Girl From the South (v5)

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Sorry, sweet. The spare-room radiator’s not working so even if this is spartan, it’s warm.’

  Tilly looked round her.

  ‘I like it.’

  ‘Jay and Mark liked it. When they were allowed to.’

  Tilly put her bag on the bed.

  ‘I’ll be down in one minute.’

  ‘Take your time. Gavin’s teaching till three, then some common-room thing. Are you drinking?’

  ‘Oh yes—’

  ‘Red or white?’

  ‘Anything—’

  ‘It isn’t the answer,’ Margot said, ‘but it helps let go. Chocolate never did that.’

  Tilly looked round the room. It was hexagonal, with windows in three outer sections of wall. Against the inner walls, two narrow beds had been arranged at angles, with a small table between them bearing a lamp made out of a model aeroplane. Apart from the aeroplane, and a tattered poster of Cindy Crawford in a white bikini above the chest of drawers, there were no signs that anyone, let alone two boys, had ever inhabited the room except for fleetingly and impersonally. The downstairs of the house was a riot of colour, all the Indian pinks and blues Tilly remembered from the first ten years of her childhood, all the mirrors and cushions and shawls and embroidered birds and flowers, but up here, it was like a shabby boarding school. It was almost as if, Tilly thought, rummaging for her hairbrush and lipgloss, as if Margot wasn’t going to bother with this room until she saw whether the relationship it represented was going to be worth it. In any case – this was perfectly clear, always had been clear-she wasn’t going to waste any personal investment on the off-chance.

  Tilly went downstairs, holding the cool wood banister rail, glancing into the bathroom and the spare bedroom and Gavin’s disordered study, and averting her gaze from his and Margot’s bedroom and the glimpse afforded of an immense bed under a rumpled zebra-striped cover. Margot was standing in the kitchen, holding a glass of red wine up to the light.

  ‘Bit blue. Hope it doesn’t strip the enamel off your teeth.’

  ‘Not sure I care,’ Tilly said. She regarded her mother. Margot had taken off the shawl and was wearing underneath it a tight ribbed black polo-necked sweater. ‘Do I look like you?’

  Margot took a swallow of wine.

  ‘I should hope so. With all due respect, you would not wish to look like your father.’

  ‘I’ve told you not to talk like that,’ Tilly said. ‘Anyway, he’s quite neat. Neat-looking.’

  ‘Neat is for sock drawers. Sit down.’

  Tilly sat. She looked into her wineglass.

  ‘I don’t know where to start.’

  ‘There isn’t anywhere,’ Margot said. ‘Is there? One thing just leads to another. You find yourself somewhere you never meant or wished to be with no very good idea of how you got there.’ She put a plate of cheese and nuts down beside Tilly. ‘Better eat.’

  Tilly said, ‘You always know where you’re going.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Then—’

  ‘Why do what I do, what I did? Because I thought it would be the answer.’

  Tilly picked up a cube of cheese and held it.

  ‘The answer?’

  ‘To not being alone. To not being left with myself.’

  ‘But you like yourself.’

  ‘Who gave you that idea?’

  ‘You did,’ Tilly said. She ate the cheese. ‘You did these things for you.’

  ‘Wrong. Because of me. Not for me.’

  ‘Did I love Henry because of me, then?’

  ‘Probably. And not to be alone, too.’

  Tilly gave a little shudder. She took a mouthful of wine. She said, ‘I hate alone.’

  Margot came and sat down opposite her. She spread her hands out on the table. Tilly saw her rings, her wedding ring, the big aquamarine Gavin had given her, the even bigger cameo that Tilly remembered from her childhood, that had belonged to Margot’s mother.

  ‘Sorry, sweet,’ Margot said. ‘That’s all there is.’

  ‘But companionship, growing together—’

  ‘You run on parallel lines,’ Margot said. ‘Overlapping sometimes, waving sometimes, but always alone.’

  ‘But love,’ Tilly said fiercely. ‘Loyalty, commitment.’ She stopped. She pushed her wineglass around. She said, ‘Henry couldn’t bear commitment.’

  ‘No,’ Margot said.

  ‘Mum, he just didn’t want to be with me. Not enough. Not enough to stay.’

  Margot looked up. She said, staring at Tilly, ‘Love is a gift. Loyalty is a gift. Commitment is a demand. Quite different.’

  ‘I didn’t demand—’

  ‘You don’t have to say anything, to demand.’

  Tilly said angrily, ‘You just don’t think people owe each other anything. Especially you. Do you?’

  Margot gave the cheese plate a nudge.

  ‘Eat up. There isn’t any lunch. I’m doing supper instead.’

  ‘Mum—’

  ‘I don’t wish I hadn’t left your father. But I do wish I’d taken you with me.’

  ‘To live with Max?’

  ‘To live with me.’

  ‘And Max.’

  ‘Well, he was there. Of course he was. But he wasn’t that important, in the end.’

  Tilly leaned forward.

  ‘What was?’

  ‘Me,’ Margot said. ‘You.’

  Tilly shook her head.

  ‘Is this what the Americans would call a Kodak moment?’

  ‘No,’ Margot said, ‘I don’t have those. I wish I’d made it plain to you how much you mattered to me, but I didn’t and there it is. I couldn’t have behaved in any other way. Your father couldn’t have behaved in any other way. I expect Henry – even though right now I would like to shoot him – couldn’t have behaved in any other way either. The fact that we all believed – maybe still believe-that we were doing right, if you think right means honest, doesn’t make any of it less sad. In a way, it makes it more so because our various cases were always hopeless.’

  ‘God,’ Tilly said. She closed her eyes. Behind her lids, she saw her mother in black Capri pants and red sandals climbing into her battered little car to drive away from her father and her, to Max. Her father had been crying. He was holding her hand and the jolts of his sobs came down his arm into her hand like dull electric shocks.

  Tilly said, ‘When did you work all this out?’

  ‘Gradually,’ Margot said.

  ‘And – and Gavin?’

  ‘Gavin isn’t the answer, any more than Max was or your father was. The answer isn’t another person.’

  ‘Is this’, Tilly said, sipping her wine, ‘supposed to be comforting?’

  Margot looked at her.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘That I may want Henry, but I don’t need him?’

  ‘There,’ Margot said. ‘You always were quick.’

  She got up and went over to a large wooden fruit bowl on the kitchen counter.

  ‘Apple?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  Margot leaned against the counter. She tossed an apple lightly from hand to hand.

  ‘You can’t reconcile everything. There are some things you just can’t talk away. People take positions which are entirely true to themselves, for themselves, but which simply can’t be harmonized with someone else’s equally valid position.’ She took a bite out of the apple and said, through it, ‘It’s so vulgar to think mere talk will solve everything.’

  Tilly said sadly, ‘I longed to talk to Henry.’ She paused, and then she added, ‘And I longed to talk to you.’

  Margot came to sit down opposite her again.

  ‘I haven’t made it very easy.’

  ‘I thought’, Tilly said, putting a nut between her teeth, ‘that you just wanted to go on and on being in love.’

  ‘Oh, I did.’

  ‘And do you still?’

  ‘There’s no adventure like it,’ Margot said. ‘No high to compare. But you can’t make a life
out of it.’ She grinned. ‘Think how many men you’d use up.’

  ‘I’m sorry to sound wet,’ Tilly said, ‘but I long to be sure I’ll fall in love again.’

  ‘Can’t promise,’ Margot said, ‘but I can predict with some certainty that you will.’ She took another bite of apple. ‘You’re wonderful.’

  Tilly blushed. She felt her colour springing up her neck and cheeks in a hot, rosy rush.

  ‘Oh—’

  ‘True,’ Margot said. ‘I couldn’t hold a candle to you, even in my prime.’

  ‘Mum—’

  The back door to the kitchen opened, and a tall, dishevelled, dark-haired man appeared carrying a canvas holdall of books and papers. He looked at them both, at the wineglasses.

  ‘I knew’, he said to Margot in a voice which had a distinct undertone of hurt to it, ‘that I was missing something.’

  ‘Gavin,’ Margot said, ‘you’re early.’

  Margot gave Tilly a carrot cake and a bag of apples to take back to London.

  ‘Pathetic,’ she said. ‘What do I think I’m doing?’

  ‘A little retrospective mothering,’ Gavin said from behind his newspaper. He had stuck to Margot and Tilly like paint all weekend, determined not to miss a single word. On Saturday night, he had brought an untidy pile of some academic papers into the kitchen where Margot was cooking supper and Tilly was intermittently helping, and spread them invasively all over the table. Then he sat in the centre of one of the long sides of the table, where he was most in Margot’s way, and bent his battered, handsome face over his work in a manner that defied questioning.

  ‘Ignore,’ Margot wrote on a pad. She held it up to Tilly. Tilly looked at Gavin.

  ‘Really?’

  Margot nodded. She handed Tilly two onions and a knife.

  ‘You said Henry was seeing someone.’

  Tilly nodded.

  ‘Do you know who?’

  Tilly shook her head.

  ‘There’s someone I could ask, this nice girl who didn’t mean to ask Henry to Charleston but sort of did and he just jumped at the offer. But I can’t. Ask, I mean.’

  ‘No,’ Margot said, ‘you can’t. But the imagination is a fiend.’

  ‘Telling me,’ Gavin said loudly.

  ‘What I can’t bear,’ Tilly said, ‘is that he’s over me so quickly. That it’s only a matter of months before he’s found someone else.’

  Margot passed her a chopping board.

  ‘Probably couldn’t bear the pain.’

  Tilly’s head jerked up.

  ‘What pain?’

  ‘Men only feel pain,’ Margot said, ‘about love affairs, when they’re over.’

  ‘Not true!’ Gavin shouted. He flung his pen down. ‘Men feel the pain of uncertainty about being loved all the time!’

  Margot winked at Tilly.

  ‘An uncertainty which is only assuaged by having sex.’

  Tilly began to laugh, weeping faintly over her onions.

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Billy Connolly,’ Margot said.

  ‘Mum—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I never thought I’d say this. But I’m glad I came.’

  Now, sitting on the returning train with the carrot cake stowed away with her sponge bag, the gladness remained, in a small, quiet pool, in her mind. She’d drunk too much, she’d hardly slept, she’d watched her mother and stepfather circling round each other like two antagonistic cats on a wall, but she’d come away with something she’d never hoped to have, a realization that somehow, over the years, she had moved from somewhere on the periphery of Margot’s life to somewhere strangely close to the centre. And there was something in the curiously impersonal way that this message had been delivered that gave it strength and truth. Margot had made no speeches, had hardly touched Tilly except to embrace hello and goodbye, but had managed to convey – and this without condemning Henry – that she was on Tilly’s side. It was a novel sensation, thinking about Margot in her jeans and boots and shawl, her hair held up haphazardly with lacquered Chinese combs, to realize that this decided, often arbitrary creature was actually there for support, should Tilly need her. It wouldn’t be conventional support; it wouldn’t be a shoulder to cry on or encouragement to rubbish Henry and all his feckless gender; but it would be there. She’d made it plain. She’d come to London, she’d travel with Tilly, she’d put off other things she was doing if Tilly needed her. It was not atonement for the past, Tilly understood that: the language of remorse and regret was not Margot’s language. But it was, instead, an acknowledgement that this crisis in Tilly’s life had precipitated a realization that they had both got to a point where something that had never quite been possible became very possible indeed. When Tilly left the train at Paddington, she felt so much better than she had for months and months that she threw caution to the winds, and took a taxi home.

  William was lying on the sofa in Tilly’s sitting room. The room was very tidy, apart from a slew of Sunday newspapers, and there was a vase of red tulips on the coffee table.

  ‘William!’ Tilly said.

  He sat up.

  ‘I still had Susie’s keys. Sorry.’

  Tilly dropped her bag just inside the doorway.

  ‘Are you my new lodger?’

  ‘I’d love to be.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Tilly said. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’

  She took her coat off and dropped it on her bag. Then she came to sit on the sofa by William’s feet.

  ‘So what are you doing here?’

  ‘Moping,’ William said.

  ‘You never mope.’

  ‘You’d gone, Susie’s gone, saw half a crap movie, thought fuck this, I’ll go and wait for Tilly.’

  Tilly looked round her.

  ‘And do a little light housework while I wait.’

  William looked too.

  ‘Not bad, eh?’

  ‘Brilliant,’ Tilly said.

  He leaned forward and took her nearest hand.

  ‘You look fantastic. I thought you’d be wrung out.’

  ‘It was fantastic. My mum was fantastic. I’ve had no sleep and about three bottles of red wine and feel amazing.’

  ‘Heart-to-heart?’

  ‘Well, kind of. Heart-to-heart isn’t how my mum operates. But she did, as they say, the business.’

  William let go of Tilly’s hand and swung his legs off the sofa.

  ‘Bloody annoying. I wanted to be the only business. Now then. Tea? Coffee? More red wine?’

  Tilly began to giggle.

  ‘More red wine.’

  William stood up.

  ‘The depravity of Oxford—’

  ‘Oh, it is. You can’t imagine.’

  William went round the sofa and through to the kitchen.

  ‘Can I meet your mother?’

  ‘No,’ Tilly said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know her very well yet.’

  ‘Can I then?’

  ‘I’ll see.’

  ‘Tilly—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Come here.’

  Tilly got up and followed him into the kitchen. He was rummaging in a drawer.

  ‘You’ve moved the corkscrew.’

  ‘I’ve moved everything.’

  She reached past him and opened a cupboard door. The corkscrew was inside, hanging on a hook.

  ‘There.’

  He turned and smiled down at her, a sudden shining smile. She took a step back.

  ‘Do you know something?’ William said.

  ‘What—’

  ‘Now that Susie has actually gone, left, it’s something of a relief.’

  ‘Very loyal.’

  ‘Works both ways—’

  Tilly said, trying not to watch William’s hands on the bottle and the corkscrew, ‘My mother says loyalty is a gift but commitment is a demand.’

  ‘Your mother is probably quite right.’

  ‘How do we get to this point, then,’ T
illy said, ‘where we feel someone owes us something?’

  William turned to get glasses out of a cupboard.

  ‘The answer is,’ William said, ‘when we have given more than we should have.’ He put two glasses on the table.

  ‘Why should?’

  ‘Because,’ William said, pouring wine slowly and carefully, ‘we didn’t give because we wanted to be generous. We gave because we wanted to control.’

  ‘Oops,’ Tilly said. ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Or,’ William said, still pouring, his voice very peaceful, ‘we gave, not because the person – in this case an entirely gorgeous girl – wanted to go on being given to, but because we were absolutely at a loss as to how else to make it completely plain to her that we were longing to make love to her.’

  Tilly said nothing. William stopped pouring and set the bottle down on the table. He picked up the two glasses and looked gravely at them.

  ‘You,’ he said. ‘Just you. For years. Decades, it feels like.’

  He turned to face her, still holding the wineglasses.

  ‘This is your chance,’ William said. ‘This is your last chance to tell me to fuck off because your heart still belongs, goddamn and blast it, to Henry.’

  Tilly stood up a little straighter. She looked up at William. He appeared to her at once completely familiar and also completely new. She opened her mouth to say something, and nothing happened. William raised the wineglasses to shoulder-height.

  ‘Try again.’

  Tilly cleared her throat. She put a hand up to the clip that held her hair, and took it out.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said.

  And William, leaning forward between his two upraised hands, bent to kiss her on the mouth.

  Later, his face pressed to her back between her shoulder blades, he said, ‘Was I wonderful?’

  ‘Seven out of ten,’ Tilly said. He could hear that she was smiling.

  ‘You were wonderful.’

  ‘What does wonderful mean?’ Tilly said. ‘Skilled? Accommodating? Grateful?’

  ‘Grateful,’ William said.

  He pushed his knees in behind hers, pulling her hard against him.

  ‘I think I’m in love,’ William said.

  ‘Please don’t talk about love.’

  ‘What can I talk about?’

  ‘Anything,’ Tilly said. ‘But not love.’

  He pushed her hair aside so that he could kiss the back of her neck.

  He said, into her neck, ‘Do you have peace of mind?’