This could be everything, p.13
This Could be Everything, page 13
16 Valentine
I was still vibrating from the dreams three days later, and when I went downstairs, I found Ann in her long-to-the-floor white Victorian nightdress, staring out into the garden. Her nightie was unbuttoned a little too much so that her left breast was almost entirely visible in profile; it struck me only then that I had never even seen Ann’s breasts before. She was wearing her house slippers from Tokyo; she and Robert had been to the Far East shortly after they were married, and Ann’s wardrobe was punctuated with clothing from Asia that sat oddly with her basic aesthetic of one-size-too-big lace blouses fused with the put-upon sensuality of Polly from Fawlty Towers. I stood and watched her for a while; she crossed the room and started flipping through the pages of a magazine – I guess it was the latest issue of Tatler – Ann had an unapologetic fascination with the social pages: the Bystander photographs of Lord such-and-such’s daughter’s twenty-first birthday party at Annabel’s with banana daiquiris and omelettes at dawn and so forth. She was singing ‘Love Shack’ by the B-52’s, very softly but as usual she turned it into a musical-theatre number, slowing it down so that she sounded like Julie Andrews in reflective mode, trembling vibrato over the chorus, and changing the spoken-word section to Received Pronunciation. But most noticeable – a new entry at number 1 above the visibility of left breast at number 2 and her hair still loose at number 3 – was the light that seemed to come from her, that new, palpable, quivering radiance, that I could see so blatantly that it embarrassed me. I felt like the Mother Abbess from The Sound of Music in her presence: prim, untouched. Ann felt more like my mother than she ever had before.
I opened the fridge door for something to do and Ann spun around. I pulled out a yoghurt and I jolted as Thomasina jumped up on the counter behind me, and the yoghurt slipped through my fingers, and split and splattered open, white, creamy, on the lino floor. I picked up a cloth. Ann rushed to assist me, her words tripping over themselves. This new anarchy in her, this new vibration, was altering everything.
‘Oh! Feb! Take another yoghurt. Oh, that was the last one. Never mind, there’s a new jar of strawberry jam and there’s a croissant in the bread bin. Or there’s cereal! You love cereal! How about CEREAL!’ With this triumphant suggestion, she picked up a packet of Shreddies, fixed her eyes on mine and shook the box violently at me, like an auditioning percussionist. I took it from her. Her left boob slipped out of her nightdress again and she bundled it back in without apology.
I wanted to bring her back down to earth with some of my pathological practicality, to let her know that I knew, that I comprehended the danger she was shoving us all into.
‘I saw you,’ I said. As soon as I’d said it, I didn’t want to have said it. I didn’t really want to burst anything. I couldn’t quite bear it.
‘You saw me?’ She was a rabbit in the headlights, which was unusual for Ann, who prided herself on being unshockable; but this wasn’t a schoolroom at Westbury House where, a week ago, she had reported to me quite calmly that a girl in the first year called Alexandra Lopez had fainted in the lab while dissecting an unborn chicken, falling head-first into a life-size model of a human skeleton, cutting her head open on a jagged rib and ending up in a pool of blood on the floor of the science lab. Now, in the kitchen at St Quintin Avenue, she felt less powerful. This was different.
‘You saw me where?’ she asked.
‘I saw you. I saw you walking down the street.’
‘Oh. Right.’ Ann’s voice had gone very quiet.
I gulped. No. I couldn’t do it, could I.
‘Well, you – you – you were – you were – it was just that – you were wearing Diana’s jeans.’
Ann’s relief was disguised so badly that even if I had not known about Gregory Arrowsmith, I would now have felt sure that something was up. She let out a long sigh, as though she had stopped breathing while I had been talking and needed to gasp for air now that she knew that her secret was still safe.
‘Oh! Feb! I’m so sorry. I meant to tell you. I don’t usually wear jeans, as you know, but I tried them on, and they fitted me, and I asked myself what Diana would have thought, and my instinct was that she would have told me to go for it. I mean, you of all people know what Diana thought about my wardrobe,’ Ann went on, warming to the subject. Anything, I supposed, to keep her off the hotter topic.
‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘Better you to be wearing her jeans than some stranger.’
‘Well, that’s what I thought. I rather imagined she might have approved.’
She looked at me, her big blue eyes searching my face. Did she know that I knew? I didn’t think so. She was an unaccomplished villain. She cleared her throat again.
‘I’m so sorry you saw me wearing them, Feb. I hope you weren’t upset.’ Ann laughed suddenly. ‘You’ve been so, so brave—’ Her eyes filled up. I wasn’t actually interested in bravery. I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t brave. ‘I didn’t tell Robert about –’ she paused – ‘about borrowing them. I thought he might think it was a bit… odd.’
‘I won’t say anything.’
She gave me that searching look once more. ‘I don’t want him to think I’m having some sort of – I don’t know – mid-life crisis thing. Trying to be younger than I am. You know.’
The sunlight streamed through the kitchen window showing no mercy. There were fine lines around her eyes and deeper lines on her forehead. Although her skinny little ankles and her long pale feet sticking out from the bottom of the nightie gave her a child-like impression, she looked every one of her forty-five years. Yet I had never seen anyone luminous like this. Not even Diana at her peak. She looked like she could have taken on Helen of Troy and won.
Later, in the evening, when Robert came back, all I knew was that I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want to know a single thing about Ann that my uncle didn’t know. He put a pile of books on the table and pulled off his tie. I looked at his tweed jacket, worn all year round, even when it’s hot enough to fry eggs on the pavement. Robert liked saying that, like a stopped clock telling the right time twice a day, he came into fashion every few years without meaning to. Right now, he was as far from cool as it was possible to be.
‘Thank you,’ I said suddenly.
Robert raised his eyebrows at me and took a biro out of his pocket.
‘Whatever for?’
‘For having me. For having us.’
‘Oh.’ Robert looked genuinely startled. He put down his biro and his eyes widened. Upstairs, I could hear Ann singing the theme tune from Brush Strokes.
I thought of Theo Farrah.
‘Diana thought you were –’ I gulped – ‘Diana thought you were so –’ I paused again and looked at Robert – ‘so nice. Nice to her. Which you were. To both of us.’
Robert looked at me as though I were speaking in code.
‘Ah,’ he said eventually, ‘it may come as a surprise, but it wasn’t at all hard to be nice to you both.’
‘Yes but—’
‘Well, Diana always thought I was completely mad, of course,’ said Robert, ‘dragging you both around the place, talking about road names and railings and—’
‘She liked it very much. Railings and all.’
‘I enjoyed it too,’ he laughed, ‘very much. You forget, I never had children of my own.’
‘I don’t forget that,’ I said.
‘Well. Ann and I felt as though we’d been given a shot at something rather wonderful.’
He’d never given us the impression that he’d found taking on Diana and me wonderful, but he’d never implied that he hadn’t found it wonderful, either. He was supremely, enviably impassive most times.
‘But we came along, and we interrupted your lives,’ I said. I didn’t want to stop talking about it now.
Robert looked puzzled. He smiled at me as though I hadn’t quite worked something out.
‘Isn’t life just one long series of interruptions? Some good, some bad? Interruptions define a life. I’m sure John Lennon had something to say about that, didn’t he? I always felt Bach did.’ He smiled at me rather vaguely. So handsome, Mama had said of him. Good teeth, that lovely, delicate nose. But quite devoid of It, you know…
‘But one day you’re living your lives together, just the two of you, the next day, we’re there…’ I realized, as I was speaking, what the hell I was driving at. It was our fault that this had happened. It was because Diana and I had come along that Ann had lost her mind over the drama teacher. That was it!
‘Well, we did have to put our plans for world domination on hold, that’s true.’
Robert doesn’t quite know how to do sardonic, so he delivered what was not a bad joke in a way that made him sound regretful as anything – as though the desire for conquering the universe was all truth.
‘Haha,’ I said uncertainly.
‘We wouldn’t have had it any other way,’ said Robert. He flipped through the first few pages of The Times, trying to cover his embarrassment. ‘It required no discussion between us,’ he said. ‘None at all. I think, if anything, we’ve been better with each other since you arrived.’
I looked away from him, not wanting to see his face.
‘Of course, not a day goes by that we don’t think of Diana and wonder if anything we could have done could have prevented—’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ I said quickly.
‘But we promised ourselves that we’d do all we could for you both. The main objective was to keep you safe.’
‘You did. You do.’
‘Feb. You’ve a whole long life ahead of you…’ Robert cleared his throat and gave me a brief nod and I waited for the next part of the sentence to be picked from the Lazy Susan of clichés that most people offered up: everything will be all right eventually, things will get better, time will heal, what goes around comes around, because you’re worth it, the sun always shines on TV, is this burning an eternal flame? etc. etc. But instead he said: ‘So, February, please. Try not to – not to – fuck it up. You know? Try not to do that.’ I stared at him, not just for the cursing, which was so unlike him, but also the directness of the order. He’d tried to cover the drama of the word ‘fuck’ by pronouncing it with a Scots burr tagged onto it, like the word ‘loch’.
‘Maybe it’s already too late,’ I said. ‘Feels like it’s already fuch-ed up, most times.’
He smiled at me. ‘Ha. Goodness, no. It’s not too late.’ He sighed in sudden agitation and stood up, and nodded at me, almost annoyed. It’s like every time he shows a piece of himself to anyone, he slams a demerit onto his report card in disappointment.
The difference between them is that when Ann came in an hour later, she picked up the copy of The Remains of the Day that Robert had taken out of the library last week and started reading it right in the middle of a chapter, to ‘get a flavour of it’. That would have been Mama’s answer too. She liked to get flavours. She liked to smell and touch things, to pick up the fruit and squeeze it round the middle, right before she decided whether it was worth eating at all. I sat at the table, saying nothing, with Thomasina on my lap. I wanted to go upstairs. I wanted to go upstairs to be with Yellow, but I couldn’t. I needed to know if I’d dreamed it. As soon as she spoke, I knew I hadn’t.
‘Remember we’ve got lunch with the Arrowsmiths tomorrow,’ Ann said to Robert.
I went very still. Ann glanced at me.
‘Oh, Lord,’ said Robert. ‘I’d forgotten. Why on earth did we agree to that on a weekend?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Ann, ‘she’s French. The wife.’
‘Do the French only ever entertain on weekends?’ asked Robert.
Ann paused and cleared her throat. ‘I don’t get the impression that the marriage is particularly great,’ she said, as well she might. ‘Not like your mum and dad,’ she added suddenly, looking at me. ‘That was a good marriage.’
I felt my head going light, and the Trench Effect laughed in the corner of my eye. There’s been a fire. Your parents have been in a fire. In a fire. The station. There’s been a fire. It’s all over the news. Then I heard the sound of my feet taking me upstairs, and into Robert and Ann’s bedroom.
‘Feb?’ Ann shouted up the stairs. ‘You OK?’
‘I’m OK,’ I shouted back down. Funny how many times you can say those two words and mean the opposite. Funny how many times people do that in their lives. Yeah, I’m OK. I’m fine.
I picked up the photograph of Mama and Daddy and I’m not OK. I’m not fine. I’m as far from OK and fine as anyone can be.
* * *
When I was twelve years old, I discovered that my mother had almost embarked on a romantic affair with John Lewitt, a white-suited Man-from-Del-Monte figure who lived at the other end of the village from us, in a big house, with an unhappy wife and three daughters with thin red hair and pale white faces. He was billed as a friend of both our parents, and he and his wife often tried to get their three boarding school daughters to mix with us semi-American state school kids, probably because they recognized in Diana a firecracker capable of cantering over class barriers slick as a whistle, but unfortunately for good old John Lewitt, we made mincemeat of Katrina, Amelia and Susanna of whom we were really suspicious, mostly because they didn’t like Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall album. But the point was: John Lewitt was rich, which appealed to my father, as he was not rich himself and admired those who had made money from nothing, and John Lewitt was crazy good-looking to the ladies, which appealed to my mother, as she was still very beautiful, and with great beauty – I have said – comes the relentless, restless desire to know that whatever age you are, you’ve still got whatever it was that you had when you first started giving people sleepless nights.
It was nearly midnight towards the end of February, and the wind was howling and raging around the cottage and rain was battering the windows and hammering the early daffodils in the orchard below my bedroom, and I couldn’t sleep. Daddy was away in London for two nights; he was an accountant for a firm that made parts for trains. There’s just no way of putting it to make it sound more exciting; Diana and I tried to for years. There was always an unsteadiness to the very foundations of the cottage when Daddy wasn’t there to keep it sensible, a sense of mayhem lurking in the wings so that in some ways I wasn’t altogether surprised when I tiptoed downstairs to find Mama, and from the kitchen door I heard a man’s voice I recognized at once to be that of John Lewitt.
‘Lily, I don’t know how I can go on. Surely you feel it too? I know you do. The Valentine was from you, wasn’t it? The Valentine’s card?’
And my mother’s reply in sotto voce: ‘A card is as far as this can ever go, John.’
And John Lewitt again: ‘But you wanted to tell me how you felt, Lily. You know I feel it too.’
‘Oh, John.’
I remember thinking that this was exactly how they spoke in the Mills & Boon stories that Mama read of an evening; novels that would start off slim and neat enough to slip in the back pocket of her denims, but three days later would be twice the size due to being read everywhere and treated like shit. Mama had no respect for the physicality of books – for their covers, the blurb, the paper on which they were printed – and she cracked them open like she was opening a bag of Twiglets, briskly breaking their spines, climbing into the bath with them and drying out their damp pages afterwards on the radiator in the kitchen.
Now she had John Lewitt talking like he had climbed straight out of chapter four.
‘Lily, you’re the most wonderful woman I’ve ever met. I think I’m going mad—’
From my place behind the door I gulped, then without meaning to, half screamed, and they turned in horror, and I ran back upstairs, and Mama rushed up behind me, breathlessly trying to forge an explanation as she went along, but she ended up doing a crazy thing otherwise known as Telling the Truth, for which I am, even now, only partly grateful.
‘What was John Lewitt talking about?’ I asked her. He was always John Lewitt, never just John, to differentiate him from John Watson, a monosyllabic work colleague of my father’s with a wife called Lynne who had Lyme’s disease and was known by us girls as Lynne Lyme, and John Le Carré, whom my mother had once met at a drinks party and had spoken of ever since as though she were the godmother to his children.
‘I suppose he likes me,’ said Mama, ‘these things happen sometimes. Even for people who are married.’ She sat down on my bed and knocked the seven-inch single of ‘Abracadabra’ by Steve Miller Band onto the floor. The record slipped out of the sleeve. She picked it up.
‘Funny cover,’ she said. I wasn’t prepared to change the subject.
‘What was the Valentine’s card? You sent him a Valentine’s card?’ I knotted my fingers around a knitted blanket. I was aware that although I felt horrified, the drama of what was happening was on some level very interesting to me. I had my mother’s absolute attention for once – that was for certain.
‘I felt sorry for him. He’s always had a little crush on me, and I wanted to let him know that I recognize that he likes me. It was a sort of thank-you card.’
‘But you don’t need to thank someone for thinking you’re pretty! Everyone can see you’re pretty unless they’re blind as bats. And it wasn’t a thank-you card! It was a Valentine’s card. You send those to tell someone you love them!’
‘Yes. Perhaps it was a mistake,’ said Mama thoughtfully.
‘Have you kissed him?’ I heard myself ask. There was that voice of mine: determined, practical, efficient. There was a silence.
