So which season had she gotten up to? She figured spring was Oxford, when she first arrived in England, where she met Mark at the very end of her schooling, on the night of the May Ball. Jean imagined her family as in a Victorian calendar, little fairies, costumed in flowers of the season. Summer was all their life together—Victoria a petal-capped budding baby, sprouting from the center of a hand-painted rose—until St. Jacques, oddly. Not of course St. Jacques’ fault, but Giovana’s, who had banished Jean to still another island, from whose shores she could only wave and hope for rescue. And so, she supposed, without warning she’d begun the autumn of her life—Jean floating down, zigzagging to the ground on yellow leaves, as in the Yeats poem about first love ending, yellow leaves falling “like faint meteors in the gloom.”
The advent of Giovana had also brought a change of season for Mark—only he of course had gone the other way. Through her, he’d returned to spring, wasn’t that the idea? Rejuvenation—Mark’s long legs sketched as daffodil stems—through his elective realignment with a natural world in bloom. Why couldn’t he have tried gardening? The sky had turned a dense gunpowder gray—rain coming and, as usual, Jean had no umbrella. She glanced at her watch: plenty of time for a pit stop.
She pressed through Hatchards’ heavy brass-handled doors just as it began to come down in earnest. After half a year on print-scarce St. Jacques, her hands helplessly grazed the teetering fiction towers, the solid ramparts of history and biography, the table groaning with glossy cookbooks. Poor St. Jacques, where the finest print was a woodcut. She dropped her bag on the floor and picked up a heavy loaf of a recipe book, contented as if she was in a warm cake-scented kitchen, turning the thick satin pages of browns and creams and raspberry reds, until she was called away from the feast by a familiar voice.
“Well hello, Mrs. Hubbard…”
It was her college friend Iona Mackenzie, the other St. Hilda’s First in Law. More than two years had passed since they’d last met, also briefly and by chance. Iona looked the same: tall, erect, and narrow hipped, wavy black hair scraped back from a middle part. She was wearing a faded jean jacket lined with fur and carrying a big, dark brown leather bag—a thing so luscious it might have been poured from the pages of this cookbook. Jean eyed the bag and beheld in it all the temptations of the great city, and she nudged her own sorry sack under the display table with her boot.
“Iona. How great to see you—completely unchanged.” Mrs. Hubbard: was that for Old Mother Hubbard or just a dig at her having taken Mark’s name, unlike Iona, so insanely proud of her roots? Even if she’d only ever been to Scotland once a year, for “Hogmanay.” She leaned across the large book to kiss Iona’s cheek and saw behind her a little boy of about nine, with his mother’s wavy dark hair and blue eyes, climbing up and jumping off from the third step of the staircase she was never going to get to now. “That must be Robert,” she said, pleased she’d remembered a name.
“Torean, actually. Number four. Cry for help, right?”
Four? When had that happened? Jean felt the current of jealousy pass through her like an electric shock, sickening, but over in an instant. Cry for help, oh what a winsome remark, she thought irritably, pretty sure Iona Mackenzie had plenty of help. She was annoyed, too, by the nutria-lined jean jacket—“luxurious casual”: laborious cool. But she’d been close to Iona, especially that final year.
“Torean. Torean. Come and meet Mummy’s old friend.”
So, Old Mother Hubbard. Iona was clever but, Jean long ago decided, just too competitive for friendship. Which made no sense: she was the one who’d had the serious career. She’d been a successful solicitor in the City before she finally quit, with child number three, to devote herself to the school run. “Is it a crime to waste your talents?”—this was the question from their Moral Philosophy Final they’d rushed to affirm all those years ago. How would they answer it now?
“Robert’s headed for Edinburgh—a golfing scholarship of all things, it’s almost embarrassing. Though of course Dom is thrilled to bits, and, let’s see, Caitrionagh says she aced her prelims, modern history—Christ Church.”
“No surprise there—she always was the brightest of the bright,” Jean said, not wanting to volley with an update on Vic. Instead she asked after another Hildean, their friend Ellie Antonucci, now a costume designer in New York. “Speaking of Oxford, have you heard from Ellie?”
“Not only heard from but saw: with her gorgeous little boy. Yes—she’s got a baby, didn’t you know? A baby at our age, can you imagine? No man in the picture, of course.” Iona raised her eyebrows.
Jean knew Ellie was expecting but hadn’t heard the result. And now Iona’s smug expression made her furious. Looking away for a moment, she tried to get ahold of herself: why was she so petty and ungenerous, why was she overcome this way? Iona had been a good friend, and a rare friend—a peer but also an equal. She recalled their long afternoons in Oxford’s covered market, arguing passionately over toasted sandwiches about Rawls versus Dworkin, Nagel, and Dennett, about Language, Truth and Logic and Anarchy, State, and Utopia…
Suddenly Torean, jumping from five steps up, gave her a feeling she hadn’t had in years, one that used to nag at her like a hangnail: Where’s my handsome giant, where’s my son? Even semiemployed Ellie Antonucci, who famously didn’t have enduring relationships with men, had a son. When Vic was still little and Jean was questioned about further children, she’d reply that “Real estate is destiny,” and there was no room at the inn. In fact, her other pregnancies, and there’d been a few, had ended when the embryo failed to attach to the uterine wall. Victoria, it turned out, was a kind of miracle.
Torean was now leaping from the sixth step and causing consternation among the staff.
“Torie! Torean. Come here at once,” Iona called. The boy bounded over, hopping from foot to foot in huge steps, as if he was bravely crisscrossing an invisible live wire. Iona grabbed his shirt collar as he issued a karate kick in Jean’s direction. “Do you want to go home and straight to bed?” She practically lifted him off the ground from the neck. “Torean is off ill today. We were on our way to Fortnum’s for an ice-cream sundae.”
“How old are you, Torean, nine?” Jean asked, leaning toward him, admiring the gap where his front teeth should have been, and the dividing ridge on the gum like a seam pinched from Play-Doh. Torean slouched theatrically and sighed, letting his head roll back.
“Seven this week!” his mother answered for him, overlaying her weariness with something bouncy as the boy disappeared under the table.
“My goodness!” Jean said, knowing she sounded like someone who had never spoken to and possibly had never seen a child before.
“Yes, he’s enormous. They’re all monsters,” Iona said, leaning pointedly over the open book in Jean’s hands and snorting, theatrical like Torean, as if she’d caught her old pal with The Joy of Sex. “Mmmm,” Iona murmured, looking at a rococo violet syllabub. “Entertaining a lot?”
Jean couldn’t imagine ordering let alone making this velvety, occasion-streaked dessert. “Too heavy to carry back to Albert Street, never mind St. Jacques,” she said, setting the book down on the table. A curly dark head popped up between them, making Jean start.
“Look, Mummy!” he shouted, holding up Jean’s purse like a sack full of gold. “I found a funny old bag. Can I keep it?”
“That would be mine, that funny old bag,” Jean admitted, “or that would be me,” she said, glancing at Iona, wishing she wouldn’t unpeel his fingers quite so forcefully. Turning away from this mother-child tussle, she picked up the cookbook, opening at random to a recipe for pasta sauce made from leftovers—borsa della nonna, grandmother’s handbag. She imagined rough-crushed laxatives and floating tubes of Dentugrip with a sprinkling of biscuit crumbs. What would her own grubby sack yield, a blue coulis of sunblock and explodedpen ink? Jean was instinctively working up a joke to lighten the mood, but the spectacle of Iona manhandling her son made her just want to crawl back under
the table with him. Poor Torean, with his gapped mouth like a sandwich someone had taken a bite out of.
Even though she knew there was more to her old friend than what she was seeing now, she hated her. And she hated herself. She was bare bones: so reduced, she’d become a person who hated perhaps the best friend she could ever have. Then she saw Larry’s book in a stack near the cash register. She made for the pile, slightly overeager, and Iona followed her movements. “Oh yes, your old swain. I hear it’s wonderful.”
“Yes, it is,” Jean said proprietorially, though she’d barely cracked open her own copy. “Let me buy it for you.” She remembered their moral philosophy tutor. “In honor of Dr. Ernst Niestokel.”
“Kneestroker!” Iona shrieked. “He must be dead by now.”
Jean went to pay. “I’ve got to run,” she said. “Lunch with my editor.” She guessed Iona would be impressed by this, while she herself was merely downcast as she faced the second grim task on her list. Mackay was an old egotist and lech, but her unease went beyond the boredom of that to a niggling sense of her own false position. How could she once again sit though lunch, stirring up enthusiasm for her column, “Inside Out with Jean Hubbard”?
She was twenty minutes late to her date with Edwin Mackay, and she didn’t care. The moment she emerged from the revolving door into the restaurant she spotted him sipping peach juice at the bar: fatter, balder, but the unmistakable protuberant pucker—“Mrs. Moonlight with his D-cup lips,” according to Mark.
“Bellini?” he asked her, frog eyes popping. And D-cup eye-balls, she thought, with his prominent lower lids like a terrible balconette bra.
Two more Bellinis later—they were very small—Jean, who in Mackay’s presence was usually stripped of all ideas, found herself proposing a series of columns on gynecology. “My readers are all women, and this is the information they need. Men will read it for reasons of their own,” she added, just trying to bulk up her numbers.
Mackay was definitely leering at her now. Jean solemnly vowed she was never going to have lunch with him again. It was a mistake even to say the word “gynecology.” Made men like Mackay think of pussy, or would that be “minge”—her least favorite word for it. Every term was bad in its way, but this was the worst, with its suggestion of mean and dingy. For a moment she thought of Giovana, and how amazing it was that she didn’t know the sound of her voice but she knew her pubic coiffure: a trim little square, as dark and dense as an After Eight Mint.
She looked away from Mackay—scanning for help among her immediate neighbors. Pussy, she thought again, as she absorbed the group of curvy women at the next table—all young and provocatively dressed—arranged around a hideous man in dark glasses. Professionals, Jean assumed, since power alone couldn’t deliver those bodies to that face. This tableau gave her an idea for a different series altogether, on the seven deadly sins, several of which she’d researched already: lust, anger, envy, pride.
Mackay, stupidly chewing, briefly flickered with life at this suggestion. “Great idea,” he said. “I like a bit of sin.” Which was just as well, because Jean thought the series might be her last.
For recently, following her meeting with Bruce McGhee at the Captive Breeding Center, she’d offered a serious British newspaper an article about the vanishing kestrel population on St. Jacques. The editor was keen, and over lunch with Mackay this boost gave her a steady charge of inner power. Like the frisson of adultery, she couldn’t help thinking: having something up your sleeve, something you didn’t share, helped you to endure the daily grind. If the paper published the piece, she could move on from Mrs and from Mackay, who over nearly twenty years had been her principal sponsor—the guardian, however implausibly, of her independence. But she wasn’t quite ready to quit. Before they’d gone to St. Jacques she’d overheard Mark’s deputy at the Christmas party, dispensing sound advice to a young employee who wanted to try her luck as a dancer: “Don’t quit the day job.” He was probably right. But how, in your spare time, were you ever going to find out if you were a dancer? Was it a crime, or maybe a sin, to waste your talents?
“One sin a month. From the health point of view,” she added helpfully, thinking she could do both: the column and the kestrels, a little moonlighting from Mrs. Moonlight. Mackay probably never even looked at a paper that wasn’t a tabloid. She would use her own name, Warner, never mind if her own agent said she was “Jean Hubbard or nobody.”
Although borsa della nonna was sadly not on the menu, Jean was pleased to see that her penne e formaggio al forno—basically macaroni and cheese, or what Phyllis used to call Kraft dinner—cost £22.50. She couldn’t leave before coffee, so she was going, instead, to order a serious dessert: the chocolate cappuccino mousse (£16.50). When it arrived, she remembered Iona’s marvelous bag. Awash with fresh regret over her missed chance in the bookstore, she longed to get beyond the force field of mousse-smooth goods and even of old friends. She couldn’t wait to be back with her daughter, at home in Camden Town, where pink hair was still cool and a feedbag might do for funky.
Outside it was raining hard, but nothing could make her linger. Mackay had just failed to tip the coat-check girl and was now blinking and working his arms into a too-small trench coat; he looked like a seagull trying to lift up out of an oil spill. Jean, stepping into the revolving door, could almost feel the willpower it cost him not to press in behind her, and when she turned to say good-bye, holding her coat over her head against the rain, she saw in his bulging eyes the commensurate will to reward his self-control—with a fat wet kiss smack on her lips. A fat wet kiss followed by fat wet tongue. It was over before she could protest, and she ran down Albemarle Street screaming and waving at the wonder of a free black cab, vowing that she wouldn’t allow herself to think about it again, ever.
And she vowed that if the newspaper published her kestrel piece she would quit her job, whatever came next. She’d finally grasped this dangerous fact: Mrs wasn’t just a dull, successful formula magazine with a pervy, pea-brained editor; it was the perfect expression of the calcified mind-set of its prize columnist. She had to stop being this Mrs. She knew Iona and Ellie would wonder why she didn’t just confront Mark. But they didn’t love him. It was easy to be righteous; what was hard was loving people, even when they were so unlovable. Wouldn’t she go on loving Victoria if she forged her mother’s checks, or ran a brothel out of Albert Street, or secretly converted to Hinduism and married her boyfriend in Mumbai? Wouldn’t she herself hope to be forgiven, and still loved?
But maybe Mark yearned less for return than for liberation. Maybe you could love someone and yet wish for that—freedom. Or maybe she’d forgive him, to their mutual great relief, only to find, unhappily, that the ghost of Giovana was as robust and toxic as her rumor had been… Basically, my friends, Jean said to her imaginary critics, there’s nothing here you can eagerly assent to. With uncharacteristic clarity she understood that—one way or another—when she did confront him, and breathe life into the phantasmagoria of Giovana, their marriage would be over. Of course she resisted final confirmation of Mark’s betrayal; of course she preferred her shred of doubt, real and instinctive as loving him, and she clung to it, smoothed it with her flattened palm, wrapped herself in it each night, and each night, as she didn’t need her friends to tell her, it covered her a little less.
The cab rolled through the rain, and Jean, desperate for air and a good sluicing, pulled the window down and leaned her face out, helplessly recalling that long-ago christening of the office-house with Mark, the roof’s standing ovation in a downpour.
Jean was so spent and bedraggled by the time she got to Mark’s office, an entire building in a lane behind Clerkenwell Green, she couldn’t believe she agreed to go with Dan “down the pub.” But he greeted her as she stepped out of the cab, opening an enormous orange umbrella over their heads like a sun—how did you say no to that? He took the updated drawings from her, tossed them onto the polyp-shaped reception desk, and locked the office door behind
him. He threw his heavy key chain up into the air, and then backhandedly caught it, ringing in the weekend.
All those keys, Jean thought, taking the arm he offered as they set off down the street. Dan was, she knew, much trusted. She thought she might talk to him about Giovana. Not talk exactly, and not confide—just somehow air the subject. He could tell her the weight a thing like this had for Mark: the male point of view. But then she remembered, her body temperature precipitously rising, she’d already given Dan the male view of Giovana, that day in the Internet café…and silently she fell into step.
“I’ve never understood why pubs insist on squelchy beersoaked carpets instead of washable boards, like in American bars,” Jean said, unpeeling her sodden mac. “But it sure is snug in here.” With its patterned, deep red wall-to-wall and the afternoon fire casting a glow over the room that they had, for just a while longer, to themselves, the Hope and Anchor was indeed enchanted.
Dan just smiled. “What can I get you?”
Already collapsed into a high-backed sofa near the fire, Jean surprised herself by ordering a half-pint of shandy. It was what she used to drink with Mark at the country pubs around Oxford, the Perch, and the Trout, in those carefree weeks after Finals, before she was banished to New York. They’d cycle out of town for lazy lunches, then spend the afternoons reading in the long grass at Port Meadow, sprung forever from the library.
She stretched her arms and legs while Dan went to get the drinks. She’d checked two feared appointments off her list: Scully, who if he was alarmed didn’t show it, and Mackay, whose revolting performance was a blessing because she was now determined to free herself from him. And she had at least parted from Iona without revealing the miasma of her soul. She’d crossed London in the rain to deliver Mark’s work for him, and soon there would be dinner, just her and Vic. Tomorrow was Saturday—finally, she could relax.
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