by Georgie Hall
On the island, the bearded groom has Kwasi in a headlock. Or it could be the other way around. Hard to tell. They’re slow-fighting in the faintly Greco-erotic way vain men do when they don’t want their veneers knocked out.
‘Hurry up, Mum, while he’s not looking!’ she pleads as she gets The Tempest’s engine spluttering into life.
‘You’re seventeen, Summer!’ I’m close to tears as I cast off the mooring ropes. Are drugs involved, I wonder? Child grooming? ‘Marriage is illegal without parental consent. Who is he? How long have you been planning this?’
She gathers her skirts higher to make room when I step on deck. ‘I never met him before today!’
I’m horrified. ‘Is he doing this for a British passport?’
‘Just for money, Mum!’ she snaps. ‘Whereas I did it for love like the tat says.’ She turns her back to me, lifting the red tresses so I can read: The more I give to thee, the more I have.
It’s from Romeo and Juliet, the balcony scene when love is blind and boundless and infinite. Like Lady Capulet, three acts later, I want to scream: ‘Accursed, unhappy, wretched, hateful day!’ but Summer’s clambering up onto The Tempest’s roof from which she power-salutes her friends piratically, shouting, ‘I gotta ride!’
They cheer.
‘You are heroes!’ Her energy is infectious. She looks down at me. ‘And so are you, Mum. You have saved me. Let’s go!’
At which point I’m clearly expected to max the throttle and whoop like a superannuated American mom in a high school drama, whereas I’m British and middle-aged with a Special Needs agenda. ‘We must tell your brother what’s going on. He’s shut in the bathroom.’
‘I’ll deal with that.’ She doesn’t stop to ask why (Ed used to lock himself in bathrooms a lot as his ‘safe’ space when he was little, so it’s considered quite normal still). ‘You get this rig moving.’ Jumping down from roof to deck, she crams her skirts inside and a moment later I hear, ‘Ed, it’s me! We’re about to go through the lock. There might be some shouting, OK? Have you got your headphones on?’
From deep inside the boat comes a faint shout. ‘Go away! I’m on level six.’
She bursts back out through the doors, ivory silk puffing. ‘You heard him.’
And I suddenly realise why her face is different. The Nike ticks are missing.
‘Summer, your eyebrows have gone!’
And in that moment, I see my younger self so clearly – that impulsive younger self I wish I’d let run free a little longer…
*
Somewhere in early middle age, fate stopped dealing me wildcards. More accurately, I stopped picking and playing them, taking fewer risks and trusting no strangers as I held my high-handed full house together. Family comes first. My reckless side retired from the game.
At what point, I wonder, did I start resenting my younger self so much for not gambling more on youth? I now regularly catch myself criticising her, wanting to shout at twenty-something-Eliza: ‘MAKE MORE OF IT, ELZ!’, ‘STOP DOUBTING YOURSELF!’, ‘YOU LOOK GREAT IN STRETCH SATIN!’, ‘LIVE FOR THE MOMENT!’
Maybe growing old isn’t about resenting our younger selves; maybe it’s mothering her. And if that’s the case, is fifty too late to act on one’s own advice (stretch satin aside)? After all, my Older Self will be looking down on me in years to come, I hope. I can hear her calling now, the yet-older version of me. She sounds like my mother, acerbically encouraging, ‘ACT LIKE YOU CAN DO IT!’
I’m claiming my Odyssey: I’m rescuing a runaway bride, a life-changing action (like the ending of The Graduate but without Dustin Hoffman. Or am I thinking of Love Story and Ryan O’Neal?). It doesn’t matter. This bride is my only, beloved daughter. We are getting out of here.
*
By the time we leave the lock quite a crowd has gathered behind us to watch. Still on the roof, striking a self-consciously dramatic pose, red ringlets swirling, Summer shouts back, ‘I will never forgive you!’ Whether this is directed at her no-sock groom or Kwasi, I’m not sure. On the island, the fight between them lurches on, now reduced to a grunting slow bear dance, shirt cuffs and ties loosened, the latter shouting, ‘Fooking let go of me!’
We race away from them all as fast as The Tempest can safely manage – we could swim faster, but it’s satisfyingly noisy with a big bow wave.
I’m at full boil, a stealth bomb hot flush pooling sweat in every crevice as I navigate past the boats waiting to come into the lock.
Behind us, a man’s voice shouts from the lock side, a rippling romantic tenor with a strong accent rising clear above the chatter and whoops there. ‘Turn around, my darling! Please turn around! Ritorno! Come back!’
I look to Summer for reaction, but she’s gazing over her shoulder with a puzzled expression. ‘Who’s that?’
‘Hey, Bella!’ comes the throaty Mediterranean key. ‘Eliza! Ritorno!’
‘Is he a friend of yours, Mum?’
I spin round so fast I let go of the tiller.
Matteo Mele is waving frantically from the lock side. ‘Hey, crazy lady! You’re beautiful, you know that!’
My red blush floods down to meet the hot flush coming up in a head-to-toe moist glow.
Summer scowls. ‘Who is he?’
I grab the tiller to set us back on course and mutter, ‘Never seen him before.’
20
Up Time
As we putter steadily away from Luddington Lock towards the Avon’s meandering, high-banked camouflage, our departure is still being cheered and recorded on multiple phones, quite possibly including Matteo’s. So much for not standing out. This journey could soon be viral.
Not that I care. It’s all about Summer now.
My runaway bride is sitting on the barge roof, big silk skirt plumed round her like a parachute. Having pulled off her punky headdress, she’s started to remove long red satin corkscrews of hair in sections, until soon just a tight ballerina bun is left which she releases into its familiar pale brown snake. She’s stunningly, wonderfully Summer again – and all the better for arched female Finch eyebrows in place of the Nike ticks, although I elect not to tell her that just yet given how low and close together both are.
‘Hideous snakes!’ She tosses the lot down into the boatman’s cabin then peels off her false eyelashes. ‘How dope are my friends helping like that?’ She admires her gel nails, long as ice-lolly sticks.
I know I should stay calm, agree, maybe point out that her mother’s not a bad getaway driver either, instead of wiping my hot wet face against my arm before wailing, ‘Summer, I demand to know the truth! What were you thinking of?’
‘You’re right. That’s the last time I do the man I love a favour.’
‘Like getting married?’
She slides off the roof and lands in front of me. ‘Mum, you are so deluded!’
‘Me, deluded? You’re the teenager running away from her sham wedding!’
‘Fake one, you mean.’ She spins round so I’m forced to witness the skin-inked Juliet quote again. ‘Help me out?’
‘Just when did you get that monstrosity?’
‘Not the tattoo – that’s just a transfer, it’ll wash off – the bodice clips!’
And for the first time I see that the dark fastenings along the spine of the dress which I mistook for punky bows earlier are bulldog clips gathering in inches of loose fabric. It’s a classic magazine-stylist technique to make a garment seem fitted to the model.
‘Today’s wedding wasn’t real?’
‘Surely you realised it was a photoshoot, Mum! I talked about it! I told you I was helping Kwasi – I mean Mr Owusu – plan it as a diversity polemic, but then our original bride dropped out at the last minute which is why I had to step in with that misogynist personal trainer as groom.’
‘So you didn’t marry him?’ My brain can’t keep up.
‘Reader, I almost killed him! And Kwasi too! I totally hate men right now.’ She looks at me furiously over her shoulder. ‘I can’t believ
e you thought I’d marry a stranger, even for a moment, even supposing I legally could. Are you actually mad?’
I wipe my sweaty face with the other arm. ‘Yes, Summer, I am actually mad. If you’re lucky, in thirty years’ time they’ll have found a cure and no woman will ever have to go through this hell. We may well, however, still hate men.’
*
Note to self: stop overreacting and taking things so seriously. Why is my over-fifty default set to Worst Case Scenario? How could I even think for a minute that my bright, bolshy daughter would marry somebody to give them British Citizenship? (It’s true that thirty years ago, stony broke and overexcited after watching the movie Green Card, I did briefly consider it as a way of raising cash myself, but that was largely to do with Andie MacDowell’s rooftop garden, and it turned out to be much easier to get waitressing work at Café Rouge.)
It must be my plummeting oestrogen that’s made me this paranoid. I’m more frightened of my children’s power to hurt me than I care to admit. I have a refugee mentality, running from a youth culture I find increasingly oppressive and alien. I trust no one. Not even my own daughter.
It’s no country for middle-aged women.
*
Summer has ditched her first professional modelling assignment, and she’s very angry about it, so angry that she hasn’t yet asked why her mother is piloting her grandfather’s boat downriver or why her brother is locked in the loo trying to crack level six of his Sonic game.
‘This dress was picked out for a six-foot Amazonian,’ she complains, looking down at the ivory silk meringue which is still taking up most of the small aft deck. Following her gaze, I notice rough tacking stitches that have taken up the hem by several inches. She twists the skirt round her waist until it’s back to front and wails, ‘This thing is wack! It’s supposed to be detachable. I can’t rip it; it’s been lent by the boutique in town. I am never getting married. You have no idea how hot and uncomfortable I am right now, Mum.’
‘I could hazard a guess.’ I have a perspiration waterfall running between my breasts and a neck like a smallpox rash.
‘I need scissors.’ She squeezes back inside the cabin, still talking, although I can only catch snatches over the engine. I pick up that today’s photoshoot – an advertorial for the restaurant boat – was originally due to take place before the river got busy, but the client got cold feet when the bride turned up with hay fever, a cold sore and a penis.
‘She’s Warwickshire’s premier drag queen. The whole idea was to gender challenge, but the boat owners said they thought drag was too cabaret, and the groom refused point-blank to kiss his bride, so I was conscripted as a last-minute replacement, after which Kwasi threatened to punch him if he did kiss me!’ she shouts as she forces her way back towards me through the tiny boatman’s cabin. ‘I should have figured he’d blow up. The moment he’s behind a camera it’s like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, y’know?’ She brandishes a pair of kitchen scissors in a way that would tempt me to step back if it didn’t mean falling overboard. ‘Well, it’s all over; I’m done with him; my love is dead. He’s rude and hypocritical and always spoiling for a fight. I can’t believe I missed Year Twelve Mindfulness for this.’
‘You played truant?’
‘It’s a study leave morning, Mum! I’m talking about something really important here and you’re just listening out for trigger words. You have no idea what it’s like being objectified like that, being held to ransom by the contradictions of possessive masculinity.’
‘Oh, I think I do. I am a woman too.’
The all-new eyebrows crease together disbelievingly.
‘This is totally different!’ She disappears back inside.
*
I’m increasingly frustrated by younger women, a Mind The Age-Gap divide that I fear is more about belated self-recognition than direct criticism of bright young things. I mistrust their self-absorption, that analysis-as-small-talk intensity they possess, the sense I get that when anyone under twenty – or thirty, let’s be honest – speaks to me, she doesn’t really see me because I am (and I hate this word) ‘irrelevant’.
Did I once behave like that, I wonder?
I don’t believe it’s an exclusively mother and daughter thing, although that magnetises it. Our mothers are often the first women we objectify, ignore and deride.
Looking back, I struggle to remember middle-aged women through my late teens and early twenties, apart from Mum and her circle or my friends’ mothers, and then only fleetingly. I was devoting myself wholeheartedly to acting, partying and romance, to my gang and my bastard boyfriends. Older female role models faded away amid this grown-up world of self-interest and male interest.
My invisibility thirty years later underlines the divide. I belong to a group I once ignored and dismissed, and nothing much has changed.
*
‘The “groom” is some hench from Kwasi’s gym who wants to be a model, and a total creep.’
Summer is still talking about the photoshoot, now in the boatman’s cabin carefully snipping away the wedding dress waistband’s tie fastenings. ‘How ridiculous was that fight between them?’
As she cuts herself free, she explains that the project had zero budget. ‘The trouble is, Kwasi needs commercial work on his portfolio if the agencies are going to hire him. He’s edgy and brave, which they’ll love, and he’s not afraid of playing the gender spectrum. Most guys his age are running so scared of toxic masculinity, they’re insipid.’ She reappears on deck, the dress now an above-the-knee shift, perfect for bopping the night away to a cheesy wedding DJ soundtrack. ‘He had to fight his way out of gang culture as a kid, so he’s hardwired to be super-aggressive as well as super-talented? Having to zip it in a classroom doesn’t suit his psyche? He teaches some total brats.’
I use the ironic eyebrow, but she doesn’t notice. Her eyes are full of tears, the tough act wavering. She turns away and I hear a gulp and a sniff.
‘Oh my poor love…’ I reach out to put a hand on her shoulder, expecting her to shrug it off as usual.
She’s turned round and is in my arms so fast we almost fall overboard. ‘I am so, so glad you were here for me today, Mum! I have no idea how you knew to be there, but I love you for it. You are just amazing! Beyond amazing.’
Letting go of the tiller, I hug her tightly back. My child is in my arms and she is little again, clinging onto me, in need of the rock of mother love, believing I was there just to save her.
She peels herself away with an audible squelch. ‘Mum, you’re burning up!’
‘Actually it’s starting to ease off.’ I reclaim the tiller.
‘I’m going down to check on Ed. Have we got anything to drink on here?’
‘Of course!’ We need to celebrate this rescue and reconciliation. Dressed as she is, it calls for only one thing: ‘There’s a case of champagne in the galley.’ (I love saying that. I never get to say things like that. Now we’re back on task, a classic road-trip moment.)
But she wrinkles her nose. ‘I was thinking green tea? I could do with a chat about it all.’
‘Of course!’
‘Why are you taking The Tempest downriver, by the way?’
I want to tell the truth, but she’s so vulnerable. She needs this journey to feel safe and idyllic and healing for now, not a crazed dash to save the boat her father loves so much.
‘Spur of the moment idea to go and see Susie and Nigel.’
‘OMG, really? I hope Roobs is there. It would be so good to have somebody I can really talk to about Kwasi. This is turning out to be such a cool day after all.’
I blow on my sizzling forehead, quietly disagreeing.
*
Up until my friends and I married and had children (those of us who chose to) we confessed all to each other on a regular basis, usually over wine glasses brimming with something cheap, white and oaked. Ours was the Bridget Jones generation, and we were already at full speed when our flagbearer slid down a fireman’s pole into prin
t. Her big pants were our big pants. We owned that space: the sex talk, the bastard talk, the ex-talk, the ‘is it love?’ talk. From graduating to gestating, it was open house on our relationships.
Then, one at a time, we decided it was love, and stopped talking about it. The wedding band encloses a secret world; we’d never dream of confiding the same intimate details about our husbands that we had about past boyfriends. Pride’s at stake, and when he’s a keeper, you keep your secrets with him.
*
The river between Luddington and Binton Bridge is hypnotically quiet and lush, the first stretch of that Heart of Darkness overhung by endless willows and hemmed with the highest, wildest reed banks. For almost the entire stretch, The Tempest shares the water with no more than wildfowl, our most interested spectators a few cattle cooling their feet in one of the watering spots where the pasture fields slope down to meet the river.
Drinking weak black builder’s tea and sporting a pair of huge butterfly sunglasses she’s found in the boat (so OTT they must be Mum’s), Summer has climbed back up on the roof to sit in the sun, eager to educate me about Kwasi. The childlike vulnerability has gone and she’s using her TED Talk voice: quick, staccato bursts, as though neatly chopping each sentence into equal lengths for emphasis. She does this when she’s lecturing me and Paddy about our elderly ignorance of all things youthful and groupthink.
‘Being shouty and rude is his trademark as a photographer, it hides his insecurities and creates amazing energy but it wears everyone down eventually.’ Today’s blow-up between them has been brewing a while, she explains, his behaviour increasingly childish as their fiery friendship counts down to his return from teacher to peer. ‘He’s conflicted; the first-generation Nigerian culture vibe is so gendered. He’s the youngest of seven; his parents are old school, in their sixties and hate each other, whereas you and Dad are at least pre-diabetic and know who Kylie Jenner is. Plus you still love each other.’
