by Sophie Duffy
In hindsight (a very annoying thing to have), seeing him swing his BMW onto the driveway that first night in London, as he came back at midnight, wild-eyed and weird, should have sent out warning bells. I should have found alternative accommodation straightaway. But I don’t do that until the day after Toni reveals her plans to me.
These plans are not quite what I had in mind when she first approached me on the sea front back home. I thought I’d be working my way up to selling houses. But, one evening a few weeks into my new life, Toni reveals the real reason for getting me to London.
Adrian has once again gone off to see his man about a dog which I am beginning to suspect could be a drug dealer as he always comes home with tell-tale eyes (remember I’ve spent my life in ports and know more than you’d think a West Country girl would know). I am not sure how much Toni knows about her partner but surely she must realise Adrian’s stuffy nose is not the result of a permanent cold. (He could do with some Vicks Sinex but I’m not going to suggest it.)
Toni is onto her second bottle of Merlot and almost through a box of Maltesers when she flicks off the telly and turns to me.
‘I want a baby,’ she says. ‘But it’s not happening.’
When I don’t say anything, she continues.
‘I’ve seen the doctor and there’s something wrong with me. My eggs aren’t that good. They’re getting on a bit. Adrian won’t even see the bloody doctor himself. Oh no, he’s the big man and can’t possibly be firing blanks. So it’s definitely my fault.’
I really don’t know what to say, thinking about Adrian and all that stuff. It is too much for me to take in.
‘So we’ve reached an impasse. I want a baby but it’s not going to happen. So this is where you come in Philly.’
She examines her glossy fingernails.
‘Me?’
‘I want you to have our baby.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I want your eggs and his sperm to get it together.’
‘I’m not sleeping with Adrian,’ I say, jumping to my feet. ‘How could you ask me to do that?’
‘No, Phil,’ she starts laughing in an almost hysterical way, pulling me back onto the sofa and offering me a Malteser, which I decline as food no longer makes everything alright. ‘I mean we use the turkey baster method.’
My stomach sinks. At what Toni is asking me to do.
‘No, I can’t.’
‘I’ll pay you. We’ll pay you. We’ll be there for you all the way through. Please, Phil, you’re my only option.’
I find that hard to believe. This sounds like the plan of a mad woman. A desperate one, at any rate. And what about cocaine-fuelled Adrian?
‘What does Adrian think?’
‘He doesn’t know yet.’
‘He’ll never agree.’
‘I can persuade him.’
‘You couldn’t persuade him to go to the doctor.’
‘That’s different. This won’t affect his pride.’
Pride comes before a wotsit, as Wink would say. I’d like to say it too but my words shrivel up and die somewhere inside me, in that place where I keep the memories of the night I morphed into the Cavalier. The girl curled up on her bed, losing blood, losing her baby, almost losing her life.
‘I can’t do it,’ I tell her, tears in my eyes.
‘Please, Philly, please say yes. Look, you only have to try it the once and if it doesn’t work, he might be persuaded to go to the doctor’s. He might see he’s not all he’s cut out to be. That it’s not all necessarily down to me. There might be something they can do to help us along. Time’s running out. Please, Phil.’
‘I can’t. I’m sorry.’
And then I tell her why. I tell her what happened to me when I was sixteen. I tell her she was almost an aunty. That the father of my baby was Terry. T-J. Justin. (Well, you didn’t think it was the bogey boy, did you?)
‘Does he know?’
‘No-one knows. Only me. And now you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘But that was ten years ago. You’re the only one who can make me happy.’
I think of all the times I was her pony, leaping over bamboo canes, galloping and trotting across Uncle Bernie’s lawn, his polyester tie around my neck. I think of the evenings I spent in her pink 1970s bedroom – still untouched and waiting for her expectantly back home in Torquay – sitting on her bed surrounded by Pan’s People, being experimented on with blusher and lipstick and eyeliner. A living, breathing Girl’s World.
I won’t do it. Not anymore.
So I tell her: ‘You’re the only one who can do that.’
The next day I phone Joe, who is living his socialist dream in a council flat in Lambeth, working for a housing association. I tell him what has happened. He tells me to pack my bags and get a cab, which is quite possibly the most decadent thing he’s ever suggested in his life.
I am migrating south, like the swallows and the swifts. South of the river to Lambeth and to a future without a family or a job but with my friend, my Jiminy Cricket, there beside me, nudging me all the way.
2006
And that’s where we are now, though the hospital has a slightly more prestigious location than the fifth floor of Joe’s tower block. But I don’t care about the location, the view, the postcode. I only care about the doctors doing their best for you. Though I am sure the more I hold you, the better you look. And slowly, slowly, unlike your mother (Me), who never had a problem with feeding (the bottles, the bottles), you are starting to get the knack. The let-down reflex kicks in and I feel my womb contract. But deeper still than this pain, is the pain of motherhood. The pain of love.
Chapter Seventeen: 1997
I’m a Celebrity – Get me out of here
Another Christmas comes and goes, followed by another January limping behind, dragging with it the annoyance of expectations for the coming year, like a bit of loo paper stuck to the bottom of a shoe. Loo paper aside, I know by now not to expect too much. But then again, I also know to expect the unexpected.
I’ve been in London for four years and nearly all of that time has been spent down the road from my birth place, where those honourable gentlemen are getting a little anxious about their seats which will be snatched away from them in a few months time, to be replaced by a new generation of honourable members. I’ve been living close by to where my mother grew up. Near that park with the rhododendrons where the nannies take their charges to feed the ducks. Not far from where my grandfather could still be living, if he is even alive at this point in time. I’ve never tried to find out. I’ve got all the family I want down in Torquay. All the family I need.
Meanwhile I make do with Joe – though four years living with a reformed Socialist who’s signed up to the whole New Labour experiment is hard to stomach at times. What has happened to my radical Joe? My heckling-from-the-floor Joe? He’s become a social worker, that’s what. And secretary of the local Labour Party branch. And older. And possibly wiser though of course I can’t be sure of that as I still don’t have a political conscience in my possession.
I don’t have a boyfriend either. Joe’s friends have tried their best but I am not interested in worthy men who think only of canvassing and the ‘Project’ (which will never be a patch on Lucas’ secret one). As far as members of the opposite sex are concerned, the only one of them I am interested in (apart from Mr Bob Sugar) is Joe – my flatmate, who I’ve lived with ever since that night he rescued me from Belsize Park – not on a white horse but in a borrowed Fiat Panda (he decided against the cab in the end). I am happy sharing a home with him in the back streets of SE1. And I am very happy doing my job.
For a job is something I do have. And although it isn’t well paid, it is one I enjoy. Like my mother, I sell books in an independent book shop. But, unlike the stock in Jabberwocky, these books are new. Clean and crisp and untouched, waiting to be devoured for the first time by loving literary customers. I have the whole world of literature around me and still hop
e I’ll be able to turn that key in the lock that will reveal the meaning of life. Here are characters I can relate to, who I can learn truths from: good old Jane Eyre has been joined by Bridget Jones, and the new kid on the block, Harry Potter (whose creator, I discover, was born just two days after me).
But none of these characters are as strong as my boss, who is the latest in a long line of fearsome women to have taken me under their wing. This time it is Evelyn.
Evelyn runs the shop as smoothly as Patty could ever hope to do, but without the sex appeal. Evelyn lives with her life partner, Judith. In their spare time they keep an allotment with regimented rows of vegetables and neatly pruned fruit bushes. Evelyn and Judith like to ply me with freshly-plucked garden produce whenever they can because they say I have a sickly pallor which is probably true as I spend my working day surrounded by books and my evenings watching television. In the summer I often return to the flat with a bag of courgettes or a punnet of raspberries. In the autumn, Evelyn pops a jar of chutney in with my weekly pay packet. In winter I have to make do with sprouts (unfortunately). In the spring I have to go to the greengrocers or the market or even Sainsbury’s while Evelyn and Judith spend every spare minute clearing and digging and quite possibly mulching (whatever that is) in order to sow the seeds for the next batch of crops.
January is a fairly quiet time in the gardener’s calendar and so Evelyn and Judith visit museums and art galleries on their days off. Judith is a civil servant and has many days off unlike Evelyn and I who seem to live at work (but then I am quite used to that). One Monday morning Evelyn tells me about their Sunday which they’d spent in the National Gallery.
‘When was the last time you went, Philippa?’ she asks. ‘You really should make the most of this great city of ours.’
On my next day off, guilt eventually persuades me to leave my duvet and to spend at least some of my spare time productively. After a long bath and a forage in the fridge for some meagre lunch (what can you do with a tube of Tartex and a bendy carrot?), I catch the No.12 up to Trafalgar Square, where Nelson balances on top of his column with a pigeon on his shoulder, the way Captain used to perch on Wink’s.
As I climb the stone steps to the National Gallery, I wonder vaguely why it is I am doing this alone. Shouldn’t I have found someone to accompany me on cultural outings at this stage of my life? I am thirty-one after all and don’t have much to show for it. Whatever I once had, I’ve somehow managed to lose on the way. I’ve lost my mother. My surrogate gran. My cat. And several best friends (I did manage to recapture Joe, though I fear I might be losing him again, this time to another man – Tony Blair – rather than the continent of Africa). As for men? I’ve pretty much given up on the idea of sex as it doesn’t lead anywhere that I particularly want to go. But it would be nice to have someone to talk to about all this. It’s hard trying to absorb these famous paintings on my own. Paintings I’ve seen on greeting cards, on book covers, on Athena posters (though I’ve yet to come across the knickerless tennis girl).
Once I’ve browsed through the Monet’s, the Matisse’s, the Gainsborough’s and the Bruegel’s, I end up back where I started, in front of a huge canvas. I couldn’t see it easily when I first arrived as a swarm of people were huddled around it, all of them looking up at it, listening to a guide’s interpretation. Now the gallery is quieter, people drifting home, back to crumpets and Darjeeling in front of the television. Back to Songs of Praise and the Antiques Roadshow. I’m not ready to go back yet. I am actually enjoying my little taste of culture. So I plonk myself down on a bench and gaze up at the scene: The Execution of Lady Jane Grey.
I am sharing the bench with a young man, an art student, busy sketching Lady Jane’s blindfolded face, working at her mouth, her parted lips. Looking back up at the painting, you can see why those lips are parted: a moment of panic as she gropes for the block. You can see she is being helped in this moment. A kind-looking man gently guiding her to the block. The block where she will lay her pretty head and have it severed from her young body. Then your eyes are inevitably drawn to the ashamed-looking executioner who stands to one side, embarrassed to have such a massive axe in his hand, looking more appropriately dressed for leaping across the stage like Rudolf Nureyev in those red tights of his. And then you are led on to the other two women, her maids presumably, one on the verge of fainting, the other with her back turned, facing the wall, her arms raised in anguish.
It is a horrible, beautiful painting. And so real. You feel you could reach up and touch the silk of Lady Jane’s gown. The sharpened metal of the executioner’s axe. The scattered straw on the floor, waiting to soak up her blood. You feel you could step into the picture and rescue this poor girl from her unfortunate end. You want to leap in and push the executioner to the ground. You want to grab Jane in a fireman’s lift and carry her to safety. Get her a good solicitor who can prove in court that she’s been used by those around her. Those who were supposed to care for her. But you can’t. She is already dead. You can’t turn back the clock. Though sometimes you want to take out the batteries and stamp on it until it is in a thousand tiny pieces.
‘Are you alright?’ the student asks me and it is then that I realise I am crying. ‘I’d give you a tissue, if I had one.’
‘Thanks,’ I sniff. I search in my pocket but all I can find is a ball of fluff and a penny. Why aren’t I the sort of woman who carries pocket-sized packets of Kleenex?
‘Have mine,’ a voice says.
I think I must be dreaming when I swivel around... for there is Adrian, holding out a handkerchief the size of a small tablecloth. The last person I expected to see in an art gallery when he could be out selling houses.
He is looming over me in a formidable way so I stand up straight and almost manage to look him in the eye.
‘Hello, Adrian,’ I say, once I’ve used his hanky. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Skiving,’ he says. ‘Fancy a drink? You look like you could use one.’
I check my watch. Knowing Adrian he means a drink-drink and I’ve just been thinking about going home for that Darjeeling and a handful of crumpets.
‘A bit early isn’t it?’
‘It’s never too early.’
‘Go on, then. A quick one.’
So that’s how we end up in a wine bar in Soho, one of Adrian’s haunts.
‘What are you doing out of Belsize Park?’ I ask him once the small talk is beginning to run out.
‘Having a breather,’ he says. ‘Toni’s doing my head in.’
‘Poor Toni.’
‘Poor Toni? Don’t you mean poor Adrian?’
‘You’re a big boy. You can look after yourself.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ he says, somewhat morosely, swilling his wine round the glass. ‘I need someone to take care of me every once in a while.’
‘Are you saying Toni doesn’t understand you?’
‘I’m saying Toni couldn’t give a monkey’s. There’s only one thing she cares about.’
‘A baby?’
‘You know then?’
And somehow after a significant part of a bottle of Chablis, I tell him about Toni’s proposal in her flat all those years before.
‘That’s why you left?’
‘I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed. Whether she would have persuaded me. Whether it would’ve worked.’
‘She should never have asked that of you. She’s a woman possessed. And you think she was bad then… ’
‘I take it there’s no progress in that department.’
‘Well, I’ve been to the doctor’s.’ He attempts to stab an olive with a cocktail stick but it flies out of the dish and onto the floor. He stares after it, shoulders slumped. ‘Apparently I’ve got lazy sperm.’
I have to swallow the urge to laugh at the thought of Adrian’s sperm pressing the snooze button – which is slightly funnier than the thought of that turkey baster Toni was proposing.
‘She wants to go
to Romania now. Adopt one of those kids from the orphanages.’
‘Gosh,’ I say, profoundly. ‘That’s a big step.’
He rubs his eyes, which are rimmed with red, the kind of make-up Toni might’ve experimented with on me.
‘And you?’ I ask. ‘Have you got yourself straightened out?’ I take his hanky from my pocket as evidence.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The old snuffy nose.’
‘Ah.’
‘Well?’
‘Yes, I’m sorted.’
‘Sorted?’
‘I mean, I don’t do that anymore. It’s all behind me.’ He waves his hand vaguely. ‘I’m trying to make her happy.’
‘And what about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Are you happy?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m bloody miserable.’
And seeing him sit there like a little boy, biting his nails, I believe I have it in my power to make him happy. I can do something. Maybe four years ago I could’ve helped Toni. But I wasn’t ready then. Now I want to help Adrian. But in helping Adrian I don’t really think too much about how this will affect Toni. How this will affect my life in every way possible.
He hails a cab for me later, after we’ve eaten in some Italian place, dark and dingy in a basement but nice enough tortellini. At the last moment he jumps in beside me and I don’t protest. I think he just wants company. He just wants to kill some time travelling in a cab halfway across London and back before going home to Toni. But when it brakes to a halt outside the flat, Adrian gets out with me, paying the driver from a wad of notes stuffed in his wallet.
