‘I’ve decided to be a woman when I grow up,’ he had announced as he climbed up on his chair.
Linus had put down his mug of coffee and looked searchingly at his small son. ‘That might not be all that easy, you know,’ he had said gently.
‘But I want to.’ Ivar’s voice had become agitated.
‘But why do you want to, darling?’
‘Because then when I’m really grown up and have a wife, she’ll like me better,’ Ivar had declared, kneeling on his chair and reaching across the table for his cereal.
Lotten was busy sharing more of those excruciating little confidences he had learnt to dread. ‘And do you know, Olivia, Linus and I have never been closer.’ She glanced around the room. As her eyes fell on Linus, she lowered her voice as if he were the one person in the room who should not hear. ‘Even our, you know what, has improved no end.’
Olivia looked helplessly at Linus and got up from her chair with an air of relief. ‘I just remembered, I promised to call Gerald. About a book,’ she added. ‘Help yourselves to more coffee.’ And she was off as if carried by a little gust of relief. Linus wished he could have followed. Actually, he could. ‘I’ll just run down and get some cigarettes,’ he said, leaping up and ignoring Lotten’s sigh and the disapproving shake of her head.
Outside, the air was fresh and clear, and a brisk wind sent the autumn leaves swooshing along the pavement, but Linus saw summer sunshine and bright, warm-weather clothes, and Lotten with her flaxen hair dancing round her shoulders. Lotten some ten years ago, smelling of lemon and looking at him with her straight gaze. ‘Grapefruit, Linus, not lemon, grapefruit.’ He was yanked back into the present by an impatient voice asking him if he meant Marlboro or Marlboro Light. He muttered ‘Light’ and, pocketing the cigarettes and his change, strode back to his parents’ apartment. ‘I love her,’ he muttered to himself as he walked, his collar up against the chill wind. ‘I love her. She’s my wife, the mother of my child, of course I love her. And who said it should be easy, marriage? Who said it should be rewarding and warm and companionable and stimulating? Someone should.’
Someone should.
Eleven
I was meeting Chloe for lunch. I was on time, as always, and Chloe was late. She finally arrived, brimming with the kind of excuses – traffic, roadworks on the Cromwell Road, telephone ringing – that the terminally tardy keep handy the way a young mother keeps wet wipes.
Once we were seated we ordered, salade Niçoise for both of us and Chloe asked for mineral water, fizzy, no ice and a slice of lemon. I wanted wine, but I had a rule not to drink on my own at lunchtime. ‘No wine?’ I asked.
‘No, I fall asleep.’
‘Why don’t you have a glass?’ I coaxed. ‘It’ll do you good.’
‘Look, Esther, if you want some, have some.’
‘Me, no, no, I’m absolutely fine with water.’ I ordered some for myself, feeling disgruntled.
‘This lunch isn’t entirely pleasure,’ Chloe said as our salads arrived. ‘In fact, I won’t beat about the bush…’ Oh do, I wanted to say, do if it’ll stop you saying something I don’t want to hear.
‘Your portraits, they’re lacklustre these days. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth of it. The wit is gone, the bite and the irony. They’re bland, lame to the point of paralysis. That interview you did with Tallulah Pinkerton Taylor, for example, it was about as thrilling as a kiss from one’s brother.’
I sighed. Chloe was right. I had tried to ask the girl some searching questions, but as I had looked into her large empty eyes, trying to find something interesting behind, as I listened to the inane platitudes spoken with the earnest fervour of someone about to reveal the secrets of life, I froze. ‘That’s a very pretty frock you’re wearing, Tallulah,’ I heard some idiot say. ‘Where do you go for your shopping?’ The idiot, of course, was me.
‘It depends, Esther,’ Tallulah said, stretching out her long legs in their high Gucci boots. ‘It depends on the season. For autumn wear there’s nowhere like Milan. Of course my winter cashmeres I get from Scotland, like everyone else. Spring, well, spring is Paris.’ Her eyes lit up as if someone had just popped a chocolate fondant into her carefully painted mouth. ‘Summer is New York, of course. No one, but no one understands what’s required for summer travelling like the New York designers. If you’ve ever travelled with anything else you’ll know what I mean.’
And so the interview had continued. I had got hundreds of handy hints: Where to go to get Mummy’s old pearls jazzed up. Where to find those little baskety handbags that were like totally to die for. She told our readers how to get to the top of the queue for the three-thousand-pound Hermes Kelly bag and which restaurant in the Swiss Alps one simply must not miss on this year’s skiing holiday.
Chloe frowned at me over the lunch table. ‘You let that girl get away with the most inane load of drivel I’ve ever seen south of Hello!. What’s up, Esther?’
I shook my head. ‘Maybe I’m just tired, my mind plays tricks on me when I’m tired.’ I could have added that these days the little blighter played tricks on me when I wasn’t tired as well. I sighed. ‘All right, I suppose I’ve lost my nerve. It’s as simple as that. Lately I’ve come to see how every action, even ones that could be deemed reasonable or justified, can have the most disastrous and far-reaching consequences. You can literally destroy someone’s life with the stroke of a pen.’
‘I’ve told you, you can’t think like that,’ Chloe said. ‘Or you’ll never do anything. If we all thought about every possible consequence of everything we did there’d be no newspapers, no TV either, for that matter, and then where would we all be?’
We’d been over that one before. ‘It’s happened to me twice now,’ I said instead. ‘First with Barry Jones: I interfered and practically ruined the man’s life, his family’s too and they were completely innocent. Then there was the gas explosion. Can you imagine what it’s like knowing that if I had just bothered to interfere some more the Hammonds would still have a home, let alone all the requisite number of arms and legs. You know me, I’m as sane as they come, but it’s enough to send anyone mad. You do what you see as the right thing and the consequences are awful. You do the wrong thing and what d’you know? The consequences are still awful. And God knows what damage I’ve done without even knowing about it, simply by existing.’
‘You can’t think like that,’ Chloe repeated.
‘I can’t see how you can fail to. As a child I made up my own rules, constructing them, Blue Peter style, from bits and bobs: keep your room tidy because that means you can find your favourite things in case there is a fire. Always finish a book once you’ve started it or the characters you left unread might come back to haunt you, say your prayers every night and never forget to include someone once you’ve thought of them because then God might let them die, that kind of thing. My parents only believed in discipline when my crime interfered with their comfort. That kind of attitude is confusing for a child. You have your own idea of what’s right and wrong, of what constitutes a misdemeanour. Then they go and change the goalposts. You think that breaking Great-Aunt Doris’s china pitcher and using the pieces for a mosaic will get you into serious trouble, you actually accept it as quite fair, but then it’s laughed off as creative. The next minute you’re treated like the spawn of Satan and all his little right-wing followers because you spilt some Ribena on a chair cover. As I said, it’s confusing and you end up losing your antennae.’
‘You certainly lost me somewhere along there,’ Chloe said. ‘But Esther, be this as it may, we have a problem.’
‘And the same with goodies and baddies,’ I carried on, oblivious. ‘Black and white. Bit by bit you come to see that what you thought was black and white was just grey and beige, and that the goodies were only looking after their own interests and the baddies weren’t all that bad, just hormonally challenged. It makes you kind of insecure, don’t you think? Apt to cling to any passing certainty as if it were a lifebuoy.’
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‘Not really, no,’ Chloe said. ‘Coffee?’
‘I can live with the thought that the likely consequences of a bad act are bad. That obviously makes sense, there’s a logic and a fairness in that. But when doing what you think, after due consideration, is the right thing, or when you commit some seemingly small act of neglect and all hell breaks loose, then the confusion starts all over again. I’ve always tried to do the right thing and look where it’s led to. And responsibility, how far do you take it? Think about it. You cross the road which makes a car slow down, which in turn makes that car reach some point seconds later than it would have otherwise. In turn, that means this same car gets caught up in a fatal crash which, if you had not crossed the road in front of it, it never would have done. You walk blithely on, wheeling along your shopping…’
‘You don’t use a shopping bag on wheels?’
‘I most certainly do. I’d kill myself lugging those heavy bags around. Anyway, you walk blithely on, with or without a shopping bag on wheels, and meanwhile this poor sod who let you cross the road is lying in a morgue.’
‘That’s life and destiny; that kind of thing. You can’t hold yourself responsible.’ Chloe put her hand over mine on the table. ‘Look, Esther, you’re a friend as well as a colleague, I want nothing better than for you to get back on form, but quite frankly, right now you’re sounding like a lunatic.’
I liked people to be straightforward, that way you knew where you stood, but just then, I thought I might have preferred to have been kept in the dark. ‘Are you saying you’re sacking me?’
Chloe sighed, withdrawing her hand. ‘I thought you might like to go freelance. Have a break, check yourself in somewhere…’
‘Broadmoor?’ I suggested helpfully.
‘A health farm, that type of thing. Then use your contacts to spread yourself around a bit. There’s a huge market for your kind of “portraits” and I’ll obviously use you as much as I can, once you’re back on form.’
‘What do you mean you’ve been sort of sacked?’ Audrey asked. I wished she wouldn’t talk about private matters in front of the manicurist. Lisa came to do my mother’s hands and feet every Friday morning together with her friend Abigail who did my mother’s hair. Abigail had left a few minutes earlier. I liked Lisa, she was a sweet girl, but this was private.
‘Coffee anyone?’ I asked brightly.
‘Tea would be lovely, dear.’ My mother waved a completed set of left-hand fingers in my direction.
Once Lisa had gone, Audrey asked again, ‘How can you be sort of sacked?’
‘I’ve been sacked as a feature writer and asked to write for them as a freelancer.’
I was back living with Audrey, back in my Audrey-designed childhood bedroom. It was only a short-term measure until I found a new place of my own, but I had found it unbearable to remain in my old street in Fulham, with the gaping hole that was once the Hamilton residence almost next door. I had found a buyer for the flat, but I was yet to find a place where I wanted to live myself.
‘You were so rigid as a child.’ Audrey sighed. ‘I always knew you would break.’
I glared at her across the pale-blue counterpane of her bed. ‘I don’t know what you mean, “break”. In fact, I’m doing a piece on Lydia Garland. There’s an ill wind, etc. Apparently she’s only agreed to an interview because I’ve got a reputation for being “nice”. For nice read harmless and ineffectual, but it’ll do for now. It’s work.’
Lydia Garland wrote heart-warming and hugely popular novels about ‘people like us’, holding up a mirror, it was often said, reflecting our everyday lives and struggles. It was interesting to see how many people saw themselves as ‘people like us’. Judging by her sales, most of the population. Her latest novel, due out next month, was called Charlotte Alone. On the dust jacket it said that the author lived in a converted windmill on the Sussex coast with her dogs, Heidi and Gretel, and her husband. It didn’t mention her husband’s name.
‘I quite like her books,’ Audrey said. She read a lot these days, in between television soaps and films, and she read widely, novels, travel, biographies, popular history, with the result that, since taking to her bed, my mother knew more about the world than ever before in her life.
But she didn’t know everything. ‘What do you mean break?’ I asked again. ‘For that matter, what do you mean rigid? I just thought then, as I do now, that an ordered life was the best way of freeing your mind for greater things.’
‘And what greater things would they be?’ Audrey asked gently. She could be so cruel.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I suppose we all imagine we’re destined to do great things, it’s just the time when we accept we’re not that varies.’ I reached out for another of Audrey’s doughnuts and bit into it, not really noticing I was doing it. ‘Right now I would just settle for some rhyme and reason,’ I said. ‘Some justice and order and system and meaning.’
‘Don’t be silly, Esther,’ my mother admonished me. ‘If God had wanted us to see any of that he would have given us a bigger brain.’
‘So you believe there are all of those things, but we just can’t see them?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Audrey said. ‘Now it’s time for my Open University class so you’d better run along.’
‘Open University?’
‘I’m sure I told you. I’m doing Renaissance art at the moment. Fascinating,’ she said, her eyes already on the television.
‘But what’s the good of there being a point and order and a system and rules and justice, if we can’t ever see any of it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Audrey snapped. ‘Why do you ask me?’
‘You’re my mother. I suppose that the forlorn hope that mother knows best, or at least something, is hard to quell. It’s inborn, no doubt.’
‘Well, I know nothing. Now run along and frown at someone else.’
The next morning I had a call from the estate agent about a house newly on the market. ‘It’s bijou,’ she said. ‘And it does need some work on it.’ Everyone joked about the language of estate agents, but at least you knew where you were with them; they were consistent. Every child knows that ‘bijou’, in estate agent speak, means tiny, and that ‘in need of work’ means it’s about to fall down. ‘But it is in Chelsea, just off the King’s Road.’
‘Is it in my price range?’ I asked.
‘As I said, it is bijou and you will have to do some work.’
My house, because I knew straight away that it was meant for me, looked as if it had elbowed itself in between its taller, more elegant neighbours. Narrow and squat, it was badly in need of paint; in fact, as I went inside, it was obvious that the list of things the little house was not badly in need of would be short.
‘This is a rare opportunity’, the estate agent said, scenting success with a near telepathic ability, ‘to acquire an unmodernised house in this sought-after area.’ Say what you will about estate agents, and people did, but you had to admire their almost lunatic ability to see the best in a situation.
The house consisted of a kitchen, sitting-room and cloakroom downstairs, and two and a half bedrooms – two double, one single to my cheerful friend – upstairs. ‘What about a bathroom?’ I asked.
The estate agent looked at me as if she was just a teensy-weensy bit surprised that I should want one. ‘I suppose you could turn bedroom three into one, well a shower room anyway.’ She suddenly got defensive. ‘I did warn you the place needed some work.’
‘I like it,’ I said.
‘You do? I mean, that’s great. Great!’
Back home I did my sums. The purchase price was not much more than what I had received for my flat, but then there was the modernisation. My savings would hardly cover that. I could do most of the decorating myself, but things like gas and electricity worried me, especially since you know what. Then again, the upkeep, once the work was done, would be minimal. What were the chances of a freelancer getting a mortgage?
I was planning the c
olour of the sitting-room walls as I drove up and parked in front of Lydia Garland’s charming windmill home. Lydia herself greeted me at the door, hands outstretched. I recognised her handsome, strong-featured face from countless publicity photographs, but she was much taller than I had expected and the hands she proffered were large and strong. She had not, to my knowledge, admitted to a particular age, but was believed to be in her late forties. She chatted on amiably as she led the way through the house and into the large farmhouse kitchen at the back. As we sat down at the huge oak kitchen table I asked her what had happened to her toe; the big toe on her right foot was bandaged and she was limping slightly. ‘Just a silly accident,’ she said breezily. ‘Gardening.’
I brought out my pad and my pencils, and my list of prepared questions and Lydia Garland quotes from previous interviews and articles.
‘You’re very organised,’ Lydia said.
I nodded, gratified. ‘I try to be.’
We chatted a bit about her Charlotte Alone.
‘I’m just an ordinary English countrywoman who happens to have a gift for telling stories,’ Lydia confided charmingly, as she poured us both some tea from a brown earthenware pot. ‘Milk? Sugar?’ There was milk on the painted tray in front of us, but no sign of a sugar bowl. Like ashtrays, they were an endangered species these days.
‘Both, I’m afraid,’ I said, watching as Lydia Garland made a move to get up. She might stumble and fall, with that bandaged toe, I thought. And break something else, her neck maybe? Cause and effect, cause and effect. I leapt out of my chair. ‘Let me get it,’ I offered.
‘Thank you, my dear,’ Lydia Garland said, looking slightly surprised. ‘It’s in the top left-hand cupboard over the sink.’
Once seated again, I asked her, ‘Your success as a writer is said to be largely due to your extraordinary ability to empathise with ordinary people’s lives and struggles. It’s a gift that’s envied by many lesser writers.’
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