by Adale Geras
She, Emily and Isis had been back in the flat for a couple of hours. Adrian had wanted to stay for supper, but Zannah had managed to persuade him to go out to dinner with his mother and Dr Ashton instead. Adrian always referred to him, rather disparagingly, as my stepdad, or sometimes my mother’s husband or Doc.
‘I can see you don’t want me around,’ Adrian had sounded a little petulant. He’d walked with her to her car, as they all left Charlotte’s house.
Zannah said, ‘It’s not that, really. Only we’re so preoccupied with Ma, it’ll be boring for you.’
‘I could come and pick you up later,’ he whispered. ‘Em’s there for Isis, isn’t she? I could bring you back to my lair.’
He leaned over and as he whispered these last words, he kissed her, just below her ear. Zannah shivered and pushed him away. ‘No, honestly. I’ll phone you tomorrow.’
‘Hope your mother’s all right. Let me know what you hear.’
All she and Emily had talked about since they got home was Joss and her flight from the lunch-table. They’d both tried phoning her mobile at half-hourly intervals, only to be met with her voice telling them to leave a message and she’d get back to them. Bob never used his mobile in the car and he was driving.
Emily said, ‘Let’s phone home. You try.’
Zannah dialled the number and almost dropped the handset when she heard her father’s voice.
‘Pa! You’re back. We’ve been so worried! How’s Ma? Can she speak?’
‘I’ll put her on,’ said Bob.
Zannah tucked the phone into the crook of her shoulder and said to Emily, ‘Go and listen on the extension. Then you can talk as well.’
Emily ran into her sister’s bedroom as Zannah said, ‘Ma? Is that you? Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine, darling. I’m so sorry. I wrecked your party.’
‘Nonsense. It’s nothing to be sorry about. We’d had lunch. You’d met Maureen at least and you can meet Graham another time. No worries.’
Silence. Emily said, ‘Ma, are you still there?’
‘Yes, Em. I’m here. I’m going to bed now.’
‘Was it really a migraine?’
‘What do you mean?’ Joss’s voice sounded thin and wavery to Zannah, listening to her younger, braver sister questioning their mother’s excuse and thinking that she’d never dare to do such a thing.
‘Well, I can’t remember you having one ever before.’
‘I haven’t had one for ages, that’s true. I used to get them as a child.’
Zannah interrupted. ‘Yes, that’s what Charlotte said.’
‘There you are, then.’ Joss’s voice was beginning to sound stronger. Perhaps there wasn’t anything really wrong. ‘Don’t worry about it, you two. I’ll be in touch in a couple of days. I’ve got to ring Charlotte now and apologize to her, so I’ll say good night, darlings.’
‘G’night, Ma,’ said Zannah.
‘Phone tomorrow,’ said Emily. ‘I want to speak to Pa as well, only I haven’t the energy now.’
‘Right,’ said Joss. ‘Kiss Isis for us.’
‘Will do.’
Emily came out of Zannah’s bedroom and flung herself back on to the sofa. She picked up the TV remote and started to fiddle with it. ‘I don’t believe her,’ she said. ‘D’you think she sounded convincing?’
‘Yes,’ said Zannah. ‘I think she did, on the whole.’
‘You just don’t like trouble.’
‘What trouble? What’re you talking about?’
‘Never mind. We’ll see soon enough who’s right. And I meant to ask you … have you told Adrian about Charlotte?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘Why not? You don’t think it’d put him off you?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. It just hasn’t come up, that’s all.’
Emily made a face that meant: I don’t believe you but I can’t be arsed to argue. Zannah continued, ‘We’ve had other stuff to discuss. I’ll tell him. Or Charlotte will. You know she doesn’t hide it particularly.’
‘I don’t see dear Maureen taking something like that calmly, do you? She looks like someone who might care about her son marrying into a family with an ex-con in it.’
‘Charlotte is not an ex-con. She was innocent. Everyone knows that.’
‘Nevertheless, six months in jail makes you a con.’
‘Nonsense. And anyway it was years and years ago.’ She paused. ‘I’ll tell Adrian in time, don’t worry. I just want to choose my moment.’
Emily made an explosive sound halfway between a laugh and a snort and pointed the remote at the television. A picture flickered into life on the screen. Isis left her drawing and came to sit next to her. She put an arm round her niece and squeezed her tight. Zannah stood up and went into the kitchen to see about supper. Charlotte’s lunch had been delicious but she felt as though they’d eaten it ages ago. Perhaps, she thought, as she searched the fridge for anything remotely tempting, Em’s right and I ought to talk to Adrian about Charlotte soon. She was probably also right about Ma covering something up. Tomorrow, she thought. I don’t want to think about all that tonight.
*
‘How about a cup of tea, darling?’ Bob was at his most solicitous. Joss, sitting across from him at the kitchen table, wondered when he’d stop being kind and start asking questions. He wasn’t a fool. He must know the migraine story was nonsense. She’d never been so glad to come home. Her house had gathered itself comfortingly around her as she moved through the hall into the kitchen. She’d spoken to the girls and reassured them that she was all right and now she was seized by a longing to run upstairs and hide in her study. She wanted to be the person who worked there. She wanted to be the other half of herself – the one whose work had appeared in magazines, who was about to produce her first collection, and who was acquiring a reputation for elegant and precise poems. Lydia Quentin was the poet. Because this was the name Gray used, it was the one she loved. She wanted to stop being Jocelyn Gratrix and hide for ever behind her pseudonym. She wished she could stare into the lighted window of her laptop and write to him. What would she say? How could she express her anger? He wouldn’t have had a chance to write to her, but there was the secret phone, which she regarded as her most precious possession.
Last year, on her birthday, Gray had sent her a tiny pay-as-you-go mobile. She kept it among the papers in one of the compartments of a plastic concertina file in the bottom drawer of her locked filing cabinet. He had an identical phone, which he used, he told her, for the calls he made to her and for nothing else. She felt weak with wanting to press the only number keyed into its memory and hear his voice. She couldn’t. She had to stay in the kitchen and she knew what was coming. Bob had always been someone who thrashed things out. That was how he’d put it. Joss sometimes felt that he must have been the kind of child who poked and prodded at things to see how they worked. It wasn’t just the physical world he was interested in, either. He sought the truth. He wanted to know about motivation, reasons for actions, ideas and where they came from: all the things that Joss thought were probably better unexamined if you wanted to remain unhurt in life. Bob had never been able to leave anything alone. He believed in discussion. He believed in sorting stuff out, getting to the bottom of problems, making everything better. He was known among his students as someone who wouldn’t be shocked whatever you confessed; someone who had answers to the more unanswerable questions. Good old Bob.
I mustn’t be nasty about him, she told herself. He’s doing his best. She could hear him putting their suitcase at the bottom of the stairs, and now he was in the doorway, asking whether she wanted tea. ‘Yes, that’d be good. Earl Grey, please.’
Joss watched him as he moved around, taking the blue teapot from its place on the kitchen dresser and reaching up to find the packet of teabags in the cupboard. He poured the milk into a pretty jug and put it in front of her and, in spite of herself, she felt touched at this attempt to please her. On an ordinary day, on an unfraught o
ccasion, he’d have put the milk bottle on the table and the teabags straight into the mugs. He was making an effort. Something, some moment, was coming towards her and she wouldn’t be able to avoid it for much longer. Maybe it would be better to pre-empt his questions. No, she couldn’t. What would she say?
Bob pushed one of the mugs towards her and Joss picked it up. She had no desire whatsoever to drink tea but it would give her something to do with her hands.
‘Jossie … ’ How she wished he wouldn’t call her that! She’d stopped being Jossie long ago. ‘You do know I love you, don’t you?’
She nodded, unable to answer. This was her cue to say, Yes and I love you too and she couldn’t. The words wouldn’t come. He went on, ‘I know that something happened back there at Charlotte’s and all the way home I’ve been trying to work out what it could have been. The migraine was just an excuse.’
He wasn’t asking her. He was telling her. Still, she said nothing.
‘It began when you saw Graham Ashton. I’ve gone over and over it in my head all the way home and I’ve come to the conclusion that you must have met him before. That’s the only thing that would make any sense. You know him. Am I right?’
Joss looked down. If she kept on being silent, was it possible he’d get to the truth by himself?
‘Where d’you know him from?’
‘I met him on a creative writing course. Three years ago.’
‘But he’s a doctor. How come he’s at a creative writing course?’
‘He wanted to learn to write poetry. Lots of people do, you know.’
Bob didn’t snort, but Joss knew that if this conversation had not been so serious, he would have done. He had a strange relationship with poetry, believing that it had come to a full stop around the end of the nineteenth century. He was suspicious of anything remotely modern and there were times when Joss half agreed with him. Towards her own poems, he maintained a loyal approval, although Joss was sure he rarely understood them, even when he did get round to casting an eye over them. He’d have been deeply shocked if he knew what some were about. He didn’t exactly bust a gut begging to see them and she only showed him the more easily explicable ones and then rarely. She read his essays, but that, she knew, was only because Egypt and the ancient world interested her. She would certainly, she often told herself, not have been so dutiful if Bob were a physicist or a chemist. He regarded her writing, Joss knew, as something she did and which he didn’t need to worry about. Lately, she hadn’t minded this at all because she had had Gray to tell her how much he loved her poems; how much they meant to him. Gray claimed to know almost all of her work by heart. Perhaps he was lying about that too. Would she be able to trust him ever again?
‘Okay,’ Bob said. ‘You met him three years ago. On a course. Have you seen him since?’
A chill had appeared in his voice. Joss said, ‘He was at Fairford again two years ago as well. A bit more than two years. September 2002.’
‘Bit of a coincidence, wasn’t it?’
How could she answer? ‘No, that time we arranged it. We booked to be on the same course.’
‘So you’d been seeing one another? Between one course and the next?’
Joss shook her head. ‘No. No, we never met. We corresponded. By email, mostly. We swapped poems. That’s all.’
‘I don’t believe you, Joss. You’re lying. Why on earth wouldn’t you meet, when you had a husband who was away conveniently so much of the time? A fool, you no doubt thought me, not seeing what was under my nose. And I was. Can’t deny it.’
‘You can believe what you like but it’s true. The reason I didn’t see him was so as not to hurt you. Not to hurt our marriage. I’d have thought you’d give me credit for that. We didn’t lay eyes on one another for more than a year. I did it because I loved you, you bloody fool.’
But he’s right in a way, she chided herself. I was unfaithful. Not seeing Gray didn’t make any difference. She realized that part of the illusion she preserved of her own innocence was the fact that Gray didn’t know her name. He’s in love with Lydia Quentin, she told herself sometimes. That’s not me. Not me in this house with a husband. That’s another woman altogether. A woman with feelings Joss doesn’t even acknowledge.
Would Bob know what ‘correspondence’ meant? She’d emphasized the email, but Gray wrote her proper letters too sometimes, sent to the library, which was the only address she’d given him. The only address she had for him was his hospital. He gave her gifts. Most of the small objects on her desk, her precious things, had come from Gray. She answered him on the most beautiful postcards she could find, always enclosed in an envelope. She used to picture him holding what she said in his hand, touching the card she’d touched, kissing it and then sitting down to answer her. When she read his letters, she could feel how much he loved her. We didn’t need to meet, she wanted to tell Bob now. There was so much emotion. So much passion. That was what had gone from her relationship with her own husband. She’d been at a strange time in her life, at the beginning of 2002. Zannah had left home and was going through all the trouble with Cal and Isis, darling Isis, was a toddler. When Zannah had got over the worst effects of her divorce and returned to London, Emily went with her, just about to start work. Suddenly, the house was empty and Joss turned more and more to her poetry.
She’d been writing it for years, but now, with more time and the house so often echoingly empty in the evenings and at weekends, she began to submit her poems to magazines and to enter competitions, which, to her surprise, she sometimes won. Then, she went to Fairford for the first time, and her life changed completely. She realized almost as soon as she met Gray that her love for Bob, though it was still there, had turned into something different from what she was feeling now. She’d forgotten what that kind of mad, exhilarated, lifted-in-the-air feeling was like. Looking at Bob now, she thought that perhaps their love had been buried: covered up by layer upon layer of habit which was probably normal after so many years of marriage.
With Gray, the padding of domestic life was missing, and passion was all she had. Every morning, she would hurry through getting the breakfast ready, making sure that Bob remembered to take his briefcase, his lecture notes, his car keys and then, when he’d gone, she’d rush upstairs to her study, turn on the computer and read the email she knew had been waiting there since the early hours. Gray always wrote very late at night. She always printed out the email and kept all the messages at the back of one of the drawers of her filing-cabinet. She read them so often that she could recite whole paragraphs by heart. As she worked at the library, as she walked through the rest of her life, she found herself unable to concentrate on anything but Gray, and having to make a huge effort to keep the real world – the world she lived in, the library where she worked, the shops she went to – everything else but him somewhere in a mental landscape that had become nothing but his face, his words, his love for her and hers for him. And yet she told herself that she was being good. She wasn’t being unfaithful, not really, and she congratulated herself on behaving well and not jumping into bed with someone she’d only just met.
‘What about the second time?’ Bob brought her back to the present. ‘Have you seen him since then?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Why not? Most people who’re unfaithful to their spouses manage to get away for a dirty weekend or even a quick shag in a hotel on the odd occasion, don’t they? Bit of illicit nookie in a motorway motel.’
Joss stared into her teacup. ‘I’m not most people.’
‘But you don’t deny you’re unfaithful, I notice.’ Bob pushed his fingers through his hair. ‘Did you sleep with him?’
She almost told another lie. Then the words came out before she had time to consider what she was saying. ‘Yes. Yes I did.’
Bob stood up and walked over to the window. Joss knew him well enough to realize that he was hurt. His back, his shoulders, slumped in a kind of defeat. He looked suddenly much older. Should she say s
omething? What could she say? If she kept quiet, would he ask her something she didn’t want to answer? She took a deep breath and spoke as gently as she could. Damage limitation. ‘It happened once. Bob. Only once, I promise. It was one night, more than two years ago. It didn’t mean anything.’
Oh God forgive me for such a lie. It had meant everything. It means everything. It’s governed every single thought in my head since it happened. She glanced at her husband to see whether he believed her. He was still staring out of the window. A silence stretched between them and Joss wondered what he’d say next. He couldn’t really object. There was the time, very soon after they were married when he’d confessed, tearfully and full of anguish, to a one-night stand while he’d been away at a conference in Istanbul. She’d almost, but not quite, forgotten the pain she’d felt at the time. She’d forgiven him because he’d begged for forgiveness and she was pregnant with Zannah and had a terror of her life, whose elements she’d constructed with such devotion, coming to pieces around her. She was someone who needed to keep things as they were. In the past, she’d regarded this as a positive quality, but now she considered it a character defect; a sort of cowardice.
‘If that’s the case,’ Bob said now, coming to sit beside her and taking her hand, ‘why were you so shocked to see him? How come you didn’t know his son was engaged to Zannah?’
How to explain their rules? Not knowing such basic things about one another would seem crazy if she were to try to explain it. She said, ‘Adrian’s surname is different. We just … we never discussed our home lives.’
‘Would have made you feel guilty, right? Okay, but if sleeping with him didn’t mean anything when it happened, then surely it has to mean less than nothing after all this time, right?’
‘It was the shock, that’s all. I never thought I’d see him again and then there he is, and his son’s going to marry Zannah. Adrian must be a stepson, I suppose. He’s going to be … he’s going to be family. I just … I couldn’t take it in.’