So, I felt flattered by Greg’s words and a certain weight of responsibility. I wanted to make Abe happy and to have a family, but was I being naive in thinking I could when there was a sword dangling over my own?
We’d been to visit my parents a couple of days earlier. I’d phoned Dad and said there was something we wanted to tell them, adding, ‘Nothing bad,’ as we all did, if there was ever news of any kind.
‘Mum’s not great today,’ he said, opening the door to us and nodding towards the living room where I could see her, sitting at a peculiar angle in her wheelchair.
‘Mum,’ I said, going to her. She barely reacted.
‘She doesn’t always recognize people any more,’ Dad said, as I waited for her to try to speak.
‘Mum,’ I said again.
It was increasingly hard for her to speak but when she tried I could usually understand what she was saying. She dropped her head to one side, letting it rest against the handle of the wheelchair and stared blankly at me.
‘I’m sorry, love,’ Dad said. ‘Let’s get you both something to drink. What would you like?’
Dad didn’t drink much, these days, and the alcohol on offer was usually the dregs of whatever was in the drinks cabinet.
‘There’s Dubonnet,’ he said, opening its doors. ‘Not sure how long that’s been there. And there’s some beer in the fridge, Abe.’
He fetched Abe a beer and one for himself. I made myself a coffee and we sat in the living room: Abe and I on the sofa, Dad in an armchair and Mum completing the circle in her wheelchair.
‘We’ve got some good news,’ I said, hesitating, thinking it needed more of a preamble but unable to think of one. ‘Abe’s asked me to marry him.’ I put out my hand to show them the ring, searching my mother for some sort of reaction but there was none.
Dad tried to make up for it. ‘Oh, that’s superb news, love,’ he said, getting up to hug me and then Abe. He was more physically affectionate now than he’d ever been when we were young, as if he needed to make up for the things he no longer got from Mum.
‘I’m so pleased for you both,’ he said to Abe, adding a quiet, almost inaudible, ‘Thank you.’
I wondered what he’d meant. Was it a thank you for the moment, which seemed to have made him happy, or was he thanking Abe for taking me on?
‘Did you hear that?’ Dad said to Mum. ‘Ivy’s to get married.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, to both of us this time. ‘She doesn’t seem to know what’s going on a lot of the time now. But don’t let it spoil your wonderful news.’
We hadn’t known what to expect and, naturally, I was disappointed. There was nothing celebratory about our visit to my parents, so I was grateful to Greg for sending Abe out to buy champagne, while I helped him prepare dinner.
‘Everything okay?’ Abe suddenly appeared in the room, removing tissue paper from a bottle of Moët et Chandon. We hadn’t heard him come into the house.
‘Couldn’t be better.’ Greg put his hand on the bottle. ‘Ah, good, it’s already chilled. I’ll get some glasses.’ He opened a cupboard and began taking out tumblers so he could reach the champagne flutes at the back.
‘Are you okay?’ Abe lowered his voice.
‘Of course.’
He asked me again later, as we dragged spare bedding from the cupboard where Greg kept it and made up our bed. ‘You’re happy, aren’t you?’
‘Of course. You know I am. I couldn’t be happier.’ I expected him to say something but he was too busy putting pillow cases on to pillows. ‘Abe?’
‘I still find it weird, coming here to see Dad. It never feels right.’
‘Maybe the wedding will …’
‘What?’ He looked at me.
‘Well, maybe your mother will want to be more involved.’
‘You’d have thought she might want to be involved in the sale of the family home but she wasn’t.’ There was bitterness in his voice.
Abe piled the pillows on to the bed and shook a duvet over it. ‘Right, that’s ready. I’m just going to the bathroom to take my contact lenses out or do you want to go first?’
‘No, you go,’ I said, suddenly anxious.
We were with the travel agent, looking into our honeymoon, when I knew for certain what I’d already begun to suspect.
My parents were doing the wedding. They’d insisted – well, Dad had, and he was hoping we’d get married in the village. I was the youngest but I was the first child in our family to get married. And despite Mum’s condition, he kept saying, ‘It will make your mother happy, especially if it’s at the church,’ as if repeating it would make it true.
It was important for Abe’s mum too. She’d leave the convent for the whole weekend. She said she’d stay at the flat the night before and go with Greg. It was the first time for years that they would be together for more than an hour or two. There was so much more than just a wedding going on. I felt the pressure of that. I knew Abe did too.
‘The vicar is really nice,’ I’d told Abe, worried that he wouldn’t want a church wedding. Maybe he’d think it hypocritical since neither of us ever went to church, and, anyway, he harboured an understandable antipathy towards it. But I was only considering it to please my parents and his.
‘Actually,’ Abe had responded, ‘I’d be much happier getting married in a church than a register office.’
‘Really?’ I was surprised.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If I’m going to get married, I don’t want it to be in some seventies concrete council building. I want it to be a building with a flint stone wall and a Norman tower!’
I should have guessed aesthetics were guiding his reasoning. And I didn’t care where the ceremony took place, as long as I was marrying him.
Dad had stopped working altogether now so that he could look after Mum, but although it was time-consuming and exhausting, he seemed to need another project to distract him, to keep him going. The wedding seemed to fulfil that need and, where once my mother would have been trying to sort out flowers, I now took regular phone calls from him asking if I wanted them on every table.
‘That sounds lovely, Dad. But if the cost’s going up, it’s not important.’
‘I want it to be a good day for you, love.’
While Dad was throwing himself into the preparations, Greg had offered to pay for our honeymoon. I was hesitant, at first, about accepting the money because he’d already given us some from the sale of the family home to use as a deposit for the flat. ‘It’s not a fortune,’ he’d said at the time. ‘Pam won’t take anything but there’s still money there for her if …’ He didn’t finish the sentence.
Abe’s eldest brother, Jackie, was an academic and lived in Sheffield. He reckoned he could buy a whole house with the money but Alan, who was renting a bedsit in Hackney and performing comedy, had plans to take himself to the Edinburgh Festival.
‘The girls are still not ready to settle,’ Greg had said, when he told us his plans. ‘I don’t think Kirsty wants to stay in London for ever and she could nurse anywhere. And Tessa seems to be planning on living at Greenham Common for the foreseeable future. They don’t want to do anything with it yet. But you two could use it as a deposit on a place.’
He’d also asked if we might have Fred, the tortoise, to live with us. ‘If you can find somewhere with a garden, it will be better for him in the summer,’ Greg had said. ‘I don’t like him being cooped up in the flat.’
So I worried that if he paid for the honeymoon, too, he might be leaving himself short.
‘Maybe his London flat is paid for by MI6,’ Dad said. He was convinced that Greg was a spy. His decision to leave his job as professor of history and join the Foreign Office was, to him, otherwise ‘inexplicable’.
‘Who exactly do you think he’s spying on?’
‘The Russians, I suppose. Or maybe the Arabs.’
However Greg supported himself, the money he’d given us put us in a good position. We had enough for a deposit, we both h
ad jobs, and the building society was happy to lend us more money than we needed, which seemed to make it harder rather than easier for us to buy a place.
‘We could buy a house, rather than a flat, with that sort of money,’ I’d said, after our first meeting at the building society.
‘We don’t really need a house, though, do we?’ Abe seemed uncomfortable with the adult nature of it all.
‘Not yet.’
‘What do you mean by “not yet”?’
‘Nothing.’ I felt defensive. ‘Just that maybe one day we will want a house. People do.’
‘But I thought we both liked living in central London?’
By this time we were spending most of our time at his house in Bloomsbury and had talked about trying to buy a flat somewhere not too far out.
‘We do. All I said was that, with the amount of money they’re prepared to lend us, we could buy a house somewhere. But if you want to look for a flat not too far from where we are now then that’s what we’ll do.’
‘Fine.’ He was clearly not.
‘What is it?’ I asked him, taking his hand, as we walked home.
‘Sorry. It’s just … I feel a bit overwhelmed, to be honest.’
‘By the thought of buying somewhere to live?’
‘Kind of.’ He refused to look at me.
‘You’re going to have to explain.’ I stopped.
‘It’s not buying somewhere per se,’ he said. ‘It’s just … it’s a lot all at once. I’m still finding my feet with the new job and there’s the wedding to think about. Trying to buy somewhere to live at the same time just feels like too much.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes.’ He appeared to relax a little.
‘I agree, really. We’ve got enough on our plates without spending every weekend looking for somewhere to buy. Let’s wait until after the wedding.’
‘Thanks, Ivy,’ he said, and then he kissed me in a way that unnerved me. It almost felt as if he was taking his leave. I think I knew then, deep down, but I didn’t want to admit it.
It was only in the travel agent’s that I knew I was going to have to confront him.
‘So where were you thinking you’d like to go?’ the travel agent asked.
‘Italy,’ I told him.
Abe said nothing.
‘We wanted to have a few days in a city, maybe Rome or Florence – neither of us have ever been – and then a week somewhere in the country.’
Alex, my boss, had said we could go cost-price trekking in Nepal.
‘It’s a honeymoon, Alex!’
‘You’ll love it.’
‘It’s very kind of you but we want to do something more … relaxed.’
‘Well, the offer’s there. I’d suggest something more relaxed if we had anything but you know the score.’
I did. It was adventure travel. If we wanted to go white-water rafting or mountain climbing I knew exactly where to go, but we wanted something different.
‘Abe?’ I tried to get him to say something now.
‘Yes, that’s what we thought,’ he said.
‘Abe works for a firm of architects.’ I felt anxious, and when I’m anxious, I babble. ‘So we’d like to spend a few days seeing some of the buildings first before going somewhere to relax.’
‘In that case perhaps Florence,’ Harry Tebbit said. ‘Then you could take a train to Pisa for the day if you wanted.’
‘That sounds interesting. Can we fly direct to Florence?’ I looked at Abe, waiting for him to say something.
Harry Tebbit was pulling heavy books out of drawers, checking flight routes and tour operators. ‘Or perhaps Greece?’ he suggested, while he rummaged. ‘You could fly to Athens, then visit one of the islands. Have you been?’
‘I have.’
Abe was still saying nothing.
‘It would be nice to go somewhere we can swim too.’
Still nothing.
Harry Tebbit turned and reached for a brochure from the shelf behind him. ‘There is this lovely pensione, about half an hour outside Florence where you could go for the rest of your stay. I can highly recommend it.’ He opened the brochure and showed us a large house surrounded by hills, with a pool and rooms that looked as if they were still inhabited by Renaissance princes.
‘It looks beautiful.’ I wanted to go.
‘Yup, great.’ Abe gave it no more than a cursory glance.
On it went. Harry Tebbit did his best. He came up with suggestions; he checked out flights and accommodation; he showed us pictures and tried to enthuse us. He showed us Rome and Pisa, Berlin and Salzburg, Athens and Nafplio, hotels on cliff-sides, country retreats and beachside villas. He seemed aware that Abe was lukewarm. ‘So,’ he said eventually. ‘Perhaps you’d like to go away and think a little about it all, then let me know if you want me to book the flights and accommodation.’
‘That’s a good idea. Shall we go and have a coffee somewhere, Abe?’
‘Sure,’ he said, getting up too quickly.
‘Here’s my card.’ Harry handed it to us. ‘These flights are unlikely to be fully booked at the time of year you wish to travel. You don’t have to let me know immediately. Give me a call when you’ve had a think.’
‘Thank you.’
‘What was all that about?’ I demanded angrily, once we were outside.
‘Not here, Ivy,’ was all the reassurance Abe could offer.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Let’s go somewhere.’
‘Where?’
‘Let’s go for a walk.’
He started walking fast towards Primrose Hill, forcing me to break into a run to catch up with him. ‘Shall we go to the top?’ he asked, at the entrance. ‘We could sit on the bench up there.’
‘No. It’s too much of a landmark.’
‘What?’
‘That bench is too iconic. I don’t want to be reminded of whatever it is you’re going to tell me every time I see it on a postcard or in some film. ‘
‘Okay,’ Abe said quietly, walking towards one at the foot of the hill, far enough away from the perimeter fence and the children’s playground to afford us some privacy.
‘Just tell me,’ I said, as we sat down. ‘Whatever it is. Just say it.’
‘I’m sorry, Ivy. I’m so sorry. I don’t want to do this to you because I really love you but I can’t go through with it. I just can’t take it all on. It’s too much.’
There was more, of course: Abe’s attempts to explain, my incomprehension – although I did understand, sort of, just not why he’d let us get to this point. There were tears, recriminations, and declarations of love that were pointless if this was the beginning of the end. They might have been genuine but they were still pointless.
If you call off a wedding, if you can’t go through with it, if you’re scared of loving someone, it damages the relationship too much to carry on with it. We both knew that, however much neither of us wanted it to be that way.
Tel Aviv, September 1974
One of the few things that August didn’t know about her was that sometimes when she looked at her collection of pictures she tried to imagine and place herself in that other, shadow life … She tried to imagine this life playing out somewhere at the present moment. Some parallel Kirsten in an air-conditioned room, waking from an unsettling dream of walking through an empty landscape.
Emily St John Mandel, Station Eleven
It was my decision to go, to leave him, even though I knew I’d hurt him, and I’d have done anything to avoid that – anything except stay.
I didn’t know what I wanted to do after school. Abe knew exactly. He had it all planned out: art foundation, then architecture at university. I wasn’t sure. University didn’t appeal, although I wanted to get away from home and the atmosphere that didn’t get better, which I didn’t understand.
Ironically, it was Abe’s neighbour, Barbara Van der Zee, who told me about a family in Paris who were looking for an au pair. It came up in a cas
ual conversation when we’d been round to use her pool. She’d asked me what I wanted to do after A levels and I’d said I wanted to travel.
She’d put me in touch with them. They were keen. I was keen. It was not for long. It was all so easy. Or it would have been, if it weren’t for Abe. Telling him was worse than I’d anticipated. More final than I’d expected.
‘But we could have gone somewhere together.’
‘But we hadn’t planned anything. And you’ve got a job lined up.’
He had work with a local firm of architects over the summer.
‘I could have had a holiday first, after or even during. We could have gone to Greece or somewhere.’
‘But I want to do something more. I want to travel. I want to see the world. I need to get away. I’m not like you. I don’t have my life planned out but I want to do something with it. I can’t just sit here. It’s too good an opportunity to turn down.’
‘I know. I just wish you were staying.’
‘It’s only for three months. I’ll be back after that.’ I’d thought so at the time.
‘But things will be different.’
‘They’d have been different anyway. We’ve finished school now. I’ll have to find something to do.’
‘You just found something a bit sooner than I expected.’
‘But it’s not for very long. Do you want me not to go?’
‘No, of course not. It’s just … It all feels so …’
‘What?’
‘Final.’
‘It’s not the end of us, Abe,’ I said.
But it was the beginning of the end.
In Paris I worked for the Cahns, a husband-and-wife team who ran a fashion-importing business in the Marais. I took their children to school and to the park afterwards. I had French lessons in between. It was an experience but a little lonely. I didn’t meet many people my own age.
Ivy and Abe Page 24