by Frances Pye
But as her career started to take off, Clive’s deteriorated. Once, he’d been the golden boy, witty, clever, politically astute, primed to succeed in the Byzantine world of TV. His life had been a steady progression, from researcher to producer to head of department. Everyone had expected it to continue that way, culminating with him as controller of BBC One or even director general. Until he’d been seduced by the independent explosion in the eighties and by the idea of real money. He’d left the BBC to start his own company with Beatrice, a young, ambitious game-show producer, and managed to sell a couple of programs. It was enough to keep him going for a time, but the promised huge financial windfall never appeared. And as the years passed, the debts mounted.
Sensing his desperation and unwilling to see her children’s father suffer, Lily had offered to help shore up his business. And he had accepted. She’d handed over five thousand pounds, everything that, over the years, she’d managed to save from her writing. Then, a month or so later, she’d discovered that he was having an affair with Beatrice. And that he’d taken her off to Switzerland on a skiing holiday when he’d told Lily he was going to Scotland to produce a pilot of a reality series. She was furious. Not only had he lied to her, he’d used her hard-earned money to pay for a holiday with his lover.
Boredom was one thing, betrayal another. She threw him out. And was tempted to go home. Her mother was still alive then, her sister married and with two young children. She knew they’d welcome her and Jack and Bella with open arms. But she’d been away a long time. Apart from a few trips to see their relatives, the twins had lived their whole lives in England. It didn’t seem fair to tear them away from the only home they knew just to satisfy her own desire to be near her family. In addition, if she went back now, she’d have to start all over again in her career. In a cutthroat, survival-of-the-funniest world where dozens of writers worked together to create and maintain a TV series. Whereas here, she could make a living from her sketches. And if she were to sell a sitcom, it would be hers and hers alone.
In the end, she had had no real choice. She had to stay. For the twins and for herself. And it had turned out to be the right decision. Though she missed her family, she’d been able to spend a month with her mother before she died. And the twins had been happy in England. They’d gone to a boarding school they themselves had chosen, and had been accepted at Durham University, to start in fifteen months’ time. Meanwhile, they were spending their year of freedom from education working and traveling in Australia and the Far East.
She let herself into the warm, wood-paneled hall and smiled. Home. Lily had been out every night for what felt like weeks. Script meetings, production meetings, rehearsals, tapings. Until she’d become involved herself, she’d never had any idea how endless making a TV sitcom could be. Particularly if you were both writer and star. She’d imagined a glitzy life full of exciting locations and glamorous parties, not the long, hard slog of gray, faceless offices and dingy rehearsal halls and enormous, echoing studios.
She poured herself a glass of wine and went into her study. Lined with books, the room was a haven, a safe place to be alone, to be quiet, to read and think. Lily sat down by the fireplace, sipped her wine, and sighed happily. A night in. Scrambled eggs, a nice, long bath, early to bed. Pity it wasn’t winter. She could have had a fire. Lily stopped herself, horrified by the direction her thoughts were taking. Early nights? A longing to sit in front of the fire? She’d be buying herself a flannel nightgown and slippers next. Maybe it was a good thing she was going to that wedding tomorrow. How long had it been since she’d been to a party? Three months? Six? She hadn’t even seen the girls all that much recently. Ah, well, it was their regular monthly lunch on Sunday. She’d see them then.
When her last relationship had crashed a couple of months previously, just before she’d started work on the present show, Lily had promised herself she’d give men a break for a bit. Because none of them, no matter who she chose, seemed to want what she did. Just a bit of fun. A couple of nights a week. Dinner. A movie. Maybe an escort to some of the industry stuff she was beginning to have to attend. And sex. Definitely sex. But no living together. No partners. And absolutely no marriage.
In the last few years, Lily’s independence had become extremely important to her. She loved being able to make decisions without reference to anyone else. She loved being able to sleep late if she wanted to, loved not having to cook dinner if she chose not to, loved going where she wanted when she wanted. No way did she need some man in her life who’d expect compromise and sacrifice and conciliation. Even such a simple thing as when to turn out the light required negotiation.
She’d imagined it would be easy enough. Sex without strings—wasn’t that what all men dreamed about? Amazingly, she had found that it wasn’t what they wanted at all. Once offered it, every single one of them sooner or later—and usually sooner—saw her independence as a challenge rather than a boon and found that they were desperate to settle down with her in blessed domesticity.
They stopped enjoying the time they and Lily had together and started wanting to know what she did on the nights she wasn’t seeing them. To move possessions into her house. To settle down. To cling. Lily kept trying, sure that she’d just been unlucky, that her Mr. Right was only around the corner. But he never seemed to be.
So, for the last couple of months, she’d given up. She’d let the work take over. But now she was tempted to look for another candidate. Okay, experience had taught her that she was not going to find what she sought. But she’d been alone for long enough. Without sex for long enough. She was only thirty-nine. And it was time to think of a new lover. After all, even if it didn’t quite work out in the long term, she’d have fun searching….
five
“Hello, sweetheart. How about I help you with that?” A balding, round-bellied man pulled away from his friends standing outside the Packhorse and Talbot and fell into step beside Mara.
“No, thank you. I’m fine,” Mara said.
“Lovely girl like you. Need something more than this to keep you warm.” The man reached for the cat box she was carrying, his hand covering hers.
“Leave me alone. Please.” Mara jerked away from him and increased her pace. For a few moments, the man followed her but eventually gave up when she turned off the High Street.
“Your loss, love,” he tossed at her as he returned to the laughs and jeers of his friends.
Mara walked on. She’d tried everything. Her clothes were as baggy as she could find in her limited wardrobe. Her full-length black skirt and large, loose gray sweater covered her every curve. She wore no makeup, kept her luminous brown eyes glued to the ground, and had stopped dyeing her rich black hair, almost hoping for bits of gray to come through. And still they tried. She could never understand what it was they saw in her. Yes, she was an attractive woman, but she was thirty-six. A mother with two children. Old enough to walk down the street without being hit upon. She didn’t believe it was just because she was Indian. Plenty of other Indian women walked the streets of the city every day and were left alone to go about their business. Lily insisted it was because she was sexy, but that seemed very unlikely when every part of Mara’s body was covered in dark, shapeless clothing.
She put down the cat box and moved her shoulders back and forth to ease the strain. She glanced up at the threatening sky, then switched the load to her other side. The parade of shops gave way to a row of small town houses, once workmen’s cottages, now sought-after homes close to the center of upwardly mobile Chiswick. Some of them looked freshly painted, their front areas expensively planted. Newly renovated houses for the newly successful. Others still had peeling paint and overgrown hedges. The last surviving remnants of the people who had been there when Mara and Jake moved in eleven years before. Good people. Who were all too often being forced to move, unable to afford the upkeep on their properties or to resist the exorbitant prices being offered.
Mara turned into a neat front yard. She
put the cat box down and fumbled in her skirt pocket. She pulled out two sets of keys, picked out one, and opened the door.
“Don’t worry, it’s only me,” Mara called out as she walked into the house. The hallway was clean but the carpet was worn and frayed and the wallpaper looked as if it had been hung before the Great War. “Amy!”
“In here, dear,” said a calm voice floating through the door to Mara’s left.
“I’ve brought Joey back. He’s had his injections.” Mara took the cat box in to Amy Fenton, a tiny, thin-haired fragile old woman in a dark blue dress and thick stockings, who sat in an ancient, shabby armchair in front of a gas fire. Mara had met the lonely, childless old widow the first day she and Jake had moved into their nearby house and had liked her immediately. Since then, they had become loyal friends and Mara had come to rely on her constant support and her unsentimental, no-nonsense attitude toward life.
“Thank you, dear. Now you run along to those girls of yours. What will the Moores think if you’re not at home to let them in?”
“Probably just what they think now, that I’m a hopeless mother who shouldn’t be trusted with their precious grandchildren.”
“Then you don’t want to give them any real ammunition, do you?”
Mara smiled and bent over to kiss her neighbor’s wrinkled cheek. “The Meals on Wheels people came?” she asked, concerned. Amy’s heart was failing and she was finding it harder and harder to look after herself. She insisted on staying in her own house, refused even to think of going into an old-age home, but she could no longer cope with cooking three meals a day. Having dinner with Mara and her girls two or three times a week and her lunch delivered every weekday was an acceptable compromise; it helped her to save her strength but didn’t make her feel as if she were completely dependent on others.
Amy nodded. “Very nice. Roast chicken and apple crumble.”
“And you’ll call if you need anything?”
“Don’t worry. Get on with you now. You’ll be late. And then you’ll never hear the end of it. Go on.”
Mara smiled at her friend, then turned and left the room. Once outside, she looked up the street to see two adults and two children getting out of a parked Ford Mondeo. Of course. She should have known. They were early. Just then, a raindrop fell on her hair. She raced along the pavement until she reached her house, ten doors away. Standing in the front yard were her daughters, Moo and Tilly, with their grandparents. Jake’s mother and father.
A few more scattered drops of rain fell. The two girls, their smiles wide, ran over to Mara. “Mum, Mum. Look what Pops and Nan have given us.” Tilly was often the spokesperson for the two even though at eight she was the younger. Moo, ten, was frequently content to let her sister talk. On the cracked stone in front of the doorstep was a box with the telltale word “Sony” written on the side.
“What is it?” asked Mara, afraid she already knew the answer.
“A PlayStation,” said Mr. Moore. “All their friends have them.”
“But…Thank you, but no. They won’t want to read or play outside or anything. They’ll spend all their spare time on it.”
“Mum.”
“Please, Mum, we’ll be good.”
“We’ll work hard.”
“Please.”
“I don’t know, loves. It’s your education. Your father would have wanted—”
“I think we’re more likely than you to know what Jake would have wanted,” Mrs. Moore snapped. Her overpainted face screwed up when talking to Mara, her distaste obvious.
Mara kept quiet. There was no point in saying anything. Jake’s parents were what they were and there was no changing them. To some degree, she could understand how they felt. They were jealous of her, they always had been. She’d taken their only child from them. Or so they saw it. And she could appreciate their feeling badly about losing their son.
She was much less sympathetic to their rage at his choice of an Indian wife. All her life she had tried to see things from others’ viewpoints, but nothing, nothing could make her empathize with prejudice. And the Moores were riddled with it. Over the years, her relationship with them had been all about dogged, silent resistance. She only wished they wouldn’t attempt to interfere in the girls’ upbringing.
The rain had been steadily increasing, spatters making kaleidoscopic patterns on the concrete paving. Finally, the downpour that had threatened all day arrived. Mara put thoughts of PlayStations and worries about the Moores and what they were going to see out of her mind. The house was already in bad enough shape without her ignoring the rain. The bowls had to come first.
“Quick, girls.” She unlocked the front door and ushered her daughters inside. Leaving Jake’s parents to fend for themselves, she ran along a dim hallway and into a small, shabby, but spotlessly clean kitchen, followed by Moo and Tilly. She bent down, opened one of the dark-wood cupboards, and pulled out an assortment of plastic, china, and stainless-steel bowls, stacked one inside the other. She handed a few bowls to each of the girls, keeping the largest pile for herself.
“Tilly, take your bedroom. Moo, my room. I’ll do the bathroom.”
Ignoring the Moores, who stood in the hallway looking on in amazement, the three raced up the stairs. At the top, Tilly ran straight ahead, followed by Moo. Mara veered off through a doorway on the half landing.
Tilly dashed into a small, twin-bedded room whose walls were covered with colorful posters of interchangeable boy pop groups and glossy models and implausibly young footballers. Without looking up, she began to lay out her bowls on the floor in a well-remembered pattern. At first, nothing happened. But then, gradually, there was the drumbeat of water dripping onto stainless steel as first one, then another leak announced itself. Next door, in her mother’s dark-curtained room, Moo laid out her bowls on and around the candlewick-covered double bed. And down in the yellow-and-purple bathroom, Mara rushed to spread out her dishes on the shag-pile carpeting. As she did so, a drip landed on her nose and then another on her head. She stood up and scuttled out of the room as the pitter-patter of falling water began.
The girls were waiting for her on the landing. “Why do we have to do this every time?” Moo complained.
“You know why, love. Because we may be poor, but…”
“We won’t live like pigs,” the girls chorused.
“But really, Mum, wouldn’t it make more sense to leave them out?” Tilly’s serious little face was intent, trying to figure this out.
Mara smiled at her younger daughter. She could see both herself and Jake in her physically, but emotionally she was all her father—charming, earnest, curious, and kind. In a way it was like having Jake back. Moo was different. She looked more like him but possessed little of his character; she was a will-o’-the-wisp, a dreamer, impossible to grasp. A leader one day, a follower the next.
“I would have thought it would make more sense to have the roof repaired,” Mrs. Moore said, climbing the stairs, toward them.
“I can’t afford it at the moment. We cope, don’t we, girls?”
“It’s fine, Nan. It’s fun.” Clever Tilly.
“Yeah. It’d be boring to have a proper roof,” said Moo.
“Fun. I never.” Mrs. Moore turned to her husband, standing behind her on the stairs. “George, tell her.”
“You must think of the girls. They can’t be expected to live like this. This house is falling down around their ears. You’ve got to sell it.”
“How about a cup of tea?” Mara slid past the Moores and headed down the stairs. This was not something she was prepared to talk about in front of the children. Besides, selling the house was not an idea up for discussion. She and Jake had chosen it together. Lived in it together. Brought the girls home to it when they were babies.
Mr. Moore followed Mara. “How long has this been going on?”
“I’ve been putting money aside for the roofers.” Mara had only managed to save about twenty pounds, and that was earmarked for her mend-the-centra
l-heating fund, but she wasn’t going to tell the Moores that. She went into the kitchen, filled the old-fashioned kettle, and put it on the stove.
Mr. Moore appeared behind her. “We think Miranda and Matilda should come and live with us,” he said.
“No. No way,” Mara said. Her girls were what kept her going.
“It can’t be healthy, living in a place like this. It’s not just the roof. That wall looks like it’s not straight and the plaster’s crumbling away in places. You should think of them.”
“I am thinking of them.”
“We just want to do what’s best.”
Mara fought down a rising tide of panic. “It’s only a bit of water,” she said weakly.
Mrs. Moore was standing in the doorway. “In their bedroom. Eight bowls on the floor,” she said to her husband. “It feels damp in there. It’s not good for them.” This was directed at Mara.
She wanted to argue, but she couldn’t. Of course it wasn’t ideal for the girls to sleep in a damp room.
“Just until you get things sorted out,” suggested Mr. Moore.
“We’ll drive them to school every day.” Jake’s mother attempted to soften her abrasive voice into a pleading tone, but her dislike of her daughter-in-law shone through. “No need for you to worry about that, my dear.” Mara hated it when one of them called her “my dear.” She wasn’t anything of the kind. She felt herself gritting her teeth and for the thousandth time reminded herself that there was no point in being angry with them.
For a moment, she considered letting Moo and Tilly go, but she felt her stomach rebel at the thought. Jake’s parents had always wanted the girls for themselves. They might promise now that it was only until she had the roof done, but once they’d gotten their hands on Moo and Tilly, once they had them living there, Mara doubted they would ever agree to give them back.
As she pulled the tea bags out of the mugs, dripping hot liquid over the damaged tiles, she tried to reassure herself. The girls were both in perfect health. It was only a bit of rain. People lived in much worse conditions for years and were absolutely fine. She breathed in deeply, fighting for control. She couldn’t lose her girls, she couldn’t. She got a carton of milk out of the fridge, carefully added some to the tea, and handed two mugs to the Moores.
