What Became of You My Love?

by Maeve Haran

  ‘I don’t know.’ Ella stretched out the arm in which she got occasional twinges of rheumatism. ‘Sometimes I do feel old.’

  ‘Nonsense! We’ll never be old. We’re the Woodstock generation! What was that Joni Mitchell song?’ Sal delved into the recesses of her memory. ‘You know, the one about being stardust and needing to get back to the Garden?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ella raised her glass. ‘Let’s just hope the Garden’s wheelchair accessible.’

  On the tube home Claudia got out her phone and set it to calculator. Yes, she was tech-savvy enough to do that, thank you, even though her daughter Gaby said she only used her phone to send nags-by-text. She roughly added up their major outgoings. If she gave up now it would damage her pension. She couldn’t help smiling at Ella’s jibe about her throwing paving stones in 1968, when here she was agonizing about pensions. What would the young Claudia have thought of that?

  But then she’d only been an accidental anarchist. In fact, she’d really been an au pair, only seventeen, trying to improve her French before A levels, staying with a well-heeled family in the smart sixteenth arrondissement. That’s when she met Thierry, best friend of the family’s son. It had been Thierry, darkly good-looking with black horn-rimmed specs and an intellectual air, who had persuaded her, on her rare day off, to come and see what the students were doing.

  Claudia, from safe suburban Surrey, had been entranced by the heady air of revolution, the witty graffiti daubed on the elegant buildings: Be realistic, demand the impossible, I am a Marxist, Groucho Tendency, and even more by the alluringly radical Thierry himself.

  It had all been so daring and exciting. She had joined hands with Thierry and his clean-cut friends in their corduroy jackets and short haircuts, not at all the standard image of revolting students, to block the Paris streets so that the hated flics couldn’t pass. She had ridden on his shoulders – like girls now did at music festivals – in the Latin Quarter with hundreds of thousands of others demanding sexual liberation and an end to paternalism.

  It all seemed a far cry from today.

  She went back to her calculations. How would they survive without her salary? Badly. At this rate, if she gave up teaching, she’d have to get a job in B&Q like all the other oldies! The most infuriating thing was that Claudia knew she was good at her job. She could enthuse her students and she was popular too. But it was true that she didn’t use new technology as much as Peter Dooley did. She wondered if she was being a Luddite. No, she reminded herself, I’m bloody good at what I do. And what if she did give up? She could always coach pupils at a crammer.

  But what Ella had said was true; she was still a bit of a boat-rocker and she hated privilege that could be bought by rich parents. If I give up, I’m bound to pick up some work, she told herself. But, deep down, Claudia knew that no matter how good she was, her age was beginning to tell against her.

  By the time she got home, the brief respite from her problems brought on by wine and friendship had evaporated. She walked up their garden path, noticing that the light was on in the sitting room and that, unusually, her husband Don – also a teacher, in his case of politics – was sitting at the computer underneath the cheese plant, another feisty survivor from the Sixties. The height of fashion in 1969, cheese plants were as quaint as aspidistras now, but Claudia felt an inexplicable loyalty to it and refused to chuck it out.

  She had spent most of last night moaning to him about the deputy head. In contrast to her own gloomy mood, Don seemed unusually cheery, which amazed her since recently he had been depressed about his own job. Tonight he seemed a different person.

  ‘Hello, love.’ He grinned at her, suddenly boyish. ‘I think I may have found the answer to our problems!’

  Somewhere deep inside, alarm bells rang. This wasn’t like Don. She was always the one who got things organized, made the decisions, rang the changes. Don had always been impractical, disorganized, totally disinterested in anything remotely useful. He was usually far more caught up with how to make the electoral system come alive to bored and phone-fixated teenagers than whether the roof was leaking or where they could get a better rate of interest on their modest savings. These things he left to ‘Clever Claudia’.

  Their daughter Gaby had followed his example and always turned to her mother, not her father, for loans, advice and late-night lifts.

  ‘OK,’ Claudia took off her coat and hung it in the hall cupboard. ‘So what is the answer to our problems?’

  ‘We’ll look into retiring. It’ll only be a couple of years early. They always used to be asking for volunteers among the older teachers. We cost more. They can easily replace us with some kid straight out of teacher training, then we can sell this place and downsize to Surrey, near your parents, and live on the income from our investment.’ His eyes shone like an early-day evangelist with a new parable to preach. ‘You could keep chickens!’

  Claudia shuddered. She’d always said retiring was something you did before going to bed, not with the rest of your life. On the other hand, could she stomach Drooly Dooley easing her out of her own department?

  She could think of a number of extremely rude French slang expressions to describe the little toad, much ruder than those on the Internet, of which pauvre mec was by some way the tamest. What if she protested to Stephen, the head teacher? He was almost her own age. Would that mean he would support her or take his deputy’s part? Claudia knew she had a bit of a reputation for arguing. No doubt Stephen would remember it. Besides, the days of mass early retirement for teachers was long gone. Too expensive and too many teachers, worn out by classroom confrontation, had already opted for it. Still, they might be open to negotiation . . .

  She’d have to make herself more troublesome.

  One thing she knew. She didn’t feel ready to bury herself in the sticks. ‘But I don’t want to keep bloody chickens! And I don’t want to move to bloody Surrey!’

  ‘It’s only twenty miles down the motorway,’ Don placated, his eyes still shining dangerously and his missionary zeal undimmed. ‘Half an hour on the train, max.’

  ‘What about me?’ demanded a voice quivering with outrage. ‘Surrey is the home of the living dead.’ Gaby, their daughter, stood in the doorway, her face ashen at the prospect of a rural retreat.

  Claudia, who’d grown up there, quite agreed.

  Gaby, at twenty-eight, still lived at home. Claudia loved having her. Her daughter was terrific fun and often filled the kitchen with her friends. But she also worried that Gaby really ought to be finding a job that paid enough for her to be able to move out. Gaby’s response was that due to the greedy depredations of the generation above she was too broke, but Claudia sometimes feared it was because she wasn’t a sticker. She had a perfectly good degree in geography but had thrown herself, in swift succession, into being an actress, a waitress, the receptionist for a vet, a call-centre operative, a circus performer (only two weeks at that), and an art gallery assistant. Recently she had decided she wanted to be an architect. Claudia and Don had exchanged glances and not mentioned the extremely lengthy training. Currently, she was at least working for one, albeit in a very junior capacity.

  ‘We could help you with the rent on a flat,’ her father announced, as if the solution were obvious.

  Gaby brightened perceptibly while Claudia wondered if Don had lost his mind. ‘Somewhere in Shoreditch, maybe? Or Hoxton?’ Gaby named perhaps the two hippest areas in the now-fashionable East End.

  ‘I’m not sure about that,’ Don began.

  ‘Neither am I,’ Claudia agreed waspishly. ‘More like in Penge on what our income will be if I leave. But that’s because this whole idea of moving is ludicrous.’

  ‘Why?’ Don stood his ground for once.

  ‘My job is here. I like London.’

  ‘But as you say yourself, you may not want to go on with your job. What happens if Dooley gets Head of Department?’

  Claudia ignored this hideous prospect. ‘What about the culture on our doorstep?�
�� she protested. ‘Theatres, galleries, restaurants?’

  ‘You never consume the culture. You’re always saying theatre tickets are priced so only Russian oligarchs can afford them.’

  ‘Art galleries, then.’

  ‘When did you last go to an art gallery?’

  Claudia moved guiltily onwards, conscious that, living in the middle of one of the world’s great cities, she rarely consumed its cultural delights. ‘And then there’re my friends! I couldn’t move twenty miles from The Grecian Grove!’

  ‘Don’t you think you’re being a little selfish?’ Don demanded.

  ‘Don’t you think you are?’ Claudia flashed back. ‘You’ve never even mentioned moving before and now it’s all my fault because I don’t want to live in the fake country.’

  ‘Surrey isn’t the fake country. Anyway, we could move to the real country. It’d probably be cheaper.’

  ‘And even further from my friends!’

  ‘Yes,’ Don was getting uncharacteristically angry now, ‘it’s always about the coven, isn’t it? The most important thing in your life.’

  ‘How dare you call them the coven?’

  ‘Hubble bubble, gossip, gossip. Sal bitching about her colleagues. Ella moaning about the son-in-law from hell, Laura judging every man by whether he’s left his wife yet.’

  Despite herself, Claudia giggled at the accuracy of his description.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Gaby breathed. ‘I thought you two were heading for the divorce court rather than the far reaches of the M25. You never fight.’

  ‘Anyway, what about your friends?’ Claudia asked Don. ‘You’d miss your Wednesdays at the Bull as much as I’d pine for my wine bar.’ Each Wednesday Don met up with his three buddies to moan about their head teachers, Ofsted and the state of British education. But friendship, it seemed, wasn’t hardwired into men as it was into women.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ offered Don as if it might provide the healing power of the Holy Grail. ‘Redbush?’

  Claudia nodded. ‘The vanilla one.’

  ‘I know, the vanilla one.’

  She kissed Gaby and went upstairs. He knew her so well, all her likes and dislikes over thirty years. They were bonded by all the tiny choices they’d made, each a brick in the citadel of their marriage. But citadels could lock you in as well as repel invaders.

  Claudia undressed quickly and slipped into bed, her nerves still on edge.

  Don appeared bearing tea, then disappeared into the bathroom.

  Two minutes later he slipped naked into bed, the usual signal for their lovemaking. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have sprung it on you like that. It was really unfair.’

  ‘Telling me.’

  He began to kiss her breast. Claudia stiffened, and not with sexual anticipation. How could men think you could use sex to say sorry, when women needed you to say sorry, and mean it, before they could even consider wanting sex?

  Ella got off the bus and walked along the towpath where the Grand Union Canal met up with the Thames. It was a moonlit night and a wide path of silver illuminated the water, vaguely swathed in mist, which reminded her of one of the holy pictures she had collected as a child at her convent school. These holy pictures often featured the effect of light on water as a symbol of supernatural peace. But Ella didn’t feel peaceful tonight. It was one of those nights when she missed Laurence.

  Any religious faith she’d had had long deserted her. It might have been a help, she supposed, when Laurence had died so suddenly, without her even being able to say goodbye, a random statistic on the News, an unlucky victim of a rare train crash. The safest form of travel. Ha. Or maybe, if she’d had faith, she might have lost it at the unfair nature of his death, away on a day’s business, standing in for a colleague, not even his own client.

  She thought of Claudia, and Claudia’s question. What were they all going to do with the rest of their lives? It was a good question. Work, she knew, had saved her then.

  It had only been her job that had got her through the grief when Laurence died. Without work to go to she would have pulled the duvet over her head and never got out of bed again.

  Of course, she’d had to be strong for her daughters, but they were grown-up now, thirty-two and thirty, no longer living at home. In fact, another reason Ella had had to be strong was to prevent Julia, her eldest and bossiest daughter, swooping down on her and treating her like a small child incapable of deciding anything for itself.

  Cory, her younger daughter, had been harder to console because the last time she’d seen her dad they’d quarrelled over some silly matter, and she couldn’t believe she’d never see him again so they could make it up.

  That had been three years ago; Ella almost had to pinch herself. The imprint of his head on the pillow next to hers had hardly disappeared. The bed felt crazily wide and every single morning she woke, she heard the empty silence of the house and had to put the radio on instantly. Jim Naughtie had proved no substitute for Laurence but he was better than nothing.

  A tactless colleague, whose own husband had left her, insisted that death was better than divorce because at least you had the memories.

  But sometimes the memories were the problem. She could still walk into the house, put her keys on the hall table next to the bunch of flowers she’d picked from the garden, and listen, expecting to hear the sound of sport on the television.

  Her job as a lawyer had been doubly useful. She had fought the train company for an admission of guilt, not just for her but for the others. And then, when she got the admission, the fight had gone out of her. As soon as she’d hit sixty, she’d retired, just like that. Everyone had been stunned. Perhaps herself most of all.

  Now she was crossing the square in front of her house. Even though it was in London it had once been a village green where a market was held, and archery contests. Now it was gravelled over but still felt more a part of the eighteenth century than the present day.

  Ella stopped to look at her house, the house on which she had lavished so much care and love, the house where she had spent all her married life.

  It was a handsome four-storey building of red brick with square twelve-paned windows and large stone steps going up to the front door. It was this entrance she loved the most, with its elegant portico and delicate fluted columns. Once it had been lived in by weavers, now only the substantial middle class could afford to live here.

  She stopped for a moment as she put her key in the door and looked upwards. A jumbo jet was just above her, on its descent into Heathrow. It seemed so close she could reach out and catch it in her hand. Incongruously, these triumphs of Queen Anne elegance were right beneath the flight path. The area where she lived was a tiny enclosure of history surrounded on all sides by towering office blocks benefiting from their nearness to the profitable M4 corridor. The square was one of those little unexpected revelations that made people love London.

  Inside the front door she could hear a radio playing and stood stock still, frozen in memory. But it wasn’t Laurence, Laurence was dead. It was probably Cory, who had the disconcerting habit of turning up and staying the night if she happened to be nearby. In fact, once she’d got over the shock, Ella was delighted to have her younger daughter there.

  ‘Cory!’ she called out. ‘Cory, is that you?’

  Footsteps thundered up the wooden stairs from the basement and a coltish figure flung itself at her. Cory was a striking girl, slender, with skin pale as wax against a waterfall of dark brown hair. But it was her eyes that arrested you. They were a quite extraordinary bright dark blue. Sometimes they were dancing with light, yet, more often, Ella saw a sadness in their depths that worried her. Cory had so much to feel confident about – an ethereal beauty, quick intelligence, and a job she enjoyed as a museum administrator – but it had only been Laurence who had the capacity to make her believe in herself. When Ella tried to praise her daughter she somehow got it wrong, and Cory would shrug off the compliment – whether to her good taste in clothes, or an
acute observation she had made – with a little angry shake, like a duckling that is eager to leave the nest but can’t quite fly unaided. Today, at least, she seemed in an effervescent mood.

  ‘Hey, Ma, how are you? I was at a boring meeting in Uxbridge and thought you might love to see me.’

  ‘Did you now?’ laughed Ella, taking in the glass of wine in her daughter’s hand. She was about to ask, playfully, ‘And how is that Sauvignon I was saving?’ But she knew Cory would look immediately stricken, so she bit the comment back. ‘Don’t worry,’ Ella shrugged, ‘I’d join you but I’ve been out with the girls already.’

  ‘Speaking of girls, your next-door neighbour is popping back in a mo. She’s got something to ask you.’

  ‘Ah. She and Angelo probably want me to water the cat or something.’

  ‘Are they going away?’

  ‘They’re always going away.’ Her neighbours, Viv and Angelo, shared the disconcerting energy of the prosperous early retired. They were both over sixty but had arrested their image at about twenty-six. Viv had the look of the young Mary Quant, all miniskirts, sharp bob, and big necklaces. Angelo had well-cut grey hair, almost shoulder-length, and was given to wearing hoodies in pale apricot. They drove around in an open-topped Mini with loud Sixties music blaring. If there was a line between eternally youthful and weird and creepy, they were just the right side of it. Though, looking at them, Ella sometimes wondered if anyone admitted to their age any more.

  It was a constant source of surprise to Ella that Viv and Angelo also had an allotment. And this, it transpired, was the source of the favour Viv wanted to ask when she rang the doorbell half an hour later.

  ‘Sorry it’s so late. Cory said you’d be back. It’s just that we’re off at the crack of dawn. And I just wondered, Ella love, if you could cast an occasional eye over the allotment for us. Once a week will do, twice at the most.’