I think they’ve seen a bit more of Eric and Isobel since they moved. I wonder if Sally’s seen Bel since Anton’s party… whether she knows how she reacted to the news and what she’s planning to do about it, if anything. I wonder, if she knew, whether Sally would tell me what goes on in the Blake/Jordan household. Would she tell me what impact the news had had on Isobel?
The afternoon things began to unfold, Isobel had yelled at Vincent.
We were lying by the pool, the three of us plus Iris, who was sitting in an inflatable boat, filled with a few inches of water and a handful of origami penguins. Harvey had made them earlier in the day and given them to Iris. Funny kid.
‘They’ll just get soggy if she puts them in water,’ Maggie had said.
‘They’re penguins,’ he’d replied, and sloped off, slightly embarrassed by the gesture.
Vincent was on the terrace near the house manoeuvring a remote control car that he’d found in a cupboard earlier in the day. ‘I remember Chris doing the same thing,’ Paddy said, watching him driving the toy, which had belonged to his son. ‘They grow up so quickly.’
He looked from Vincent to Iris, splashing happily, and I followed his gaze, letting mine rest on my daughter, so perfect in her tiny swimming costume, picking up a cup and pouring water over her paper penguins, focused on the task and apparently oblivious to the drone of Vincent’s car and the occasional cracking sound as he ran it into a flowerpot. It seemed almost impossible that she would one day even be Vincent’s age, let alone grow up and leave home. I watched her, wanting to freeze the moment, keep her like that as long as possible. But it was broken by Isobel, leaning out of her bedroom window and yelling at her son.
‘Vincent, will you stop that now! Switch that car off now.’
She sounded unreasonably furious. Vincent started and shrank, picking up the car and switching it off without argument.
‘It’s probably the menopause,’ Paddy said, and I laughed, but Maggie shot me a look.
Vincent ambled over, dejected.
Paddy sat up. ‘Fancy a diving competition, Vince?’
The laziness had been driven out of the afternoon by whatever was eating Isobel. I wondered what it was as I stood up and caught sight of her turning away from the window and disappearing into the upstairs room. She seemed to have been on edge for the past couple of days. She kept making snarky remarks towards Maggie, making comments about breastfeeding because Maggie wasn’t, asking her if she planned to go back to work and implying that if she did she might somehow be neglecting her child. What did it matter to Isobel if Maggie went back to work or not?
And now, maybe she won’t be able to. It’s unlikely, in the immediate future anyway. There’s too much else to think about: how we learn to communicate with our child, what we are going to do to try to combat her lack of hearing, who could look after her if Maggie does want to tour again.
I wanted to tell Isobel to fuck off and leave my wife alone. But of course I didn’t. I couldn’t. Instead, when we went upstairs after dinner and Maggie began to undress, with the lights out so as not to disturb Iris who was sleeping, I stood behind her and told her to wait. ‘Let me do it,’ I whispered in the dark as she began unzipping her dress.
Maggie didn’t say anything. She held up her arms as I lifted the dress over her head and then stepped closer as I undid her bra.
‘I love you, Maggie,’ I said quietly. ‘Don’t let Isobel get to you.’
Then I knelt down and removed the rest of her underwear, kissing her until she stopped me and we moved on to the bed.
‘I love you too, Ben,’ she said, afterwards. ‘We’re OK, aren’t we?’
‘We’re more than OK,’ I said.
Isobel, Wednesday morning
‘Goodbye, then.’ Eric is still pissed off with me.
We’ve already had the discussion we’ve been having for the past few days.
I am sure, because I know Eric, that he must be feeling guilty too, but it seems to manifest itself as antagonism towards me.
‘What are you going to do?’ he asks.
‘What can I do?’ I ask back.
‘Contact Ben,’ he says.
‘I’ve texted and he hasn’t replied.’
‘Then call him.’
I need to discuss what to say with someone first. I need Eric to help me. He is refusing.
‘I’m having lunch with Sally today,’ I tell Eric as he heads for the door and the early train to work. ‘I spoke to her last night, after you’d gone to bed.’
‘Well, that’s really proactive,’ he says, and leaves.
‘At least someone’s willing to sit down and talk about it,’ I shout after him.
I switch on the radio to fill the silence. There’s a report on the news about ostrich farmers going bust during the recession.
‘I didn’t even know there were ostrich farms in England.’ Harvey joins me in the kitchen, opening the fridge as soon as he’s through the door, in desperate pursuit of food. ‘Are there any bagels?’ he asks.
‘Not in the fridge,’ I say.
‘Ham?’ He’s still looking.
‘On the middle shelf?’
‘Cheese?’
‘You’re hungry this morning!’
Harvey grunts, pulls ham and cheese from the fridge and heads towards the bread bin. ‘Do you want something, Mum?’
‘No, thanks, love.’ I don’t have the stomach for a huge breakfast at the best of times. I pour myself a coffee, the dregs left in the cafetiere Eric had made for himself, and sit at the table, keeping out of Harvey’s way while he busies himself with his breakfast. The radio is a drone in the background, but suddenly the words jump out at me.
‘… growing concern over the number of reported cases,’ the radio newsreader is saying. ‘Ministers are urging parents whose children have not been vaccinated to attend the additional clinics that are being set up around the city.’
‘Oh, yeah, Joe’s going today,’ Harvey says.
‘Where?’
‘To have his jabs.’ I hadn’t been aware he was listening. ‘I told them we had ours in France.’
‘Are any of your other friends having them?’ I ask, wondering if Harvey is aware of the controversy over the MMR vaccine. It was only when Gabs got ill that we’d rushed the boys off to the local French GP and asked if they could be immunised, hoping they’d spent so much time outside that they’d not already caught it from Gabby.
Harvey takes very little notice of what goes on in the world, but he has half an ear to the radio now.
‘A GP at the centre of the recent epidemic said some people had been invited to get their children vaccinated with the MMR jab fifteen times,’ says the radio presenter. ‘Joining me now to discuss this is Dr Ailsa Millington…’
‘Some,’ Harvey says in reply to my question. ‘Alfie might be, I think.’
He tucks into his bagel.
‘Immunisation levels among ten-to-eighteen-year-olds have fallen to such low levels in the area that it is only a matter of time before there is a widespread outbreak,’ Dr Millington is saying. ‘Parents who have still not had their children vaccinated are being grossly irresponsible.’
‘That’s what Sean’s mum said about you.’ Harvey looks up.
‘When did she say that?’ I feel piqued to think people are talking about me behind my back, although I suppose I knew it was likely.
‘When I went round last week,’ Harvey says, his nonchalance disguising a certain gleeful curl around the corners of his mouth. Clearly hearing another parent bad-mouthing your own mother gives a boy a certain sense of satisfaction.
‘What did she say exactly?’ I don’t really want to know but I can’t help myself.
‘She said you were grossly irresponsible.’ Harvey grins, his mouth loaded with ham and cheese, and I look away. ‘Declan brought a note back from school about measles and I told her Gabs had it while we were on holiday and she went off on this rant.’
Declan is Sean’s you
nger brother.
‘And what did you say?’
‘I asked what school Declan was going to next year.’
‘I mean what did you say when she said I was grossly irresponsible?’
‘Nothing.’ Harvey takes another bite of his bagel.
‘The region has a large vulnerable age group,’ the doctor on the radio is saying. ‘It’s only a matter of time before we start seeing deaths.’
‘She’s grossly irresponsible for not having a net around her trampoline,’ I counter Sean’s mum’s accusation, even though she’s not here to hear me, even though she has every right to say what she said – just not to my son.
‘Bloody hell, Mum. That was years ago,’ Harvey says. Clearly he remembers the incident too. He must have been seven or eight when he went to play with Sean after school and fell off their trampoline on to the decking. He hurt his arm. I thought he’d broken it, he made so much fuss. I rushed him up to Casualty and they took a look but said it was just badly bruised. But I still had a go at his friend’s mum for not watching them while they bounced, even though I knew you couldn’t watch kids all the time. I berated her, too, for not having a net round the trampoline.
To be honest I’ve never really liked this particular mother, but I was forced to keep up a semblance of friendship for the sake of Harvey’s friendship with Sean. However, now they’re both in their second year at secondary school and surrounded by other friends, I feel less compelled to accept the invitations to the ‘impromptu drinks’ which still arrive by text every now and then.
Sorry, we’re not around that evening, I will lie in reply, exercising my right not to have to be friends with her, now that the boys are no longer so thick.
She is, no doubt, glad to be shot of me too.
‘What if it had been worse?’ I’d said to her at the time of the trampoline incident.
‘But it wasn’t,’ she’d replied. ‘You’re overreacting.’
In hindsight, I was, but at the time I really thought Harvey had seriously injured himself. Not everyone had trampolines in their back gardens then. Google Earth wouldn’t have revealed half as many black holes in between terraced houses as it does now. Sean’s house was one of the first places that the boys got invited to bounce at, and, when Harvey fell, I couldn’t help feeling that his mother was to blame.
And now it’s her to turn to call me grossly irresponsible.
Ben, Wednesday morning
‘The current measles epidemic is slowing down, but too few young people are protected against the disease,’ a newsreader says as I switch on the radio.
It’s early. Maggie and Iris are still asleep. I am in the kitchen making breakfast. The radio’s just background noise in the quiet of the morning. My thoughts are elsewhere, but it grabs them.
‘Unless there is a significant take-up in the vaccination rate there will be more large outbreaks of the disease,’ the newsreader continues. ‘Six new cases were reported yesterday, and public health officials are predicting more.’
I listen attentively as I wait for my toast to pop.
‘Parents whose children have not been vaccinated are urged to attend the additional clinics that have been set up around the city.’
A discussion follows. A doctor is explaining how some parents have been invited to attend vaccination clinics up to fifteen times but have still not done so.
‘Does that surprise you?’ the interviewer asks, which is a variation of the question Hedda asked me when I met her on Monday.
‘Were you surprised that Ms Blake had not had her children vaccinated?’
‘I was surprised when she told us Gabriella had measles,’ I told her. ‘I didn’t think anyone got it any more. And Maggie was worried, naturally. We both were.’
Actually at the time, if anything, I was more struck by how odd it was, to have measles. I’d thought it had more or less disappeared.
‘And yes, it did surprise me,’ I said to Hedda. ‘Isobel was always so principled. It was the sort of thing I can almost hear her sounding off about.’
‘Sounding off?’ Hedda asked.
‘Going on about, making a point,’ I explained. ‘I mean, it wasn’t an issue then. But, if it had been, she would definitely have had a view.’
Everyone had strong opinions when we were at university. It was a place for idealists, radicals and people who wanted to change the world. Isobel was one of them. And I thought she would, too, because she was clever and energetic and she really thought that all it required was a bit of effort and organisation.
She wasn’t overambitious in her plans. She didn’t want to bring about world peace or end apartheid single-handed, although she did her bit. She just wanted to change things a little. ‘If my mother had lived twenty miles away she might have survived,’ I remember her telling me, and I thought it was the saddest thing. ‘She was denied the drugs that could have saved her because the health authority where we lived wouldn’t pay for them.’
At the time, Isobel was holding forth, to a room full of people all engaged in sitting around and changing the world with their chatter. She had their attention. ‘How is it right that, if you live twenty miles apart from someone with exactly the same kind of cancer, one of you gets a life-saving drug and the other doesn’t?’
I thought Bel was so beautiful when she was passionate about something – and she always was, when she was younger. Now the only thing she seems to get worked up about is whether the kids have had enough fruit to eat.
I know we’ve all grown up a bit, and our priorities have changed, but I never expected Isobel to shift so much.
‘And your wife?’ Hedda asked me. ‘She was angry that Ms Blake had not had her children vaccinated?’
‘Yes, she was.’ I nodded. ‘Angry because our baby was at risk of getting ill, especially as Maggie had never really wanted to go on holiday in the first place.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Is all of this relevant?’
‘It could be. I need as much background information as possible,’ Hedda explained. ‘If this case gets to court, it would be the first of its kind. We are testing the water.’
She looked up from her notebook and there was a shine to her eyes that wasn’t there before. I think it was zeal. Hedda wants this case, not because it might make a difference to Maggie and me, but because she wants to trailblaze.
‘There have been a couple of similar cases in the States,’ she told me, twisting her white-blonde hair around her finger, an unconscious gesture that seemed to help her concentrate, ‘where people have sued successfully for deliberate infection with HIV. This is different, harder to prove, but if we are to prove it I need to know as much as possible about the relationship between all the parties concerned.’
She’s well suited to being a trailblazer. I can imagine her on the television news, talking to reporters, briefing them on the steps of the courthouse before we go in to hear a judgement, if that’s how it works.
‘Maggie didn’t know the rest of the party as well as I did,’ I told her. ‘And she wasn’t really that keen to travel with the baby.’
‘Why was this?’
‘No reason, really; she was just happy to stay at home.’
‘But you decided to go anyway?’ Hedda asked.
‘Yes, I wanted to go. I felt I needed a holiday – teachers always do by the end of the summer term – and I wanted my friends to get to know Maggie, and Iris too.’
This was what had driven the decision for me. I’d wanted to show off my wife and my baby. I’d wanted to show them that I was one of them now, settled and happy. I’d wanted them all to get to know Maggie.
The unspoken worry had been Isobel.
I knew they were wary of each other. I’d never told Maggie how I used to feel about Bel but, although she never mentioned it, I think she was somehow aware. She was curious, when we first met, about why I’d never settled down. I think she suspected that there was someone, somewhere in my past, whom I had not quite let go
of, someone who had stopped me from moving on. And, when she’d met Bel, I think she’d known it was her.
Isobel, Wednesday lunchtime
‘Grazie mille.’ The waiter retreats after we’ve ordered a couple of glasses of wine.
We’re in an Italian restaurant on the seafront. It feels a bit too lavish today. When Sally suggested coming down and meeting me for lunch, I’d thought that we’d have a sandwich in a café, but Sally had insisted we come here. ‘My treat,’ she’d said.
She is more decadent than I am. She can afford to be. That’s not to say she isn’t generous. She is – always was. Even before Paddy started to make money and she had a baby and was not working, it never stopped either of them sharing what little they had.
‘I love that expression,’ Sally says. ‘Italian is such an effusive language. “Thanks a lot” is the nearest we get to grazie mille!’
‘Gabriella and her friends seem to say “thank you sooo much”, which is almost the same.’
Sally laughs. I set down the menu and put my reading glasses back in their case.
‘That’s a novel specs case,’ she remarks.
‘It’s one of Harvey’s creations.’ I smile, seeing the case, which is now familiar to me, through Sally’s eyes. It’s made of a juice carton, a Tetrapak – a Polish one that he bought from one of the increasing numbers of Polish supermarkets that have sprung up to keep up with the increasing numbers of Poles in Brighton. So it’s adorned with interesting graphics which I can’t interpret, and various red and green fruits. It must have been a mixed fruit juice before it was drunk and the carton folded and glued into a funky spectacle case.
Living With It Page 11