Henry, watching him, said, “Listen, Jack. I’m eighty-two now and what I have mostly learned is that there’s a lot of stuff I don’t know, but I’ll tell you this much for free: If you wait around for life to come and get you out of bed in the mornings, you’re waiting a long time. You gotta get on with something, Jack. Make a plan, write, cook, travel, do something you want to do because woe-is-me loves a blank space.”
“You’re a good friend, Henry, and I’ve neglected you.”
Henry shrugged and smiled. The maid came in to clear the soup things. “You got good health and good friends, Jack. A lot of the time, that’s enough.”
Just sweat a chopped potato and some onion in unsalted butter and cook it in chicken stock before you add the shredded lettuce leaves (loose lettuce) and then purée. You could add fresh basil if you wanted, or thicken it with a little cream or whisked butter, sometimes I do, but I think the potato makes it creamy enough. People often find it difficult to identify the flavor, but it is delicious, and very practical. I loathe finding sad little lettuces left in the bottom of the refrigerator, and if they won’t refresh in ice water, this is a good way to use them. It occurs to me, writing this, that a great deal of my life has been spent limp and lonely, like those forgotten lettuces. I wonder if a plunge in ice water would refresh me.
Eve
Jack only had romaine lettuce so he didn’t make the soup, but he thought that he might.
I like the idea of the ice water plunge, he wrote:
but I fear I’m past refreshing. Meanwhile, my favorite leftover dish is turkey hash. It’s a rough thing with inauthentic curry powder in it. My mother used to make it. I never made it until she died. And I never got over that she did. I make it when thinking about her has left me desolate or joyful. It tastes like home.
Jack
Chapter Eleven
“I’m not saying over, Ollie. I’m saying postponed…”
“It sounds like Over.”
Izzy began to cry. She was sitting on the little sofa that she had bought for the alcove window just a few months after she’d moved into her flat, crying. She couldn’t believe she was crying again.
Neither could Ollie. He loathed it, loathed the clouds in the hitherto scintillating eyes. He preferred anger from Izzy. Much preferred it. You knew where you were with Izzy’s anger; it was a straight road. He liked that. He had never felt, faced with even the worst of her temper, unsure. But this new gulf she was leading them into was dingy and unfathomable. It unnerved him. He threw up his hands, hoping to prod her toward a burst of lucid outrage, and said, “Not more tears. Izzy, you’ve been blowing your nose for two months.”
“And you’ve been emotionally distant for two months.”
Ollie sighed, but felt, too, some relief; in the current circumstances, petulance was an improvement. “What the hell is emotionally distant, Iz? What is this rubbish? Where’s it coming from?”
“I don’t know,” she said sadly.
Ollie sat down, destabilized again, dropping the last few inches. He looked exhausted. They’d been arguing since breakfast and it was 11:00 a.m. now. It had started over toast. Izzy had complained that he never made the toast, and then, when he’d done nothing to redress this situation or even deny the charge, she had moved on to: “Is this what it will be like being married to you?” with a swiftness that had blind-sided Ollie. It was a Saturday morning and he was mildly hung over. He had known, from Izzy’s tenor, that it was a risk, but he had fallen back on habit; snatching the toast that she’d already made and spreading it with some of her mother’s excellent gooseberry jam, he’d bitten into it oafishly.
“Probably,” he’d said.
Izzy had lifted the bread board, with half a loaf of bread still on it, and hurled it across the kitchen. That was at around 9:00 a.m. and no progress had been made between then and now.
“Iz,” he said. “Why don’t you just go and take a shower and get dressed and we’ll go out for lunch somewhere.”
But Izzy looked at him with those opaque eyes again, eyes that frightened him, and shook her head.
“You go,” she said flatly. “Call Rob, or someone, if you like. I just want to be on my own.”
It is strange how powerful and illogical the concept of identity is. Writer is part of who I am, and although I don’t have to do it, if I don’t, there’s a part missing. I have tried to fill that bit up with other things, one of them is cooking, one of them is women. Cooking helps, women don’t—at least not the ones I’m hooking up with. But then, what kind of woman is gonna want a man with a part missing? A key component. Also, I’m gaining weight. Food needs to be produced and consumed in an atmosphere of comfort or joy—otherwise it turns to flab.
Two good, smart friends who’ve managed their lives pretty well have told me to get a hold of myself lately. I wonder if you’ll make it three strikes.
Yours in the soup,
Jack
Eve had read Jack’s letter a total of six times. When she first opened it, she read it three times and then later she read it again, twice. Just now, she had read it again. She couldn’t believe that someone, anyone, let alone someone who was talented and successful and good at all the things that she was not good at, should seek her opinion in this way. She could not define the sense of accomplishment it gave her, the confidence.
She went into her kitchen and prepared for herself a planned, and extravagant, lunch. A soup whose particular ingredients—celeriac and a single black truffle—she’d ordered from a supplier in London. They’d arrived, to her delight, the day before.
She set the chopped celeriac to simmer in some milk and thought about Jack some more. A writer. A real writer. A species hitherto mysterious to her. She’d known a woman, vaguely, years before, who had written a novel, but that, it had turned out, had been a case of early promise, not a career. Eve had read the novel, but she could not remember it. Jack’s books were far more affecting. The characters were real. You felt for them. When you weren’t reading, you thought about them. When you finished reading, you didn’t want to read about anyone else for a while. She could not understand why Jack would want to stop doing that. But then there was probably a great deal she didn’t understand about a creative life; hers had been so deliberate and prosaic.
By the time she had finished lunch, at the place she had laid for herself with the meticulous care of a Victorian servant, the sky had brightened and she decided that she would go for a walk. It was too late in the year for mushrooming, which was her favorite sort of walk, and the woods were boggy, but she could stick to the lane, climb up to the high part, and look back at the view and her house and the winter garden and think about what to say to Jack. It was important to her, very important, to tread carefully on this breakthrough in their friendship. A lovely friendship. A friendship, like her celeriac and truffle soup, that was decadently sumptuous, and all her own.
Eve had already put on her coat and scarf when the telephone rang and she almost didn’t answer it. Then, when she did, she thought it was a wrong number, or a hoax call, but Izzy’s voice was recognizable after a moment through the sobs.
“Izzy?”
“It’s off, Mummy. I’ve called off the wedding.”
“Oh, Izzy,” Eve said.
“Mummy, can you please come up?”
“To London?”
“Yes, to London. Now.” Her voice broke again.
Eve, hating herself for it, hesitated.
“Please, Mummy. I can’t take any time off work, but if you could just stay here for a few days and help me to—”
“Of course. Of course I’ll come,” Eve said. “I’ll come this afternoon.”
There was a train at 4:30 that she could intercept if she drove to Westcastle. It would get her in around 7:00 and she could take a taxi to Izzy’s flat from the station. But while she packed, Eve wondered whether, by the time she got to London, the whole thing wouldn’t have blown over. That was what Gwen had said, when she’d telepho
ned her to let her know she was going.
“Our Carly did exactly the same thing,” she assured Eve. “Broke off her engagement to Ben twice before they made it down the aisle. Drove her father up the wall.”
“I hope you’re right,” Eve said.
“I’ve been through three of them. Honestly, give them the price of the airline tickets and let them elope. Easier all round.”
Eve had given no thought to how crowded the train would be. She so rarely traveled on a Sunday evening, so rarely traveled at all, that these things didn’t occur to her. It was evidently the last week of some sort of school break, and there were families and students crowding the platforms. On the train were no seats. She was pinned, as it pulled out, against a large black plastic suitcase that someone had propped sideways on a too-full luggage rack near the doors. She was hot and uncomfortable in her winter coat. She tugged at her gloves and shoved them in her pocket, but even that was difficult. There was barely room to move her elbows.
“It’s these weekend fares,” she heard a woman complain loudly. “It shouldn’t be like this in First.”
A woman with a young child saw Eve then and scooped the child up and motioned to her. “Chloe,” she said. “Move your things.”
The little girl, about three, reluctantly lifted a coloring book from the tray in front of her seat just as a man with a broad, aggressive face pushed forward and stood squarely in front of Eve, forcing her even farther back against the mass of luggage, the coarse straps of a bulky backpack plucking at her calves. The man’s chest, encased in wadded nylon, blocked Eve’s view and her path. Trapped, she became acutely aware of the pulpy warmth of the crush around her and the sour smell of something that somebody was apparently eating farther up the aisle. Those were her last cogent perceptions.
It was an older woman. An organized older woman, with a reserved seat and four nicely packed cheese and ham sandwiches in a recycled paper bag, who knew what to do.
“Just breathe, dear,” she said. “That’s it.”
Eve allowed the woman to cover her mouth and nose with the paper bag, now emptied of its contents, although she was terrified momentarily that the woman was trying to suffocate her. Something was. She felt as though she were dreaming, although the symptoms were, of course, well known to her. The paper bag helped and her breathing leveled, but she still felt dreadful.
She went on feeling dreadful, and apparently looking it, given the concern of the poor young mother. Eve had been helped to the seat beside her. “What’s the matter with her?” she heard the little girl ask. But the mother, settling the child on her knee, shushed her and directed her attention out of the window.
After that, Eve feigned sleep for most of the trip.
“Will you be all right?” the woman who had helped her asked as the train finally shunted to a stop, whining over an arrival announcement, in London. Eve, with no choice, stirred.
“Yes,” she said. Though she knew this was far from true. She began to gather her things. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you very much. I don’t know what came over me. I expect I was hungry,” she lied.
The woman looked at her as if she did not believe this, but smiled anyway. “Take care, then,” she said as she lifted her small, boldly labeled suitcase and turned to leave.
Eve waited until everyone had got off, nodding a weak good-bye to the mother and little girl. The little girl paused and turned back to look at her over her shoulder. Her coat had a hood with a fluffy collar that obscured her chin. Her mother tugged her hand to urge her on.
Eve stood for a minute in the empty carriage. And then walked to the luggage rack, where her bag lay toppled on the floor. Her legs were still weak beneath her, and she felt profoundly unwell.
“Pull yourself together,” she said out loud, though she knew, from her sessions with Beth, that this was the sort of lofty rationality that distress paid no heed to. She wished that she could go home. Go home and lock the door and sit in silence all alone, but she couldn’t.
Izzy was still looking unkempt when her mother arrived. She knew this and she knew her mother would disapprove. Or thought she knew it, she wasn’t sure really, and her unsureness was further charging her desire for drama. Izzy felt that her life was in crisis and some drama, some substantive concern, openly manifested at the sort of level her grandmother had always been able to rise to, so easily and conspicuously, would be curative.
Eve was terribly pale when she got to Izzy’s flat and had paid for her taxi with shaking hands. She was still suffering light flushes of—not nausea, but the sensation that she might pass out, coming over her at regular intervals. She was very shaken. She would have liked to go into the spare bedroom, where she was to sleep, where she had never slept before, and lie down on the ivory bedspread, on which small piles of Izzy’s summer clothes and an out-of-favor jacket lay, and bury her head.
Izzy did not offer her mother a drink, and so, after she had stowed her things, Eve went into the kitchen and found some chamomile tea and the pair of them, mother and daughter, sat silently for a moment drinking it. Izzy, having stood only to press the door opener when Eve had buzzed, had gone back to sitting morosely on the little sofa, which was dented by now with her weight.
“Aren’t you going to ask me why?” she said after a while, in a sulky voice, a voice Eve recognized from her childhood.
Eve set her tea in front of her, on a coffee table covered with books and magazines and a small collection of trinket boxes. “Do you want to tell me?” she asked. Her own voice lacked strength.
“I’m just fed up with it all,” Izzy said.
“Fed up?”
“Yes, fed up with doing everything myself. With feeling as though I’m the parent.”
“Is that how you feel? I’m sorry.”
“Well, of course it’s how I feel.” She stood up with a little spring and began to pace agitatedly around the room. “Having to organize these cozy get-togethers between you and my father. Having to sit there with his second wife and those boys, as if they were my family. People I’ve never met in my life. It’s my wedding and it’s being taken over by the past. Your past.”
“Yes,” Eve said, lifting her tea again, twisting the cup carefully on its saucer. “I can see how it might feel for you.”
“Can you? I don’t know if you can. You’re as bad as Ollie. Off in your own little world, like you always have been. I bet you’ve already arranged to get back to that Charity Shop of yours. That volunteer thing that you treat as if it were a proper job. I bet you didn’t even want to come.”
Eve was struck by the truth in this accusation.
“I wish Gin-gin was here!”
Eve was aware that Izzy had intended to wound. She was surprised that she had not. The small jolt of the words charged her a bit, though, and she recalled, for the first time since the awful moment on the train, some of the things she had learned from her sessions with Beth. She sat up straighter and did not react to Izzy’s ferment.
“I’m assuming you’ve talked to Ollie about all this,” she said, keeping her voice low, steady.
“Well, that just goes to show how well you know him. Ollie is hopeless, absolutely hopeless. He won’t even telephone his mother to find out if she’s coming.”
This made sense to Eve. These two offspring of messy families had found each other.
“Izzy, do you think that it’s the wedding and all this family business you’re upset about? Or is it that you don’t want to be married?”
Izzy stopped pacing and looked at her mother as if she had never considered the possibility that these two things were unrelated.
“If we can’t even get through organizing a wedding together, what does that say about the next, God knows how many, years?”
“I just think—”
“What! Mother, what do you think? I’m interested. I’m fascinated, actually. Do you mean you’re going to venture an opinion? Display some personality? Take a stand. Act like a parent. What?”
In the morning Eve woke up and looked at the clock on the bedside table—7:14. She felt lifeless. She could hear Izzy moving about, and then the running of water through the pipes, then, distantly a kettle boiling. She waited, stiff and curled like a seashell, for the bang of the front door. Thirty-five minutes later she heard it, but she held still anyway just a few minutes longer. Then, in the silence, guarded and fragile, she lowered her feet to the floor as if wondering whether they would support her, and stood, and bent to pull the end of her bed away from the door.
Eve made a cup of tea, but she didn’t drink it. Twenty minutes later she made another one, but she didn’t drink that either. She showered, without washing her hair, and dressed, but the buttons of her cardigan were mismatched to the buttonholes. At about twelve o’clock she noticed that the cardigan was improperly fastened, but she didn’t correct it. At one o’clock she poured some cereal into a bowl and ate it with her fingers, picking out raisins and nuts and some small pieces of something that may have been dried apricot. She ate sitting at Izzy’s kitchen table, which was covered in a piece of checked oilcloth. From outside she heard a church tower strike the quarter hour and she looked toward the sound. Tiled rooftops stretched out over the tiny, sodden back lawns and stacked outdoor furniture and neglected plant holders of winter London. The sky was the same color as it had been at nine. She gave up picking at the cereal and just stared out of the window.
That Part Was True Page 15
