‘It is. But it is only a place, in the end.’
‘I don’t think Mum felt like that,’ Scott said. ‘When she and Dad split up, she went back to Durban and he went back to Auckland.’
Beth sat down again, settling Bonus on her lap. ‘They were young, though. And probably felt a bit lost. I’m adopted and, strangely, I’ve never felt lost. I sometimes wonder if being given away at birth got all my lostness in life over with, in one dreadful fell swoop.’
Scott fell silent, as if all this was far too much information to digest along with his noodles. Beth smiled at him again. ‘Just a thought. Different things validate, or fail to validate, different people. I’m just not defined by being adopted. Or by being gay, for that matter.’
Scott swallowed. He took his hands off his keyboard and jammed them between his thighs, hunching forward.
‘Did you find your birth mother, ever?’ he asked, not looking at Beth.
‘I didn’t want to.’
‘OK.’
‘There were a thousand reasons, but one was that it would have upset – badly upset – my adopted parents.’
‘So,’ Scott said, ‘you’re still angry? With your birth mother?’
‘I don’t think about her,’ Beth said pleasantly.
He glanced up briefly. ‘Conversation for another time?’
‘Or never, perhaps.’
‘So it’s OK about Mum staying, is it?’
‘If Angie’s OK with it too, and it doesn’t conflict with my father coming down from Aberdeen, then of course. I’d be glad to meet her.’
Scott ducked his head. ‘Cheers,’ he said and then added, ‘It’s cool, being here.’
Beth stood up, gradually, transferring Bonus to the chair she had been sitting in.
‘Good. I like having you.’
He removed one hand and gestured at the noodles. ‘Even putting up with what we eat?’
She laughed. ‘As long as I don’t have to eat it, too.’
He grinned. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Of course.’
‘Can you tell me how you get egg off a saucepan?’
——
Beth closed her study door behind her and, for a few seconds only, leaned against it. The room in front of her was, like her room at the business school, evidence of her commitment to work. They were both rooms in which, over the years, her essential, most profound and most developed self had been at liberty to become what she had become. She had thought, once, that how she lived was an indication of both what she was and what she hoped to be, but as time went on, the significance of style seemed to diminish every year as a measure of anything that was going on inside her head. It wasn’t exactly a carelessness about surroundings and ways of living, it was more a growing sense of proportion about what mattered and what, in essence, didn’t. If the supremacy of the life of the mind meant that you left a full coffee pot and a waiting mug among the papers on your desk and gave them no more thought after you had put them there, then so be it.
She crossed the room and picked up the coffee pot and the mug, and put them down on the carpet, just inside the door, where they would be impossible to miss. Then she lifted a collection of shawls and sweaters that had formed a soft, disorganized mound on the back of her desk chair and hung them on the hooks Claire had had fixed to the back of the door intended, she said, for Beth’s academic robes. Searching among the papers on her desk, Beth found her landline telephone handset nestling in its cradle and carried it across to the window, which looked out into the yard at the back of the house. The bird feeder Claire had hung in the plum tree was, she noticed, empty, and swung pointlessly in the wind.
She propped her shoulder against one side of the window frame and dialled. The phone rang out four times, and then Claire said distinctly, ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’
‘Please don’t hang up.’
‘It upsets me,’ Claire said. ‘It upsets me to hear you. Anyway, I’m going out.’
Beth fixed her gaze on the plum tree.
‘This won’t take long,’ she said.
‘I don’t want—’
‘And I don’t want—’ Beth interrupted.
‘Please—’
‘Stacey came this afternoon,’ Beth said. ‘At Gaby’s instigation.’
‘I was worried.’
‘Were you?’
‘I didn’t like the sound of how things were going, in Wilkes Street.’
‘Honey, life in Wilkes Street is much the same only not so tidy.’
‘I heard—’
‘What did you hear?’
‘You’d been seen in a bar,’ Claire said, gathering courage. ‘You’d been seen—’
‘Which bar?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘I think it does,’ Beth said, ‘so that I know when it was and who I was with and what was happening.’
‘No,’ Claire said. ‘No. The details are irrelevant. It’s the impression you gave, the impression of someone not quite in control any more, and you are someone for whom dignity and respect are very important.’
Beth adjusted her shoulder against the window frame. ‘Are we talking about me?’
‘Of course we are!’
‘Then perhaps I could be allowed an opinion about how I conduct myself and how I wish to be seen?’
‘I’ve always tried to protect you!’ Claire shouted. ‘I’m trying to protect you now!’
‘Ah,’ Beth said. ‘So this has nothing to do with the house?’
Claire was silent.
Beth went on, ‘This has nothing to do with our conversation about the new flat you want to buy and the absurdity, as you see it, of my rattling around here on my own in Wilkes Street?’
‘Beth,’ Claire said, in an altogether lower and calmer tone. ‘Please.’
‘Explain to me, then. Explain to me what you want.’
‘I can’t. You’re so – so adamant.’
‘I’m adamant about some things, I know, because some things I can’t change. I can’t change what I earn, for example. As you know, I’m better paid than I would be at the LSE, but not as well paid as I would be at the London Business School. Another thing I can’t change is the mortgage, which is still reasonable against the value of the house, but needs paying each month all the same. So, with the lodgers here, I will be able to release sums of money to you now and then – a few thousand here and there perhaps – but in the meantime, you just have to put up with the consequences of a situation which I’m afraid, honey, nobody but you created.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘It’s true enough,’ Beth said, watching a blue tit discover that the bird feeder was disappointingly empty. ‘For the purposes of the present situation.’
‘You are so pompous.’
‘So you keep saying.’
‘How can I put anything behind me, how can I move on, if you refuse to change anything, ever?’
Beth picked a dead fly off the window frame and moved to drop it in the nearest waste-paper bin.
‘I’m trying to recover too, Claire. I’m trying to heal as well. But I have to do both in my own time and in my own way.’ She paused, and then she said, ‘Are you crying?’
‘No.’
‘I think you are.’
‘It isn’t the house,’ Claire said unsteadily. ‘It isn’t the money.’
‘Isn’t it? Isn’t it money that made you say what you did both to me and then to Gaby?’
There was a pause. Then Claire said, in a very small voice, ‘I made a mistake.’
‘What?’
‘I’m not doing as well as it looks as if I am.’
Beth closed her eyes. She said, ‘Stacey reported Gaby as saying you looked wonderful.’
‘Anyone can look good with exercise and no caffeine.’
Beth waited, her eyes still closed. Then Claire said, softly, ‘I miss you.’
——
Scott was watching football on television. He was lyi
ng full length on one of the sofas with both cats beside him and no light beyond the glow from the television screen. Beth put her head round the door.
‘Scott?’
His gaze didn’t leave the screen. Liverpool versus West Ham. First half.
‘Hi,’ he said, absently.
‘I’m going out.’
‘Fine.’
‘I might be late. Really quite late.’
‘Fine.’
‘Can you remember not to deadlock the front door?’
‘Sure.’
‘Scott. Did you hear me?’
The crowd roared as Sturridge scored and Scott threw a cushion in the air, in jubilation.
‘Scott?’
‘I heard you. Don’t deadlock the door.’
‘Good. Night night.’
She closed the door and crossed the hall to pick up her coat, passing the mirror framed in strange silver twigs that Claire had hung against the panelling. She paused to look in it. Impossible. Impossible to tell if she looked better or worse. Even good or bad. But she did look – well, galvanized was the word. She put her coat on and turned the collar up. She had no idea where she was going or who she would meet. She had no idea, even, of which way she would turn, once she was outside the house. All she knew was that she was going out, on a Saturday night, alone and free and ready for anything, rather than something, to happen. She opened the door and stepped out into Wilkes Street, and as it slammed behind her it nudged her forward slightly, like a shove into the future.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
STACEY
A victory for Steve, Stacey reflected, was a quiet thing. He didn’t appear to need to have it acknowledged, and he certainly showed no desire to demonstrate triumph. After Mum had been taken to the nursing home – no distance away and with far less protest than had attended her leaving her flat – Steve hadn’t even suggested putting the house back to the way it had been before she came. It was as if he had achieved what he needed to in retrieving their way of life together and the rest was entirely up to Stacey.
What was left after Mum had gone wasn’t comfortable. Her personal furniture and possessions – the television chair, the bedside table, the pussy willow tea set – all went with her to her clean, bright, blank room with its view over the Regent’s Canal and hospital bed. But the remnants – the bolted stairgate, the adapted shower, the illuminated light switches – seemed to Stacey to be reproachful, symbolic of intention and effort that had, in no time, proved too much to fulfil. Even Bruno, released from his duties, hung about her feet as if eternally pointing out to her that he was, because of her decision, now deprived of his useful employment.
Finding the home had been dispiriting at best. And the best had been only very occasional. She had been appalled, and alarmed, by most of what she had seen, frightened enough to say frequently to Steve that it wasn’t going to be possible, it just wasn’t, she couldn’t contemplate subjecting Mum to those places, to those indignities, the incessant television, the revolving door of changing staff, the smells. Steve had offered to come with her, on her inspections; he’d suggested doing some research so that she didn’t have to, but he never backed down, he never said that because of what she’d seen, he’d think again. He wasn’t thinking again, that was very plain. He wasn’t resorting to threats and ultimatums about Stacey having to choose between her mother and her husband, but he was sturdily immovable in wanting his wife and his life back where they had been. It wasn’t, he said when he got back from New York, a matter for negotiation. Mum’s condition was a tragedy for her, but that tragedy was not, he said to Stacey, going to spill over into making an equal tragedy of both their lives, and their marriage.
‘I don’t mind the idea of sacrifice,’ he said, ‘I don’t even mind the fact of sacrifice. But it’s got to be worth it.’
It was Steve, in the end, who had found the nursing home. Newly built, part of a small chain, right by the canal, and within walking distance of the house. It specialized in dementia care and encouraged residents to take their own furniture and familiar belongings. It was also expensive. Stacey, standing in the unimpeachable space that might be Mum’s, said in dismay,
‘A thousand pounds a week!’
Steve was looking out at the water, his hands in his pockets.
‘We’ll manage,’ he said, neutrally.
‘Will we? How?’
He didn’t turn. He said, in the same tone, ‘We can start by selling that flat.’
She gave a little gasp. ‘Mum’s flat?’
‘An empty flat in a good location.’
‘Oh, Steve . . .’
‘She can’t live there again. And it certainly can’t become some sort of shrine. Selling it will pay for several years here.’
‘Years?’
‘It may come to that. But by the time the money from the flat runs out, you’ll be working again.’
At last he turned round. He said, ‘A lot of things need to go back to the way they were. Like you working.’
She gave a little shrug. ‘It’s – it’s confidence, Steve. It takes years to build up and half a minute to lose, it seems.’
‘I know.’
‘Do you?’
‘You will find work again,’ he said, with sudden force. ‘I know you will. Your mum being here will be the first step for you.’ He took his hands out of his pockets. ‘You’ll see.’
——
What she seemed to see most clearly, once Mum was being looked after in Waterside, was that there was suddenly neither point nor justification in being at home. There were a lot of things that could be – should be – done, like re-arranging all the furniture which had been carried up and down the house when Mum arrived, but it was strangely hard to make herself do them. She could make lists, of course, but then there was a tendency to look at the lists, and feel that the energy taken to write them had used up all the resolution there was. She could walk Bruno, she could make appointments – the hairdresser, the podiatrist – she could visit Waterside, but she couldn’t shake off the sensation of being still trapped in a void with no evident way out. And it didn’t do to brood, either. Thinking about her situation seemed to plunge her into a cauldron of feelings of failure and rejection that brought back that terrible afternoon on a bench in St Paul’s Churchyard. If she hadn’t, in the end, been good enough at the one thing she had been sure she was good at, and had now failed in the most fundamental role of dutiful daughter to an irreproachable mother, then what kind of person was she?
When Gaby rang to recount her breakfast with Claire, and suggest that Stacey, being geographically the nearest, might go round to Wilkes Street, Stacey had leapt at the chance with almost exaggerated eagerness.
‘Of course I’ll go! I’ll go at once.’
‘No,’ Gaby said. ‘No. I’m not even sure Claire wasn’t over-egging it all. Leave it till the weekend.’
‘But if the weekends are the problem?’
‘I only have Claire’s word that they are. It’s just to get an idea, you know. Beth is, after all, a grown-up. A real grown-up, if you get me.’
‘And Claire?’
Gaby said, ‘You know what I think of Claire.’
Stacey had felt immediately fired up – full of a sudden energy, she told Steve, that she hadn’t felt in weeks.
He said, taking a beer out of the fridge and flipping off the cap, not hurrying himself, ‘Do as she says, Stace. Don’t go dashing round there.’
‘I wasn’t—’ she said automatically, and stopped.
‘Weren’t you?’
She looked away. ‘It was so nice – to be asked.’
‘Of course.’
‘To feel necessary.’
He took a swallow from the bottle. ‘You are necessary.’
‘Well – you know.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course you mean to someone other than me.’
She had waited until the Saturday before she emailed Beth. She had written several versions of the email before
she sent it, trying to be both truthful and, at the same time, nonchalant enough to look less vulnerable than she felt. And when she reached Wilkes Street on Saturday afternoon, it was all rather anti-climactic, with Beth looking so much better and the house seeming comfortably relaxed; a nice young man with a South African accent at the kitchen table, which had one of the cats asleep on it, in a nest of papers. She had tried to relay her mission but it had felt wrong, and clumsy, even as she was speaking, and Beth had got the point, read the subtext at once and had seemed immediately at her most professional and decided, even amused. Stacey had wondered if Beth was hurt by Claire’s assumptions and whether Beth felt it was better to be in Claire’s thoughts, even for the wrong reasons, than not be in them at all. But she couldn’t ask. She had known Beth since they were both nineteen, but she still couldn’t ask. She had said, instead, ‘What will you do?’
‘Do?’ Beth said. ‘About what?’
‘About Claire.’
‘I haven’t decided. But I might ring her. I might.’
‘To . . . ?’
Beth had got out of her chair. She took her reading glasses out of her pocket and swung them by one arm. ‘To tell her that nobody could take me anywhere I didn’t want to go.’
‘Are – are you angry?’
Beth looked down at her. ‘No. Not angry. Why should I be?’
‘Well, it isn’t very nice, being talked about like this.’
‘Stace,’ Beth said. ‘Compared to being left, it’s a walk in the park. Come and meet Scott. He’s in the kitchen.’
——
‘She seemed fine,’ Stacey said to Steve that night. ‘In fact, I would say she was better than I’ve seen her for ages.’
Steve was carefully mixing a salad, turning the leaves and herbs over with slow precision. He had laid the table and put out candles, and polished glasses and bought steaks, which were lying on a wooden board, ready to cook, side by side. Steve was as neat in the kitchen as if he had been a sailor. He said, ‘Well, as Gaby says, she’s a grown-up.’
‘It isn’t just a matter of age, is it, being grown-up?’
Steve went on methodically turning the salad leaves.
‘I can’t say it again, Stace,’ he said. ‘You’re a wonderful woman and a great daughter and you haven’t failed. Not as a daughter, not in your career. Beth has made different choices, and lives with different circumstances. You have to stop comparing. You have to stop beating yourself up about everything under the sun.’ He balanced the salad servers across the top of the bowl and pushed it to one end of the table. ‘Anyway, I want to talk about something else.’
City of Friends Page 17
