An Irresponsible Age

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  Juliet fetched a plate now and laid on it a little of the three foods she had been living on since Jacob had gone: peaches, corn chips and orange sherbet. She ate some of each, and lit a cigarette. She had no idea what to do next.

  An hour later, she called Theo. ‘I know I said I wanted this night to myself, and I think I do in the end but could you come over for a while? I haven’t even gone and I miss you.’ Would she have dared to speak to Jacob as simply as that?

  Theo came, and they spent an hour on the porch. They agreed to swap addresses and phone numbers, hers in London (Botolph Square) and his in San Francisco. She pulled a book from his jacket pocket (Montaigne’s essays) and wrote her details in that, and so he went indoors and found a book on her desk and did the same. They held onto one another for a long time and then kissed as if it were almost too much for them, which it was and so they did not kiss again.

  When Juliet thought she might sleep she let herself think about Theo, not with any formed interest but for the pleasure of something as fresh as his attention. He would be a distraction when she was back in London, and was once more facing the swirl of her old life – Jacob’s disappearance, Fred’s house, Clara’s marriage, Carlo’s bodies, Mary’s singing, the doctors waiting to operate and Tobias’s refusal to be felt. Her parents rose to the surface, drifted and receded, and Juliet watched them go, calm now because she could cross any bridge and see Theo – or someone like him – on the other side, waiting for her in a new and empty city.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  To Juliet’s surprise, the time she spent in Littlefield set itself aside so neatly that soon she could not imagine herself there. She had lived in the middle of a forest in a foreign country where she did not have to travel far or work hard. It had been a pleasant existence, and Jacob had enlivened and complicated it in ways she still could not make sense of and so these too were set aside.

  London remembered her. As she walked along Piccadilly, the number nineteen bus passed, taking her home to Khyber Road. When she went to see her tutor at the Institute, she met herself on the fourth flight of the tightly wound stone stairs where for years she had paused to look down over the low banister with the same shiver. She was greeted everywhere by details she knew intimately: the loose corner of a wall, a missing railing, the greening and flaking bark of a plane tree. There were certain views, too, in which the rhythm of windows or the graph of the skyline were unnervingly recalled.

  She had flown back into London at dawn and arrived to see the sun shining on Fred’s new house, which was a real house, solid and white with high ceilings and tall windows. Juliet soon learnt that it had begun to change those who lived there. They had straightened up and separated out. Even Fred looked taller; older too now he had lost so much hair.

  Botolph Square was calmer than she had expected. Fred, Mary and Caroline had established a routine which meant that they saw little of one another. Juliet was alone all day and by evening was eager for company, but Bella was fretting about being teased at school, Fred had to call brokers in New York and Tokyo, and Caroline was busy. Juliet phoned Clara, who was either in her studio or putting children to bed, so she sat alone by the empty fireplace and told herself stories about Khyber Road.

  Juliet called her parents and promised to come home the next weekend, then set about finding someone to go with her. No one would, so she went alone to sit with her mother at the kitchen table and to walk with her father in the woods. The countryside around Allnorthover was at its most open. The hedgerows crept, every garden frothed and insects trawled the flowery, fumy air. Yet compared to the green of Littlefield, this landscape looked thin-skinned and easily exhausted.

  She searched the village, the house, even her old room but found nothing to make her feel better, so caught an earlier train than she had planned to, back to the city, noting the landscape’s shift from a kind of countryside to the beginnings of a town – warehouses among cottages, shabby brambles giving way to slippery green brick and then the first scattered tower blocks, and among them the occasional tree, always one alone, overshadowing a patch of grass and reaching frailly up, sometimes beyond the fourth or even the fifth floor.

  From Liverpool Street Station, she walked down to the river. On the embankment, she met herself with Jacob and understood that it was not over. She did not allow herself to think further, or to admit that she needed time to accommodate what had happened with Theo; and there was also the matter of money and her thesis and a place of her own. Everything she recognised made it clear that certain matters had now to be thought through and acted upon. Some things, love and work and the body, did not take care of themselves after all.

  Clara found him. His sister Sally had become worried when he left her house in Bath and did not get in touch. She had thought of asking Barbara, and then Juliet, but wasn’t sure what was going on and would have hated to cause any upset. She remembered Clara’s name from talk of an exhibition, and worked out that Clara and Juliet were related. So she wrote a note to Clara Clough, care of the Arts Council, who forwarded it to her studio.

  Clara had thought all morning about what to do. She did not know where Jacob was. That was all she needed to say. She phoned Sally: ‘I don’t know if I can help.’

  ‘Your sister hasn’t said anything?’

  ‘She’s only been back a fortnight. We haven’t really had a chance to talk. What about Barbara?’

  ‘He stayed with her when he first got back and then he came here after the funeral and then –’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘I couldn’t really say.’

  Clara persuaded Sally that there was nothing wrong in her phoning Barbara and asking where Jacob was. Sally did this and called back.

  ‘She says she found him a room, with an old friend of theirs, that architect Patrick Hyde.’

  ‘He knows Patrick Hyde?’

  ‘Oh yes, in fact Patrick and I once –’

  ‘Do you have a number?’

  ‘I didn’t like to ask, but I have an address. At least I hope it’s still his address. It must be more than ten years old. He invited me to a party to celebrate the birth of his third child, or was it his fourth …’

  ‘So you’ll go and see your brother?’

  ‘Me? I don’t know if that’s what he wants.’

  ‘May I have the address?’

  ‘You won’t give it to your sister will you? It’s just that Barbara might get a bit upset if she knew I’d passed it on.’

  ‘I’ll contact him myself.’ A note, she was thinking, I’ll give him the number at Fred’s house so he can reach her. She did not like to think of Jacob as up in the air.

  ‘Forty-eight Chacony Villas, SE1.’

  ‘It’s only a few streets away from my studio.’

  ‘Perhaps you could just pop round? I’m sure Patrick wouldn’t mind. They insist on being informal.’

  ‘I’ll make contact.’ She would write a note.

  ‘Thank you. I hope you don’t mind, I know we don’t really know each other but you know Jacob a bit, I think, the art world and all, so I’m sure you understand.’

  ‘Understand?’

  ‘Let me know how he is, will you? Give him my love.’

  Clara tried to write a note but could not strike the right tone. Written down, the information she had to give, Juliet’s phone number, looked so slight that the note declared itself an excuse, which it wasn’t. She really did not want to see him. The trouble was that if she sent a note, she wouldn’t see him and so couldn’t tell Sally how he was. If she went now, it would be done. She worked on the corner of a painting till she would only have an hour to spare before catching her train.

  At first she thought the man who opened the door was Jacob – mid-forties, making the most of his hair and asserting the poignancy of his failing good looks. He was wearing an apron and holding a glass of wine, and somewhere behind him, far away, she could see sunlight, glass and steel. A child flitted past, then another.

  ‘I’m looking f
or Jacob Dart.’

  Patrick Hyde smiled, as if remembering something pleasing.

  ‘Jacob? He’s upstairs, or at least I think he is. Come in, come in. Drink?’

  ‘No, thank you. Would you mind letting him know I’m here?’

  The architect grinned. ‘Oh I think you should just go on up, sorry what did you say your name was?’

  ‘Clara Clough.’

  He looked as if this might be even better than whatever he had envisaged. ‘It’s the top floor. Do please go on up. I’m sure he’ll be delighted.’

  Like a teenage son, Jacob had been given the attic room of this four-storey townhouse. He stood in doorways, said nothing at dinner, finished the whiskey and slept till midday. The three children of the household, aged eight, ten and twelve, were impressed and then unnerved.

  Clara made her way upstairs through the brutally converted house and on to the top landing, where Jacob was standing in a doorway. He kissed her with slow-motion formality on each cheek and then retreated, which she took as an invitation to go in. The room had been punched out of the roof and extended into a glass slope under which all the heat of the day and of the house seemed to have gathered. Jacob, in pyjama bottoms which ended above his delicate ankles and a girlish sweatshirt that did not quite cover his softening belly, did not look warm. Clara was finding it hard to breathe. She glanced around at the floor covered with paper and books, the jam-jar lid heaped with cigarette butts, the half-eaten bar of foreign chocolate, the wads of tissues and the milk bottle half full of yellow liquid.

  ‘Are you alright?’

  Jacob looked behind himself and back at her, and shrugged.

  ‘It’s just that your sister’s worried. I wouldn’t have bothered you only she wanted to know that you were alright. And Juliet’s back and doesn’t know where you are.’

  Clara wrote the address for Botolph Square on a piece of paper lying on a desk, but in the end did not give him the number.

  That night Clara dreamt that she walked into the architect’s house and Jacob reached out and touched her hair and the place went up in flames. She cried out and woke Stefan, whose question, ‘Let go of what?’, entered her dream as her own.

  Two postcards arrived from San Francisco. In spacious, connected writing, Theo told Juliet that if she were truly interested in bridges, she could come to see the Golden Gate, and that he missed her. The second postcard said that she could come and see fog if she preferred, and that he missed her. Juliet was so perturbed by how one feeling distracted her from another (Theo from Jacob, instantly) that she set herself a single task and saw it through. It took her two hours of flicking through all the books she might have left on her desk that last evening in Littlefield, to find the page on which Theo had written his number. She waited until he ought to have been waking up and called, but got an answering machine with a girl’s voice on it, a brisk lilt, ‘No one’s home.’ Without being prompted to leave a message, Juliet found that she could not.

  Those postcards had brought back his voice and now she needed to hear it. She called every hour until it was midnight in London and he picked up the phone.

  ‘Juliet? That’s so great!’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘It’s good to hear you. Did you get my cards?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you called. I gave you my number and you called.’

  ‘Yes, I did. I miss you.’

  ‘Sure. I miss you.’

  ‘So.’

  ‘So … how’s London? Have you seen Jacob?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  She didn’t want to ask about Theo’s girl; she didn’t want to know her name or if it was her voice on the machine.

  ‘I have to tell you something,’ Theo said. ‘I might be coming over. I’ve been offered a junior fellowship at University College.’

  ‘You might come here?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘That’s wonderful. When did you apply?’

  ‘Before I met you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I should have said something but I didn’t want to scare you.’

  They both passed this off as a joke.

  ‘We might get to see something of each other.’ He sounded as if it had only just occurred to him. Juliet was finding it hard to grasp. Everyone else seemed so far away whereas Theo actually was far away and didn’t, at that moment, seem so at all.

  Jacob turned up at Botolph Square the next Saturday afternoon. Caroline answered the door and they both tried to hide their surprise at seeing one another.

  ‘Go on through,’ she said, gesturing rather formally towards the back of the house.

  Jacob reached the brim of the garden, six steps up from the kitchen, and hesitated unseen in the steep shadow of the house. Juliet was standing in the long grass with her hands over her eyes, counting. She had her back to him. Bella, hiding behind a bush, signalled to Fred who had crept up behind Juliet with a garden hose in his hand. Sun toppled down through the leaves of a neighbour’s chestnut tree. Fred grinned and put a finger to his lips, Bella clasped her hands and stretched up on tiptoe as water arced from the hose. Drenched and squealing, Juliet ran at Fred and fought him for the hose till they both fell to the ground in a growing pool. Bella hurried to throw herself on top of them, but stopped short and yelled: ‘A stranger!’ She stood pointing at Jacob like a sergeant choosing a volunteer, and he shrank down onto the step so that the only way Juliet could greet him was to put out a hand and pull him to his feet.

  She took him through to the living room and shut the door behind them. She did nothing about her wet clothes and dripping hair, and did not resist when he pulled off his shirt and used it to dry her face. She leant against his chest but when his hand rose from her waist to her ribs and onto her breast, she drew back.

  He whispered, ‘We lived together.’

  ‘Like babes in the wood.’

  He held her head against his chest and she was startled by how fast his heart was beating and then annoyed to think that he had positioned her to make sure she would hear it.

  ‘We had a nice time,’ she added. Nice. She stepped back, and saw that his shirt had three buttons missing and one sleeve rolled up, and felt irritated.

  He was running a finger up and down and round her arm, and his touch made her skin panic.

  ‘Please,’ she said, moving away. ‘You got on a plane and went back to England, leaving me alone in the forest.’

  ‘I telephoned.’

  ‘Days and days later, and even then you didn’t tell me where you were staying.’

  ‘With Barbara and then with Sally. You had only to ask.’

  ‘But why not tell me?’

  ‘My mother died. I was finding it hard.’

  ‘My brother died but I didn’t go off to stay with some ex.’

  ‘You went to America. I’m sorry I disappeared, I realise that’s what it must have seemed like, but it wasn’t about you. My mother …’ She had not remembered that his voice could sound so weedy and fake.

  If she felt sorry for him, she would have to feel bad about Theo. ‘I offered to come back with you.’

  ‘You couldn’t, you had to teach. What difference would it have made if I’d flown back just to leave again?’

  Juliet was furious that he couldn’t tell. ‘It would have changed everything,’ she said.

  He sat them both down. ‘We want a real life together. That’s what we said. This first year hasn’t given us much of a chance but now, we can choose. We can make a home and do our work. It’s all that’s real – love and work and a place to be.’

  ‘And overdrafts and illness and unfinished PhDs …’

  ‘We can manage all that. What we need to do first is find a place to live.’

  ‘I thought I might stay here a bit.’

  ‘I’ve started looking. There are some delectable streets north of here; a bit rough but up and coming …’

  ‘I don’t have any money.’

  ‘I do. My mother l
eft me a bit and I ought to get something out of Barbara after all I put into our place.’

  ‘I don’t know, the idea of it seems a bit strange.’

  ‘Strange?’

  Juliet still could not imagine them living together anywhere other than Littlefield. ‘I mean unreal.’

  ‘My feelings about you are real.’

  ‘Yes, but your feelings about yourself are more real.’

  ‘You are real. I believe in you.’

  There it was, the problem: ‘But I don’t believe in you, Jacob.’

  ‘That’s alright, I don’t believe in myself either.’ His voice was swollen with feeling. He lifted her wrist to his mouth and she felt nothing.

  ‘What are we doing, love?’ he said. ‘We mustn’t waste us.’

  ‘I’m jetlagged, I’ve got a chapter to write by the end of the month, and I’ve got to see my doctor.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please let me come. I look after you, remember? That’s what I do.’

  Jacob was still courting her, but she resisted. She knew that once he had had his effect he would step aside so as to observe it.

  ‘I’m not sure you ever felt very much,’ he said in a more familiar voice.

  ‘Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off,’ she screamed, not caring how childish it sounded because at least then he stopped talking and would soon be gone.

  Carlo thought that Juliet was looking wonderful but could see that the pain was back. One day, when she was alone in the house, he phoned.

  ‘What’s happening with your innards?’

  ‘They’re going to be sorted out.’

  ‘Which hospital?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’ll go and see your doctor then, chase it up?’

  ‘I said I would, didn’t I? Only he’s not my doctor any more, now that I don’t live in Khyber Road.’