by Adale Geras
I’m a selfish bastard, he told himself. I had it all worked out. No one keeps house better than Maureen. She cooks as well as any chef. Wherever he looked, he saw a kind of beauty. The house was orderly, with not so much as a smudge on the wallpaper or a whisper of dust on the skirting-boards. She was a better gardener than any of that lot on TV. She was efficient. She kept track of his diary. She made sure his life ran like clockwork and that was something Graham needed. She knew he wrote poetry, but she left him well alone to do it, regarding it as a kind of indulgence, a silliness she forgave him. Maureen had, however, almost no claim on his heart. That had belonged to Lydia since the very first day he met her. Maureen didn’t even realize that his love had mostly been given to someone else. They still fucked often enough. More often, he thought, than other couples in their fifties, but she had no notion that behind his eyes, he was conjuring up Lydia’s pale face as it had been on that night, their one night together, when he’d actually considered how good it might be never to wake up and know what it was like not to be with her. His Lydia. The name he would always use, even though she was Jocelyn Gratrix. He went to the door. She’d be phoning him in half an hour. He had no idea what she’d say, but he had to see her. They needed to talk about this new situation. I’ll walk round the golf course, he told himself, me and my trusty adulterer’s phone. Maureen was at church. She wasn’t a bit religious but had a firm belief in the desirability of being the kind of person who was seen in a pew on Sunday and, what’s more, wearing better clothes than anyone else in the congregation.
*
‘Such a shame!’ said Edie Nordstrom, balancing a piece of tarte aux pommes on her fork before putting it into her mouth and munching it with her eyes closed to indicate pure pleasure, ‘ … that your guests never got a chance to taste this. Still, their loss is our gain. Your pastry’s divine, Charlotte. As usual.’
Edie was a small woman with sharp eyes and short grey hair, cut in a style she liked to think made her look like Judi Dench. The pinkish shade of her spectacle frames, together with a taste for the pastel in matters of dress, led people to think of her as a sweet old lady. Nothing, Charlotte knew, could have been further from the truth. Edie was stubborn, intelligent, kind and rather cynical. She trusted no one except her children, Charlotte, and Val. Even Nadia with whom they played cards and took tea, she regarded as slightly unreliable (because she was foreign by birth), even though she conceded she was ‘a good egg’. Charlotte had met her when she fell ill shortly after arriving in prison. Edie had been one of the youngest nurses in the sickbay, and did what she could to make the time her patients spent there both calm and pleasant. She thought of her charges not as criminals but as women who needed her help. Most of them were much older than she was, but even in those days she had a natural authority. She was, Charlotte thought, like Mary Kingsley, who in the nineteenth century had explored Africa and apparently used to subdue fierce animals with nothing more than a glance. She was also, in the modern phrase, non-judgemental. It wasn’t so much that she believed every single woman’s assertion that she was innocent. Many, she knew, were as guilty as hell but in Edie’s eyes that didn’t affect their humanity or their needs. She would have been happier if there were a category called something like, ‘Guilty but Justified,’ which described many of the women she had to deal with in prison. She’d done everything in her life with the minimum of fuss, marrying, having two sons and losing her husband in a slow, organized progress through the years. Nowadays, she spent much of her time fundraising for a local battered women’s refuge and it was she who made sure that jumble sales and whist drives were put on regularly to benefit it. She’d helped to found it in the early seventies and still took an active part in running the place, sitting on the steering committee and frequently ringing up the newspapers to give them opinions on many issues relating to violence in the family, whether they’d asked for them or not. She even appeared on the radio from time to time, and when she did, she always spoke clearly and with a precision that came as a surprise to those who had written her off as a sweet old thing.
‘Did you even get a chance to discuss things like the venue?’ Val Handley asked. ‘You have to start thinking about that months ahead, booking the church and so forth.’
She was sitting across the table from Edie and Charlotte, looking exactly like what she was: a middle-aged tomboy. At sixty-five, and because she was younger than her companions, Val refused to be categorized as ‘old’. She wore corduroy trousers in what Charlotte privately considered an unfortunate shade of beige, a brown and orange hand-knitted Fair Isle cardigan, and her dark hair (‘only about sixty per cent grey’ she maintained) was tied back in a girlish ponytail.
On Sundays, Edie went to church, Val spent the morning in the garden and Charlotte cooked lunch. Today there was enough food left over from the engagement party to feed all three women. Val was a romantic and almost as excited at the prospect of a wedding as Isis, in spite of her own experience of matrimony. She’d been married at a ridiculously early age to a domestic monster and only Charlotte and Edie knew how little she regretted his death, for which she’d served six years in prison. He’d been an optician in a small market town and had taken in everyone with his façade of respectability. Behind closed doors, though, he’d made Val’s life a constant torment. Everyone agreed on that, and she was very young, but the law was the law and this was in the days when desperately hitting out at an animal who repeatedly brutalized and beat you was not quite as sympathetically regarded. We’ve come a long way, Charlotte thought, looking at Val. She’d never have served a sentence like that nowadays. Mitigating circumstances. Today, someone like Val had people like Edie to help her and places like the refuge to run away to.
‘I think Mrs Ashton has some ideas,’ she said. ‘She mentioned wanting somewhere “suitable”. You can hire castles, she told me. She did strike me as the castle-hiring type. She’d want to make an impression.’
‘But the young couple, what do they want?’
‘Adrian will want what Zannah wants, unless his mother gets to him first. I don’t know them well enough to judge how much influence she has on him. Quite a lot, I suspect.’
‘I think,’ said Val, standing up, ‘that you ought to have a say, Charlotte. After all, you’ve been like a mother to Joss and a grandma to the girls. I know what I’d choose.’
‘It’s not your wedding, Val,’ Edie said quietly.
‘I know, I know. You should thank your lucky stars you didn’t see mine! Cold sausage rolls left over from the previous evening in the local pub and a family who looked like gargoyles in fancy dress. I should have known, shouldn’t I? That’s why I think – well, never mind.’
‘Oh go on, spit it out! You know you’ll tell us in the end.’
‘I think,’ Val said, ‘that we could put on a damn good show right here. In this house. The garden would look lovely. We could have a marquee.’
Charlotte nodded. ‘That’s occurred to me too, but young people nowadays have their own ideas, don’t they? I swore I’d never say that: young people nowadays, but I do. All the time.’
*
‘Don’t hang up, Lydia, okay?’ Gray said. He’d found a place where the reception was perfect and the silver phone had been pumping whatever ghastly radiation it possessed into his right ear for more than half an hour. Lydia, he knew, was on a landline, in the telephone kiosk she’d described to him in their emails. He also had a clear picture of her surroundings because she’d sent him photos of her kitchen, her study, her garden, the view from her windows. He’d offered to do the same but she’d refused. She wanted, she said, to think of him in an empty room in front of a blue screen. She wanted to know, to see, only his face, so he sent her pictures of himself which she deleted from her computer after, as she put it, learning them by heart.
‘Listen, just listen. I see why you’re cross.’ Wrong word. What could he call it? Hurt, wounded, devastated? ‘But listen. All the time I’ve known you, the worst thin
g, the very worst thing has been the thought of you and Bob together. And you have been, haven’t you? Go on. Tell me your married life hasn’t gone on exactly as normal. You can’t, can you?’
A silence hummed at the other end of the line. Gray continued, ‘There you are then. Now get this: all that time, I’ve had to live with images of him smiling at you, touching you, sharing jokes with you, brushing his teeth while you’re in the bath, eating breakfast with you, going to the movies with you, laughing with you, fighting with you and worst of all, in bed with you … nothing but torture. Constant torture. How would you have liked imagining me doing all those things? Which I’ve done, Lydia, make no mistake. All of them. I wanted to save you that, can’t you understand? I’m married to Maureen. We’re connected in ways that have to do with time and children: things you know about because they connect you to Bob. I wanted to be a single person in your mind. I just wanted to have a universe I could go into that had nothing but you in it. No one else. And I did. Whenever I thought of you, I knew you were thinking of me all by myself, just working and writing.’
‘I know.’ Her voice was not much louder than a whisper. ‘I realize you were protecting me, but now … I can’t bear the thought of you lying to me. Not trusting me to be grown-up enough to deal with the truth. Perhaps you’re right too. Now that I’ve met your wife, it’s hard to get certain pictures out of my mind. I know what you mean, Gray. But I can’t bear any of it any longer. All of it. And it’s worse now, because of Zannah and Adrian. I had no idea Adrian Whittaker was anything to do with you. Zannah didn’t mention that the surnames were different, though she did say his father was really a stepfather. I should have asked more questions, I suppose.’
‘He’s my stepson and I adopted him, but he chose his own father’s surname when he was a teenager.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’ve decided. We must stop everything. Now. At once.’
Gray nearly dropped the phone. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘Exactly what I’m saying. Nothing between us any longer. No emails, no letters, no poems. Nothing.’
‘I can’t do that, Lydia. I’d … I wouldn’t be able to.’
‘It won’t be easy for me either, but I’ve promised. I told Bob that we’d only meet as Zannah and Adrian’s parents in future. I’m not going to break my word.’
Gray closed his eyes. He spoke as reasonably as he could, although he was on the point of tears. He didn’t cry often and when he did, he regarded it as a kind of failure. He said, ‘And the promises you made to me? Don’t they mean anything to you?’
The silence at the other end went on for so long that Gray checked the reception. It was fine. He said, ‘Lydia, are you still there?’
‘Please call me Joss. Lydia’s just a pseudonym.’
‘It’s not just a fucking pseudonym!’ He was shouting now. If he managed to hold back tears, this was what often happened: an explosion of frustration and rage. ‘It’s my name for you. You were Lydia when I met you and that’s what you’ve been ever since. God, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. It’s as if it all meant nothing. You’re ready to give everything up. Everything we have … ’
‘What do we have, Gray, when you come down to it? Nothing. Words on a screen or on a page. Nothing real.’
‘It is to me! It’s real to me!’ Even though he was shouting, the tears were now dangerously close. ‘And it used to be real to you. Don’t pretend it wasn’t. What’s your husband done to you? Has he threatened you? Tell me.’
‘No, Gray. Nothing like that. But I can’t leave him and I can’t jeopardize my daughter’s marriage to your son.’
‘Stepson.’
‘You know what I mean. I’m not going to say a word to the girls. I don’t see that it’s any of their business. I’ve got to return to normal and I can’t do that if you’re still part of my life. That’s it, Gray. I’ve made up my mind.’
‘Please, Lydia. Please meet me just once. I have to see you again. I won’t be responsible for what I do if you refuse me … ’
‘Are you saying you’ll tell Adrian about us? That’s not worthy of you, Gray. I can’t believe you’d do something like that.’
‘I’m sorry. But please … don’t you have to come to London for something? Please.’
‘I do have to see my editor, that’s true. I could arrange something.’
‘Thank God. Next week, Lydia. I hate feeling like this. Next week?’
‘Okay. Okay.’ He could hear her sighing. ‘I’ll tell Bob I have to see Mal and that I want to chat to Zannah about arrangements. We did rather cut that short yesterday. Yesterday … God, it feels like a lifetime ago.’
‘I don’t care about anything, now you’ve agreed to see me. Walking on air. Email me, Lydia. Let me know which day. I’ve got to square it with work. I can’t wait … I can’t wait to see you.’
‘I haven’t changed my mind, Gray. I’m not getting back into what we used to do. It’s over. You’ll get one email from me telling you when I’ll be in London and that’ll be it. D’you understand?’
‘I’ll see you again. That’s what I understand.’
‘I’m going to ring off now. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye, my darling.’
Silence. More silence. Gray listened and heard nothing but the dialling tone. He turned to call history and deleted the call, which had used up most of the money on his phone. Never mind, only a few more days and then he’d see her. He’d be able to hold her. Kiss her. She’d relent when she saw him. She must. He could feel the blood moving more swiftly through his veins as he walked towards the car-park. Better get home before Maureen put lunch on the table.
*
‘So how did it go, then, the family get-together?’ Cal said.
‘Don’t ask. Really, don’t ask. I can’t go into it now.’ Zannah looked round and saw that they were alone. Emily was still in the shower and Isis was getting ready to go to Wimbledon Common with her father.
‘Bad as that, eh?’
Zannah did sometimes wonder at Cal’s tolerance. He was perfectly happy for her, it seemed, to go out with Adrian, to fall in love with him and now even to marry him. How come he didn’t loathe the very idea? How come he wasn’t even the least bit jealous? She could still bring back feelings of searing pain just thinking about Cal and his Russian lover and she wondered how long she’d have to be with Adrian before the pain disappeared completely. And however hard she tried, she found it impossible to dislike her ex-husband. Her college friends, her friends from home weren’t always available for confessions and discussions, so she relied on Claire and Louise, her fellow teachers. They’d become very close over the last couple of years. They sat in the staff-room at school and one of the things they often talked about was amicable divorce. The others didn’t believe in it, and maintained that the phrase was a contradiction in terms.
‘Wanting to strangle your ex goes with the territory,’ said Claire, who taught Year Four.
‘That’s my experience,’ Louise said firmly, and when Zannah objected that Claire was happily married and Louise far too young and still single so how could she possibly know what she was talking about, they shook their heads, tucked into their sandwiches and declared that it was a matter of observation. You only had to look around you and it was obvious to anyone who had more than two brain cells to rub together: when love died, that was it. You hated the person who’d let you down, and if you were the one who’d done the letting down it didn’t seem to make any difference.
‘I don’t hate Cal,’ Zannah told them. ‘Sorry. No one could hate Cal. Most people love him.’
They raised their eyebrows and muttered about ‘denial’. They were wrong. Cal Ford was lovable, and that was that. For two pins, Zannah thought, I’d pour out my heart to him right now and tell him about Ma and what happened yesterday and even pick his brains about wedding venues. He looked just the same as he always had: like a large, rather friendly dog. His brown hair was shaggy without actually covering his eyes
. They were brown too, and looked out at the world in a trusting way. He didn’t care about grooming, and although he practically lived in the shower, his clothes were haphazard and he wore them to keep him warm and cover him up. Zannah never failed to be amazed that a journalist on a national newspaper could be so ignorant about matters of design and fashion. Cal claimed he never registered advertisements even when they were right there in front of him, and when Zannah had chided him for his ignorance, he would shrug and smile and say, ‘Who gives a shit about the difference between Armani and Versani? Not me.’
‘Versace,’ Zannah had said, knowing it was useless.
‘Whatever,’ Cal would answer, waving his cigarette around and scattering ash all over the place. He was a smoker when they were first married and only gave up when Isis was born. Recently, she’d seen him smoking from time to time, although as far as possible never in front of Isis, who scolded him whenever she suspected he’d been at the fags.
‘Daddy, I’m ready!’ Isis rushed into the kitchen, her pink rucksack already on her back. ‘Let’s go. Now.’
‘Hang on a mo, Icey, I’m having a word with your mum. We’ll go in a minute, okay … oh, hi Em. You coming on a picnic with us, then? Go on. We’re going to Wimbledon Common.’
Emily’s smile, Zannah noticed, lit up her whole face. She couldn’t hide it. She was thrilled to bits to be asked to join them. Zannah knew about Em’s crush on Cal, even though she herself hadn’t said a word. She hadn’t needed to. Zannah had started going out with Cal when her sister was only sixteen and from the first time she’d laid eyes on him, it was obvious that she was besotted. She’d done quite a good job of hiding her feelings but they shone out of her eyes for anyone to see who was looking properly and Zannah was good not only at looking but at understanding what she was seeing. She’d been so in love with Cal back then, and he with her, that Emily’s crush didn’t worry them. She’d never been difficult or unpleasant about it. She didn’t go into a decline. She didn’t let Cal and Zannah’s marriage cramp her style and their parents’ house was always crowded with her admirers, boyfriends, hangers-on and cronies. Em’s crush was exactly the same whether she was going out with someone or not. At the moment, she had a collection of boyfriends, but no one she could ever be committed to. Zannah wondered if it was worth asking Adrian whether he knew anyone eligible, and decided it probably wasn’t. Her sister had very definite views.