Byron Easy

by Jude Cook

  And none of it made her happy. At the height of this madness, I would look at the framed black-and-white photo of Mandy and me on Brighton pier; clothes low-slung, hand in hot lover’s hand, future-facing and optimistic. It was almost too much to bear. Too antithetical to the ‘lots of fun, lots of sex’ promise she had made. Okay, a lover’s promise is not a political manifesto, but by this point I thought they shared the quality of containing no truth whatsoever. When I found myself in one of the locations where we had spent our brief happy time, that summer of solid shadows in Finsbury Park for instance, I was overcome by a stately heaviness. Walking past the windows of our old place above the bakery in Archway, I remembered the sybaritic afternoon I leant out of the wide sash frame and relished a sense of high balance in all of nature: the sun so sympathetic to the leaves, the leaves so sympathetic to the sun. Now, with the poor terrified lodgers witnessing such ructions, I felt it was all over bar (literally) the shouting. I experienced an intense urge to abandon the sinking ship once and for all.

  Unfortunately, it is when you most want to jump off the train in life that you often discover it is moving too fast.

  ‘There are lesbians in the building? Montse’s voice had wailed, in the hysterical tones of a village señora exposing a heretic during the Inquisition. The setting was the landing of Leo’s airy flat in Tarragona, and old Montserrat was indeed correct, there were lesbians in the building: one of them was her daughter.

  This terrible discovery had been made a month before Mandy’s aunt and grandmother paid their threatened visit to us after the second Christmas of our marriage. The ancient matriarch, no longer puzzled as to why her surviving daughter hadn’t been near a man for a quarter of a century, had concluded that Leo was no longer a sexual being (hard as it was for her to ever conceive of either Ramona or Leocadia as sexual beings in the first place). This assumption was reversed one afternoon when Montse awoke from her siesta to find her daughter sitting on the kitchen table in front of a young woman she had previously known only as Carmen, a young colleague from the mental hospital where Leo spent her days bed-bathing schizophrenics. This wouldn’t have made an especially unusual tableau, except for the fact that Carmen was kneeling on the tiled floor with her head buried underneath Leo’s skirt, the older woman moaning in beatific transport. It took a while for Mandy and I to learn the full shocking details from the splenetic old woman, but the resulting heart attack she almost suffered sent her out onto the landings and balconies of the apartment block to proclaim the outrage. ‘There are lesbians in the building! Get out as soon as you can?’ the octogenarian shrieked, her heavy bosom heaving, as if she were warning of a blazing inferno.

  As this tale was related to us in the cramped galley of our kitchen in Seaham Road, we tried to suppress our laughter and intensify our looks of surprise. Because this was not as shocking a piece of news to us as it had been to Mandy’s grandmother. We were preparing to take the selectively deaf old bat to Grease at the London Dominion, a production which, I had read, was famously loud for the theatre, more like a rock gig than a West End show. Both Mandy and I were rubbing our hands at the prospect of Montserrat turning up her hearing aid. Leo, meanwhile, had been relegated to their Bayswater hotel for the night. Mandy’s grandmother had assented to travel with Leo (she felt unable to get on a plane without ‘assistance’) but refused point blank to be seen in public with such a degenerate. She imagined that Leo would walk down Oxford Street salivating Sapphically at every young woman they encountered. We, meanwhile, were secretly relieved that the greying auntie wasn’t around as the real purpose of her visit to England was to palm Montse off on us, preferably in our flat, or in a house nearby which she was, incredibly, willing to buy, in order to be shot of the old dear for ever. This is how much Leo wanted to make a home for herself and Carmen in Tarragona, feeling, as she strongly did, that she had done her time in the dungeon of filial duty and that it was now Mandy’s turn. My intemperate wife reacted with horror at this suggestion, and to be honest, I shared her reluctance. The idea of a life with both Mandy and Montse was a Dantean vision of purgatory. Usually I’m softened by the presence of women—a strange influence that I cannot account for—but not by that of Mandy or Montserrat. Their company was like being trapped in the Big Cat house at London Zoo.

  ‘I tell you—’ foamed Montse in our kitchen, ‘I have nothing against them in principle. Dios mio! In the war, Barcelona was full of them. But my daughter! En mi casa?’

  ‘Gran, it’s Leo’s house, not yours. And we should be getting on. You’ll make us late with your hysteria.’ Mandy had been holding her grandmother’s coat for the past twenty minutes as the vieja stalked the kitchen like an elderly elephant. We had known for some time that Leo was a lesbian and thought it wonderful that she had finally plucked up the courage to start a relationship under the pejorative eye of Montse. Mandy had revealed to me one evening on our honeymoon that the real reason why Leo’s marriage had mysteriously failed in the sixties was that it had never been consummated. Confused by her own sexuality, the imperatives produced by a wedding night had shocked Leo into an acceptance of her own nature. This made relations very uneasy between her and the virile toreador she had married. Subsequent to this disaster, any affairs had to be conducted in secret. With Franco coming down hard on miniskirts let alone open Sapphism on the streets of Tarragona, Leo’s sojourn in the closet had indeed been long.

  ‘You will never understand what shame this has brought upon me, chica, upon my good name. All our good names!’ she appealed to Mandy. ‘If my Pepe were alive, he would have had none of it, I tell you! He would have sent her to her room to wash out her unholy mouth with jabón. Every day is hell. I cannot face my neighbours. Marisa ignores me on the stairs. Henriquetta stares at me on the street. La morvida. Ay, ay, ay!’

  ‘That’s because you went and told them all,’ said Mandy. ‘How do you think Leo feels?’

  ‘Perhaps if you moved somewhere else …’ I suggested to Montse. At this, Mandy shot me a look. ‘In Spain, that is.’

  ‘Ah, mi vieja corazon,’ she moaned melodramatically, clutching her breast where she imagined her heart to be. ‘I don’t have long to live. You will all fiesta on my grave, I know it!’

  ‘Don’t be foolish,’ snapped Mandy, with real impatience. ‘Now get your coat on.’ It was like dealing with a reluctant child.

  Montse appealed to me, her stooped form only slightly shorter than mine, and hissed, ‘You don’t think it’s right, do you? Do you? She is only defending Leo because she has always hated me.’

  ‘Perhaps now’s not the time to go into it,’ I muttered.

  Briskly, Mandy said, ‘I don’t hate you, Gran, now get your coat on.’

  There was the parp of the cab from outside.

  ‘I think we’d better hurry up, Señora,’ I said, relieved not to have to answer her question.

  But the question of whether it was right or wrong lingered over the roomy seats of the black cab, a mode of transport we hadn’t seen for a number of years, such were the dire straits we were in. Unfortunately, Leo had got wind of our penury, and had spent a month on the phone to Mandy attempting to bribe us into taking Montse off her hands. When this had failed she reverted to the old standard of filial duty and its importance in the building of character, something which she doubted Mandy possessed. ‘My dear,’ I had overheard Leo saying on the crackly line from Tarragona, ‘I have had forty years of the old woman, the least you can do is show willing. It is your duty to your grandmother. You knew this was something you may have to take on one day.’ Mandy had replied to this with unusual tolerance: ‘But only when you’re dead, Leo!’ There had been a pause; just static on the line, during which I thought her auntie had indeed kicked the bucket from such a display of ingratitude. ‘Well, I don’t intend on doing that for a while yet!’ So the situation had reached an impasse, a deadlock. Privately, I knew Mandy’s iron will would never countenance such a move, even if Leo offered us a million quid. She had always
resented Leo’s patronising ways. And Leo, in turn, had always hated Mandy for her insouciant airs and graces, her feline body, her freedom.

  As the cab sped through the jewel-lit streets of Euston, past the illuminated phallus of the Post Office Tower, Montse said,

  ‘You young things—your problem is that you have never had to live through a war.’ All pretence of deafness had now vanished. She was as alert and persuasive as a defence lawyer. ‘When I think of how we held out against the fascists. Starvation. Rats running over the bodies of our brave men. No water for days on end. That is hardship. And my own daughter repays me like this!’

  ‘You have to live and let live, Gran,’ said Mandy, wearily.

  ‘Ramona would have had an opinion on the matter, I can tell you!’

  ‘My mother had an opinion on everything, but I’m sure she wouldn’t have minded. What’s the big deal? You have to let Leo get on with her life, lesbian or straight. God knows she’s done enough for you.’

  Montse put her hands over her ears theatrically. ‘Don’t ever use that word! What do you know of the injuries she has done me?’ I expected to see the evidence of tears around her surprisingly young-looking eyes, but her rages were always conducted without waterworks. The olive oil she applied every night gave her skin the texture of kid leather. Just like her granddaughter, she was a formidable engine of determination. I suddenly wished myself anywhere but there, in that cab, heading for a night of sub-standard acting and outworn tunes. ‘She wasted all my savings on her trips. I never knew where she was for months on end.’

  ‘It wasn’t months, Gran. She went to Barcelona every spring for a weekend.’

  ‘And what perversion was she up to there? Eh? She was never the good one, the pretty one. God will repay her for spitting on the Bible, imbecile?’

  ‘Gay people even get married these days,’ announced Mandy with a smile. ‘Imagine that,’ she said, turning to me and grinning. ‘Leo and Carmen wearing wedding dresses and exchanging rings.’

  Montse let out a moan as if she had just been stabbed in the side. She was shaking her head pitifully. ‘I will never accept it. Nunca.’ Leo had shown us a picture of Carmen in the lobby of the Bayswater hotel. She was very pretty, with the wide lascivious mouth of southern Spaniards and eyebrows that met in the middle, just like her greying paramour.

  ‘Come on, Gran,’ said Mandy, taking her arm in preparation for leaving the cab. We were now outside the towering frontage of the Dominion. ‘We don’t want the cabbie to cancel his holiday in Benidorm.’

  The performance was indeed very loud. Prior to the show, Montse had repeatedly insisted her hearing aid wouldn’t be powerful enough to pick up ‘the lovely voices’. It caused us great pleasure to see her continue in this assertion—with the intention of garnering our pity, of course—for the whole evening. Repeatedly turning the volume control up to max, Grease must have sounded like a speed-metal gig inside her head. When we exited onto the lairy pavements of the Tottenham Court Road, old Montse really was deaf as a post.

  The following day she was due to return to Spain. Mandy drove us all to Heathrow in stony silence—Montse still furious at her only-surviving daughter’s deviance, Leo fuming that her grand plan had come to nothing. Ian Haste had agreed to meet us in the departure lounge to see them off, as he had always got on tolerably with Leo. I knew this was not because Leo reminded Mr Haste of Ramona—no, she couldn’t have been more different from his wife: Leo was timid, restrained, decorous. It was rather that they were old allies against common enemies: first his truculent mother-in-law, latterly his impossible daughter.

  We sat over cooling cappuccinos, Ian Haste’s endless legs absurdly unaccommodated by the low table. The subject of conversation turned to Montse’s proposed ejection to England.

  ‘Are you sure this is your final word on it, Mandy?’ said Mr Haste, his tired face looking more like a skull on every encounter. There were smudges of strain, almost as black as boot polish, beneath his eyes.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re on her side, now?’ Mandy groaned.

  ‘He’s on the side of reason and fairness,’ said Leo, with a properness to her English diction.

  ‘You two always gang up, I remember—’

  ‘Corta el bacalaol.’ Montse said to herself.

  ‘Translate please,’ I asked Mandy.

  ‘It means, “Whoever cuts the fish decides”, and comments like that get us nowhere, Gran. You can’t expect me and Byron to put you up. We can’t afford it.’

  ‘But I will pay for everything!’ Leo said brightly

  ‘It’s not the money we can’t afford, Leo. It’s, it’s—the nervous breakdown. Look at her! She would drive a priest to suicide.’

  ‘That’s no way to speak about your elders,’ she said, but gently, persuasively. Despite her doctrinaire manner, her school-matronly hips and hands, she was a big believer in diplomacy. I could see how important her new life and freedoms were to her. There was something super-sensitive and soft about the old auntie; on the last lap now, before sixty. She was transparent, her soul visible in the quick wrinkling of her brow or tiny twitches of her hirsute upper lip. I felt sorry that she had to deal with the old Señora. She deserved better.

  ‘Ah, de perdidos al rio,’ burst out Montse, with a vigour that belied her four-score years.

  ‘Qué?’ I said, to Mandy.

  ‘From lost to the river,’ my wife translated, unhelpfully.

  ‘Whoever wants me can have me,’ moaned Montse. At this point she called over the waiter. ‘Hey! Guapo.’ Do you like experienced women? Si? Then live with me. I am no trouble!’

  ‘Mother,’ said Leo angrily. ‘Keep your voice down. You’ll embarrass him.’

  ‘Embarrass him!’ Montse cried. ‘What about the shame you have caused me? I cannot even stand to sit next to you on the plane with thinking of the filth you have performed with an innocent girl.’

  ‘She’s not innocent, Mother,’ said Leo. ‘Carmen is thirty-five and has a niño to take care of.’

  ‘Ai, ai, ai, dos y dos son cinco!’

  ‘Just quieten down,’ persisted Leo.

  ‘Me cago en la mar salada … me cago en la puta,’ snarled the old woman.

  ‘Escoria!’ snapped back Leo.

  Now I was completely lost. I said again, ‘Translate please.’

  ‘That’s unrepeatable, I’m afraid,’ said Mandy. She turned to the trembling old woman. ‘Now, we’ll come and visit you as much as we can. I know Leo has bought you some nice things from Harrods for your special diet. It will be spring soon and you like that, don’t you? Flowers and newness and light. And Leo, you know this is not for ever, don’t you? It’s just the wrong time. She can’t walk into our lives like this and expect us to cope.’

  I looked at Mandy as she said this and felt the stirrings of my old admiration. She could be remarkably even-handed when it suited her. I know I would have caved in years ago faced with the perdition of the devious old dear and the quietly steely auntie. No, I was too easy for that double act. I thought, with a twist of anguish, about Grandma Chloe, and how sane and sweet she had been. I pictured then her liver-spotted hands and prune-like face, blowing bubbles from the bubble-blower kit in the back garden of Dovecote Lane. Her human essence rich in sympathy. The distance between her elegance and the maddened old señora stretched before me like a chasm.

  As the flight was called, Mandy’s father said: ‘You say it’s not the money, Mandy, and you can’t afford the time? Is that correct?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she lied. I remembered the story of all the dodgy ruses Ian Haste had had to employ to make his loot, and the even dodgier ones used to hang on to it. Coming from nothing, from a stinking tenement in Bow, he knew how difficult it was to get on when you knew no one and had nothing. And even more so when you bore these handicaps in big letters on your face. His dark eyes held sad knowledge about the tides that run in the affairs of men.

  ‘You shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. She’
s offering to buy you a bloody house,’ said Mandy’s father, his voice suddenly making use of the blunt importuning vowels of the East End. He no longer relied on incremental movements of his greying brows to register annoyance.

  ‘We can get by without you lot, thanks all the same,’ said Mandy.

  ‘But Leo’s made you a very good offer. You could all live together in this place; stop pouring money down the toilet on rent. Those landlords of yours must be laughing all the way to the Caribbean.’ As he said this, his eyes met mine. Over the years he had changed from being a suspicious and protective father to an enthusiastic detractor of Mandy and her crazy ways. Not quite a confidant or ally, but more certainly on my side than that of his capricious daughter.

  ‘Yeah, somewhere a landlord laughs so hard he pisses his pants!’ I volunteered, quoting Lou Reed. There was a sudden silence around the low table. This wasn’t a good idea. All eyes fell on me, containing varying quotients of outrage. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s a song …’

  Mandy gave me the evil eye and got to her feet. She looked at her father, Leo and Montse in turn, then stated with finality: ‘Sorry No can do. Now, let’s get you back to Spain.’

  Thirty, that famous and dispiriting summit, that Mont Blanc of the psyche, was staring me in the face. In the last few months of our marriage, before that dreaded line in the sand, we took our final holiday together. A package trip to Cephalonia. For once I had managed to save some money by working a band-saw at a furniture restorer’s on the Camden Lock market (a job which played havoc with my twisted recalcitrant spine), so I was able to pay my way. Incredibly, Mandy would later travel to Italy three times before the summer was out, where she would have to rely on the kindness of strangers. But I quickly found my new dough meant nothing to her. It was ‘pocket money’ again. I had thought this might have reestablished some parity between my wife and myself, but I was sorely mistaken. It was the holiday from hell.