by Julie Cohen
There was a challenge in Jo’s voice, as if she were anticipating an argument from her daughter. It was the first time Honor had heard her stating a demand to one of her children, rather than pleading a request.
She felt herself nodding involuntarily.
She would never have suspected that Jo had a temper. In the twenty years she had known her, she had never once raised her voice. She had been a beautiful blank: kind, polite, cheerful, letting people like Honor walk all over her. Even at Stephen’s funeral, she had been quiet, absorbed in Lydia’s welfare rather than her own grief. She had barely cried. At that moment, Honor had hated her for that.
But it seemed that there was a spark inside her son’s wife, after all. However small, however weak – she had enough spirit to battle against Honor.
‘More lasagne, Honor?’ Jo asked her, and the woman laid down her fork and knife.
‘I believe I will,’ she said.
She went back to her room after the meal, as she usually did, and sat in her armchair. She covered her mouth to suppress a burp. Jo, whatever her faults, was a very good cook, especially of comfort food. A few minutes later there was a knock on her door.
‘Granny H?’ said Lydia, poking her head in. ‘I wondered if you were bored?’
Boredom is for people without inner resources, she was about to reply, but something about Lydia’s voice stopped her. ‘I am not. But I would be glad to have a conversation.’
‘I have to watch OscanIrie. Do you want to come out and sit on the sofa with me for a while?’
Lydia wanted something, but Honor couldn’t tell what. She nodded and came out to the living area, walking slowly to avoid the toys on the floor. She perched on a sofa. The two younger children were sitting on a beanbag on the floor, watching television. Lydia sat down beside her, jiggling her foot. Honor could feel the vibrations through the sofa.
‘What’s on your mind?’ Honor asked.
‘I wish Dad were here,’ said Lydia. ‘I really wish he were here. I’d like to talk with him. I could talk with Mum, but she’s so … I don’t know if she’d really understand. She thinks that if you’re nice, then everything will work out for you.’
‘That seems like rather a lot to expect from mere niceness,’ said Honor. ‘In my experience, that is not how the world works.’
They were silent, listening to the television. The programme appeared to be about some sort of creatures who could do yoga but not speak English. It was a wonder that children learned any language skills these days.
They had never been close, she and Lydia. As a very young child she had been boisterous, too full of energy, never settling. And then once Stephen died, Honor could not look at her without seeing Stephen.
Jo had brought her to visit not long after the funeral, and when Lydia had walked into the house, even at age six, the light had caught her face in exactly the same way as it had used to catch Stephen’s when he returned home from school. The hair was different, the clothes were different, but the expressions were exactly the same, and Honor had been struck with longing so sharp it was like a knife. She wanted to grab this little girl and hold her and never let her go. She wanted to stare at her for hours, tracing the resemblance to her father, to Honor’s dead son. She wanted to cry and to kiss Lydia, over and over, and spend every waking moment with her, shutting out everyone else in the world. Reliving her son’s childhood through her granddaughter’s.
And of course none of that was possible. It was irrational and frightening. It was unreasoned love, far too close to loss, the same way she had loved Stephen and, at one time, Paul.
So Honor withdrew. She loved Lydia too much and therefore she could not love her unrestrainedly. They were careful with each other, with much unspoken.
This girl was Honor’s only living relative. Honor had no idea how to make small talk with her, or how to talk about their lives. They had never done it. The only thing they had ever discussed at length, were books.
‘What have you been reading?’ she asked now.
Lydia stopped jiggling. ‘I borrowed your copy of Hamlet. I hope you don’t mind. You were out taking a walk.’
She had gone for a walk up Keats Way. Carefully, step by step up the wide pavement, returning exhausted.
‘Of course I don’t mind. You are welcome to any of my books, you know that. Hamlet is a wonderful play. Have you read it yet?’
‘I started. I …’ Lydia shifted on the sofa so that she was facing Honor. ‘Actually I wanted to ask you about what’s written in the front of your copy.’
‘Oh. I see.’
Honor knew what was written inside it; knew the shop it had come from in Oxford, knew the high shelves and the smell of paper and binding. She knew the moment it had been bought. She could see his hands selecting it, handing over the money. The smooth motion of his writing, with his favourite gold fountain pen, on the flyleaf. She knew the moment he had passed it over to her, at a corner table in a café where they would not be seen, and she had opened it to read what he had inscribed within.
‘It says H. I think of you always,’ said Lydia. ‘And it’s signed P.’
‘Yes,’ said Honor.
‘Was that … were you …’
‘It was written by your grandfather. Yes.’
On the television, she heard the strange creatures crying out in nonsensical joy as they floated into the air. How strange to call Paul ‘your grandfather’. How strange to be speaking about him at all.
‘I … don’t know anything about him,’ said Lydia. ‘Is he … is he still alive?’
‘I don’t know. He wasn’t much older than I, so it’s possible.’
‘You’re not in touch?’
Honor folded her hands in her lap. ‘Paul Honeywell was my professor. I was a junior lecturer, newly appointed. And he was married.’
‘Your professor? So – like your teacher?’
‘No, the Head of the department where I worked.’
‘And you were in love with him? Did he leave his wife?’
‘Yes, I was. And he with me; at least then. And no, he didn’t.’
‘Did you think he would leave her? I mean, you must have hoped, right?’
‘He never told me that he would leave his wife for me.’
‘So what happened?’
Honor closed her eyes. The falling moments replayed themselves.
The stolen glances, the accidental brushing of hands. The awkward pauses, full of things unsaid, at the end of departmental drinks. The time he called her back, saying ‘Honor,’ her name in his voice meaning more than her name.
And she had gone back to him. She had touched his face, in the shadows, before they heard someone coming and sprang apart. The impression of his skin stayed on her fingers for days.
The first time had been that weekend in Copenhagen at the convention. They’d had too much wine at dinner, knowing what was going to happen, both afraid of it even though they both wanted it so much. And then the unimaginable luxury of his hotel room: that bare hotel room, with an unshaded light bulb and scratchy sheets, a smeared glass of cloudy water. All that time together. All those hours till morning. She touched him from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, drinking in every part. She had not known she could be so greedy. She had never suspected it of herself, before then.
‘I loved him anyway,’ she said to her granddaughter. ‘I loved him without hope.’
She felt Lydia’s gaze on her face. She knew what she was thinking: she was wondering how such an old lady, dried out and hobbling, could have been capable of a passion so strong that it had made her forget reason.
One day, you will be eighty, and you will feel thirty-five. Some days, you will feel twenty, or ten, or six. You will stretch out your hand for people long dead. You will feel a shock when you touch your own papery cheek.
There was no point in saying that to someone Lydia’s age, of course. She would never believe it. The young think they will be young for ever. Honor certainly ha
d.
She felt a fierce stab of protectiveness for this girl with her coltlike limbs and her careless hair and her smell of fruit-flavoured sweets.
‘Anyway,’ she began briskly, ‘you’ll enjoy Hamlet. It’s all about death, of course, and Hamlet is a fool, but that’s rather the point.’
‘But … if he never left his wife, how did you manage with having a baby? My dad, I mean?’
‘I went to live with my father in the house in Stoke Newington. My mother had died some time before, but he took me in. I was grateful. I was a grown woman, in my thirties, and old enough to know better. Not all parents would have been so accepting.’
‘And didn’t he want to know where the father was?’
‘We didn’t discuss it.’
They didn’t discuss much, Honor and her father. Shimon Levinson had been a man of few words. Not an affectionate man, either. As a child she had never received kisses or cuddles from him; would have considered it unthinkable. Honor’s mother had been the one to soothe hurts and give kisses at night. Her father had been a constant solid source, not of love, but of presence. Reliability. Even after he sold his hardware shops and had retired, you could set your watch by his habits.
But when Stephen was born, he had come to the hospital and held the baby, his grandson, with a tenderness that brought tears to Honor’s eyes. He kissed Stephen’s downy head.
‘It’s a new beginning,’ he said to her, his voice hoarse with emotion.
And Honor suspected for the first time that her father’s lack of affection had not been because of a lack of feeling. That perhaps it was precisely the opposite. He felt too much to express it easily in caresses or words.
Even though he was gone, she understood him more as the years passed. She saw his own nature in hers.
Now, Honor reached out. She touched Lydia’s hand and she took it into her own. The soft, unblemished skin, halfway between a child’s and a woman’s.
‘We have perhaps not talked enough, you and I,’ she said.
‘Was it worth it, to love him?’ Lydia asked her. ‘Even knowing what you know now? Would you still have done it?’
Honor rubbed her thumb against the back of Lydia’s hand. She remembered other hands in hers. Paul’s, and Stephen’s. Her father’s, at the end.
‘I would not have changed anything for the world,’ she said.
Lydia went upstairs to put the children to bed and Honor stayed on the sofa, thinking about what they had said. She never spoke of Paul to anyone. This was perhaps the first time she had mentioned his name on purpose in forty-five years. It was not easy to say aloud.
But there was a thread, running from Paul through her, to Stephen, to Lydia. Honor had been raised in a religious family and although she had discarded those traditions, they had tethered her to the past in a way that she imagined Lydia did not have.
Perhaps it was time to speak of him. Perhaps she should have spoken of him long ago, but she had done her best not to think about that.
Why did you never tell me? Stephen had asked. Honor swallowed, hard.
Lydia re-entered the room; Honor could tell by her tread before she saw the movement. ‘I … I have these,’ the girl said, sitting down beside Honor. She put something in hr grandmother’s hands. A bundle of paper, perhaps envelopes. Letters.
‘The handwriting is the same as in your book,’ Lydia said. ‘That’s what made me think, but I couldn’t remember where I’d put them.’
Honor sifted them in her hands. She moved them and held them to the light. She could see Paul’s handwriting on them, every one of them, firm thick black strokes writing out Stephen’s name and address. The address in Brickham, the house Stephen and Jo had lived in when he was lecturing at the university here.
‘They haven’t been opened,’ Honor said.
‘No,’ said Lydia. ‘I didn’t – I never. I didn’t know who they were from. Are they from his father, do you think? My grandfather? The return address is in California.’
‘Yes.’ How strange, to touch something else that Paul had touched, now, so much later. The envelopes were heavy, good quality: greeting cards rather than letters.
She had had a letter like this, before Stephen died. Before she had argued with her son. It had the same handwriting, the same stamp.
Lydia drew in a breath. ‘I … I used to wait for the post. When I was a little girl. I got into the habit of it. I liked to get it first thing. After Dad died, I collected anything that had his name on it and I kept it. I put it in a special drawer. I think I thought … I thought that if I kept them, he might come back for them. That’s silly, isn’t it?’
‘It is silly, but understandable,’ said Honor, who had some recent experience in denying reality.
‘I have all sorts of things in there – mostly junk mail and bank statements, I think. I never opened them or read them. But these ones came every Christmas. I suppose I thought they were Christmas cards.’
‘Perhaps they are.’
‘I don’t know if we have any from before Dad died. Mum threw away all his letters and things. She said they were too painful to read. She only kept a few of his books and his wristwatch.’
The stamps were American. There were eight letters. ‘Have they stopped arriving?’
‘I think so. I mean, this was all I could find. They’re all addressed to our old house before we moved here, so maybe they just haven’t been forwarded. He must have …’
‘He must have thought Stephen was still alive.’
‘Yeah,’ said Lydia. ‘Did you know he was writing to Dad?’
‘No.’ Stephen had never told her about the letters. Was that her fault, too?
‘Should we – do you think that we should read them?’
Eight letters from her lover to his son, unread. Honor closed her eyes and she battled with herself. But she was old, now, and who would it hurt, to touch the thread, to let it spill through her fingers?
‘You read them,’ Honor said. ‘You read them to me. One at a time. Please.’
Chapter Twenty
Jo
PARENTS’ EVENINGS WOULD be easier if not for the other parents.
The ones she didn’t know well weren’t hard; they were mostly very nice people, and Jo enjoyed exchanging a few pleasantries over the plastic cups of orange squash that the school put out for them in the gym whilst they waited between appointments. They might know the old gossip about her and Richard, but they wouldn’t say anything. They would pretend not to know. Politeness and small talk gave you a screen, and the subject in common of the school, and exams. And there were plenty of single parents around, or parents there without their partners, so Jo didn’t feel inconspicuous being by herself.
It was the people like Helen and Logan Travers who you had to watch out for.
‘Jo!’ Helen came rushing up to her from the gym entrance, Logan at her heels. Their daughter, Erin, lagged behind. ‘How are you?’ She kissed Jo on either cheek.
‘I’m great, how are you?’
‘We saw Richard, and heard he’d proposed to Tatiana.’
Helen’s face was the picture of sympathy and concern.
‘I’m absolutely fine with it. Iris is excited about being a bridesmaid.’
‘And how is Lydia coping?’
Lydia probably thinks good riddance, and I can’t much blame her. ‘Lydia’s coping really well, thanks.’
‘It must be so hard, to lose two father figures like that.’
‘Lydia misses her father, of course. We both do.’
‘And you must be lonely!’
‘I don’t really have a chance to get lonely, with the children, and Lydia’s grandmother is staying with us for the moment, too, while she recovers from surgery.’
‘Her grandmother? You are a saint! I think of you often, Jo. I’m so sorry I’ve been so busy.’
‘We must get together for dinner soon,’ said Logan. ‘We have a friend or two you might like to meet.’
They’d used to have
dinner parties together, before Richard left; sometimes their daughter Erin and Lydia would have a sleepover, too. Jo pictured what it would be like now, sitting next to one of Logan’s friends, a divorcé or confirmed bachelor who would be no more interested in matchmaking than she herself would be. He would, of course, have been prepped by Logan and Helen about the sad breakdown of her marriage.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we must. Hello, Erin, how are you?’
‘Fine,’ said Erin loudly. She was wearing tracksuit bottoms, slung low enough to show the top of her pants, and she was staring straight at Jo with a strange smile on her face. At least it was good to know that Lydia wasn’t the only teenager who acted weird sometimes.
‘Erin’s doing ever so well,’ Helen said. ‘We were thrilled with her predicted grades. Lydia’s must be wonderful too – so much to live up to! Isn’t she with you?’
‘She’s looking after her brother and sister. I’ve only seen the English and French teachers, but so far, so good.’
‘Come along, darling,’ Helen said, ‘we’ve got Mr Treadbull now. I have no idea why we have to have conferences with the PE teachers! Lovely to see you, Jo, let’s set a date for dinner, yes?’
‘Of course,’ Jo said, making a mental resolution not to answer the phone if Helen rang.
But she wouldn’t ring. And if she did, Jo would answer.
She checked the slip of paper with her appointments on it. The school ran their parent-teacher evenings like a production line, with the teachers arranged in the gym and the dining hall behind rows of desks, and a bell ringing to signal the end of each appointment. She had Geography next, with Mr Graham, who was also Lydia’s new tutor since Miss Wheeler had left at Christmas; according to the little map she had, he was sitting in the back right corner of the dining hall. She headed over, so she’d be on time.
As usual she looked around for Avril’s mum, but as usual, she didn’t see her. Mrs Toller had only come to one or two parents’ evenings in their secondary-school career so far; in fact, that was one of the few times that Jo had actually met her. Often Avril helped Lydia babysit while Jo went to the school, but tonight she hadn’t turned up, and Lydia had snapped Jo’s head off when she’d commented on it. Jo had thought maybe that Avril was with her mum instead. It was an important parents’ evening, the last one before the girls started their GCSE exams.