‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I still find it hard to talk about.’
‘I’m glad you’ve told me now.’
‘Can we go for a walk or something?’ he asked.
We’d both finished our drinks.
‘Yes.’ I picked up my coat and put it on as we went to the pub’s door.
Outside, Abe put his arm around me, and mine circled his waist, squeezing him to me as hard as I could. We wandered in no particular direction, ending up in Bloomsbury Square.
‘Shall we sit for a bit?’ Abe asked.
We sat side by side, our legs touching, no longer talking. It was a beautiful night and the stars were clearly visible.
‘Look at the sky,’ I said, breaking the silence. ‘So many stars.’
‘And we are all stardust.’
‘Is that a song lyric?’
‘No. It’s science!’
‘Are we?’
‘Every atom of your body came from a star that exploded. We start out as particles floating around the universe and we end up back out there.’
‘That’s a lovely sentiment. It’s a more positive way of thinking about death.’ I wanted to tell him about Mum. I had to explain soon. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to start, not just then.
Later, when we were back at his house and had made love, I wasn’t sure if he thought I’d fallen asleep and wouldn’t hear him when he said quietly, ‘I love you, Ivy.’
It was my idea to go to Hampstead Heath. I wanted to have good memories of the day, in case, when I told Abe, things started to unravel.
I’d only recently discovered the swimming ponds and, since the weather promised to be warm, I’d suggested we take a picnic.
‘You really love swimming don’t you?’ he’d said.
‘Well, yes. ‘
I tried to swim once or twice a week and sometimes I’d met Abe afterwards or left him early in the morning to swim before work.
‘You always seem to be happiest when you’re heading towards a swim,’ he said. ‘Even when it’s in a duck pond in the middle of a city.’
‘We don’t have to go if you don’t want to.’
‘I’d like to. It’s a lovely idea. I’m not much of a swimmer but I’ll try not to show you up.’
‘I’m not planning on doing laps around the ducks or anything! I just wanted to have a day out with you. We could go somewhere else if you prefer?’
‘Nope. I want to do laps around the duck pond!’
I’d bought a proper picnic: taramasalata, olives, cold chicken and ham. I’d packed beers too. The weather obliged. The pond was surprisingly empty for a sunny London day and Abe was less appalled at the prospect of swimming in a duck pond than I feared.
‘It actually looks quite tempting.’
‘Just imagine you’re in the middle of the Swiss mountains.’
He screwed up his eyes. ‘Not quite getting it. Maybe the Sussex countryside. Can we go for that?’
‘If it helps you enjoy yourself.’
‘I am,’ he said. ‘I almost can’t wait to dive in.’
We lay on the bank for a bit, warming ourselves before we took to the water. It wasn’t cold and the ducks kept their distance and we messed about with other bathers, jumping from the jetty, seeing how far we could make it out into the water. I felt like a kid. I felt happy, sun-kissed and energized.
After we’d had lunch, sated by food and a bit light-headed from the beers, I stretched out on my towel, next to Abe, who turned on to his side and looked at me. ‘Are you happy?’
‘Yes. I feel like I’m swimming in warm water.’
‘As good as it gets.’ He laughed and I tried to hold on to the moment a while longer.
It felt like having to tell someone you’d done something terrible, something you didn’t want to tell them in case they despised you and could never forgive you, in case being honest with them, knowing that if you weren’t you might lose them, might be the very thing that caused you to lose them.
‘So good that I don’t want to spoil it,’ I said.
‘Why do you say that?’ He eyed me quizzically.
‘The other day, when you told me about your mum, there was something I needed to tell you too, about myself … about my mother.’
‘I thought so. Whatever it is, tell me. You can tell me anything.’
‘I’m scared it will change things.’
‘It won’t.’
‘It might,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’ve been trying to find the right moment.’
‘Go on.’ He was stroking the side of my stomach as we lay on the grass facing each other.
‘My mum’s not well.’ I took a deep breath. ‘She’s got Huntington’s disease.’
Would he know anything about it or would I have to say more?
‘Is that serious?’
‘Yes. Very.’ I paused. ‘I only found out myself a few years ago what it was that had been making her ill. It started about ten years ago but it wasn’t that noticeable at first. It’s a neurological condition. It affects muscle control and mental ability. At first Mum just seemed a bit moody and forgetful and clumsy. But it’s much worse now. She needs a lot of help.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Abe said, but I had to carry on.
‘There’s no cure and most people don’t live more than twenty years after their initial diagnosis.’ I swallowed. I still found it hard to acknowledge my mother was probably only a few years away from dying.
‘Ivy, I’m so sorry,’ Abe said. ‘I should have been more sensitive. I should never have gone on the way I did the other day. I only did it because I wanted you to know everything.’
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘You’ve got nothing to be sorry about. I should have told you before but it’s hard, and when you told me about your family, it just didn’t seem right to blurt it all out.’
‘Still. You were so understanding and you’ve got all that going on. But you’re still wonderful and warm and loving and unafraid.’
He gazed at me intently, as if he really did love me, as if he really did mean everything he said.
‘But I’m afraid,’ I said quietly.
‘Of course you are. I didn’t mean … I just meant … I’m not expressing myself very well, am I?’
‘No.’ I smiled. ‘But it’s not just Mum. It’s me too. Her condition, Huntington’s, is hereditary. It’s genetic. The chances of my having it too are fifty–fifty. I won’t know until I start to show the signs but it might be the same for me. I could get it tomorrow and be dead in fifteen years. I don’t know.’
‘Jesus.’ He sat up and looked at the pond for a while. Eventually he asked, ‘Is there a way of finding out?’
‘There’s no test. I didn’t know when I was younger that Mum’s dad had died of it. Mum never talked about him much or told us how he’d died.’
‘Did you know him?’
‘He died before I was born. Apparently I get my red hair from him. So I definitely have some of his genes.’
‘And is it related? To having red hair?’
‘No. That was a red herring.’ I caught myself. ‘Sorry. That was an unintentional pun.’
‘And no one ever told you he’d died of this disease?’
I shook my head. ‘It was only when Mum was diagnosed that all the details began to come out. He died when she was in her twenties. The awful thing was, apparently he drank a bit. Not so much that things were really difficult but he’d go to the pub every evening after work and come home a bit pissed.’
‘Did that make it worse?’
‘I don’t think anything can make it much worse than it is. It’s a horrible condition. But when he first began to show the signs of Huntington’s everyone just thought it was the drinking – that it had got worse, that it was causing all the muscle spasms and the raving. It causes a kind of madness, too. In the past, people got locked up in asylums.’
‘So they didn’t know what was actually wrong with your grandfather?’
‘I don’t thin
k so at first. It’s all a bit unclear. Gran never talked about him. Mum didn’t either.’
‘But they knew when he died?’
‘Gran did. She didn’t tell Mum until she decided to get married. She hadn’t known when she married Granddad that the condition ran in his family. She thought Mum needed to discuss it with Dad before they went ahead with their wedding.’
‘And your dad was okay with it?’
‘Yes, but …’ I paused. I was assuming things that I didn’t really know to be true. ‘I think, because he’d never known Grandad, because he’d never seen anyone with the condition and because he knew there was a chance she might not have it …’
‘Go on.’
‘I don’t think he realized how bad it would be. But if he did, he took the risk anyway. I don’t know what he’d have done if he’d known for sure, back when he asked her to marry him.’
Abe was silent.
We both knew what I was saying.
‘Some of the symptoms are just things that are normal anyway,’ I told him. ‘I didn’t know until Mum had deteriorated what it was. Initially she would stumble for no reason and she was a bit forgetful and moody. I thought it might be the menopause. I’d never heard of Huntington’s.’
‘And you never thought it might be more serious?’
‘I suppose I had a sort of subconscious inkling but nothing more. Sometimes, especially at the start, she’d get upset about something that didn’t really seem to matter. If she dropped something, she’d get tearful and Dad would ask her if she was okay. In hindsight, he was more than usually concerned. But I was a teenager at the time. I didn’t think anything of it. I was concerned with other things.’
Abe began plucking handfuls of grass from the bank and throwing them a little distance away. He plucked so much that a bare patch of earth appeared. I had to put out my hand to stop him and that disconcerting sense of déjà vu came over me.
‘Say something,’ I said.
‘It doesn’t make a difference,’ he said. ‘I still love you.’
But it did make a difference. How could it not?
‘You need time to take it in,’ I said, as gently as I could, trying not to let dread filter into my voice. ‘It took me a while to get used to knowing.’
He remained quiet. Eventually he said, ‘I love you, Ivy, nothing else matters.’
But it did matter, not at first, not when the two of us were together, but when he met my parents. Even though he behaved impeccably, I could tell he was shocked. He was taken aback by the way Mum’s body jerked so uncontrollably, by her slurred speech and the way she dribbled and slopped her food when she ate.
He didn’t know how to react when he tried to talk to her but she didn’t appear to notice, or what to do when she suddenly shouted at my father, a really angry vitriolic rant that came from nowhere and left her exhausted and almost choking.
It’s not a pretty condition. It must be easier having a mum who was a virtual nun.
When I was a child I used to romanticize the Victorian illnesses I’d read about. I liked the idea of having consumption, like Helen Burns in Jane Eyre, or scarlet fever, like Beth in Little Women. I imagined looking pale, and people coming to sit on the edge of my bed to read to me while I slipped away. I knew now that those diseases were more painful and frightening than literature made them out to be. I also knew that the genes that accounted for my hair and eye colour also had a fifty–fifty chance of being marked with a disease that was cruel, especially to those who had to watch a loved one disintegrate over a prolonged period, knowing that there could be only one conclusion.
If I asked Abe to carry on loving me, that was what I might be asking of him. And if it went further, I’d be asking more of him too.
‘Do you think you want to have children, Ivy?’ Abe had asked, when we drove home after I’d taken him to meet Mum and Dad.
‘Yes. I do.’
‘Even if …’ He didn’t finish the sentence.
‘Yes, I think so,’ I said.
‘But if you knew now?’
‘But I don’t. And I won’t.’ I wanted him to see it from my point of view, although I could also see it from his. ‘There’s only a fifty–fifty chance I might be carrying the faulty gene. It’s the same for all of us, Jon, Cathy and me. Maybe we all do. Maybe one of us is lucky. Maybe one of us will and the others won’t. Maybe we’re all free. When you see Mum like that, it looks like a higher risk, but it’s only a fifty–fifty chance. I could be fine. I have to live my life as if I am.’
‘You’re such a glass-half-full person,’ Abe said, looking at the road, but I could tell he wasn’t concentrating on it.
‘I have to be. I don’t want to spend my life worrying about what might be. There are so many what-ifs. You can’t worry about them all or you’d never get out of bed in the morning.’
‘I know but some things are –’
‘I could be run over by a bus. We could all be wiped out by a nuclear war. This is my life, whatever happens. I want to dive in.’
‘You’re only ever one remove from a swimming metaphor.’ He glanced across at me and smiled ruefully.
‘But I mean it.’ I said. ‘I have to live my life. It’s the only way I can cope.’
‘You’re right,’ he said, and gripped the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles turned white.
Abe’s father, Greg, seemed genuinely delighted when we told him, getting up, hugging Abe and kissing me, slightly awkwardly, the way men of that generation do. They’re not really comfortable with showing physical affection.
‘I’m so pleased,’ he said. ‘Really happy for the two of you. Have you told your mother, Abe?’
‘Not yet,’ Abe said. ‘We wanted to tell you first, Dad, and I didn’t really want to tell Mum over the phone. I guess we’ll have to go down one Sunday.’
‘She should be here now,’ Greg said, as if he needed her, more than ever, to tell him what he should do next.
‘I feel bad that we didn’t find a way of getting them together,’ I said to Abe later.
We were making the sofa-bed in Greg’s study for us to sleep on. They’d recently sold the family home near Oxford, given a lump sum to each of the children, and with his half of the remainder Greg had bought a small flat in Hampstead. He’d also left his university job and was working for the Foreign Office.
What he did was a source of mystery to me. He’d been to Washington twice, where he’d met President Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher had briefed him before he’d left.
‘It was time for a change,’ was all he would say about the job, and ‘I was rattling around in it all by myself,’ about the house. ‘It made sense to move to London with Kirsty, Alan and Abe all here.’ He never said he’d given up hoping that Pam would come home. But it was implicit in the changes he’d made to his own life.
‘She could still go and live with him in London if she decides to leave that place,’ Abe said.
He always called it ‘that place’ or ‘the place’: it was his way of showing that he was angry with his mother.
‘It must be difficult for him, living here without your mother.’ I took the cushions off the sofa and piled them near the bookcase.
‘It’s difficult for all of us. He’s happy for you and me, though,’ Abe said, as if I needed reassuring.
Greg had sent Abe out with some money and told him to buy champagne. ‘I’m driving, Dad.’
‘Why don’t you both stay? You’re here for dinner anyway. You can leave first thing in the morning if you need to get back. I’ve got the sofa-bed. Someone’s got to use it sometime.’
‘Ivy?’
‘I’d love to.’ I suspected our news had made Greg feel lonely.
‘It’s wonderful news,’ he said again, to me, as I stood at the sink washing potatoes while he prepared fish.
Greg’s a good cook. I suppose necessity had made him one, just as it had my dad. He was removing bones from a lemon sole, concentrating on the fish while talking to m
e.
‘I’m glad you think so.’ I was scraping mud off lumpy Jersey royals.
‘It doesn’t feel right, Pam not being here,’ he continued. ‘But I’m really happy. It’s the best news, Ivy. It’s what I’d been hoping for but when you told me …’
‘I know.’ It wasn’t necessary for him to finish his sentence. ‘We’ll go and see Pam and tell her too. And you’ll both be at the wedding?’
‘Of course we will. Of course. She wouldn’t miss Abe’s wedding. I just wish …’ A pause. ‘I wish she knew you better. She’d love you if she did.’
‘There’s plenty of time for that,’ I said, as Greg took a jar of capers and began sprinkling them liberally over the fish.
‘I hope so. It hasn’t been easy for any of the children, Pam being … well, especially for Abe. And I know you’ve got your mother’s illness to deal with and everything that goes with it. I’m just happy you and he have got each other. Life’s easier if you have someone to go through it with.’
I wondered how hard it had been for Greg to say that. I felt I owed him something in return. ‘I know there’s always going to be the uncertainty,’ I began.
‘Oh, Lord, Ivy, I don’t want you to think … I wasn’t for a moment suggesting …’
‘I didn’t think you were. But I don’t exactly come with “happy ever after” stamped all over me …’
‘It’s an uncertain world, Ivy,’ he said. ‘If I was young now, I’d want to just get on with my life, the way you two are. There are bigger what-ifs out there.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m sorry, Ivy.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I didn’t mean to diminish what you have to live with. What I’m trying to say is you’re a wonderful young woman and I’m so pleased that you’re going to be a part of the family.’ He cleared his throat again.
‘Thank you.’
I hadn’t thought of it like that before. When Abe asked if I’d marry him, three days earlier, after he heard he’d got the job he wanted, I was only thinking about the two of us, that I would get to spend the rest of my life with the man I’d wanted from the moment I’d met him. It hadn’t occurred to me until Greg voiced it that I would become part of his family and he mine. I’d only really thought about the possibility of us having our own family and I still worried Abe hadn’t fully grasped the implications of that. We’d discussed it, of course, but children were still only a vague possibility. I worried that, when the time came, he might not want to have them.
Ivy and Abe Page 23
