by Jo Verity
‘Who are they?’ she said, although she already knew.
‘Ava and Pearl, my wife and daughter. What d’you think?’ He might have been showing her a picture of his new car.
You’ve abandoned me twice, that’s what she thought. What hope she’d had of his coming back to save her had been snatched away by this Ava and Pearl.
‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ she said.
‘I needed to do it in person,’ he said. ‘That’s why I came.’
‘So why haven’t you?’
‘I had this crazy idea that they’d have mellowed. Dream on, as they say.’
‘You will tell them though?’
‘After all that stuff about “outsiders” and funny-smelling food?’ he said. ‘Can you imagine their reaction? No. They don’t deserve to know.’
‘So why are you telling me?’ she said.
‘In case anything happens to me. It’s important that someone knows Danny Edlin has a wife and child.’
‘You’re unbelievable,’ she said. ‘You’ve dumped your secret on me and now you’re going to disappear again. Can’t you see what an impossible position this puts me in?’ Her anger flared. ‘You’re selfish and cowardly. Fuck off back to America. I’ll be fine.’
Danny left and, overnight, her parents aged ten years. It had been bad the first time but lingering somewhere in the background had been the hope of reconciliation. This time there was none. His absence tainted the household with the bleakness of bereavement. Indeed there were times when she wished he had died. At least then they could have talked about him. Because they didn’t. Not to her anyway.
The new neighbours – a middle-aged couple – moved in. He was a bank manager and she did ‘good works’ of some kind. They kept themselves to themselves and Miriam wasn’t aware of any weird cooking smells coming from the house. Despite this, her parents treated the world as an increasingly hostile place. Everyone, and everything, was conspiring against them. They went out only when it was necessary. Her mother fretted about every little thing. Their conspicuous misery piled pressure on her to be a dutiful child. To compensate for their prodigal son. It wasn’t fair. Nevertheless, she did her best to please them because, in spite of everything, she loved and pitied them.
Frankie dyed her hair the colour of Ribena and moved on from Gregg to his crew-cutted friend, Andy. Most afternoons she went straight from school to Andy’s flat which meant the two girls rarely walked home together. Frankie had stopped pretending she was nineteen and Andy was doing his best to persuade her to leave school. The friends’ worlds were diverging. But Miriam’s life was made bearable by Bing.
As she grew more dependent on him, her parents’ opposition became even stronger. He wasn’t welcome in their house; they didn’t like it when she went to his. They dreamed up reasons why she must stay in, or why she had to be home early. She became convinced they were spying on her, sneaking in to her room looking for clues of… what she wasn’t sure. She took to leaving her desk drawer slightly open, not sure whether she was pleased or not to come home and find it as she’d left it. They said mean things about the Crosby family’s ‘bohemian’ lifestyle hinting that, by associating with them, she was risking her reputation.
Had the Crosbys treated her like that she would have given up, but Bing took it on the chin. ‘They’re vile to you,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why you bother with me.’
‘Well, whatever they say and whatever they do, I’ll keep turning up.’
When life at home became intolerable, she dreamed of joining Danny in America. After the bust up with her parents, he’d disappeared without saying goodbye, but when she opened Middlemarch she found a sheet of paper with his address (964, Harding Street, Fairfield, CA – she’d committed it to memory before destroying the evidence) and the sentence ‘For your eyes only.’ She’d resisted for a whole month before writing to him. Her letter was short – a bit about school and her new Joni Mitchell album. In a PS she’d added ‘best wishes to Ava and Pearl’. She’d used Frankie’s address in the hope he would reply. But she’d heard nothing.
End-of-year exams done, the freedom of summer stretching ahead, she and Bing were foraging for raspberries in the Crosbys’ jungle of a garden. The day was humid, the air alive with flying insects. Bing’s T-shirt was stained with raspberry juice. His hair, damp with sweat, was curling at the nape of his neck and, in that instant, she was overwhelmed with love for him.
‘Here.’ He was holding a perfect raspberry between his thumb and forefinger. When she opened her mouth, he dropped it on to his own tongue and they came together in a raspberry-flavoured kiss.
The garden baked in the sultry heat and before long they were lying on the grass, hidden from the house by a dense box hedge.
This was the right time.
Her father arranged for her to spend August with his sister, Adele, in Boston. Most girls would have given their eye teeth for such an opportunity but Miriam had reservations about spending a month away from Bing. Her parents behaved as if in agreeing to go she’d done something clever and as a reward they bought her several outfits and a new suitcase. Their being so keen to send her to the same place as their missing son was bizarre. She’d checked the map. Thousands of miles separated Boston from Fairfield but at least she’d be on the same landmass as Danny – assuming he still lived in America. (He never replied to her letters.)
On the day before she left, she and Bing made love three times. Her parents thought a crowd of them were hiking to the local reservoir. His parents were at work and his sisters who were somewhere in the house failed to notice what was going on. (‘They’re probably up to the same thing,’ he said.)
Her aunt and uncle couldn’t have been kinder. And her cousins – older than she – went out of their way to include her in whatever they were doing. She did all the right things. Saw a baseball game at Fenway Park. Drove around in an open-topped car. Drank milk shakes, played tennis and went to the ‘movies’. The weekend after she confessed to a passion for The Great Gatsby – the book and the man – they drove her the two-hundred-odd miles to Long Island. She missed Bing. But there was so much going on she didn’t have time to mope.
Bing demanded to hear every detail of her stay in Boston and she found herself underplaying it, not wanting him to think that she’d had too good a time. He kept returning to the boys she’d encountered while she was there. Worrying away at it. Names. Descriptions. Whether any of them had tried to get off with her. This irked her and culminated in their first ever falling out.
‘You said you didn’t mind my going,’ she said.
‘I didn’t think I would.’
‘Don’t you trust me?’ she said.
‘Of course I do. I just can’t bear to think of you even speaking to another man.’
‘That’s ridiculous. In a few weeks you’ll be in London and I’ll be in Manchester. How’s that going to work if we don’t trust each other?’
‘Don’t rub it in. The moment you’re out of my sight, I know some bastard will snap you up.’
‘You don’t have much faith in me, do you?’ she said. ‘Besides if we’re going down that route, I could point out that you’ll be spending your life examining naked women. Prodding and poking their breasts and fannies. How d’you think that makes me feel?’
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘Oh, I see. I’m being daft and you’re being rational.’
Without waiting to hear any more she ran home and spent a miserable afternoon in her room. When her mother called her for supper, she said she wasn’t hungry.
Around seven-thirty the doorbell rang and, recognising Bing’s voice, she hurried to the top of the stairs. He was in the hall and her father was telling him that she was in bed, unwell and unable able to talk to him. Bing was wearing a suit and had a perfect parting in his hair. Aside from the bunch of daisies in his hand, he looked as if he were on his way to a job interview. He glanced up and gave her a tentative smile, and with that her exasperation dissolv
ed. In a moment of recklessness, with her father looking on, she planted a kiss on Bing’s freshly shaven cheek. So there.
Her mother gave her a notebook with family recipes and instructions for washing woollens. Her father coached her on the correct way to write a cheque and clean her shoes, and warned of the repercussions of attending student demonstrations. When neighbours asked if she were looking forward to university, she murmured assent, and put the whole business out of her mind.
Their parting had been a mirage, flickering on the horizon. If they mentioned ‘leaving home’, it was as if it were going to happen to two characters from a book but when a cabin trunk appeared in the spare room, and a cheque book addressed to Miss Miriam Edlin turned up, there was no escaping the reality. They would be living two hundred miles away from each other. (She’d checked in her father’s AA book.) They would spend weeks and weeks apart. And this would continue for years and years. University felt like a punishment not an opportunity.
Bing’s term started a week before hers. They’d planned a romantic ‘last evening’ but, due to a last-minute crisis at the surgery, his parents had to drive him up to London a day early. They ended up saying goodbye on the pavement outside the Crosbys’ house, whispering pledges of love whilst his father packed his stuff into the boot of the car.
They exchanged explicit letters which they wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to read. Miriam kept hers in a wooden box, its lid inlaid with mother-of-pearl. She read them, in chronological sequence, every night when she got into bed, wallowing in the misery of separation, tears boosting their potency.
It became obvious that letter-writing didn’t come easily to Bing. He struggled to find new ways of saying that he missed, loved and desired her. As the weeks rolled by, she couldn’t escape the fact that his letters were becoming repetitive. When a letter arrived, she scanned it for something fresh, informative. An account of his meals. Or a description of a lecturer. An amusing or bizarre incident – he was a medical student, for heaven’s sake. Most of all she longed to hear that he hated his course and his fellow students. But he rarely touched on these matters. I miss you, Mim. I love you. I can’t wait to make love to you. Yes. She knew all that. There must be things he wasn’t telling her. Parties he’d been to, people – girls – he’d met. How readily doubts crept in when they relied on words to convey complex feelings.
They lived in halls. There was a system for phone calls but it involved Bing ringing the warden’s office where the minion on the switchboard directed the call to the correct floor. From there on it relied on a random inmate picking up the phone and coming to find her. A similar process applied when she phoned Bing. If the phone outside her room rang, Miriam always picked up. But there had been the odd occasion when, on discovering it wasn’t Bing, she’d replaced the handset, depriving some poor girl of her phone call. When they did make contact, their conversation – a succession of tentative questions, halting answers and miserable silences – petered out in peep-peep-peep as the money ran out.
Half way through the term, she went to London. The journey was time-consuming. A chunk of her grant went on a new dress – he said he liked her in blue – but, surrounded by his worldly friends, she felt overdressed, provincial. The visit had been arranged for weeks, yet he seemed surprised when she turned up. He asked what she wanted to do, where she wanted to go. She’d been to London only twice before and could suggest nothing, and they wasted hours drifting aimlessly and irritably, spending money they could ill afford. Bing persuaded one of his friends who lived in a flat, to let them sleep there. Their bed was a couch in the living room. She had nowhere to leave her things, nowhere private to undress. The others in the flat looked at her as if she were an exhibit in the zoo. It was humiliating and uncomfortable and, to be honest, she was relieved when her train pulled out of Euston.
They limped on towards the end of term, Miriam hanging on to the hope that things would revert to normal once they were on home ground. She’d read that soldiers returning from battle were reluctant to talk about their experiences. To begin with, they were like that – not knowing how to pick up the threads; each shielding the other from something they wouldn’t understand. But within days they were back in step. Miriam was re-absorbed into the familiar chaos of the Crosby household, whilst her parents made no attempt to conceal their displeasure that she and Bing were still together. They spent hours in his bedroom, ‘listening to records’. (This fooled no one. More to the point, it shocked no one, and Angus Crosby proved this by leaving a bumper pack of condoms on Bing’s bedside table.)
There were Christmas parties and New Year parties with the old crowd from Betty’s. Little Pete, Barbara, Colin, Judith – they’d all changed a little but the changes were tempered with affection. She even felt warm towards Emms – although that might have been the cider. And there was Frankie, when she wasn’t busy with her new man. Friends were as good as family. Certainly easier. She had nothing to prove and that was a great relief.
Then term started, and the whole thing lurched off kilter again.
Part III
9
‘Come in,’ SHE SAID.
He stepped inside, scrubbing his perfectly clean shoes on the muddy doormat. He looked weary. Stooped. His hair had turned from dirty blond to nothingy grey. But eyes and voice, and the tilt of his head – those hadn’t changed.
‘Wonderful to see you,’ he said.
Heart thudding, she fumbled a hug whilst he aimed a peck at her cheek, and they laughed to cover their awkwardness.
‘Let me take your coat,’ she said.
She made space on the hall stand, rearranging anoraks and duffel coats and woolly hats, conscious that he was watching her. Near-white hair. Broadened hips. The beginnings of jowls.
‘Have you eaten?’ she said.
He said something about sandwiches and motorway services but her mind was skittering about, dispersing his words so they didn’t quite make sense.
‘Why don’t I put the kettle on?’ she said.
The kitchen smelled of fish fingers. A basket of washing stood next to the tumble drier and the floor could have done with mopping. While the kettle boiled, she wittered – the weather, his journey, the state of the kitchen – collecting dirty crockery and piling it next to the sink to form a neater muddle.
‘Tea? Coffee?’ she said.
‘Tea, please.’
‘Sugar?’ How could she have forgotten?
‘I gave it up at med school,’ he said. And without warning they were lurching towards the past and she was nowhere near ready for that.
He must have felt the same way because he nudged them towards safer territory. ‘You live here with…?’
‘Naomi, my daughter. And my grandchildren. Rosa’s eight and Max is six. They’ve gone to the cinema. A treat before term starts on Monday.’
‘D’you have other children?’
She shook her head. ‘Just the one. You?
‘One son and two daughters.’
‘Grandchildren?’
‘Not quite. My older daughter’s due in six weeks. I’ll be glad when it’s over. I know too much about childbirth.’
‘Let’s find somewhere more comfortable,’ she said, leading him across the hall to her sitting room, explaining about the extension and David’s absence and her hopes that he and Naomi would soon patch things up.
They sat opposite each other – he in the armchair and she on the sofa – not knowing what they were supposed to do next.
‘So your parents are still alive,’ he said.
‘Just about. They’re scarily frail. Yours?’
‘Both dead.’
Julia and Angus Crosby. Ahead of their time and no longer in the world.
‘I’m sorry to hear that. They were always kind to me.’
‘I should hope so,’ he said.
A beat. She should mention her parents’ treatment of him but again he steered them away from the past.
‘Your note came as a surprise,’
he said. ‘I had no idea you still had connections there.’
‘Only Mum and Dad.’
‘Your husband died,’ he said.
‘Sam. Yes. Last year.’
‘Was he ill?’
‘No. It was a car crash.’
He raised his eyebrows but there was a lot of ground to cover before they came to that.
‘You know I’m divorced?’ he said.
‘Angela did say something.’
‘We should have done it years ago.’
‘How long were you together?’
‘We almost made our thirty-fifth. You?’
‘Not quite forty.’
The sat for a moment.
‘What’s your ex-wife’s name?’ she said, not sure why this was relevant.
‘Eloise. She’s French.’
A sylph-like woman with jutting cheekbones and dark glossy hair cut in a geometric bob. Miriam wanted to punch her on her perfectly-straight nose.
‘So your children must be bilingual?’ she said. ‘That’s a great asset.’
‘It is.’ He smiled. ‘You haven’t changed, Mim.’
She raised her hands to her cheeks, feeling them warm beneath her palms. ‘Apart from white hair and wrinkles and—’
‘I’m talking about the you-ness of you. The essence of Miriam.’ He leaned forward in his chair. ‘I’ve thought about you every single day.’