by Liz Byrski
‘It’s only ten o’clock. And they’re two grown-up people, Julia,’ Tom says. ‘If there were a problem, if Zoë had had an accident, or something, Richard would have called. He called last night and you, quite rightly, told him not to be silly. Zoë probably turned up five minutes later, just as you predicted. All you’re worried about is that Zoë might be having wild sex with your brother, which, frankly, I think is most unlikely.’
‘But I feel responsible for Zoë. I started all this by writing to her.’
‘Yes, darling,’ Tom says. ‘And it was a lovely thing to do and Zoë told me herself how much it has meant to her.’
‘But you know Richard and women; he’s like some sort of hazardous substance. They always fall for him, and then it all congeals into something nasty, and he drinks more . . . and . . . oh lord, I wish they’d answer the phone.’
Tom grabs her hand as she paces past. ‘Come here,’ he says, pulling her down to sit beside him. ‘Zoë’s perfectly able to look after herself and if she fancies a bit of a fling with her ex-husband, it is none of your business. You are such a control freak.’
‘I know, I’m sorry, but it’s going so well. I know this is all frightfully important for Zoë. I just don’t want Richard to stuff it up.’
‘Your brother isn’t a complete bastard, Jules. So, women swarm to him likes moths to a lamp and he doesn’t know how to do relationships. You should worry more about what this might do to him. Zoë, I suspect, is well able to look after herself, and she has a very nice husband, so I don’t think she’ll be leaping into Richard’s bed.’
Julia shrugs. ‘It’s a difficult time of life for women; they do often need some sort of affirmation of themselves as sexual beings.’
Tom puts his arms around her. ‘Would you like me to affirm you as a sexual being, my darling?’
‘Raheem said not for four weeks.’
‘Oh, bugger Raheem. Seize the day, I say.’
She leans against his shoulder. ‘Just cuddle me – I feel exhausted. Do you think life from here on is going to be one of us getting sick all the time? You know, measuring out our days with medication, doctors’ visits, incontinence pads and zimmer frames?’
Tom laughs so hard that it makes him gasp with pain. ‘Raheem should have banned laughing,’ he splutters. ‘No, it’s not going to be like that. But I think you might enjoy it more if you unload some of your commitments and relax a bit. Taking things more easily doesn’t actually mean immediate admission to a nursing home. It just allows you to pick and choose what you do. And, as I remember it, that’s what you said to me after the first operation, and it’s why I eventually decided to retire when I did.’
Julia is silent. Eventually, she says, ‘I’ve been thinking that maybe we should sell the business.’
Tom tightens his arm around her shoulders. ‘Thank you, god,’ he says. ‘And thank you, Hilary.’
Julia smiles. ‘She did keep going on about it.’
‘Yes, we talked of it often, and about how hard it would be to get you to give it up. We agreed that you had to arrive at the decision on your own.’
‘I know, but, as I kept explaining to her, it would feel – does feel – like giving in to age.’
‘What? You mean there’s something youthful and magnificent about consistently hurling yourself at something that has already sucked you dry?’
She laughs. ‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but it does seem like a step nearer death, doesn’t it?’
Tom sits up straighter, takes her by the shoulders and holds her away from him. ‘Absolutely not! Oh, you are so exasperating. This is not a stage of deterioration, unless you choose to make it so. It’s just another one of life’s changes and change means opportunity. D’you really think that bloody language school is somehow holding the grim reaper at bay? It’s ridiculous; you’re only fifty-five and it’s far more likely that it’ll drive you into an early grave. You’ve stopped enjoying it, stopped being excited by it – it’s become a burden. Think of all the things you and I could do if you were free. The school is a wonderful achievement, but does it still make the earth move for you, Jules?’
A few small tears squeeze their way out of Julia’s eyes, against her will. ‘No,’ she admits, shrugging and clearing her throat. ‘No, I’m sick of it. I was going to go back as soon as you’re better but I really don’t think I can bear much more of it.’
‘Well then?’
‘At the same time, selling it feels like stepping into a void.’
‘But there is so much more that you want to do.’
‘But suppose I end up not doing anything, or failing.’
Tom winces again with the pain of laughter. ‘It’s most unlikely,’ he manages to say. ‘And what would it matter if any, or all, of the things you or I do fail? We have nothing to prove, and we will at least have the satisfaction of having tried. Listen,’ he says, stroking her cheek, and, getting to his feet, he walks to the bookshelf and runs his fingers along the spines.
‘You were doing that the day we met,’ she says. ‘Looking for a book.’
‘The score of The Magic Flute was what I was looking for that day. And instead of that, I found you. If I’d kept on looking, and ignored you and your egg and cress sandwiches, we wouldn’t be here now. Life hinges on such small events, and sometimes you have to take your eyes off one thing before you can see others.’
‘What are you looking for?’
‘William Hazlitt.’
‘Dreary,’ she says, picking up their mugs.
‘Not at all,’ Tom says, pulling a slim volume from the shelf and flicking through the pages. ‘Hazlitt is timeless; listen to this. Leave the mugs and sit down and listen properly. “The only true retirement is that of the heart; the only true leisure is the repose of the passions. To such persons it makes little difference whether they are young or old.” ’
Julia looks at him. ‘I always loved you, you know,’ she says, ‘even through the dramas in between. It was always you.’
‘You too,’ he says, closing the book. ‘Every minute of every day, although your reluctance to say yes the second time was somewhat testing. You just didn’t get it, did you? You were supposed to fall straight into my arms when I turned up at Greenham Common, not keep me hanging around like a puppet on a string for more than a year.’
‘I needed to be . . . damn . . .’ Her mobile rings and remembering she left it on the hall table, she goes out to answer it. ‘Hopefully, that’ll be Zoë or Richard.’
Tom returns Hazlitt to his place on the shelf, pausing briefly to enjoy a small moment of satisfaction that he has gone at least part of the way in creating a change. Hilary, he thinks, will be cheering him on from heaven, and he looks upward and gives her a thumbs up.
‘That was Zoë’s husband, Archie,’ Julia says, coming back into the room. ‘He sounds awfully nice, but he’s worried too. Her mother’s been taken to hospital; it’s not serious but he thinks she ought to know. He’s been trying to call her mobile for hours. What am I to do? Do you think I should drive up to town and see if everything’s all right?’
‘If you even attempt to do that,’ Tom says, ‘I shall have to forcibly restrain you. You’ve got tangled up with the two of them before and you’ve always regretted it. You can’t honestly think that I’m going to stand by and let you do it again. Come on, we’re going somewhere nice for lunch to finish the conversation about the school, and you can leave that bloody phone behind. You’ll have to drive, though; that’s the other thing I’m not supposed to do for four weeks.’ And, picking up the car keys, he urges her out the door and pulls it closed behind them.
‘Pretend we’re on a date,’ he says, maneuvering himself awkwardly into the passenger seat. ‘You know, focus on me, look into my eyes adoringly, agree with everything I say, and I’ll get you drunk and try to seduce you, although consummation will take another week or so.’
‘Is this what it would be like if we had more time?’ she asks, starting the engine
. ‘You being the bossy one and me quietly doing as I’m told?’
‘It’s an attractive thought,’ he says, ‘but somehow, even in my wildest imagination, I can’t see it happening.’
Honeysuckle is still growing against the back fence, and now a trellis covered in what looks like a vine but is actually hops covers the path. Hops in West Hampstead; she takes some more photos for Dan. Pictures of the scrubby patch of grass where he and the other kids played, which is now a neatly mown lawn, the cracked paving stones replaced with rosy old bricks, and the large pots overflowing with pansies, pink geraniums and white lobelia, grouped together in the spot where the old outside toilet used to be. At the bottom of the garden, she turns to photograph the back of the house, changed now by the addition of a glazed extension in which they are about to have breakfast.
Strolling beneath the hops, Zoë wishes desperately that Dan were there to see it. Here in this place where they spent his first five years together, she seems able to ignore the present and think of him again as he was in the days when she could decide what he did and where he went, what he wore, who he played with. Nostalgia for the time when it was just the two of them against the world almost chokes her, and she has to remind herself that it was hard, exhausting, and frighteningly precarious.
The house is changed even more radically than the garden: walls knocked down; a well-fitted kitchen; a second bathroom; all so much lighter and brighter than it had been in her day. It is the result of Gloria’s professional success and, as she had conceded last night, her marriage to a Jungian therapist, who had died suddenly of a heart attack in his sixties. It had amazed Zoë to learn that Gloria had been married.
‘You actually got married to a man?’ she’d asked. ‘But you were . . .’
‘A feminist, sure thing,’ Gloria said. ‘But I didn’t have anything against men per se, Zoë; just the system, the politics.’
‘But I always thought you were . . .’ she paused, blushing.
‘A lesbian?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘No, hon, not me. But Claire and Marilyn ended up together.’
‘But they’d both been married,’ Zoë said.
Gloria laughed out loud. ‘It happens,’ she said. ‘Women find things out about themselves as they get older. They’re still together, although Marilyn’s not too well these days. She never did give up smoking and she’s just turned eighty, and it looks like the emphysema is going to win. You should give them a call; they live in Fulham and they’d love to see you again.’ She paused, leaning forward and looked hard at Zoë. ‘I know you never had any time for women’s politics, but they were good days and we achieved a hell of a lot. I often thought that if you hadn’t had so much else to worry about, we might’ve won you over. It was all so relevant to your situation.’
‘I know I’m a disappointment to you,’ Zoë said with a smile, ‘and to my younger daughter as well. Gaby can’t believe that I let the women’s movement pass me by.’
‘Well, you send her over here to me, and I’ll make sure she keeps the torch burning.’
‘You and my former sister-in-law,’ Zoë said. ‘Do you remember Julia?’
‘The poker-faced dame in the Chanel suit at the hospital?’
Zoë laughed. ‘Yes, only she’s not poker-faced and these days, she shops in the high street. You and she would get on well now. She spent quite a long time at the women’s peace camp at Green-ham Common.’
‘You’re kidding? But wasn’t she married to some rich guy in Paris?’
‘That’s right, Simon Branston, but they were only married for a few years. Julia joined a women’s group in Paris, what was it now . . . Jeunes Femmes, I think she said.’
‘She was in the Jeunes Femmes?’
‘Yes. Have you heard of them?’
Gloria rolls her eyes. ‘Is the Pope a Catholic!’
‘Oh well,’ Zoë shrugged. ‘I hadn’t, but then, I wouldn’t have. Anyway, she left Simon, and came back here with a friend and started a language school in Rye. I’ve been staying with her this week. ’
It seems so much easier to talk to Gloria now; Zoë’s not sure if it is just that she’s older or if it was her reliance on Gloria for a place to live that made her so intimidating. Strangely, since she walked in here yesterday afternoon, she has felt free to say what she thinks without fear of judgment. ‘What I said earlier,’ she had ventured later in the evening, when they had finished drinking Gloria’s iced tea and were well into a bottle of wine, ‘you know, about disappointing you and Gaby. Well, the person I’ve disappointed most is myself.’
‘Yourself?’
She nodded. ‘I don’t mean about the women’s stuff, but because when I first arrived in London, I was so full of hope and ambition. You know, my mother’s only ambition was that I wouldn’t get into trouble or get above myself. I thought that coming to London would let me get free of all that.’
‘And you think it didn’t?’
‘No. Once I’d met Richard my only ambition was to hang onto him and, of course, I did get into trouble, in just the way Mum had feared. And so, I got drawn back onto that narrow path of survival; different in many ways from hers, but so often I behaved just as she had done. Marrying Archie was my salvation and so I’ve never really had to worry about my lack of ambition; my complete failure to focus on anything other than my family. Except, of course, until now.’
Gloria shook her head. ‘Family’s precious, Zoë; it takes strength and commitment to raise three kids and maintain a long relationship. Don’t underestimate what you’ve done, or what you’ve got.’ She poured the remains of the wine into their glasses.
‘I don’t underestimate what I’ve got,’ Zoë said, picking up her glass and swirling the wine. ‘It’s my life; that’s why I’m so scared of it slowly being taken to pieces. Why it seems so dangerous to let anyone else in.’
By the time Richard called, they had been out for a meal, smoked a very large joint, and were well on the way through a second bottle of wine. And when he arrived in a taxi, they sat talking for hours until they noticed that Richard, stretched out on the sofa, had fallen asleep.
‘He’s had it and so have I,’ Gloria said. ‘Two-thirty, way past my bedtime. The bed in your old room is all made up, Zoë. You might as well stay the night, what’s left of it.’
And so, she had lain down in that same room trying to remember herself and Richard as they were, trying to see things clearly as an outsider might do; trying to free herself from the judgments and emotions that had accumulated over the years. And this morning she had woken, fully dressed, and wandered downstairs to find that Richard and Gloria had been up for some time and were cooking breakfast together.
‘C’mon, Zoë,’ Gloria calls from the kitchen, ‘breakfast is ready, and I’ve got my first client at ten.’ Now well into her seventies, she is half the size of the old Gloria. The voluminous tent dresses and fringed shawls have given way to more sophisticated, but colourful, long skirts and flowing blouses.
The table is loaded with fruit, croissants, toast, coffee and cream, and the smell of bacon wafts through from the kitchen.
‘You look worse than I feel,’ Zoë says to Richard, smiling as she piles melon and raspberries onto her plate.
‘Thanks,’ Richard says. ‘I always look like this in the mornings. You don’t look your best either but then, you were totally off your tits on weed.’
Zoë smirks. ‘First time in decades,’ she says. ‘No wonder I warned my kids off it, it’s far too nice.’
‘I tried to get you to try it and you never would. Archie must have been more persuasive. You were always such a prude about drugs.’
‘Scared stiff,’ she says, through a piece of melon. ‘Still am, really, so god knows what got into me last night.’
Gloria puts an oval platter of bacon, eggs and tomatoes onto the table. ‘Well, who’d ever have thought I’d have you two under the same roof all these years later,’ she says. ‘Especially you, Richard.’
‘Last time, as I remember it, Gloria, you virtually slammed the door in my face,’ he says, helping himself to bacon. ‘Not that I blame you, I deserved it.’
‘When was that?’ Zoë asks.
‘When you went to Glasgow,’ Gloria says. ‘Is that the time you’re thinking of, Richard?’
‘When I went to Glasgow – you came here?’
Richard nods. ‘I came to win you back with a ticket to the film and TV awards.’
‘You came to get me back?’
‘Yep. But clearly I missed the boat.’
There is a sudden and subtle change in the atmosphere. ‘I didn’t know,’ Zoë says, looking at the two of them, bewildered.
Richard sees the confusion in her face, the furrows forming between her eyebrows. He looks at Gloria.
‘Did you tell her?’
‘I sure did.’ She looks at him and then at Zoë. ‘Yes, hon, I really did. When you got back a coupla days later, I told you that Richard came and asked you to call him. Maybe you don’t remember.’
Zoë pauses, shakes her head and puts her hand to her forehead. ‘No, it’s so long ago. Did you tell me he’d come to get me back?’
Gloria laughs. ‘Well, no, because I didn’t know. He wasn’t gonna tell me that, was he?’
Zoë looks at Richard. ‘What did you say?’
‘Christ, Zoë, it’s donkey’s years ago; I can’t remember the actual words. I’d spent weeks mooning around getting drunk, knowing I’d made a mistake, wanting you back. I’d convinced myself I could be a father to Daniel. And then we heard we’d been short-listed for the award, so I got really sober and put the invitation in my pocket, and came over here to ask you to go to the ceremony with me. I thought it might be a start, that maybe we could try again. But when I got here, you’d gone off to Glasgow.’
There is a silence and they face each other across the breakfast table, eyes locked.
‘You didn’t call,’ he says, suddenly feeling the waste of it.
‘I didn’t know,’ she says, in what is almost a whisper. ‘I was stunned by what had happened to Harry. I suppose . . . well, I suppose that when Gloria told me I must have thought it was about the divorce, or that if it was important, you’d call me.’ She looks across at him, confused still. ‘But you didn’t call; you didn’t come again.’