These Days of Ours

by Juliet Ashton

  ‘Is their place still called Hujorie House?’

  ‘Yup.’ Kate surreptitiously eyed Julian to see if he was being stern or indulgent. Sometimes her family amused him; at other times she felt him prickle with a toxic mixture of embarrassment and disdain. ‘Tonight let’s get up to no good. Just the two of us. After the fancy dress party.’ Her hand landed gently on his thigh. She loved the dormant power in Julian’s body when it was at rest. He was athletically built for a man who spent his days at desks or on the phone.

  ‘I hate it when you do that.’

  ‘Do what?’

  Julian flicked at her hand. ‘Diarise it. As if sex is on your to-do list. Defrost freezer: tick. Collect dry cleaning: tick. Screw husband: tick.’ He kept his eyes on the white lines disappearing beneath the car. ‘Although if we’re honest, the freezer gets defrosted with more regularity than we have sex.’

  Counting to ten stopped Kate from responding in kind.

  Despite how painful it was to talk about it, she’d persevered. So Julian knew why their love life had dwindled. Bit by bit, Kate was able to admit how overwhelmed she sometimes felt. How weary. How worried. After hours of painful to and fro, she’d found the words to satisfy him that it wasn’t a problem with her heart, nor her loins, but with her brain.

  Julian even conceded that after a day calling the shots at work and overseeing the refurbishment of their new house, he was often glad to collapse into bed like a felled redwood.

  Our libidos are out of sync. Knowing that arguments wouldn’t help them rediscover their rhythm, Kate stayed quiet until they pulled up at Aunty Marjorie’s gate.

  ‘We needn’t stay long.’ The usual pre-emptive reassurance.

  ‘I . . .’ Julian chewed his lip. ‘Look, I’m not coming in.’

  ‘But . . .’ Kate was dismayed. Her tunic crinkled as she let go of the door handle and turned to face him. ‘So there’s no outfit in the boot?’ This was a new low. ‘We’re always straight with each other, Julian.’ She sensed both their thoughts hopping to the same branch. ‘Well, I’m straight with you,’ she said, meaningfully.

  ‘Not that again, please.’ Julian started the engine. ‘Work’s fine, Kate. Got that?’ He closed his eyes, as if he was officially the most patient man in the world. ‘This is just one party. I usually do my duty. Go in, give your aunt my best, then get a taxi home.’

  ‘How will I explain your no-show?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Julian didn’t sound as if he much cared. ‘Why not say I’m not up for another evening of chit chat about China and cancer?’

  When she reached the gravel she heard his shout of Kate! but she kept going, past the gnomes, past the fake wishing well, past the garden thermometer shaped like a sunflower. A feral Marilyn Monroe lay, whimpering, in a flowerbed.

  Madonna opened the door. To be specific, the 1990 Jean Paul Gaultier version, with high ponytail and golden conical bra, opened the door. ‘Where have you been?’ said Madonna, in Becca’s voice.

  The house juddered, its walls alive with midlife energy. Through the sitting room door, Kate glimpsed Sitting Bull shaking his booty.

  ‘Where’s Julian?’ squawked Princess Diana from the kitchen; Aunty Marjorie’s tiara was askew.

  ‘Working on the house.’ Kate ignored Becca’s sceptical look. It wasn’t the first time she’d employed the handy excuse; in truth, she and Julian were not hands-on and the house didn’t need them. Kate’s daydream of Julian swinging a sledgehammer while she painted skirting boards, her hair in a scarf and an adorable smudge of emulsion on her nose, hadn’t come true. Instead workmen and contractors crawled over the Georgian gem like ants. ‘Where’s Dad?’ Always her first question nowadays.

  ‘He’s fine,’ said Becca firmly. ‘Despite that bloody awful outfit you’re not actually his nurse. Tonight, matron, you’re going to have some fun.’

  This bossiness would be unacceptable from anybody else, but Kate readily handed the reins to her cousin. Throwing herself around in the fractured light of Aunty Marjorie’s glitterball would be just the ticket, rocketing her back to school disco days when Becca would fend off lovestruck, spotty boys and Kate would, well, stare at Charlie, mostly. In Becca’s shadow, Kate felt strong and ready, as if the valiant joie de vivre rubbed off on her.

  There was Dad. In the corner. Not the blanket-over-the-knees invalid of his fears but nonetheless apart from the action.

  Together, Kate and Becca danced kookily around him. ‘Not another nurse,’ he laughed. ‘I see enough of them, thanks very much.’

  Beneath the Shakespeare wig – bald on top with fetching auburn border – his hair was poker straight and pure white. Chemotherapy was his stylist; his hair had grown back that way. The other side effects – tiredness, nausea, a tingling in his palms – had all receded, as the doctors promised, once the course was over.

  Becca sashayed away, and Kate crouched at the Bard’s knee, fussing with him, checking he’d taken his 9pm pills. Dad’s failure to thrive after the second, far more invasive surgery had disconcerted his multidisciplinary team. Sensing her mother’s fatigue, Kate had stepped up. Withstanding Mum’s belief that cancer was some form of black magic, Kate researched her father’s condition.

  She’d gone from having no idea what a lymph node might be to a working knowledge of cancer. The brisk breeze of education blew away the fog of Irish superstition. Scary metaphor was redundant when reality was formidable enough. Tablets for this, tablets for that, tablets to counteract what the first tablets did to Dad’s beleaguered constitution.

  Her father’s moods shifted as he lost his sense of taste, regained it, suffered odd aches in the far reaches of his anatomy. His gums bled. His feet were sore. There was no trick cancer wouldn’t play, as it toyed with them.

  When Dad fell asleep – he nodded off sporadically, no matter how frenzied his surroundings – Kate kissed his forehead and made for the patio.

  The massed lookalikes impeded her progress. As ever, Aunty Marjorie had invited far too many guests. Despite her pretensions, Hujorie House was a fifth the size of the Ames home. Through adult eyes it was not the swanky establishment five-year-old Kate had envied. Reproduction everything allied to terrible artworks and swirly carpet, all of it scrupulously matchy-matchy: Hujorie was everything Kate’s new home wouldn’t be. Yet she felt perfectly at home there. She loved it despite its faults. Kate hoped people felt the same about her.

  The cool of the patio was welcome.

  ‘Jaysus, you nearly gave me a heart attack!’ Mum’s pale face, draped in voluminous blue, swam in the dark.

  ‘Is the Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus, supposed to have a sneaky fag in the garden, Mum?’

  The back door delivered Aunty Marjorie to them and the cigarette was flicked neatly into the bushes. Even sisters have their secrets.

  ‘It’s so hot!’ Aunty Marjorie fanned her puce face. ‘I’m a victim of me own success with these parties.’

  Uncle Hugh, whose last minute application of a bed sheet had transformed him into Gandhi, said, ‘I hear there are storm clouds gathering in the housing market, Kate. Is hubby worried?’

  He was almost knocked off his bare feet by the storm of tutting from his wife and her sister.

  Mum was outraged at this slur. ‘Julian’s a smart cookie.’

  Aunty Marjorie said, ‘Sure, only the other night wasn’t he talking about the grand profit youse’ll make on that house you’re renovating.’

  Uncle Hugh turned to Kate. ‘Isn’t that meant to be your forever home, as they say?’

  ‘We’re keeping an open mind.’ Some details of the house were not as Kate had envisaged. Concrete worktops were, Julian assured her, very now and would add to the ‘sale-ability’. Her campaign for a reading nook off the master bedroom had fallen on deaf ears: family buyers need more bedrooms, and ‘the stupid planning officers won’t let us extend’.

  Secretly grateful to the stupid planning officers, Kate knew that without their veto Julian would have torn off the
back of the building and replaced it with a three-storey glass box. He was right: such boldness would ‘maximise the profit potential’. But it would also desecrate a fine old house. She planned to hang on to the house forever. Profit meant nothing to her in this instance.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ said Aunty Marjorie, ‘to have a grand fella like that looking after you.’

  ‘He’s a good head on his shoulders, all right.’ Mum nudged Aunty Marjorie. ‘He keeps my little eejit on the straight and narrow!’

  As they tittered – Aunty Marjorie surreptitiously sniffing Mum’s breath – Kate wondered if they pressed a ‘mute’ button when she talked of the chain of five shops she’d painstakingly built up. The little eejit contributed half the household expenses, correct to the last penny.

  ‘S’cuse me, folks.’ Kate’s mobile chirruped and she turned away, into the darkness of the lawn. ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘I’m home,’ said Julian. ‘How’s the party?’

  ‘The usual. Superman’s crying in the loo.’

  There was a pause.

  Julian asked, ‘Are you still angry with me?’

  Kate sighed. ‘I wasn’t angry.’

  ‘I was an arse.’

  ‘I was hurt, Julian. But I wasn’t angry. If you’d said you didn’t want to come right from the beginning I’d have understood.’

  ‘I meant to go. I wanted to support you. I know you don’t like seeing your dad on the edge of things.’

  ‘You do support me.’

  Another pause. Kate hated having emotional conversations on the phone. She liked to watch Julian’s eyes. It felt a waste to touch on such matters, so rarely discussed, while so far apart.

  She heard the suck of their fridge door opening as Julian said, ‘It’s horrible here. The flat feels empty.’

  Kate had seen little of the apartment lately. Her life was a hamster wheel of taking Dad to hospital for his myriad appointments and rushing over to Fulham whenever Mum panicked because he’d gone a funny colour or seemed oddly drowsy. She knew Julian had missed her when she’d sat up through the night to keep her restless, unhappy dad company after his chemotherapy sessions.

  It was perverse: the power she held over her husband was only illustrated by negatives. By Julian missing her. Kate felt exquisite tenderness at how couples hold each other’s happiness in the palms of their hands.

  Julian said, ‘It’s too damn quiet.’

  ‘Wish I could say the same.’ Becca had commandeered the karaoke machine.

  ‘Is that, oh, what’s that song?’ Julian reached for it.

  ‘Say My Name. Destiny’s Child.’ Kate made him laugh by joining in with Becca’s screeched say-my-name-say-my-name.

  She laughed too. When they were daft together, Kate and Julian worked. They made sense. It was when they were both head down, their shoulders tensed, that they were brittle with one another. Some days Kate’s life felt like one long exam.

  Kate had repaid the money Julian had lent her, yet still felt as if she owed him something. When he bristled because he reached home before her and had to pull together a meal of leftovers, half of her bristled at his male presumption and the other half agreed with it. She would love to please him by flinging open the door and kissing him, the aroma of home-cooked food wafting around them.

  But there’s only one of me to go round. Only one Kate to belt from hospital to shop to hospital to home. Once upon a time Julian would have scoffed that the answer to that conundrum was simple: she must give up the shops. He hadn’t said that for a while.

  ‘Don’t put your fingers in the light sockets or play with matches, will you?’ Did Julian ever notice how she sometimes faked her energy levels around him? He had tumbled to the bottom of her priorities, simply because he was her husband and therefore always there. It wasn’t fair. ‘Most blokes would order a takeaway and watch a brainless action movie where every other cast member gets blown apart by aliens.’

  ‘I’m not most blokes.’ Julian would go into his study and knuckle down. ‘I’m the bullying bastard you married.’

  ‘Shush. We’re over that silly spat now. I’m glad you’re not here, to be honest. This party is so different to the one we just left that it might blow your mind.’

  If Julian’s parents’ legs fell off they wouldn’t dream of bothering their offspring. They asked nothing of their grown children apart from a Christmas card and the occasional dinner. Julian put up with a lot from her close-knit clan.

  ‘Anyway, Julian, support works both ways. If you’d only tell me a little more about—’

  ‘Good God, darling, I’d bore you to death.’

  Persevering, Kate leaned on a wonky gazebo and said, ‘For example, why not tell me what was said at that meeting with your investors yesterday?’

  ‘How’d you know about that?’ Julian couldn’t camouflage his irritation.

  ‘Because you wander about the apartment talking very very loudly into your phone, you twit.’ She waited. ‘So?’

  ‘So, it was the usual panicking, the usual accusations. Things are tough for everybody but they know I’m on top of the situation. Or they should. I told them to back off.’

  ‘You said you’ve been here before. Where’s here?’ Kate had felt tremors; she needed to know if the aftershock could reach the penthouse.

  ‘I can’t discuss serious matters while your cousin’s belting out r’n’b in the background, darling.’

  ‘How about when I get home? Please? Will you stay up?’

  ‘Kate, you’ll be tipsy and knackered and full of stories about what A said to B and who got off with C. Don’t worry that pretty little head, yeah?’

  Julian didn’t know about Kate’s Running Away account. That had to remain safely hidden from the peril she could smell on the wind. She’d stand shoulder to shoulder with Julian, through thick and thin, but nothing could endanger that money.

  Processing the thoughts crowding her ‘pretty little head’, Kate by-passed the heaving epicentre of the party and crept up the stairs. In the spare room, she found what she was after.

  On the bed, Flo lay on her back, arms flung out, face tilted and her cherub mouth slightly open. At eighteen months she was a more fully realised version of her baby self. The flossy wisps of hair had settled into a custard-coloured bob and her chubby limbs had lengthened. Kate could look at her all day, every day and never find a single fault.

  Coming up behind her, Charlie whispered, ‘She’s getting big, isn’t she?’

  ‘She’ll be married soon. Who has she come as?’ Kate took in the tiny jeans and a sequin top which was obviously cut down from an adult garment.

  ‘Who do you think Flo’s heroine is?’ asked Charlie. ‘Sorry, I mean who do you think her effing heroine is?’ Being Bob Geldof for the night was proving difficult: since his daughter came along Charlie had been careful not to swear.

  ‘Ah, I get it!’ Kate rocked with laughter. ‘It’s you!’ She pointed at Becca, hovering over the child, rearranging her the way mums do. ‘Flo’s heroine is her mummy.’

  ‘Flo’s mummy was in charge of Flo’s costume ergo . . .’ Charlie’s hair was losing its Geldof disarray. It was tidy hair that wanted to lie in a sleek cap, the way Flo’s did.

  ‘Be honest, Kate.’ Charlie sat on the rug and Kate joined him. ‘Julian just didn’t want to come, did he?’ All three of them had escaped the action with a bottle of something cold.

  ‘It’s obvious.’ Becca swatted at the ponytail that seemed constantly in her face. ‘They had a row on the way and he wouldn’t come in. Now he’s pouting at home, grizzling about being neglected.’ She wobbled on the stilt heels no self-respecting Madonna clone can be without. ‘I know Julian pret-ty well, don’t forget.’

  Feeling Charlie squirm beside her, Kate wished Becca wouldn’t mention their partner-swap so casually. Neither she nor the men ever referred to it.

  ‘I don’t blame him, not really.’ Kate refused to demonise her partner.

  ‘He’s doing his best,�
� said Charlie.

  ‘In what way?’ Becca’s voice went shrill. ‘It’s Kate’s poor dad who’s doing his best, fighting like a hero. We should all have come dressed as Uncle John tonight!’

  ‘That,’ said Kate with feeling, ‘would make for a very strange fancy dress party. Everybody in fair isles and comfortable slacks.’ She’d often heard Becca refer to Dad’s ‘battle’ with cancer: it helped Becca to see it that way, so Kate had never challenged it. Like Mum, Becca never countenanced Dad’s death: death, they seemed to believe, happens to other people.

  Charlie was able to follow Kate to that place in her head where she was quietly preparing for both the practical issues and the gaping Dad-shaped hole in their lives. They even managed to joke, gently, about it. It helped her at a time when very little could. Kate said, ‘I don’t blame Julian getting bored of it all every so often. Illness is repetitive and depressing.’

  ‘Tough! Mind you,’ said Becca, ‘you might consider not talking so much about the orphanage. That,’ she said sagely, ‘is boring.’

  Taking that on the chin, Kate warned her it was about to get even more boring. ‘Dad doesn’t know it yet, but we’re running away to China together.’ She relished their astonishment.

  Spending more time with her father meant helping him with many tasks; Kate refused to call this putting his affairs in order but she knew that was how Dad saw it. One of the jobs she busied herself with – it was imperative that she feel useful – was to collate the correspondence between her father and Jia Tang, the founder of Yulan House.

  She’d laid out eleven years of handwritten notes and printed emails in front of her dad. Despite her immunity to the virtues of the orphanage, Kate had found herself becoming engrossed as they sorted them together, quoting lines here and there. She liked the man who wrote those letters; they were thoughtful, philosophical, smart.

  And Jia Tang was his equal. The warm friendship had risen out of the written word in front of her like a hologram. She’d knelt back on her heels, laughing. ‘Maybe you should have married her, eh, Dad?’