by Julie Cohen
‘I’m gay,’ Lydia said again. ‘I like girls. Not boys.’
‘I know what gay means,’ said Granny H, but she said it gently. ‘Have you known for some time, or is this a new discovery?’
‘I’ve always known, I think. Don’t tell Mum.’
Granny H frowned. ‘Why not? You don’t think she would be so foolish as to disapprove, do you?’
‘No – not exactly. I mean, not at all. But she’d say … I know what she’d say. She’d tell me that everything is all right and it’s all going to be fine. That one day I’ll look back on my feelings and wonder why I was so confused and hurt and it will all have just been a blip on my way to future happiness.’
‘I think that is exactly what she would say. And yet it’s not what you want to hear?’
‘No. Because I don’t want to have felt all of this for nothing. I don’t want it to be a blip, part of the happy story that Mum makes up about the world. It’s real.’
She sounded hoarse and frantic to her own ears. Granny H held out her hand and Lydia went to her, sat beside her, let her hold both her hands in her papery, dry, soft palms.
‘It is real,’ agreed Granny H. ‘And it is not a happy story, not all the time. But there are compensations.’
Granny H held her hands and they both listened to OscanIrie playing outside. A high peal of giggling and the thunk of a ball against the side of the house. It sounded like another world.
‘If his wife has died, you could see him again,’ said Lydia.
‘You mean that his wife was my blip?’ Honor’s voice was dryly humorous. ‘You are more like your mother than you admit.’
Lydia blushed. ‘Sorry. I just …’
‘You want a happy ending. But even though we read the stories, we are realists, you and I.’
Chapter Thirty
Jo
SHE COULDN’T BELIEVE his body. No – she could believe his body, only just; what she couldn’t believe was that she was here in bed with him, not for the first time or even the second, side by side on their backs, on the bare sheet with the duvet pushed off onto the floor. They had been so eager that Marcus still had his socks on.
He pulled her over so that her head rested on his chest and she laid her hand on his flat stomach. His heart was still beating hard. She knew even from her brief experience that he would be ready to go again within half an hour. Even sooner, if she pushed the matter.
‘Why are you smiling?’ he asked her.
She raised her head. ‘You couldn’t see me smiling.’
‘I felt it.’ He stroked her hair back from her face. ‘You’re laughing at my socks, aren’t you?’
‘I was just thinking that the last time I slept with a man in his twenties, I was in my twenties myself.’
‘I’m thirty next month. I think I want to eat cake in the rain. And then you can sleep with a man in his thirties.’ He smiled at her, then sobered. ‘Was it Lydia’s father?’
Jo nodded. ‘Stephen.’
‘How did he die? You don’t have to tell me,’ he added quickly.
‘I don’t mind. He died saving someone else’s life.’
His hand had been idly playing with her hair, but it stilled. ‘That’s … amazing.’
‘Stephen was like that.’
‘Lydia knows?’
‘Yes, of course. We’re very proud of him, while at the same time missing him like crazy.’
‘And your second husband …?’
‘Was an arsehole. Actually, I don’t think I’ve said that aloud before. He’s remarrying in July.’
‘Yikes.’
She smiled at Marcus. She liked the ‘yikes’. She liked that he asked about her husbands. She liked the way his hair curled on his forehead, and the laughter lines in his otherwise unlined face.
She liked him altogether more than was appropriate.
‘And you?’ she asked. ‘Why haven’t you found a nice girl and settled down yet?’
He shrugged. ‘I was serious about one girl. She wasn’t so serious about me.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Tasmania.’
‘Yikes.’
‘Indeed.’ He kissed her on the lips. ‘My love-life history is embarrassingly brief.’
‘Give it time.’
‘I’m learning something new every day.’ He kissed her longer, but Jo had to know, so she pulled away.
‘What happened with the girl in Tasmania? If you liked her so much?’
‘She wanted adventure. I wanted to stay at home and teach. I’m too nice for her, she said. Too boring.’ He said it lightly, but Jo could see the pain: that he was hearing the girl’s voice when he said the words. She knew they were the exact same words that his girlfriend had said when she’d left.
‘I can’t imagine you as too boring for anyone,’ she said.
‘That’s what’s miraculous about you, Jo. When I’m with you, I don’t feel boring at all.’
‘You’re not. You’re young and clever and ridiculously sexy.’
‘And I’ve got a mortgage and a job and I mow the lawn every Sunday.’
‘And carry on an affair with your neighbour.’
He laughed. His face was so sunny when he laughed.
‘My friend Sara and her husband have been going through a bit of a dry spell,’ Jo told him. ‘I told her that maybe she should send him some sexy texts. Spice things up a bit.’
‘Did it work?’
‘He came home and demanded to know who she was having an affair with. He thought she’d sent them to him by mistake. But they had good make-up sex, so I suppose it did work.’
‘You’ve told Sara about us, then?’
‘Er … no.’ And because he seemed to be expecting an explanation, she added, ‘Not yet.’
He was watching her. She rolled onto her back to avoid his scrutiny, and caught a glimpse of the bedroom wall. She’d been too preoccupied to notice before, but he’d hung up his photographs of glaciers: six of them, across the wall of his bedroom. They were windows to other worlds. ‘Oh, you hung them up.’
‘It took all morning to get them straight.’
‘They’re beautiful.’
‘You’re beautiful.’ He drew her closer against his naked body, and ran his fingertips lazily across her skin. ‘Tell me something else about you. Not about your husbands, or about your friends – about you. What’s your secret ambition?’
She squirmed. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Polar explorer. Not going to happen: I’m not rich enough and too attached to my toes. I have to make do with a fortnight on a glacier every year. You can forget that humanity ever existed. I think that’s why I like it so much. What’s your secret ambition? Stop avoiding the question and tell me.’
‘I used to want to go to university and train as a teacher.’
‘You’d be good at it. You could do that, in a year or two, once the children are both at nursery. You could do it now, part-time in the evenings, and then you’d be ready to work when Oscar and Iris were in school.’
‘No, it’s been too long since I studied. I probably wouldn’t be any good at it. Anyway, I’m always exhausted as soon as the children go to bed.’
‘You don’t seem exhausted to me.’
‘Well, I’m sleeping these days,’ she said, and was immediately surprised that she’d said it.
He propped himself on his elbow. ‘What do you mean, these days?’
‘I … I often get a bit of insomnia this time of year.’
‘Why this time of year?’
‘It’s the …’ She swallowed. ‘It’s the anniversary of Stephen’s death, at the beginning of June. I wake up in the night and I think – Oh, this is going to sound really morbid.’
‘You think of what, Jo?’ he asked her quietly.
‘I think of what his last moments were like. Whether he was frightened. I wasn’t there, but I hear him screaming sometimes.’
His arm tightened around her.
‘It wasn’
t perfect, our marriage,’ she said. ‘We had some difficult times. Honor idealizes him, and so does Lydia, and that’s fine. It’s wonderful actually, that they can do that. But sometimes I feel as if I’m the only one who knows the truth, and I have to keep it together for other people. And for Stephen, because he wouldn’t want us to be sad. Those are … the kinds of things I think about late at night when I can’t sleep.’
‘But you said you were sleeping these days.’
‘Yes.’ She smiled at him. ‘I’m sleeping much better. You’re to thank for that.’
‘I’m glad.’ He sat up. ‘Are you hungry? I’m starving. I was on lunch duty and I never manage to eat anything.’
‘I have to get home and make the children’s tea.’
‘I’ve learned something about you by now, Jo. You’ve done their tea already, it’s just waiting to be warmed up.’
‘Yes, but Honor—’
He tilted up her chin. ‘Ring her. Say you’ve been delayed. Come out with me for dinner.’
‘Dinner?’
‘Yes. You and me with our clothes on, talking to each other. Maybe a glass of wine. Like grown-ups. Fancy it?’
She fancied it so much she could taste it. ‘We can’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Lydia? Your teaching position?’
‘Dammit, you remembered.’ A kiss. ‘We could go out of town. A little country pub.’
‘I don’t have time.’
‘I could make you dinner here? I make a mean spag bol.’
‘I have to get back.’ But her hand, seemingly by itself, slid down his belly, through the hair at his groin.
‘But you have a little bit of time.’
‘A little bit.’ Her hand went lower, but she glanced at his photographs on the wall. All these places he’d been, this life he had lived, that she could never be part of. He was a stranger, still, aside from these stolen hours together.
‘Do you still love her?’ she couldn’t help asking. ‘The serious one, in Tasmania?’
‘I … care about her. She changed me. It still hurts sometimes. I don’t know. Is that love?’
‘I think it is.’
‘You still love Stephen. Despite the difficult times.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I don’t think about him all the time. Not … when we’re doing this.’
His eyes closed briefly as she grasped him, but then they were looking into hers again. ‘What is this, that we’re doing?’ he asked.
‘I’d have thought it was self-evident.’
He caught her wrist and stopped her hand. ‘I don’t think it is entirely self-evident. I think you need to say.’
This, from a man ten years younger than she was, with a body and a recovery time that would put most men to shame. A man who didn’t seem to realize his own power and beauty, who was nursing a bit of a broken heart, who was a good listener, who travelled to glaciers so that he could be alone with their vastness.
And that smile, far too easy to like.
‘I’m using you for your body,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you noticed?’
She squeezed, and he groaned, so she did it again.
‘Then go ahead and use me,’ he whispered, tilting his head back and closing his eyes again.
Chapter Thirty-One
Honor
HANDWRITING WAS NEARLY impossible, so she had borrowed Lydia’s laptop to touch-type. But the phrases that she had composed in her head felt wrong in her fingers. How could you tell a man that the son he had never known was dead? How could you explain the years of silence, the years of yearning?
She had been at it for hours and made no progress. Honor rose and went into the kitchen in search of a cup of tea. She was moving more easily, now; the pain was nearly gone, no more than a dull ache in the evenings, and she had dispensed with the cane, though she walked with an habitual shuffle in Jo’s house, so as to avoid tripping over any toys. She had mapped out this house nearly as well as her own – knew how many steps to the kitchen table, how many steps to the kettle, the reaching distance to the mug cupboard. But the clutter shifted day by day.
Iris pattered over to her and hugged her leg. Honor let her hand rest on her silky curls. The kitchen was warm from the oven, and smelled of vanilla and butter.
‘Ganny H, you can lick the spoon,’ said Oscar, putting something wooden in her hand.
‘That’s all right, Oscar, you can lick it,’ she said. ‘My spoon-licking days are past.’
‘I’m Ganny H’s helper,’ announced Oscar. ‘Because I have good eyes.’
‘Are you helping Mummy bake a cake?’ Honor asked quickly.
‘Two cakes!’
‘Tea, Honor?’ Jo’s voice had a studied lightness to it. Honor nodded and sat at her seat at the kitchen table, letting the family move around her. They were glimpses of colour and shape, noises and scents, vanilla and sugar and jam, the hot mug of tea placed near her hands.
Someone knocked on the front door and it opened straight away. ‘It’s me!’ called Jo’s friend, Sara. ‘Kids are in the car, can’t stop, come on Oscar and Iris, we’re on our way to the farm park to see the deer!’
A bustle at the door. Honor liked Sara, from what she had noticed so far. She had spirit and dark skin, which made her different from almost everyone else in this neighbourhood. ‘Bye, Ganny H!’ cried Oscar, running over and planting a kiss on her cheek, and then they were gone and it was quiet again.
‘I’m going out as soon as the cakes are done,’ said Jo, coming back to the kitchen and taking up her mixing bowl. ‘And Lydia’s gone to the library to revise today. So you’ll have the house to yourself.’
‘Are you going anywhere nice?’ Honor didn’t expect Jo to tell her about her lover, but she couldn’t resist a little probe.
‘It’s … a friend’s birthday.’
‘It must be a very good friend, if you’re making them two cakes.’
‘One is for us. You can’t make cake in this household without giving some to Oscar.’
Honor hesitated, knowing she had no right to ask, then said, ‘You were awake last night.’
‘Oh! You heard me? I hope I didn’t disturb you.’
‘I was awake. You are often up in the middle of the night.’
‘I’m sorry. I try to be as quiet as I can.’ Jo scraped batter into the tins. ‘I … actually I thought it was getting better. I think I must be worried about today.’
Honor said nothing. She did not, as a habit, invite confidences from her daughter-in-law. But Jo seemed agitated as she put the cakes into the oven and washed up the bowl and spoons. Honor wondered if she was going to hear the story of Jo’s affair, and she rather hoped it would not be tedious. Though it probably lacked illicit thrill, if Jo was making him a cake for his birthday.
Jo pulled out a chair and joined Honor at the table. ‘Actually,’ she said, sounding uncertain, ‘you could come with me, if you like.’
‘Come with you?’
‘I’m … you may be angry about this.’
Honor said nothing, remembering her fury, cleaning the kitchen.
‘I’m visiting Adam Akerele,’ Jo said.
‘Adam?’ asked Honor, but as soon as she said it, the name clicked into place. ‘You’re not talking about Adam …’ She had not said the name for ten years. She wasn’t sure she’d even said it then. But she could see it in print, behind her eyelids, next to Stephen’s. ‘You visit him?’
‘Only on his birthday. He’s often lonely. I like to bring him a cake.’
The cake was not for her lover. It was for Adam Akerele. Honor clenched her teeth. ‘You don’t owe that man anything.’
‘No, I don’t, but I like to do it. I think Stephen would have liked me to. He’s quite a vulnerable young man.’
‘He killed Stephen.’
‘Stephen died because of him. But it wasn’t Adam’s fault. He didn’t mean to.’
‘Outcomes matter. Not intentions.’
‘Well, I think intent
ions matter as well. And it was difficult to see him at first. But then I saw how desperate he was, and how sad. And I thought: What did Stephen die for, if this young man’s life is also miserable?’
‘So you go to see him every year to cheer him up? Is that your mission?’
‘I go to see him because it’s his birthday and I think it’s good to celebrate life while you’ve still got it.’
‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t think that Adam Akerele’s life was worth the life of my son.’
‘That’s not really the way it works, Honor.’
‘Is this a role that comes easily to you? The saint?’
Jo stood. ‘It isn’t any kind of a role. My husband is dead, and it helps me feel more peaceful about it.’
‘How does Lydia feel about you visiting this man?’
‘I mentioned it to her once, and she became very angry. The same as you.’
‘With good reason, I think.’
‘Fair enough. I can’t argue with you. It’s been ten years, though. It’s a long time to hate someone who doesn’t deserve it.’
Jo left the room and Honor stayed at the table with her cold cup of tea, fuming.
Our son died, Honor typed. You never knew him, I never allowed you to know him, and he died to save a stranger. His wife was dry-eyed at his funeral and she bakes this stranger a cake every year, and I am so angry, so angry that he did this instead of choosing to live.
Honor deleted what she had written. She had pictured Stephen’s death to herself, in dreams and in waking, many times. Sometimes it was a torture and sometimes a comfort. In her mind, Adam Akerele was hazy. A distorted blank, like the centre of her waking vision. He was a cause, a reason, a mechanism, a curse.
In the kitchen, Jo was placing an iced cake into a tin.
‘All right,’ Honor said to her. ‘All right, I will come with you. But don’t expect me to say anything to him. I don’t like him. But I’m curious. I want to see what my son lost his life to save.’
Jo put on Radio 4 as they drove, which obviated the need for talking, but Honor was too preoccupied to say much anyway. She did not want to find an explanation for her son’s death, because that would mean that she had accepted it. And she could not accept, would never accept, that her beautiful, brilliant boy, so full of potential and intelligence and love, could be gone.
