by Maisie Mosco
The English butler, a dying breed in his own country, entered to announce that dinner would be served, and Marianne allowed herself just one more thought on the distressing aspect of tomorrow’s joyous occasion: There was no such thing as undiluted happiness and all too often it was Family that watered down the cup.
Chapter 2
Laura and Jake arrived home from Berlin refreshed by the few days together without their children and found Jeremy alone before the television set eating chocolates.
“Janis and Kurt are at one of their meetings tonight,” he said without removing his gaze from the gyrating pop group on the screen.
“Where’s Bessie?” Laura inquired.
“Where she always is when she’s been on a bender. And I’m trying to watch Top Of The Pops.”
Laura switched off the set.
“What did you do that for!”
“Because I want an explanation from you, Jeremy. ‘A bender,’ you said. What does that mean?” Surely not drink at Bessie’s age? But the things kids got up to nowadays, you never know. And Laura’s knees felt weak.
Jeremy’s response to his entertainment being cut short was to rise and stand, hands thrust in his jeans pockets, and glare at Laura. “You didn’t have to do what you did.”
Though it was not Jake’s policy to insert himself into Laura’s dealing with the children, he did so now. “Don’t be so damn rude, Jeremy. And I too want an answer to what Laura asked you.”
Jeremy cocked his head towards the near-empty chocolate box on the table. “There’s your answer. Bessie ate most of them and she’s now throwing up.”
Laura’s relief was such that she had to sit down.
“It isn’t surprising that Bessie is sick after gorging herself on chocolates,” Jake said to her, “since she never eats anything sweet.”
“That’s what you think,” said Jeremy. “It isn’t me who scoffs all the cake and biscuits that are gone from the tins in double-quick time. And where they end up is down the loo but not by accident.”
While Laura and Jake were trying to make sense of that, Jeremy went on with his revelations.
“I don’t know where Bessie got the bright idea from, but for ages she’s been pigging everything she feels like and afterwards sticking her finger down her throat to get rid of it.”
“Oh, dear God,” Laura said to Jake before turning on Jeremy. “If you knew, why didn’t you tell us?”
He avoided her eye. “Perhaps I should have –”
“You’re damn right you should have!” Jake thundered. “Does Janis know?”
“If she does she hasn’t mentioned it to me.”
“What sort of family is this?” Jake said incredulously to Laura.
“Not the sort I thought it was,” she said heavily. “It seems that you and I haven’t done as good a job as we let ourselves think.”
What a shock it was to find that under this roof were three children concerned only with their individual needs. Two of them, though, were no longer children in the real sense. There were times when Bessie was left in their care if only for an evening – and this was the outcome!
“Look –” began Jeremy.
“No, you look!” said his father. “I want to know why we were left to find out about this the way we did.”
“All I can say, Dad, is – well, I didn’t think it was for me to be the sneak I once accused Bessie of being. And I found it funny, to tell you the truth, that a kid who once scoffed everything within sight couldn’t any more without chucking up –”
“Funny?” Laura shouted.
“I stopped thinking that when I found out about her finger-down-the-throat trick.”
“Did Bessie tell you she does that? And allow me to inform you that none of this is funny!”
“No, I caught her at it. You two were out and after pigging it on ice-cream she went upstairs. A minute or two later I went to get something from my room, and I heard Bessie retching. She hadn’t locked the bathroom door and I went in to try to be helpful. I didn’t get further than the doorway though, I stopped in my tracks.”
“Are you sure that’s what you saw her doing?” Laura asked hopefully.
“I’d rather not conjure up what I saw, but you can take my word for it. And something’s just come back to me, Laura – I once watched a TV documentary about girls who ate what they liked and kept slim by doing that. Bessie watched it with me. That has to be where she got the idea from. Can I switch the set on again now?”
“No, you damn well can’t!” said Jake. “And the next time I hear some clever pundit spouting that there’s no statistical evidence that kids get their ideas from TV –”
Jeremy declared before departing that it was their responsibility, not his, to monitor Bessie’s viewing but to do so they would have to spend more evenings at home than they did.
Laura sat mentally wringing her hands, a new experience for her. “What are we going to do, Jake?”
“Number one, take Bessie to a doctor.”
“You don’t think a good talking to would suffice?”
“I’m afraid not, Laura, and you must forgive me for not taking Bessie’s dieting as seriously as you did. I’m now kicking myself both for that and how testy I’ve been with you about it.”
Laura managed a shaky laugh. “No need to kick yourself, love, Jeremy has just succeeded in bruising the pair of us. I feel as if I’ve been through a mangle wearing rose-coloured spectacles and had them smashed.”
Jake went to sit beside her on the sofa and took her hand. “We’re in this together, Laura. Whatever it takes to get Bessie right you can count on me, as I know I could on you if it were Janis or Jeremy.”
Whatever it takes to get Bessie right. Warming though Jake’s words of reassurance were to Laura, there was to them too a chilling ring.
Chapter 3
Half-way through a lunchtime signing session at Hatchards, Marianne looked up to greet the next person at the table and did a double-take. Simon Newman lining up to get my signature? This had to be a hallucination.
“I got off on the wrong foot with you,” he said, “and since then I’ve been in New York. This seemed as good a way as any of my going out the door and coming in again.”
On his face was that quizzical smile. Had this not been a public appearance Marianne, though her heart was thudding, would surely have burst out laughing.
“May I call you this evening?”
“Since I can’t talk now, please do. But my number is ex-directory –”
“Or I’d have called you before I left for the States.”
Marianne turned to the young man standing beside her and received from him a wink. He was one of the promotions people whom her publishers employed and escorting authors to signings was part of his job. He had in the past accompanied Marianne on some of her whirlwind tours, necessitating their spending the evenings together, and had told her it was a relief to be with an author who preferred to retire early and in some respects reminded him of his mother.
Marianne Dean, though, was now behaving like some of the younger novelists of Paul’s acquaintance. I am never going to live this down! “Would you mind scribbling my home phone number on a scrap of paper, Paul, while I sign the book for Mr. Newman?”
“Why not write the number under your signature?” said Simon.
“Wouldn’t that be defacing the book?”
“On the contrary,” he answered, holding her gaze.
Blushing like a schoolgirl and aware of Paul carefully not looking at her, Marianne did as she was bid.
That evening seated opposite Simon in the intimate atmosphere of a French restaurant, Marianne, despite having acknowledged his effect upon her, was prey to confusion.
Why had she said yes to his dinner invitation without thinking twice? As if whatever was going to happen between them was inevitable and there was no point in stalling. It had been that way with Ralph. But she was then just a girl. Not a mature woman in control of her own life.
/> “I couldn’t get you out of my mind,” Simon said.
No, stalling would not feature in this relationship. Nor had one of the flippant replies other men who had crossed her path received from her sprung to her tongue.
Instead she remained silent, studying his face in the candle light, noting its lived in look, the fine lines beside his grey eyes, and the vertical creases above the bridge of his nose, denoting as those on her own face did that concentrating was how he spent his days.
“You believed what I just said, didn’t you, Marianne.”
A statement, not a question, as if he too had no doubts.
“I had that trouble about you.”
“Have you been to New York?”
“Several times, to see my American publishers. And I now have cousins living there.”
“It’s a city that has to be seen through a New Yorker’s eyes and you must do that with me.”
“You might find me too objective to see things through your eyes,” she warned him with a smile.
“And you have plenty to learn about me, I guess! Like why and how I became a ghost writer, though I’d set out to be what you are – a story that would figure large in my autobiography if I thought it worth writing, which I don’t.”
Was that quizzical expression born of an inner self-deprecation? If so, the second love of Marianne’s life was in that respect a replica of her first. And how often had she guiltily attributed to her success Ralph’s finally giving up on his own hopes?
But she had met Simon at a later stage in his life. When the damage, in whatever form it had taken, was long since done, she reflected while hors d’oeuvres were served to them from a trolley and the wine poured.
By now, according to Arnold, Simon had made a name for himself though his name didn’t appear on his books. Success of a kind, and he probably made a lot of money ghosting memoirs in an age when politicians and pop stars alike saw themselves as worthy subjects for public consumption. In Arnold’s case he doubtless had posterity in mind!
Success of a kind because it had to taste bitter, given Simon’s failure to achieve what he had set out to be.
“Your brother mentioned that you’re widowed,” he said while they ate.
“Did he also tell you I have a son and a grandson?”
“No, and it hadn’t occurred to me that you might be a family woman. You don’t look like one.”
Marianne laughed. “What does a family woman look like?”
Simon surveyed her smooth, olive complexion upon which a few lines were there to tell the tale. The dark eyes that right now seemed opaque and unfathomable. And the silvering hair that was at odds with her youthful shape. Did she work out in a gym every day to stay that way? Somehow he doubted it. She wasn’t the sort to spare time for her looks, nor need she. It was the woman herself though, not her looks, who’d got to him. And without trying to.
“My idea of a family woman,” he replied, “has a somewhat careworn appearance you don’t have. My sister has two daughters, both divorced, and never stops worrying about them and their teenage kids. I myself haven’t experienced the pleasures and otherwise of parenthood. Only a marriage that ended in my forties and put me off getting involved again,” he added after a pause, “which I guess I’m now doing.”
“And with a female you seem to have incorrectly assessed,” said Marianne. “Not that you’re alone in making the mistake you did. I’ve often been told I come over as a dedicated career woman. I admit that I am, if that’s what a compulsive writer who’s never been in it just for the money can be called.”
She ate a sliver of marinated mushroom and put down her fork. “But that isn’t the whole of me, Simon. I’m also a family woman in more senses than just the parental. One of a big clan and there’s rarely a dull moment – for want of a better way of putting it.”
“Does that mean your family sometimes get in the way of your work?”
“And how! For some reason I’m the one they come to with their problems. My hostessing my brother’s dinner-party was how he solved his when his wife opted out and I can’t say I looked forward to that evening.”
“But looking back?”
“I’d say it was a milestone in my life.”
“In mine, too.” Simon raised his glass. “You and I still have far to go before we know each other, Marianne. Here’s to our step into the unknown!”
Simon’s introduction to Marianne’s involvement with her family was not long in coming.
She had invited him in for a brandy when he took her home, neither sure if what they felt for each other would be physically consummated on their first date, the only certainty that they did not want to say goodnight.
They were seated together on the living-room sofa when the telephone rang.
“In my family, at this hour that could be an emergency,” Marianne said, rising to answer it.
It was past midnight and an emergency it proved to be.
“Can you come, Marianne?”
“I can barely hear you, Lyn, this must be a bad line –”
“It isn’t the line, it’s me. We’ve had terrible news and I can’t deal with myself, let alone with Arnold. We’re at the flat.”
“I’ll be with you as soon as I can get there.”
Simon had seen Marianne pale. “What on earth is the matter?”
She had replaced the receiver and was staring down at it.
“Take a sip of this,” he said bringing her glass of brandy.
“I can and must pull myself together without it,” she said, managing to do so. “I’ve had a lot of wine tonight and I’m going to need a clear head. My nephew is ill, Simon. I didn’t let myself believe he might be a victim of Aids. That was his mother on the phone and her voice was enough to tell me that Matthew has it.”
She mustered a wan smile. “What an end to a memorable evening. And I must now go where I’m needed –”
Simon’s response was neither the awkwardness nor the repugnance with which many would have greeted Marianne’s revelation that the late-twentieth-century plague had touched her family.
“Come on. I’ll drive you there,” he said.
Though not taking her own car would mean having to call a cab for the return journey, she accepted Simon’s offer, which seemed to her a display of moral support boding well for their relationship.
“I met Matthew at the dinner-party,” he reminded her when they were driving down Haverstock Hill, “and I liked him.”
“You also met Pete, with whom he’s lived for years. And the idea of infidelity on the part of either of them –” Marianne voiced her thoughts. “Well, I’m finding it hard to believe.”
“But gay couples are no less human than the hetero equivalent,” said Simon. “One of the few faithful marriages I know of, back home, was recently hit by Aids. The wife imbibed more than usual at one of the out of town sales conference shindigs her job lets her in for and woke up in bed with some guy.”
“Did she tell her husband?”
“I doubt it. But he sure found out when she passed on to him what was passed on to her.”
“It would have to be something of the kind that got Matthew or Pete in bed with a stranger.”
“And Pete will be a lucky guy if the tests he’ll now have to have don’t prove positive.”
When Marianne arrived at the Westminster flat, Arnold opened the door and Lyn, red-eyed with weeping, stumbled into her arms.
“Much good it will do for you to come to me with your sympathy,” said her brother.
Marianne, her arm around Lyn, followed him into the claustrophobic room in which he had spent more of his life than in the house in Manchester he still called home.
“It’s Matthew whom my heart breaks for,” she replied crisply, “in which I include his having you for a father.”
Arnold turned on her like a raging bull. “So speaks the aunt my son has always looked up to! But instead of taking the stand I did about his aberration, what did you do? Supporte
d it, that’s what!”
He glared at Lyn. “Like his loving mother did. And I sometimes had to laugh about me ending up the outcast. I’m not laughing now, though, and I hold you two as much to blame for the retribution that’s finally come to prove me right as I do that bastard Pete!”
“If you want to follow in the footsteps of our late father and brother, Arnold, you’re going the right way about it,” Marianne said quietly.
“That would suit me fine.”
Arnold glanced at a framed photograph of his daughter, composed and smiling. Who would have dreamed, when that picture was taken, that Margaret would one day enter a convent and the door clang shut on her contact with the world outside for all time.
“What have I left to live for?” he said.
“Certainly not me. That’s been plain for years,” said Lyn.
Arnold added as though he had not heard her, “I shan’t be able to hold up my head in public when the news gets out.”
Lyn’s nerves finally snapped. “Even though his son has a fatal disease, Sir Arnold Klein doesn’t stop thinking of himself! Nothing has changed and I hate you, Arnold!”
Such was her hysteria she began pummelling him with her fists. “I could kill you! Not for what you’ve done to me, for ruining both our children’s lives!”
Marianne dragged her away from him and led her to the sofa. Never had she seen her brother look so shocked. But people rarely knew their effect upon others and especially not those as self-righteous as Arnold had become.
“Did you hear what my wife said to me, Marianne?”
“I would rather not have heard any of what you’ve said to each other.” Marianne stroked Lyn’s awry hair. “What I now want to say to both of you is enough with the histrionics. Apportioning blame might be an emotional release for you two, but it won’t help Matthew. He needs you now where he’s never really had you – side by side supporting him together.”
Arnold said after a silence, “They discharged him from hospital this afternoon, and you-know-who had the chutzpah to ask us to leave them alone together this evening.”