Slowly she followed her path back up the stairs, the letter dangling dangerously from her twitching fingers, and on opening her door, glanced round the flat. Its essential similarity to the one she left some time before filled her with frightened disappointment. She checked herself in the mirror, as if to see where the enormous changes she had been told of had taken place. Had they registered on her face yet? Did she look any older? The letter seemed too small a place for them all; the information it alluded to clearly in the world, but not in a world she belonged to, at least, not yet.
‘What took you so long? I’ve been standing here for an age, waiting,’ her mother snapped.
‘I’m sorry, I was really quick I thought.’
‘Did you get it?’
‘Yes. I’ve got it with me now.’
‘Then read it for God’s sake, read it to me.’
Regan did as she was told, slowly. When she had finished there was silence the other end. It struck her that the time it took to read the letter was probably the longest she had spoken to her mother without interruption for years, an irrelevant yet teasingly satisfying accomplishment.
‘Mummy, are you still there?’
There was coughing and what sounded like a wet hiccup. ‘Please, please, again, slowly if you could, I need to sit down and hear it again, I’ll tell you when I’m ready. Okay, just a minute. There. I’m ready, go on. Louder this time please.’
Regan, growing used to operating in shock, began to read again, the experience of being carried on the back of her nerves slightly exhilarating.
My Dear Regan,
Please forgive the gap between my letters, I have never been very good with words, or found a voice I am comfortable with to address you, either now or when you were a small girl. Cambridge must be a thrilling place to be at your time of life. I wish I could have followed your progress more closely. I remember going to Cambridge once, years ago, to buy a cap, the kind that people once wore to drive. It’s funny how all men used to wear hats but don’t anymore, the same thing happened with beards I suppose and god knows how many other trends and peccadilloes down the ages. I used to have a moustache when you were growing up, I wonder whether you remember it? I don’t know when I shaved it off but when I did people said I looked younger or older; I can’t remember which. So much for small talk.
I am leaving your mother and nothing anyone can do will make me change my mind about this, so please don’t try – in essence I have always been a waverer but on this I am adamant. I will also be leaving England, for good I hope. For some years I have had another family, here in the Philippines, by a woman who has been as good as a wife to me. I have accepted her children as my own, even though they are of another race and colour, for a simple reason. I have never lived in the presence of so much love and simple understanding. I wish you could know it for yourself. But now my partner here is pregnant, with twins, and naturally she is asking me for a commitment which after all these years of devotion it would be dishonourable not to make. Please be clear; I have no plans to divorce your mother or change your lives in any way. Everything will go on as before and none of you ever need want for anything; I mean your step sister and brother too. But I shall no longer be with you, if ever I really was. You’ve seen so little of me these past few years that this may make absolutely no difference to you in practice. For me it will make all the difference; for years now my soul has felt like something dragged along in a sack, and my life in England a lie that serves no one apart from your mother. Am I not, as much as you, her own work?
If you can forgive me, or wish to know who I am, I will provide you with a return ticket to Manilla any time you like, but you will not see me at the farm again.
Love
Your Father
Ps: Be assured that money will never be a problem, I have written to your mother on the subject and will oblige her in any way she asks, as I always have.
‘Ha!’ laughed Petula scornfully, ‘ha!’
‘I’m sorry Mummy, but that’s what it says.’
‘Ha!’
‘Do you want me to read it again?’
‘Where did that little weasel find such fine and flowery words… he certainly never spoke them to my face. No, I got the weasel and you get Sir Walter Scott. In all our years he never strung a sensible sentence together or uttered a single thing of sense. I don’t, I just don’t understand where all this piety has come from. It wasn’t there before. Look, can’t you tell him that you love him and need him?’ Petula added, almost absentmindedly.
‘Sorry?’
‘In a letter back or something, tell him how much he means to you, you know, make him realise that he should come back?’
‘Seriously Mum? You can’t want anything more to do with Dad after this, right?’
‘What?’
‘You can’t want him back, already?’
‘No… no, no, no. Of course not, no, just thinking aloud. No not thinking. Losing my mind. It’s been terrible, too terrible, I’m not myself. He’s succeeded in driving me crazy, that’s it, he’s finally done it. Sweet heaven, what did either of us do to deserve this treatment? I mean, you, his daughter, what have you done to deserve it? Apart from to trust and depend on him. It’s disgusting and vile. No, no it’s more, it’s more evil, the man’s evil. You can’t treat people like this without being evil. If the definition of evil is doing something like this then yes, he’s evil. How could I have never seen it?’
‘I’m… I’m amazed too. It’s so… so weird! You aren’t the only one, I didn’t think he could be so determined about anything. Like, he never has been before. It’s like he’s suddenly just taken a bravery pill or something!’
‘Yes, determined! Where did he learn to be so determined is what I’d like to know! But that’s the thing with ditherers, they’re all opportunists, no matter how long they dither their decisions always seem to come out of the blue. That reminds me, did he ever touch you?’
‘What?’
‘You know, touch you, sexually?’
‘No! Of course not, no, why?’
‘Oh nothing, just another possible angle. But how could he have done it, that’s what I want to bloody know! How could he have actually gathered his wits enough to ship out and not give himself away first!
‘Did you only find out about it today?’
‘This morning! Like you, at the same bloody time as you! I had no idea, simply no idea. About this bloody double life of his. All men are perverts and liars, nature’s fault, but this kind of caper, he should have been a bloody spy! He’d have made the perfect assassin. I gave my whole life to that plum, everything, tied myself to the bloody post and stood before the judgement of my peers, everything, I sacrificed everything I had! A husband, children, my good name, everything! And now he repays me with a letter… I’ll be honest darling – when the facts catch up with “love” you need something pretty powerful to keep your relationship going and maybe I did take my eye off the ball, a bit, but what did he have to offer to keep me interested? All that man did was lollop, lollop, lollop. Lollop around doing nothing and expect to be taken care of. Is it any wonder that I should have found other things to do with my time than wilt in his shadow! It’s not my fault, I didn’t do anything wrong, do you understand me, I did nothing wrong!’
‘I know! But perhaps it’s for the best Mum, do you see what I mean, you may not think so now but it could turn out to be. I’ve no respect at all for the way he’s treating us, we don’t need him, and if this is what he’s really like, aren’t you better off with him gone? This is hell now but… but don’t you think that it could all be part of our destiny?’
‘Destiny? You’re saying that this is destined?’
‘Haven’t you thought of it too? That it’s our destiny that Daddy should do this and for us to be rid of him. Things happen for a reason, right?’
‘Stop it, stop it! Justifications are just an excuse! Is destiny any more than what simply happens by mistake? Things don’t always h
appen for a reason darling, they only look like they do to idiots!’
‘But…’
‘No! No, no more. I can’t bear it, please, I can’t.’
‘Shall I call later?’
‘No! Don’t leave me now! I need you!’
‘I’m here Mummy, I’m here for you. I was just thinking, this is strange, I’ve the letter in my hand and the stamp on my letter, it’s, well I think it’s from the Philippines. But the postmark says York even though the stamp is foreign… that’s kind of fishy, yeah?’
‘So?’
‘Is he in the country do you think?’
‘No! Of course not, he’s a born coward! You should know that, you get your courage from me. I got the letter treatment too, like you, a shabby shower of obfuscation, the same as yours. Full of foul cant and lies. I’m surprised he didn’t just send a fax.’
‘What did it say in your letter?’
‘What is there to say? Accusations, waffle. No answers. There was nothing in it… Like him in that respect. Nothing to the man, absolutely nothing, he’d rehearse his quips a whole day early if he thought he was going to meet you; a most unnatural man. God knows what went on in his… in his demonic mind. He gave away sod all, so vague, what woman and what kids? I mean, what the bloody hell is all that stuff about a family in the Philippines! It’s the first I’ve heard of it! I thought he was working his arse off out there getting ideas about fertilisers. That was what he was supposed to be doing, what he kept telling me. Months he was away, which at least fits with what we’ve learnt now. And do you know the worst part about it? There’s nothing more manipulative than making someone think they know you when they don’t, and God, what scope I gave him to do that! I was his collaborator, his accomplice…’
‘He was practically always there, abroad, wasn’t he? Away and travelling. He always said it was really boring, that there was nothing worth talking about when I asked him what it was like to be travelling all the time.’
‘Ha! I wonder what that bitch looks like, how big her tits are, tiny I expect…’
‘Mum…’
‘Oh for God’s sake do you always have to be so bloody cold? Really, dealing with you and your brother is like the difference between being burned or frozen to death. What’s wrong with you? My husband has just left me! Aren’t I entitled to wonder for what minger I’ve been dumped?
‘You haven’t been dumped Mum, he’s just decided he doesn’t want to be with you and I guess there’s never a not cruel way of that happening…’
‘Alright then, I’ve been swapped for someone else and it’s all perfectly normal and I’m overacting like a child. Happy?’
‘I’m sorry, you know that isn’t what I mean Mum. He hasn’t told you anything else then? I mean, you don’t know what comes next…’
‘Nothing, absolutely no clues, nothing. He’s left us high and dry, nothing about her, and nothing about us. A practical and emotional vacuum. How are we to go on? I’ve no idea how we’ll keep the wolves out. Rally, we must rally. When you’re struck by lightning that’s all you can do.’
Regan would, when prying about in her mother’s study the following day, find a letter from her father that ran into ten sides of foolscap paper, a verifiable diary of her parents’ life together, ending with a list of figures regarding continuing payments for the private clinic Evita was kept at, Jazzy’s ongoing subsidies, Petula’s many ventures and an allowance for them both that made her gasp. Regan had always believed her mother’s fiction that they were poor, or relatively so. For now she replied, ‘Do you still want me to come home at the weekend or…’
‘No, now, come now. The weekend’s too late. We’ve got to be together at this time. There’s so much we need to discuss, to be sure of again. Foundations that need to be rebuilt, yes, we have to build again, from the bottom up. And not on sandalwood or clay, we need bricks. We can’t let this be it for us; stronger, stronger, we have to come back…’
‘Stronger.’
‘Exactly. And trust, it needs to be rebuilt too. Between you and me, I am afraid I have let us become strangers…’
‘No!’
‘Please Regan, that’s very good of you but it’s true. We need to get to know one another again. It’s socially necessary for us to. Together we are something.’
‘Oh Mum. I know.’
‘Of course you do, you’re my daughter.’
‘But I was going to bring Jeremy…’
‘Who?’
‘Jeremy, remember, I told you about…’
‘Yes, yes, if he can leave at once bring him, we’ll need help to break up the misery, if not he can bugger off. Passengers are the last thing we need. I’ll expect you today then, come what may, and darling…’
‘Yes?’
‘I care about you more than anything else in the world. So be careful not to drive into the hard shoulder.’
Regan glided onto the sofa, lightly like a petal evaporating in a storm. She was weightless, the shock of her father’s abandonment less affecting than the tremulous vibration issued by her mother’s offer of a sisterhood reborn. Reaching over to her stereo Regan thrust the graphic equaliser up and, turning it on, adjusted the dial to Radio Three. It felt like what Petula would do, or at least might have done had she not ‘got into’ dance music, to celebrate a moment like this. Wistfully she closed her eyes, less a person than an instrument of a higher purpose. The room shook to the glorious force of Wagner’s ‘Das Rheingold’, chains rattling and dragging this way and that, as the Argentinian, now fully clothed, shook his head sympathetically and made his way out unnoticed.
*
An hour later and Petula was ready to make her next move. For much of that time she had been sitting down. Her habit of skipping meals, currently last night’s supper and that morning’s breakfast, had led to the desired loss of weight (her bad leg meant that the pounds could only be controlled by denial), but also to physical unreliableness. Standing during a crisis was no longer an option. Never one to learn nothing from adversity, Petula had decided that sitting made her less evasive and more accepting of feelings that in the past she would have strode round the room to avoid. This was a time for sitting; she had been hit hard and wished to let the blow rest where it fell.
In obedience to a suggestion she was rapidly tiring of, Petula took a sip of green tea and curled her lip, her expression suggestive of a young Elvis trapped in the body of Diane Keaton – if the young playwright who had recommended the drink were to be believed. His days as her court favourite looked as numbered as those of his preferred beverage, the idle sycophancy of her set indicative of the complacency and aimlessness she had confused for ‘a cutting edge’. Despite its bitter flavour, there was a dignity in soothing her woes with a stinking cup of boiled water, especially as the consolations of alcohol were the rational drug of choice for an unwanted wife. Petula glanced at the bottle of Johnny Walker sat by her wastepaper basket, resigned to facing the next few hours without its help.
The old playroom, now her study, having undergone a patient and orderly phase that ran against her preferred way of using it, was a mess. Her immediate response to Noah’s news was to look for the files sent by a private detective commissioned to follow him years before, the findings salty though considerably less seasoned than what she presently took to be the case. Sensibly she saw that old facts, however useful if she were looking to retain a wavering Noah, were useless now he had moved beyond her ‘protection’. He was not the only attachment she was waving goodbye to, with him would go a world view that underestimated the separateness of other people’s existences, their version of their own realities and disregard for her formal dominance over them. Carrying on as she had could only mean applying a botched analysis of the future and misunderstanding her past. Petula knew that if she did not pit herself against the questionable character of anything that seemed obvious, she would sinkinto the tired and loudly voiced delusions of victimhood she had spent her life denouncing. There was ground to make
up and she would have to hit it running.
She snorted; if only it were that easy. With one eye back on the bottle of scotch, Petula drank the murky green tea to the dregs, its promise of preventing cancer forcing her to keep it down, and the telephone erupting into song again, though for once she wisely ignored its summons. It was time to admit, if only to herself, that just as she built Regan up too high, and buried Jazzy and Evita too low, the glaring failure with Noah was to make him think he was not necessary, when what he represented – a successful if highly relaxed marriage – was a cornerstone of her success. Noah’s affairs were known to her, a simple way of extending himself beyond the confines of his prescribed role, but to fall in love, for she was sure he had, with an Asiatic floozy, ground glass into her assumptions. Had he not given up on love by now? It was not fair that he should be in thrall to the emotion, and causing her pain into the bargain, while she had sought romance without success ever since her marriage deprived her of her greatest asset: her unrealised potential.
‘For you have mistook me all this while…’ she muttered, wiping a clod of green sludge off her gums. The belief that it was possible to actually know someone else had been based on the strongest of intuitions and the flimsiest of evidence. Softly Petula touched her stomach; she could feel several types of burning there, the most pointed of which was humiliation. The thought that someone else, a Polynesian beauty plucked out of a Gaugin, was enjoying what she could not, namely Noah’s finer points, whatever they still were, made her miss him with an intensity she would have thought impossible a day earlier. Worse, it forced her to remember the man she had fallen in love with: Noah as he was before his great withdrawal, spilling champagne into goblets as their open-top car sped through the villages of the lower Loire, hair tumbling into her freshly kissed eyes. Petula reached for a tissue in anticipation of the expected tears. None came, despite her desiring the release afforded by their arrival. There would be no redemptive flood to wash away the memories, she was stuck with them. It was her own fault: she had started with so many. Even as the years became more alike, Petula had privately mourned the driver of that car as he shrank and faded, her love dying in stages, this final blow actually softened by countless smaller passings, yet a stubborn remnant of that initial glut still flickering at the periphery of her vision.
Nature and Necessity Page 36
