by Maisie Mosco
Were that not depressing enough, a stock market crash had followed, reminding Marianne that it was some time since she had met with her stockbroker, that being a widow put you in control of matters you’d been pleased to leave in your husband’s hands.
Marianne’s disinterest in how her earnings were invested had been a source of amusement to Ralph. “Yet you think of yourself as an independent woman,” he had once said. She still did. Why else was she keeping Simon waiting for an answer to his asking her to marry him? He had finally got around to it last week – another reason for October being memorable.
Etched upon her memory too was the day she had driven her grandson to Oxford to enter the next phase of his life. Amid the dreaming spires where intellect was for a brief while nurtured before the real business of living began.
His parents had offered to take him together to New College, where Martin had once been a student. What a kick my son would have got out of that, thought Marianne. Which father wouldn’t? He had, however, hidden his disappointment when A. P. said he would like to be ferried with his belongings by Marianne.
If Moira too had felt rebuffed, it was for her as for Martin just one more disappointment. Eventually they would surely come to see it as Marianne had. How could the lad have borne for them to take him to college together, when he knew they would not be under the same roof when he returned?
Moira was still living in the house and Martin had moved into a service flat until he found a place suitable to accommodate A. P.
Marianne recalled her conversation with A. P. when he had clutched as at a straw at her telling him to consider her place his second home. He would now have three to choose from but given the circumstances would not know a real home again until eventually he himself set up home.
A telephone call from Laura interrupted Marianne’s musing.
“Bessie’s having a bonfire party tonight. Fancy coming along?”
“I have a date with Simon.”
“He’s welcome to come, too.”
“I’m not sure that fireworks are his scene –”
“Come off it, Marianne! He’s an American. Lighting fireworks on every possible national holiday is their popular pastime. But any excuse for his not meeting the family, and for none of us meeting him, will do! This is beginning to get a bit hurtful, Marianne.”
With that Laura rang off, leaving Marianne angry both with her and with herself.
Briefly she paced the room she sometimes thought of as her cell. The place in which she was imprisoned with her work, hour after hour, day after day.
Self-imprisonment, but that’s my privilege. If I marry Simon, he’ll make demands on my time when he isn’t working or suffers an attack of writer’s block. Ralph had left for work early in the morning and returned in the evening when Marianne was ready to put the cover on her typewriter. Life with Simon will be unpredictable and gone will be my régime.
Will be? Or would be? Indecisiveness was still with her. Could she live without him? Did they love each other enough to make the concessions necessary for two writers to share a life and continue to meet their deadlines?
Nor, for Marianne, was a deadline her sole incentive. There was and always had been within her a creative dynamo that drove her without respite until a novel was complete. How would Simon live with that – the part of her he didn’t yet know? With a woman who sometimes got up in the middle of the night to set on paper ideas that would not let her sleep.
Marianne plumped up the cushions on the Chesterfield. I could have done without this dilemma at my time of life! But Simon has brought to this time of your life something you’d thought gone forever.
“You can’t have the ha’penny and the bun, Marianne,” Sarah Sandberg’s voice echoed in her head from the past. “Nobody can.”
Nor were the best things in life necessarily free. In Marianne’s experience there was a price to pay for everything. Was she prepared to pay the price of marrying a man she loved?
That evening she found that Laura had taken the matter of his introduction to the family into her own hands.
“I got a call from your cousin – the one who’s a photographer,” Simon said when he dropped in for a drink earlier than Marianne had expected him. “She said we’re invited to her kid’s bonfire party. But you already know, no doubt. I guess she called me too to be polite, since I haven’t yet been to her home.”
“I haven’t encouraged my family to clasp you to its bosom, Simon.”
“Or me to clasp it to mine. If you think I didn’t know that, you must take me for a fool, Marianne. I seem to recall suggesting more than once that we invite your relatives for Sunday brunch to my place, or yours. You never did anything about it, though, and I was aware that wasn’t because you couldn’t be bothered scrambling eggs for a crowd and dishing out bagels with cream cheese and lox.”
Simon smiled dryly. “Who are you ashamed of? Me, or them?”
“Neither! And if you’re going to be snide about this, you can go to the bloody bonfire on your own.”
“I don’t mind missing out on the bonfire. What I do mind is that I haven’t yet met your son and his wife.”
“They’re no longer together.”
“Since when? Don’t bother telling me. I’m not curious, Marianne. Just shocked that a relationship I thought the closest I’d known could exclude your letting me in on something as distressing for you as what I’ve just – by chance – learned. Maybe I am the fool you think me.”
Marianne watched him drink the Scotch she had poured for him and get himself another.
“Is this to be the first time I see you get drunk?”
Simon eyed her contemplatively and made no reply.
She sipped some of her sherry and put down the glass. “The truth is, Simon, that I wanted to keep you to myself. Once you become part of my family scene –”
“The honeymoon we haven’t yet had would be over – is that what you mean?” he cut in.
“Sort of, though I have to say that was a cock-eyed way of putting it.”
“Then let me put it differently,” he answered. “You’re reluctant to let me into the full context of your life is how I see it.” He paused to share a long glance with her. “The love I have for you, though, has changed my life. To give it to you straight, you now are my life.”
“But you are neither a parent, nor a grandparent. My being both ensures that I can’t say to you what you’ve just said to me. On our first date I told you I’m a family woman – remember? And in the fullest sense.”
“Apart from your midnight dash to your brother’s though, I have yet to see you in action.”
Marianne mustered a smile. “If you’d seen me in action between then and now, you might wish you hadn’t popped the question you did last week! Would you care to withdraw it?”
“You’re not getting off the hook that easily!”
“I’m not yet on it, am I?”
“But I was hoping to put a ring on your finger and take you with me to New York next month. My agent has something special lined up for me.”
Marianne made a quick decision. Call it a step forward in the decision-making process. “I need a break after finishing a first draft. Could you manage a week in Bermuda?”
“With you? You bet.”
“I’m told it’s idyllic and not a long flight from New York. Why don’t we do that, Simon? But without the ring on my finger.”
“You’re a slippery fish to catch, Marianne!” he said with a laugh. “But I’m still hoping to land you and okay, we’ll do it your way. Drink up your sherry and we’ll go watch that effigy Britishers burn on bonfire night go up in smoke.”
They left the flat and walked to Laura’s home hand in hand, fireworks lighting the night sky. Like a couple of kids, Marianne thought. Next time she counted her blessings she would add Simon.
Chapter 12
On the day they were to leave for New York, Marianne called Simon early in the morning.
“Hi, h
on! If this is to remind me to pack the special tea you’re taking for your cousin, I already did so. If the customs guys open our baggage they’ll think we intend setting up a tea shop!”
“Did I waken you?”
“I’ve had juice and coffee and was about to go take my shower. Did you get a good night’s sleep?”
“I haven’t been to bed.”
“Don’t tell me! You got some new ideas about the first draft you thought was finished and spent the night making revisions. What am I going to do with you! You’ll have to get some shut-eye on the plane.”
How light-hearted he sounded. But not for long. “I can’t go with you, Simon.”
“Say that again?”
“After you left last night I got a call from my sister-in-law –”
“The one you said lives with her daughter in Israel? The press are now calling what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank an uprising. But you told me your relatives live in Tel Aviv. It wouldn’t affect them. Why in the hell can’t you go with me?” And why did I, before asking you, waste time mentioning something irrelevant to us? Because I’m still trying to take in this last minute let down by the woman I love.
“The call was from Lyn, Matthew’s mother,” Marianne said. “There’s been another crisis, his worst yet and it’s still going on. He couldn’t breathe and was rushed to hospital by ambulance. They say it’s pneumonia and the outlook is grim.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“As if that weren’t enough for Lyn to take, after the doctors had spoken to them Arnold let Pete have it. He’s been bottling it up for years, holding Pete responsible for Matthew’s being gay. Pete is now in pieces.”
“All concerned have my sympathy,” said Simon, “but why does this have to mean you can’t go with me?”
“If you have to ask that, you’re not the man for me, Simon.”
“Damn right I’m not! Nor you the woman for me.”
A moment later each had replaced the receiver and stood staring down at the telephone. Marianne in Hampstead and Simon in Highgate, a ten-minute drive from each other, but for both it was as if a yawning cavern now stretched between them.
What is it with her? thought Simon. Is she some kind of masochist? She’d looked forward to this trip as much as he had, even gone out and bought herself new outfits to wear in Bermuda. Okay, so her sister-in-law needs some support, but Laura’s around, and also that young rabbi and his wife I met at the bonfire party. Well, Simon had sure seen Marianne in action now! But why did it have to be her, and why did she stand for it?
He could not have known how often Marianne had asked herself that question, or that she was again doing so. If ever there were a reluctant and unsuitable unofficial matriarch, it’s me!
The answer to why she stood for the demands made on her, though, lay in what she had finally said to Martin on the night they discussed pros and cons of the institution responsible for her present plight.
Come what may, she was thankful that hers was a family that continued to stand by each other.
Simon took his shower, tidied his kitchen, checked his briefcase, dressed and left for the airport like a robot going through the motions of getting where it was programmed to go. Robots didn’t feel pain and he would hold his at bay for as long as he could.
Marianne allowed herself the luxury of soaking in the bath, threw on fresh clothing, drank some strong tea, got into her car and returned to where she was needed.
Neither had yet come to grips with how their brief telephone conversation had ended. That the words they had said could not be unsaid and implicit in them was the end of their affair.
Chapter 13
Simon had anticipated a wait of up to two hours after arriving at Kennedy Airport, before Marianne joined him after proceeding through immigration. The line for foreigners entering the country could stretch, four abreast, like a mile-long snake curving itself to fit into the overheated space, any time of year. And this was the week before Christmas.
Making his way past those who had no option but to put up with inconvenience of that sort after flying the Atlantic, he thought it time something was done about it. Foreigners came to New York on business, but he couldn’t imagine them doing so if they could find an alternative market.
He was still not letting himself think of Marianne. The Scotch he had consumed on the flight, the movie too, had helped blot her out. When the thought of her inserted itself he would go on making himself dwell upon something else, like the seemingly arrogant attitude of New York’s immigration authority, as he had just now.
He had also anticipated sharing with her the suite he’d reserved at the Plaza! Put that thought away, too, he ordered himself as a cab carried him there.
“You bin to the UK for woik or for pleasure?” the cabbie inquired.
“What makes you think I’ve flown in from there?”
“I’ve seen the tag on your baggage. What am I, blind? Believe you me, a guy in my lina woik gotta keep his eyes skinned, or packa pistol, wid what goes on in this city! You a New Yorker?”
“Born and bred.”
“So I shouldn’t have to tell you. You ain’t one of them limeys who wants to know why I got a cast iron screen between me an’ who I’m drivin’. I took a look at you, though, an’ slid it back, like I do when I pick up limeys at Kennedy. I got family in the UK. My mom was a GI bride. Came from a city called Manchester. You ever bin there?”
“No.” I thought I might soon be marrying into a Manchester family, Simon wanted to tell him, but you didn’t unburden yourself to a cab-driver, friendly though New York cabbies could be if they hadn’t got out of bed the wrong side that morning.
“My mom took me to see her folks when I was a kid, but I never bin back. Always meant to, but never made it. Things get in the way, you know how it is.”
Simon did. And the hell with Marianne’s family!
“You don’t have a home in New York, you’re askin’ me to take you to the Plaza?”
“I live in London.”
“They say that’s some city, still civilized.”
“Depending on what you compare it with.”
“Me, I live in Queens and it has to be better than where I was raised. The Bronx ain’t fit for human habitation no more!”
Simon rested his head against the seedy upholstery, his gaze on the skyline that was for him like no other; the pure symmetry and soaring strength of it never failed to take his breath away. He was home again.
In London, to where he had escaped for a change of scene, he felt the lonesome exile he was. After the three years he had spent there he’d been thinking of up’n running again when he met Marianne. Up’n running was right! A writer without ties could live anywhere, all he needed was an agent wherever to find him work, and a typewriter.
So it had been for Simon since his marriage broke up. Kids would have kept him in New York, provided too the stability of a sort even a divorced guy got out of being a father. He’d have had them to stay on the weekends and on their school vacations.
Minus that incentive to stay put, he had lived for a while in Madrid, lured there by his admiration for the author he had in his youth hoped to emulate, Ernest Hemingway. Me and all the other aspiring male novelists of my day, he thought now.
Marianne, though, had revealed that she had hoped to emulate nobody, just to be herself. In spite of that, her books had been compared in some reviews with the work of Howard Spring. There was about them, Simon had thought after getting one of Spring’s novels from the library, the same rich texture, and a social content that didn’t stop them from being a good read.
Again he ordered himself not to think about her and tried to give his attention to the cabbie’s continuing monologue about the changes time had wrought to their home town.
When eventually he was unpacking his bag in the splendour he had hoped to share with her, he found that one of the numerous packets of tea she had asked him to put into it had split. Had she been with him th
ey would now be laughing together. The white shorts he had brought to wear in Bermuda looked as if a swarm of black flies had settled on them.
Simon glanced around the bedroom. Opulent described it. The richness of the fabrics and the carpet. The ornate furniture. The perfume drifting from a vase of flowers. He had not stayed here before but had chosen it as a setting for Marianne. She, though, would probably have giggled when she saw it.
He recalled saying to her on their first date that he wanted to show her New York through the eyes of a New Yorker. Since then he had found himself seeing through her eyes much that he had not really looked at before. She took nothing at its face value. And they shared a lot of laughs, though Simon wouldn’t have called himself, before he met her, the kind who saw the funny side.
He had reserved a suite for them in Bermuda at the Elbow Beach Hotel, a setting that would charm Marianne. But Bermuda was now out. At the bottom of his bag was the lightweight clothing he wouldn’t require. Such was his inertia after Marianne called, he had not bothered repacking. And what in the hell was he to do with eleven packs of Lyon’s Red Label tea?
The shortbread intended for her cousins was in her own bag. There was no reason, though, for them not to get the tea.
Though Simon had neither their telephone number nor their address, the switchboard operator was patient and helpful. At these prices she should be!
A woman whose voice implied she was the gentle sort, its north of England accent reminiscent of Marianne’s and Laura’s, answered.
“Is this Mrs. Diane Sanderton?”
“Who’s speaking?”
“My name is Newman –”
“Marianne’s friend! Please excuse me for sounding wary –”
“No need to tell me why. When I lived here I also had my share of crank calls. I have something for you from Marianne.”
“She always was a thoughtful person. We were thrilled to hear she was coming. And needless to say upset when she phoned today to tell us why she had to cancel her trip. Ronald will be home from the clinic soon and we’re in this evening, if you’d care to visit us –”