When they got back to the hotel Abigail rang her mother. She held the letter because it seemed to give her courage. She told Mum what had happened, but they had a bad line and she had to say it twice, which was painful but in an odd way calming.
‘Oh no,’ Mum said. ‘Oh no.’ And there was a long silence.
‘He was writing a letter,’ Abigail said. ‘You can read it when I get back. It’s addressed to me but it’s meant for you really.’ She felt herself starting to cry again but they were healing tears this time. ‘It’ll make you feel lots better.’
There was more silence from Mum, then she said in a sort of blurred voice, ‘Should I come out for the funeral?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Abigail said. ‘You’d only get tired and upset and spend a lot of money. And what would be the point?’
Mum sighed, sounding relieved, as if she were the child and Abigail the adult, telling her what to do.
‘I thought about coming home early,’ Abigail said, ‘but I think I’ll stay on. I might as well just be here for a bit, the way we planned it. I feel closer.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Mum said. ‘You must do whatever you think best.’
Abigail didn’t mention the baby. Time enough for that when she got home. She needed to be in the room with her for that: Mum might need a hug. Meanwhile she would sit in the sun with Julie and talk about Dad the way they both remembered him, and get brown the way he had promised her she would. She could do that for him at least. She would collect shells and walk through the icing-sugar sand and photograph the iguanas with their ancient faces and stare at the coloured fish and the coral reef through Julie’s snorkeling mask. She felt oddly at peace. Nothing worse could happen to her now. And there would be the child. In a way Dad was still there: he would go on in her, and in her brother or sister, whichever it turned out to be. Julie had destroyed something but she was creating something too.
Abigail sat in the sun and looked at her nails. She had forgotten to bite them for two whole days and they were beginning to grow.
‘I shall stop biting my nails,’ she decided. ‘I’m really too old to do that any more.’
Jessica in Love
The first time Jessica came to London she fell in love: it was the blind instantaneous passion you were supposed, in popular folklore, to feel for a man, although she had fallen in love with Colin very slowly. It was everything that pop songs promised: some enchanted evening, and strangers in the night and fly me to the moon. She felt frightened and elated, yet at the same time entirely comfortable because of the intense familiarity of this town where she had never been before. This was her place: she recognised it. In fact she wanted to hug the whole city, to fling her arms round it and embrace it like a person. It gave her a strange mixture of security and excitement. Anything was possible here.
‘You haven’t been here ten minutes and already you’re being unfaithful to me,’ Colin teased her when she tried to explain. ‘But it’s all right. I forgive you. I’d rather have London as a rival than another bloke.’
Lying on her narrow college bed after making love, they would listen to the city breathing and purring outside the window (‘You can even make traffic sound romantic,’ Colin said) then get up and dress and wander through leafy Hampstead, up and down hilly streets, their arms round each other, to catch a Japanese or Swedish film at the Everyman. The dusk turned London gently purple, but when they came out in search of a pizza, it was evening with that curious rusty light, the amber glow of the dark city’s lamps suggesting it was distantly on fire. Rationally she was aware of the noise and the dirt all around her, but emotionally it seemed remote, dwarfed by the magic, like tiny endearing faults in a lover. Sometimes they would go on to listen to jazz on the South Bank and she would stand entranced, hugging Colin, her back to the Festival Hall, her face to the river, dazzled by the lights on the water, weaving a fantasy in which they both became so rich they could have a permanent suite at the Savoy. Then they would walk slowly across Hungerford Bridge towards Embankment tube station, pausing to pick out landmarks, and Jessica would feel the city belonged to her.
Leaving Euston for a visit to her parents, she always felt homesick before the train left the station, wrenched away from her city, and apprehensive, as if something terrible might happen to it in her absence. If she was travelling with Colin she would try to distract herself by studying his face. His hair was so thick and heavy that it always flopped forward, making him look untidy, and his eyelashes came down straight like a cow’s, veiling his eyes. It was odd that she found this so attractive in him, whereas cows didn’t move her at all. His nose was broad and squashed, tending to spread across his face, and his mouth turned slightly up a the corners, making him look good-tempered even when he was angry. Jessica herself was dark and dramatic, like a gypsy, with glossy hair and sallow skin. People who didn’t know them often took them for brother and sister, which amused her.
Feeling her scrutiny, he looked up and smiled at her. The smile warmed her, as if she had held out her hands to a fire. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, knowing she’d been thinking about London. ‘It’ll still be there when we get back.’
Her parents always made a fuss of her when she arrived and pressed her to eat more than she wanted. She told herself it was their way of expressing love. ‘You’re just skin and bone,’ her mother said. ‘You need feeding up.’ But by Saturday afternoon the visit was wearing itself out and the talk shifted to her sister Jennifer and her husband and baby, who would all presently arrive for tea. Jessica felt that praise of Jennifer implied criticism of herself, that there was not enough love and approval in the family to spread over both of them. Yet she loved Jennifer and was fiercely protective of her if anyone outside the family attempted to criticise her. It was confusing to feel jealous of someone she loved. The baby confused her, too, sometimes making her long to be pregnant and sometimes making her long to run away. ‘I’m glad I don’t have to read all those books,’ said Jennifer, eyeing the pile Jessica had brought with her as a defence.
If her parents stayed in on Saturday evening, she and Colin would go to a film or a disco, but if the house was empty they would stay in and watch television like an old married couple. Making love here felt illicit, which could be thrilling or uncomfortable according to their mood. Sometimes they didn’t bother. But when the news came on Jessica always felt a pang of loss at the sight of the London skyline. ‘Relax,’ said Colin, kissing her. ‘We’ll soon be back.’
On Sundays she went to lunch at the farm with Colin and his father and Dave, his brother. It felt odd to be the only woman there. Colin could not even remember his mother. The three men talked about what needed doing on the farm and what had to be done, and Jessica smiled and stared out of the window, wondering how anyone could live without the reassuring sight of buildings. The fields stretched away into the distance, seemingly endless; even the animals looked lonely, she thought. It always surprised her to see how effortlessly Colin melted back into the language of the farm, instantly talking technicalities with Dave and his Dad like somebody born bilingual, as if he had never been away, as if London were a foreign country and this was home. It frightened her; she didn’t feel he belonged to her then. He wasn’t her Colin any more. She couldn’t wait to get him away and back to civilisation.
‘Come on, Jess, get some fresh air in your lungs,’ said Dave, who liked to tease her. And she would tramp obediently over the fields for hours in gumboots and anorak, knowing that somehow she would get her revenge: by the end of the afternoon she had always managed to catch cold.
Then it was back home with Colin for an early supper with her parents before getting the train back to London. Sneezing merrily by now, Jessica would be faint with triumph at proving she was allergic to the countryside, dizzy with excitement at the prospect of the escapist train journey. She was all hugs and kisses, Dave forgiven, Jennifer forgotten, her parents beloved and so soon to be left behind.
‘Back to the smoke then,’ her fat
her always said. ‘You take care of yourself now. You look after her, Colin.’
Jessica felt that they saw London as an alien place, that there was an unspoken criticism of her for choosing to go there when she could have picked a local college. She felt like a naughty child who had run away from home. She couldn’t have explained what it was about London that gave her such a charge; she didn’t do any of the usual tourist things, although she had at first, and she couldn’t afford any treats on a student grant. She just knew that as the train raced towards London she was flooded with relief, as if she had come through some danger and survived. There was something essential mixed in with the noise and the dirt, addictive as a drug, and as vital to her well-being as oxygen.
They had their lives all planned. Colin was going to teach and Jessica was going to be an estate agent. But jobs were harder to find than they’d thought, when the time came; it was a shock not to be students any more with subsidised accommodation, travel and food.
‘If you got work up here, you could live at home,’ her mother said. ‘Think of all the money you’d save.’
‘We can always use an extra pair of hands,’ said Colin’s Dad.
It had never occurred to Jessica that both families cherished a dream of them going home after college. How could they think that London was not for ever? ‘They really expect us to go back,’ she said to Colin. ‘Isn’t that amazing?’
‘Well, maybe they’ve got a point,’ he said. ‘It would be cheaper. We could save much faster up there and get a place in London later.’
Jessica was terrified. If they once went back, they might get stuck there and never get away again. ‘You don’t want to go back, do you?’ she said. ‘You can’t. You’re winding me up.’
He smiled. ‘I want to be with you,’ he said. ‘And you want to be in London.’
So Colin took the job at the comprehensive in Battersea and Jessica enrolled for a secretarial course. ‘All those exams and you end up as a secretary,’ said Jennifer, watching her pack. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’
‘I’m not ending up as anything,’ said Jessica, trying to stay cool. ‘I’m just beginning.’
‘Oh well, I suppose you can always do a bit of temping when you have kids,’ said Jennifer, who had to have the last word. In childhood Jessica remembered occasionally banging her head on the ground in an effort to shut her up.
They told their families they were going to share a flat with other people. Everyone knew that meant living together but it was easier than saying it. They rented a room in a mansion block near the river at the wrong end of the King’s Road where lorries thundered past on their way to the M4, making the whole building shudder and keeping them awake until sheer exhaustion got them suddenly adjusted. It was Chelsea, but only just. On Sunday mornings they would stroll down the road to buy the papers and have a drink at the pub or take their glasses across the road to lean on the wall and admire the houseboats floating gently on the brown water.
‘Maybe we can live on a houseboat one day,’ Jessica said. Jennifer’s remark about kids haunted her and she thought no one could expect her to have kids if she lived on a houseboat.
‘Maybe,’ Colin said. ‘But it might smell a bit. People chuck refuse in the river.’
‘Hey,’ she said lightly, ‘that sounds like criticism. This is our town, remember?’
‘It’s yours,’ he said. ‘I’m only here by invitation. You belong.’
She was shocked into silence. She had always wanted to believe that he loved London as much as she did, though on some level she had known that nobody could. ‘What is it?’ she said eventually. ‘What’s the matter? You sound so sad.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Jess,’ he said, not looking at her. ‘I’m just a bit disenchanted.’
‘Is it the kids?’ she said, frightened, hoping that was all he meant. ‘Are they getting you down?’
‘Well, they never stop thumping each other, if that’s what you mean. I suppose I’m bloody lucky they don’t thump me. Barry got duffed up the other day; he was off sick for a week. They put razor blades in our teacups if they get half a chance, and one of them told me his father found a baby in a dustbin on their council estate. What did he do? Call an ambulance? Not on your life. He called the News of the World.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Jessica said, feeling inadequate.
‘I told you they were rough. I didn’t know you wanted a daily bulletin.’
‘You could teach at another school.’
‘They’re all like that.’
‘Well, a private school then. They can’t be like that.’
‘Oh, Jess,’ he said hopelessly, ‘if I do that, then I’ve really sold out.’
‘I don’t see why.’ But she knew what he meant.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it’s not just the kids. We’re not saving anything. It’ll be years before we can get our own place.’
She hated to see him so defeated. ‘It’ll be all right, you see. Once I get a proper job. Once I start pulling my weight. You’re carrying me at the moment, that’s why it’s tough.’
She took him home, cooked a wonderful lunch, got him rather drunk and made love to him. He slept heavily afterwards and she watched him with protective tenderness, wondering if that was how Jennifer felt about her child. In the morning he went back to work as if nothing had happened, but Jessica felt the conversation marked a turning point in their lives.
She got a job as secretary to an estate agent and started learning as much as she could about the business. It excited her so much that sometimes she felt quite breathless. Sooner or later she would be a negotiator, selling properties as if the whole of London was hers to sell.
At the end of the year Colin left the school in Battersea and went to another one in Wandsworth. Jessica hardly dared ask him what it was like, but eventually she had to. ‘It’s just the same,’ he said. ‘I’m not a teacher, I’m a policeman. But don’t worry. I can cope.’
At weekends they went to art galleries and museums; during the week to theatres and films. Colin was far more hungry for culture than Jessica. ‘Otherwise we might as well not be here,’ he said.
They rented a flat of their own in Fulham. It had tiny rooms but a large roof terrace. Jessica sunbathed to the hum of traffic. When she went home to visit her family, the silence kept her awake.
‘It’s highway robbery,’ said Jennifer, leafing through one of Jessica’s property magazines. ‘You could buy a whole house up here for the price of one of your tarted-up studios in London. Are you going to be selling rubbish like that?’
Next year Jessica got the job as a trainee negotiator and at last it was all happening, the dream coming true. Colin said he was happy for her and they drank champagne and went to Covent Garden to celebrate. She spent all her spare time studying and she bought a second-hand car with her savings that had been meant for the deposit on a flat, so that she could get to know her area as well as a taxidriver and drive clients around from one property to another. She had exams to take, too; she was very busy. Colin kept telling her how well she was doing, but he didn’t talk about school any more and he didn’t make love to her as often as he used to. She was suddenly afraid. She felt a chill where before there had been warmth.
When the blow fell it was without warning: a phone call from Dave to say Colin’s father had had a heart attack. By the time they reached the farm he was dead, and Jessica, who had surreptitiously packed black clothes just in case, felt guilty and responsible, as if she had made it happen. Colin and Dave formed an instant alliance of mutual support and she felt relieved but excluded. At the funeral she surprised herself by crying a lot while they didn’t cry at all. Afterwards they went for long walks together to have whatever private conversations they could not have in the house while she was there, and she watched their broad backs disappearing over the horizon with a sense of dread.
Colin didn’t tell her until they were back in London. Then he put it very plainly. ‘I’m sorry, Jess,’
he said. ‘I’ll have to go back. Dave can’t manage without me.’
She stared at him with absolute horror, saying, ‘Just for the holidays, that’s what you mean, isn’t it?’ while knowing it was worse than that.
‘No, to stay. Dave can’t cope – well, he probably could but he’s panicking, he’s talking about selling the farm. If I’m there I can steady him down. Don’t look like that, it’s not yet. I’ll have to give a term’s notice, of course.’
Jessica didn’t know how she got through the next few weeks. They both went very quiet as if keeping their heads down, keeping a low profile. They made love with particular intensity but didn’t talk. Then Colin suddenly said, ‘Would you like to get married? I’ve always assumed we would one day but maybe I should have asked you before.’
She didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t imagine life without him but she knew life on the farm would be a death sentence for her. So she just gave him a big hug. ‘Let’s talk about it another time.’
‘I know it’s a lot to ask,’ he said, ‘uprooting you like this.’ And then she realised he was expecting her to agree.
‘It’s so soon after the funeral,’ she said. ‘We can’t make decisions now. We’re not thinking straight, either of us.’
‘I know how much you love London,’ he said. ‘I just hope you love me more, that’s all.’
‘Of course I do,’ she said, but she wasn’t sure she meant it and he looked as if he didn’t believe her.
‘We could come down for weekends,’ he said. ‘We could even move back in a few years. It wouldn’t have to be for ever.’
They were both crying when they said goodbye on Euston station. ‘See you soon,’ were his last words, and he waved till he was out of sight. Jessica went home in a taxi she couldn’t afford and the phone was ringing as she walked in. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Jennifer said. ‘You love him, don’t you? You can’t let him go.’
‘Yes, I love him,’ said Jessica, crying, ‘but I can’t leave London.’
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