looked at him and he looked at Bella.

  ‘I don’t know anything. You can sing anything.’

  That night she looked out from the stage into the dimness of the room and saw Clara Clough.

  Foolish things …

  Foggy dream …

  all the time …

  far away …

  It never seemed to occur to her audience that she could see them, or that she got a strong sense of their collective mood. This was what directed her performance and that night, something got stuck. She started and stopped and looked again.

  You said you,

  every time you say,

  you say you,

  but not for …

  Mary had not recognised Clara at first. She noticed a flow of green velvet, the flossy sparkle of her hair, the presence of angles and curves that commanded the light, defined all the more by the fact that the man sitting beside her was dressed in black.

  She and Clara had been friends since the Cloughs moved to Allnorthover. Clara had compelled everyone with her wicked face, her overt body and magical hair. Her impatient loyalty had helped Mary grow up. At seventeen and nineteen, they shared their most adventurous and fragile years, and while no one was surprised when Mary settled down with Tobias, they were amazed that after art school, Clara had returned to the country, married a Swiss banker and had three children. ‘It’s not what artists are supposed to do,’ Mary had wondered but Tobias explained: ‘He’s taken her to live under the sky she likes to paint best.’

  These days, Clara and Mary met only in kitchens or around tables. They used to talk about sex and death; now they talked about food and sleep.

  Love too easily,

  fall, far away …

  When Clara and Jacob met at Clapham Junction on their way to Juliet’s party, it had been a coincidence, and when a city as big as London throws you up against someone you know, it is too unlikely a possibility to ignore. You may choose to walk past one another, each pretending not to have noticed the other, in which case you will have troubled thoughts for the rest of the day. Or you might make something of it, which they cheerfully did.

  The next time they met, Jacob arrived by appointment at Clara’s new studio. They talked all afternoon and when it grew dark they continued to talk as they left the building, got in a cab and arrived in Soho looking for something to eat. They found an empty restaurant where they sat at a bleached oak table and ate salads of sour green leaves and semi-dried vegetables, grilled goat’s cheese and snappy biscuits burnt with parmesan. It all tasted the same, piquant.

  Clara was staying with Carlo, so had no train to catch. It was eleven o’clock and Jacob was suggesting another drink, but where? There was The Glory Hole just round the corner, and it was a Tuesday so Mary would be singing, and to go in there, to choose to be seen by her, would make safe this dangerous night, and so Clara said Yes, why not? She would say goodnight to Jacob soon, and she would see him tomorrow.

  Carlo was lying in the bath when the telephone rang. He hurried to answer it:

  ‘Hi!’ he sang.

  ‘Hello,’ said Fred.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Who did you think it was?’

  Jonathan Mehta. The man who left this bruise on my throat. The reason why my lips are so swollen and dry, why my groin aches and my cheeks sting.

  ‘Fred, it’s one o’clock.’

  ‘I know. The thing is –’

  ‘What?’ Carlo managed, faintly. Jonathan had taken him dancing in a place where everything was dazzling and delicious. He had smelt and touched Jonathan’s skin. He had watched a bead of sweat trickle down his forehead and had traced its path with his tongue. At midnight, Carlo had said he had to go, he had an early start, and it had been lovely but no, he really had to get some sleep. It had been a perfect evening.

  ‘I don’t know what to do!’ Fred was whispering.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t speak louder, I might wake Bella.’

  ‘Is something wrong with Bella?’

  For a moment, the music stopped.

  ‘No, she’s fine. The thing is Mary …’

  ‘Is she ill?’

  ‘No, the thing is …’

  Carlo could hear his brother breathing and concentrated.

  Fred blurted: ‘I think she’s in love with me.’

  Carlo began to giggle. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘She touched me.’

  This was hilarious. ‘Improperly?’

  ‘She ran her hand up and down my thigh.’

  Carlo roared and in the midst of his laughter, recalled Jonathan’s touch and wondered why we didn’t all go round stroking each other’s thighs, it felt so good.

  Fred struggled on. He needed to make sense of this. ‘Bella was asleep on my knee. Mary sat down beside us. She wouldn’t look at me of course, too shy. Except she did say she didn’t want to go, to leave me that is, and then she just ran her hand –’

  ‘Up and down your thigh!’ boomed Carlo. ‘Lucky boy!’

  ‘Lucky?’

  ‘Didn’t it feel good?’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘Then what’s the problem?’

&
nbsp; Fred could not think what the problem was.

  THIRTEEN

  After the dinner, Merle and Rogen retreated. Rogen was on sabbatical from somewhere in Missouri and in the past six months they had spent more time together than they had in the eight years of their marriage, but Juliet had not asked and did not know, and so felt set aside. Her friendship with Terence Bull had hardened into Wednesday nights at the sports bar, and she found herself wondering who else there might be for her in this place.

  She thought of her neighbour, Buckie Buckingham, a semi-retired classics professor. Her apartment sat over the garage adjoining his house. Parked below was a huge old car built on distinctly American lines; it looked like a cross between an ocean liner and a barn. She assumed that the car belonged to Buckie but never saw anyone use it. She rarely saw him – a lanky, flabby man with fat white curls, given to wearing an improperly loose silk dressing-gown – although she heard him singing: arias and lieder and what she imagined were songs from his varsity days, full of whoops and slang.

  Buckie warbled on as she idled over the Littlefield Fencepost in which the week’s entire police activity was reported on the back page: mother raccoon and cubs escorted from dumpster back to woods; officer called out to investigate a complaint about the smell of coffee. The only things that suggested the town made any mischief at all were the personal ads – caringly worded requests from married couples in search of a third person. Juliet thought of Merle and Rogen, and then Buckie. She turned the page.

  It seemed that Littlefield offered no further possibilities. Everyone who might come close moved firmly past. Juliet was established in her isolation and found the circuit of routine more bearable than talking herself into going out and trying to discover any more society or entertainment. Besides which, the place had come into a kind of life. One day, walking across the common, Juliet noticed that where the morning sun fell on a beech tree, the leaves had turned yellow – precisely so, the yellow cutting a line across the leaves regardless. This interested her and so she looked up and around and noticed, elsewhere, the imprint of light: one curve of a pale broad maple flushed at the tips, a swathe of orange across dark green, the gradual encroachment of red on brown, no, more than that, crimson on bronze. Apricot, peach, citron, rose, olive, cream, chestnut: the colours of the leaves that she brought home demanded such comparisons. Using the names of pigments was cheating, she thought. No burnt sienna, umber or ochre. They had to be things, things from the world she missed; they had to taste of something.