My friends all thought I was lucky having Donald as a boyfriend. But then I suspect that they would have thought I was lucky to have had Lisa Hicks’s spotty brother Seth as a boyfriend.
‘You’re really very pretty when you’re not scowling,’ Arabella had said only the other day. Behind her was a row of nodding heads. ‘But you don’t seem to have any idea of how boys like their girls to be. You’re so… so argumentative. Aggressive, even. You know when you argue a point? You just never give up.’ She had looked at me with a mixture of reproach and concern in her soft hazel eyes. ‘Boys don’t really like that kind of thing.’
‘It’s not for them to like,’ I said. ‘If I want to argue a point I argue a point.’ Behind Arabella the group – Posy, Fee, Lisa and Beth – looked at each other and sighed.
‘There you are,’ Arabella had said, sighing with the rest of them. ‘That’s just the worst attitude when it comes to boys. You can think like that, but you must never ever show it. Don’t you know anything about how to handle a man?’
I told them I had watched my mother handle my father.
But now I had Donald and all my friends were pleased and surprised, in almost equal measure.
That April I turned eighteen and on my birthday Donald asked me to marry him. Shortly afterwards, while I was still on holiday from school, Olivia Stendal came over for her spring visit.
‘What a coincidence, Linus and Esther both getting engaged at the same time, both at an unsuitably early age and both to people of whom we don’t approve.’ My mother smiled, making out that she was joking, but the smile was brittle as she poured Olivia another glass of Chablis. These days, I thought, as I held out my own glass to be refilled but was ignored, everything about Audrey was brittle: her hair, which seemed finally to have rebelled against years of perming and bleaching and backcombing and lacquering; her voice, pulled thin after years of reaching out to be heard; her laugh, running away from the ever-threatening tears. Audrey herself said it was all due to a decrease in hormones, but personally I put it down more to the constant struggle to keep reality at bay, the strain of stretching truth just that little bit further. She had, in her time, been a painter and a poet, and an interior designer, she had been a garden designer and a student of Post-modernist paintings, but each time the brightly coloured butterfly of success had eluded her. So she had told herself and the rest of the world that she was, at least, the adored wife of a great intellectual. Lately, though, she’d had to resort to statements like ‘Men need time to themselves’, as Madox went away for yet another vague-sounding weekend or research trip. ‘Give them a long enough leash and they’ll always come running back in the end.’ To me it sounded as if she had already half given up.
‘You don’t think he might be seeing someone else?’ I had asked the other day. It wasn’t that I wanted to cause trouble for my father, or that I wished to cause my mother more pain. Far from it. But this was the eighties, a decade for strong women. I wanted to tell my mother that she didn’t have to put up with it any more. I couldn’t bear to watch as she spent yet another day in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
My engagement to Donald had not helped. Donald had short hair and wore suits. There was also that thing about him being a Young Conservative. And when Audrey flittered around the room wrapped in mental chiffon, engaging him in talk about the latest play or concert or exhibition, he would just smile engagingly at her and explain that he liked art when he had time for it, which sadly wasn’t often. He, in turn, tried to speak to her of what he termed Real Life, assuming incorrectly that Audrey would have some idea of what he referred to. Worst of all, to my mother, he was planning to go into… hum, ah, there was no getting away from it… the City. ‘A money man, darling!’ Audrey had shuddered – Audrey who loved money and spent more of the stuff in a month than most people got through in a year. But she was born to dissemble. I was sure, for example, that she had convinced herself that there were two completely separate things known as lamb; the white fluffy baa ones that frolicked in the fields as you passed by on the motorway and the garlicky pink-in-the-middle ones that lay very still on your plate.
Olivia had finished her smoked chicken salad and put her fork down. ‘It’s their beds; they made them, now they have to lie in them.’
‘But why have they made those beds?’ Audrey lamented. ‘There she is, my only child, four A levels, university offers coming out of her ears, the world at her feet, announcing out of the blue that she’s got engaged to this… this rather ordinary young man and saying that she would take a course in…’ Here Audrey had to pause and refresh herself with a sip of wine, ‘… in typing.’ It was all too much, it seemed. Audrey sank back against her chair and lit a cigarette. ‘It’s as if you’re deliberately setting out to be ordinary yourself,’ she said, turning to me.
‘What’s wrong with ordinary?’ I wanted to know.
‘Nothing, Esther, for ordinary people.’
‘Why are you in such a hurry to get married?’ Olivia asked me. ‘And can’t you go to university first?’
I explained that I no longer wanted to do law and that university would just be another waste of time, like childhood. There are too many people already aimlessly cluttering up courses because someone has told them they should have a university education. ‘I want to get on with real life and I want to know where I’m heading. Donald and I are right for each other, so why wait? And with all that dating and searching-for-love stuff over with, I can concentrate on what I really want to do with my life. In the meantime, I’ll learn to type.’
‘Think about what you want to do while you’re at university,’ Olivia insisted. ‘And why marry? There’s plenty of time for that later. Being so young, you really are stacking the odds against it working in the long term.’
‘That’s what I keep telling her,’ Audrey said. ‘Why can’t they just live together? And anyway, I don’t even think you’re really in love with the boy. Not that I can blame you.’
I looked sternly at her. ‘You’re my mother, allegedly. You’re not supposed to talk like that. And anyway, as I see it, all long-term relationships come under threat sooner or later. It really doesn’t matter who you are, what age you were when you got together or even, to an extent, who you’re with as long as you’re good friends and have stuff in common because in the end it all boils down to much the same: you fall out of love. So why put so much emphasis on being in love to begin with? It all comes down to an act of will. I see it as a very exciting challenge.’
‘You call that exciting?’ Audrey looked at me as if she were trying to figure out where she had picked me up and why.
Olivia sighed and shook her head. ‘You know so much for one who has lived so little.’ I couldn’t work out if she had just insulted me or paid me a compliment. ‘Still,’ she went on. ‘At least you seem to have it all worked out. With Linus, I really don’t know. Lotten, his fiancée, is his first girlfriend. She’s as determined as hell and he, well it’s like he’s two people, this fey, almost slow young man who looks as if he’s just stepped off at the wrong planet, yet, when it comes to his work, he’s someone entirely different. Then he’s determined, focused, one hundred per cent committed…’
‘Typing,’ I heard Audrey mumble, as she opened another bottle of wine. ‘This is my daughter, Esther, she types.’
Olivia raised her glass. ‘Well, good luck, Esther.’
Bertil bade Linus sit down on the sofa beneath the portrait of his grandfather. ‘About this marriage you’re proposing…’ He got no further, interrupted as he was by that laugh, as high-pitched and abandoned as ever. Bertil’s forehead creased into the familiar frown. It was well trained for the purpose, Linus thought and he stopped laughing.
‘What I’m trying to say, Linus, is that twenty-one is awfully early to settle down. Can’t you at least wait until you’ve qualified? And what is Lotten going to do with herself in Copenhagen? So far you’ve done remarkably well. You’ve got everything ahead of you, so why tie yourself down at s
uch an early age?’ As his son said nothing, Bertil continued, ‘I have to tell you that your stepmother and I are not at all happy with your decision. However, it is your life and if you persist with this course of action we will go along with whatever is required of us.’
Linus got to his feet and put out his hand, taking his father’s and shaking it firmly. ‘Thank you. I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that. Thank you.’
Bertil looked sharply at his son. There he stood, tall and lanky, with a huge smile on his handsome face. His grey eyes held no hint of mockery and their innocence and the wayward curl of his fair hair made him look younger even than his twenty-one years. If he had not known better – Linus had come top of his class at the Copenhagen college two years running – he would have thought his only son was a half-wit. ‘I’m surprised that Lotten’s parents aren’t a little more concerned,’ he said.
‘They like me,’ Linus said placidly, as he sat back down. ‘And they know Lotten is different. She wants to do things properly. She has this theory about adapting the best of the old values to fit in with our modern existence. She’s very interesting about it. She believes that a lot of the so-called feminism of the sixties and seventies was only another way of controlling and ultimately oppressing women. That by denying status to traditional female roles like marriage and motherhood you are playing into the hands of the very reactionary forces you’re trying to fight.’ Linus had near perfect recall, when he chose to, and he knew he had represented Lotten’s views correctly. ‘And she really understands me and what I want to do.’
Bertil smiled and shook his head. ‘Women always understand what you want to do until the time when it begins to clash with what they want you to do, and that normally starts to happen after about two years of marriage. Your stepmother, I have to say, is a notable exception in that she still understands, and what’s more she respects and encourages. But she is unusual. It’s not that they mean to deceive, it’s just bred into them, this desire to please, to be all things to one man. If you like Toulouse-Lautrec they’ll like Toulouse-Lautrec. If you like sporty girls with no make-up they’ll become sporty girls with no make-up. If you say you can’t stand women who worry they’ll assume the most carefree air in the world. But it can’t last, so eventually they revert to type. Children normally see to that, if time alone doesn’t.’
‘Lotten is not at all like that,’ Linus said. ‘She’s very much her own person – she just happens to share my interests. She understands me.’
Bertil just went on shaking his head as an annoying little smile played at the corners of his mouth.
Lotten strode towards Westerbergs café where Linus was sitting waiting for her at a small square table by the window. Before he had had a chance to get to his feet she had thrown her rucksack on to an empty chair and sat down next to him. ‘So what did your dad say? Was he pleased?’
Linus met her ice-blue gaze and marvelled at her bright-eyed assumption that things were pretty much the way she wanted them to be. ‘He was OK.’
Lotten gave him one of her brisk smiles. ‘That’s fine, then.’ She did not bother to ask any further, but got to her feet again and nodded towards the self-service counter. ‘Shall we get our sandwiches?’
As they waited in line, Linus said, ‘I might not earn that much, at least not to start with, not from the kind of work I want to do. That’s all right with you, isn’t it?’
Lotten helped herself to a prawn and mayonnaise sandwich, scooping up a prawn that had dropped back on to the serving platter with the cake slice and returning it to her sandwich where it joined the others in a neat little pile on the white bread and lettuce. ‘Marriage does not equal serfdom,’ she said finally. ‘You do what you have to do. Partnership’, she continued, as they returned to their seats, ‘should be about helping each other towards greater strength and freedom. You should view me, not as a drag, but as a pole on to which you can climb ever higher towards the light.’ She cut into her sandwich and put a forkful in her mouth, showing her small white front teeth. Linus gazed at her admiringly as any lingering doubts about his decision vanished.
Lotten raised her glass of low-alcohol lager. ‘To us. The future belongs to us.’
‘That sounds just like a Hitler Youth song,’ Linus murmured.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Lotten said.
Five
At first I didn’t tell Audrey about my change of plans. I just sent in my application for UCL and said nothing until I needed the money to pay for my first term’s accommodation. When I did tell my parents they were predictably pleased. Madox patted me on the head and said he knew I had made the right choice, English too, his subject. Audrey beamed and banged on about smoky student flats and Existentialism, digging out volumes of poetry and quoting from Milton. I just wondered why it pained me so to please my parents. Maybe because they were always pleased for the wrong reasons?
I had told Donald that I wanted to postpone the wedding until after I had graduated. He didn’t seem to mind. ‘I can wait,’ he said. Part of me wished he couldn’t.
On my weekly visits home Audrey usually grew misty-eyed as I was about to leave and said things like ‘You live for me too’, and ‘Enjoy these carefree student days’, until I felt like shouting at her that there were no such things as carefree student days and who was the bloody idiot who had said there were in the first place? I realised that I was almost as bad at being a carefree student as I had been at being a child. It wasn’t the work that was the problem, it never was. In fact, I shone, getting a first at the end of my first year. It was all that other stuff: being out all night, taking drugs, sleeping around. I did my best, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was almost faithful to Donald. (I would have been, completely, but for that afternoon with James Connor.) Dope gave me a headache. I fell asleep in clubs. It didn’t matter how loud the music, the moment I stopped dancing and sat down I fell asleep.
I was permanently accused of taking things too seriously. I looked mournfully at Sophie (my room-mate at the start of the second year and the one doing the accusing at that particular moment). ‘Lighten up,’ she was saying. ‘You’re only young once.’
‘Thank God,’ I muttered. Anyway what exactly am I supposed not to take seriously? Life? OK. I could go along with that. Life was indeed a big joke. No, it was the little things which cluttered up the road between birth and death that I insisted on taking a little bit seriously, things like war, peace, illness, starvation, the nature of evil, those kinds of things. I couldn’t help it. And I kept getting things wrong. When this government minister came to speak to the student union about the possible introduction of student loans, I listened to him. I didn’t agree, but I heard him out, or tried to through the heckling and booing. Afterwards I went up to him and told him that I thought he was a misguided fat cat out of touch with real life. That was wrong too. I should have yelled abuse while he was talking, like all the other students did and then, the moment he’d finished, I should have elbowed my way out of the lecture hall on my way to the pub. That’s when I should have spoken up, telling everyone else there who also hadn’t listened what was wrong with the fat-cat bastard. It was all quite difficult to get the hang of.
In my third year I was sharing a flat in Bloomsbury with Sophie, whose father owned the flat, Arabella and Gillian Norris who had somehow slipped in, no one quite knew how. Arabella was doing a secretarial course nearby and Gillian was reading English with Sophie and me.
A couple of weeks before the Christmas break Sophie and Arabella knocked on my door. I looked up from my book and then, as I saw the grave but smug look of the bearer of bad tidings on their faces, I closed the book altogether.
They sat down side by side on my bed. ‘It’s Gillian,’ Arabella said. ‘She has to go.’
‘Has to go where?’
‘Anywhere,’ Sophie said. ‘As long as it’s away from here.’
‘Why? What’s she done?’
‘She hasn’t done anything in particular,’ Arabella said
. ‘She’s just continuing to be herself.’
‘I don’t know about you, but I can’t stand it any longer.’ Sophie sounded close to tears. ‘She’s always there. Have you noticed? Always hanging around. And not in her own room either but in the sitting-room. It must be getting to you too, Esther. Every time you bring Donald back, who’s there on the sofa like a blob of left-over custard? And that smelly old dressing-gown she insists on wearing while she just sits and sits there every bloody night. She never gets the hint. She hasn’t got a life so she tries to grab bits of ours. David is soon going to refuse to come here altogether, he finds her so off-putting. I mean, just last week I said did he want to come back to the flat for coffee and he said he’d love to, but when we got here and Gillian was sitting there, practically in darkness for Christ’s sake, with only the flickering lights of the television screen, he changed his mind. And who can blame him, coming back to his girlfriend’s flat and finding Norman Bates’s mother?’
‘Wasn’t the mother Norman Bates all along?’ I wondered.
Arabella and Sophie ignored the question. ‘If at least she could wash her hair,’ Arabella said. ‘But she looks so gross. As Soph says, she actually puts people off from coming here. And her mother…’
Her mother was a problem, I agreed. Mrs Norris had been a frequent visitor from the very start, but lately she had taken to turning up at all hours and staying the night too, half the time. Last week I had even found her in my bed. I was coming home late after an evening out with Donald and as I walked into my room and switched on the light there she was, in my bed, her head covered in little flesh-coloured curlers like maggots crawling all over her hair. ‘Oh, is that you, Esther?’ she’d asked, as if it was really surprising that I should be in my own room at night. ‘Gillian and I thought you were staying at your young man’s.’ She had sat up, her beefy arms crossed over her large, low-slung chest. ‘So Gillian said, “Mum, why don’t you take Esther’s bed, saves you kipping on the sofa.”’ After a pause she had added, ‘I suppose you’ll want it now, your bed?’ Before I had had a chance to answer she went on, ‘Well, it’ll be cosy for you now I’ve warmed it up.’
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