by Anna Maxted
‘Ooh, baby,’ said Ron, when I walked in that Monday morning, ‘lookin’ hot!’
I approached him smiling, and pressed my fingers hard into his neck until he choked. ‘It’s the twenty-first century,
Ron,’ I sighed, ‘it’s the twenty-first century.’
‘Just sue him,’ said Greg.
Ron rubbed his neck and muttered. When he said anything he showed his lower teeth, like a bulldog. I resented that he was getting work because of my grandmother’s funeral. At least Greg knew I was telling the truth – the death notice and funeral details had appeared in The Times.
At ten thirty, I checked my appearance in the mirror. ‘Lookin’ hot,’ I said. The powder had melted to a shine on my scarlet face, each bead of sweat was beige. I wished I didn’t sweat so much. Show me the woman who glows because I’d like to shake her cool, dry hand. I sweat like a man. A horse, even.
At ten thirty-two, I left for the funeral, sweating, having done no work.
The crematorium was nice, as crematoriums went. Dark wood, but not too dark. Some of them are little more than cement garages in a car park. I joined my mother, my father, Ollie and Gabrielle in the front row. Jude was sleeping in his pushchair. The coffin was right there, in front of us, next to a velvet curtain. I felt this was in bad taste. I’m not entirely comfortable with death. I have this medieval notion that it’s catching.
I stared at my mother, but she wouldn’t look up. Gabrielle stood beside her like a bodyguard, gripping her hand. She wouldn’t make eye contact either. My father gave me a brisk nod. So did Ollie. I presumed Gabrielle had told him how I’d placed his son and heir in the line of fire. I noted that they were prompt in thinking badly of me. Martine sidled in, breathing heavily, sweating like two horses. I was touched, although she probably saw it as a chance to wear a nice hat in front of Roger. (I was prompt in thinking badly of Martine.) Probably, we both deserved it.
There were very few mourners, and I felt bad for my mother. I had this crazy thought that Jack might see the notice in The Times, and turn up, but why should he? He liked my mother. That was all I could think of. It hadn’t, I noted, occurred to Jason that it might be good manners for him to show. No doubt he’d written my mother a beautiful letter. The minister spoke in a loud, clear voice. He also got Grandma Nellie’s name right, which I was grateful for. He must have ten of these burn-ups a day; I didn’t take his accuracy for granted.
I didn’t think Angela would speak, but I was still surprised when my father rose, shuffling papers. There was a pulpit, behind which he stood to address us. He was immaculate in a dark navy suit, with a pink tie, and yellow shirt. He was always dashing, but that day he was stunning. The faint lemony scent of his aftershave lingered prettily in the air. It reminded me of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan. I glanced at my mother again. She looked dreadful. Her mascara was streaked right down her face, and she was wearing some sort of black sack.
My father spoke smilingly. He even cracked a joke about Grandma Nellie and her trainers. Martine laughed, then clapped her hand over her mouth. I ‘hm!’ed. Everyone else stared silently at the floor. He then read an excerpt from the Bible, about trusting in God. I’d have thought this precisely a time you wouldn’t trust in God. If He was in charge, there was a strong case for Him being the one who’d struck down Grandma Nellie. After that, you’d be hard pushed trusting Him with the school hamster.
I heard my father’s voice but his words drifted through me. I felt like I was five years old, waiting for the headmaster to stop preaching. His voice rang out, confident – almost, I felt with a twinge of disloyalty, too confident. I’d hesitate to use the word ‘patronising’. Surely it would have been good manners to stumble a little, be overcome with emotion? But he was word-perfect, enunciating the tedious conversation between God and His Disciple with great enthusiasm and in different voices as if he were reading from a play, say, Separate Tables.
I had to trust him that this was the right thing to do. I wasn’t that great on social convention. I glanced at my mother again, and saw a tear splash on to her prayer book. It struck me that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her cry. Suddenly, she stood up.
‘I’d like to say a few words now.’
My father stared at her. He hadn’t finished the excerpt. ‘But I—’ He smiled. ‘Of course, dear.’ As he returned to the other side of the aisle, he muttered, ‘It’s your funeral.’
No one heard him, except me, perched on the end of the row. And I didn’t want to hear him. Those words were unwelcome. There was no way to interpret them that was good. The sweat trickled down my neck and I felt swollen with heat and misery. My father was strong, kind, capable, perfection. It was like watching Spartacus and seeing some Roman wearing a watch. You put a lot of stock in the people who rule your world knowing what they’re doing; you don’t want to witness their mistakes, you need to know that they don’t make them.
As my mother took the podium, I felt rotten with the knowledge that my father wasn’t perfect.
Chapter 23
Whatever my mother had wanted to say about her mother, remained private. She smiled shakily, from the pulpit, and said, ‘I was never very close to my mother, but she was … she was … she …’ Then she shook her head, covered her face. Ollie escorted her back to her seat. My father got to finish his lecture.
Then everyone drove in a convoy to Gab and Ollie’s house and ate salmon bagels. I wasn’t hungry but tried to eat something. Grandma Nellie had hated to see food go to waste. My mother wore dark glasses indoors, which meant she had a migraine. She went to lie down in Gab and Ollie’s spare room five minutes later. I took this to mean the party was over, and left. As I shut the door, Martine was chatting to my father. I wondered what was left to tell.
I took a detour to Hampstead Heath, and sat staring at the pond until the sky began to turn pink. Afterwards, on the drive home, about fifty cars hooted me. Either I’d won the cup, or my attention wasn’t on the road. Funerals are supposed to make you feel more alive. There’s a mean reflex in human nature that, on an unconscious level (unless you’re particularly unpleasant), makes us think, ha ha, they’re dead, I’m not – even if we loved that person. I felt dead.
‘Grandma,’ I said, addressing the car roof, ‘I’m an idiot. I am sorry I never made it to see you. All those years. It seems so petty now. I always … meant to.’
I meant to.
How pathetic. Just like I’d always meant to explain to Jack.
Jack.
I thought of what he’d said in the restaurant. ‘You betrayed me, Hannah, when I loved you more than any woman I will ever love …’ And I felt a great rush of contrition. It washed over me like a wave, and there was a need to see him that made me ache. He had to know that I was truly sorry. I couldn’t stand for him to hate me. I had to tell him to his face that I had been stupid and scared of love but that I wasn’t a cheat. I couldn’t go another minute without him knowing this.
I stared at the imposing white interior of Jack’s building, then hurried up the stone path.
It was only when I’d rung the doorbell and heard footsteps that my legs went wibbly. I smacked my lips together – they felt oddly slippery, I so rarely wore lipstick – and planted my feet square on the hallway carpet. Jack hadn’t told me where he lived but I’d found out, courtesy of a rather fabulous website we had illegal access to. It was used by the police to trace people. You tapped in a phone number, and the corresponding address popped onto the screen. Oh, naughty.
‘It’s HannahI’msosorry,’ I said as fast as I could before he could shout at me. The words sounded pretty, running into each other like paint, so I repeated them, ‘Jack, I’m so so sorry about everything, the divorce, everything. Grandma Nellie died and I had to see you, I had to explain.’ I added, ‘Please don’t be angry with me. I know you are but don’t be, because I am very very sorry.’
He stood there, tall, and it felt as if he were swooping down on me, like a vampire bat. Or maybe I was gi
ddy. My hand flew to my mouth, ‘Oh God,’ I said, ‘I forgot. Is your girlfriend there? The blonde one?’
‘How many girlfriends do you think I have?’ said Jack. His expression was inscrutable. I flinched, as if he might hit me. Although he never had, he was expert at communicating physical menace. Other men didn’t start fights with Jack.
I made an apologetic face.
‘I ended it with the blonde one. It wasn’t working,’ he said. But he held open the door, and made a grand curly gesture with his arm, inviting me in. As I passed him, he touched my back, briefly. ‘I’m sorry about Grandma Nellie.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. His hallway was a lot different from mine. The white ceiling, for instance, was twice as high, and had decorative swirly bits of plaster in each corner. Cornetting, I believe it’s called. I looked up, turning as I did so, like Alice in Wonderland after taking the shrinking pill, and nearly lost my balance. Jack grabbed my arm and righted me.
‘Oh, this is so pretty, Jack,’ I said, ‘It’s all Chinese-y, this dark wood floor, and dark wooden blinds, and hardly any furniture, it’s very plain and minimalist.’ I was gabbling. Jack had come a long way since the days when placing a big pot plant on the kitchen table alongside a large anglepoise lamp to highlight our chops was his idea of a romantic dinner.
Jack showed me to a squashy sofa. It didn’t fit with the room but you sank into it as into a warm bath.
‘Thank you,’ I said. I cleared my throat. I knew what I wanted to say, and tried to arrange the words in comprehensible order. ‘I had this falling out with Grandma Nellie. Years ago. The way she was to my father … offended me. I stopped going to see her and, because she’s of … she was of the generation that believed the younger people should make the effort, she never came to see me. And so, out of stubbornness, we never made up and she died. And, now it seems like a great waste.’ I paused.
Jack nodded.
‘The funeral was today and I had to see you. I … didn’t want the same thing to happen with … us.’
‘I was hoping I had a few years left,’ said Jack, and I knew he was nervous. His jokes always took a dive then.
‘The truth is, Jack,’ I said, ‘that I did understand how you felt betrayed by me, and I am more sorry about it than about anything in my life. I was then too, but I couldn’t express it. I don’t know why. You assumed the worst and I froze. I felt sick with stupidity; I didn’t have the words to say that I would never have slept with Guy while I had you. It was terrifying, being with you, because you played indifferent. That one time I kissed Guy – bad, I know, but nothing more – it was to give myself distance from you. It felt safer. I loved you, but I didn’t get how you felt about me till I saw your reaction.’
Jack closed his eyes and opened them. ‘I should have listened to you. But I couldn’t. I believed the worst. It was as if I was so down on myself that I wanted to. You think you have confidence, but the test is what it can stand up to. If you don’t grow up with confidence, but acquire it, you can just as easily unacquire it. When you said you’d been with that bloke, mine blew away like a fucking dandelion.’
He shook his head. Then he got up, abruptly, and walked out of the room. I wasn’t sure what to do.
‘Jack?’ I called after him. ‘Jack? Are you OK? I wanted to tell you, I’m sorry, I’m sorry for everything I did, you were everything to me, it was too much, I hate that I did that to … us.’
There was no reply and I was shouting into white silence. I held my breath and crept down the corridor. At the end, a door was open to a bathroom, the sort of bathroom I’d only ever seen in magazines, and Jack was leaning over the cream-coloured stone sink, one hand over his eyes, shaking. He was, I saw with a shock, crying.
‘Oh, baby.’ My heart lurched and I blurted out the words before I could think. I wanted to back away, I was mortified, for both of us, to have stumbled on him in this private moment. I also knew that I’d been kidding myself about Jason, that I had to end it, God help me, the next time I saw him.
‘Look, I’m sorry, Jack,’ I said. ‘I’ll leave now, I’ll leave for good, I mean, I—’
Without looking up, he raised a hand and said, through gritted teeth, ‘Wait.’
I nodded, hurried back into the cool, white front room. I was too agitated to sit, so I wandered over to a mirror propped against the wall and looked into it. It was slightly dusty, and mottled. Jack didn’t buy … antiques, did he? I felt sober, embarrassed, suddenly, as if he had become a discerning adult, and I was still a bug-eyed child – who preferred things cheap, mass-made, new. I emitted a small squeak, and peered closer into the murk of the reflective glass.
A clown stared back.
I hadn’t applied my red lipstick to my lips, more around them. Jesus, I looked ridiculous. I must have been in more of a state than I’d thought. I started smearing it off my face with the back of my hand. Why hadn’t he said something?
I was reminded of attending a wedding with Jack, a few months after we married, and Martine. It was a fierce, hot day, and I was wearing a hideous menopausal peach silk ‘ensemble’ (as described by the woman in the shop – Sammies of Highgate – recommended by Martine, a place that reeked of oestrogen; you got the feeling if a man ever walked in, a trapdoor opened in the floor and whoop, down he went). That was my problem: I so rarely dressed like a girl, I didn’t know how to. Hence the purchase of an item that turned me into a mutant butterbean. Not only that, I was so damn hot, I felt sure I’d sweated right through that mean scratchy material and there was a huge dark blotch of wet down my peach back.
‘Jack,’ I said, ‘have I got a sweat stain on the back of my dress?’
He inspected it, and said, ‘No, Special, you look beautiful.’
But I noticed Martine’s eyes flicker. We walked into the church and I found a cloakroom with a mirror. I turned my back and, good grief, there was a dark damp patch on my dress the size of Wales. I was just about to be furious with Jack when it struck me that his lie was an act of love. I arranged my matching peach shawl strategically, and marched to my seat, head high. My heart felt newly moulded into a soft shape.
I was wiping off the last of my clown’s lipstick when I heard Jack. I stood up as he walked fast towards me.
He said, ‘Let me help you with that.’ Either I offered him my hand, or he pulled it to him, but I was right up against him in a hot, hard kiss, we were stumbling, frantic, grabbing each other, I was rattling his belt buckle like it was a lock, and I could feel his fingers tremble as he tore off my jacket and trailed his hands over my back, front, all of me. ‘Oh God, Hannah,’ he whispered, ‘oh God.’ I shook my head, crushed myself against him. I felt like crying, laughing, I couldn’t speak.
He carried me to his bedroom, and lowered me onto the bed.
Our bed.
‘You kept it,’ I said. My eyes teared up. ‘I thought you’d sell it.’
He whispered, ‘I couldn’t.’
He kissed me again, hard, and it felt right, in a way it never had with anyone else. Sex had made me want to cry before but not, believe me, out of elation and joy. It never felt like a celebration, but with Jack it did. As if it was meant to be us all along. It was like we could communicate better in bed than we could out of it.
I remembered Jack saying, after one mind-blowing session, ‘What the hell was that?’ At the time, I felt embarrassed, like I’d exposed my soul to a non-believer. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be a happier interpretation. Now, with him again after ten years, I breathed in the scent and feel of him with a hunger I didn’t know I possessed. I felt ravenous for him, as if I’d been starving myself for the last decade.
Afterwards, he said, mouth to mouth, ‘How could you think I didn’t love you?’
‘I … I suppose I never knew a good definition,’ I said. My heart leapt about inside my chest like a small bunny rabbit.
It was immeasurably more wonderful with Jack than with Jason. I always found Jason too hot. (Not in the sexy sense, i
n the ‘you’re unpleasantly warm get away from me’ sense.)
Jason. Jason! Oh God. I hadn’t even told Jack the situation with Jason. He’d gone right out of my head.
‘What?’ said Jack. His left arm was flung over my chest. He had beautiful arms, beautifully defined muscles, and skin the colour of a fading tan. Jack probably went on a lot of holidays. I touched his cheek, softly, apologetically, and shifted away a little.
‘Nothing.’
Now my heart was leaping in my chest like a small bunny rabbit trying to avoid being shot.
‘I like your bedroom,’ I blurted. The truth, even if it was to distract his attention from my discomfort. Jack’s bedroom was cool, plain, and masculine. Not like some men’s bedrooms. You see it in Sunday supplements, with actors or footballers. They’re wealthy, young, handsome, living alone, free to design the master bedroom of their shag pad as they wish – and they decorate it for their mother to sleep in. Apricot carpets. Silk curtains, with swagging. Floral duvet, with fancy valance. Oh God. Poor Jason.
‘Thanks,’ said Jack, his dark eyes meeting mine. ‘So. What’s the situation with Jason?’
‘Jack,’ I said, ‘you have got to believe me. Jason proposed last week, and I accepted, and then Grandma Nellie happened, and I realised I’d made this hideous mistake. He’s angry with me because I haven’t yet told my parents – or anyone. I said it wasn’t the right time, but now I see it was because I knew it was a mistake. Not consciously, even, but I knew. And I, I promise, I didn’t expect … this … I knew it was over with Jase before I came here. I would have told you straight up, but there wasn’t time, and I’m going to end it with Jason, say it was a terrible mistake, I’m going to end it now, tonight, I’m going to ring him, I—’