by Beth Morrey
When I became a mother I assumed I was no good with children, since I was no good with Melanie, but as the years went by I realized the only prerequisite was to want to be good with them. I never did with Mel because there was always something else that needed doing; I suppose her outrage was an awareness that my attention was elsewhere. It’s hard to accept, when you have children, that your time isn’t your own anymore—it belongs to them, every precious second. When I saw Otis pulling on his mother’s arm as she checked her phone I wanted to shake her. But we all make the same mistakes, whether it’s phones or cleaning or looking out the window come rain or sunshine, waiting for your husband to come home. So Otis and I played, and he climbed on logs, and brought me bugs in the palm of his hand and ate the biscuits I baked, and every second was spent watching him, and paying attention and responding to the endless questions, because I knew it wouldn’t last forever, but we would both remember it. I didn’t do it for Melanie, and I couldn’t do it for Arthur, so I would do it for him.
Angela still annoyed me, with her scattiness, smoking, swearing and constant harping on about politics, but she was entertaining, and whenever she picked up Otis she would inevitably end up staying for tea and a diatribe. She would march around my kitchen holding Otis’s wand like a cigarette, delivering her tirade in that husky Irish accent. It mostly went over my head as I busied myself providing sustenance for them both, admiring my newly adorned mantelpiece and slipping Bobby the odd crumb of biscuit, after I’d picked out the chocolate. Her tail would thump in thanks as she dribbled on the Aubusson rug. She was quite a nice old girl really.
“Screw the lot of them,” concluded Angela as she finally drew breath. “This room looks amazing. Sylvie is a bloody genius. That reminds me, there’s this quiz at the pub on the twenty-second. She and Denzil want to make up a team. You up for it?”
Obviously I was pleased they’d thought of me. How Leo would have scoffed though. He found trivia . . . well, trivial. But that was the kind of knowledge I had, I supposed—skimming stone snippets, garnered here and there throughout my long life.
“Who will look after Otis?”
“I’ll get a babysitter, it’s only round the corner. Sylvie’s a fiend when it comes to quizzes. She’ll actually lynch you if you get anything wrong. I’m not going to answer any questions just in case. I thought I’d just get drunk and shouty.”
“Why change the habit of a lifetime?”
“Fecking cheek. You in, then?”
“Is the pub dog-friendly?”
I’d got into the habit of taking Bobby around with me, in addition to her usual walks. She’d sit, tied to a lamppost outside the butcher’s shop, ears pricked, sniffing my bag when I returned. The owner of the charity bookshop was happy to let her wait by the children’s section while I browsed, and as the weather was warmer we could sit outside the café, where Hanna would bring a bowl of water for her. Bobby was an undemanding companion, happy to accompany me and lie by my side, quietly panting as I read the papers. She was a handsome creature with her ochre coloring, and passersby would often stop to admire and pat her, which was rather gratifying.
* * *
—
A week or so before the quiz, a package arrived from Melanie. It must have been sent a few days after she received my letter, which hadn’t been as easy to post as it was to write, and had traveled around in my bag for a while before I could pluck up the courage. How to undo those brutal words between us? Dear Melanie, when I’d never really treated her so. I viewed the parcel with some trepidation, but when I opened it, there was just a DVD and a note that read So Bob can learn about her pedigree. It was the second series of Blackadder.
I’d never watched a sitcom before; Leo and I caught the odd documentary or film, but apart from that the television was just a redundant box in the corner. Leo used to pride himself on the fact that he didn’t really watch it, and it was one of the few rows he and Mel had, about the medium’s cultural significance. I remember waiting for them to thrash it out, realizing that the set was coated in a layer of dust and dashing off to find a tea towel.
At first I found it stagey and affected, with the elaborate Tudor costumes and crude set, but then relaxed into the silliness of it all, enjoying the deft wordplay and absurd caricatures. Once Angela and Otis dropped by to join me; Angela brought over fish and chips and we sat drinking wine and giggling as Baldrick’s next cunning plan was unveiled. I was thinking myself quite a fan until the last episode, which I watched on my own, with Bobby on the sofa next to me, her head in my lap. It was all as ridiculous and enjoyable as usual but then the ending came, with the characters all murdered, their corpses littering the floor, and for some reason it was quite upsetting. I went upstairs to bed and for the first time in months checked the cupboards, then slept badly, waking and watching the shadows on the walls, listening to the dog snoring and snuffling and finding comfort in her presence. In the early hours of the morning I finally fell into a deep sleep, my hand on her head.
I awoke late, to hear Bobby down in the kitchen drinking noisily from her bowl. Dressing quickly, I followed her downstairs and clipped on her lead. We made our way round the park, though since it wasn’t our usual time we didn’t see as many familiar faces. We sat outside the café for a while, watching the deer, Bobby growling at a paper bag blowing in the breeze.
Returning home, I had a bowl of soup and listened to the news on my new radio while I went through a box from the attic that Sylvie had left for me to sort. They were mostly letters my mother had kept, which I stowed away to read properly another time. I binned some old documents relating to the sale of the house in Kensington, though kept a photograph of it, taken shortly after the war. There was also a little box that looked like a jewelry case, but inside I found two milk teeth and a rolled-up piece of paper. Unfurling it, I read my mother’s handwriting: Henry 1940 & Milly 1944. I’d never done that with my own children. Rolling up the paper again, I put it carefully back in the box along with the little ivory gems. A neutral voice on the radio told me an MP had died, stabbed in the street by a constituent. She had children too.
Ludwig and his bloody dagger, indiscriminate slaughter. A mother who saved her children’s teeth and another who didn’t. A parent killed and another kept alive. Live, die, love, don’t love; it was all so arbitrary and random that the unfairness and unpredictability of it took my breath away. Again I loathed myself for choices I had made, things I said, and things I didn’t say. I wished Leo were there to hold my hand and tell me it would be all right, but his chair was empty, so instead I sank my fingers into the dog’s lustrous fur and felt her breathe, up and down, up and down.
“Live,” said Bobby, and I started in shock, but she was just doing one of her yelping yawns.
I ruffled her mane and gazed around my cozy living room, with the pictures of my family glinting in the lamplight, my father smiling down at me: how lucky I was, how monstrously lucky. It had started to rain, a proper downpour lashing against the pane. Bobby’s walk would be a wash-out tomorrow. She nuzzled me, turning on her back to show me her white belly.
“I’m glad you’re here.” I tickled her soft fur and she wriggled nearer for more.
The magic doesn’t stop the worst happening. The worst happens all the time, every day. And then life goes on. And you just hang on and hope that you can keep whatever crumbs and tiny white teeth are left.
Chapter 22
Question number seven: The Greek military junta, also known as the Regime of the Colonels, ended in which year?”
“Oh balls, was it 1972? Seventy-three?”
“Seventy-five, surely?”
Bobby’s head was on my knee, willing us to do well, and I could have told them, but I was swept away, back to a night almost fifty years ago when the colonels were still in power, and Leo and I had the fight that nearly made me tell him everything.
* * *
—
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It was 1970 and there had been ghost-fingers of leftover snow on the ground that evening when Leo and I returned to Cambridge to attend a dinner at a hotel near Queens’ College. It was some tourist thing we’d been invited to, something to do with Greece, but I barely paid attention when he told me about it because I had a demanding five-year-old intent on wrecking the house and Melanie was ten going on twenty-three with a hundred dramas a day. So that afternoon I just put on a dress that didn’t have their dinner on it, and we got on the train, and then into a cab, and rushed into the River Suite, because Leo said we had to get there early for some reason. On the way into the hotel, I noticed a small crowd of people staring at us, and one of them shouted something that sounded jeering, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time as we were in such a hurry.
I couldn’t see anything particularly Greek about the affair, just a few of the town’s illustrious personages standing around quaffing, but it was obvious when we arrived that something was wrong. The waiting staff had a harassed air, shoulders tense as if expecting an eruption from the kitchen. Already anxious at events like this, while Leo began his perambulation of the room, I stood with my back to the wall and before I knew it, had consumed three glasses of champagne. When he finally returned to my side, everyone had developed a kind of echo body that overlaid their own, and at first I thought the noises I could hear were just in my head. Shouting voices were filtering in from outside, the waiters looked more worried than ever, and guests were starting to whisper to one another behind their drinks.
“There’s a protest out front,” muttered Leo, swiping a glass and downing it in one gulp. “Tristan says they’ve been gathering for quite a bit. Lucky we were early.”
“Who?”
“Students, mostly.”
“Protesting what?”
“Greece. The junta.”
My Greece was an ancient one—myths and metaphors, mountains and magic—and the harsh reality of a modern dictatorship felt vastly at odds, as did this suddenly ridiculous dinner.
We took our places, although a few seats were still empty, and the first course was brought out and presented with noticeably shaky hands. Olives and peppers, fried squid rings and numerous dips with strips of flat bread curling at the edges. Everyone around me began determinedly chatting about the various tavernas they’d frequented, to prove their sophistication. As if to further enrich the Mediterranean tone, music suddenly blared into the room, causing some to cover their ears in consternation. Several people looked around to determine the source but it seemed obvious to me that this was no gentle acoustic counterpoint to our evening. With that, and the continued shouting outside, the event was rapidly becoming a farce.
After a whispered discussion with Tristan and a hovering waiter, Leo turned back to me. “Someone’s set up speakers outside.”
“How obliging of them,” I replied, sipping my wine.
After that, some dignitary got to his feet and attempted to make a speech about the wonders of the Greek coastline, to the booming accompaniment of “Zorba’s Dance.” Leo’s shoulders were shaking; he and his friend Tristan were egging each other on. The shouting was now coming from all sides and eventually the speaker gave up and tailed off, shrugging helplessly at his colleagues.
The waiters were visibly sweating and gesticulating at one another, the chanting outside getting louder, diners becoming more disturbed and distracted. And then a stone hit one of the long windows that looked out onto the river. It was only a tap really, but everyone was so on edge that one woman actually screamed. It was all we needed to tip us over. A waiter dropped a tray of avocado slices with a crash, another stone followed the first, the window of the River Suite smashed, and two young men charged into the room waving placards. They were immediately set upon and bundled out, but everyone leaped up and started bunching toward the entrance, jostling, though no one seemed to know where we were going, and then, then, all at once, I was enjoying myself more than I had in years.
I wasn’t at home on my own with two whining children; someone else was doing the wiping; I was in a nice frock and my husband’s hand was clasped firmly around my own. By then the shouting was deafening both inside and out, men bellowing instructions at one another and women squealing and clutching their skirts as if rape and pillage were on the agenda. There was something aptly bacchanalian about it all, and as Leo hustled me out of the room, I swiped an open bottle of champagne from a wobbling tray and gave a little wave to the bemused waiter.
Out in the lobby it was no better, staff milling around in all directions and no one taking charge. A man who looked like he might be the maître d’ kept clapping his hands vainly, but no one took any notice. Several of the women were hysterical, though in fact, apart from the noise, nothing had really happened. How swift we were to descend into panic and mayhem! I began to giggle as I surveyed the dramatic scenes and took a slug of champagne. Leo was engaged in an intense discussion with Tristan, but when he turned and saw me, he grinned across the room, and once again I was the girl hugging my books by the Mathematical Bridge. We were still holding, he and I. Despite everything.
Leo walked toward me, still smiling, and I offered him the bottle. He took it and drank from it, and when he handed it back to me, I noticed he had my coat.
“Well,” he said, “it seems everyone is going upstairs to hide out until this is all over.”
“Hmmm,” I said, eyeing him and my coat speculatively.
He held out his arm like a gentleman. “What do you say we make a run for it?”
I hung on and, chuckling like a pair of schoolchildren, we swept past the twittering guests, gunning for the exit. Just before the door we paused, girding our loins.
“Ready?” Leo asked, turning to me with a wicked glint in his eye.
“Ready,” I replied, and we ducked out.
Immediately, we hit a wall of heaving bodies, a seething mass of anger and exhilaration. I could see several policemen in the midst, vainly pushing against the crowd, but there must have been hundreds of people there in that tiny cul-de-sac, and the police didn’t stand a chance. We plunged into the throng, hands intertwined, heads down. At first it was hard to make any progress and I worried we would just get pummeled and pulled backward, but gradually Leo threaded his way through, never letting go of my hand. We were almost there when it started to pour rain. At least, that’s what I thought it was, but the deluge was too heavy—in seconds I was drenched, like everyone else, and looking up, we saw a man in the first-floor window of the hotel, smirking as he sprayed us with a fire hose. Pandemonium broke out, people shoving this way and that, the paint on the placards drizzling and blurring. But throughout it all, Leo’s hand was in mind, palms firmly pressed together, fingers entwined. He wouldn’t let go.
Then all at once we were out, running down a side street toward civilization, attracting curious glances from pedestrians as we squelched past, laughing helplessly. When we finally came to a halt on a small side street that backed St. Catharine’s, we were both disheveled, panting, triumphant. I passed Leo the bottle again and he handed me my damp coat.
“What on earth were we doing there?” I gasped, shrugging it on and squeezing out my hair.
Leo took a swig and spluttered. “Tristan invited me, he’s half Greek. I thought we might get a free holiday out of it!” He clutched the college’s wrought iron gate, wheezing with laughter, then snatched my hand up and again we were running through the dark cobbled streets.
“Where are we going?” I puffed at one point as Leo led me down an alleyway off King’s Parade.
“Somewhere I used to know,” was all he would say.
The night was dark and cold, with the lights of the colleges twinkling as we rushed past, and for a second I missed it all, that cocoon of academic life, the delicate unpicking of words in dreaming spires, rather than the brutish earthiness of motherhood. I got a first-class degree, in t
he end—the highest honors. How might my life have been, I wondered, if all my children had been unborn? But then, Leo’s hand in mine, pulling me along, and I was dragged through a graveyard with the Round Church on our left, until a Gothic redbrick building loomed in the gloom. The Cambridge Union debating chambers. Students were milling about, but Leo didn’t break stride, carrying on inside, bearing me along several corridors and then turning down a small set of stairs. As we descended I could hear music again, but a very different kind.
We emerged into the cellars, a place I wasn’t familiar with, but could see that this murky set of underground rooms had been turned into an impromptu jazz club. The band was at one end, dimly lit, with a few couples dancing in the middle, and others ranged on tables round the edges. Leo looked around for a second, then sighed in satisfaction.
“Just as I remember,” he said fondly. “Do you want a drink?”
We found a table and I sat down while Leo went in search of refreshment. After a moment, he reappeared with a bottle of wine.
“This is much better,” he said, sitting down and pouring us both a glass. We clinked them and I thought how lovely it was; how we’d never done this before, because he was always too busy and I was always too ground down, but maybe, here in this dingy basement, I was finally surfacing into the light. Maybe in the end, it would all be worthwhile, and everything I had to go through, everything I gave up to get here, was just a test designed to make the reward more satisfying. As the children got easier, and he settled into his career, Leo and I would spend more time together, and he could learn to love me in the all-encompassing, single-minded way I craved.
“Dr. Carmichael!” A dark-haired, bespectacled young man was standing before us, blushing and stuttering. Leo immediately got to his feet, pumping his hand and exclaiming.
