I’d thought the secrecy and the not staying the night were to protect me. I hadn’t been sure how the elderly expat English Christian woman who ran the orphanage would react to her foreign charge having a relationship with someone, and on the premises at that. I’d had no idea, until Deepak did not attend the clinic one week ‘because his wife has gone into labour’, that I had done anything wrong.
And even though I was in the wrong only unwittingly, I still felt that I had done something terrible and deserved the heartache I felt when I realised I’d had an affair with a married man. I felt every bit as guilty about it as I would have had I known at the time.
I tried not to think about him after that, but I still missed him, missed being loved by a man, even if he had not really loved me as I thought he had. But, in the absence of the relationship I’d had with him, I was glad of the warm and affectionate friendship I had with Ben.
So when, that night after the gig, he collapsed next to me on the beanbag and put his arm around me, I thought this was just another typical ending to another typical night out. We’d eat toast, drink orange juice, Ben would tell me the bass player was slightly out of key and I wouldn’t have a clue if he had been or not. Then Ben would go back to his room to sleep.
But on that particular night, when Ben put his arm round me, he pulled me closer to him.
‘Isobel?’ He sounded suddenly serious.
‘Yup!’ I was not.
‘You are the most amazing, kind, clever and beautiful woman and I want to kiss you,’ he said.
‘Do you, now?’ I was still treating it as a bit of a joke.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve wanted to kiss you since day one and I think I’m going to now.’
There was a split second then when I thought, this is all wrong, we’re just friends, I don’t even fancy him, it wouldn’t be fair to Ben to let this happen, and various other thoughts along those lines. But alongside them I was thinking, why not? I haven’t kissed anyone for the past six months. I like Ben. We get on well. Maybe it would be nice to kiss him. We’re good enough friends for it not to matter.
Again, I was naïve. If you are in your late teens, you’ve been out drinking and dancing, you don’t have to get up in the morning and you start kissing someone a foot away from a bed you have access to, the chances are you will end up in that bed with them.
So, of course, we did. Then, and the following evening, and again and again for a few months, until I realised it had to stop.
It was the morning after Ben had spent the entire night in my room.
Previously, he’d gone back to his. It made sense. The single beds were narrow, almost impossible for two people to actually get any sleep in, and Ben had his own identical bed just a few doors away. Plus in my mind – and probably in Ben’s too, considering what happened next – it kept things fairly casual. We slept together because we were both young and single and we liked each other and we wanted sex. But that night Ben said he was too tired to move, and when I woke in the morning he was already awake, propped up on one elbow, looking at me.
‘Morning,’ I said, rolling away from his gaze because there was something in it that made me uncomfortable.
‘Come here,’ he said, rolling me back towards him, holding my naked body against his and pushing my bed hair from my eyes.
Then he said it.
‘I love you, Isobel.’
And that was when I knew we had to stop.
‘I don’t, I can’t…’ I couldn’t find the right words. ‘I’m really fond of you, Ben. I love you as a friend but…’
It’s hard not to hurt someone who has just told you they love you, when you are telling them that you don’t.
‘You should have made it clearer earlier,’ Yasmin said to me when I told her afterwards. She seemed to think I’d been remiss: that I’d somehow led Ben on, made him think I felt more for him than I did. But I’d thought we both knew it was friends-with-benefits.
Of course things were strained after that, for a bit. It was a little awkward, but Ben seemed OK. We were still friendly, even if I didn’t ask him back to my room so much any more – friendly enough for him to ask if Eric could stay in it, when he came to visit on a weekend I was going home to visit Dad.
Friendly enough for me to say, ‘Sure.’
Ben talked about him a lot: Eric Jordan, his friend from school. Eric whose parents had encouraged Ben more than his own: to try to get into acting, to go to university, to be the person he wanted to be.
Eric was at Cambridge reading history. Ben always said that I’d like him, but we’d never met. I’d never seen Ben in the holidays. He went back to Nottingham, I went home to Sussex, and Eric had never come to visit Ben at UEA, even though it wasn’t that far and he had a car.
It felt a little weird letting someone I’d never met stay in my room, but I tidied it up before I left, changed the sheets, and locked away in a drawer anything I deemed too personal for a stranger to stumble across.
My room looked so untouched, when I returned, that I wondered if he’d changed his mind and cancelled the trip, but Ben said they’d had a great weekend, divided between showing Eric around Norwich and the campus and the Student Union bar.
Eric was ‘quite good-looking, well-spoken and very interesting’, according to Helen, another friend on the same corridor. ‘And,’ she added, ‘he seemed quite interested in you.’
‘How so?’ I asked.
‘He saw the picture of you in India in your room and asked how long you’d been there and what you were doing,’ she told me. ‘And he looked at your books and wanted to know what you were studying. And at your ‘Support the Sandinistas’ mug and asked if you were a genuine revolutionary or just another student hung up on a cause!’
‘What did you tell him?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t get a chance,’ she replied. ‘Ben filled him in a bit then went off on some story about something that happened when they were at school together.’
‘So when do I get to meet the famous Eric?’ I said to Ben later. I wasn’t really bothered one way or the other. I was curious to know what the friend he talked about was like, but that was it.
‘I’m not sure that I want you to meet him, Bel,’ Ben said, suddenly going all quiet and serious.
‘Why not? He’s your best friend. I’m your close friend. Why don’t you want me to meet him?’
‘Don’t make me spell it out,’ he said, raising his voice a little.
That was when I realised I’d been naïve to assume that everything was fine and cool between us.
Ben, Monday evening
‘Eric is your best friend,’ Maggie says, calmly but with meaning.
There’s a stage direction for you. Once more, calmly but with meaning.
‘I know,’ I reply.
I don’t have that many people I would count as good friends, just a handful that I’ve retained from various stages of my life. Eric is my oldest.
We are stacking the dishwasher, after the meal during which I recounted the details of my meeting with the solicitor. Maggie knows now that Hedda thinks it is possible we could sue Eric and Isobel. I want to go ahead, but Maggie isn’t so sure.
‘You could lose him,’ she says, taking a dishwasher tablet from under the sink and slipping it into the dispenser. ‘And Isobel.’
‘I don’t care,’ I reply.
‘Really?’ Maggie asks. ‘We’ve got a deaf daughter, Ben. We’re going to need friends. You’re going to need friends.’
‘I’ve got other friends,’ I say, although none I could count on the way I used to think I could count on Eric and Isobel.
‘You could lose them too,’ Maggie continues. ‘You don’t know how people will react, if you sue your best friend and your…’
She pauses, and I wonder, as I often do, just how much she knows about Isobel and me. She knows we went out together briefly, of course, a long time ago. The only reason Isobel is still in my life, I’ve told her, is because she’s married
to Eric. But you know what women are like. Sometimes they know more than they let on. Sometimes they know stuff, even though no one has told them.
‘His wife,’ I finish the sentence for her.
‘If you go ahead, people will take sides. You may not be able to count on their support, and we’re going to need all the support we can get. Our daughter is deaf.’ She repeats this as if I don’t know, as if I don’t think about it virtually all the time.
‘I know that! That’s why I’m doing this,’ I say, then correct myself. ‘That’s why I’m thinking about it.’
‘Is it?’ Maggie challenges me. ‘Is that really why you’re thinking about it? Do you think that is the best thing to do for Iris?’
‘Ultimately, yes,’ I reply.
‘And you’re not just doing it to…’ She pauses again.
‘What?’ I think I know what she’s thinking but I want her to say it out loud if she is.
‘I’m going to check on Iris.’ Maggie closes the door of the dishwasher and moves past me to go upstairs, leaving me with my thoughts.
I had this idea that it would all stop when I went to secondary school. The B-B-B-Ben-ing, the Are you having a b-b-b-bad day-ing and the Cry b-b-b-baby-ing.
I convinced myself, during the summer holidays, of three things. One, that the stammer I had had since I was very young would miraculously cease; two, that, with the worst of the bullies going to a different school, the ones that were left would lose interest in taunting me; and three, that the boys and girls I’d never met before would find my slight speech impediment endearing rather than something to take the piss out of.
My conviction didn’t last beyond the first day. Why is it, I wonder, that so often people stammer over the letter their name begins with? I was fine with Deakin, but the shiny new comprehensive I attended didn’t call people by their surnames, unlike the grammar school it had replaced. Had I been a few years older, I might have been spared the relentless bullying that having to say ‘Ben’ incurred.
But on day one the geography teacher highlighted my inability to speak by asking me both my name and the capital of Germany and I was already exposed, ripe for the ribbing which would inevitably follow.
It wasn’t bad at first. It was a big school. We were at the bottom of it. The people who would emerge as the cruellest were still taking stock. Others were keen to make friends.
But a few weeks into the new term a boy called Matthew (why wasn’t I called Mike? I had no problem with Ms either) decided the way he was going to make friends was by getting the rest of the class to join him in a game. This involved asking me questions to which the answer always began either with a B or a P.
I tried to take it in my stride, laughing with them and turning his game into one of my own – a game of coming up with an alternative word.
‘What type of bread is that?’ Matthew would ask, pointing at my sandwich.
‘Wholewheat,’ I was the point-scorer, as far as the rest of the kids were concerned.
‘What colour school jumpers did you have at your old school?’
‘Navy.’ I was a walking Thesaurus.
‘How were you out in cricket today, Ben?’
‘B-b-b-bowled.’
I think, because he was always jocular and I tried to remain so too, Matthew actually thought it was all good-natured. They didn’t know how much I hated being unable to say things, or that I cried myself to sleep most nights.
Three weeks into term Eric arrived, all blond and shiny and confident and exotic because of it. Exotic too because he was three weeks late for the start of a new term at a new school and the school seemed to have given him dispensation to do whatever it was he’d been doing before he arrived.
‘I’ve been with my family in Rio,’ he explained. ‘My dad was at a conference there and they said he could take the family. It was too good an opportunity to miss.’
‘What does your dad do?’ someone asked.
‘He works for a think tank,’ Eric answered, as if we’d all know what a think tank was.
Of course nobody did, but nobody admitted it either.
‘He used to be in politics,’ he added, either to casually let us know who his dad was or to give an inkling to those that didn’t know what a think tank was.
I looked at his exercise books, stacked on the desk next to mine. A boy who arrived three weeks late into term had no choice about where he was going to sit; he got to sit next to the stammerer, whom everyone else avoided. Eric Jordan, he’d written on the front and it all began to fall into place. The late start, the trip to Rio, the father who used to work in politics… his dad must be Ralph Jordan, former local Labour MP and social reform campaigner.
Of course Ralph Jordan would have a son who didn’t mind sitting next to the class stammerer – not only didn’t mind but told the others, in such a way that he didn’t alienate himself or me by doing so, to ease up on the teasing. And his mother was a drama teacher, who helped me learn not only to act but, more importantly, to speak.
I sometimes wonder, if Eric hadn’t been at the same school, how my life would have turned out. If we’d not been friends, I’d never have met his mother who somehow made me take myself out of the words I was saying and just say them. ‘To be or not to be.’ I still remember the thrill of saying that for the first time, unimpeded by errant Bs. I never imagined that by the time I was in the sixth form I’d be the lead in Hamlet, centre stage, in front of a hall full of pupils and parents, to-be-ing and not-to-be-ing without a care in the world. Nor did I ever think I’d go on to do drama at university and try to forge a career in acting.
That ambition failed, but, for me, even to have the ambition felt like a huge achievement.
And of course he got me interested in politics too, which led me to UEA and Bel.
I wonder what I would have done, if he’d gone to the grammar school on the other side of the city?
One of the many ‘what if’s in my life. What if I’d not persuaded Maggie to go on holiday with my friends? What if Isobel and Eric hadn’t come? What if Gabby hadn’t got ill? Would we still have a healthy hearing baby, or would another ‘what if’ have stepped in to fulfil our fate?
Maggie was forty-five when Iris was born, high risk for Down’s syndrome. We didn’t have the tests, even though we knew this, because we weren’t going to get rid of this child, were we? Perhaps we were always meant to have an imperfect baby.
I know it’s not PC to say that. I wouldn’t actually say it to anyone, although I wish I could. But that’s what I feel. We had this perfect child, and something came along and spoiled her.
And what if I’d not asked Isobel if Eric could use her room, that weekend when he came to stay? He was interested in her then, I could tell. Of course he wanted to meet her.
And, when they did meet, whatever secret hopes I still harboured that Isobel might actually have more feeling for me than she was letting on were dashed. They looked like they were together, within minutes of my introducing them.
‘Oh, Bel, this is Eric.’ I tried to sound casual when she knocked on the door of my room, and I tried to feel it when she came in and sat next to him and started talking and they carried on, as if they’d known each other for ever.
If you can see two people connect, I saw it then. It hurt, of course, when they slowly started getting together – just letters at first, because there were no mobile phones or emails. Then he came to stay again and I knew it wasn’t really me he wanted to see.
He told me when I walked back to the station with him.
‘Ben, I’ve asked Isobel if she wants to spend the weekend with me in Cambridge.’
I don’t think I disguised very well the fact that I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach. I was privately furious with him. Why did Eric get to have it all? He had the place at Cambridge, the righton dad that would have made him a magnet for half the women at UEA. He was good-looking and could have had his pick of virtually any woman. Why did he have to decide that Isobel
was the one he wanted?
But Eric didn’t know how I felt about her, and I wasn’t about to tell him.
That was the point at which I stopped sharing with Eric. Up until then, we’d talked a lot. But then I realised there were some things I’d never be able to share with him.
I’d never be able to tell him how hopelessly in love with Bel I’d been and still was, even though I knew it was largely unrequited. And I’ve never told him, or anyone, what happened afterwards.
Isobel, Tuesday evening
‘E!’ I can hear the irritation in my voice, although I am trying to convey urgency.
Eric is still playing his cards close to his chest. ‘Did you talk to Gabriella?’ I’d asked him, after he brought her home from orchestra last night. ‘Did she say anything?’
‘Not really,’ was all I could get out of him.
‘Eric!’ I use his full name this time.
He’s back early. We have a parents’ meeting later at Gabriella’s school and we would have been in plenty of time, had Eric not decided to shower.
‘It smells of burning rubber in here,’ he’d said, as if the smell of the kitchen necessitated his washing.
‘Harvey’s been melting vinyl.’ I gestured towards the work surface where a row of mini bowls were cooling. Harvey had made them from a selection of EPs he’d picked up at a market a few weeks earlier. He’d spent the hours after school heating them in the oven then shaping them into misshapen bowls. It was his design and technology homework.
‘Cool,’ Eric said, looking at them, forgiving the smell if his creative son had caused it.
‘Not yet,’ I’d joked, trying to lighten the mood, but Eric had ignored me and gone upstairs to the bathroom.
Harvey is helping Vincent with his homework now.
‘I have to write a list of as many nasty things people call each other that I can think of,’ Vincent announces, taking his blue homework diary from his Simpsons rucksack.
Living With It Page 8
