‘Thanks for the introduction, Andy.’ He laughs then, spontaneously, loudly, incongruously, and I can see everyone being drawn in. ‘I still get out once in a while, but most of the time I’m office-based now.’
‘You! Office-based? Poor fuckers in the office!’
‘Yes, I know, it doesn’t really sound like me, does it?’ Johnny laughs again and I wonder why. ‘So is anyone else around here office-based?’
‘My sister is bookshop-based. Does that count?’
I flinch at being drawn into the spotlight, but Johnny just looks at me with a wide smile and says, ‘No, that definitely doesn’t count at all, and nor does your classroom, Jenny. Completely different beasts. Andy, on the other hand, is the worst kind of office junky there is.’ His tone is teasing but warm, and Andy looks pleased.
And so we talk and laugh about the politics and the banter, the quirks and routines that define office life in our modern world. It occurs to me that Johnny doesn’t fit either of Jenny’s male stereotypes. He often and easily becomes the centre of attention, but he doesn’t dominate; he doesn’t litter the conversation with anecdotes or knowledge for effect. This man is no peacock, but he isn’t earnest either. He laughs too much for that.
‘What happens when an Australian and a Norwegian have sex?’
Oh shit, I think, a joke. Andy is warming up to his punch line. My eyes seek Jenny’s like a reflex and I see something that I have never seen before. It is something about the way she is looking at Johnny, almost quizzical, searching, not listening to Andy’s joke at all. I realise that for the first time the outcome of this relationship is not a foregone conclusion and I feel a mixture of hope and nervousness.
* * *
I learnt the full story of Johnny’s hybrid background from Jenny later. Born in Malawi to diplomat parents, he spent his early years in East Africa, landing permanently in England for the first time at the age of eleven. Untypically, his parents had resisted the concept of boarding school in the UK, and exposure to a string of local schools that accompanied his parents’ moves set him apart from his English peers. He found himself popular yet bored at the same time. He sought stimulation outside the company of humans and found it in time with rocks. His work as a geologist took him initially on extended field trips: weeks spent in the vast, white Altiplano of northern Chile or the tin mines of Bolivia. Promotion had meant that he was now predominantly London-based, though he still made time to visit his parents, now retired in Kenya, and an early girlfriend, now a mother of three and living a few miles from his parents in Naivasha.
I could see why Jenny was attracted to him, beyond the good looks that are a prerequisite in her case. There was a waywardness about him, an edge, a resistance to stereotype, which challenged her. ‘What kind of rock would he be if he were a rock?’ I asked her once, early on, after that Moroccan dinner.
‘I don’t know. Jade maybe? I know what you mean, though.’
‘What?’
‘Well, it’s as if something of the rocks that are his life has rubbed off on him.’
‘Solid charm and hidden depths – how romantic!’
‘Mmm.’ And an unfamiliar dreamy look touched her face before she laughed.
Over the weeks that followed I watched something soften in Jenny, as if she were happy for the first time to let her world contract and contain her. In Johnny’s company she relaxed into the domesticity of television serials and Indian takeaways, shared walks and shopping lists on a Saturday afternoon. It was the first time that I felt at ease in the company of one of her male partners, without being on my guard or witness to a performance. Two emotions moved within me: a real sense of joy that something was taking her out of herself, out of the blackness which I sensed in her but could do nothing about; and a shiver of jealousy that I could not control.
There were times when the habit of Jenny’s personality took over and my own squirming felt all too familiar. On one occasion the three of us were sitting around the kitchen table over an impromptu meal of cheese on toast with red wine when the conversation veered dangerously, led by Jenny.
‘Have you ever been unfaithful, Johnny?’
He paused and I thought, pass the test, please pass the test.
‘Yes, I have, once. I was very young and very naïve and it hurt all of us.’
Oh dear, I thought, you’re slipping – not so intense, not so intense.
Jenny played her card. ‘Well, I hope you don’t expect me to be faithful to you. Ownership is not my thing.’
He looked straight at her and then saved himself. He laughed. And laughed. That was Johnny’s strength. He challenged her attempts to test him by making fun of her, refusing to be drawn in. Jenny looked momentarily nonplussed by his laughter, and for a glorious split second I thought she was going to let the whole thing go and laugh as well, but then her face hardened into an all too familiar grip.
‘So, how young were you? How naïve?’ There was something cold and calculated in her tone, which Johnny did not pick up.
‘When?’ Still laughing.
‘When the better half in you rejected the notion of possession by another human being.’
Still totally unaware of the revenge she was about to unleash, he straightened his face into a frown and answered in a mock Cornish accent. ‘I were sixteen, me Lord, sixteen and a day.’
‘Funny that, isn’t it, Pips?’
‘What Jenny?’ I tried to will calm into her eyes with the coldness of my voice.
‘Funny the difference six years makes. Do you think six years would have made a difference to us?’
‘Leave it out, Jenny.’
Her eyes anchored Johnny’s. ‘Pippa and I were abused at the age of ten. You know –raped – if a tongue can rape.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Jenny, shut up.’ I saw a wine glass shatter in slow motion on the table and red wine splash like blood across the unfinished food. I felt Johnny and Jenny staring at me and realised that it was my arm that had thrown the glass. In another slow-motion second I wondered where the brain message that triggered that movement had come from, and then I found myself standing and screaming at Jenny.
‘If you want to fuck up the only relationship you’ve ever had that’s worth anything, then do it in private!’ And my body left the room, slamming the door behind it. Funny that. It was Jenny who was pushing for a reaction, trying to shock, and me who did in the end.
Chapter 47
There are silent tears spilling into the box. So little to show, really. Two diaries, a handful of photos and letters, postcards of her travels, always somehow intimate. There is one from Greece with two old women in black with creased leather faces, laughing into each other’s eyes, seemingly unaware of the camera. Perhaps they were.
Pips, you were right, this is one to look after. Johnny is trying to change me and I love it. I feel free and yet with him. The village is gorgeous and our days are spent rambling in mountains and conversation. Next week we chill out on the beach. I am happy and I miss you. Love you always, Jenny.
I feel strange reading these words. A deep sense of irony bites me from within as if I’m facing the sequence of events that came afterwards for the first time. Imagine if flash-forwards to the future existed, how many events would seem unbelievable, laughable even, or just plain intolerable. I imagine life as a pile of bones without the flesh of time to join the different bones together and fatten the relationship between them . . .
They returned, full of themselves and each other. Jenny exuded warmth and laughter, and it occurred to me suddenly that she could be the one to get hurt if things went wrong. Not that there was any reason for things to go wrong. Johnny so obviously cared and she so obviously wanted him to. I began to feel awkward, a superfluous presence between them, and Jenny at last broached the subject of moving out to live with him.
But she never did because something happened first that drew demons like blood from inside her and turned her relationship with Johnny into an impossibility.
/> When she told me, I responded unthinkingly, with a lump in my throat: ‘Oh Jenny, that’s fantastic.’ And then more slowly, ‘My God. Does Johnny –?’
‘No, no, he doesn’t. Don’t tell him, Pips. I don’t want him to know. I need to get used to this first, understand how I feel about it, what I’m going to do.’
‘But doesn’t he need to know? This is about both of you.’ There was a vacant look in her eyes, a look of distance that I had not seen for a long time. ‘Jenny, aren’t you happy about this? It’s bound to be a shock, of course you need time to get used to it, but don’t cut Johnny out. You should be going through this together.’
‘Fuck Johnny! Who said I wanted his baby?’
‘Oh Jenny, Jenny, don’t do this to yourself. Talk to me, tell me what’s going on in your head.’
She looked at me, lost and angry and hurting. ‘Don’t you see, Pips? Can’t you see that it wouldn’t work? What if I end up hating him?’
‘But why should you?’ I knew that something very, very deep-seated in Jenny recoiled from being boxed and defined, and planning the future. I knew the commitment would scare her, but surely not enough to have an abortion?
‘Don’t you see?’ She spoke again between her tears. ‘Part of me would love to do this, to be a mother, a wife, to do what other people do, to be normal, but I’m not sure I’ve got it in me. You . . . you could do it, Pippa, but I don’t know if I can.’
‘Jenny, if I could do it, so can you. We’ve got the same scars, the same childhood,’ I coaxed her, a huge sense of emptiness rising in me to meet the darkness in her.
She turned on me angrily then. ‘It’s got nothing to do with being abused. That’s all useless fucking history.’
But I persisted. ‘It’s bound to have affected us in ways that we’re still learning about. We never had a father, we were abused by our mother’s boyfriend, and our mother accused us of lying, not to mention the fact that she was too busy drinking to be a mother to us most of the time anyway. Don’t you think those are scars that might surface when faced unexpectedly with motherhood?’
She looked at me gratefully for a second and gave a tiny, wet laugh. ‘Put like that, you may have a point.’
‘Jenny, listen,’ I pounced on the moment. ‘Don’t make any quick decisions about this, please, and please talk to Johnny.’
But she refused to tell him, and I watched, helpless, as he struggled to understand her sudden moodiness and her apparent reluctance to follow through with their plans to move into a flat together. I snatched time alone with Jenny to try and work through this thing with her, to help her not to punish herself and Johnny because of something she was not prepared for. I felt sure that it was mostly the shock of it that was getting to her, and the fact that something outside her control was suddenly dictating her life, imposing a responsibility that she had rejected all her life. I knew, too, that Johnny would embrace this die that life had cast and I wished that she would just share this with him and allow them, together, to come to terms with it. I toyed with the idea of telling him, but I knew Jenny would treat that as a betrayal, and I was not prepared to put that between us.
But I did not expect the level of rejection that poisoned her. She spoke of ‘it’ as if she had swallowed something alien and she blamed Johnny irrationally for deceiving her, for making her think that she could lead a ‘normal’ life, a life that could be neatly traced in a series of steps leading, in a straight line, to grandchildren and death. She took off for a weekend alone in the Lake District, telling Johnny she needed to think, but not telling him why.
‘Pips, I can’t go through with it.’ She finally cut through any other possibilities. ‘I’m going to have an abortion and I don’t want Johnny to know. It’s over between us. Will you help me?’
‘Of course I’ll help you, Jenny. You know I’ll stand by you whatever you decide, but why does this mean everything is over between you and Johnny?’
‘How could I live with him knowing that I had killed his child?’
‘It’s your child, too, Jenny. The baby is both of yours,’ I pleaded.
‘No, Pippa, please. It may be mine biologically, but it has nothing to with me mentally or emotionally. I feel as if Johnny has invaded my insides, forced something into me that I do not want, and I know that even if I had this baby, even if I accepted it and came to love it, I would hate its father forever. Johnny deserves more than that.’ She looked immeasurably sad.
‘Oh Jenny, you’re not making sense. Please don’t make this decision without talking to Johnny. Why don’t you just talk about it together?’
She blinked through wet eyes and her face took on the stoniness that had kept her strong through our childhood. ‘If I tell him he’ll want to have it. He won’t understand how I could possibly not want to. He doesn’t have the darkness that’s inside me. He’ll misunderstand it. He will recoil from me.’
I knew that she was right. Johnny would have seen Jenny with young children, would have marvelled at the lack of self-consciousness and the enthusiasm with which she could slip into the fantasy of their worlds. I had been to her school, seen her working and looking as though she was playing. She never talked down to children, was perpetually curious and reacted to them on their terms, sharing imaginary slug suppers with a three-year old, a rude joke with a fourteen-year-old.
‘What makes you so sure that you don’t want this baby, Jenny? You love children.’ I was running out of words.
‘Yes.’ She was looking very straight into the mental distance in front of her. ’Yes, I love children and I don’t want to bring a child into this world that I cannot be a mother to. I don’t have it in me. I just don’t have it in me.’ She was crying dry, silent tears and I knew there was nothing I could do except be there.
Chapter 48
She told Johnny finally, but not until afterwards. At the time, she lied to protect him. Told him three days before her appointment that it could never work between them, that she was not cut out for the commitment of sharing a flat, that she needed space that he could not give her. Her lines were not new, but her suffering on saying them was. Johnny came to me in distress and incomprehension and I colluded in the lie, telling him that this was the way she was, I had seen it before, it was no use trying. He found himself cornered, like Alice, in a world whose dimensions had suddenly changed. He resorted not to resentment, but to pride, and removed himself, more like a neighbour come to borrow sugar at an awkward time than my sister’s closest and only real boyfriend.
We came home after the abortion and Jenny let me put her to bed like a baby. The days that followed were sore, quiet days, which blocked out the lengthening light of early summer. Jenny had a sick note, which bought her two weeks to come to terms with what she had done and lost, and I rushed home during lunch breaks to give her food and encouragement as if she were an injured cat. In the hollow of draped rooms she moved like her own shadow and built a new resolution around what she had done.
I came home two days before she was due to return to work to find the curtains drawn, windows wide open and light mopping away the greyness that had gathered inside the flat. Her face was smiling.
‘Come on, sis, we’re going out. It’s over. I am going to drive myself nuts if I carry on like this.’
Over celebratory king prawns and aioli in a tapas bar she told me that she had decided to change everything about her life except her sister. The wheel of fortune had turned in a direction she had not chosen. Well, so be it. She would turn the wheel a little further herself. That way she would gain control again. She loved abandon, but she liked to be in charge of it. I understand so much more about her now.
I told her that Johnny had spoken to me, wanted to see her, wanted to understand what had gone wrong.
‘Do you want to stay in touch with him, Pips?’
‘Well, of course, I shall miss him, but it’s not about that. I just don’t think it’s fair on either of you to end it like that. This is different to other times. You
know it is.’
She paused, counting the cigarette butts in the ashtray between us. ‘OK, I’ll see him and I’ll tell him, but not yet. I can’t deal with it yet. I need time to get used to not having him around. Pippa, I’m going to try and find a job outside London. I need to put some distance between this and the rest of my life. You understand, don’t you? It’s not that I want distance between us, but I think it would do us both good to live separately. It’s something we were going to do, after all.’
‘Yes, I think you’re probably right.’ And I did. Most of me did. Probably.
‘And another thing. I don’t want you to stop seeing Johnny just because the relationship between him and me is over. You have become friends, I can see that, and I don’t want that to stop just because of me.’
Did she sense something that I didn’t?
Chapter 49
And so, with the help of changed circumstances – Jenny’s new job in a prep school in Sussex, my new flatmate (a quiet, dreamy girl called Karen), a new man in Jenny’s life (a painter who lived in Brighton) and a new hobby (bungee jumping) – time slowly put flesh on the bones that otherwise could not have belonged to the same body.
At first I think Johnny hoped that there would be some way back to Jenny through me. He talked incessantly about her, probing for answers that I could not give him, but gradually he talked, imperceptibly, less and less about her, and still we found things to say. There was something protective and solid about him and there were no barriers to get through. We had crossed many bridges in the endless conversations about Jenny, unconsciously revealed and inferred things about each other that were normally taboo, and I ventured opinions in the safety of his company that I would never have offered around a dinner table.
Finally he received a call from Jenny, out of the blue, unforewarned by me, and they met on neutral ground in a pub neither of them knew in central London. I heard about it afterwards from both of them. Johnny said that it was a surprise, but not a shock. He hadn’t guessed at the time what it was, but had known she was keeping something from him. To realise that about Jenny meant that he had got a long way – closer than any other man had ever done. He said he felt sad, but that she was right in a way, because it would never have worked in the long term, and yet he hadn’t known that then. Jenny was unusually subdued after their meeting. We met at our favourite Café Rouge and I pushed her gently to tell me how it had gone.
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