Attachment

by Isabel Fonseca

  “We’re moving away from crisps and cleaning products and that sort of thing.” Dan was keen to tell Jean about the new accounts. “Mark’s given everyone so much freedom in the office—you can really see the new talent taking off. So, for example, you’ve got Theo and Blake working more or less independently on the National Gallery and the Arts Council. And most of the time, well, I’m pitching new stuff—new clients but also new gear: high-speed trains, electric cars, improved pedestrian signage; cool fluorescent self-locking bicycles for the urban rider…”

  “You’re such a boy—very focused on modes of transportation.” Jean liked to listen to him talk. She realized Mark never really told her anything about work; as he would say, he “spared her.” She was thinking she didn’t want to be spared. “And what’s this I hear about a Clio?” she asked, knowing that Dan had picked up a prize for the firm at the ad industry’s awards ceremony: for best public advertisement, poster category. Mark told her that Dan had worked on it in his free time, pro bono, and it had been selected for the new Women’s Aid campaign.

  “Have you seen it?” He looked at her sidelong, blowing smoke away from her out of the corner of his mouth.

  “No, not yet,” she said apologetically, wondering how old he was. “But I’m sure I will.”

  “Only marginally less depressing than the old one,” he said. “You know, the one with a blurry, sepia-tinted bint holding a steak over her eye with one hand while dialing the emergency services with the other. Mine has a mobile, no bruises, and the girl’s texting. You’re supposed to be reminded of the old advert—and the same old problem. But my girl, she’s a looker, in addition to being in color and in razor-sharp focus—yep, that’s what clinched it. You can actually see the girl.” He laughed, suppressing a cough.

  “Well, it’s accurate, I’m sure. And that’s useful,” she said with effort. The ad didn’t sound very remarkable—every ad she’d seen in London today seemed to feature a pretty girl texting. “Most domestic abuse probably is fairly hidden, right? No welt doesn’t mean no abuse.”

  “Exactly right, Mrs. Hubbard. Could be that lass right there,” he said nodding his head toward a busty redhead pressing coins into the cigarette machine.

  “Mrs. Hubbard” again. Maybe it was just that everyone agreed with her: Jean was about the ugliest name in the language. One short of Mildred—or Phyllis, for that matter. She looked over at the redhead, impressed that a girl with such a rack had the nerve to wear a sweater so tight and so fluffy, and pink for a redhead—there practically used to be a law against it. Too confident, anyway, for a victim of abuse, Jean thought, still staring. The chubby girl looked up as if she sensed they were talking about her and broke into a gummy big-toothed smile. She waved childishly at Dan, who winked back and turned to Jean.

  “Another half?”

  Jean glanced at her watch—quarter to five. “Okay,” she said. “You know her?”

  “Yes ma’am. Shirley. Our latest intern, just three months in the saddle. Shall I introduce you?”

  But the girl in pink had vanished, as if she’d fallen through the floor. Dan shrugged as if this was no more than you could expect from interns these days and headed back to the bar. The place was filling with young office workers, their arms spiking the air as in a classroom, trying to get the bartender’s attention.

  Lots of people leaving work early, she thought, wanting to be off herself, regretting the beer on the way. But Dan was good company. She realized that, for the first time all day, she was not annoyed by anything.

  Okay, he was a little cocky, but she liked this certainty that seemed not so much earned as a part of him, like his shortened vowels and his wide, athletic stance, like his inky hair and the jut of his big jaw, the sharp break in his long, thin nose. Dan sounded like Ted Hughes, that’s who he sounded like. In fact he looked a little like the great northern bard—Ted Hughes before life turned his hair gray. Jean, momentarily embarrassed to be caught studying him, looked down at the rain-soaked suede boots she hoped would revive with some vigorous brushing. Dan, she saw, had very wide feet and sturdy inelegant shoes that didn’t mind the rain and didn’t mind how they looked.

  “There’s something different about you,” she said. “When did we last see each other? At the Christmas party?” He looked straight at her as she studied his face. “I know what it is: your glasses. You’re not wearing glasses.”

  “Yeah, I finally got contacts,” he said, pleased she noticed. Jean held it against him only a little, this small vanity that didn’t go with the rest of his rugged self. Hard to imagine him getting the invisible sequins into his eyes with those thick, stifflooking laborer’s fingers; and she thought of Mark’s long tapering hands, stabbing ineffectually at the tublet of milk on the train. Jean guessed that she and Dan didn’t have much more to say to each other, but also that the silence was fine. You could say nothing, or you could talk to him about anything at all: a discovery that made her feel lucky, as if she’d just found a twenty-pound note in the pocket of an old jacket.

  Jean drained her second shandy, not as delicious as the first. “Remember that intern—Natalie, I think her name was? The one who wanted to be a dancer.”

  “Sure do. She was great.”

  “Was great? You mean she left? So she didn’t take your advice. Don’t quit the day job.”

  “You remember that?” Dan turned to look at her, intrigued, and a little surprised. “Well, she wasn’t as good a listener as you. I don’t know why I bother. No one ever takes my advice.”

  “What about Giovana? Is she a good listener?” It just popped out. She offered him a cool, corrective little smile, as if she was not only unruffled but maybe even amused by the whole business.

  He stared at her, and his characteristically mobile face went still. He didn’t exhale the smoke in his mouth as he waited for another word, not yet sure what she knew. Then he grinned—or was that a smirk? So he did know about Giovana. Of course he did. Maybe everybody knew. And why was he giving her that loony look, or was it supposed to be “meaningful”? But no, this was just intense embarrassment on her behalf. She immediately set to framing the disaster, telling herself she should not be humiliated, that it was good that Dan knew she knew. And if he chose to pass it on, well, maybe this was the only way she would ever communicate with Mark who over all these months she had utterly failed to confront.

  Some new arrivals in the pub stopped by their sofa, and Dan leapt up to talk to them. Jean didn’t care that he didn’t introduce her; she just wanted to go home. And now she could stop pretending, as she occasionally had, that it was all an elaborate hoax. Giovana was no joke, and what’s more, she was clearly still around. When Jean rose to go she saw the room was jammed and the clock above the bar said six o’clock.

  “Shit. Vic will be home any minute.”

  Dan touched her arm, sensing she was about to sneak away. “Wait,” he said, and broke off his other conversation. “Let me get you a cab.”

  Outside, the rain had broken and left behind a gray and yellow sky so bright at the bottom it looked manufactured, like the glow from a distant stadium. She violently inhaled the clean air and wobbled on her boots. Dan put up a steadying hand and squeezed her elbow.

  “What are your plans for the weekend?” he asked, keeping an eye out for a taxi.

  “Vic has a big do in Cambridge tomorrow night. A flurry of twenty-firsts, a hail of twenty-firsts. Sooo, I will probably do as Mark has urged me to, and see a double double feature of Bulgarian documentaries.”

  They both laughed, knowing Mark’s preference in movies for what he himself called the billion-dollar bloodbath.

  “Actually,” Dan said, pulling up the collar of his leather jacket and plunging his hands into his jeans pockets, “there’s a brilliant Chinese film festival on at the NFT. Would that do?”

  “It might, so long as it’s all double features, no intervals, and preferably no subtitles. And please, black and white only.”

  “I’m dying t
o see the uncut version of He Lu Hui’s Shroud of Dew, but I have to admit, I can’t find a sinner in Christendom who’ll go with me. Tomorrow’s the last night. You mad enough to come with me? Please say yes.”

  “Hmmm, Shroud of Dew, huh?” Then she saw that he was serious, looking at her as if something depended on it. “All right. I will,” Jean said, looking up from a level head, gamely and quietly as the question demanded, feeling that she was in a movie herself, not having given it even a minute’s thought, as if this conversation had no bearing on what she might do tomorrow night or any other night of her life.

  “You won’t chuck, will you?” Dan asked.

  Jean liked the way he said “chook,” along with “look” for “luck.” “No, I won’t chuck,” she promised. “Now may I go home?”

  Dan stuck two fingers in his mouth and let out an almighty whistle, bringing a passing cab to a halt right in front of them.

  “That was good,” Jean said, still facing him and folding herself into the cab while he held the door open. She pushed the window down and said “Thanks,” which she meant, resting her paws on the glass like an upright rabbit.

  Vic was leaning on the railing when she arrived. Jean, shelling out her third twenty-pound note of the day, was stricken.

  “Oh darling, I am so sorry,” she said. Dan with his orange umbrella and black leather jacket receded like a Halloween dream. “Where’s your key, sweetheart?” When she kissed her she smelled smoke on her breath. So, she smokes. No point asking her.

  “Vikram has it. I thought you’d be here. Don’t worry about it, Mum.”

  “Do you mind if we stay home?” She was blindly sifting through the rubble at the bottom of her damp bag. “We can order in. I am so sick of being out. The jet lag is really beginning to hit me.” And that second shandy, she thought as the door swung open and banged into the wall. Elizabeth was whining, her cat’s cry almost human. Definitely not going to any Cloud of Mist at the NFT, she thought, remembering her ridiculous promise. She imagined Mark’s amusement at the image of her setting off south of the river, for a Chinese documentary, and wondered if he’d called. Just then, she saw his mobile phone, left behind on the hall table.

  “I don’t mind at all. Ramen, or are you depressed by a noodle dinner? I’ve given up meat.”

  “You have? Wow. Impressive, I guess. Your pick, darling,” Jean said, kicking off her boots and shaking out her hair like a dog. “I just want a crack at that bath. God, I’m glad to be home. Do you mind if I go first? How’s your day been?”

  “Good,” Vic said, already at the bend in the stairs going down to the kitchen. “I’m going to feed Elizabeth. I have things to tell you when you come down.”

  What things? Smoking vegetarianism was enough news for one day. Jean ran a bath. Naked, waiting for the tub to fill, she caught herself in the mirror. The right breast was bruised, a blush irradiating out from the biopsy spot; she thought for a moment of Dan and his campaign against domestic violence.

  The white marble bath surround was lined with unfamiliar products—pink-luster bath-oil beads, discount cream shampoo and iridescent cream rinse in two-gallon jugs. Even Vic wouldn’t buy this stuff, Jean thought. Traces of the heart-broken Maya Stayanovich. Traces she saw, looking around, she was going to have to borrow.

  Wait, there was a tube of something maybe a little nicer. Jean unscrewed it and sniffed—that faintly medicinal gel Mark had on his hair this morning. She held out her arm as far as it would reach and read the label through the steam rising from the tub: Ortho-Gynol jelly. She smiled. Mark had gotten the wet look with Maya’s contraceptive cream. Vic will love this, she thought, so pleased to be home, not for a moment considering that the tube might belong to her daughter. Stepping into the bath she stretched right out, keen to wash off the Hope and Anchor, and sank below the waterline.

  Jean had no idea how long she’d been soaking when she heard Vic hollering. It used to drive her crazy, the preference of her family for yelling over walking ten feet into the next room. Now it filled her with happiness.

  “Mum!”

  “Yeah?!” She wasn’t above yelling back—not ready to abandon her soak.

  “It’s Dad!”

  “I’m in the bath! Get a number!” Silence. Mark’s call seemed to make the water go cold. She wrapped herself in a flowerpower Barbie beach towel—more Maya. She did like the look of that cosmetics console, though—a dozen shades of pink and purple eye shadow arranged in the drawers of a chromed bureau for a doll. Jean dressed quickly. Checking the mirror, she raised her eyebrows to reverse the frown that had become her neutral gear and went downstairs.

  “Dad sounded good,” said Vic, sitting on the counter, fiddling with her empty wineglass. It didn’t seem very long ago that she and her friends were standing right here on crates, rolling out cookies.

  “And?” said Jean. “Did you get a number?” Jean was sure the answer would be no; for all she knew, he’d called from a hotel in Mayfair.

  “He said they were about to go in to dinner but he’d call back and that he hadn’t killed anything or anyone. And, oh yeah, that everyone including him is drinking ‘lakefuls’ of Riesling.”

  She could feel her daughter eyeing her as she got out the plates and cutlery, padding around in a pair of loose yoga pants that hadn’t made the island cut and Maya’s giant Garfield slippers.

  “Hey Mum, you look really good in those.”

  “These flattering pantaloons?” Jean held them out at their greatest, clownish width. “What do you think? Ideal pants for a pantisocracy, everybody gets a pair.”

  “No thanks,” said Vic, “not even for the greater good. But those, on the other hand, now you’re talking.” Vic was smiling down at Jean’s feet.

  “Oh yes, I know,” Jean said, frowning. “Aren’t they gorgeous. I must get my own pair, some black ones. Sort of panthery, you know, for evening.” She pointed one bulbed orange toe. “Do you think Elizabeth might be jealous?” Jean picked up the cat and stroked her silky gray coat. Then she told Vic about Maya’s other contribution to family fashion, the unorthodox quiff.

  “I can’t believe Dad put that stuff in his hair,” Vic said, refilling her glass.

  Jean, who hoped this story wouldn’t be wheeled out too often, doubted she could have this kind of fun with a boy child. At such moments, she positively envied single mothers. This was the basic relationship; even biologically they were on the same side. “Take it easy,” she said. “You haven’t eaten anything.” And then, not wanting to go that way, she said, “Poor Dad. We are not telling him. He’ll be miserable.”

  “Of course we’re telling him. In fact, I think we should call right now and make an announcement over the PA system at the Biergarten.”

  Biergarten. Jean smiled. She herself had pictured a long, dark dining hall festooned with link sausages and lined with mounted boars’ heads and, for servers, Fräuleins with yellow braids and heaving bosoms, packed into scoop-necked peasant blouses. And where was the Fräulein Giovana in this festive scene? Upstairs, she supposed, kneeling by the bed and praying.

  The doorbell was so loud that after more than twenty years it still made Jean jump.

  The two women sat opposite each other across the scrubbed pine table, the low enamel lamp casting a circle of yellow light, and sipped their noodle soup in silence. Jean thought Victoria looked too thin. She’d never been fat, but now, sucking broth off her porcelain spoon, she had that sunken, haunted Hubbard look where you could easily make out the shape of the skull. But that was all you could make out.

  Her generation was so secretive, Jean thought. “Do you see much of the old gang?”

  “Some,” said Vic, laughing at her mother’s archaic slang. “Maya, obviously. And Fi. It’s Charlotte’s party tomorrow night, though I hardly ever see her now that she’s at Cambridge.”

  Quite a few of her friends were a little older, but then Vic had grown up alone with her parents. Or with her parents, alone. “What, the gang plus Vikram? It
must be a little different.”

  “Yeah, course it is.”

  Jean sighed, giving up. “What is that pink on your eyes?” she asked, changing tack. Eye shadow, obviously, but evenly spread over both lids, deepening in hue at the brow bone, like stage makeup spread not to cover but to illustrate a bruise. Worried about her Phyllis-like tone, she added, “I like it.”

  “You do?” Vic said, tapping her eyelids as if to check that the swelling had gone down. “My friend Sophie gave it to me.” She said, glancing up, “I mean your friend Sophie.”

  “My friend Sophie? Do I have a friend called Sophie?” Jean asked, rising to clear the bowls.

  “I told you about her in my letter. I wanted to ask you…well, I think she’s Dad’s friend really. I guess. Or her mother was or something.”

  “You mean Sophie de Vilmorin.”

  “You do know her!”

  Why Vic was so delighted Jean couldn’t imagine. She remembered the postcard in the Wallace Collection: the pale duchess. “Funny you should mention her because just today I saw a portrait that looked like her. I couldn’t think who it reminded me of and that’s who. Serendipity. Salad?” She didn’t like Vic’s blazing eyes, looking at her as she would have, at least a few years ago, if Jean had confessed to a casual acquaintance with Kylie Minogue. “What was she doing here, anyway? You said in your letter that she’d come round.”

  “I invited her. But then she said you’d invited her too, when you saw her in the dry cleaners, was it? I kept seeing her around—I thought maybe she was some weird Camden lesbian. She was always smiling at me—and then one day, me and Vikram and Maya were having breakfast at the caff and she like came right up to me and said ‘You are Victoria Hubbard?’” Vic said her name with a good French accent, opening her eyes wide to show alarm. “So we got talking and she said she used to live here. Here in Albert Street—in this house.”