Ben, Monday evening
I told Hedda that I met Isobel on my first day at university.
I didn’t tell her that I also fell hopelessly in love with her and carried on feeling that way for years, even though it was never fully reciprocated. I haven’t even told Maggie, although I think she suspects. It might be female intuition or maybe just the fact that Isobel has never been wholly welcoming towards her. They’ve always seemed wary of each other. I think everyone noticed it on holiday, even before Gabs got ill.
When I arrived at university, Isobel was outside on the terrace of the building that would be our home for the first year, pulling a large rucksack and several holdalls from the back of a car – a new car, I noted. I arrived with less stuff than Isobel but with sackloads of chippiness. I was convinced I would be the only person there who’d been to a comprehensive school, the only person whose parents couldn’t drive me because they didn’t have a car, the only person who wanted a revolution.
‘How exactly do you plan to bring about a social revolution by playing Hamlet?’ Isobel asked me, some time later, after I’d got to know her. ‘Or getting a part in Crossroads?’ She was studying politics and she’d spent a year in India, working in an orphanage, both things she thought would better equip her to change the world.
If we hadn’t been living in the same block of university accommodation, I might never have spoken to Bel. The chippy me took against her, as she stood on the pavement surrounded by stuff and talking to the tall, slim, grey-haired, striking-looking man who I assumed and later confirmed was her father.
She was striking too. She had her father’s physique and long, dark brown hair with a slightly reddish tinge. Her clothes all looked long, too: long skirt, long top thing and long necklace. The only items of clothing that skimped on material were her shoes, which were flip-flops.
‘I’m really going to miss you,’ I overheard her say as I looked for the entrance to G-block, my home for the next year. It sounded like a prison and it looked a bit like one, too. The building was constructed of breeze-blocks and no one had thought to plaster or paint them on the inside. The rooms were like cells, each with a bed and a desk and a washbasin. The only thing missing was bars.
‘Will you be OK without me?’ I heard her say to her father.
She was well-spoken and she irritated me. Rich daddy’s girl, I thought, disliking her for having the arrogance to think her father might not manage without her.
‘I’ll miss you, Bel,’ he said, putting his arms around her and just standing there, holding her, in a way neither my mother nor father would ever hold me or had ever held me. ‘But I’ll manage. I managed when you were in India. It’s no different.’
So she’s a hippy as well, I snorted to myself, and made my way up the breeze-block stairs to find my room.
I was doing my party trick that evening when she appeared, hovering nervously at the door of my room. I’d left it open in a friendly and inviting way and a couple of other blokes from down the hallway had taken up the invitation and were now seated on the bed.
‘Do you play the guitar?’ one had asked, nodding towards my acoustic propped up against the wall.
‘A bit.’ I hoped to sound as if I was being modest, whereas in fact I was being truthful. I did only play a bit. But I had one or two tricks, which usually impressed.
‘What can you play?’ the other bloke asked.
‘I’ll show you.’
I picked the guitar up and tried to manoeuvre myself into position, which was harder in my cell than it had been in my bedroom at home. There, I had a kind of big squishy old armchair that sagged everywhere to accommodate the guitar. In the room, I had to half lie on the bed. Of course I could have sat on it, if I’d been going to play the guitar normally, but I was out to impress.
I put the guitar behind my head and began playing ‘House of the Rising Sun’, contorting my arms to make the chords and strumming with difficulty. It was something I’d taught myself one afternoon when I was bored. I’d mastered the song with the instrument in regular position then decided to try it another way. It impressed the friends I’d done my A-levels with and later, when I was trying to make it as an actor, naively I thought it might come in useful. They always asked at auditions if there was anything else you could do: sword-fighting, scuba-diving, that sort of thing – something that might give you the edge in a Bond movie. I thought maybe being able to play the guitar behind my head would be useful. Looking back on it, I must have looked like a pretentious twat, although if anyone had said as much I’d have told them I was being ironic.
Isobel looked confused at first when she looked into the room, as if she couldn’t work out who was playing. Then she saw me and smiled this huge, beautiful, friendly smile, and I more or less immediately dropped all my earlier preconceptions and asked if she was going to come in.
It’s odd now because, even though she has three children, I never think of Isobel as motherly. But I did then. Not like my mother, or any of my friends’ mothers – more like some sort of fantasy mother, the kind I would have liked to have, waiting at home when I came back from college, to be introduced to my friends.
Isobel instinctively took people under her wing. By the end of that first evening she must have had at least seven people back in her room, waiting to be fed. She thought we should eat before going to the freshers’ disco.
Somehow, in between saying goodbye to her father and appearing at the door of my room, she’d unpacked all those bags. Her room didn’t look like a cell. It was actually inviting. She had posters on the wall, cushions on the bed, a beanbag on the floor, and the black surface of the desk was lined with books. Next to it was a smaller table that she must have brought from home, covered with some sort of Indian throw and stacked with plates and cutlery.
I only had one of everything. Isobel had at least ten. She must have been planning to cook for friends, even before she arrived. And she did, that evening and on numerous subsequent evenings. Soup and pasta mostly; the odd curry and quiche too. She made it all seem so effortless, looking after everyone.
So if you’d asked me back then who, of everyone I knew, would be the most natural mother, I’d have said Bel without hesitation. But when she had Gabby she surprised us all. She seemed on edge, unsure what to do, harassed by having to deal with just one other person. I didn’t get it.
Maybe Isobel didn’t know what to do because her own mother died so young.
‘Is that your dad?’ I asked her, pointing at a photo in a frame on the desk. ‘I saw him dropping you off.’
‘Did you?’ She looked really surprised that I’d seen her, as if she’d have expected me to introduce myself there and then. ‘Yes, that’s my dad.’
And then, either because she wondered if I’d overheard her talking to him or just to spare me and the rest of the crowd sitting around on her floor forking pasta off china plates from Habitat the embarrassment of asking something awkward, she told us.
‘My mum died a few years ago and I’m an only child. So it’s just been me and him at home for the last few years.’
Beautiful, capable and tragic, I remember thinking.
I wouldn’t admit it to anyone then, but I was scared of going to university… terrified really. I didn’t think I’d fit in, didn’t think I’d be as clever as everyone else there, didn’t know if I could act, even though I was studying drama, wondered if I’d make any friends, thought I’d miss home.
I was a giant bundle of anxiety, but meeting Isobel made me feel calmer, safer and less anxious, for a short time anyway. Then I began to fall in love with her, began to believe that she really could change the world if she wanted to, and mine too.
Well, she’s changed it now, and I’m not prepared just to sit around doing nothing.
‘We lived in the same hall,’ I told Hedda. ‘We met on the first day and we’ve been friends ever since. She met her husband through me. He was my best friend from school.’
I made it all sound so g
rown-up, so comfortable, so civilised and easy.
But it wasn’t, not for me, and I want to make it as uncomfortable as possible for Isobel now. Why should I be the one who always has to suffer?
Isobel, Monday evening
‘Where is everyone?’ Eric asks, when he comes in from work and finds me sitting at the kitchen table, inert, thinking, looking at the photograph in its glassless frame.
It’s a picture of Gabby in her first Christmas play. She was a snowflake because school plays never touch on religion these days. When I was at school we did the classic traditional Nativity story every year, so that by the time we reached secondary school at least a quarter of the girls had had a chance to play Mary. But our children are only dimly aware what the Nativity is.
This particular year, when she was chosen to be ‘chief snowflake’, I don’t think Gabriella was aware what snow was either. She used to think those polystyrene packaging chips were snow. It didn’t snow down south until she was at least twelve. But all the time she had spent watching Pingu had given her a feeling for it, and I had been so proud when I pushed the shutter on my camera as she stood up, all dressed in white, and said, ‘I am going to keep coming every day until New Year.’
I was as proud of her then as I am now, when I go to watch her play the French horn in her school’s Christmas concerts.
‘The boys are watching TV,’ I say to Eric, getting up, trying to look busier. ‘And Gabs is at orchestra. I have to go and pick her up in a bit. Dinner’s in the oven. We’ll have it when we get back.’
‘How is she?’ Eric asks. I sense the subtext.
‘Fine,’ I reply, ignoring it.
‘I’ll go and pick her up if you like,’ Eric offers.
‘No, it’s OK. You’ve only just got in.’
‘I don’t mind, really. It will give me a chance to talk to her.’
‘I wish you’d talk to me,’ I say.
Eric avoided me most of yesterday. After his run he took Vincent to the park to play football. They stayed out for ages and came back at lunchtime, at the same time as Harvey, who’d been out with friends and returned with a battered abandoned supermarket trolley.
‘Harvey, what are you doing with that?’ I’d asked.
‘I’m going to make it into a chair. Dad, will you help me?’ he’d replied.
And so I lost any chance to speak to Eric all afternoon to a spate of ingenious product design, which required his assistance.
The end result was impressive. Between them they’d managed to cut off the front so it resembled an Eames-style wire chair, with wheels. Harvey had slid it to and fro across the kitchen as I prepared dinner, outlining his ambition to become an industrial designer. He is gifted at art and design technology and he might have been on to something with the chair, but at the time I was resentful that his master plan had occupied Eric for what little time I might have been able to monopolise him – although I knew it was good for Harvey to do stuff with his father. Somehow Vincent and Gabriella always seem to demand more of my attention and Harvey just gets on with things. So it makes me feel a little better when he manages to claim more of Eric’s time than the others.
But, however much fun they had had together during the afternoon, Eric was uncommunicative towards me over dinner last night, and every time I tried to broach the subject that was always on my mind he kept repeating, ‘I need time to think.’
‘I don’t know what you want me to say, Isobel,’ he says now.
‘Anything,’ I say. ‘Anything is better than this silent withdrawal.’
Eric shrugs.
‘Eric, can’t you see that I feel terrible? It’s all I can think about, Iris being deaf. I wish I could change things. But I can’t. I need you to talk to me,’ I plead.
‘I’m sorry, Bel,’ Eric says. ‘I don’t know what to say. I know you feel bad, but what can I do about it? I just wish you’d thought it all through in the first place, because then things would be different.’
‘It doesn’t help,’ I say, frustrated that all he is willing to do is keep going over the past. ‘In hindsight I wish I’d done things differently, of course I do, but at the time – ’
‘I just wish you’d listened to me. If you had, none of this would have happened.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Eric, this isn’t getting us anywhere. Yes, you were right. I was wrong. But I took a decision I thought was right at the time. If you were so convinced I was wrong, you should have taken the kids to be vaccinated yourself.’
‘Yes? And how would you have felt if I had?’ Eric laughs in response.
‘I don’t know,’ I snap.
‘You’d have been furious with me. You used to get angry if I so much as gave the children a chocolate biscuit. You’d behave as if I was poisoning them.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ I protested, but he was right. I did regard their sugar-free early years as one of my greatest parental achievements. Sugar-free, nut-free biscuits were my peculiar speciality; I always had a tin full of them. There was no need for Eric to offer them his chocolate digestives, yet he did.
‘Isobel. You knew exactly how I felt about the MMR. I tried to bring you round. I tried to make you see sense.’
‘As I said, if you really felt so strongly about it, if you really thought there was a serious risk to any of the children from not being immunised, then you should have done something about it.’ I was damned if I was going to be held solely to blame. Eric knew I didn’t want to have the kids vaccinated and he’d accepted that, at the time. He has to share some of the responsibility, surely?
‘What could I have done? Be like that bloke who fell out with his wife? The man who took his ex to court to force her to have their kids vaccinated?’
‘No, of course not,’ I say. When I’d heard about it in the news I was chilled by the lengths that man had gone to, to make his point.
‘My loyalty was to you,’ Eric says. ‘I knew you were shouldering the bulk of the childcare.’
‘Bulk?’ I’m laughing now. I’d done pretty much all of it, when they were young. It was my choice, but I still wanted Eric to acknowledge the amount of work I’d put in.
‘Yes, I knew you were shouldering the bulk of the childcare, and so I thought that, out of respect for the job you were doing, I should allow you to make decisions.’
‘Jesus Christ, you can be infuriatingly smug, Eric,’ I retort.
‘Well, there’s no point trying to talk, then, is there?’ Eric replies, looking at the clock. ‘I’ll go and get Gabs.’
He picks up the car keys, leaving me to go over and over things in my mind. It gets me nowhere. I wonder if there is anything I can do to help Ben and Maggie and Iris. I wonder if they will ever forgive me. I wonder if Eric will, or Gabriella.
I wonder how the unfolding events will affect us all: Eric, Gabriella, Ben, Maggie and the rest of our friends.
And I wonder how it will affect me and Ben.
It was towards the end of the spring term. We’d been to a gig in the Student Union. I can’t remember what the band was. I only remember it was a high-octane, high-energy evening. We’d been dancing throughout, and we were hot and high when it ended.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Ben said. ‘Before we go back.’
So we headed off around the lake before going to my room, as we usually did at the end of the night. Ben bought little more than bread and beer from the Student Union shop, and only had one plate, one mug and one set of cutlery in his room, whereas I had a kettle, a toaster and jars of peanut butter, Marmite or cheese spread to go with the toast we invariably needed by the end of an evening.
I liked Ben from the start. He was funny and interesting and I felt at ease with him. He was easy to talk to, kind, and he made me laugh. I was really glad of his friendship, especially in that first year when I could have easily been lonely: missing home and the friends I had there, missing Dad, and still grieving for Mum.
And I still missed Deepak too.
Ben had aske
d me about him when he nosed through my photographs early on. ‘You’re so fucking right on and dungarees,’ he’d said. ‘Working in an orphanage and screwing the local doctor.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ He could wind me up when he wanted too.
‘Right on – politically correct,’ he said. ‘Dungarees – a feminist.’
‘And how does what I did in my gap year fit in with your theory?’ I asked, secretly flattered because that was exactly how I wanted people to think of me.
‘Right on, because you were saving the world by rescuing orphans while at the same time making it clear that you were not just some patronising posh white girl who needed India on her CV by sleeping with one of the natives. And dungarees because you loved him and left him and probably broke his heart in the process.’
‘And is that your definition of feminism?’ I asked.
‘Nope – just wearing dungarees is enough to qualify as a feminist in my book!’
Ben was still flipping through my photo album. I knew he was trying to get a rise from me. So I ignored him, and tried to ignore his further questions too. ‘So, this Deepak – what was he like?’
‘He was nice, kind, interesting – a doctor. What more do you need to know?’
‘Well, there must have been a bit more to him than that if he charmed his way into your bed.’
‘It was a holiday romance, that’s all.’ I half wished I’d not told Ben I’d had a relationship with him. But he said I’d given it away when he asked who the tall, dark, handsome stranger in the photograph was. ‘Deepak,’ I’d replied, thinking my tone was neutral. ‘He was a doctor in the village. He came to run a clinic at the orphanage once a week.’
‘So were you shagging him?’ Ben had asked.
‘Why do you ask?’ I’d wondered what in my reply had given it away.
‘So you were!’
I’d brushed it off as a holiday romance, but in reality I’d fallen heavily in love with Deepak and not known, until months into our relationship, that he was married with three children and another on the way. I’d thought when he came to the orphanage at the end of the week that he lived in the countryside with his parents… presumed when he asked me if I’d like a drink one evening that he was older than me but equally free and single. I had never for a moment, when he came back to the small room on the edge of the orphanage courtyard that was mine, imagined that he had a wife and children to go home to.
Living With It Page 7
