Last Chance Café

by Liz Byrski

  ‘Please, Aunty Phyl,’ she’d said this morning, hugging her before she left for work. ‘Make today the day you do it. This business of the brooch is like a wall that you’re banging your head against. If you can sort that bit out I think you’ll be able to start dealing with the rest of Uncle Donald’s mess. We can look for it together when I get home tonight if you like, but you can’t just stay stuck like this.’

  In the last few days Emma has shown remarkable insight and thoughtfulness, and as each day has passed Phyllida has clung to the relief of having someone to talk to – someone who hasn’t reminded her that she is saying the same thing for the fiftieth time, someone who hasn’t made her feel stupid, incompetent, and shamed for having trusted a man who seems now not to have known the meaning of trust. And so, having promised Emma that today is the day, Phyllida knows that this is something that she needs to do alone.

  She picks up the velvet pouch feeling its weight and a distinctive oval shape in her hand first and then she slackens the cord and tips the brooch out onto the desk. It is a very fine piece but there are two small garnets and a pearl missing, and she looks into the pouch and sees that they are still there. How did it happen? What was Donald doing when it happened? A vision of him naked in a strange bathroom having sex with May Wong on a vanity unit flashes before her eyes, and she gasps, pushing it away as rapidly as it had come.

  Phyllida runs her finger over the rose gold setting. ‘He took it on the day he was taken ill,’ May had said, ‘he wouldn’t have had time to take it to the jeweller.’ And it’s this which, more than anything, has made it so hard for her to confront the presence of this small piece of jewellery. On that day, their golden wedding anniversary, Donald had spent part of the morning with May, and Phyllida knows exactly how he organised it.

  It was mid-morning, Grant had already arrived to help set up for the party, and as they chatted in the kitchen Emma had arrived to do her bit with the photos and music, and to help Phyllida organise the kitchen for the caterers. Phyllida feels a tightening in her chest as she remembers the four of them sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee, Emma saying that the first thing she must do is check that the slide show of photographs on her thumb drive works on the digital television, Grant suggesting a way to organise the furniture to maximise the space, and Donald – Donald getting up and saying, ‘Indeed, indeed,’ and then his pager ringing.

  ‘Sorry, everyone,’ he’d said, ‘have to call the hospital.’ And a few moments later: ‘Going to have to leave you to it, I’m afraid. Patient in a bit of trouble, I need to get over there right away. An hour, maybe, two at the most.’ And he had kissed her on the cheek. ‘Sorry, Phylly, but Grant and Emma are here, and I’ll be back in no time. Plenty of time to get everything ready.’

  And he had gone to the hospital, or so she had thought then. Now, of course, she knows different. There was no patient. Had he told May to page him? Or did he have a way to activate it himself?

  Phyllida’s heart is thumping so hard she feels it might burst out of her chest. It makes her giddy and she leans back in the black leather chair and closes her eyes. This woman was so important to Donald that he had been to see her on the very day which should have been Phyllida’s alone. Was he unable to stay away? Did he need to reassure her that despite this trifling anniversary party, despite the forthcoming trip to California and the cruise, that it was she, not his wife, who came first?

  The image of them both naked in a bathroom returns and she opens her eyes to banish it. Phyllida has never been comfortable with her own body, never sufficiently free or confident to walk around naked, even when she is alone. And she has learned to hide the fact that she has never experienced real pleasure from sex, never actually had an orgasm, although she has learned from movies how to fake one. It had been comforting to discover, in her forties, that there were other women like her, older even, who had never reached orgasm. Did Donald know, she wonders now, did he realise that she was a fake? He was not a romantic or tender man, and certainly not an imaginative lover. Throughout their marriage she had protected both herself and him by pretence. Did he know that their intimate life, minimal as it was, was a lie? Is that why he turned to May Wong?

  She feels now like the woman she had been in the car park: an old woman, pathetic, doddery, a woman on whom the world is suddenly closing in. But as she sits there, the brooch lying on its pouch on the desk in front of her, she thinks of Donald that Sunday, lying to them all. She imagines him in a strange bathroom, picking up the brooch, retrieving the lost stones, and watching as May slipped them into the pouch. And then, later, coming back to the house, taking it from his pocket and dropping it into this drawer.

  Phyllida gets to her feet and walks across the room to where a framed photograph taken on their wedding day stands on a shelf. She is wearing a full length ivory satin dress with her mother’s veil of Chantilly lace, and carrying a bouquet of apricot roses. Her arm is tucked firmly into Donald’s, while he, in a grey morning suit and cravat, is holding high a grey top hat in what looks like a gesture of victory. Phyllida sees the hope, the trust, the naivety in her own eyes. She remembers the joy and anticipation of that moment, and the pleasure and satisfaction of those final minutes fifty years later as he spoke about their marriage, when she had felt he made a precious connection between their past, present and future, before he crashed to the floor. But now, sprayed like graffiti across those memories, are images of a naked Donald, in a bathroom with another woman, and of his smiling, self-satisfied return to the party preparations. Phyllida feels something burning deep in her gut; it throbs and roils, rising like a ball of fire up through her chest to her throat.

  ‘You bastard!’ she screams. ‘You lying, conniving, selfish bastard! I hate you!’ And she sweeps her arm along the shelf sending the photograph, a crystal decanter of port and some glasses, along with a heavy glass paperweight, crashing onto the stone hearth of the adjacent fireplace. The strong sweet smell of the port catches in her throat making her cough, and she stamps in fury on the shattered picture, grinding glass and port into the stone and the carpet. ‘I will never forgive you,’ she says now in a low voice, looking down at Donald’s face still smiling through a haze of port and needles of glass, ‘and I will not let you ruin the rest of my life.’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t like her or admire her,’ Dot says. ‘I do. Alyssa’s a remarkable young woman. I suppose what bugs me is that I can see so much of myself in her, at least myself when young. So I want to save her from making the same mistakes I made, protect her from running headlong at everything. I want her to listen to what I learned and learn from that and … well, to be honest, perhaps I’m just a bit jealous of her having it all in front of her.’

  ‘Well you’d better get over it,’ Margot says from the kitchen. ‘This campaign is not about you.’

  ‘I’m trying, really I am, but it’s so hard to sit back and let someone else be the leader when you know there are better ways of doing it.’

  Lexie leans back in her chair, listening to them with amusement; for as long as she can remember, her mother and Dot have maintained this no holds barred way of relating to each other, forged, as Lexie knows, in the collective action of the sixties, seventies and eighties when trust was built by working together, not just for themselves but for a cause.

  ‘Try to think of it as different rather than better,’ Patrick says. ‘After all, Dot, the way you did things in the past is not necessarily better.’

  ‘Sometimes it is!’ Dot insists. ‘Some things you can only learn from experience.’

  ‘Then maybe you need to let Alyssa and the others get the experience and stop trying to take over. Stand back a bit, Dot. Don’t try to lead by the nose. Lead from behind – a little subtle nudging is the way to go.’

  Dot flashes him a look that has crushed lesser men.

  ‘That’ll be the day,’ Margot says, putting a lemon tart in the centre of the table. ‘You may need to deconstruct that idea a bit for Dot, Patrick. S
ubtlety and nudging aren’t top of her list of people skills.’

  ‘Thanks for that, Margot,’ Dot says. ‘I will try to control my primal urge to batter the young ones over the head until they do it all my way. That is actually easier since you took charge, Lexie. The business plan is brilliant, as is the plan for the rally. Margot, it feels just like the old days. Don’t you want to get the bit between your teeth again?’

  ‘I do,’ Margot says. ‘And I will – really soon.’ She slides a slice of tart onto a plate and hands it to Dot with a small bowl of whipped cream. ‘How’s Vinka? I did invite her tonight but she said she was going to something special at the Polish club.’

  ‘Still anxious that she won’t find a place she actually likes,’ Patrick says.

  A small and unexpected draft of warm breeze from the window extinguishes one of the candles on the table and Margot reaches for the matches. Lexie watches as her mother leans across the table, holding a lighted match to the wick and waiting for it to ignite. She holds her breath as the flame rises and then blows out the match and turns to speak to Dot. In that moment, as the two women face each other, Lexie sees something that makes her catch her breath. In the half-light they look so different, so old. Most of the time, she realises, she doesn’t look closely at them, they are just there, part of the scenery of her life. Now she sees the stories of their lives etched into their faces and she is transfixed by that elusive iridescence only ever seen in some people old enough to radiate the luminous dignity of a long life. They come, both of them, from a time and place that confined their imagination and their aspirations – their ideas of who and what they might become. Dot has always rattled that cage, crashing through the limits, taking risks. And yet here she is, age and weariness carved into her face, but still fighting, immune to concerns about whether or not she is loved or hated as long as she has something to believe in and to drive her.

  But it is Margot whose appearance is more arresting to Lexie tonight. It’s as though despite the fact that she sees her almost every week she hasn’t really seen her for years. What she sees when she’s with her is her mother, and a mother is a person you can meet and talk with, eat lunch and go shopping with, and she is just that, just your mother. They are talking now around the table but Lexie is not listening, she is thinking about what it means, about who a mother is, who her mother is. Margot has always been there, constant and consistent, responding to the ways in which everyone else has changed, finding solutions, putting things and people back together, a sounding board, a source of comfort and wisdom, and sometimes of irritation and criticism. Lexie tries to recall a time when, even if only fleetingly, she has moved beyond this to see Margot as others might see her; as a more rounded person, a person of facets and textures, talents and strengths, a person not obscured by the overwhelming effect of being her mother, and she finds she cannot.

  As Margot leans over now to speak to Dot, Lexie sees those physical signs of age, the lines and wrinkles, the hollows and the slackening skin, and understands, perhaps for the first time, that she knows her mother well but knows Margot hardly at all. She remembers the day not so long ago when, as Margot got out of the car, she had leaned across the passenger seat and called out that many writers do their best work beyond middle age. Her mother had bent down to look back at her through the open door of the car, her face a mix of emotions. ‘Not this far beyond,’ she had said. And as she had driven away Lexie had been infuriated by Margot’s apparent determination to close off the possibility of doing now what she had failed to do earlier in her life. ‘Why not just get on with it, give it a go, for heaven’s sake,’ Lexie had said aloud to herself as she drove away. ‘Just stop making excuses.’

  Now, sitting here at the table, Lexie sees something different in Margot. Fleetingly, she feels she is looking at a stranger. Well, Margot took her advice and having done so she is changing. What can it be like, Lexie wonders, what depth of emotional fortitude does it takes to embark, so late in life, with passion and energy, on something that one thought was lost?

  ‘So what do you think, Lexie?’ Patrick asks, nudging her. ‘Or have you gone to sleep?’

  ‘Huh?’ she says. ‘Um, no. No, I was looking at Mum and Dot, and thinking.’

  The three of them look across at her, waiting for something more.

  ‘Go on then,’ Dot says.

  ‘I was thinking,’ she says, ‘that you are both really rather beautiful, that age is beautiful, and it’s so easy to forget that, not to notice it. I think maybe we need to find a way to make use of that.’

  Dot throws her head back and the two of them laugh out loud.

  ‘I think you may have had a drop too much wine, Lex,’ Margot says. ‘Have some lemon tart to soak it up.’

  ‘What are you plotting, Lex?’ Patrick asks. ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet,’ she says. ‘Give me time, I’m working on it.’

  And as they laugh and tease her again, Lexie watches Margot in the candlelight and she knows with absolute certainty that whatever it is that Margot is writing it will change her, already has changed her, and that it has the potential to change them all.

  NINETEEN

  Emma is going through a sea change – at least she hopes it’s that and not the change; the word peri-menopause keeps creeping up on her. She’s not sure what it means, what the symptoms are, but probably not this rather elevated mood spiced with occasional glimpses of contentment. So, as she sits here now in Donald’s office, working her way through some of his papers, she’s opting for sea change.

  ‘You could borrow mine,’ Theresa had said when Emma had mentioned this change while getting a facial a few days earlier. ‘I’ve got all three series on DVD. I loved that program. Do you think Sigrid Thornton’s had work? I’ve got a feeling about her lips.’

  Emma was only fleetingly confused. ‘Not that sea change,’ she’d said. ‘A sea change, you know – going through a period of transformation. It’s from Shakespeare – The Tempest, I think.’

  ‘But they didn’t have beauty salons then,’ Theresa said. ‘Mind you, they did all sorts of weird stuff – like, I saw this program where they said actors used pig’s blood or beetroot juice to make their lips red. Sea change; I’ll remember that. It’s good, isn’t it, because that’s just what we do here – transform you. It would make a good name for a salon.’

  Emma was about to explain that a sea change was actually an inner transformation but she stopped herself in case Theresa responded with a recommendation for colonic irrigation, which was also available in the salon.

  The first stirrings of this change had begun after her conversation with Margot. For the rest of that day, while they were shopping with Rosie, and later as she and Rosie made their way back home, Emma’s thoughts kept drifting back to Phyllida. What she could do to help. Just knowing what her aunt was going through had explained everything – well, almost everything. Margot had told her she was the best person to help Phyllida right now and as Emma thought more about it she began to feel that she really could be useful. She’d always excelled when she was given more responsibility at work, and this felt similar. It made her feel confident and as though she could be of value.

  She felt so positive about it that when they got back to Phyllida’s place soon after lunch she’d suggested to Rosie that they could make a cake and take afternoon tea up to Phyllida in her room. It was years since Emma had made a cake, so long that she couldn’t remember it, and she certainly wouldn’t attempt it without a recipe, so she took down one of Phyllida’s cookery books and together she and Rosie searched for a recipe.

  ‘What about this one?’ Rosie had said. ‘It’s called Black Forest Gate U.’

  ‘Gateau,’ Emma said. ‘It’s French for cake. But we don’t have any cocoa or chocolate. I think we’ll do this one.’

  And by four o’clock they had produced a spectacular Victoria sponge filled with jam and cream. Emma looked at the cake in disbelief, wondering if she was dreaming.
Baking? Baking with Rosie? Weird! But it had been fun and Rosie was impressed.

  ‘Wendy never makes cakes,’ she’d said, licking jam and cream off her fingers. ‘Even Grandma doesn’t make them.’

  Emma smiled indulgently, trying to look as though knocking up a perfect Victoria sponge was nothing special. Later they took the cake and a pot of tea to Phyllida’s room, where she was slumped in a chair watching a black and white film with Gregory Peck, one of a stack of DVDs on the floor alongside her.

  ‘Anything to stop me having to think about Donald and that bloody woman,’ she’d said by way of explanation when she returned with an armful of movies from the video store. But she switched the TV off and her eyes lit up when Rosie stuck her head around the door.

  ‘Oh yes! Tea. Come in, Rosie.’

  ‘And cake,’ Rosie said, proudly carrying the cake over to her. ‘We made it.’

  ‘Made it? How wonderful, and it looks perfect. How clever of you, Rosie.’

  ‘Mum did a bit of it,’ Rosie said, smiling graciously at her mother.

  Phyllida took the tea Emma handed her and sampled the cake. ‘Delicious,’ she said. ‘I never knew you could bake, Em. I can never a get a sponge to rise. You’ll have to tell me your secret.’

  ‘Oh well …’ Emma began.

  ‘Me,’ Rosie cut in. ‘I’m the secret. I did all the measuring nearly by myself and I put the jam on it. Mum just did the beating and stuff.’

  As they sat there in Phyllida’s room, Emma, enjoying the unusual combination of pleasure and satisfaction, thought that this was probably how mothers were supposed to feel, and she wondered how she might hang on to that feeling.

  The following morning as they left to take Rosie home to Grant, Emma slipped two slices of cake into a plastic container.

  ‘You can carry these,’ she said to Rosie. ‘Hold them carefully in the car, so Daddy and Wendy can see what a lovely cake you made.’ Emma’s desire to impress seemed less self-serving in the light of Rosie’s pride in handing over the cake.