‘Do you know what was weird?’
‘No—’
‘Even when she went to Spain,’ William said, ‘even when I was really pissed off with her, I didn’t like the thought of her with anyone else, I didn’t like the thought of her not caring whether it was me or some Spaniard she’d picked up in a bar. But today, looking at her, I didn’t care. I just didn’t. I can’t – I can’t even remember fancying her.’
‘Really,’ Tilly said.
William leaned forward.
‘It’s because of you. I can’t look at Susie now and see whatever it was I once saw because all I can think about is you.’
Tilly crossed her arms on her desk and leaned forward until her face was only inches from its surface.
‘Did you hear me?’ William said.
She nodded.
‘Am I being ignored?’
‘No,’ Tilly said. ‘It’s just that so much has happened today that I’m almost numb.’ She looked up at him, through her spectacles. ‘I tried to resign and my boss won’t have it. Then Susie and all the fall-out from that. And – well, and I heard from Henry.’
William went very still.
‘Why,’ Tilly said, ‘didn’t you tell me you were going to see him?’
‘I thought you’d stop me—’
‘I wouldn’t have. I’d – I’d have loved you for going.’ She looked down again.
William got up from his chair and came round her desk to stand beside her. He put one hand flat between her hunched shoulder blades.
‘Don’t say anything,’ Tilly said. She sat up a little, pushing her back against William’s hand. ‘He said you’d really pricked his conscience. He sent us his best wishes. He sounded so completely pompous.’
‘I don’t think he feels it,’ William said. ‘He feels awkward and at fault.’ He bent a little and slid an arm round Tilly.
‘Me too,’ Tilly said.
‘What?’
‘I get this e-mail,’ Tilly said, ‘Henry’s e-mail is waiting for me this morning and I spend all day in a complete turmoil about it, raging away at Henry, raging away at Gillon, rehearsing what I’ll say in calls I’ll never make and e-mails I’ll never send, and then Susie comes along and asks to come back to the flat and I tell her she can’t because of Alicia and she says OK then, she’ll ask you and, even though I see what she’s going to discover, I can’t stop her.’ She paused and looked round at William. ‘And now I can’t make self-righteous speeches to Gillon any more. Not even in my imagination.’
William straightened up.
‘You could, you know. The cases are hardly parallel.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We both got left. Henry left you. Susie left me.’
‘Splitting hairs,’ Tilly said. She looked straight ahead. ‘I am so tired of everything being such a mess.’
‘I’d take you for a drink,’ William said, ‘except I have to go back to the office. Stuff I didn’t get done on account of Susie.’
‘Where is she?’
‘I don’t know,’ William said.
‘Will—’
‘She’ll be OK. Susie will always be OK. She is twenty-six years old, for God’s sake.’
‘When I was twenty-six,’ Tilly said, ‘I’d just got the job here. I’d just got the Parson’s Green flat. I’d just made the first payment into my pension. I thought I’d got it sorted. All sorted.’ She looked down at her desk again and began to roll a yellow ballpoint pen back and forth. ‘When I found the flat, I signed the lease, not Henry, because I was the one with the monthly salary. I tried to persuade Henry to start a pension, I tried to persuade him to get an accountant.’
William gave a little grunt.
‘He said, “Please don’t try and run my life for me.”’
‘Yes.’
‘And now I can’t even run my own.’
William bent and kissed the back of Tilly’s neck.
‘Passing phase,’ he said.
After he had gone, Tilly performed the nightly ritual around her small office space that was designed to give the next day a sporting chance of starting bearably. This involved a degree of tidying up, as much throwing away as possible and, on nights when energy and optimism permitted, a list made for the next day, starting with the least attractive tasks. The final thing to be done each night was switching off the computer, having conscientiously checked and replied to any outstanding e-mails. Miles talked despairingly about the tyranny of e-mails. Most nights, faced with a barrage of last-minute communications from people similarly clearing their desks and their consciences, Tilly warmly agreed with him. She clicked on to her in-box. There were two new messages. The first was from a contributor asking for two days’ grace on copy delivery. The second was from Gillon. Tilly had not had any communication whatsoever from Gillon in months, no word of any kind. In fact, so silent had she fallen, so preoccupied had Tilly been with Henry’s exclusive life in Charleston, that Gillon had almost faded in Tilly’s consciousness to the status of an interlude rather than a relationship. Until this morning, that is. Until Henry’s stiff and almost formal announcement. And then this. Twelve hours after Henry’s message comes Gillon’s: twelve hours in which they would have discussed and analysed and wondered and decided. Together. Tilly leaned forward. She slid the mouse along its rubber mat and manoeuvred the cursor to rest precisely in the centre of Gillon’s tiny closed envelope. Then she clicked on ‘Delete’, and closed the computer down.
When Tilly walked into her flat an hour later, the telephone was ringing. Her first thought was that it might be Susie, desperate enough for shelter to set present resentments expediently aside for the moment. Her second thought was that it was unlike Susie to use a landline instead of a mobile, and her third that, if it was Susie, she would renew the offer of the sofa and face the inevitable consequences. She picked up the telephone, her mind suddenly filled with a renewed image of Susie’s pitiful bare feet in their glitter sandals.
‘Susie—’
‘It’s Paula,’ Paula said.
‘Paula!’
‘Is this a bad moment—’
‘No,’ Tilly said. ‘No.’ She dipped her shoulder to drop her bag on the floor and sank down beside it, cradling the receiver. ‘No. Oh Paula—’
‘I should have rung weeks ago,’ Paula said. ‘Story of my life! Should have done this. Should have done that. Haven’t done any of it.’
‘Me too,’ Tilly said. She was shaking. She put her free hand up to steady the one holding the receiver.
‘You OK?’
‘Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Did you—’
‘Yes,’ Paula said, ‘I heard from him. At last, I heard from him.’
‘I didn’t want to ring you. I didn’t want to seem to be complaining. He’s your brother, after all.’
‘Doesn’t mean I can’t see him straight,’ Paula said.
‘I don’t want you to tell me he’s a shit,’ Tilly said. ‘I don’t want anyone telling me that.’
Paula laughed.
‘He’s not a shit. He just couldn’t see what to do.’
‘Well, he can now.’
‘Yes,’ Paula said, in quite a different voice. ‘Bit of a shock for you.’
Tilly said slowly, easing her shoes off, toes against heels, ‘Maybe I should have seen it coming. Maybe I should have seen that, if you fall for somewhere or something in general, you’re quite likely to fall for someone, from that somewhere, in particular.’
‘I had a friend here,’ Paula said, ‘went to work in the children’s ward in a big hospital in Seville. Fell for the whole thing, Spain, sunshine, cute brown babies. Now she’s living in a flat the wrong side of the river with two kids of her own. He’s a hospital porter.’
‘Poor thing—’
‘Stupid thing, more like,’ Paula said.
‘Do you think Henry’s stupid?’
‘Half and half,’ Paula said. ‘Leaving you, yes. Starting somewhere new, no.’
‘He loved it from the
first moment,’ Tilly said. ‘He loved the city and the wetlands and the people and Gillon’s family and the lifestyle. Everything. He was like a new convert to some cult religion. Even if there hadn’t been Gillon, Paula, even if there hadn’t been another woman, I couldn’t have fought a whole culture. I couldn’t.’
‘No.’
‘Paula,’ Tilly said, ‘Paula, what I can’t get rid of is the feeling that somehow I just wasn’t enough. Not good enough, or pretty enough or interesting enough or sexy enough. That I failed. Somehow.’
‘Crap,’ Paula said.
‘But—’
‘I’ll tell you something,’ Paula said with force, ‘I’ll tell you something I see all the time at the hospital. If you’d got Henry, if you’d got Henry to stay with you and then you’d had a baby and being you you’d have wanted to go on working, I tell you what would have happened. You think Henry would have been everything. Well, maybe he would, till there was a baby. But a baby changes everything. You wouldn’t have been balancing your life, as you were, between Henry and work. You’d have been balancing it between work and a baby. Henry’d have been nowhere.’
‘Is this supposed to console me?’
‘Maybe,’ Paula said, ‘it’s supposed to show you that what you think you want now isn’t what you’ll want for ever.’
‘Will I’, Tilly said babyishly, suddenly, ‘stop missing Henry?’
Paula sighed.
‘Can’t tell you that.’
‘Do you miss Clive?’
‘Maybe,’ Paula said again.
‘I like intimacy,’ Tilly said. ‘I like having someone to talk to.’
‘It can suffocate you, intimacy, it can make you want to scream. D’you want to come up here?’
‘What,’ Tilly said, ‘to Leeds?’
‘Yes. For a weekend maybe. Meet some of the girls—’
‘I’d like that,’ Tilly said. ‘Thank you.’
‘I have to go. I’m on nights. Nights with the babies. Love it.’
‘Paula,’ Tilly said, ‘it was so nice of you to ring.’
‘You take care.’
‘Yes.’
‘Bye,’ Paula said.
Tilly put the telephone down and got to her feet. She went into the kitchen and, without really thinking, plugged the kettle in. The kitchen was very tidy. Alicia, a spare, quiet girl, was living with Tilly very deferentially. There was hardly any sign of her presence in the flat beyond her bedroom door, and even her frugal food items in the fridge were marshalled into an inconspicuous corner of a lower shelf. Sometimes, looking at these things, or the neat perforated plastic basket in which she stored her shampoo and lotions, Tilly had an acute nostalgia for chaos, for the carelessness of William and Susie, for the comfortableness of Henry’s toothbrush and bathrobe and dirty coffee mugs which were there because they had a right to be there, belonged there, were part of the unspoken mutual accommodations of people living together. She opened the fridge now to find the milk and her eye fell on Alicia’s low-fat yoghurts, Alicia’s pot of hummous, Alicia’s loaf of gluten-free bread clipped hygienically into a plastic bag. Tilly moved the milk and something fell to the floor. It was a small tube, a tube of transparent blue eye gel, which Susie had insisted on keeping in the fridge because she said it was the only answer to hangovers.
Tilly picked it up. The outside was smeared, still bearing the imprint of, presumably, Susie’s fingers.
She put the milk carton down on the kitchen counter and carried the eye gel back into the sitting room. She sat down on the floor again, beside the telephone, and dialled Susie’s number. It rang twice and then Susie’s recorded voice said, ‘Can’t talk now. Leave me a message.’
Tilly took a breath.
‘Susie,’ she said. ‘It’s Tilly. I don’t know where you are but I meant it about the sofa. You’d be welcome.’ She paused and then she said, with as much warmth as she could muster, ‘Very welcome.’
Chapter Seventeen
Margot was standing waiting again, on Oxford station. She still wore her sunglasses but had exchanged her fringed shawl for a denim jacket.
‘I wish you wouldn’t wear that,’ Gavin had said fretfully, over breakfast.
Margot had taken no notice, just continued to eat toast and to read the Guardian.
‘I wish’, Gavin said, ‘that you wouldn’t dress as if you were unattached.’
Margot had thought about this on her drive into central Oxford. The jacket – cropped, with a row of discreet studs across the back yoke – had belonged to the son of a friend of Margot’s who ran a New Age emporium dealing in everything from crystals through essential oils to self-help books on giving birth in a teepee positioned over favourable leylines. Margot did the accounts for the emporium and the quarterly Value Added Tax returns. She performed the same service for a handful of other small businesses in Oxford, including a café, an upholsterer and a man who dealt in antique agricultural implements. Margot was comfortable with figures. They responded to her. It wasn’t that she was especially precise but more that she saw logic and patterns in numbers which seemed to her quite natural. Long ago, when married to Tilly’s father, who was an accountant, she had soon perceived that she could quite easily have been a better accountant than he was; a far more creative one. Once she had seen that, and failed at the same time to stop observing with what fussiness and rigidity he approached his work, it had been almost impossible, and then quite impossible, to accord him the respect necessary for quality cohabitation. She had been amazed at how quickly her originally warm feelings for him had withered into something close to scorn. When she had tried, in her own offhand way, to describe this sad decline to her mother, her mother had said firmly that that was not what marriage was about, that when you promised to remain true to someone for better or worse, until death did you part, worse encompassed such things as discovering your husband to be not only a lesser mortal than you had originally thought him, but possibly also a lesser mortal than yourself. Margot – this was the 1970s – was both appalled and amused by such a notion.
‘You’d better have a baby,’ her mother said. ‘You’ll be too busy to even think like this if you have a baby.’
Nobody nowadays, Margot thought, had babies to help them keep a promise. They had babies because they wanted them, because they felt they had a right to motherhood, because they were in search of love or personal fulfilment, because they still believed, God help them, that a baby would make an elusive man suddenly focused and adoring. The change in attitude was enormous. It was, Margot thought, reflecting on Gavin’s objection to her denim jacket, as enormous as the change in attitudes to sex. Margot’s mother was very proud of the fact that Margot’s father, whom she had married in 1942, was the only man she had ever had sex with. Margot – and this was presumably what Gavin had picked up on, over breakfast – would have been appalled at such a lack of experience; it would have horrified her, shamed her, to have only known such woefully limited sexual partnering. In fact, during Tilly’s long liaison with Henry, it had often occurred to Margot that there were definite, inevitable limits to sexual experience there, that the constraints of a long, modern, living-together relationship bore some regrettable resemblances to the accepted conduct of the past. She glanced at her jacket. When her friend’s son had given it to her – he was twenty or so, and attractive in an unfinished kind of way – it had plainly been because he had been both disconcerted and entranced to realize himself capable of fancying a woman the same age as his own mother. Margot had easily accepted the jacket in precisely that spirit – and Gavin had missed none of it.
Gavin, whom Margot had married for his brain as well as for his careworn physical glamour, had become as unhinged by Margot’s basic self-assurance as all the previous men in her life had been. She was never surprised when people were attracted to her, or fell in love with her, nor was she able to be very concerned-or even interested – when, in their growing need for her attention as the relationship developed, her confidence b
ecame a threat, rather than a charm. Her colourful clothes, the careless way she skewered her hair – Tilly’s hair – up with pins and combs, the way she walked and sat and lounged against walls with the ease of a dancer, all became symbolic of her fundamental sep-arateness, of the impossibility of possessing her. She saw this, quite clearly, with Gavin. She saw that he was like someone desperately trying to coax a very alluring, very feral cat down out of a tree. She did not – it was not in her nature – play games with Gavin’s feelings, but nor was she, ever, going to play by the rules he wanted to impose. He was, after all, for all the apparent liberalism of his social and political attitudes, a man who felt diminished, even threatened, by the equality of opportunity resulting from the women’s movement. Margot sometimes wondered if he would have been so attracted to her had she been a fellow academic as well as a fascinating and liberated woman. His reaction to her robust independence of spirit was to make endless attempts to impose small curbs and controls on aspects of her appearance or conduct which seemed to him alarmingly wayward. It was primitive stuff, if you thought about it, but then relations between the sexes always seemed to come to that, in the end.
She looked up the railway line. The train was, of course, late.
‘I can’t believe,’ Tilly had said on the telephone, ‘I can’t believe I’m coming to see you for the second time in a month.’
Margot could hardly believe it either. Nor could she believe, given their history, given the capacity for emotional distance in her own nature, how pleased she was that Tilly was coming. It was intriguing, and something of an odd relief, to feel such anticipation at seeing someone who was not a new prospect in some dangerous area of her life, and to feel such concern for their welfare. It was extraordinary to be aware of such strength and simplicity of emotion. Margot turned her jacket cuff back once more to look at her wrist-watch. Perhaps she would, at the end of the weekend, give the denim jacket to Tilly.
Susie sat on the sofa in Tilly’s flat. She was wearing a T-shirt and knickers and socks and a sweater of Tilly’s she had found in Tilly’s bedroom. The previous night, because Tilly was away seeing her mother, Susie had slept in Tilly’s bed. She had also slept in Tilly’s pyjamas and washed her hair with Tilly’s shampoo, leaving the towel on the floor. When she went back to the bathroom to find her hairclips, Tilly’s flatmate, Alicia, was in there, picking up the towel.
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