Out of the Ashes

by Maisie Mosco

  “I find it remarkable that your son hasn’t banged your heads together,” Bill declared when Martin finished speaking. “Our daughter once did that to Sukey and me. Her usual method of effecting a truce between her parents is to threaten to leave home.”

  “The difference,” said Martin, “is that Mary Lou isn’t the sole reason for you and Sukey staying married.”

  “Then I better had offer you some advice. Though I’ve seen him but seldom since he was baptized, your boy is my godson, and oft have I chided myself for allowing that relationship to dissipate into no more than Christmas and birthday gifts.

  “I shouldn’t think you want any pudding, Martin. Nor me. While we’re waiting for coffee, if you wouldn’t mind I’ll light my pipe.”

  Bill fumbled in his jacket pocket for his ancient briar and a worn leather pouch. Waiting for him to fill the pipe and light it, which required numerous matches, reminded Martin of his own impatience years ago when their conversations were frequently interrupted while Bill lit and relit his pipe.

  When eventually he resumed speaking his tone was stern. “I shudder to contemplate the damage already done, Martin, by your son’s living in the atmosphere he doubtless does. A couple remaining together for the sake of their child, or children, is a situation more harmful than protective. To which I might add that you and Moira could end up in the loony bin, if this state of affairs continues.”

  “Just so long as we have separate rooms, Moira would say to that, since it’s already our modus vivendi. And if that’s where they put religious maniacs she is certainly headed there,” Martin declared.

  “You didn’t include the latter in what you told me.”

  “You’re Catholic like she is. The last thing I want is to offend you –”

  “Something of a lapsed Catholic nowadays, Martin, Sukey too, and we haven’t allowed Mary Lou to grow up with the fear of eternal damnation instilled in us. When we were sharing unwedded bliss in the sexual revolution the sixties was, Sukey went on calling it ‘living in sin’ and had to steel herself to go to confession.”

  Bill paused to fidget with his pipe. “Lapsed I may be, Martin, but I haven’t forgotten the hold my religion is liable to exert on those who allow it to –”

  “The same could be said for Jews and Muslims, Bill. As on a less personal scale the militant settlers on the West Bank, and the Ayatollah’s followers are currently demonstrating!”

  “But returning to the highly personal –”

  “I was about to. If Moira and I split up, there’s no chance of me getting my lad without standing up in court and revealing his mother is going off her head. I couldn’t do that to Moira, Bill, and voluntarily she wouldn’t let me have our son. Church and work, in that order, are what her life revolves around. There’s nothing I can do to change things, but nor can I allow A.P. to be raised by her without me there. That’s the impasse I mentioned, as you’ll now gather.”

  “But were you going over the top when you called her a religious maniac?”

  “There are statues of Jesus and Mary all over the house, Bill, and that’s the least of it. I’ve thought of having a word with her priest, and I almost did when she put one in the bathroom.”

  “What stopped you?”

  “I’m a Jew, aren’t I? And nowadays Moira isn’t beyond calling me one, though she hasn’t yet included an adjective. I sometimes feel that what she’d like to do is crucify me –”

  “As was once done to another Jew,” Bill said wryly.

  “And the rest of us are still paying for it. It must be hard for you to relate all this to the Moira you knew.”

  “And I would like to hear her side of this story. It seems to me that another lunch shared by old friends is called for, Martin. I’ll give her a ring.”

  Thus it was that Marianne’s dilemma was fortuitously solved. Bill decided to invite Moira to dine at home with him and Sukey. By the end of the evening both he and his wife had arrived at the conclusion Marianne had.

  It was Sukey who accompanied Moira on her first visit to the eminent psychoanalyst in whom Martin, though it was necessary for him to pretend ignorance of what his friends had engineered, allowed himself to put his hope.

  Chapter 9

  Arnold lost his gamble as Marianne had feared he might. Matthew and Pete were rehearsing a play in London and accepted his invitation with alacrity.

  “I ought not to have agreed to your cunning bargain!” he fumed to her as they stood together in a cocktail lounge at the Inn On The Park awaiting his assorted guests.

  “If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here, done up to the nines, when I’d much prefer not to be,” she countered, “and I’m about to make another bargain with you, Arnold. I shall perform my role with good grace, and you must show the same to Matthew and Pete. If you don’t I shall disgrace you by getting drunk, which I only did once in my life and Ralph told me, after I’d passed out and he’d brought me round, that I’d taken off my shoes and danced on the table.”

  “I can only hope that wasn’t at one of his dinner-parties!”

  “It was at one of mine.”

  “You gave separate parties, did you?”

  “One might just as well try mixing oil and water,” Marianne replied, “as people from the arts with those who have cash registers where their hearts should be. The time I got drunk some of my pals were helping me celebrate the aspect of getting one’s first novel published that none, but writers and the like would understand.”

  “Do you still see those people now you’re successful?”

  “Did you drop your old friends after you were knighted?” Marianne responded.

  “I haven’t had time to acquire many.”

  “Me neither, but somehow I have. And I have to tell you you’ve missed a lot, Arnold. To reach the peak of ambition with nothing but that in view has to be a lonely climb and I imagine you’re feeling the chill now you’re there.”

  Marianne paused pensively while watching a lady mount the ornate staircase and head for the powder-room – did she know she had a ladder in her wispy black tights?

  “The pals I got drunk with now have a lot of demands on their time, as I do,” she told Arnold, “and one or two are very big names. We still keep in touch though and manage to meet occasionally. After my return to London I wasn’t short of invitations to dinner or whatever, but I didn’t expect it to be maintained. I know what their working lives are like and so is mine.”

  “I am neither feeling a chill, nor have I yet reached the peak of my ambition,” Arnold harked back.

  Which has to be a baronetcy, thought Marianne. And why not for a man to whom the influential people he entertained were nothing more to him than stepping stones?

  She glanced at her wristwatch and said impatiently, “Your guests seem to have decided en masse to make a late entrance!”

  “Including the two I was coerced into inviting! If Pete puts his arm around Matthew’s shoulders this evening, as I saw him do at Laura’s, I shall die of shame –”

  “There was once a time,” said Marianne, “when even you would’ve thought nothing of it. Unfortunately we’re now living in an era when interpreting something so casual is influenced by the eye of the beholder, and that coloured by the anti-gay propaganda I’m sure you approve of.”

  “It’s the eye of the beholders I’m worried about! Including the chap I’m considering to ghost my memoirs. If he rumbles those two –”

  Marianne cut short her brother’s distasteful words. “One more remark like that, Arnold, and I shall leave you high and dry, wait for Matthew and Pete in the lobby, and take them out for an evening all three of us would enjoy.”

  The woman Marianne had watched head for the powder-room emerged wearing tights of a different shade and entered the bar to join a group of couples standing with champagne glasses in their hands and animated smiles on their faces. Had she rushed in to a late-night pharmacy and grabbed some replacement tights from the stand those places all seemed to have for s
uch emergencies?

  Such are the observations and conjectures of my trade, Marianne reflected dryly. Even on a night out – and what an experience this one might prove to be – a novelist doesn’t stop working. Was the woman widowed, or divorced? Feeling somewhat out of things, as I’ve been known to when with a party of couples –

  Arnold prodded her from her musing. “Would you believe it, the first thing Matthew asked me after accepting the invitation was would his mother be there.”

  “I certainly would, Arnold, and it should tell you something, shouldn’t it? Lyn loves him warts and all. Being gay is in that respect no different from an assortment of other things parents might view as shortcomings in their children. You, on the other hand – well, is it too late for you to realize what you’ve done to your son? For you to let fatherly love take precedence to your prejudice?”

  “Lower your voice, will you?”

  People had begun streaming from the bar in to the restaurant.

  “If you knew the disappointment that boy is to me, Marianne,” Arnold hissed. “I could kick myself for taking him to the Manchester Opera House when he was a school kid to see whichever Shakespearean play it was that we saw. It was after that he told me he wanted to be an actor. I laughed and said at his age I’d wanted to be a professional cricketer –”

  “You were no good at cricket, though, were you? The same can’t be said of Matthew’s acting. Aren’t you proud of what he’s achieved?”

  “I would rather he were a street-sweeper than what, thanks to you-know-who, he became.”

  Trying to get through to Arnold was like butting your head on a brick wall! Marianne eyed their reflections in a mirror beside the lift. Was that portly gent really the lad she’d grown up with? The woman clad in black and red, her hair streaked with silver, the kid who’d minded the shop with him and Harry while their parents ate a hasty meal?

  All that remained of that Arnold was the dimple in his chin. And of that Marianne, naught but the simple hairstyle she had not let the dictates of fashion change. As for Harry… just thinking of him was a source of distress. Her envisaging his running his business from a wheelchair had not taken into account the self-pity consuming him though he rejected compassion displayed by his family. Marianne’s daring to voice her expectation had resulted in one of his tirades, including that the sight of him in the store would frighten the customers away.

  “If my guests kept me waiting this long, I’d be in the bar knocking one back!” she exclaimed to Arnold. “Why don’t you and I do that?”

  “It isn’t the done thing.”

  And according to the “done thing” was how Arnold had lived his life, except for his marrying out. An exception that had since proved the rule!

  Matthew and Pete were the first arrivals, Matthew sartorially elegant as always and Pete looking as if he had tried his best.

  “We got here too early,” said Matthew after they had kissed Marianne, “so we hung around downstairs.”

  “Too early?” said Arnold. “You are half an hour late!”

  Pete bathed him with a smile. “Eight for eight-thirty, your secretary said, Sir Arnold. It was I who spoke with her when she called to confirm the time.”

  “That accounts for it,” Arnold said with relief to Marianne. “I had begun to think the cabinet minister I’ve invited had decided to snub me at the eleventh hour. He is known to be somewhat mercurial and has done that to others. As for the young woman who called you,” he said to Pete, “thankfully she is not my secretary but a stand-in while that reliable person is on leave.”

  When Arnold went to have a word with the head waiter about the delay, Matthew said to Marianne, “I shall probably spend the evening pinching myself to believe I’m here! How did my father talk you into hostessing the occasion?”

  “Can’t a woman do her brother a favour?”

  “I’d say that depends on the brother. Have you any idea why he invited us?”

  “Since you’re no longer starving theatricals, it couldn’t have been that,” she said lightly.

  “When we were, I only recall eating a meal in a restaurant with him once and it was at my suggestion,” said Matthew. “I was daft enough to think, since I’m his son, he might like to be one of those prepared to help us get the company started.”

  Matthew had a mental picture of himself striding out of the place, heads turning to watch his stormy exit, and his father left stranded with his sole meunière at the table. The flat refusal to contribute a penny hadn’t come as a shock, nor was it the reason for this remembrance remaining so painful. Matthew had cut short Arnold’s expressing his opinion of homosexuals by revealing the truth about his own son.

  On the tube train back to the dump he and Pete had then called home, he had found himself seated beside one of the young actresses he encountered at auditions. What was her name? No matter, it was what she said on the train that had heightened his feeling of having let his father down: “If only you were straight, Matt – it’s a real waste.”

  Matthew was left in no doubt that she fancied him, and she was by no means the first girl to be disappointed in that respect. But it was another kind of waste that had from then on dogged his father. Despite Arnold’s noxious attitudes, the effect of Matthew’s being gay upon his parents’ natural expectations continued to haunt him. He could no longer let himself hope that his sister would one day give them grandchildren.

  Arnold returned from the restaurant, consulted his watch, and tried to look interested while Matthew and Pete spoke of their plans to tour Europe with their new play.

  “What’s the theme?” he had the good grace to inquire.

  “The rise of neo-Nazism,” Matthew replied.

  “Then you’d better take care,” Arnold cautioned him, “or you and the rest of your company could find yourselves getting beaten up by some of the thugs whose activities your play is about.”

  “Does that mean you actually care what happens to me?” Matthew asked jocularly.

  Arnold gave him an agonized glance. “Don’t ask bloody stupid questions! And if I may say so, you’ve lost weight since I saw you last. Are you working him too hard, Pete?”

  “We have been going at quite a pace.”

  “The flesh doesn’t seem to drop off you, though.”

  “I don’t use up the nervous energy actors do each time they give a performance, Sir Arnold.”

  And Matthew is giving one this evening, thought Marianne – of a son at ease with his father. When she saw the two of them together, what with Arnold’s antics and Matthew’s putting on a brave show, it was sometimes like watching comedy and pathos side by side. Arnold had just let his mask slip though and fatherly feeling was briefly visible.

  “Directing,” Pete went on, “doesn’t knock the hell out of you in the same way and expending your energy is just for the duration of rehearsals.”

  “After which you no doubt sit in the wings noshing chocolate while Matthew knocks the hell out of himself on stage,” Arnold said rudely.

  “Bananas, as a matter of fact,” Pete replied with a bland smile. “Chocolate doesn’t agree with me.”

  Only for Matthew would Pete put up with what he has from Arnold over the years, thought Marianne.

  The arrival of several of Arnold’s guests together could not but be a relief to all four. Introductions were made and drinks served. Arnold was constrained to hide his dismay when Matthew and Pete were engaged in conversation by the cabinet minister, who proclaimed himself a theatre buff.

  Marianne had not known until Arnold primed her for her duties that she was to be the sole female. A situation which would have sent Lyn into a panic – and on past occasions probably had, she was thinking, when the final guest made his appearance.

  Marianne’s first impression of Simon Newman was of a bearded man of medium height whose smile was somewhat quizzical.

  Arnold added after introducing them, “Marianne is a novelist, Simon, but you must have heard of her.”

 
“I have to confess I haven’t. Am I going to be forgiven?”

  His style matches his expression, thought Marianne. “Certainly by me, though possibly not by my brother,” she said. “I understand that you are a ghost writer, Mr. Newman, so there’s no likelihood of my having heard of you.”

  The glance he gave her was as if he had said, “Touché”. Or ought she to interpret it as: “We’re quits in the first round?” A sparring bout was what their brief exchange had felt like and when the party went to the table, Marianne was none too pleased to find Simon Newman seated beside her.

  It wasn’t just her ruffled ego, or his bad manners in not pretending he had heard of her. There was something about him she found disturbing and so it continued. A consciousness of his presence even while her attention was engaged by others.

  As course followed course, and the wine and the talk flowed, Marianne played the role required of her, dispensing charm to the industrialists, discussing Tory concerns with Arnold’s colleagues, promising the cabinet minister a signed copy of her next novel, and winking surreptitiously at Matthew and Pete when she received from them tongue-in-cheek glances.

  Only with the cultured American on her right did she make no effort whatsoever, replying when he addressed her and immediately turning away.

  Not until late that night, when she was finally alone and forced herself to examine her behaviour, did Marianne let herself recognize the reason for it. She had not expected ever to encounter a man capable of resurrecting in her the feelings she had thought buried alongside her husband, nor would she have wished it.

  Simon Newman was that man.

  Chapter 10

  Bessie awoke on her birthday and tiptoed downstairs to see if the mail had arrived. Her relatives never forgot to send her a card. And now she was ten, perhaps they would stop calling her “little Bessie”!

  She also got cards from her friends, but they didn’t come through the letter-box. If her birthday was on a weekday they were given to her at school. This year, though, it was on a Saturday and she wouldn’t receive them until her party, this afternoon.