The Generation Game

by Sophie Duffy

  But my grief is nothing compared to Toni’s. Through the hats, I can see her shoulders shaking, her head bowed, Sheila leaning towards her. And Adrian picking up her delicate hand and kissing it – an affectionate gesture, which really works up the green monster into a frenzy as I can’t remember him ever doing that to me but then he has special dispensation under these circumstances. He knows how much Toni loved her father. And her grief looks like it will consume her, grief that has no doubt been quickened by the realisation that he’ll never be a grandfather. He would have done well in that role. I’m not so sure about Sheila as grandma…

  ‘Stand up,’ Bob tells me. ‘You’re meant to be singing.’

  He hands me a hymn book, open to (oh-dear-oh-dear-oh-dear) Abide With Me. I would probably carry on sitting down, here on the pew – not out of disrespect but from something far more complicated – if it weren’t for Bob dragging me to my feet and telling me to get a grip, one of Captain’s favourite phrases, though Bob’s tone is much kindlier than either the words suggest or how that manky old parrot would express them.

  Much later, when speeches have been made by the priest, by Sheila, by a panel beater from Dudley, we move on to the crematorium as the Pope will now allow Bernie to be cremated like lesser mortals. It is everything you’d expect of such an event though we could do without the final song, Hold Me Close (has Auntie Sheila forgotten the significance of this?).

  Now we are all back at Auntie Sheila’s where I’ve volunteered to roll up my sleeves and lend a helping hand. I zigzag through the suits and black dresses, offering trays spilling over with vol-au-vents and sausage rolls and egg mayonnaise sandwiches, all of Bernie’s favourites, though it has been a long time since he’s been allowed to indulge in such fatty foods – not since the high fibre diet which made him into half the man he used to be. Not that it helped. His dodgy ticker had a limited shelf life and was never going to be easily fixed with duct tape or a bit of soldering.

  Toni comes into the kitchen but isn’t much help either, standing still, staring at the funeral cake that Sheila has decided to bake for her late husband and that now takes pride of place amongst the food on the kitchen table. I don’t have the luxury of staring as I have to get the next batch of cocktail sausages out of the oven and impaled onto sticks. (Somebody has to keep these people fed with something to soak up the vast quantities of alcohol being knocked back in Bernie’s memory.) Toni pulls herself together enough to refill her sherry glass (which is far too small for the job in hand) and winces at the sight of so much cholesterol all around her.

  ‘I don’t know how Mum could make all this food. She should know better.’

  ‘It’s just a mark of respect for your dad, I suppose.’

  She raises her eyebrow – at the word ‘respect’ presumably.

  ‘A bit late now,’ she says, staring out the window at the winter garden beyond. At Coco, Bernie’s abandoned excuse of a dog, cocking his little leg against the naked sycamore tree. ‘I hope this heart thing isn’t hereditary,’ she goes on, laying her hand against her silk blouse, feeling her own heart. ‘Another reason to adopt anyhow.’ She brightens up a bit then, at this glimmer of hope that is always burning out of her reach. But it makes me think of my tiny baby floating around inside me, the size of one of Evelyn’s ripe apples – but alas, not ripe enough… was that why I lost the baby? Did it have a dodgy, faulty heart? Does Justin? Is there some kind of gene that he carries?

  I make my excuses, leaving Toni alone to mope over the cake, and disappear into the garden for some fresh air; the after-life presence of Bernie is oppressive. I can still hear his phlegmy cough following me from room to room. Out here I am able to see the positives of his life: the new greenhouse, the kitsch Alpine rockery, the surgically-pruned rose beds. I’ll miss Bernie. He was as good an uncle as any. And I believe he loved my mother in some way, his own way. He certainly loved Sheila. How else would he have put up with her Bob-pinings all these years?

  Oh dear. This is all too much. If I were a smoker, now would be the time to reach for a fag and inhale deeply. As it is, I have to make do with a tepid cup of tea and a slice of Dundee cake. But someone else has the same idea: there is Justin sitting on a bench under the sycamore, puffing on a cigar of all things.

  It has been a long time since I’ve spoken to Justin. Now is the moment to put that right. I leave my safe haven behind the pampas and sidle over to his tree. It is damp on the bench. I can feel it seep through the tights and skirt I’m not used to wearing.

  ‘Where’d you get that from?’ I indicate to his cigar. ‘Was it one of your dad’s?’

  ‘No.’ He blows the smoke up into the air, away from me. ‘Adrian gave it to me. He’s handing them out like Ferrero Rocher in there.’

  ‘I bet your mum’s pleased about that.’

  ‘She’s itching to get out the Febreze. But then she lets Adrian get away with murder for some reason.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘She thinks he’s good for Toni, bizarrely.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really, Philippa. What’s with all the surprise?’

  ‘I didn’t think he’d be good enough for her – in your mum’s eyes.’

  ‘He’s grown on her – like staphylococcus.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Bacteria that lives on the skin.’

  ‘Nice.’

  He relights his cigar as it isn’t handling the breezy weather too well. We sit quietly for a while. I am not really sure what to say exactly, it has been so long since I’ve been with him. But it is alright. Despite everything.

  ‘I suppose Mum reckons Toni can look after herself,’ he says eventually.

  ‘You don’t sound so sure.’

  ‘She’s got a lot on her plate.’

  ‘The baby.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘The mythical baby.’

  Coco bounces up to us at this point, yapping and jumping up at our legs, snagging my tights. I push him off but Justin makes a point of stroking his tummy, under that ridiculous tartan coat he is wearing. Then Coco spots a magpie (only the one) and chases it without any game plan as to how to catch it. I half expect the bird to turn the tables, pick Coco up by his diamante-studded collar and fly off; the bling round his scrawny little neck is just the sort of thing a thieving bird like that would go for.

  Justin takes another puff at the fat cigar, blowing expert smoke rings that would’ve impressed Miss Goddard’s Hiawatha no end. Then he turns his attention to me but in a way that yanks the tablecloth out from a long abandoned feast. He looks up at the house and says: ‘Is it over between you two?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You and Adrian,’ he says.

  I don’t answer.

  ‘He told me.’

  ‘He did what?’

  ‘He got drunk – just for a change – the night you’d finished with him. It all came out. I bloody punched him.’

  I must look absolutely horrified because he says (facetiously): ‘Don’t worry. Toni doesn’t know. I never told her.’

  I employ a cliché Miss Mothball would have been proud of: ‘I never meant it to happen.’ Then I add my own take on things. ‘Adrian was unhappy. We just sort of fell together.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now? It’s none of your bloody business now.’

  ‘She’s my sister.’

  ‘She’s an adult.’

  ‘I wish you’d bloody act like one,’ he says, a little too loudly for my liking, up on his feet now. ‘You’ve got to stop waiting for your mother to come back and sort your mess of a life out. That’s down to you.’

  A freaky echo of the words I said to his sister, sitting on the bed in Belsize Park. ‘You’re the only one who can do that.’

  He is right. I am the only one.

  Adrian chooses this point to come out into the garden and I am tempted to accept the cigar he is offering to me. I am tempted to do anything that will help me ignore what Justin – pacing back and fo
rth on the wet grass – has just said. About my mother. About Helena. So I look at Adrian and I dive straight in.

  ‘Justin was telling me to steer clear.’

  Justin stops the pacing. Adrian eyeballs him. ‘Of what?’ he asks.

  ‘You.’

  Adrian puffs on his own cigar, studying Justin through narrowed eyes, shaking his head.

  ‘Nice one,’ he says.

  I am expecting a big confrontation right now, right here on Bernie’s lawn but Justin obviously thinks otherwise.

  ‘Do what you like,’ he says, chucking his cigar butt in the pond. ‘I’m going in.’

  He turns away and there – tripping down the path towards this debacle – is Mel. He strides towards her, the wind rearranging his still-longish hair into strange and weird shapes that gel alone can never do. Hair I once tangled my fingers in. Hair I’ll never touch or smell or feel ever again. That is all Mel’s privilege now.

  ‘Yeah, go to your girlfriend,’ I call after him – quite eloquently, I think, considering the circumstances.

  ‘Grow up, Philippa.’

  Grow up.

  I remember how I felt the first time he held me, when he was still T-J. My sixteenth birthday. I felt like a grown-up then, like I would never be the same again. And I don’t suppose I ever was. But I was a silly child. And him? He was the grown-up. He was the one who should’ve known better.

  Grow up.

  But now it is Adrian who reaches for me in a script that could’ve been written by Miss Mothball or Wink’s beloved Danielle Steel:

  He takes me in his arms, puts his lips to mine and kisses me as if his life depends on it. As if he will die without me. As if I am the only one that can save him. And it is so good to feel like this. Like I have power at my fingertips. Knowledge in my heart and in my brain. The whole wide world at my feet. The rest of my life in front of me.

  ‘Marry me,’ Adrian says.

  I can almost hear the birds breaking out in song, the harps plucked by tubby, rosy cheeked cherubs, the slushy muzak of an airport reunion at the end of a film. But the script is soon crossed out and rewritten by Auntie Sheila who’s come out into the garden for her own slice of fresh air and oneness with Bernie’s memories. At the sight of such an unlikely and unexpected coupling, she shrieks and flaps like a mother gull and launches herself from the back door. I can make out the immortal phrases filthy harlot and disgusting slut hurling over the sodden lawn towards us.

  And I know, without a doubt, that I’ve made a choice that will change things for good. That will test every single relationship I know.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, turning back to Adrian. ‘I will.’

  (Oh dear.)

  But there is one person I am most concerned for. And that, sadly, isn’t Toni, grieving for her father, but Bob who, when he lumbers behind Sheila across Bernie’s soggy garden, is slow on the uptake. He looks at Sheila – still shrieking at us – in puzzlement. He looks at Adrian as if he hasn’t a clue who he can be. And he looks at me as if he thinks he knows me but can’t quite place me. As if this is a case of mistaken identity. That I am still inside, rolling up my sleeves and lending a helping hand in Sheila’s kitchen, stabbing cocktail sausages through the heart. But it is his heart I am piercing. His starter motor that will never work in quite the same way again.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asks, dazed.

  ‘Adrian’s asked me to marry him,’ I announce to the gradually assembled guests which includes the panel beater from Dudley and (oh-please-no) Toni who is unable to speak or object or even cry but who manages to conjure up a look that could be sold on the black market and then wallops Adrian so hard in the face that his feet skid beneath him, toppling him to the ground where he lies quite still, just his eyes blinking.

  ‘Get out,’ Bob whispers, standing over him. ‘Pick yourself up and get out.’

  Adrian picks himself up, with what little dignity he can gather off the soggy grass, and takes my hand, not even bothering to wipe the mud from his Paul Smith suit.

  Bob finally turns his attention to me, remembering who I am at last.

  ‘Of all the people in London, why did you have to choose Toni’s husband?’

  ‘He’s not her husband.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Yes, it does. He wants to marry me. I’m sorry about Toni, but he doesn’t love her.’

  ‘I’m sorry too, Philippa. Sorry you don’t know how to do the right thing.’

  ‘Maybe if I’d had a proper mum and dad then I would know. As it is I have to make my own decisions. And I’ve decided I want a proper family of my own. I want a proper life. I want Adrian.’

  ‘He can’t have children. Has he told you that?’

  ‘I don’t want children. Why the hell would I want children with the upbringing I’ve had.’

  I might just as well have punched him in the face. And actually, I feel like punching him in the face.

  ‘If you go with him,’ he says, ‘I’ll never speak to you again.’

  So what do I do?

  I don’t punch him in the face. I go.

  I walk away, my hand in Adrian’s hand, being led up the garden path and out of my old life for what might possibly be for good.

  Six weeks later I marry Adrian in Southwark register office. He is wearing something casual. I am in a dress, both of us out of our comfort zones. We say our vows in front of a paltry show of friends and family (those of them who’d come). Someone takes a photo on one of those new digital cameras and shows it to me on the little screen. There we all are, a raggedy collection:

  Joe with his arm around the Blair Babe (Rebecca), now his wife and mother to a bundle of blue crushed to her voluminous breast.

  Cheryl, who’s been good enough to drop her dying patients in Bristol and come to London for the day.

  Adrian’s best man and brother, John, a city banker with novelty tie and matching waistcoat.

  Adrian’s mum, Pamela, who hates me at first sight. (‘I was switched at birth,’ says Adrian. ‘There’s no other possible explanation.’)

  Adrian’s school friend, Will, who’s quite clearly always lived in my husband’s shadow (I know the feeling).

  Evelyn and Judith, wearing matching trouser suits like they are part of some religious cult.

  And – who-would’ve-thought-it-after-all-these-years – Auntie Nina.

  ‘I heard on the grapevine,’ she says, sailing in on a wave of Chanel No. 5, dressed to put me completely to shame.

  I am not entirely sure what grapevine this could be though I have my suspicions. At least there is someone to witness my marriage. Someone who knew me when I was a child. Someone who could possibly be proud and shed a tear.

  It is only later – in the Crown and Greyhound – that she hands me the card, after several double gin and oranges.

  It is from Helena who, of course, is the root of the grapevine planted across the ocean.

  Congratulations! It says on the front. You did it!

  Well, yes, I certainly have done it though I am not absolutely sure I should be congratulated for it.

  And inside, in her finest schoolgirl handwriting, a somewhat cryptic message that I could choose to listen to or ignore:

  Don’t worry what people think. Follow your heart.

  I am not convinced that Helena should be the one to give out advice of that nature. But I do know about broken hearts and dodgy hearts, so I am not really sure I should trust my own to be working properly.

  Too late now. I’ve got myself hitched to Adrian: an adulterer, a golfer, an estate agent, an ex-druggie, a poser and the man I think I am in love with. Whatever being in love means.

  ‘Helena might’ve ventured across the pond if she hadn’t been so ill,’ Auntie Nina says.

  ‘Ill?’

  ‘Bronchitis,’ she explains with a sigh and a tut. ‘She should really stop smoking.’ And with that, Auntie Nina extracts a Camel from her very expensive leather handbag and lights up in the manner of a star
of the silver screen.

  We don’t have a honeymoon as Adrian and I haven’t made the most sensible financial move in marrying each other. He has to get used to living south of the river, in my tiny flat, with no money for a cleaner, no tube station for miles. But in time East Dulwich will grow on him – even if I don’t. In time he will set up a sister office on Lordship Lane as it makes sense to keep the business going, leaving Toni to run Belsize Park. But I will not leave Evelyn or the books because at least I know I can spend my days surrounded by other worlds, other people. I can be anyone. Go anywhere. And I can have as many happy endings as I want.

  For now I have Adrian to myself. In the evenings when he eventually gets home. At night, when he reaches out for me in what I can only describe as desperation. For a little while. But for some reason, when I am in the flat alone, it isn’t Adrian I pine for. It is everyone but him.

  On January 4th, I am home early from work and I switch on the television. It is Blue Peter. They are digging up the time capsule, John, Peter and Valerie. The contents are all mouldy and disgusting and I have a moment of panic thinking about Lucas’ chocolate tin buried in Bob’s backyard. I know I can’t dig it up. I am not allowed back there. I don’t have a child of my own. And that might never happen, with Adrian’s track record. Which leads me back to Justin, the father of my child that never quite made it. The tiny baby that was in a rush. Too early. And that is when I know I’ve made a mistake. A big mistake.

  Oh sod it.

  2006

  A big mistake. Are you a mistake? Never, ever. I will treasure you always. Cherish you every moment. The most precious gift I have ever had. More than Lucas, more than Bob, more than Wink or Joe or Miss Parry.

  Talk of the special baby unit has stopped. It’s completely full up with babies more poorly than you. (Poor things.) Though you, a special baby, are being closely observed. But they are pleased. Really pleased that finally you’ve got to grips with this feeding and there’s no stopping you. With every breath you take, you get stronger and I get more confident that you will do this. We will do this.