Exposure

by Talitha Stevenson

  As he settled in his mum's old chair, he realized he had forgotten to eat his sandwiches on the train. He took them out and unwrapped them, suddenly ravenously hungry. They were quite delicious—sausages, good butter, soft brown bread and a little coarse-grain mustard. What Michelin-starred meal is better than this, he thought. With his bad leg propped up on the old footstool, his weight sunk deep in the sagging green chair, he wondered why he had ever thought he needed so much out of life.

  But Alistair had decided not to be easy on himself, to leave no posture unexamined. Was this sudden charming unworldliness merely another luxury of wealth, he wondered. In one sense it was. But in another perhaps it really did constitute an arrival in new territory. Perhaps the conclusion he was beginning to draw was that it wasn't the wealth, the possessions, that mattered, but the necessity to rid oneself of the appetite for them. It seemed there were two ways of doing this: either by wisdom or by slavish accumulation. This moment would come either way.

  If only I had been wise, he thought, rather than merely clever. If only I had thought a little more and worked a little less.

  But he was not sure what this might have changed. The permutations were too various: they spiralled off uncontrollably, making him sick with possibility. It was very much easier to believe that life was destined to unfold as it did. But even as he thought this, he knew that he was not prepared any more to sit back in resignation and observe the shambles of his emotional life.

  When he felt rested and he had unpacked his shaving things in the bathroom and hung up his change of clothes in the empty wardrobe, he went out.

  Uncle Geoff and Auntie Ivy had lived just round the corner. And all these years they had gone on living there, at sixty-three Hill Road, still calling on his mother for tea, still asking her over for a glass of sherry, no doubt. On the way into the centre of the town in the taxi, he had read some signs on the town-hall notice-board: 'Wednesday nights: Bingo!', 'Tuesday afternoons: Knit and Natter!'. This would have been their life. A game of bingo and a half at the pub afterwards, he thought. Would Uncle Geoff still have fetched the drinks for his 'girls'? Of course he would. Alistair could imagine it all.

  He reached the front door and rang the little bell. It gave out a resounding 'ding-dong', which seemed to belong to a far larger house than this two-up-two-down. He waited for what felt like a very long time before a shape became visible through the frosted glass in the door. 'Coming quick as I can,' it called.

  It was Ivy! That was Ivy's voice! He was surprised to find that his heart was racing, his palms wet. Why, after all these years as himself, had he so little talent for guessing how he was going to feel?

  The door opened and there she was: smaller, stouter, her hair now completely white, but it was no other person in the world than Ivy Gilbert who stood in front of him. He took in her familiar smell. 'Hello, Ivy. Remember me?' he said.

  She looked at him and shook her head, smiling. 'Well, look what the cat dragged in.'

  How typical of her sense of humour, he thought, adoring her, loving her voice, her sweet face, her satirical eyes. 'May I come in?'

  'No,' she said. 'Not without a hug first.'

  He moved forward awkwardly and, with his nose squashed against her ear, her white hair tickling it, a sob rose up in him and broke like a wave. Her hand patted his back. 'Tears is it now?' Ivy said. 'Silly boy. Where on earth have you been?'

  Then she moved away from him and he followed her down the passageway towards the kitchen. She walked very slowly, her hips plainly uncomfortable, her hands distorted by arthritis. 'I'll put the kettle on,' she said.

  The kitchen was completely changed. The sink was on the wrong side of the room; the cooker was in the wrong place. It almost made him dizzy. 'This is all new,' he said.

  She glanced round at him as she filled the kettle. Her hands were so shaky he wanted to rush over and help her, but he would not have offended her for anything. She had always been independent. 'New? Oh, love, you're going years back. Martin did this for us. You remember Martin? Our nephew?'

  Alistair nodded and smiled. Yes, he remembered Martin. Martin with his incredible carpentry skills prized beyond anything Alistair could do; Martin, who was Ivy and Geoff's real nephew. Did he still feel jealous? What a petty character I am, he thought.

  Ivy went on, 'Yes. Dear Martin came and done all this work for us about—oh, it must have been a good fifteen years back. He died about five years ago, you see. He got cancer and it took him quick.' She tutted as she carried the kettle across the kitchen and plugged it in. 'Where's the sense in that, eh? Old bag like me still going strong and Martin dying not even sixty. 'With an attempt to conceal a wince, she reached up for the cupboard door. 'Now, if I know you,' she said, 'you'll be wanting something sweet. You're lucky I've got custard creams in, aren't you?'

  She tipped out some of the biscuits and put them on the table in front of him. He could see the faces of the newly married Prince and Princess of Wales smiling on the plate underneath them. Geoff had always been a royalist, he remembered. He got a tear in his eye when he heard the national anthem. Although he never spoke about it, he had been decorated for bravery in the war.

  Ivy poured water into the teapot and Alistair brought over the cups and the milk she had put on the side.

  'Thank you, dear. Sorry about the bottle,' she said. 'My lovely milk jug I had since I was married, I went and broke it the other day with these useless hands of mine.'

  'Couldn't matter less,' Alistair said. He sat down at the table. Had she no money to buy a new jug, he thought, his stomach clenching, just as Luke's did.

  He watched Ivy stir the tea in the pot and took in the sweetish perfume. She poured a little milk into the cups—had this been the first of his horrified discoveries, that in polite society one never put the milk in first?—and then she pushed the sugar cubes towards him. So, you could still get cubes of sugar! Custard creams and sugar cubes and milk jugs ... Ivy seemed to exist in a time capsule, an England that had died long ago. It was wonderful.

  'Thank you very much, Ivy. This is lovely,' he said.

  'Well, you always loved a custard cream. Anything sweet.'

  'Yes. Yes, I did,' he said.

  It was Rosalind's Tarte Tatin, these days. He bit into a biscuit. It was the taste of childhood.

  'Good. No change there, then,' she said, nodding definitively. She handed him the cup of tea, her hand rattling the little cup on its saucer.

  'Thank you. No, no sugar, thanks. Is Geoff around?' he said.

  'No, love. I've not got him here any more. He's up at the old fogeys' home near Castle Hill. I visit him, but it was ... well, it was too much for me to have him here,' she said.

  'I'm so sorry.'

  'I've been waiting for ever on my old hip, you see. And Geoff, well, he's not been in good sorts for a while and it just got too much for me.' She looked down into her lap and Alistair thought how typical it was of Ivy to feel guilty when these were circumstances entirely beyond her control. This was what he feared most about old age: the loss of control. Suddenly the balance shifted and the body ruled the will.

  'Still,' she went on, 'they've pretty young nurses up there and he's settled in nicely. I've no reason to worry.'

  'Oh, Ivy, it must be difficult for you not having him around,' Alistair said. And as he spoke he knew what her stoical reply would be.

  'Well, we had a good innings. You can't deny that.'

  'Yes, that's true,' he said. Ivy and Geoff must have been married for more than sixty years. He and Rosalind had done less than two-thirds of that! They were mere beginners. 'You're all right here on your own, though, are you?'

  'Oh, I'm not on my own, love. I've a fantastic girl from the Meals on Wheels comes in every day with a bit of lunch for me. And I've a nurse comes by from time to time for my physio. And then I have my check-ups with Dr Hargreaves. And you might not believe it, love, but I still get out to my bingo every week with those of us who haven't croaked it yet.'

&nb
sp; It was just as he had imagined, then.

  'Did Mum go? You and Geoff and Mum?'

  'Oh, yes, till a year or two back. Yes—off to bingo. And down the pub quiz with old Ben Singer, your mum used to. Oh, yes, love.'

  Ivy spoke about everything with nostalgia—even the current or recent facts of her life. There she was, elevated by her years—as if she was literally gazing down from a quiet place a long way above the struggle. It was only her distorted hands that spoke of immediate sensation, of pain. Her hands and the brief allusion to her hips.

  Did she need a hip replacement? Damn the National Health Service and its waiting lists, he thought. He hoped she was not in constant pain and then felt certain that she was. How lucky he and Rosalind were that they would never be without their private health insurance, never have trouble buying another milk jug or replacing anything that broke. Whatever happened now, after all the wise investments, they would be well-off until they died.

  Ivy was laughing: 'Yes, every Monday, down the George and Dragon, a little glass of sherry or a half, she always had, and her packet of pork scratchings. She had a bad hip like me, but there was no stopping your mum. Never was, though, was there?'

  'No,' he said, smiling.

  'Well, except when it came to you, love.'

  Alistair put down his cup of tea and looked straight at Ivy, knowing this was something he had to face. He was going to have to hear what it had done to them—his disappearing like that.

  He remembered Rosalind telling him about giving birth to Sophie. They had been sitting on their bed with their miraculous little girl on the blanket in front of them. He had asked her if the labour had been very painful: 'It's funny,' Rosalind said. 'You start off shouting and crying and everything, but then it's as if you suddenly see that giving birth to your baby is the one thing in life you can't get out of, no matter what. It's the one kind of pain you know you can't get angry about, as if it wasn't fair, because it's more important than your body. It isn't fair or unfair, it's just happening with or without your consent. So you just accept it and get on, I suppose.'

  Rosalind's answer had impressed him profoundly and he knew that now he must be as brave as his young wife.

  'Oh, Alistair,' Ivy said, 'whatever did you vanish like that for?'

  'I was ashamed,' Alistair told her, trying to speak as honestly as possible, no matter how crass it sounded. 'I wanted to be with smart rich people in big houses, far away from Dover.'

  'But this is where you were raised. It's where you come from, love.'

  'Yes. I know.'

  'Couldn't you have written? Visited?'

  'I couldn't keep you in my life. I couldn't have explained it. I'm not proud of it, Ivy, but I was making a new life for myself and, well, the people in it, they would have looked down on—on everything. And I couldn't bear it.'

  'We wouldn't have cared about a bunch of snooty so-and-sos. I wouldn't.'

  Alistair laughed sadly. 'No,' he said, 'you were always too wise for that. But I cared. I was the one who cared. If you want to know the truth I was scared they wouldn't accept me and I wanted their kind of life so much, Ivy.'

  'Dear me,' Ivy said. 'Did you hate us that much, then? Are we that dreadful?'

  Alistair reached out and took up her bent, bony little hand. 'No. I've been wrong and very stupid,' he said.

  'And with that big brain God gave you ... What a waste.'

  'Yes.'

  'She sounded nice, too, your wife. Not the snobbish type, really.'

  'Oh, no, Rosalind isn't at all snobbish,' he said confidently. 'She's never looked down on anyone in her life...'

  And then he thought: It has always been me, hasn't it? I'm the one who needed the cripplingly expensive ski holidays in Val d'Isère, the children at extortionate public schools, which they hated anyway. I'm the one who needed the chandeliers and the damask silk hung on the walls at a hundred pounds a metre in place of ordinary paper. Hadn't Rosalind once said she thought it would be rather lovely if they lived in a little cottage with Alistair writing a history book the way he had said he wanted to when she first met him? He had told her she'd miss her pearls and her fur coat and her seat at Glyndebourne, her tennis at Queens. But perhaps she had been telling the truth.

  'Well, it must be quite a feeling, coming home after all this time,' Ivy said.

  'It's changed a lot.'

  'You're not wrong there. That huge terrible ferry-port making all that racket. Lot of foreign faces, too. There are wars in the world, you see. They come here for safety.'

  Trust Ivy to see it this way, he thought. She was a genuine liberal.

  'It's still your home, though—your roots are here,' she said, blowing on her hot tea.

  He studied her lovely old face and wondered how many people there were left in England who would die in the same street they grew up. She had been born two houses along. 'Ivy, your roots are here,' he said. 'I don't think I ever really had roots.'

  'Now why d'you say that? Go on with you, Alistair. You had a home and a mum who loved you as best she could, and there was always me and Geoff.'

  'I know. I know. I just ... it was not knowing about my father, I suppose.'

  There. He had said it. It was out and now the world seemed quieter—the way it did when you ran all the way up the cliff path with the wind and rain crashing in your ears, and then you saw an alcove and ducked in and it all went peaceful.

  'I can understand that, dear,' Ivy said. And then her eyes fixed on his for a long time—perhaps as long as thirty seconds—her eyebrows contracting in response to her thoughts. She was frightening him. He gazed into her old face: here was the impenetrability of another human mind.

  He remembered the extraordinary way he had summed up the issue of his father to Karen Jennings, that night at the Ridgeley Hotel. It had been spontaneous—and totally out of character. Over a glass of whisky, he had calmly revealed to this perfect stranger how his mother always told him that she and his father were planning to marry but that his dad had got killed in the war. It was just a sob-story, he explained, which stopped adding up when he was about eight. He had even told her how he had marked this realization by throwing all his toy soldiers into the sea. He said he hadn't seen his mother for nearly forty years, 'possibly to avoid the conversation'.

  The formula was so absurd he had known immediately that there was an element of truth in it. He had avoided emotional contact with his mother just as he had avoided physical contact ever after the day he came home unexpectedly from his confirmation class. (Afterwards, he was sure he had known something wrong was happening when he ran up the path—that the house had grown ugly, that the air had seemed to cool and darken as if for rain.)

  He had found them there in the hallway, on the carpet, struggling. At first he thought Mr Bisset was attacking her, but as he pulled back Alistair could see she was enjoying it. Then she saw him. 'Oh, Alistair,' she said, 'I thought you were down the church.'

  She had always been passionately insistent that he get to Sunday School on time. And now he knew why. 'I forgot my sandwich,' he said. 'I got hungry.'

  Even now he found it difficult to go into a church. Rosalind had wanted the children to be Catholic, just as she was, and he had had no problem in leaving it to her. He had washed his hands of the whole filthy business of religion.

  'Ivy,' he said, 'do you know anything about my father?'

  'Yes, love. I do,' she replied.

  He stared at her incredulously. After all these years to learn something - anything - about this absent figure. What he had dreaded most of all was that no one knew, that his father had been just one of his mother's sunny afternoon 'jaunts', just one of her Sunday treats or her late-night 'talks'. 'Tell me what you know, Ivy. Please?'

  'It's Geoff, love,' she said.

  That a human voice should reply so simply, that it should provide anything so contained as an answer, was almost as stunning as the answer itself.

  'Geoff? Uncle Geoff? Your husband? I don't ... How ca
n that be?'

  'Geoff, my husband,' she said, nodding.

  'But how can that ... how can that be, Ivy? How?'

  She sighed. 'It just is, love,' she said.

  Alistair stared at the objects on the table: biscuits, saucers, cups and spoons—things reduced to mere physical presence, stripped of their significance. They might as well have been pebbles on a shore or leaves on the grass. Briefly, he saw them with the eyes of a patient historian, ten thousand years after this day.

  'Alistair?' Ivy said. 'Alistair? Are you all right?'

  'I'm not sure,' he said truthfully.

  'I always wished he'd tell you—for what it's worth to you now.'

  'How long were they... when, Ivy? When did it start?'

  'It was no more than a year or two they saw each other in that way,' she said. He watched her pick the biscuit crumbs off the edge of the plate, squashing them under her forefinger and brushing them off into the palm of her hand.

  'A year or two? But you must have been married by then. She was your closest friend.'

  'Yes,' Ivy said. 'It sounds bad. The thing is, you've got to understand, things were different in them days. I was trying for a baby, Al, I wanted nothing more in the world than a little baby. Anyway, I fell pregnant and in them days we all thought you mustn't have ... well, you mustn't have relations with your husband, if you had a baby in you. All in all I had a baby in me for almost two years...'

  'Ivy, I don't understand.'

  'What I mean is, I kept losing them. Three little babies in a row—miscarriages - before we knew I couldn't do it. And ... well, it was in that time he must've got tempted. She was a very attractive woman, your mum, June— all that lovely red hair and that full figure of hers.'

  'Tempted?' Alistair repeated.

  'She and Geoff were sweeties as children, you know.'

  'No, I didn't know.'

  'Yes. His childhood sweetie, June was. But she was always a will unto herself and she took up with that Nigel Benson whose dad owned the tackle shop out by the Britannia. Anyway, everyone thought they'd tie the knot, but Nigel got killed in the war. Heartbroken, she was. Me and Geoff, we got together a little bit before it happened—when Geoff was home with his shrapnel in his leg. I'd been writing, you see. I'd always had a soft spot for him. I wrote him letters when he was serving.