by Stella Duffy
The arrival of another bottle of wine called a halt to the men’s sparring. Even Daniel knew better than to draw the waiter’s attention to Will’s public persona while they were still discussing their collective past. Saz agreed to be the first point of contact with Andrea, though said she’d have to sort out a few babysitting problems first. She didn’t explain her reasoning for wanting to keep Molly out of what was going on, and neither of the men asked. The desire to keep past and present apart was perfectly understandable to all of them. Caught in a shiver of her own fears, Saz figured the men felt as sick as she did. The danger posed to Will’s career was obvious – the nation might love a charming bastard on its screens, happily believe that every passionate woman really did crave a bit of rough with a golden heart – it didn’t like the same story so much when it took up tabloid covers as revealed truth. For Saz it was easier to see the whole thing as Will’s problem, it meant she didn’t have to look too far back to her own involvement. After the initial explanation of what was going on, and agreement on a plan of action, Janine Marsden’s name was not mentioned again. Instead the three of them settled into their old pattern – menas-boys ganging up against Saz, Saz and Daniel taking the piss out of Will’s new fame and new name, Saz and Will mocking Daniel’s still-present auteur aspirations. All of it too close and too true, but easy as well. While each of them was nervy about the news from Janine Marsden, they were also used to being with each other. They had lived through some of their most important moments together. The fact that not one of them ever acknowledged that time in their current lives if they could help it was irrelevant. They were bound, and they knew it.
As Saz drove away she thought about herself and the two men all those years ago. That time and place so long ago when she had both craved and despised their company, loved being part of the group and loathed herself for loving it, for the compromises she made to keep her place. In and out, just as she’d always known herself to be. She arrived home late and very sober. Molly and Matilda were sleeping together in the big bed. Saz lifted her daughter and laid her carefully in her cot, lifted her partner and laid her carefully in her arms. Around three in the morning Matilda started crying and Saz went to their baby. Held her, soothed her, lullabied her back to sleep. Molly woke when Saz climbed carefully back into bed, Molly turned in Saz’s arms, her partner her passion and her pillow. Saz turned in on herself, in another place, kissing another face.
TWENTY-FIVE
We were nine when we first played “kissing”. We weren’t best friends, I didn’t have best friends, but that year we sat together in Mrs King’s class and a few times we slept over at each other’s houses. No spare beds at her place or mine, but it wasn’t strange to share a bed, not then. Top and tail, head to foot. Turn in the night face to face, lips to lips, mouth to mouth. And more. Turn in the night, but never in the day. In public. We knew to be quiet, not to enjoy ourselves too loudly. We knew it was enjoyable. And we knew part of the fun was the secret. We knew too – I don’t know how we knew, we were so young, stupid and naive in so many ways – but we did – we knew it wouldn’t be OK. That the boys and girls playing doctors and nurses at school got in trouble when they were found out. Had to go and speak to the Deputy Head, one at a time, into the big office, embarrassed and denying and leaving crying. If doctors and nurses was so wrong, we knew there’d be a problem with nurses and nurses. We didn’t know any men nurses then, and only one lady doctor.
So we didn’t tell. This was our secret. And we perfected it, that year we were friends, we got good at it. Very good. And then she decided it was done, too much, over. We were too old to play kissing, she said. I didn’t mind dropping the play part. And I didn’t believe her either, I thought we were probably just old enough. But we did stop. Because we had to. Because it was safer that way. Because she wasn’t my best friend and not even my good friend; then she wasn’t my friend at all.
I always thought she’d come back though.
TWENTY-SIX
The woman who came to meet Saz from the train didn’t look like an anti-establishment, eastern mystic. Or a born-again hippy. Or any of the things Andrea’s Aunty Jane had assured Daniel’s mother she would. She looked like a nice middle-class mother. New jeans, bright green trainers, ironed pale green shirt and a denim jacket hung over one arm, two carefully dressed children hanging on to her arms, the boy in shorts and T-shirt, the girl in a little cotton dress. But Saz knew only too well appearances could be deceptive. She knew that in a recent Your-TV poll, the man most British grandparents wanted to see their granddaughter walking up the aisle towards was Ross Gallagher. She knew that Daniel Carver, with his tall, thin body and bald patch and staffroom-straight clothes didn’t look much like the kind of teacher to be having an affair with one of his more advanced ex-students. She knew that she and Molly hadn’t looked a great deal like the other couples at their ante-natal classes. And she also knew that, unless Andrea had totally changed personality, the perfect Boden mother she now showed herself as, was not necessarily all there was to know.
Saz allowed herself to be drawn into Andrea’s delicate hug. Andrea smelt of good perfume and warm sunshine on fresh cotton, was taller than her still, and her short-cut hair was just greying at the temples – a sight which both pleased and disturbed Saz. Something to do with knowing her own hair hadn’t yet started on that route, while noting that, after all this time, Andrea still seemed more adult than she did. The woman who’d come to meet her had no trouble conveying an air of ease. Perhaps it was because she was on her own territory, Andrea had been very clear on the phone that Saz had to come to see her and not vice versa. Saz hoped the confidence wasn’t to do with whatever practice Andrea had adopted, those of abundant faith too often wanted to share it round, and Saz was perfectly happy to skip her turn. With any luck there wouldn’t be quite enough time to attempt her conversion today – Saz had three hours before the return train, with just enough time on both stuttering train journeys to drink several cups of bad coffee while berating herself as an appalling mother and a wicked partner.
Andrea led her across the carpark to a large and shiny people carrier. Up close, Andrea’s immaculate mother image was even clearer – smooth tan, light makeup, no jewellery other than a plain white gold wedding band topped with a subtle diamond on her ring finger. The presence of the two children in the car stopped Saz asking about Janine straightaway and so she questioned the country life instead.
“I thought you … I mean, Daniel’s mother told him that you were … ”
“Living in a field? A tent? An ashram?”
“I don’t think Mrs Carver knows what an ashram is.”
“Probably not. Well, we were, sort of.”
“But you’re not now?”
Andrea pulled out of the carpark as she explained. “Robert and I started at this farm out here. He’d been working in the City, I was in advertising, fairly successful too, but after a while we just got sick of it. We were working all hours, never seeing each other, no time for the children – we have three now.”
Saz nodded, taking it in. Molly always said that of the parents who came into the hospital, the more kids they had, the more they figured they knew what they were doing – whether they were right or not. Andrea certainly looked self-confident, though that could just have been to do with wealth, it was a very big car. However, unlike the parents who blocked up her road dropping off just one child from their eight-person vehicle every morning, Saz figured that with a family of five, this didn’t quite count as a Selfishly Unnecessary Vehicle. She forced herself to listen more carefully.
“I wanted somewhere we could use our old skills, but also learn new ones, Robert was keen to be around the children more, then we heard about the place out here. We stuck with community life for a couple of years, but it wasn’t really us.”
“So you moved out?”
“We’re happier as a smaller unit. We have a little farm of our own now.”
Saz looked around her at t
he spotlessly clean, clearly very new vehicle. “Doing well?”
“Not as well as we’d hoped, not yet. Organic vegetables, free range eggs, a few specialist flowers. We did expect more business from the London exiles in the other villages round here, but maybe it just takes time. No,” she said, patting the steering wheel, “this isn’t from the farm. Robert’s grandfather died recently. And we bought two new cars.”
“Well, that’s lucky, if you needed the help.” Saz wondered if that was all the family death had meant to them, more money.
Andrea smiled. “We think so.” She turned the car into a narrow opening in a hedgerow, took a quick right and pulled up outside an imposing Edwardian farmhouse.
“Well, here we are. Welcome home, Sally.”
“It’s Saz now.”
“Yes, I heard you say so on the phone. Since when?”
“Since I left school, left home. My mum always called me Sarah, still does, but everyone else knows me as Saz. It’s who I am.”
Andrea’s grin took Saz back years. “You really have run away from your past, haven’t you?”
Saz felt her anger rising, that Andrea was trying to push her into a place where she always came out better than Saz did. Saz hadn’t liked it back then, and she really didn’t like it now. She took a slow breath and slipped down to the gravel driveway, working hard to speak softly in front of the children.
“I still live in London. I visit my mum and dad, my sister and her family regularly. I often go back to where we all came from. I drive past that school, down those streets, at least once a fortnight, if not more often since my own daughter was born. How about you, Andrea? How often do you go back?”
Andrea just looked at her for a while, then she shrugged. “Well, things change, don’t they?”
“Yeah, they do.”
Saz followed the children and Andrea into the house. Wishing Molly beside her, Matilda in her arms, wishing herself far away and safe at home. Safe in her easy normal usual incredibly bloody ordinary life. She closed the door behind her cursing Will and Daniel for sending her out here alone.
The happy couple insisted on showing her around their gorgeous home – it really was massive and even while Saz fought to keep her spare-room jealousy in check, she managed to make at least some of the right noises, while doing her best to scour the place for anything that might give her a better clue as to Andrea’s current state of mind. When they’d completed a circuit of the house, they went back downstairs to the big old kitchen. Andrea made coffee, the third child appeared airing a cut finger and a new, blood-glazed painting to pin on the wall, and Robert produced fresh bread with fat slices of his home-cured ham, organic plum jam tarts for the kids. Saz quite fancied a tart herself, but was wary enough of Andrea to know this was one time she really needed to prove her adult credentials, not express her youthful joie de vivre by exhibiting her childish desires – a shame, because the tarts looked really good.
As soon as Robert had left the room with the children, Saz leaped in. “We have to talk about Janine. Can we make an excuse to go off somewhere together?” Andrea looked at Saz and smiled, said nothing. Saz tried really hard to resist the urge to slap her. “It’s just that I assume you don’t want Robert to know about Janine? Daniel and Will seem very keen to keep it all quiet.”
“Well, they would. Will’s career-driven, and Daniel … well, unless he’s changed a great deal, he’s probably still very ambitious himself, isn’t he?”
“Ambitious and bitter probably. But would you be OK with Robert knowing about Janine?”
“Robert understands that I was not always as careful of other people as I am now,” Andrea said.
“That’s not quite what I said.”
Andrea didn’t answer, just continued to smile.
Saz stared, then asked, “Does Robert know about Ewan?”
Andrea shook her head, speaking quietly. “I told him that we had a little … gang. After you called I explained that someone is trying to blackmail Will about something he did as a young man. As a child really.”
“Something he did? Just Will?”
Andrea ignored her. “And that if we agree to meet with this woman, she’ll drop it. That’s more than enough for Robert to know, don’t you think?”
“And are you going to come?”
“I don’t know … it all seems so long ago now.”
“Yeah, well, not so long ago that Janine’s forgotten, and Will said she insisted on having all five of us there.”
Andrea laughed, “That’s going to be a bit tricky, isn’t it?”
“It’s not funny, it’s serious, for all of us.”
“Why? Do you have nasty little secrets as well, Sally?”
“Bloody hell, Andrea, don’t you? Isn’t that why you haven’t told your husband the whole story?”
Andrea put the coffee mug down on the table and, just as Robert came back into the kitchen, hissed at Saz, “Why the fuck would I?”
And then, with more coffee poured and jam tarts finally passed round to the adults, Robert began. He was clearly a man used to being listened to. There was the unsatisfying life of a rich man and a wealthy woman, the lack of truth in City work, the constant stress, that awful daily train trip. Though Robert was keen to underline the soul-searching nature of their conversion as well – this was about the inner journey as much as the outer. Besides that, Andrea admitted, interrupting Robert briefly, there was nothing about her soul’s yearning that involved mucking out pigs. Saz was relieved to see in Andrea’s disdain for dirt the sharp-tongued girl of their teens. The girl whose nails were always perfectly painted, and who would never have left a city apartment for the country life, even if it had an indoor-outdoor swimming pool attached.
Andrea went on to confess how bad they felt about their affair. They knew at the time that it was wrong, but anyway, and because this was where their hearts and souls had led them, they had to be together. This much Saz already knew, but apparently they needed to tell her in their own way. Their truth. As opposed, she imagined to Andrea’s exhusband’s truth – the one about love being a choice, and passion being an option, and even a first marriage being a commitment. She thought all this and said none of it. Because she knew everyone used the same excuses, and who was she to call Robert and Andrea on it when she’d used those excuses herself? Although she’d never thought about blaming a higher power, as Robert was now doing.
“Andrea and I were destined to make a difference, together. The kind of difference you too could make, Sally … ”
“Saz.”
“If only you’d turn your heart over to the greater good.”
“Give and you shall receive,” Andrea intoned, nodding her head as if she’d just thought of a really clever new thing. “It’s all about surrender – of the ego and the ties that bind us to the material world.”
Saz really had been trying to hold it in, but this was excessive. “But you’ve got so much – three cars outside! What are you talking about?”
Robert smiled down at her and Saz wanted to punch him. “We earned these benefits through prayer and hard work. And now our life is truly comfortable.”
Andrea grinned, “Which leaves us more space for prayer.”
Saz sighed. She could have tried harder. Asked about the starving millions, where they fitted in with this great plan that simple prayer granted everything from a life partner to a three-speed ice-cream maker. Could have suggested that the world was full of people who had faith and worked hard, they just didn’t all have a rich family to leave them a deathbed start-up kit. Could even have asked what happened to Andrea’s wild side. Was it truly possible to deny that in some part of her she still craved excitement and danger and thrills? But she simply couldn’t be bothered. Two of the three children had started a mini-war in the next room, the toddler was screaming upstairs, and all these two in front of her wanted to do was spout platitudes about belief. And as yet they hadn’t even got around to telling Saz what exactly it was they did b
elieve in. For all she knew it was the full pantheon of Greek, Roman and Norse gods lifting them to this astonishing degree of self-satisfaction. She was bored. And her train was going in an hour. She excused herself and went upstairs to the toilet – the downstairs one had two children in it, fighting to see who could block it first. When she came back downstairs she felt calmer and more certain than she’d been since meeting Andrea at the station.
“Look, I need go soon. Quite obviously, you have a lovely home and no doubt a lovely life and if those kids manage to survive the next half hour without ripping each other’s arms off, I’m sure they’ll grow up to be lovely people. But I live in a different world and I’m bringing up my child in a different world.”
“You mean the real world, Sally? All worlds are as real as we make them.”
Saz wasn’t to be stalled. She ignored the smiling Robert and concentrated on Andrea. “You said Robert knows all about you, about your past. In that case he also knows that between us, we fucked up pretty badly back then. And right now, Will and Daniel are waiting to hear if you’ll help us sort out a mess that all of us created and each of us has, in our own way, run away from.” Neither of them responded, so she continued, “While it might seem strange to you that, after all this time, Will needs your help, he does. We all do. I’ve done what you asked, I’ve come out here, listened to the pair of you, now it’s time to go. I don’t want to miss my train, so I need to know if you’re going to be part of this or not. Well, Andrea?”
Robert took Andrea’s hand and then the two of them each reached out a hand to Saz.
“I don’t … ”
Robert’s hand was big, and surprisingly soft, he squeezed Saz’s fingers and spoke quietly. “We’re asking the inner voice to guide us.”
“The what?”
Andrea’s hand was small, and cold, as it always had been, finely shaped nails carefully shaded, she pinched Saz’s fingers hard between her own, turned to whisper, “If you’d shut up, Sally, maybe just for a minute, you might even hear it yourself.”