Gemma also hated a quiet house. On the evening of the first day when all three of her daughters were about their business, Gemma saw Stephanie disconsolately browsing the organic vegetable counter at the Helford Magno. She looked out of focus. Even in old shorts and a blue chambray shirt the woman was a pretty dresser in the trim, modest style of young mothers in French baby-wear ads, but today there was something disarrayed about her. Gemma decided to approach.
‘So howyadoin?’ Stephanie blinked in surprise. ‘Remember me, the madwoman you bought the Corsican mints from?’ Her thick hair was braided for coolness, and tied with black silk cord. It hung down over one shoulder, tangling with the buttons on her loose orange dress. There was a lot of movement in the dress; if she was wearing a bra, it was not up to the job of keeping her breasts still.
‘Gemma,’ Stephanie confirmed, coming back to earth from the misty grey planet Miserable, where she seemed to spend all the time that wasn’t given to work. ‘At Gaia. Of course. You saved us with those mints. Hello.’
‘Howareya?’ Gemma disregarded the flicker of guilt in the other woman’s face and picked up a pack of oyster mushrooms. ‘Do you eat these things? What are they like?’
‘They’re … pointless, I think.’
‘No taste, no texture, why bother, huh?’
‘I think people have them for stir-fries.’
‘No taste, no texture but no real cooking necessary, is that it?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Mints take all right?’
‘They must have done, the clients haven’t complained.’
‘I hope they’ve got someone to water them if they’re away.’
‘No need, I put a watering system in the design scheme. Automatic. On a timer. Always do it – you have to have automated sprinklers. Even if they take out a maintenance contract with the boys who work for me they never remember the watering.’
‘I never understand how people can do that. I mean, why invite a plant into your life and then kill it? You have something in your life, you give it what it needs, right? I mean, it’s only water. Pretty basic.’
‘And it has to be a timer with a year calendar. They can’t handle setting it month-by-month.’
‘People are weird, aren’t they?’
Companionably, they walked over to the fruit. ‘These are so cheap,’ Gemma marvelled, weighing a Guatemalan melon in her hand. It was chilled and had no scent. ‘What did they pay the guys who picked them?’
‘I know.’ In her state of deepened melancholy, Stephanie was so tender-hearted that the world’s injustices ate at her spirit like ulcers. ‘I wish they wouldn’t label the apples,’ she remarked, picking up a ball-shaped red cellulose growth with a sticker reading ‘Gala’. ‘It’s like they’re just products.’
‘There’s no fun in shopping when you’re on your own, is there?’ Gemma rolled the melon back into the display.
This was not a Westwick conversation. Westwick conversations were as light as the thistledown which drifted over in the summer air from the Oak Hill Nature Triangle. Westwick conversations were as free of content as a fat-free yoghurt is free of fat. Actually, more so. Westwick conversations would no more court an issue than a Westwick child would ride in a car without a seatbelt. In Stephanie’s increasingly robust opinion. Westwick conversations were not worthy of the name. She found herself breathing easier.
They drifted on to Magno’s café, which attempted, with a blue and white plastic awning over the steel counter and plastic palm trees stuck on the tiled walls, to convince the supermarket’s clientele that the store was as warm, human, entertaining, varied and nutritiously enticing as a Mediterranean street market.
‘You’re not going away, then?’ Gemma blew on her coffee; they both took it black rather than get involved with non-dairy whitener.
‘I don’t like to. I keep thinking – suppose I wasn’t here when there was some news of my husband?’
‘They’d find you.’
‘I suppose – I don’t like to take the chance, you know? And I need to keep working. I mean, thank God I can. His firm – well partnership, he’s an architect – isn’t insured to pay his salary for ever. I’ve got to be a bread winner now.’
‘Tough, huh?’
‘Mmn.’
‘Tell me about it. I like your hair, by the way. It suits you.’
‘Thank you.’ Stephanie ran her hand over the nape of her neck, still not used to feeling bare skin. She found she wanted to ask why this woman’s husband was in jail. The question was welling up like molten lava, not to be resisted. ‘Why—’ she began.
‘He imported a foreign car without a licence,’ interrupted the other, confidentially narrowing one eye. ‘Actually, quite a few of ’em. It was his business but he bent the rules because he was crazy. So what he’s really in jail for is being mad. Oh, excuse me, I shouldn’t say that. Mad people have their rights too. Sanity challenged, maybe. Manic depressive, it used to be. Now its bi-polar syndrome. Molly was what tipped him over the edge, after she was born he made our lives living hell, which is not actually a crime. So in the end, I found out what he could be charged with, and turned him in. Now his parents don’t speak to me because I made their son a lunatic and my parents don’t speak to me because I made the girls’father a jailbird. But we get by.’
‘My father was in jail,’ Stephanie looked into the dregs of her coffee, realising that she had confessed this to no one since the something-to-declare conversation she had with Stewart after they decided to get married. ‘We got by. I can see now, it was very hard on my mother: But for my sister and me, it was just a blessing to have a quiet normal life.’
‘How is it with what happened to your husband and stuff?’ For once it seemed a natural question.
‘Hell. It’s so frustrating, there’s nothing I can do. Nothing anyone can do. I think I’m going mad, sometimes. This morning the guy from the Foreign Office said there was going to be a support group of people like me and did I want my name put forward.’
‘There are that many people?’
‘Seems so. So I said yes.’
‘Good.’
They were silent for a little while. Stephanie slipped her feet half out of her white summer loafers and felt relaxed for the first time in months.
Gemma finished her coffee. She sensed something, the chi flipping about like a fish, sending destiny off in a new direction. ‘Look,’ she proposed, ‘dya wanna go down the Wilde At Heart and do some serious bitching?’ Groye Parade faced St Nicholas’s Church across the corner of The Broadway and Church Vale. Here the municipality had been induced to recreate a theme park market square, with old shop fronts glowing under their preservation orders around a red granite horse trough now planted with begonias.
Among these little emporia, the Kwality Korner Store stood out by its lack of pretension. The rest of the shops, battered as their margins were by soaring rents, redoubling taxes, merciless parking restrictions and the relentless competition of Magno Supermarkets, turned bright-painted faces to the world and offered such luxury goods as Magno customers did not buy in big enough quantities to make their supply economically viable.
Gemma and Stephanie took an outside table at the Wilde At Heart and indulged themselves with white wine and salads. The long afternoon sun sparkled in the bottle-glass panes of Parsley & Thyme’s bow window. The boy from Catchpole & Forge was sweeping up the day’s sawdust. The window designer of Bon Ton slipped a Max Mara beige silk shirtwaist over the single display dummy and complemented it with a pair of pale python slingbacks. In Bundle’s Baby Boutique, the assistant, her mouth full of pins, finished a window display of sunsuits and swimming costumes.
Outside Pot Pourri, Marcia the owner topped up the water of her stocks and sunflowers and her spaniel, Bedlam, lay on the hot pavement panting. Pot Pourri had taken to staying open in the evening, hoping to make some guilt money from commuting husbands returning late from the office. The bank of bouquets, displayed in rustic bask
ets outside the period shopfront, led one to expect Eliza Doolittle at any moment.
They exchanged fears and wishes and life-stories. They talked luxuriously about their children. They discussed hybridisation of fashionable plants and deplored it. They discovered that they both knew Rod Fuller, and Gemma told Stephanie the true story of his wife’s death but did not open the topic of his drinking since the accident. They agreed that Sweetheart was the most adorable child in Westwick after their own and put this down to her Irish-Chinese-Anglo-Saxon heritage plus good parenting.
They finished their salads and, in holiday mood, ordered ice cream. The senior negotiator at Grove Estates put in the window the details of a new six-bedroom, five-bathroom immaculate family home in Cedar Close. People almost never bought homes from Grove Estates and this woman was the reason. She was small and thin with a pinched face which seemed on the point of creasing up with quiet weeping; she looked like a woman whose husband had just left her, and people came to Westwick for substance and space, stability and happy families. Greenwoods on the Broadway did three times as much business as Grove Estates, although their negotiators were almost caricatures of their profession, vulpine young men in striped shirts, mobile phones welded to their ears.
‘This isn’t just have-ovaries-will-talk, is it?’ Gemma suggested. ‘This is a moment. Something will come of this.’ Stephanie opened her mouth to say she had to get back to work, then changed her mind and said nothing.
‘You see, I have this theory about mothers,’ Gemma continued, putting her feet up on an empty chair. ‘That every now and then when two mothers are gathered together a moment comes along, and they have to say – yes. We will have this. This is for us. Not for our children, or our husbands, or our families, or society, or God, or the highest good – we have no excuse for this, this is for us and we are going to have it, just because we want it.’
‘Good theory, I like it,’ Stephanie affirmed, surprised that now she was not even wondering what she might be getting into here sharing the deepest, darkest and dirkest with this voluptuously undisciplined female whom the rest of Westwick shunned.
‘What a moment is is an oxygen mask.’ She pulled out the cord that tied her hair and dangled it from her upstretched arm, copying the air-crew cabaret. ‘Just when you’re gasping for life with the trivia and the banality and the socks and the pants and the schoolbooks and the total endless utter responsibility for everything, it comes tumbling down from the sky and you can breathe again.’
‘But I like the little stuff,’ Stephanie protested, truthfully. There was much security in knowing you were doing your best for your child, even in tying his shoe laces. Parenthood as the spiritual death of a thousand cuts was something she had heard other mothers complain of, but had never experienced. ‘I enjoy it. Max is just … an angel, I’m so lucky. And I like looking after everybody.’
‘Yeah, I like it too, and I love my girls to pieces and I like the nice warm feeling you get of doing the right stuff.’ Gemma looked at the face opposite her and saw the slightest, most tentative gleam of vitality dawning in the harrowed grey eyes. ‘But let’s face it, that’s all you get. Otherwise all you get for bringing up kids is abuse. If you’re lucky. And if you’re not, you’re just wiped. People come along and take another little piece of your heart, and one day you won’t be there any more, just the hole where you used to be. You’ll be a disappeared one, a non-person. It’s like you can make yourself a victim because you think kids are the purpose of life but everybody else thinks it’s something else. So the purpose of their life actually is taking away yours. You’re just the next best thing to dead meat, a herbivore in a carnivorous world. So that’s why you need the moments. I mean – did Thelma and Louise have any kids?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘Betcha they didn’t. If you’re a mother you can’t even drive off a cliff and get away with it. I tell ya.’
13. The Tudor Theatre
The days after this meeting seemed lighter. Stephanie found she worked faster. Jobs which had stuck to her fingers were finished at last; things she had lost were found. She became aware that since Stewart had been gone she had drifted for long, grey hours in a kind of chaos which was born of unhappiness, with so little mental strength that a very simple task, like costing a planting or computing a slope, had needed long and laborious concentration.
She went with budding hope to the first meeting of the support group for the partners and families of kidnap victims, which was convened by a deep voice on the telephone at an anonymous uptown hotel, close to Central Station, at 5 pm, over coffee and finger sandwiches. When she arrived she found a woman of a species she recognised at once, the unsexed matron bred by the armed forces or the civil service, a flat-chested, crop-haired, long-skirted doyenne, posed in the centre of a small group and using her institutional good manners as a means of domination.
‘And where is your husband?’ she enquired, and fluttered with insincere embarrassment as she added, ‘Or is it your husband? We’ve all got so much to learn about each other.’
‘Kazakhstan.’ Stephanie mumbled the still unfamiliar name. ‘In Russia. What used to be Russia.’
‘The former Soviet Union.’ The matron made it sound like a correction. Around them the rest of the group, unified only in their willingness to be drones to this queen bee, nodded understanding. ‘My husband,’ the matron confided, ‘is in Iraq, poor man. A diplomat. Very junior, actually.’
There were four others, their missing men had been on business in Namibia, studying the climate in New Guinea, backpacking in Indonesia and on a church mission to Algeria. ‘And she has had no news,’ the matron volunteered. ‘Not a word since he was taken. That must be the worst, don’t you think? I don’t know how I’d cope with nothing at all.’
The scrape of cups on saucers was loud in the quiet room. Eating sandwiches seemed too gross, they went untouched. Soft, shallow smiles were traded. The matron mediated the exchange of information as she would have run an embassy cocktail party. No doubt she had used her leverage with Capelli to get this event organised for her own benefit. Stephanie felt cheated; she had hoped for the chance at last to rage against the unfairness of it all in good company. The horrible compost of her feelings was just too ugly to bring into her cultivated day-to-day life.
The matron and two of the others were seeing counsellors. Only the backpacker’s partner had no children. The others all had children in their teens. In time they got down to where they all lived.
‘Westwick!’ marvelled the matron, as if personally affronted. ‘But that’s a very nice neighbourhood, isn’t it?’
‘We thought so,’ Stephanie answered, half smiling at what she was saying. Five faces were regarding her with rank envy. The matron was in a Foreign Office apartment close by. Three of the others were from cities in the Coffin, one from a much less favoured suburb to the east of the city.
‘Where is Westwick?’ queried Algeria, sounding as if the place had been chosen to distress her.
‘Out near the airport,’ Stephanie answered briskly.
‘One of those lovely quiet places with old houses and trees on the streets – it was the first garden suburb, wasn’t it?’ The matron was giving no ground.
‘That was Maple Grove,’ said Stephanie. ‘We don’t live in Maple Grove.’
‘All the same,’ said the matron, ‘it must be very nice.’
After that the other five formed a bond which excluded her, and Stephanie went home on the train in tears again, having been condemned to suffer without support as punishment for the privilege of living in Westwick.
The next day her mother returned, bringing her son to console her.
‘Max is such a dear,’ she said, settling in the garden as if she had an important matter to discuss. ‘Quite fell in love with my grandson when we had him to ourselves. Did I tell you what he said to the stewardess on the flight back?’
‘Yes, you did.’ Stephanie observed that her mother was restless. S
he was looking around and twitching her toes and playing with her triple-strand pearls. Something was up. There was a sense of purpose about her. She usually cruised along with at least a facade of serenity. Since the necessity for action was what made her mother nervous, it wouldn’t be long before she made her move.
‘Oh well – but he was a dream. I suppose it is the annoying thing about children that they always act their best with other people.’ Rejuvenated, her mother appeared now, with a good strong suntan to set off her Grace Kelly pastels.
‘He’s a dream at home too. And at school. Term starts tomorrow.’ Another milestone in time, another cycle of the year begun, and still no hope of Stewart. Mr Capelli had lately been assuring her, ‘things are moving forward very well in Kazakhstan,’ but after nearly five months he was obviously running short of things to say.
Max had been inside his home all of thirty seconds before asking if Courtenay Fuller could come over. It was simple to amuse Courtenay, all she wanted to do was climb things; Stephanie’s garden had one tree worth climbing, with one branch within reach. Between the three of them they had added a rope ladder and the children had begun some fantasy game requiring them to climb the tree and descend the ladder interminably.
It was the no-man’s land of the year, the time when seeds are setting, fruit is ripening and late roses open in the mellow afternoon sun. Creation was gearing up for the great push of the autumn. In the city, working people were getting back to their desks with an obscure feeling of relief and drawing up masterful task lists. In Westwick, mothers were pairing football boots and naming hockey-sticks and laying in supplies of pens, pencils, ink, socks, calculators, geometry instruments, gym leotards, dictionaries and nit lotion, mobbing out the scruffy little school shop in Helford.
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