‘A month later I found out, but when he modelled it, I really thought it would never happen.’ Judy turned, her eyes sparkling, and Rosa thought for a moment she was crying, but then Judy emitted another expansive laugh, and said, ‘Ridiculous! Quite neurotic. Chance would be a fine thing, to stop now!’ And you are, thought Rosa, like a conveyer belt, pounding out the human race. Forging it. They passed into Will’s study, which was crammed with careful clutter, books piled on books, a computer with Post-it notes stuck round the screen, a leather armchair, a battered sofa with the stuffing spilling out, and a sculpture which seemed to represent a man drowning in mud. Rosa admired it, knowing it was another one of Will’s. Was this Will when Judy was failing to conceive, Rosa wondered? It was pretty good, when she looked more closely. Will was a modest Renaissance type, working a farm and loving his wife and kids and cooking and occasionally fashioning something from stone. He was far from talentless! And the house was charming. Every room, Judy was telling her, had been completely restored. Much of it Will and his sister had done together. The bedrooms were cluttered with children’s clothes and toys, and Judy and Will’s marital bed was a bright orange fertility symbol.
Rosa was reeling from the colours and scents and the general vibrancy, and her repetitions of ‘lovely’ were echoing along the corridor as they passed into another room, spartan and nearly empty. As Rosa admired the frilly farmhouse curtains and the pristine whitewash of the walls Judy turned and said: ‘Rosa, this is a complete secret, for the moment, because I’m not quite at three months, but it’s so wonderful to see you and I really want you to know – I’m pregnant again!’
Rosa was genuinely startled. A fine tally. Four children. And Judy barely thirty-five.
‘But that’s really it,’ said Judy. ‘I really can’t do any more.’
‘Hardly surprised,’ said Rosa, and it was the first truthful thing she had said for an hour. ‘Hardly surprised at all.’
And Judy laughed and patted her on the arm. ‘Literally, Rosa, I will go mad if I do another!’ Now Judy turned her head and walked again, drawing her along another corridor, past the sleeping brood – Judy with a finger raised to her lips – and then they passed into a cold wing of the house, where the wind seemed to rattle at the shutters.
‘We’re still renovating this part,’ said Judy. ‘But we’ve done this guest room’, and she pushed open a latched door to reveal another immaculate whitewashed room, with an iron bed and a handsome iron fireplace, and an assortment of Lakeland prints on the walls. There were green jalousies across the windows. Judy walked across the room and flung them open.
‘You can’t see it,’ she said, gesturing into the blackness, ‘but this room has the most beautiful view of the lot. Tomorrow you’ll see. The fells are a brilliant red, and the sound of water you can hear, that’s the most gorgeous ghyll thundering down the slope, you’ll be able to see that too tomorrow. It’s exquisite. I wanted Will and I to use this room, but it’s too far away from all the children. You’ll be very glad of that when Eliza starts bawling at 4 a.m. Which she will, I assure you.’
Rosa put down her suitcase in the corner. There was a long mirror and a hat stand. There were some books on the windowsill. Sons and Lovers, Rosa noted. The complete works of Wordsworth. John le Carré. Some P.G. Wodehouse. They were educated but not showy. They didn’t stack up piles of Kant and Kierkegaard. There were fresh flowers in a vase on the bedside table, beautiful red and white flowers, she had no idea what they were. It was too much for Rosa. Feeling suddenly ashamed, she said, ‘Judy. I shouldn’t have come. You’re so busy with the children. And you put flowers in a vase. It’s so kind of you. But I really shouldn’t stay.’
Judy paused and turned, as if this was the frank admission she had been waiting for. She was stern and definite. Her face was puce, but her hands were steady. ‘Rosa. I won’t hear anything of the sort. You’re to stay as long as you like. I think it’s just dreadful, what’s happened. You have my utmost sympathy. I don’t know what happened between you and Liam, but I know there are always two sides to such things.’
‘Sometimes three sides,’ said Rosa. ‘When you’re in a triangle.’ She smiled, hoping by that to lighten the mood, but Judy was like a policeman, holding up her hand. ‘Rosa, I don’t want to get into it,’ she said. That was slightly bemusing, but it hardly mattered. ‘It’s wonderful to have you here’ – and Rosa murmured something in response. ‘Come on, let’s go to dinner,’ said Judy. And she turned them both around and sailed them back along the corridors, past the portraits of Judy and Will painted by Will and the watercolours by an unknown hand, the latches making solid, comfortable sounds as they opened the doors. In the bright living room, where the fire was crackling and candles had been lit, Will had a fistful of plates and on the table stood a casserole dish.
They patched an evening together. By the sheer force of Judy and Will’s goodness, they found some phrases and turned them out. Rosa was quite consumed by the strain of it, pawing at her food, striving to stay away from the truth. Judy and Will talked in a rich slew of adjectives – words like delightful, gorgeous, beautiful, special, wonderful and extraordinary. Rosa founded the repetition uplifting. It was like watching someone carefully remaking the universe, spilling shafts of light across the shadows, turning grey to yellow and black to gold. Rosa, lacking necessary words, tried out ‘lovely’ a dozen times, but couldn’t quite get her tongue around it. It wasn’t that Judy and Will lacked imaginative range, thought Rosa. It was just that the place repeated certain qualities. As in the city Rosa found her brain consumed by recurring thoughts of grime and grey and surprising beauty and moments of being and litter and menace and noise and insistent bass-beat and wide-eyed crackhead and insalubrious shanty town and sprawling chaos, so they talked about the fells and the silence and the freshness of the air and the beauty of the view and how much it revived them. Then they were bawdy for a while, and Judy told tales of cracked nipples, and the slow recovery of her body from childbirth, and how tired she was because Leila and Eliza never slept, and Will smiled at his wife, and kissed her hand. There was an established pattern. Judy emanated a worthiness that made Rosa feel still more acutely the isolation of her self-centredness, her overdeveloped ego. Her fear of subsuming her own desires and impulses. Her ambitions, unfounded as they were. Her lack of realism! Her squeamishness and moral cowardice. Her committed procrastination. Rosa thought that friendship was a curious thing. She really had little in common with Will and Judy. Yet they listened to her, committed themselves to a tumbling series of questions. In response, she really bored on. Stimulated by food and wine, she was mighty, boring and terrible. They raised their eyebrows and diagnosed her. Clearly a nervous breakdown, said Will. Not surprising in the circumstances.
‘I think I merely opened the doors of perception,’ said Rosa. That was after a jar or so of wine. Doors of perception! The words only came with drunkenness. Otherwise it was quite impossible to say them. They made her think of Blake with his naked tea parties, visions of souls dancing in trees, the rest. Jim Morrison in a kaftan with a chiselled chest. ‘Everything was obscured before. I wasn’t looking carefully at things. Without the death – you know – my mother, death death, I would have lived on for a few more years, quite content, in a dream. You understand.’
‘Rosa, you were under too much strain. You know, the death of a parent, it’s very hard. And your relationship was ending. There was a lot going on for you. And people are busy, they don’t have time,’ said Judy. ‘You should have come to see us sooner. Grace and Liam, we saw them not so long ago, when was it? They came to stay, it must have been a few weeks ago. Liam is a good person, Rosa, you mustn’t forget that. And Grace is very compelling. We understand their attraction.’
‘Oh, he is good, yes, of course,’ said Rosa. This made her angry, but she kept feeding herself wine.
‘Really, he is a fragile man,’ said Judy.
‘I’ve never thought of him like that,’ said Rosa. ‘But
I’ve been wrong about a lot of things.’
‘Of course it’s hard to say – but we understand some of what he’s been saying. What they’ve both been saying,’ said Judy.
‘You know, you were both at fault. Or rather, perhaps, there’s no one to blame. The relationship had clearly decayed,’ said Will. ‘That’s not to say his timing was sensitive.’
‘Decayed?’
‘They say you were depressive, overbearing, self-obsessed,’ said Will. He was so naturally congenial that he smiled as he said it.
‘Not really depressive, not then. But the others, of course,’ said Rosa. ‘I would have to confess to the others.’
‘Liam says you were wild for a long time, and he was too afraid to end it,’ said Judy. ‘He says you tired him, he couldn’t keep supporting you emotionally, and eventually he couldn’t cope. He felt he was only an emotional crutch to you, nothing more.’
‘No doubt I said a lot of foolish things.’
‘Perhaps you’re being too hard on them. Your relationship has clearly declined, you’re angry and frustrated, you explain to Grace how demoralised you are, how much you want to get out, and you tell her over and over and Liam is there – and of course Liam is attractive, intelligent – who would blame her?’ said Judy. ‘I mean, you can blame her, but can you be sure you wouldn’t have done the same?’
‘I don’t know what I would have done,’ said Rosa. ‘I haven’t been in a similar situation. I can’t possibly guess.’
‘They were in love. It sounds like a grand passion! And that’s hard to resist,’ said Judy, and Rosa detected a trace of autobiography in her voice.
‘Grace says you hit her once at a party, a few weeks back,’ said Will. ‘She had a cut eye. I remember that – it was still bruised when they came here.’ He was looking carefully at her now, monitoring her response. Did they think she was putting on a front? Did they assume she was about to lose control, release a screaming fit, a violent outburst? She had raged, of course, but internally, to the walls of Jess’s living room, to the self-assembly furniture. She had never really raged to anyone. Perhaps occasionally she had emitted something, but it was mere metonym. Anything she expressed was more like a personal code.
‘My jacket hit her, when I put it on to leave. I was in a hurry, I wanted to leave so she would stop talking to me,’ said Rosa. ‘I think that must be what she means. I seem to remember the zip caught her. I was being clumsy; I was desperate to get out of the room. She was hounding me at a party. You know she can be sanctimonious.’
They stayed silent.
She knew what Will was talking about. She remembered it clearly; her memories were cut glass, quite polished. In a flat on Elgin Crescent – one of those generic places of stripped pine floorboards and big mirrors, the proprietor a proper denizen, more so than most – Rosa had seen Grace moving slowly, wearing black. She hadn’t wanted to go to the party, this congregation of the righteous in a crowded room, but Jess had insisted and Rosa had followed orders. The flat was packed with the young and wealthy, picking at vol-au-vents and sipping wine, leaning their satin-clad limbs against fine antique furniture, and the place was too small for Rosa to hide. By the time she sighted Grace, there were only a few metres between them. Grace nodded, and came towards her, seeming to falter though that had to be an act – or who knows, perhaps she was nervous as anything, it was hard to tell and Rosa had long stopped thinking she had any grasp on the thoughts of others. Rosa gritted her teeth, waiting, drinking wine in gulps to steel herself.
Grace arrived, holding a glass of sherry, her beauty as striking as ever, her voice soft and her eyes cold. She was wearing a tense black dress, and it worked well on her hips. She had a slung motion to her walk, as if she was carrying something on her head. She delivered her opening line in a low tone, as if they were plotting someone’s downfall. She was saying connive with me and for a moment Rosa bent towards her. ‘Rosa,’ she said, a hand on her arm. ‘Rosa, I’m so glad to see you. I left you messages. I thought you were wasting your energy in rage and it pained me to think that.’
And Rosa said, ‘Grace, there’s no point us discussing anything.’ She was aiming for lofty indifference, a look of distaste, but she was slightly drunk and couldn’t control her mouth. Grace, pushing back her hair, said, ‘I want you to know that I struggled with my feelings,’ as if she had been swept towards Liam by forces beyond her control, and perhaps it was so, perhaps she had been overwhelmed, thought Rosa. ‘I struggled not because I thought my feelings were wrong but because I was concerned you weren’t yet ready, you couldn’t move on. I knew it was right, but I was aware you would find it difficult to understand. But months went by, and you were so angry, and finally I felt sorry for Liam.’ Grace’s mouth – small, rather too small somehow, thought Rosa, though she’d never really noticed it – was pursed in contrition. ‘But you must understand that for much of our friendship I just thought of Liam as your partner. I never thought of him in that way, the other way, I mean.’
‘As “not-my-partner”, you mean,’ said Rosa.
‘Exactly,’ said Grace. ‘I don’t want you to think I was biding my time, waiting for a chance.’ She struck this resoundingly, quite certain of herself.
Rosa smiled in embarrassment and took a slug of wine. She wasn’t sure why she had ever liked Grace. After a gap of a few months, Grace sounded like a zealot. Why the hell did I like Grace? she wondered. Why did I even invite her round for all those dinners? It turns out she’s contrived. Was she always so contrived? Grace was performing one of her old gestures, which Rosa had previously thought was quite charming, her head cocked to one side, a hand on her hip. Rosa couldn’t help it. She thought Grace looked funny. She began to laugh.
Grace pushed back her hair again, and licked her lips. She smiled a little. ‘Rosa, there’s no need for that. It’s very simple, wonderfully simple if you’ll just accept it. Our arms are open to you. We both love you, of course, as much as ever. If you could return to us, then you would find we could celebrate the friendship and closeness – all the elements you needed from Liam and myself – without the drag of a failing relationship. I know it sounds unpalatable to you, but if you think you could try that would make me very happy. Liam too, I’m sure. We miss you.’
Rosa found it hysterically funny. She was laughing, sipping wine. Then she started hiccoughing. Grace stood and stared, in apparent confusion.
‘Rosa, what’s wrong? We love you, and there’s nothing funny about that,’ said Grace.
There was Grace, dashing towards the winning tape, and Rosa, Rosa had trapped her spikes in the sand and fallen off the track. Rosa had thoroughly flunked the race. She had the element of surprise on her side, though. She had the inappropriateness of her response. She couldn’t quite control herself. Grace wasn’t sure whether this was the moment to walk away, shaking her head at the wreck that was now Rosa, or to stay and stare in bemusement. She stayed and stared. Hoping to drag out the scene, thought Rosa. Grace never backed off. She was usually victorious. It was Rosa who was dredging around for something to say, trying to wipe her mouth with her frock.
‘Rosa, come on, calm down,’ said Grace.
‘You’re like a large coiled snake,’ said Rosa. ‘And Liam is your rat. I mean, he is your nourishment, your perfect complement. You look better than ever, on your diet of perfect fodder.’ She watched Grace winding along with another phrase, a few more maxims for free living, deconstructions of stifling mores and the rest. Grace, sighing, suggested that Rosa sit down and have a glass of water. Then she supplied a staccato performance of sympathy and something else, something more mysterious and uncertain, a trace of condescension, that was what it felt like, as if Grace was approaching Rosa from a long way above her, drifting cloudlike over her mortal mess. Rosa didn’t sit and when water was found she refused to drink it. Grace was still there with her open gaze and her hands cupped around her glass.
‘Rosa, I’m sorry you’ve taken it all like this,’ she said. ‘I
understand, things have been terrible for you. But you must see that I care, I care passionately about our friendship. I’m so sorry about the way it happened. But you spent months telling me you felt restless and bored. And I went to see him to say how sorry I was, and things just happened.’
‘You went to see him?’ said Rosa, very calmly now, regaining gravitas, apart from her occasional hiccoughs.
‘Yes, yes, of course, as a friend.’ Grace’s eyes had narrowed again. She took an elegant sip of sherry.
‘But you never told me,’ said Rosa. ‘When was that?’
‘I’m not going to get into this,’ said Grace, holding up a hand. ‘It won’t help us at all. You should understand that.’ She smiled again. Her hair was lustrous with health, and her skin shone. That despite her fags and booze, thought Rosa. She was plain lucky, and her face would be beautiful for years yet. Decades, perhaps. Her cheekbones were fine. Lovely shoulders she had, and the dress set them off well. All that made Rosa nod at the inevitable. Of course, some slide – slide into a slump, slump down and drop and the rest – and some ascend. Of course, she was thinking, nodding and smirking.
‘Roughly,’ said Rosa. ‘A week before he ended it all? Months before?’
‘Come on, Rosa,’ said Grace. ‘I understand that you feel betrayed but this is ultimately an erroneous feeling, a mistake in emphasis. It’s very straightforward. Your behaviour is textbook. You’re looking for people to blame for the mess you’re in. Liam and I seem to be likely culprits. But you know yourself the truth is more complex.’
‘Well thanks for letting me know,’ said Rosa. ‘Thanks so much for assuring me of the complexity of truth.’ Briefly she despised the pair of them. She definitely despised the party. This glass of cheap wine she was holding in her hand, she wanted to throw it to the floor and stamp on it. Childish, she thought. Truly childish.
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