An Irresponsible Age

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  ‘Sign up with another practice.’

  ‘But I don’t know where I’m going to live.’

  ‘Then go back to the Khyber Road doctor and don’t let on.’

  ‘Can I do that?’

  ‘You’re not supposed to but the point is you ought to see someone.’

  Juliet wasn’t sure. She felt herself again, and part of herself was this pain.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The next day, Juliet was sick. There was pain, although it was not the time when it usually came, and it was different, a stabbing in her right side. She vomited, and then returned to bed feeling empty and hungry. At lunchtime she wanted an omelette and went down to the kitchen but the melting butter and broken eggs made her retch so she took a piece of bread and went back upstairs. In the afternoon, Fred came up with some news. Their parents had sold the Clock House.

  He sat on the end of Juliet’s bed in a huddle, and rocked back and forth.

  ‘They’re going to live in Salisbury. Carlo says it’s fine, a bit basic and remote but fine. Are you alright?’

  ‘Jet lag.’

  ‘Still?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Juliet did not think further about her parents but she fretted about the house. Objects she had scuffed and stained and left behind now appeared beloved and endangered. What would happen to the walnut bureau, the chaise longue, the Chinese dragon mirror, the brass kitchen clock? Her sickness stayed with her as a hollow queasiness, and although she chewed dry bread and oat cakes, and drank mint tea, it would not go away.

  The sickness and pain came and went, and her stomach was bloated. She was tired in such a profound way that she stood apart from herself and watched what she was going through with only the slightest interest.

  She continued to work and managed to establish a kind of routine as she picked up the threads of her research. The images she had been working on spoke to her differently now: nothing within a frame could be empty, not even an empty frame was empty, and there was always a frame. She tried to explain this to Ritsu over lunch one day, and went home wanting to write her seventy thousand words again.

  Another postcard arrived from Theo: ‘Will be seeing you in September, take care, T.’ Juliet felt only vaguely excited. September was months away.

  Barbara Dart was calm. She knew that Jacob was at Patrick Hyde’s house and that Juliet was at her brother’s. It could not be said that they had split up, but only because Jacob would not have made clear an ending, and the girl would be too unsettled to make anything clear herself. He would hide from Juliet and then rush towards her, and would always be too little or too much. It would not occur to him that a girl like that would go on making her life, and of course she would.

  Barbara had asked Clara to sit on a panel which discussed arts promotion. She had said almost nothing during the meeting but the others were pleased to have an actual artist there, and one at such a promising stage of her career. Afterwards, Barbara suggested a cup of tea in her office.

  ‘How is your sister?’

  She sat behind her desk with Clara opposite, as if this were an interview.

  ‘It’s hard to say.’ The sun was full in Clara’s face, and she raised a hand to shade her eyes.

  Barbara swung round in her chair and lowered a blind. ‘She strikes me as the type who gets over things.’

  Clara was startled. ‘She’s quite frail at the moment.’

  ‘Really?’

  A tray of tea arrived, but Barbara made no move to serve it.

  ‘Yes, and we’re all a bit worried.’

  ‘I’m sure she’ll be fine. Jacob proves surprisingly easy to live without …’

  ‘She isn’t lovesick; this is real.’

  ‘No it’s not, she’ll see that soon.’

  ‘I realise you must dislike my sister but she’s not well and I think –’

  ‘Oh no,’ Barbara insisted, ‘this isn’t personal. I rather admire her, actually. You have to remember that I know Jacob better than anyone. It wasn’t her fault. She’s just the one who said yes.’

  Clara closed her eyes. She wanted a moment to make sense of this, only Barbara had the conversation in her grip: ‘Never mind all that. I’m so sorry to hear that she’s unwell, what on earth’s the matter …’

  The emptying of the Clock House was to take place immediately. In this settled weather, Doctor Clough arranged for the contents of the cellars, attics and barn to be turned out into the garden where his children could choose what they wanted. He had an inventory drawn up and furnished each of them with a copy when they arrived together one Saturday morning. There was a second list of the few items that the doctor wanted to take to the cottage near Salisbury. Francesca Clough was as indifferent to her grandmother’s cherrywood cabinet and fur coats as she was to the table-tennis table. She had decided to take only what she could fit in her car.

  The journey made Juliet nauseous and when she saw all their junk and treasures laid out on the yellow lawn, she blinked and retched. She had no home of her own, nowhere to put the cherrywood cabinet or to hang the fur coats, and no need for pearl-handled opera-glasses, mildewed trunks and a hundred brittle paperbacks, but she wanted to save them all. Things that had given the Clough home a sense of substance and achievement looked shabby and useless in such daylight – split cardboard boxes of school exercise books, plastic bags leaking mouldy toys and clothes, records beginning to warp in the heat, a chair with no back and a desk with three legs. The doctor had arranged five bicycles in order from Fred’s tricycle to Tobias’s racer, and a series of wellington boots, red child size one to green adult eleven. Inside the house, the pictures and mirrors had been taken down so that the walls were reduced to flat surfaces and hurt the eyes of those who glanced towards a place where for years there had been something into which they could travel.

  At first, no one ticked anything on their list. Then Clara sat down in her Welsh grandmother’s rocking chair. ‘Didn’t this used to be in Tobias’s room?’ she asked and stood up again. Juliet sat down.

  ‘If you want it, do say,’ said Clara.

  Juliet jumped up. ‘Not if you want it.’

  ‘Please, no, you have it. Unless Fred? Carlo?’

  In the end, Juliet ticked the chair on her list.

  The brothers had started a game of table-tennis but the table was more warped than ever so they gave up and hauled it off to the bottom of the garden, where they decided to make a heap of things for a fire.

  By the end of the afternoon, each child had acquired some furniture, one or two paintings, some glassware, crockery, linen and a few useless but significant objects, some of which were of real value. They ate supper with their parents and walked across the garden to start the fire. It was a mucky, unreliable enterprise as the things on it were either too dense or damp to burn, or so synthetic or aerated that they went up instantly in noisy white flame, giving nothing else time to catch. Carlo retrieved the last of the winter’s wood and coal, and soon the fire was a clean blaze, which inspired them to find more to feed it.

  Clara ran back to fetch a box she had put in the car and began to throw on her early sketchbooks.

  ‘What are you doing?’ screeched Fred. ‘That’s your juvenilia!’

  ‘If I keep them then one day someone might see them,’ she explained. ‘I’d hate that.’

  ‘You have a point,’ said Juliet. ‘I’m going to throw in my diaries.’

  ‘What about those books that have gone green?’ Carlo encouraged.

  ‘You’re right. The pages will crumble if I ever try to open them again. And you?’

  Carlo fetched a sheaf of photographs, ‘Do you want anyone to see what you looked like in the Eighties?’ and they danced for the mischievous joy of watching themselves bubble and disappear.

  Carlo stopped when he realised that he was holding a picture of Tobias, aged fifteen, sitting on his first rebuilt motorbike.

  ‘I should give this to Mary, for Bella.’

  ‘No,’ sa
id Clara. ‘Let’s keep him.’

  Fred was avid, ‘He’s ours!’ He snatched the photo and threw it in.

  When the others went inside to find more wine, Clara got something else from her car. It was a canvas she had taken down from the attic of her house that morning. She stuffed it quickly into the fire, pushing at it with a stick so as to make sure that it did not unfold before it had turned completely black.

  Clara tried to persuade them all to stay, but when Carlo said that he felt like driving back to London, the others were quick to persuade him to do so. They wanted to leave Allnorthover behind in flames and darkness.

  It was two in the morning when they arrived at Botolph Square and Mary was in the kitchen, making tea.

  ‘You look all dressed up,’ said Juliet.

  ‘I’ve been out to see a band. Caroline looked after Bella.’

  ‘How was it?’

  ‘Great.’ She had gone to see Smokey Vanilla and the Pirouettes, and had talked to them afterwards. They were to try something out the next weekend.

  ‘Well we’ve burnt half the furniture and plundered the heirlooms,’ said Fred. ‘Who wants cheese on toast?’

  Juliet grinned. ‘Lord knows what we’re going to do with all the stuff we said we wanted.’

  ‘You just felt sorry for everything,’ said Fred.

  Mary looked agitated. ‘What about Tobias’s tools?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ said Juliet. ‘There was so much stuff. I’m sure Dad will have set them aside.’ She made a note to phone her father in the morning.

  ‘There should be something for Bella,’ Mary said.

  ‘Of course!’ said Fred.

  ‘We thought of that,’ said Juliet. ‘It was meant to be a surprise, but you know our Welsh grandmother’s rocking chair that used to be in his room?’

  Mary smiled. ‘I used to feed Bella in that.’

  ‘It’s yours, hers, whatever. And there’s the patchwork quilt, Tobias had it the longest I think, although Carlo nabbed it for a while, it’s American, really old, you can have that too, oh and the opera-glasses …’

  ‘Opera-glasses?’

  ‘For Bella. I’m sure she’ll go when she grows up, she’s just the type.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Mary, ‘for thinking of us.’

  ‘And what’s more,’ said Fred, ‘we thought that before this house fills up with all that junk we ought to have a party because once the dining table arrives, we’ll have to give dinners instead.’

  ‘We used to give dinners without a dining room,’ said Juliet.

  ‘Did we? I don’t remember.’

  ‘And it’s your birthday next Saturday, Fred. You’ve reached a quarter of a century and we’ve lost our home. It’s the end of childhood. We can celebrate it all.’

  ‘Don’t you mind?’ Mary asked.

  Fred shook his head. ‘After Tobias, losing the house isn’t so bad.’ It was not a convincing equation, but it was one that, with variations, had become of use to them all.

  Barbara was right. Things between Juliet and Jacob were not yet clear. He turned up again, as he used to at Khyber Road, and asked her humbly if they might go for a walk. It was a fine evening; Jacob had chosen it especially.

  They made their way to the Heath and up the hill, past the last of the families kicking footballs in the dusk, the last sated runners and dog walkers, until they were accompanied only by lovers, mostly couples but also those who were hopeful, prospective or off-duty.

  ‘It’s odd that we’re still living in other people’s houses,’ Juliet said, trying not to show that she was out of breath.

  ‘And now it’s with other people.’ Jacob took her hand and she did not object.

  ‘Could we sit?’

  He led her into the long grass.

  ‘Not there,’ she said, ‘on a bench.’

  A giggle, the chink of a glass, the strike of a match, the edge of a moan.

  ‘Come and lie down with me,’ Jacob said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Anywhere. I miss you.’

  ‘I’m not well.’

  ‘Then let me look after you.’

  ‘That’s not what I need.’

  ‘Then come and lie down.’

  His mouth was on her neck and she felt an echo of the explosion there had been when he first kissed her, but that was it. She did not trust his desire for her and because of her sickness, did not have the strength to be interested in what might lie beyond it.

  ‘We’ll never fill this house,’ Fred had said when they made a list of people to invite to the party. ‘Everyone will have to be told to bring someone we don’t know.’ So that was what they instructed their friends to do, and also why the next Saturday night, they found themselves surrounded by strangers. Some mistook Fred, in his suit, for a waiter, which he didn’t mind as he liked to be thought of as a man who employed waiters.

  ‘This is my house,’ he said happily to a man leaning against the banisters. The man looked nervous and bent down to pick up a cigarette butt that he had just trodden into the floor.

  Caroline was answering the door and taking coats. Clara was out in the garden shouting and making people laugh: ‘So I burned them all! My great works!’ Carlo introduced people he didn’t know to one another. A severe architect lit the cigarette of a chubby banker, a defiant academic debated with a fractious doctor, and Fred listened, amazed by how the people he knew, or at least the people they knew, were becoming what they were.

  Mary passed through each crowded room, drawing on the life and noise around her. She had invited several people from the bookshop (two turned up) and also the boys from the band, who arrived with their instruments.

  ‘Maybe we’ll have a session later,’ the saxophonist suggested.

  Mary shook her head. ‘I’m just going to check on my daughter. Do go through and help yourselves to a drink.’ She hurried upstairs with no intention of coming back down.

  In the bathroom on the top floor, she found Juliet kneeling by the lavatory.

  ‘I’m not drunk,’ she said, wiping her mouth.

  Mary looked at her green-ringed eyes, her watery face. ‘You’ve been feeling sick a lot haven’t you?’ She busied herself fetching a glass of water. ‘Are you at all faint?’

  ‘It’s not what you think. I can’t be pregnant. I feel too ill.’

  Mary helped Juliet onto her feet and gave her the glass of water. They sat side by side on the edge of the bath.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Mary ventured.

  Juliet shook her head. ‘Not absolutely.’

  ‘What will you do if you are?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s ridiculously unlikely.’ She saw something in Mary’s usually guarded face that interested her. ‘What made you have Bella? She wasn’t an accident, was she?’

  ‘No.’ Mary decided to tell the truth. ‘The year before, I lost one.’

  ‘Christ, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’

  ‘It wasn’t his.’

  ‘You had an affair?’

  Mary shook her head. ‘That sounds too grown-up. I just bumped into someone I hadn’t seen for a long time.’

  ‘Daniel Mort?’ He was the only other man Juliet could imagine her with, the boyfriend before Tobias, an art-student friend of Clara’s.

  ‘Yes. When I went back to Allnorthover to help my mother clear out the shop, I went into Camptown and there he was.’

  ‘Did he know about the baby?’

  ‘No, but I told Tobias.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  Mary retreated. ‘I can’t remember, but I wish I hadn’t.’

  ‘Been unfaithful?’

  ‘No, I wish I hadn’t told him. I thought it was the honourable thing to do but it hurt him so much, and I offered to have an abortion, and then the decision was made for me.’

  ‘That must have been a relief.’

  ‘No, because then I couldn’t show Tobias that I’d chosen him.’

  ‘I always thought you two were quite simply h
appy, and that was why you decided to have a child.’

  ‘It was all I could think of.’ Mary did not like other people’s curiosity any more than did Juliet. ‘I don’t know what’s going on with Jacob,’ she said, reaching out to touch Juliet’s shoulder and then thinking better of it. ‘But what with his wife, it’s going to be complicated.’

  Juliet felt dizzy and put her head in her hands. ‘It certainly is,’ she muttered, hoping that by the time she sat up again, Mary would have disappeared and that they would never have had this conversation.

  One of the guests recognised Smokey Vanilla and the Pirouettes, and they were persuaded to play. Fred was so excited – A live band! In his house! – that he bounced round shouting for Mary, who came to meet him wondering what this evening would bring next.

  ‘The boys want you downstairs,’ panted Fred, tugging at her sleeve.

  ‘The boys?’

  ‘The Pirouettes!’

  This was where Mary lived, not where she sang, and she hadn’t sung for ages, at least not this year. Fred jumped up and down and clapped his hands – ‘Ladies and Gentleman, Smokey Vanilla has been reunited with the Pirouettes!’ Most had no idea what he was talking about but fell in with his enthusiasm, and stomped and cheered as Mary edged into view.

  She could not imagine doing what she was about to do, but also knew that this was what she had been hoping for – not here like this and not yet, but here it was. A saxophone and an acoustic guitar; no mike, reverb, monitor, stage or lights, but something of a song she knew well. Mary followed one phrase and then another, took a breath, hesitated, and caught the refrain:

  Might as well,

  where have you been,

  haunting me, too easily …

  She sang to her shoes and then to the wall, and knew that people could barely hear her. The music took over once more, and she turned and looked up into Fred’s face and saw how badly he wanted it to go well.

  The one who knew, here again,

  who knew me, here we, here again …

  She had dropped out of key. The guitarist frowned and moved to meet her, which surprised the saxophonist who had to bend a note a long way to catch up. Mary could not hear herself, not even in her head, and was cut off from her voice by walls of panic.