This went on, on a loop, for a good ten minutes before Helen had to leave for Italian coaching.
I carried on solo.
After a while, Julian and some other teacher, neither of whom I could focus on, came to sit at the table with me. ‘Fuck. Jesus. Crap. Whoa. Shit. Rah! Oh, God,’ I muttered, unseeing. ‘And I have to buy a dress! I’m a bloody wardrobe mistress who still has no idea how to dress herself! I have to find a great big shiny shitbag dress! Crap, crap, crap …’
‘I agree, crap,’ said the woman to Julian’s right. ‘Jetlag and old age are not happy companions.’
Her voice was crisp and American and very familiar.
‘Oh, God! Stevie!’ I wailed, as she came into focus. ‘I’m so sorry! I had no idea you were there!’
‘I could see that, my dear,’ Stevie Bell replied drily. ‘I shan’t ask how you are, Sally darling, because it’s quite obvious. Julian just told me about your forthcoming success,’ she added. ‘I’m thrilled for you. Don’t you give silly gowns another thought.’
Stevie Bell was the most awesome woman in America. I’d just ‘cursed and profaned’ in her direction and she hadn’t turned a hair. Not to mention the letters that I’d sent back unopened during those early days of bone-chilling grief. Or that I’d put the phone down on her in JFK airport, so devastated by what I thought her son had done to Fiona that I couldn’t even be civil. In spite of all that, here she was, her hair in a crop that was both elegant and sexy, a beautiful navy jumper and very cool spectacles framing her sharp and not remotely jetlagged eyes.
‘You are completely stunning,’ I told her, and didn’t even feel embarrassed. ‘I’m so happy to see you!’ I got up and hugged her. Julian’s delight was almost palpable. ‘And, Stevie, I …’ I blushed. ‘Stevie, about the letters and stuff, I’m really sorry I –’
‘Oh hush, darling,’ she said smoothly. ‘No need.’
I hugged her again. I loved Stevie almost as much as I loved –
I stopped there. Right there.
‘Mom insisted on coming into college,’ Julian said happily. ‘She’s bollocked me about my appearance, of course.’
‘He was really smart before!’ I told Stevie. ‘Honestly, you wouldn’t have recognized him!’
‘Oh, I know that look,’ Stevie replied crisply. ‘And I strongly dislike it. That cursed agent of his. Did he tell you I fired him and became Julian’s manager myself?’
‘Um … no!’
Julian pulled a packet of Wotsits out of his coat pocket and sat back, shaking his head. ‘I am here, you know,’ he said, but we ignored him.
‘When he told me he was going back into singing I took matters into my own hands,’ Stevie announced. ‘I’m sick of seeing my lovely boy all gelled and polished. He grew up in gum-boots, Sally! And wore hay in his hair as standard! Dressing to impress is such a waste of time. His fans don’t care what he wears to go buy a quart of milk.’
I thought suddenly of little twenty-one-year-old me, blowing my entire salary on natural fibres so that I could look like a proper wardrobe assistant. Then buying loads of trendiness to fit in here at college. Aged thirty. ‘Um, I’ve been guilty of that,’ I admitted ruefully.
‘Oh, me too, sweetie, me too. I kitted myself out in all manner of waxed cotton to attract his father. I even bought a flat cap. The shame! I was a professor of linguistics!’
If someone as clever and brilliant as Stevie had got caught up in that madness, perhaps I wasn’t as weak a moron as I’d imagined.
‘We’re all flawed,’ Stevie remarked, as if reading my mind. ‘We all struggle to believe in ourselves.’
‘Mm,’ Julian and I said, at the same time. I wasn’t quite sure who was mm-ing about what.
‘But there’s still a happy medium,’ Stevie rounded on her son sternly. ‘Such as ironing one’s clothes, Julian …’
Julian pretended not to hear her.
‘Julian’s very attached to creased shirts and crumpled jumpers,’ I said. ‘I never really believed the smart suits.’ Immediately I blushed. Far too familiar.
‘Oh, Sally, it really is such a joy to see you.’ Stevie grinned. ‘Tell me how you’re finding college.’
‘Well, it’s been really nice to chat,’ Julian said peevishly. ‘I enjoyed our catch-up. But now I’ve got a student to coach.’ He grinned. ‘Bye, Mom,’ he said, ambling off.
‘Tuck your shirt in!’ Stevie yelled after him.
We watched Julian go. ‘I do wish I could stop telling him what to do.’ She smiled. ‘You know, a mother tries her best but we just make mistake after mistake, doing what we think is right for our child. We’re blind, Sally! And that, my dear, is because we love too much. Nothing prepares a woman for how she feels about her child,’ she said. ‘Nobody warns you of that fierce, wild love …’
I fiddled with my yellow ring, wondering if Mum had ever felt that way about me. Certainly there had been scant evidence of fierce, wild love in my childhood.
‘Was your mother in your face all the time?’ Stevie asked. ‘Always trying to “help” you and being a pain in the butt?’
‘Um, well … No. She kind of kept me at arm’s length.’
Stevie cocked her head. ‘Really?’
I didn’t answer. I was still extremely confused about Mum and Dad. I gave a non-committal shrug. ‘Pretty much.’
There was a long pause. I stared out of the window at a very drab autumn sky.
‘I often wonder if Julian felt that I did the same to him,’ Stevie said eventually.
‘I doubt that very much. He raves about you!’
‘Good. But, still, I worry …’
‘Honestly! I don’t think you have anything to worry about!’
Stevie traced a finger round one of her chunky silver bangles. Something sad had come over her. ‘When he was eight I realized I couldn’t stay with his father any more. He’s a good man, in his own closed way, Sally, but he couldn’t communicate. With me or anyone. And, well, you may have noticed that I’m quite fond of talking.’
We both giggled.
‘I’d fallen in love with the idea of living on an English farm. In Devonshire! All those cream teas and wild moors and cows! Even educated Americans are susceptible to all that,’ she said drily. ‘But although I could have coped with the disappointment of the greyness and the solitude of that farm, the ceaseless mud, vets and broken fences, I couldn’t live with a man who couldn’t talk to me. I’m a Brooklynite. I missed my home. I missed my life. I missed talking. I felt like I was dying of loneliness. I delayed and procrastinated because I couldn’t bear to disrupt my little boy’s life. But in the end I had to go.’
Julian had told me about the move to America; how confused and lost but thrilled he’d been. And how, after a year, his mother had sent him back to Devon because he was falling in with a bad crowd at high school and had stopped singing. ‘I did what I thought was best for him,’ she said helplessly. ‘I cried every night for two years, wondering if he thought I’d abandoned him. Or that I didn’t love him.’
There was a long silence. ‘Did I do the right thing?’ she asked, eyes bright. ‘I don’t know, Sally. But I did the best I could do as his mother. The very best I could do at the time.’
I nodded thoughtfully.
‘Ignore me,’ she said, smiling. ‘As I said, a mother never stops worrying!’
‘I have to go,’ I said. ‘It’s so lovely to see you, but I’ve got some … things to do.’
Jan Borsos bowled into the canteen and swooped over, kissing me on my cheek, nose and chin. ‘My big furry Chinese panda,’ he exclaimed loudly. ‘Good day!’
He turned to Stevie. ‘I am Sally’s boyfriend,’ he announced. ‘How do you do?’
‘I am Julian Jefferson’s mom.’ Stevie twinkled. ‘And I’m very well, thank you.’
‘I was just heading off,’ I told Jan. ‘Shall I come round tonight?’
‘YES! We will have fun times, Sally!’
‘I’m so glad I saw you
,’ I told Stevie. ‘So glad. Have a good trip.’
‘And I’m glad you’re happy,’ Stevie said. There was a slight crack in her smile as she watched Jan and me heading off. ‘You take care, Sally.’
Scene Twenty-four
I drifted into Kensington Gardens, deep in thought. It had been a beautiful morning, sunny and sharp, but now London was compressed under the weight of a thick, cold fog. It fitted quite well with the state of my head.
I sat on a damp bench, not particularly caring if I got a wet bum. I needed to think.
Since Mum and Dad’s house I’d found myself in an impossible quandary. Nothing had changed about my childhood, or even my adult relationship with them: the facts were immutable. Yet it had dismayed me to see them so stunted and old. They’d seemed fragile, somehow, rather than cold and indifferent. Why? Had they actually changed? Or had I just seen them through a different lens, having come to the house with company for the first time since I was tiny?
Whatever it was, it had blunted my sharp defences. I was worried about them. I seemed somehow to have harmed them by telling them what I thought to be the truth.
I watched a squirrel ferreting around in a dustbin. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked him. He stared defensively at me, a crisp in his paws. ‘It’s OK,’ I told him. ‘I really, really don’t want your crisp. I just want some clarity.’
The squirrel gave me a look as if to say, You are a moron of epic proportions. Piss off. He plunged back into the dustbin.
I smiled. And, before I knew it, I’d dialled home.
I jammed my bottom into the back of the cold, slimy bench, my chest and abdomen engaging in a complex dance routine. I didn’t know what I was calling to say. The squirrel was right. I was a moron of epic proportions. Abort! Abort!
But before I could Mum answered. ‘Hello?’ she said. A tiny voice shot through fibre-optic cables and blasted into the sky, only to be funnelled down into my phone. My mother. Creator of Sally Howlett.
Nemesis? Friend?
‘BARP.’
‘Hello?’ She sounded worried now, which was understandable.
I cleared my throat. ‘Sorry, Mum, it’s me. Got a bit of a frog in my throat there …’
A shocked silence whizzed down the fibre-optics. Then, ‘Sally?’
‘Yes.’ My voice was almost lost in the dank air. I was almost lost in the dank air. It was just me and the squirrel, the only two people in the world.
‘Oh,’ Mum said unwelcomingly. My hackles rose, and then – to my surprise – flattened down again. That’s just how she is, said a rather unexpected voice in my head. It’s the best she can do.
‘Um, I was calling to … to apologize,’ I said.
Was I? Apparently so.
A tremulous silence. ‘I shouldn’t have said that you blame me for Fi,’ I mumbled.
Still more silence.
‘Hello?’
‘Oh, sorry, Sally, I was just …’ She trailed off uselessly. Then she cleared her throat. ‘You shouldn’t have thought that we blame you for Fiona,’ she said, all of a sudden. I could tell she’d surprised herself. ‘Of course we don’t. Where did you get that idea?’
‘Oh, you know. Just you warning me in quite a threatening way that I had to look after her out there, then not talking to me since I got back.’
It was as if someone else was talking. The squirrel, beady eyes fixed on me, was munching a piece of chocolate now. He was probably wondering, quite reasonably, if I’d lost it. Was I calling to apologize or to start a fight? I wasn’t really sure.
‘I see,’ Mum said. There was some rustling, and then she came back. ‘I think you should talk to your father,’ she said.
I sighed. This was a waste of time. She still didn’t want to talk to me. Or couldn’t talk to me. Or whatever. I wasn’t sure I cared.
I could tell Dad was appalled at having the phone shoved at him.
‘All right, our Sal,’ he said uncertainly.
‘All right, Dad.’ I sounded weary. ‘I was calling to say sorry for making a scene. I don’t want to disturb you both. I’ll go.’
‘Oh,’ Dad said. ‘Oh.’
I sighed.
Then Dad said something extraordinary. ‘I’m glad you called, Sal. We both are. Thank you.’
And that was pretty much that. After some disjointed farewells, the call was ended.
The squirrel watched me keenly. ‘I haven’t got a bloody clue,’ I said. ‘No idea what just happened.’
He cocked his head to one side, and I smiled. Something in me was lighter. ‘But I’m glad I did it, Squirrel.’
Scene Twenty-five
Six weeks later
Just before we broke for Christmas, I found myself staring at my reflection in the mirror in deep horror. I had no idea whether to laugh or cry. Some MA students were practising carols for a charity concert down the corridor, and our dressing room had been decked out in illegal fairy lights and holly stolen from Hyde Park. I had every reason to be jolly.
I was not jolly. I looked absolutely preposterous. Like a big shiny golden banana, but with extra wide squashy bits that bananas didn’t have, and a whole lot of wrinkling where my generous hips pulled tight this humdinger of a satin dress.
‘Lovely,’ Violet said, wrapping a long cashmere scarf around her neck. She was still wearing the leather jacket she’d been wearing in September. What was it about posh skinny girls that meant they never felt the cold?
For once, Violet’s smile was sincere, albeit for all the wrong reasons. I looked like a fat blob shoved into a horrible dress and she knew it. ‘You look a million dollars, darling. You’ll knock their socks off at this concert!’
She slid out of the door, waggling her fingers at me. ‘Night!’
‘Night,’ I said to the empty room. I looked in the mirror again and despaired. Why was it that I could now sing in a room full of people, navigate my way through a new friendship with my half-American ex-lover while maintaining a dizzyingly sexual relationship with my current Hungarian lover – all with commendable aplomb – and yet found myself incapable of saying no to a shopping trip with Violet Elphinstone? A trip that I had known would turn out like this.
I sighed, trying to squash down the stretched bits across my hips but succeeded only in creating a camel toe.
Lord Peter Ingle’s concert was tomorrow. Jan and I had been rehearsing for the last few days and – save for the dress – we were ready to go. My first proper public performance. Ever. For more than an hour I would have to stand on a stage, like a proper opera singer, hair in billowing waves, makeup fit for a cruise liner and a dress that could stand up on its own without me in it.
And this was it. This fat golden banana dress. Violet, overhearing me telling Helen that I was going to buy a dress today, had dragged me off to Knightsbridge at lunch. She was still high from her tremendous success in Manon last week, and from being the girlfriend of world-famous tenor Julian Jefferson, and could not sit still. We walked along the Old Brompton Road, Violet’s arm linked through mine, while she chatted non-stop about Julian.
Strangely – even though we were talking about her relationship with my ex-lover – I found myself hating her less: the more time I spent with Violet the more I realized that she was quite possibly more insecure even than I was.
‘He’s so mysterious,’ she babbled, as she selected various awful dresses for the shop assistant to prepare. We were in a small boutique on Beauchamp Place. A boutique where you actually had to ring a doorbell to enter. If I was to nurture the tiny seed of a relationship with my family that had grown over the last few weeks (Mum had sent me Tesco vouchers, Dad had sent me a newspaper article about a Birmingham opera company, and I had made myself call them for another awkward chat), it would be important to make sure they never found out that I’d shopped in an entry-by-doorbell shop.
‘I just love working out what’s going on behind those lovely big blue eyes of his. I think he’s actually quite sensitive, like on Tuesday he came round t
o mine after college and he just said, “Actually, can you just hold me? I need a hug.” ’
Something sharp poked at my heart.
Things between Julian and me had been a lot more cordial over the past few weeks. We now smiled and talked when we passed each other in the corridor, and once or twice – like the time I’d found him choking on a Cadbury Creme Egg and performed an emergency Heimlich on him – we’d even found our old banter. But the whole thing was beset with weirdness and sadness.
Helen, whom I’d since told everything, had not been helpful. ‘If you wrote down the perfect romantic lead for a film script, it would be Julian,’ she had stated forcefully. ‘If you aren’t still in love with him then you’re completely mental.’
I had reassured her spiritedly that I was not still in love with him.
But that didn’t stop me feeling as if someone was applying a cheese grater to my heart as I listened to Violet talking about him.
‘I mean, when do you ever hear men saying things like that? “Can you hold me?” God, Sally, I just totally melted.’
It’s fine, I told myself. I used to love him. It was never going to be easy when he met someone else.
I started trying dresses on, Violet sipping a dry cappuccino – ‘Just coffee and some skimmed milk foam,’ she instructed. ‘Fewer calories!’ – and continuing to yabber on about their relationship. Thankfully, I was too absorbed in the horror of the dresses to focus on what she was saying.
After trying on a few I settled – reluctantly – on a royal-blue affair with cap sleeves and less sparkly than the others.
‘No,’ Violet said, screwing up her face. ‘It makes your arms look fat. How come you can’t see that for yourself, sweetie? I thought you were a wardrobe mistress?’
Violet was not the first to flag this up, and she would probably not be the last. The answer was as pathetic as it was true: I simply did not like looking at my reflection and went a bit barmy and useless when I had to buy clothes. Everything I knew went out of the window, and if I bought anything at all it was generally the wrong thing. That was part of the reason I’d so loved my swishy bohemian linens from my opera house days. God, I missed them.
The Unfinished Symphony of You and Me Page 31
