Jules was watching her. ‘That was taken on my birthday, just before we had to go back to school. We dressed up and went to Melbourne by train, and had it done. So we would have a proper, sophisticated record. A grown-up photograph of ourselves together, how we wanted to be. To last until next time. As it has always done.’
Next time. Viv was aware that this had acquired a new meaning. From now on, was what it meant. This was the implication. She made no attempt to come to terms with it, not yet. It was enough just to take this in.
‘Those weeks. They were a turning point?’
‘They were seminal. The entire summer.’
‘Was it the turning point of your life?’
‘Of course it was. And, you’d have to add, the discovery of singing. That I could sing, and make a crust from it. They were the two turning points.’
She unwound her arms, rotated her shoulders and arched her neck. ‘I thought I needed to tell you this, Viv. Before he gets here. Because now – with this new stage of life, with the divorce – it’s time. And because I wanted to.’
All the premières. All the phone calls and flowers. ‘It never waned, did it?’
‘It never waned. We were irreplaceable, you see.’
Viv did see, clearly. And perhaps had always seen, when they were together. She nodded. ‘He did marry.’
‘He tried. We both did. He had children. And that’s a great thing, for both of us.’
‘Any marriage was never going to work though, was it?’
Jules lifted her hair. It gleamed as it fell. ‘We were each other’s first, and we will be the last. We always knew that.’
This was what it was like – to see someone through new eyes. It wasn’t hard to look at this woman and see the girl. Not if you had known her for most of her life. If you believed you had known her.
Viv could discern the template: June Jeffs as she was, glowing and ardent. Max Jeffs at fifteen, already tall and classically handsome. Two creatures in the bloom of youth. Enraptured. It didn’t take much imagination to picture it, or to understand.
‘I understand it, Jules,’ she said.
Viv was familiar with a particular expression. A playful one, full of incipient mischief. It had served Jules well, over the years. It settled now on her face. ‘My God, Viv, am I glad to have this hulking bloody elephant off my chest. Believe me, I didn’t want to wait until my hand was forced. I was always dying to tell you. I just couldn’t quite— You do understand that too, don’t you?’ And she does. But a sore point will remain in place. If only a pinprick.
Viv puts her unread book away and leaves the station. She strives to reboot her mind. A short time from now she must concentrate on helping children learn to read, in a way that will not put them off. In a way that will empower them. Ignoring the drizzle, she takes long, swift strides towards the school.
But her delinquent mind refuses to move forward. It lingers on them, on Jules and Max. Lingers with a protective tenderness. You can know someone intimately, for so many years, yet in all that time know nothing about the seminal emotional experience of her life. The turning point that would affect everything to come. Although I always did have an unformed knowledge. I always knew there was something she wasn’t telling me.
Odds are, they have the perfect cover from now on. No one will think twice. She wonders if it can be hidden from Geoff. If Geoff ever suspected, it would confirm his worst convictions.
Oblivion. To be, for so long, oblivious.
The school rings with children’s voices. Shouts, yells, high screams of laughter. Is there anything else I am oblivious about?
28
VIV
It’s Tuesday morning. Viv picks up her mobile and glances at her favourites. Before she can think twice, her thumb has connected of its own accord with number six. It is answered straight off. ‘You again.’ A light stress, not unwelcoming.
‘I’m afraid so. Sorry about that. I’m wrestling with an issue, Martin. A matter of contemporary etiquette. Do you mind if I ask your opinion?’ She puts her feet up on the work table, having cleared a space. ‘You may want to consult your wife.’
‘No,’ a pause, ‘that’s what I’m here for.’ Genial. ‘One of the things, at any rate.’ Nice timing, and an altered intonation.
‘But you don’t know what it is. You might think it’s quite trivial.’
‘That’s just as well. I tend not to deal with things of any great import before lunch. So, what’s happened now?’
He must think I’m a walking disaster area. ‘Well, it hasn’t happened yet. It’s supposed to be happening on Thursday. I should really deal with it myself, and impersonate a halfway normal person, without bothering you.’ A halfway normal person? I’m impersonating Leary.
‘You can feel free to bother me at any time. I doubt if there’s such a thing as halfway normal. Or normal at all, for that matter.’
Could this be the root of the problem? ‘No, perhaps that’s …’
‘And a lot of things are subjective. It may well be that I don’t find it a bother.’ This is encouraging. ‘Whatever it happens to be.’ Is that ambiguous again, or am I imagining it?
‘Is it acceptable to withdraw from a relationship – well, nothing like that, more of a passing acquaintanceship, by text? Before anything has happened? But I suppose that’s likely to be subjective as well.’
‘I shouldn’t have thought that was very subjective, Beatrice.’
She laughs. ‘No, you’re right, that’s pretty clear-cut. But the thing is, it – I mean that – is scheduled to happen around lunchtime on Thursday, or after lunch. Potentially, I mean. Although I may have let it sound as if I was going to go along with it.’
Just to clarify, we are talking about Mr Davidson? Martin had sensed he wasn’t floating her boat.
‘No, but he might have thought he was. I’m sure he’d float plenty of other people’s, though, so please don’t write him off. I suppose I could just tell him that I’ve fallen for a hot new intro. Whereas I keep telling myself that I ought to give him more of a go.’
‘Is that what you’re feeling you’d like, Beatrice?’
‘What I’m feeling I’d like?’ What am I feeling? Confused and all at sea might cover it. If they don’t live together, Martin and his wife must be separated. Is that a viable assumption?
‘A hot new intro,’ he’s saying neutrally. ‘I can try to arrange that.’ It sounds offhand. ‘If you think it would be a good idea.’
‘A good idea?’ Offhand to match. Why is this so infernally difficult? Nothing for it. Confront the fear head on. ‘Well actually, Martin, I don’t think I do think that. That it’s a good idea, I mean. You see, I don’t …’
There is an extended pause. Extended, and confronting. Then she hears him exhale in what sounds like a sigh. Of what? Irritation? Resignation? Or something else?
‘Beatrice,’ a definite hesitation, unless this is a contradiction in terms, ‘lately I’ve been wondering if it might be more helpful to talk about this in person.’
Wondering lately. While on the diffident side, this allows a lift of the heart. ‘In person? Is that allowed, in the rules?’
‘Well, I don’t think it’s explicitly forbidden. In any case, I make the rules, and I can bend them.’
‘How very convenient.’ There was just the one meeting. Since then, there have been only phone conversations. ‘It’s ages since we met, isn’t it? Although I think I might be able to pick you out from a police line-up, in a good light. But would you recognise me?’
‘In all probability, I think. There’d be more of a chance if you wore that red hat. That’s if you haven’t lost it after all these weeks.’
‘It might be helpful to meet, as you say. Were you thinking, for instance, of a quick coffee somewhere?’
‘I was thinking of something a bit longer than a coffee. More along the lines of a drink in a pub.’
‘A long drink might be more helpful.’
‘That’s what I thou
ght. We’d better make a plan. When is good for you?’
‘This week might be good. Or did you mean earlier than that?’
‘Earlier might be preferable on the whole, I thought. Later today, for instance?’
Viv says she’s supposed to be doing something later today, but she could bend the rules. They arrange to meet in a pub near Green Park Tube at five-thirty. It’s quiet, Martin says, and defiantly unfashionable. Six stops on the Jubilee, not too hard for you to get to. She’d forgotten he knew where she lives. He lives, she discovers, in Parsons Green.
‘I’m meeting someone for a drink, so I might be late,’ Viv tells Geoff at lunch. ‘Are you in for dinner?’ Green salad and a plate of beetroot and feta is at one end of the table. Geoff’s laptop is set up at the other end. He’s been working on an article for the online fanzine.
‘I’ll be in,’ he says. ‘But don’t feel you’ve got to rush back. I can get myself something.’ He doesn’t ask who she’s meeting, she notices.
He gives the salad a toss. What is he working on, she asks. A review of the new movie Lize was talking about. The one featuring robot-activated algorithm viruses that run amok and colonise computers, he reminds her, causing worldwide chaos. Based on a novel that was a runaway bestseller.
‘A dystopian farce, is it?’
Not at all, it’s deadly serious. It’s a wake-up call for sleepwalkers. He serves her some salad. ‘What are we going to do about Daisy’s birthday?’
‘Well, that depends on you, to some extent. Mum’s coming down to see her show. She wants to stay over. She wants us all to have dinner. I told her this is probably not likely to—’
Geoff snorts. ‘All includes Adrian, I assume.’
‘Exactly.’ Viv taps his hand. ‘You know, Geoff, it’s not going to go away.’
A groan.
‘I mean, it’s not going away imminently. I don’t mean it won’t go away in the long run, necessarily. But in the short run, do you think you might be able to grin and bear it? Or if that’s too unrealistic, hide it behind a mask of grim stoicism? You don’t want not to see her, do you?’
He shrugs. ‘Of course I want to see her. It’s him I don’t want to see. I’ve got an atavistic aversion to him. Why does he have to be included in everything?’
‘Because he’s—’ Viv hesitates, ‘her partner. At least for now. And because it’s what she wants. Can you work on it? I mean, you worked on your atavistic aversion to Mum, didn’t you? For my sake. You conceal that very well, I think. By and large.’
‘Do I? Thanks.’
‘People who don’t know you would never pick up on it.’
A grin, and a sigh. ‘All right, I’ll work on my stoicism. But whatever else you want to say about Judith, she’s not a poncy twit. It’s not that I dislike her, I respect her. She’s a very able woman, not a dissipated wastrel. You can’t help but admire her ferocious capacity to get her own way.’
Viv thinks this is as far as he is prepared to go in smoothing the waters. ‘Max arrived yesterday,’ she says. It’s nearly a year since they last saw him. She pictures Max. Still a striking man. She used to think of him as remote, but she’s prepared to reassess this in the light of new evidence. Her idea of Max Jeffs has undergone a fundamental change, along with that of his half-sister, her lifelong friend Julia Jefferies.
‘A bit strange, isn’t it?’ Geoff remarks. ‘The idea of having anyone to stay while she’s still rehearsing. Jules must be mellowing in her old age.’
Viv sees him wishing he could bite this back. ‘Something we should all consider doing in our old age, perhaps?’ There have been fewer clangers, but she’s not prepared to let anything pass. ‘Of course, Max is not just anyone.’
How long is he staying this time?
‘Oh, for quite a while, I think. His daughter does most of the running of the galleries these days.’ It’s as well to start laying the groundwork. ‘Max is the closest family Jules has. They’ve always got on so well, and he has the perfect London base. Now he’s divorced, he’s planning to be here more. A whole lot more, she says.’
Geoff surprises her by saying he always wished for a sister. Max and Jules are lucky to have such a lot in common, aren’t they? They get on much better than most siblings he’s come across. Than most married couples, for that matter. I don’t mean us, sweet pea, he adds, with an evasive grin.
Viv looks at him. She’s tempted to say something banal (yet apposite) about sex rearing its head and complicating everything. But it’s too apposite, and too close to the bone. Instead she says yes, he’s quite right. Jules and Max have the perfect relationship.
And she and Geoff are able to laugh it off. Their amusement is genuine and mutual, but derives from different sources. It comes at its subject from tangents, touching at times but not merging. As will be the way with us, she feels, into the future.
Viv works through the afternoon with an intensity she hasn’t experienced for a while. All year she has been working on this patchwork quilt, and now the end is in sight. There’s a satisfying symmetry of colours and patterns in the design. Compared with the results achieved by people like Joy or Yasmin (who’s in a different league) she has a long way to go, but progress has been made.
The pleasure she feels in her work, the flow, keeps safely at bay the competing feelings she doesn’t care to analyse. Immediately after this morning’s phone call she put her red hat on the bed so as not to forget it. An hour before leaving she changes out of her work clothes, and after a moment’s consideration opts for what she wore to her first interview with Martin Glover. The suit will have a chance to recapture its insouciance. And keeping out the cold will be that old faithful, the voluminous sixties overcoat her husband dislikes.
On the point of leaving, almost as an afterthought (in fact, not wishing to give it another thought at all) she picks up the straw tote instead of her usual bag. Which still, as it happens, contains various items that accompanied her on recent journeys to Chelmsford and to Paris. Many of them travel-sized and packed in a wash bag, together with the recent black purchases. She places two paperbacks on top to hide what lies beneath.
At the appointed time Viv is at the pub in a lane behind Green Park. She doesn’t bother with being a polite five minutes late. The door opens into a simple, shabby bar with a sprinkling, as Martin had indicated, of unfashionable patrons. The kind of neighbourhood drinking hole that has nearly vanished, especially in that area. No TV, no fruit machines, no music. Nothing changed or spruced up, she would guess, for more than half a century.
All afternoon she has been aware of an internal stasis that is almost a concern in itself. It’s unnatural how becalmed I feel. The calm before the storm? There is ample potential for getting this whole thing massively wrong.
She finds Martin Glover out the back in the snuggery. There is an electric heater – not a real fire, that’s too much to hope for, but with bright and cheerful flames. The small room is lined with age-speckled prints and photos of London before and after the Second World War. He is the sole occupant, reclining on a worn leather chesterfield. He’s not reading, but there’s a book on the table at his elbow, next to an untouched beer and a packet of cashews.
Viv takes in a series of impressions. A white male with grey receding hair, brown eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses, and a touch of middle-aged spread. She observes a face with a prominent high-bridged nose. The mouth has a wry curve that suggests its owner is attuned to the humour of life, and not unfamiliar with its downsides. His clothes look comfortable and well worn. A tweed jacket over a fawn crew-necked sweater, blue shirt and brown corduroys. Although they have only met once, she is struck by how familiar he looks.
He seems to be gazing at the wall, although possibly not seeing it, and her other immediate impression, arriving directly on the heels of the first ones, is of a man in deep and possibly troubling thought. She stands in the doorway, taking all this in. While also remembering to take in the deep and steadying breaths Julia would advise.
‘Martin,’ she says.
He looks up. ‘Vivien. You’re here.’ He gets to his feet and the worried expression creases into a smile that, she thinks, is very much in the moment. But the moment is rapidly followed by another, this time of uncertainty. It’s mutual. They regard each other.
‘Well,’ he says. He comes over and kisses her slowly on both cheeks, lightly grasping her shoulders. Pensive kisses, she thinks. Contemplative. From someone becalmed, like me.
He picks up her hands and rubs them. ‘You’re freezing. Did you forget your gloves?’
‘There was rather a lot on my mind,’ she says. ‘Although it was trying to convince me there wasn’t.’
‘Mine was convincing me of the opposite, rather too successfully. That’s a large coat for a small person. Is it an old favourite?’
‘It’s a battered relic from the sixties. They were called swagger coats. George – that’s Geoff, my husband – thinks it should be put on the scrap heap.’
He relinquishes her hands and takes it. ‘And you wore that hat. It’s a trilby, isn’t it? I’ve become quite partial to it, in its absence. Come and sit down, and talk to me reassuringly, Beatrice.’
‘Do you need reassuring?’ She touches his arm. ‘When I came in, I did think you looked worried.’
‘Did you?’ He’s still holding her coat. ‘I think I was worried, among other things, that you might have changed, or I’d got you wrong. But you’re just as I remember, Vivien.’ He shakes his head, as if to throw something off. ‘It’s rather a relief.’
‘It is a relief, isn’t it? I was worried too, in case you’d turned into someone else. I don’t know what I would have done. It would have been really quite –’ she thinks this over rapidly, and opts for the truth, ‘really quite unbearable.’
They are still standing facing each other. ‘Good lord,’ he says, ‘you’ve been left stranded without a drink. What would you like? Gin and tonic? White wine? They do a warming Tuscan red here. Nice and chewy.’
The Age of Discretion Page 31
