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by Robert Barnard

  “I suppose you resented that?”

  “A little. I did try not to. It was an exciting time in other ways because you were born in Crossley, and quite soon after that we bought the house, with help from May’s father, and May was enormously enjoying her new job.”

  “Taking over a lot of the headmistress’s work.”

  “Yes. When May became deputy head, which was quite soon after we arrived. Evelyn made no bones about that, and it suited May, preparing her for what she always wanted: a headship of her own somewhere or other. You can’t believe Evelyn Southwell on everything—couldn’t, I suppose I should say—but she never hid the fact that she loved teaching and despised administration. You were probably too young to remember her. You were named after her, you know.”

  “She’s still alive, by the way. I met her recently,” put in Eve.

  “Really? Lucky old Evelyn. She’s done better than May. By the way, she and May genuinely liked each other at first, though May would giggle a bit behind her back at her ways and all her little dramas.”

  “Did the liking cease when Jean Mannering came along?”

  “Ah, so you know about her. Yes, that was roughly the turning point. I can’t even remember how they met. Some kind of ‘do’ in Crossley, or Halifax perhaps. Or did May give her a lift in the car?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “Anyway she clicked immediately with May, who from then on was full of admiration for her—loved her differentness, her sense of adventure, her love of saying and doing outrageous things.”

  “Jean was much younger than May, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes, by several years. But even so, somehow, she always seemed to be the leader.”

  “Were you jealous?”

  John shifted in his chair and frowned.

  “Common sense suggests that I probably was. Certainly I became jealous. But in the early stages, as I remember it, I was mostly amused. You know Jean was a lesbian? I knew May was not lesbian, though she found the idea of it attractive. I also knew that behind Evelyn Southwell’s relationship with May there was a strong lesbian impulse.”

  “Evelyn’s?”

  “Oh yes. Didn’t you get it? You say you’ve met her.”

  “Oh yes. We’ve talked.”

  “Well, maybe the fires have burned themselves low by now. But look at the situation: May is a new teacher in a new school, and almost at once she gets loaded with administrative work that was not just donkey work but often quite important stuff. The fact that she did it brilliantly, the fact that everyone recognized May as future headmistress material, are neither here nor there. The fact is, the situation was very unusual, could have aroused real jealousy, and was sometimes downright irregular. It was favoritism of the usual kind, based on sex. Evelyn wanted her favorite to be recognized as a star. Evelyn fancied her rotten, though it was in the balance whether she would risk her position, and May’s, by proposing any physical relationship.”

  “Which way did the balance go?”

  “Toward ‘no.’ But that may be because Jean had come into the picture.”

  Eve thought for a time, and in the silence John slipped out and brought in prawns.

  “Evelyn said she ditched her husband because she couldn’t bear him near her,” said Eve. “And she was very scathing about how May’s work went downhill as soon as she got involved with Jean.”

  “That was a downright lie,” said John, popping a prawn into his mouth. “I know that. People were always full of praise for the way May did her double job. That’s how I knew the job would always come first—was the thing she prized most. That hurt, perhaps more than the business with Jean.”

  “You thought that the job came before her marriage?”

  John pondered this.

  “Well, it wasn’t quite like that. But after a year or two in Crossley, the marriage wasn’t going well. May was getting her most pleasurable hours with Jean, not with me. I was getting mine with you. It was a rotten situation. The basis of the marriage was crumbling under our feet.”

  As John changed their plates and doled out spaghetti and sauce, Eve thought about the situation in the house, which she now lived in, or camped in, when she was hardly more than a baby.

  “Jean says there was never a physical relationship between them,” she said as they settled down over their food. John pulled a face.

  “I suspect she was lying. So you’ve talked to her too? What’s she like now?”

  “Not quite the original and energetic soul everyone paints her as when they talk about her thirty years ago. But then, who is? She’s got into religion, by the way.”

  “Really? Well, that I never would have suspected. But religion gets a hold on the most curious people. Rupert Murdoch, for example . . . I suspected at the time that they did sleep together but that May found it—how shall I put it?—irrelevant, neither exciting nor disgusting but beside the point. She was interested in the friendship, that was where the life and the vigor of the relationship lay. In any case it’s pretty irrelevant now. The important point is that Jean was young, hot and very determined. She realized that as long as May remained a teacher, particularly in a small Yorkshire town, there was no question of an open relationship. But she was determined, if she could, to destroy May’s and my marriage, to make herself the central, dominant figure in May’s life and to gain the nearest thing possible to the open relationship she craved. Me out of the way, and of course with the child, you, remaining with the mother, as went without saying then—it was to be the perfect little family group, from her point of view.”

  Eve meditated on the picture. It seemed to make sense, though perhaps more with the young Jean of popular report than with the older Jean she had met. Perhaps religion had wrought change.

  “So how did she take May along with her?” she asked. “I don’t believe my mother would go along with anything underhand or crooked.”

  “May didn’t know. That’s the whole point of the story: the biter bit. When May found out what Jean had done, she assured me she was utterly shocked. She broke with Jean forever.”

  “Yes, I heard that, though Jean assured me it was just a natural wastage of friendship over time. So what did Jean do? This was on the weekend when you and May were both away, separately, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. I went straight to Glasgow as usual early Wednesday morning, leaving a note for May with my London hotel’s phone number on it. After my usual two days, which was in fact a day and a half there, I flew down to London. The reason I went there was that I had been offered an interview with the editor of the Observer.”

  “A job interview? As their cartoonist?”

  “No, just an interview. I’d approached them, they were responding. Perhaps they were just being kind. When I had the interview, on Friday, early evening, the editor said they could be interested long term, at some time in the future. But he felt my recent stuff had lost a lot of the punch and energy of the earlier work I did for the Tribune. It was exactly what I thought myself, but depressing to hear it from someone else. It was a helpful interview though, it set me thinking how I’d lost a lot of the brio of my earlier political stuff. Was this a normal stage of growing up? Was I getting stale? Or was I just out of things, away from the action? I tried to ring May, who was in Birmingham, but she wasn’t in the hotel room. I never managed to contact her that evening.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I got a phone call in my hotel room. I’d had a couple of drinks, but any fuzziness cleared the moment I heard the voice. It was Jean Mannering. I thought, Watch it!”

  “Why?”

  “She’d been encroaching for months. Making decisions about Eve—sorry, you, my dear—getting the keys to the house, making unusual calls on May (calls she usually resisted, I may say). Now she started off: ‘Listen very carefully, John. You’re going to have to make a big decision.’”

  “She sounds as if she was power crazed.”

  “Do you think so? I don’t think she was e
ver crazed. She went on: ‘You must know by now, John, that your marriage with May is over. She’s bored, you’re in a rut. Did the Observer offer you a job today, by the way?’ ‘No, they didn’t.’ ‘You see? You’re in a rut. You need a great big change in your life. Here’s the offer. If you go to Heathrow early tomorrow morning, you’ll find waiting for you a single ticket to Australia, all paid for.’ I just laughed and said: ‘Manna from heaven! What if I said “I’d rather die?”’ She said: ‘In effect, you have no choice. I know you can go. You have your passport.’ That was in my note to May. She had started to annoy me. ‘Is this some conspiracy with May?’ I demanded. Because we’d discussed the need for a warmer climate, and I’d told her I might take off for a month or two to Majorca. I didn’t like the thought of Jean reading my notes to May, but I liked the idea of my future being discussed between them even less. ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Jean. ‘But I’m sure she’d sympathize.’ I blew up: ‘May is much too sensible to sympathize with nonsense like this. And bullying like this. We’ll solve our problems in our own way and time.’ And then it came out.”

  “What?”

  “The clincher. The reason I had no choice. Jean said: ‘If you don’t get on that plane, the ten thirty BA flight 674 to Sydney, the police will be informed that in your house there is a rich collection of explicit pornography involving underage girls.’”

  Eve stared at him.

  “But I don’t understand. Why—”

  “I said: ‘There is no such collection,’ and Jean said: ‘There is now.’”

  “She’d put a collection of pornography in the house?”

  “Oh yes. You can see how she could have got hold of one. One branch of lesbian taste and one branch of male hetero taste for once coinciding.”

  “But it wouldn’t have your fingerprints on it.”

  “In a way absence of fingerprints would be as suspicious as the presence of them. It would show that I knew what I was doing was illegal. And of course it still is. People caught downloading such stuff from the Internet get caught routinely and jailed for quite long periods.”

  “But I still don’t see—”

  “Think about it. Jean was trading on the fact of my tenderness for May and my pride in her achievements. Where would her career as a primary school highflier be if her husband was arrested for possessing explicit pornography involving little girls? Even continuing to employ her would involve terrible publicity and an orchestrated public outcry from parents and an orgy of righteousness from the tabloids. My career would be in tatters, especially if I was jailed. That cartoonist with the series about the McTavishes. Just a dirty old man at heart. And with children! Little girls! London in the seventies may still have been swinging, but I can tell you Glasgow was much less swinging, and Edinburgh never swung at all, except at festival time, rather genteelly. Oh, she was clever, was Jean. She chose just the right thing that would ruin both May and me.”

  “I’m beginning to see. So what did you do?”

  “I hemmed and hawed, I accused her of all sorts of things (with good reason and good evidence), but in the end, as she said, there was no choice. I said ‘I’ll be on that plane,’ and next morning I was, with what I stood up in, a change of underwear and shirt, and that was about it. I knew our marriage was crumbling anyway, and I couldn’t ruin May’s career to keep it going for a few months. We had no future. The fact that May had brought our marriage to the brink of disaster by associating with a ruthless little pirate like Jean only made me more convinced I had to move on. Leaving you was the hardest thing of all, but I couldn’t stay with you without ruining May and myself. Next morning I got the first underground train to Heathrow, collected my ticket and got on the plane.”

  “Do you think you were watched?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t even think about it. Maybe Jean knew someone at Heathrow. Maybe she got in her car—alone or with a friend—and went down to keep watch herself and make sure I got on. It would be like her: she loved action, the chase, doing unusual things herself.”

  “Why do you mention a friend?”

  “Because all the time during the phone call, I could hear voices in the background, and all of them were women’s voices. I wondered if she was ringing from the club for lesbians that met in Halifax every Friday. Sapphonics, they called it. But I’ve no reason to think she had an accomplice.”

  “One thing: you mention Jean possibly driving down herself. She and May met when May offered her a lift. What was Jean doing by the time your marriage split up?”

  “Oh, she’d left the tax office and gone into business—got a nice little job with a textile firm, a well-paid job. She had a little sports car, bright red and zippy.”

  “And now she’s gone into the church. I wish I could understand Jean.”

  “I wish I’d understood her, back then. I must say that if she’s gone into the church in the sense I think you mean, the Church of England has changed a hell of a lot since I lived in England.”

  John cleared away the plates, and they by tacit agreement changed the subject. They talked about Australia, how he had come to love it, how his style of cartooning had changed, how the jokes had become more vitriolic as he had come to hate Australian politicians, how the sacking of Gough Whitlam soon after he arrived had made his name as a political cartoonist and he had never looked back. He was enormously chuffed that Eve had seen and liked his initial reaction to the sacking.

  “To think it’s led you to me! . . . But I always did love a political earthquake. Even now, when a new scandal is brewing, my cartoon finger starts itching and soon some newspaper or other phones me up and offers me nice little sums to return to the fray.”

  “And you do,” said Eve.

  “Yes, I do. I can’t resist.”

  Later he and Eve walked back to the Ocean View, and he kissed her on the step of her room. She felt unusually happy, and was sure her body told her that he was happy too, that a change had come over his life, in its last phase, that was infinitely to his taste.

  Going to bed, Eve had a sense of having been made whole.

  CHAPTER 11

  Four Score and Five

  The rest of the week was for Eve a time of the sharpest pleasures she thought she had ever known. First she was shown the coast by one who knew it better, in more closely observed detail, than most natives of the area knew it. Then they drove—Eve drove—down to Sydney, and she was shown, again, things that only an artist—sometimes only a satirical artist—would know about and appreciate. The spring sun was warm, the occasional breeze was welcome, and the days passed in happiness, community of tastes, and endless new experiences in food, in animals and vegetation, in people and their habits and assumptions. John was showing off his Australianness.

  “You must come again, and properly,” said John. “And bring your Indian boyfriend.”

  “I’m not sure he could get away. Policemen always seem to get their leave canceled at the last moment. Anyway, would he be allowed in?”

  “If he’s got a British passport, he shouldn’t have any difficulty.”

  Eve screwed up her face.

  “Imagine the awfulness of making the flight, being turned away by immigration, then having to do it backward.”

  “It wouldn’t happen. Anyway you could make damned sure in advance that it wasn’t going to happen.”

  “You’re ignoring the fact that planes fly in the other direction. Have you never had an urge to see the places that you knew again?”

  John shook his head violently.

  “I can honestly say no. Or not since the early months out here. To tell you the truth, it was the last months back there that made me ready for a completely new start, and that’s what happened. I’ve never wanted to retrace my steps.”

  “It’s not the police, is it? Surely once you were out of the country, Jean would have retrieved the pornography and the police would never have been involved.”

  “No, it’s not the police. It’s nothing about England.
It’s about me.”

  The subject of John’s departure from England and Eve’s life there came up now and then, but casually, a matter of detail, rather than anything central or vital. One time when they were talking about the McNabbs’ early years in Crossley, Eve asked John who would know most about them.

  “Is George Wilson still alive? May’s colleague at the school?” he asked.

  “Yes, he was at the funeral.”

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “A bit.”

  “Try again. He’s not a gossip by nature, but he’s quiet and trustworthy and he gets told things. He was devoted to your mother, and he might be willing to pass on what he knows to you. It’s worth a try.”

  Another time, Eve never could remember how, the subject of Jean Mannering’s family background came up.

  “Her parents kept the general store in Crossley. I suppose these days you’d call it a corner shop.”

  “These days there isn’t such a thing in Crossley. Everyone goes to the supermarket two miles out of the village.”

  “Anyway, they more or less showed Jean the door.”

  “Like the Menzies figure in your cartoon?”

  “Not quite. There was no illegitimate child, of course, and they didn’t say they never wanted to see her again. They just said they didn’t want her living there. People criticized them a lot about that. Rumors were going around about Jean’s sexual tastes, and some of the more liberal minded said they were punishing her for being lesbian. I don’t think it was that at all.”

  “What do you think it was?”

  “I think the Mannerings were fed up with being organized, told what to do, dragooned into doing it. Jean was incurably bossy. More bossy than May. Give her a friend, show her a colleague, and Jean would turn them into underlings. Maybe she’s changed, but I doubt she could.”