And with that, Miranda sat down and Lucy thought that despite her support underwear, the uniform of skintight top and maxi-skirt was becoming rather ill-advised. She wanted to say that Miranda was a natural tabloid journalist and this would solve all her financial worries, but something stopped her.
“So what are you up to these days?” said Miranda, changing her tone. She tilted her head to one side in the “tell me about the tragedy” mode. “How are you coping with things?”
For a moment Lucy panicked that Miranda had somehow heard about her mother, but no, she was referring to the demise of Richard’s share options. Lucy remembered Camilla’s horror at the prospect of the Consolations of Miranda. So she announced that she had taken the opportunity of the move to New York to reinvent herself and that these days she was writing.
As she said it she knew what had come over her.
Miranda was impressed, though she tried to hide it. The hint of faux sympathy disappeared from her voice.
“What sort of writing? It’s not like everyone else—I’m working on a novel about the mothers at the school gates—is it? The world simply doesn’t need another female hack rambling on about retail and reproduction. Tell me you’re tackling the big issues.” Lucy gulped, disconcerted by Miranda’s aggression, which was not passive. She had often considered writing, and, if she were to try, her stories would be about the school gates and the women she met there, the tales they had to tell if you listened, indeed, the roar that lay on the other side of silence.
“I’ve been working on TV, actually. A crime show. Rage Undercover, it’s called. You won’t have seen it, I expect. It’s on Living. Extremely violent, elemental-type vibe.”
She could tell from Miranda’s expression that although she certainly had not seen it, she would be scanning the cable menu later that night. Lucy sat straight upright like Julia did and adopted Julia’s breezy tone.
“I did it under a pseudonym to allow me to explore a whole different side of my personality, a masculine side, really. Richard’s so conventionally macho that I felt I was becoming absorbed into a very traditional role. Julia Kirkland’s my writing name. Look out for me.”
Miranda positively bristled. She had had enough of Lucy. Fortunately, at this moment Simon appeared to warm a bottle.
“Here, give me that,” she demanded, and Simon started, unsure as to whether she was referring to the bottle or the baby. “Sounds like everything’s going really well for you,” she muttered through gritted teeth.
“It’s amazing what positive things can happen from a reversal of fortune.”
It was the only truthful thing Lucy had said.
She smiled sympathetically at Simon and moved away, knowing that she needed to find Camilla to prevent her from being arrested later for drunk-and-disorderliness while driving an Eastern European 4x4. As she headed for the stairs she glanced into the living room, looked at the women, obediently clustered on armchairs, talking about the common entrance exam, the men standing by the mantelpiece, guffawing. It was positively Stepford. And yet only a few months ago she would have been firmly in the female area, or else sitting on a cushion like a dog at Richard’s feet.
Camilla was lying in the bathtub with a bathrobe on and a towel rolled up like a pillow under her neck. Lucy sat down on the toilet.
“Are you okay?” Camilla asked.
“Sort of,” replied Lucy. “I’d forgotten what it’s like when you haven’t seen people for a while. I hate giving the one-line description of my life.”
“I know,” agreed Camilla.
They both considered this for a moment.
“Mine is, ‘One kid, one divorce, life sucks.’ I don’t want to say it, and no one wants to hear it,” Camilla said.
Lucy leaned over and kissed her friend on the cheek.
“You’re not bitter and twisted, are you, Milla?”
“No! My life didn’t turn out how I imagined. But then neither did yours, right, Lucy? You used to be so Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and now it sounds like Last Exit to Brooklyn. Cheers!”
She handed Lucy the shaker, and Lucy drained the last gulp.
• • •
THE MORNING OF THE FUNERAL, Lucy awoke to a thin layer of frost on the window and a robin perched on the ledge outside, staring straight in at her.
She shrieked and George rushed in, bleary-eyed, gray-faced, in striped pajamas.
“What the hell?” he cried.
“That robin is looking at me strangely.”
“What?” George turned, but the robin had disappeared, and now he looked at Lucy strangely.
“I’m telling you. It was kind of malevolent. Like in The Birds.”
“Robins are territorial and aggressive. They mark out their living space and will attack trespassers.”
Lucy’s vision settled, and she peered at her brother. She noticed the flecks of white in his stubble. “You look dreadful.”
“My mother died, and I’ve been on an aeroplane for twenty-six hours.”
“Don’t start—”
“The springs on my old bed are completely useless. Should have known you’d grab the only decent mattress in the house.”
He sat on the edge of her bed and swung his legs beneath him. Lucy knew he was controlling an urge to suck his thumb.
“I wish Cordelia and the kids were here,” he said.
Lucy, by contrast, did not wish Richard and the boys were there at all. She had always wanted to keep them as far away from all this as she possibly could. George stared out the window for a moment. Lucy followed his gaze, wondering if he was thinking the same thing as her, remembering the weekends they roamed the park behind the house together while Mother lay in bed.
“There’s something I want to run by you. Obviously, Mum has left the house to the two of us.”
He paused. Lucy looked at him, curious.
“I’ll get it valued before I leave, and then . . .” He hesitated. A brown moth fluttered against the glass, futilely crashing against it. Lucy reached for a magazine, rolled it into a baton, and raised her arm, but George opened the top window and tenderly guided the disorientated insect outside. As it flew away, he continued, carefully, as if he had been practicing. “Cordelia and I would like to buy your share. Whatever the estate agent says, we’ll give you. In fact, we can get a few valuations and then average them.”
“Okay.”
“No, I want you to talk it over with Richard—”
“Richard won’t have a problem.”
“It’s just Cordelia knows a brother and sister who did this, and then ten years later when the house had tripled in value one of them came back for more money, and we couldn’t have that; it would be a once-off thing.”
(Gosh, thought Lucy, maybe it is true that there’s no such thing as the perfect family?)
“I said it’s okay.” Lucy suppressed her urge to pat him on the head and moved the conversation on. “What will you do with the house?”
George looked at her, surprised.
“We’re going to come back and live here. We’ve been thinking about it for a while, and now . . . I love this house. I had happy times here. I can’t think of anywhere better to bring up my kids.”
Lucy did not know what to say. It seemed unspeakably inappropriate to start listing reasons why they had had a terrible childhood. So instead she replied, “That’s cool.”
“Cordelia knew you’d be fine with it. She sees auras round people, and she’s says yours is yellow.”
“Is yellow good?”
George nodded. Lucy decided to peel the smiley-face sticker off the royal wedding commemorative plate. Cordelia could have it if she really wanted it.
“George. It’s only seven o’clock. You must be exhausted. Why don’t you lie down in here and I’ll bring you some breakfast? It’s going to be a horrid day.”
/> “Thank you, Lucy.”
“And George . . . I’m sorry—”
“For what?”
That I could not sacrifice myself to save you, she thought, but she said, “For everything. Everything that happened. Everything you went through that I didn’t.”
Lucy pulled an old school sweatshirt she had found in the bottom of her wardrobe over her nightshirt and headed for the door.
“Did I tell you Cordelia’s training to be a therapist?” said George.
Lucy turned, unsure what she felt about this piece of news.
“Anyway, the first thing they said to her in therapy school is that everyone of our age has to give their parents an amnesty. No one had a clue about parenting in those days, so they just muddled through and did what their parents did to them. The challenge for us is not to repeat the mistakes they made. Cordelia thinks Mum and Dad were completely useless. The important thing is that we shouldn’t blame each other.”
“That’s actually very helpful, George.”
And she walked down the stairs to the kitchen, thinking about Cordelia and her exemplary perception, until George shrieked and she turned and rushed back upstairs.
“That robin is looking at me strangely,” he said, amazed.
• • •
LUCY IS STANDING holding a plate of wilting egg-and-cress sandwiches and avoiding her portly second cousin who stuck his hand up her skirt at her eighteenth birthday party. As she looks around the church hall she thinks this, this strange cocktail party bit, with the complimenting on the organization and the sausage rolls, and the peals of laughter from corners of the room, is the very worst bit of the day; worse than having to sit next to a coffin containing the body of someone in whose body you grew; worse than watching George choke on tears as he read out a letter his eldest daughter had written to her grandmother; worse than watching people struggle to describe this difficult, disliked woman in euphemisms; worse than the hideous Wizard of Oz curtain moment at the crematorium.
She looks over to see George towering over Aunt Eva, deep in conversation, probably about the house and his return to England. She watches her father, his face red and puffy, sitting isolated on an uncomfortable chair at the side of the room, forever the villain, with Paula beside him, holding his hand, occasionally getting up to bring him another cup of tea. She feels his bemusement that his life should have turned out like this and Paula’s relief that their remaining years on earth together will be free of the tormenting phone calls, the demands for money, and the guilt, the interminable guilt of it all.
Lucy wishes them well.
She puts down the sandwiches, asks the two sweet teenagers from the Tasty Bite to make more coffee and tea, and heads to the ladies’ bathroom, pausing to splash water on her face before going into the disabled stall and sitting down for a few moments.
Outside, the door opens and a familiar clip of heels and a high-pitched whisper indicate the entrance of Camilla, who has driven down with Rose to support Lucy, for which she is grateful. Camilla goes straight to the small window and opens it, and Lucy hears the click of a cigarette lighter, a deep inhale, and there is a bustle as Camilla climbs on the sanitary towel disposal unit so she can stick her head and shoulders out and smoke while Rose pees loudly, ending with a few intermittent splashes to strengthen her pelvic floor.
Lucy remains silent, gripped with curiosity, listening as Rose comes out and washes her hands.
“Do you think we can go now?” Rose says.
“Absolutely,” replies Camilla. “We’ve done our bit for poor dear Lucy. She looks dreadful.” She pauses to climb down onto the tiles. “George turned out surprisingly attractive, though, didn’t he?”
“That’s it, we’re leaving.”
But Camilla is having a reflective moment.
“You know the worst thing about these sort of funerals, funerals of people who were just awful, is that everyone has to stand up and say how great they were, and how it was all the fault of the ‘illness,’ how they really did love their husband or their kids despite everything. But the truth is, I never saw Lucy’s mum smile except when a large bottle of chardonnay was heading toward her. Do you remember her performance at Lucy’s twenty-first, when she tried to pick up one of the waiters?”
“Don’t remind me. We picked up the pieces of that one for days afterward—”
“She was a total bitch.”
“CAMILLA!”
And they giggle guiltily, Lucy craning her ear against the metal door for further illuminating tidbits as they leave. She thinks for a moment. And then she makes a decision.
She walks out and goes to the cloakroom, where she puts on her coat, throws her bag over her shoulder, and takes the keys to the hired car out. She walks back into the church hall and says good-bye to her father, Paula, and Aunt Eva, and wraps George in a huge hug, telling him she is happy for him to do whatever he wants, and George, seeing her the way she actually is and not through the prism of their mother’s resentments, hugs her back and smiles. She tells him she’s done everything she can and now she wants to go home.
She walks out and throws her bag playfully onto the backseat of the car. She jumps in and turns on the engine, driving through the roads of her childhood to the motorway, where a sign for the airport soon appears.
She switches on the radio; she starts singing along, loudly, her upper body dancing as much as a person can dance while holding a steering wheel with at least one hand. She is free.
She realizes that she, Lucy, has not yet surrendered.
the attack dog
If Julia had been writing what happened as a script, which was unlikely, as Julia avoided “woman-y” stories and much preferred Apollo 13 to Beaches, she would have started with a voice-over, and sought an arresting opening sentence to catch the audience’s attention.
Julia liked voice-over as a dramatic device; it was an economical way of setting a scene and creating a tone. And tone would be critical to the retelling of this episode, as Julia would seek to replicate her very particular sense of regret and disbelief as she looked back in anger.
There were several options. She could have chosen
WOMAN’S VOICE (OOV)
During her month’s vacation at the Wellness Center in Connecticut, Julia devoted many sessions with the family therapist to her complicated feelings about motherhood. . . .
but would have rejected it immediately. Too much setup, far too earnest, and, most important, “complicated” wasn’t the right word to describe her feelings, as, without any qualification, it felt too negative. Julia had been surprised how happy motherhood had made her. It was all the other crap that had done her in.
She might try
WOMAN’S VOICE (OOV)
So every day they went out walking, the ugly dog and Julia—
which, in theory, could be good, particularly if juxtaposed with a series of striking images of downtown, a sort of “woman with dog on First Avenue” opening, but Julia wouldn’t have liked it. There was no subtext.
No, in the end Julia would have hit upon an introduction over three mojitos one Tuesday night with Lucy, as she explained the dramatic reversal of her fortunes.
It was
WOMAN’S VOICE (OOV)
Everything changed because Courtney from upstairs turned thirty-nine and got a dog.
and while others would have dismissed it as too quirky, too self-conscious, or too left-field, Julia liked it, and she had been a writer long enough to know that if you find a sentence you like, you go with it.
You always fear you might not get another.
• • •
EVERYTHING CHANGED because Courtney from upstairs turned thirty-nine and got a dog.
Of course, as these two events coincided, Julia assumed it was a cute, fluffy, baby-substitute dog, most likely a bichon frise, the chien du jour, apparently, altho
ugh the growling and scrabbling she heard from upstairs never sounded cute. There was something feral, urgent, and enraged about the canine noise that she recognized instantly. It was how she felt at that time, after all.
Although Courtney and Julia had owned apartments in the building for nearly twelve years, they were neighbors, not friends. Before Julia and her family moved to the loft on Rivington Street, they had all lived there and Courtney had managed not to learn either of the children’s names, quite an achievement in a four-unit co-op with communal entrance hall. Julia and Courtney had both made a decision to cultivate a cordial, if distant, relationship, far easier to manage if there were any disputes in the building about floor coverings, noise in the hallway, or unsuitable new tenants. But as the years went by they became united, mainly because their apartments nestled on floors two and three of the 1895 town house, sandwiched between the basement with outside space (owned by two elderly Marxist academics who harangued them at the annual co-op meeting about making property history) and the penthouse with roof garden (owned by Michael and Johannes, the litigious and unpleasant life coaches, who wanted the other freeholders to sell in order to make the property all theirs).
So when Courtney broke her ankle in a freak accident and looked around for help from her neighbors, she realized that there was only one possible candidate. Courtney decided to take a chance that Julia, who had recently reappeared in the building on her own, had a better nature (not something she could have known for certain at that point) and asked if she would walk the dog.
Her gamble paid off. Julia’s better nature recalled the sound of step THUD, step THUD, step THUD on the stairs outside her bedroom and agreed.
And then Julia met the dog.
The dog was without doubt the ugliest animal Julia had ever seen.
No One Could Have Guessed the Weather Page 5