An Irresponsible Age

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  ‘Don’t,’ Monica was trying to say, but what came out of her mouth was a feeble honk. ‘I don’t want to know, you silly fool. Why can’t you just keep it in your trousers?’

  ‘The thing is Barbara doesn’t love me. Most nights I have to sleep in my room, this room I have to rent at the back of a gallery. Try to breathe more slowly … in … out …’

  Monica strained, and Jacob tried to sit her up but did not know how and losing his balance, yanked his mother half out of bed. Barbara appeared, stepped over him and settled Monica back.

  Jacob got to his feet. ‘Sorry darling,’ he said. Both women looked up. ‘I’m pretty useless, aren’t I?’

  ‘That’s always been your excuse,’ said Barbara.

  Monica’s jaw waggled, her mouth dropped open, her tongue flapped, her eyes watered and she gave a majestic caw.

  ‘I made her cry, Bar,’ said Jacob, tears in his eyes.

  Barbara, who spent more time with Monica than he did, knew better: ‘Don’t be silly. She’s laughing.’

  FIFTEEN

  There were three cars parked in the Clock House garage, but neither Fred nor Mary had a licence, and Juliet insisted that now she could only drive in America. Clara came to collect them for lunch, marching into the kitchen shouting, ‘Why can’t you grow up and stop depending on others to ferry you around!’ only the person in the kitchen wasn’t Juliet, but Mary.

  Fred appeared behind Clara, carrying bottles of champagne and brandy. ‘Before we go, we have to have a champagne cocktail. Don’t we always have a champagne cocktail before Christmas lunch?’

  ‘You can make them at my place,’ said Clara.

  ‘No! We have them here, in this kitchen. Where are the sugar lumps?’

  ‘And we toast the goose, which is at my house. Do come on.’

  Clara had set up a table in her studio, the library, because she thought it the grandest room in the house. Two tables huddled together under high windows. Stefan was up a ladder trying to encourage the bar fires suspended along the walls to give off some heat. The twins were playing among a stack of zinc garden chairs, while Horace sat in his playpen and grizzled tremulously.

  Mary noticed his blue fists: ‘Isn’t he cold?’

  Clara swept him up. ‘Nonsense, just hungry like the rest of us. He wants some tit.’ She pulled open her shirt.

  ‘You’re still breastfeeding?’ Mary had not produced enough milk to sustain Bella for more than two months.

  ‘Obviously. Now why don’t you lot bring up the food.’

  ‘We’ve got to toast the goose first and I say it will hear us from here,’ put in Fred, who had put a sugar lump in each glass and splashed them with brandy which he then topped up with champagne.

  Clara continued to motorise the day. ‘There is smoked salmon to start with. We should have it now. Can’t someone bring it up?’

  They drank the cocktails and ate the salmon, and then Clara marshalled everyone to carry up the dinner.

  ‘I’ll keep an eye on the children, so Stefan can concentrate on the heating,’ said Mary, meaning to sound helpful.

  Clara looked exasperated. ‘It’s not that cold and you’ve got Bella so thoroughly wrapped up, I’m surprised she can breathe.’

  She marched off and Mary muttered, ‘Don’t tell her. I can’t stand it, just don’t tell her.’

  Juliet was irritated. ‘Bella was fine, remember? Slept right through it. It was your shrieking that woke her up.’

  ‘I still don’t understand what happened. How could the smoke from downstairs end up in her room?’

  ‘A down draught, I think it’s called. The flues connect and sometimes the fire isn’t strong enough and the air is so still that the smoke can’t rise, so it has to find another way out.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘It happened before, ages ago, on the same kind of night. Dad lit a fire in the hall and a while later Tobias came spluttering out of his room, swiftly followed by … what was her name? They had practically nothing on. It was hilarious!’

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘About Daisy? Of course. You did too, didn’t you? I mean she was before you.’

  ‘Not about Daisy, about the hall fire and how it could do that.’

  ‘I suppose so, now that I’m reminded of it.’

  ‘You knew the room could fill with smoke?’

  ‘Not really, I –’

  ‘And that Bella was in there?’

  It was you who shut the door, thought Juliet.

  Fred appeared with a heap of plates and Mary asked him, ‘You knew, too? About the fireplace in Tobias’s room? The down draught?’

  He looked from one to the other. ‘I’ve heard the story.’

  ‘You lit the fire.’

  Juliet said it: ‘You shut the door.’

  Frightened, angry, they all spoke at once: ‘How could you not think!’, ‘Why did you shut the door?’, ‘She’s your baby’, ‘It’s your house’, and then Fred yelling: ‘It’s Tobias’s room and I didn’t think of it because it didn’t matter because he’s not here!’

  ‘His daughter is,’ said Mary.

  ‘Yes,’ said Juliet, ‘and sometimes that just makes it worse.’

  Clara’s goose was plump and bronze, but it tasted of feather and bone. It was served with cranberry-and-date stuffing, puréed potatoes and swede, glazed carrots with caraway and sprouts sautéed with nutmeg – all babyish, burnt and cold. The children were bored and disappointed. Bella strutted round and round, slapping every chairleg she passed, which was startling then amusing and finally annoying. Told off by Juliet, she retreated to a corner and stood regarding them all, her scarlet cheeks and wispy orange hair flaring against the tea-green walls. Mary would not concede that the child was over-dressed but eventually unbuttoned her cardigan. The twins disappeared and because neither Stefan nor Clara appeared to listen out for them, Mary felt obliged to. Horace wheezed as snot drooped from his nose and crusted on his upper lip. When Clara went to fetch her homemade plum-pudding ice cream, Mary leant over and wiped Horace’s raw face. He began to yell.

  ‘What set off roaring boy?’ asked Clara as she came back in. She whisked Horace into the air. Only Juliet could see her face in the bleaching winter light and how tired she looked.

  Cold, drunk and swimming inside, Juliet missed her mother and felt a burst of protective love for her sister.

  ‘He was fine until Mary decided to scrub his face.’

  ‘I only gave his nose a wipe,’ said Mary.

  Juliet had always liked her before, but she was beginning to sound peevish.

  At this point Bella fell hard on her face and began to cry.

  ‘You see?’ said Clara, ‘If you weren’t so busy with other people’s children, yours might not be concussing herself in the corner.’

  ‘If you knew …’ Mary rushed to pick up Bella, who thought her mother was shouting at her and cried harder.

  ‘Knew what? That my brother died? I know that.’

  ‘We all know that,’ added Juliet, looking savagely at Mary. ‘What you can’t take is not having someone to look after you, that’s why –’ and she knew she should not say this but at last the stone laid on her heart by Tobias’s death was starting to move, ‘you’re after the nearest replacement.’

  Fred, who had been plucking at the tablecloth gave it a yank so that plates, glasses, bottles, bowls, cutlery, candles and vases of holly rattled and slopped. Stefan took Horace from Clara, and went to find the twins. Fred stood up but kept looking at the tablecloth where he was dabbing at a puddle of red wine. ‘I’ll make another round of cocktails shall I? To go with the pudding? This is going to stain. Where’s the salt?’ He unscrewed the top of the mill so fast that it spun out of his hands.

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ Mary could make no sense of this.

  Fred had upended the mill and was shaking it over the spilt wine.

  ‘I mean Fred,’ said Juliet.

  ‘Oh shut up!’ said Fred and Clara s
imultaneously, which so annoyed Juliet that she went ahead and said it: ‘Mary made a pass at you, didn’t she, Federico?’

  Wax hardened on the white cloth. Thick water oozed from an upset vase. Fred threw the salt mill at Juliet hard enough for it to have hurt her, and walked out.

  ‘Why would you say something like that?’ asked Mary.

  They looked at her as if they had forgotten she was there.

  Here they were: Mary in the corner with Bella simmering in her arms, Clara still standing, still looking up into the light and Juliet sitting back in her chair, as rigid as her sister. They had reached the edge of something.

  ‘What is this about?’ asked Mary.

  Clara explained: ‘Fred told Carlo that when he was babysitting for you, you made a pass at him.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘That he was holding Bella and you ran your hand, um, stroked his thigh.’

  ‘His thigh? Why would I stroke Fred’s thigh?’ As she said it, Mary remembered the moment – reaching for Bella stretched out across Fred’s knees and running her hand up and down the child’s back just as she constantly, thoughtlessly, touched her. Fred’s thigh. Her full, sudden blush as she realised what she had done convinced the sisters.

  As Mary stood up, pulling Bella after her, something fell into her mind with the words already in place as if she had been wanting to say them for years. ‘When I sing at the club, I realise afterwards how much of the audience I’ve taken in – someone’s red hair, say, and their green dress, and the man next to them.’

  ‘Mary, I think that’s the longest sentence you’ve ever uttered,’ Juliet remarked. This was interesting; troubling and interesting.

  ‘Could you explain the point of this little speech?’ Clara would not look round.

  ‘Can you explain why you go down to London so often?’ Mary was not sure that this piece of information belonged with the other, but nonetheless decided to cobble them together.

  ‘You’re being ridiculous,’ said Clara turning round to the table and beginning to stack plates. ‘I know you’re embarrassed about lunging at Fred but you don’t have to contrive more mess.’

  ‘I’m not –’

  ‘Who do you see in London?’ asked Juliet, only because she was relieved to have found a way into a different conversation.

  Clara fumbled the greasy plates.

  This got Juliet interested. ‘Clara! Have you got a man? A man in black?’ She was following her sister round the table, jabbing her finger at her playfully; it was meant to be playful. ‘That’s a bit Eighties, isn’t it? A throwback in black?’

  Clara hurried out and her lack of response convinced Juliet that she was right. She turned back to Mary. ‘I go off for a few months and you’re seducing Fred and Clara’s got a man in black. Well, well …’

  How dare you, thought Mary and took another step: ‘Who do you know who wears black?’

  Even the shock of realising what Mary was suggesting didn’t stop Juliet blaming her for this as well. ‘You bitch, Mary George, you bitch.’

  It took some time for Juliet to make her way down the three flights of stairs that led from the library to the kitchen. She took a wrong turning in one corridor, heard someone coming, panicked and slipped into a room where the twins were torturing their soft toys. She knelt down as if to play with them and they ignored her politely.

  Juliet waited until she could breathe evenly and then set off once more, rehearsing her lines: ‘I hear you’re fucking my cast off.’ Too direct. It left nothing to be said. ‘Clara, a word …’ Too smug. ‘Seen anything of Jacob?’ Not tough enough.

  She strode into the kitchen: ‘Clara, I –’ but she wasn’t there. Fred was doing the washing up. He had to stand on tiptoe to put the plates in the draining rack. His emphatic presence, his wispy hair: ‘Bella, have you seen Jacob?’ Where did that come from? She gave a painful, pleading laugh; Fred didn’t even turn round.

  Juliet walked through the kitchen and along a corridor, opening and then slamming each door she came to, more in protest than in hope of finding Clara. Here was the scullery, the pantry, and the laundry with its monumental washing machine and institutional boiler; rooms given over to fishing rods, photographic equipment and demijohns, creosote, whitewash and pesticides, and jars of fading fizzing jam made from the pears and plums that overwhelmed the orchard each year.

  At the end of the corridor, Juliet turned a corner and walked into Clara. Unprepared, she gestured at the row of doors behind her. ‘Playing at it, playing at everything.’

  Clara responded as if she too had been rehearsing. ‘It’s not what you think.’

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘Me and …’ She decided something. ‘I can show you.’

  Juliet was sufficiently curious to follow Clara up to the top floor where the ceilings were low and the rooms plain and chill. ‘It’s like Khyber Road up here,’ she said. Clara seemed gratified.

  They continued on to the end of the corridor and up a steep set of steps into an attic so large that it seemed to Juliet more like a barn. It was empty, apart from at one end, a rack full of paintings. Clara was taking one down, pulling off the plastic wrapping, setting it against the wall under a window so as to catch the dregs of afternoon light, and then she stood back and looked at Juliet while Juliet looked at the picture.

  ‘Well?’ prompted Clara, after a minute or so.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘You can’t see it?’

  She could see that it was a face, or parts of a face. See what?

  ‘You need to find the right perspective.’ Clara shuffled her sister to the right, ‘Can you see it now? Perhaps a little closer … no, not too close … now?’ The elements of the face composed themselves and there was Jacob, as he had appeared the first time, when Juliet had attributed to him all that you might hope for in a beautiful stranger.

  ‘It’s true,’ she said.

  ‘Do you think so?’ asked Clara. ‘The plane of his nose, the way it flares and flattens so that the light broadens and sinks at the same time. That was hard to get.’

  Juliet was slow to react. The small white pill she took each day kept her in suspension. There was no blood, no pain, just a spongy thickening. Her thoughts thickened into what to do – lift the axe, say the words – rather than why. But now she felt something rise through the thickened chemistry of her saturated body.

  Clara rattled on: ‘So of course I’ve been seeing Jacob. How else could I get this done? And that night we worked late, had something to eat and then dropped in at the club for a drink. Of course Mary saw us, she was meant to … I was going to say hello but you know how she scuttles off … oh for god’s sake, I only painted him!’

  ‘You paint landscapes not people.’

  ‘It was a commission.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The point is now you know that whatever Mary was trying to suggest is nonsense.’

  ‘Who commissioned it?’

  ‘Barbara Dart.’

  Juliet continued to look at the painting. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I thought you’d be upset.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you weren’t here, because it’s for his wife, I don’t know …’ Clara, so rarely nervous, pushed on: ‘He has such a complex face …’

  ‘And now you’re for hire?’

  ‘I couldn’t really say no. She’s done a lot for me.’

  ‘Didn’t it occur to you that she is only interested in you because of who you are?’

  Clara looked blank.

  ‘My sister?’

  ‘That’s insulting and absurd.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You mean why. That thing you had with Jacob was hardly –’ Enough.

  ‘Would you have done it if it hadn’t been Jacob?’

  ‘It was a commission,’ Clara repeated and went to switch on the lights, as if to prove there was nothing hidden in her or this room or this picture. ‘And if you must know, y
es, I wanted to do it. I haven’t painted a human being since art school and I felt like having another go. And yes, perhaps I did it because it was him. He’s an interesting subject. I’m a painter, he’s a subject, she is writing the cheque. I didn’t mention it because I knew you would read something into it. You always make something out of nothing. Always.’ Whether or not this was an accurate observation did not bother Clara; with it, she felt sufficiently restored to leave.

  Juliet remained. Why had Jacob agreed to this? She tried once more to find the exact point from which the portrait demanded to be viewed but kept losing it, as if Jacob were moving her in and out of place. The coherence of Jacob the glimpsed stranger broke down and she saw in his image what she had never seen in his presence: his struggle to become and remain his idea of himself.

  Mary insisted on leaving and was persuaded to accept a lift from Stefan only here they were, still in the garage while he tried to get the car to start. Each time he turned the key in the ignition, the engine made less noise.

  ‘I’ll have to leave it a while, it’ll only flood.’

  As two quiet people, they were comfortable sitting in silence but Mary had something she wanted to say: ‘I’ve given up singing, you know. I’ve left the band.’

  ‘That’s a shame. I’ve always meant to come and hear you. Why?’

  ‘Because no one will look after Bella.’

  ‘You can’t find a babysitter?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have to. They are her family, Tobias’s family, they should help me. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Well, I …’

  ‘Forget it. I’m just fed up. You go in. We’ll wait here.’

  ‘Shall I bring you a blanket? Some tea and cake?’

  Everyone adored Stefan. He took them seriously, distracted and consoled, but did not offer a view. Most of what he heard, he set aside. Mary knew she already looked foolish and would have to go back in because Bella would get cold and wake, but she was still too angry and frightened to trust herself.