by Jane Green
Roll out the pastry and cut into 4 squares. For each parcel place 1 salmon in the middle of a square, season, spread ¼ of the cream cheese mixture over the top. Pull the corners of the parcel over the fish and seal at the top. Beat the egg with the milk and use this to brush the parcels. Cook for around 25 minutes, or until the pastry is golden.
Serve with the rest of the cream cheese and a green salad.
Chapter Eighteen
Honor places the phone back in its cradle and checks her watch. She left Callie at the hospital in order to come home and babysit the children. She knows she has just told Reece she would look after the kids, but how can she look after them when her daughter is in the hospital and all she can think about is whether Callie will be okay?
How can she be present for these children, explain why Mommy didn’t meet the school bus as she does every day after school, when her daughter is sleeping, knocked out by one of the heaviest narcotics available, and the doctors don’t know what is wrong with her?
She desperately wishes that it was possible for Lila to come tonight so that she could go back to the hospital. It is a waiting game, and she knows she cannot do anything more at the hospital, but today, the first day Callie is there, Honor needs to be with her. This, after all, is what mothers do.
She goes into the bathroom and stares at herself in the mirror. All of a sudden, she thinks, she looks old. Gray skin, deep hollow shadows under her eyes. Her entire face seems to have fallen overnight.
She turns on the tap, waits for the water to become icy cold, then splashes her face with it in an attempt to wake herself up, tighten her skin, make herself look better.
And when she has finished she looks at herself in the mirror again, and sighs, because she still looks like a woman twenty years her senior.
Honor had been a great beauty when she met Walter Tollemache, the life and soul of the party, a butterfly who flitted around the town of Bar Harbor, Maine, waiting to spread her wings and fly to somewhere, something, far bigger and better.
Until she met Walter. So impeccably behaved, so well-mannered, so solicitous and kind, he took care of her from the very first date in a way she had never been taken care of before.
Of course we all marry for different reasons, and Honor, who had lost her father at a young age, and had been raised by a devoted mother, had not had the unconditional love and adoration that every little girl needs from her father.
She came into her own in the sixties, went to parties and dances and social gatherings where men crowded around her, just as they would later do to her daughter Callie, and didn’t realize how long she had spent looking for someone to take care of her.
When Walter appeared, looking down his aquiline, elegant nose, introducing himself, then whisking her off to supper, taking her home to her door afterward and telling her that he would be taking care of her from now on, she turned into the little girl she had never been able to be, sinking into the arms of her daddy.
For a while, they were happy. As a wedding gift his parents gave them the carriage house on their estate, and Walter’s mother, Mrs. Tollemache, taught Honor how to entertain.
Honor didn’t particularly want to learn how to entertain, although she loved cooking, but Mrs. Tollemache told her she should not cook meals herself: that was what the staff were for. Her job was to be a gracious and perfect hostess, and Mrs. Tollemache took her under her wing, introduced her to all of Boston society, had her dressmaker sent up from the city to measure Honor for a full wardrobe of clothes she would need for the season, and treated her much like the daughter she had never had.
She taught her to wear bouclé suits and pearls, or large colorful clips in her ears. She brought Honor up to the main house every Friday for the hairdresser to set her hair in much the same way as Mrs. Tollemache’s.
Jewelry was bestowed upon Honor, the likes of which she had never imagined wearing: diamond and enamel earrings, large citrine bracelets, Jean Schlumberger rings.
Honor tried so hard to be the woman they all seemed to want her to be: a younger, prettier, carbon copy of Mrs. Tollemache.
For a few years, she managed it. She threw summer cocktail parties and dinner parties, planning menus like a pro—loving cooking herself, rather than, as her mother-in-law tried to insist, delegating to the staff. Her boeuf en croute was legendary. She sat on the boards of various museums and ballet organizations. She was a Tollemache, after all, and as her mother-in-law kept reminding her, being a Tollemache entailed great responsibility; noblesse oblige meant having to give back.
From time to time she would accompany Mrs. Tollemache on a tour to see how the disadvantaged lived, smiling and shaking gloved hands with those less fortunate, who seemed utterly shell-shocked at the arrival of these perfumed, bejeweled visitors, bewildered by these strangers who had just co-chaired a gala that had raised enough money to put their children through school.
For a while, it was fun. It was like stepping into one of the black and white movies that she had loved so much when she was growing up. She was Grace Kelly. And Walter? Well, Walter had to be Cary Grant.
Honor had always rather liked acting, had, as a child, hoped that she would grow up to be a movie star, and although this wasn’t quite the acting she had in mind, she loved the glamour and excitement of it all.
For a while.
Then Callie was born—Caroline Millicent—and that changed everything. Mrs. Tollemache expected Honor to do exactly what she had done: hand the baby over to the nurses and carry on as if nothing were different.
During Honor’s pregnancy, Mrs. Tollemache kept eyeing her growing bump with distaste.
“One mustn’t let one’s body go,” she would insist, horrified when Honor reached for another slice of cake. “It is a discipline, my dear, and one must keep in shape for the menfolk.”
But Honor, for the first time, ignored her. She stopped wearing the patent pumps and tiny bouclé suits, even though Mrs. Tollemache had suggested the dressmaker let them all out to accommodate the pregnancy. She replaced them with flowing kaftans that were just becoming fashionable—they were in Vogue, for heaven’s sake!—and started growing her hair out.
From a perfect sprayed set, Honor let her hair go long and blond, parted down the center in a glossy silk sheath, seeing no reason to change once Callie was born.
As for handing the baby over to a nurse, Honor couldn’t bear to be away from Callie for a minute. Callie was either cradled in a sling over her shoulder—it was so much easier to nurse her that way—or carried in Honor’s arms. As she grew older Callie followed her mother around, holding on to the hem of her floor-length skirt.
It was when Callie was around eight that the discontent started to fully set in. Walter had not been keen on this new, relaxed version of his wife. Women should be ladylike, he thought, dressed at all times, not floating around the house in diaphanous gowns with no makeup and bare feet.
Honor still dressed the part when she had to. No more sitting for hours under a hot dryer with rollers in her hair, but she scraped her hair back in a long ponytail, and trussed herself up in the obligatory suit when she had to be wheeled out as the younger Mrs. Tollemache.
She did indeed feel as if she were being wheeled out. Like an accessory. Which, she supposed, was exactly what she was. Walter loved her, of course. And what his parents loved was not her, but that she could be molded into a Tollemache, someone to carry the name forward through the generations with pride.
Until she refused to be molded anymore. Until she stopped being quite so willing to fit into the Tollemache role. Then Walter and Honor started to drift apart.
Walter was bewildered. What had happened to the woman he married? Particularly after Honor met Sunny, a woman from California who had ended up in Maine and had turned her house into an impromptu market. Various friends had set up stalls in each of the rooms and people would come to shop and stay for hours, sitting around the kitchen table, or lounging on the velvet floor cushions in the living ro
om, passing around beaded necklaces and glasses of wine, the scent of patchouli and the sounds of Neil Young filling the air.
When Honor first walked in, saw the posters of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones, heard the music, saw the people, she felt . . . assaulted. There was so much to take in. She was curious, repelled, excited.
She couldn’t keep away.
At first she would drop in on the pretext of buying a beaded necklace, or another flowing top, or some flat leather sandals from India, but soon she was just dropping by for a glass of wine. When the joints started being passed around the table, it would have been rude not to try them.
Walter knew little about her other world, her new friends. He was so stiff, so straitlaced and starchy, she knew he would have hated them, would have insisted she didn’t see them. So rather than have to actively disobey him, she just didn’t tell him.
Callie did, though. She told him all about Mommy’s other friends. But times were different then and Walter didn’t realize that it wasn’t just that Honor had friends of whom he’d disapprove, but that in finding these other people she was beginning to find herself.
One of Sunny’s friends started offering art classes during the school day, and after Callie had gone to school Honor would throw a smock into the back of her station wagon and head over there.
As a small child, Honor had had a talent for art, but it had never been fully formed. Now, she had the confidence and willingness to pursue it, and she had an eye for the nude form that her teacher said was unparalleled.
Hours would go by, Honor lost in a meditation, brush in one hand, palette in the other, capturing the exact formations of the light on a woman’s thigh, or the sweep of a shoulder and the curve of a chin.
It was, she slowly realized, the first time in years she had been truly happy. And she only knew this because of the contrast with how she felt every night when Walter walked through the door.
She would be in the kitchen, cooking—by now she was refusing to listen to Mrs. Tollemache at all, and did all of the cooking herself—with Callie perched on a stool, helping and chattering away. Sometimes they would put an eight track in the player and dance around the kitchen, giggling.
Until she heard the crunch of gravel that told her that Walter was home, and she would quickly usher Callie upstairs to brush her hair and put her socks and shoes back on.
It was as if a black cloud appeared. Nothing terrible. Nothing earth-shattering. Nothing that would cause a woman to leave, but a black cloud of depression that muted her, overshadowed the developing Honor, who was only able to reemerge the next morning when Walter leaned down, kissed her cheek and disappeared down the driveway again.
Art was her salvation. It kept her busy, kept her from dwelling on the fact that she knew, almost without a shadow of a doubt, that she had married the wrong man. She was not only a wife and mother, but she was married to a Tollemache. What woman would possibly leave a husband like Walter, and who, after all, would want her?
Steffi was a surprise. A huge one. Honor had told herself that as soon as Callie was old enough, perhaps even boarding at school—the girls in the family all went to Putney—she would leave. Then her period didn’t come. She didn’t take much notice, and a few months later—yes, honestly, it took her that long—she realized that she wasn’t just getting fat, she was pregnant. How could she possibly leave her husband now?
But just over two years was all she could manage. When Steffi was still practically a toddler, Honor knew she couldn’t carry on. She had reached the point where she couldn’t stand feeling every day that a little bit more of her was dying.
Mr. and Mrs. Tollemache sat at opposite ends of the formal mohair sofa in the drawing room and explained that it was perfectly all right to be unhappy in a marriage, but duty called and you just had to grit your teeth and get on with it. At least, that was what she thought they were saying. For much of the time she simply attempted to tune out.
Walter was devastated. That was the hardest part. He lost vast amounts of weight in what seemed like minutes, his suits all hanging off him, prompting people to whisper that he must be terribly ill.
He would come to pick up the girls—he had moved out of the carriage house and into the barn at the far end of the property, several acres away, in fact—and as soon as Honor opened the door, he would burst into tears.
Which was heartbreaking. Walter had never been a man who wore his emotions on his sleeve, and the fact that he was not able to contain himself made things so much harder.
Time and time again Honor would ask herself whether she was doing the right thing in leaving Walter, the Tollemache family, the lifestyle; but every time she thought of the elegantly paneled living room, the antique chinoiserie desks, the bronze busts and collections of enameled pillboxes on every surface, she felt herself suffocating.
She may not have known what she wanted, but she knew what she didn’t want.
The Tollemaches eventually accepted that she was not going to bend to their will, and she ended up with enough money to buy herself a house on the outskirts of town. An antique farmhouse that had small, cozy rooms, huge fireplaces and creaky floorboards. She loved it.
Callie had a beautiful sun-filled room at the rear, and Steffi, barely out of toddler stage, a tiny bedroom next to the master, which was only the master by dint of being one foot larger than Callie’s bedroom.
Friends came to visit every day. Fires roared in the grate, bottles of wine were always open, music was always playing. Walter, poor, stiff Walter, would arrive to pick up the girls, and he would stand awkwardly on the doorstep as people hustled and bustled about inside.
After a while his discomfort turned to hate, a tremendous source of sadness for Honor, who only ever wished for him the things she wished for herself: peace, happiness, joy, and perhaps love, for everyone deserves to be loved. She continued to feel guilty that she was never able to love him in the way he wanted, the way he deserved.
She always hoped they would be able to be friends, partly to assuage her guilt, and mostly for the girls, but as time progressed he seemed to find it harder—so often he could not even meet her eye—and before long he started sending emissaries to get the girls, so he wouldn’t even have to see her.
And then, when she least expected it, and when she was truly happy, she met George, who was indeed the love of her life. He was everything she had hoped she might find, and so very much more.
He started talking to her in a bookstore, commented on a book she had chosen, and they ended up going for coffee, sitting and chatting for hours. Honor felt immediately as if she had known him forever. He was funny, and clever, and humble, and kind. And above all he was entirely accepting. He loved Honor for who she was, not for who she could be, or for who he wanted her to be.
His death was brutal. Eight years ago and still it seems like yesterday; and yet she refuses to not live. George would have wanted anything but that. Some of the time she loves being on her own—cooking for herself, especially food that George never liked, pasta and lamb; or as is so often the case, not cooking: eating whatever concoction she can throw together from what she finds in the fridge, food that others would never admit was palatable.
And bed is glorious. Her large, soft bed piled high with pillows; magazines, books, art journals, sketchbooks all stacked up on what used to be George’s bedside table, spilling onto the bedcovers. And no one to complain, no one to click his tongue on the roof of his mouth when he opened the bedroom door and found, yet again, that “fourteen bombs have exploded while we were out.” Although, to be fair, he always said it with a smile in his eyes.
She does not sleep much these days, or not, at least, at night. Not in the way she used to. She can go to bed at midnight and still be wide awake and raring to go at four. She has always loved peaceful mornings, and often gets up, makes herself some tea and reads on the sun porch, lying on the wicker chaise longue with a blanket flung over her, where she always manages to doze off. Other times
, she crawls back into bed at five, drifting off to sleep until mid-morning, rarely feeling truly well-rested.
It is coupledom she misses. Sharing. Companionship. Someone with whom to dissect an evening, someone to share an interesting article with, someone to . . . talk to. She misses the ease of walking into a party as half of a whole, of being introduced to other couples and being able to refer to “my husband.”
She misses fitting in.
Not that it matters much in her circle of friends, in the town in which she has lived for over forty years; but at those times when she ventures out of her comfort zone she finds herself wishing for a companion.
Those times she circles a play she wants to see, an opera she’d love to go to, a talk she’d find interesting. She’ll call around the other unattached or widowed friends she has, and sometimes, even if they are all busy, she will still go, taking just her bag and her smile for company.
She always talks to people, but people aren’t always so willing to talk to her, and she misses the car ride home, talking about why the play was so disturbing, or how much better this production was than last year’s.
But she has been lucky. She has had three great loves, far more than most people ever get. George, Callie and Steffi.
Losing George was numbing. Losing Callie . . . it is unthinkable. And Honor has been through this before, five years ago. She is still not entirely sure how she got through it.
You do not lose your children first. It should not, and cannot happen.
“Not to me,” Honor whispers, looking at herself in the mirror before she goes out to start making the children’s dinner. “Not again.”
Lamb Shanks with Figs and Honey
Ingredients
4 tablespoons olive oil
10 lamb shanks
3-4 stalks thyme
2 pounds onions
2 garlic cloves
2 tablespoons rosemary needles
15 ounces canned pumpkin puree