Angelina was now presumably the breadwinner. She would see an opportunity to be supportive, perhaps in return for Richard doing the cooking and ironing. How Richard would respond to the change in roles was another matter. Regardless, Angelina had chosen to try to make a difficult situation work, and I had to respect that.
In Singapore, a couple of months into my world tour, I spent some time with an American consultant. Bob hailed from Idaho and was a technology guru of about forty with the regulation beard and Buddy Holly glasses. Over chilli crab and Tiger beer, he told a story of working in Poland in the early seventies, when the Iron Curtain was firmly in place, and meeting a heart-stoppingly beautiful woman.
He had pictures, and his description was a fair one. She was also intelligent, cultured and, for reasons he could not fathom, interested in him. He thought, life doesn’t get any better than this for a computer geek; we’ll deal with any problems as they come along. After knowing her only two weeks, he asked her to marry him—and they were still together.
‘How old were you?’ I asked.
‘Twenty-six.’
Bob was giving me the same advice as the woman in the antique shop. Too late now.
That did not stop me chewing it over. And over. It was no single thing. It was my job, her job, my unwillingness to commit, her unwillingness to bury her marriage, my concerns about fatherhood.
But the nub of it was this: if Angelina had truly wanted me, she would have been willing to wait and then give us both time to let the relationship develop without the need for any bigger commitment.
At the same time, her self-esteem may have been torn down so comprehensively by Richard, with some help from her mother, that she needed that commitment to see her through. I had left it too late, not just through fear of making a wrong decision, but because I had not believed I was good enough for Angelina, a belief she had reinforced by not offering to wait for me.
I wanted Angelina to prove her love by doing it my way. She wanted the same of me. But we had each doubted ourselves too much to do what the other needed.
In Hong Kong, I read Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, in which the hero must wait until his seventies before being united with his beloved. In a moment of melancholy, I inscribed my copy: Angelina, I will love you always. Adam and sent it to her, via Jacinta. It was an unhealthy book for me to have read at that time, and to have then inflicted on Angelina. Just wait long enough and somehow the right people will die, the stars will align, we’ll get over ourselves and we’ll be together. And, in the meantime, what?
In Johannesburg, I had a few dates with a woman who was staying in the same block of serviced apartments—Swiss, working for a pharmaceuticals group. Brigitte was good company and we had fun, but I was not ready to take a relationship to the next stage. My heart wasn’t in it.
Angelina wrote to me twice. The first time was when she and Richard finally broke up. It had taken just over a year.
I’m sorry I didn’t write earlier. I hope you’ll understand that I was trying to get on with my life and I could not do so if I stayed in touch with you. Thank you for the book. I loved you too, and if you really were going to love me forever then I made the wrong decision in not waiting for you.
I think so often of the time we spent together, but I have to let go of it to move on. I keep thinking we were meant to be, but I can’t expect it to happen now.
I’m OK and have been getting a lot of support from Jacinta (you remember my crazy sister) and Charlie, who’s a big bear who used to work with my father.
I can’t change the past, but I’m so sorry that I screwed up.
Love
Angel
I had finished my marathon contract with the insurance company and landed a new assignment in London. The letter came to my mother’s address in Manchester.
My mother brought a certain amount of sanity to my life or, alternatively, she cemented in the insanity that had caused the problem and stopped me from fixing it. A married woman I’d only known for a few months—an actress, for goodness’ sake—putting pressure on me to commit, and me only twenty-six.
‘You’re well out of it. Thank your lucky stars it wasn’t a local lass. When your grandfather went to war, my mother waited for him for three years. This girl needs to get her own life sorted out before she starts messing yours up. How long did you say she’d been married? Oh, for heaven’s sake, she needs to grow up.’
More than anything else, I was torn, guilty that I could not get on a plane and go to Angelina. I had promised eternal love, and when she called it in I was not there.
15
My client in London was four years older than me, short, strawberry blond, cute in a freckly, jeans-and-sloppy-jumper sort of way, and a bit of a gym addict. She interviewed me for the job, and I liked her immediately. Her name was Claire.
We had a rapport: it often seemed that we were the only two who knew what needed to be done and wanted to get on with doing it. She enjoyed a reputation for astuteness, fairness and absolute unflappability. Every problem could be solved; nothing that happened at work was worth losing sleep over; the past was for learning from.
Among those in need of Claire’s steadying influence was a data modeller named Gérard. Out of the blue, he asked me for a drink after work—in his case a Campari and soda with a twist of orange. We chatted for a while about why the specification he had given me was an unworkable fantasy, a view that Claire had endorsed.
‘We should hardly be surprised. She’s putty in your hands.’
Claire was putty in no one’s hands.
‘How do you work that out?’
‘There’s no other reason for her to agree to de-normalising the reference tables. Ask her out. Relieve us all of our misery. I presume the interest is mutual.’
It was, but I was not going to ask my client for a date, especially on such tenuous evidence. Perhaps when the contract was over, six months or so down the track.
‘If she fancies me, she can ask me out.’
A couple of days later, I walked away from my terminal and came back to find someone had sent a message from my account. To Claire.
Dinner and a movie tonight?
I hit Recall, something you could do back then, but it was too late. The message had been read.
‘Guilty as charged,’ said Gérard, calm in the face of my absolute bloody apoplexy. ‘Someone had to do it, and tragically you lacked the cojones.’
‘Right then, Cyrano de Bergerac. We’re both going to see Claire and you can tell her what you’ve done. You’d better hope she can take a joke.’
‘Shall we see if she’s replied before we get too excited?’
It was my turn to buy Gérard a drink that evening. Before going to dinner and a film with Claire.
She was great company, but we were both conscious of working together and our conversations stayed on safe territory. After two dates, I decided to push it a little and booked dinner at the River Cafe in Hammersmith.
Half a drink into the meal, she put down her fork and said, ‘Date number three. Friday Night. Special Restaurant. What should I assume?’
‘You’re the project manager. I wouldn’t want to disappoint you by falling behind schedule.’
‘You’ve got that part of me worked out. How about I tell you something about the other part and you can decide whether you want to keep seeing me?’
‘The secret life of Claire Axford?’
‘Enough of it to stop you wasting your time and money. I’m not a foodie. This is nice, but so is curry, and fish and chips. If you want to impress me, you can cook me a roast dinner. My perfect night out is listening to music. And I don’t want to have children.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Barely the beginning. But you needed to know that much. Especially with regard to children. No point starting out with mismatched expectations.’
There was something immensely appealing about her no-nonsense façade, because I was sure it was a
façade. There was more to her, and I wanted to be the one to see it.
It was after 11 p.m. when we finished the meal.
‘Not too late to catch some music?’ I said.
‘Full marks for paying attention.’
‘I thought we agreed on music,’ said Claire, arms folded. I had managed to deflect her questions about venue as I let the train pass the clubs of Camden Town and alighted at Hampstead.
‘We did. This is my place, and I’m going to play you some music.’
‘I meant live music.’
‘Of course.’
‘You play something?’
‘Piano.’
‘All right. I let myself in for that. I’ll come up for a cup of tea, but for future reference, I’m more of a rock ’n’ roll person.’
While Claire made herself tea (‘I know how I like it’), I plugged the electronic keyboard into the stereo, cranked up the volume, then had second thoughts. An acoustic piano can make plenty of noise in a small flat, and it seemed appropriate that the Rönisch Three Crown that I had decided would accompany me through my life should be my weapon of choice.
Claire walked in with her cuppa. I ripped my right thumb down the keys and tore into Jerry Lee Lewis’s ‘Great Balls of Fire’: big chords, strong bass line and my best Little-Richard-in-full-cry impression. Claire stopped dead, put down her tea cup, watched for a few seconds and burst out laughing. And then she was singing with me, rocking, hitting the top of the piano in time with the beat, still laughing. It was the first time I had seen her let go. And it was the first time I had played a full song since ‘Angel of the Morning’ in Shanksy’s bar, almost a year before.
I must have played for an hour and a half, Claire into it as much as I was, the barriers down. It was only rock ’n’ roll, but it was a huge release after so long.
The next morning, she made coffee and I asked her about the issue with children.
‘I suppose I can’t object to your asking a personal question after I’ve spent the night with you. I’d be a terrible mother. I had a really bad role model and I don’t want to pass it on to another generation.’
Like me, Claire had been an only child, but in her case it was because her sister Alison had died of meningitis at the age of three, a few months before Claire was born. Her mother had never got over her grief, nor taken the risk of loving a child again. Claire’s father had died of a heart attack when she was six. Claire had decided that it was better not to have children of her own and risk repeating her mother’s mistakes. I could understand that.
When my lease ran out a few months later, I moved in with Claire. She got me playing again and we caught a lot of live bands. Her taste was broader than she had indicated, but she wasn’t much of a lyrics person. She just wanted the pure hit of music.
It was her way of opening up emotionally. Intimacy and conversations about feelings did not come easily to her and, after a few sessions with a psychologist before she met me, she had decided that therapy created more problems than it solved. She had made a strength of her emotional detachment, built a career on it, and was not going to tamper with that foundation. Except with music, and only with me. The band would play, I would wrap my arms around her, and there would be a connection beyond anything words could achieve. And if I wanted to reach her: a song at the piano would cut straight through to a place she would never otherwise let me into.
It was a while before she shared a bit of information that I should have guessed.
‘You know that message Gérard sent to me? I got him to do it.’
It was almost a year before I met Claire’s mother, Joy.
‘Bottle of something?’ I asked Claire as we packed the car for the overnight stay in Norwich. It was a Saturday, and her mother would be turning sixty-five the following week.
‘She doesn’t drink.’
I had already been warned that we would not be sleeping together.
‘Religious?’
‘Hardly. That’d involve some sort of hope.’
‘Come on, she can’t be that bad.’
She was. I would have picked her for seventy-five rather than sixty-five; short like Claire, but slumped shoulders, bent and grey. No hug—not even a smile—for her daughter. I had been promised that I would hear about Alison in the first few minutes, and Joy did not disappoint.
‘I’m sorry, Adam, you’ll find dinner’s very plain. It’s hard to get enthusiastic about cooking when you’ve lost a child.’
It was so contrived that it was almost funny. Thirty-two years had passed. Over lamb chops and mushy vegetables, Joy managed to weave Alison’s death into every second sentence.
‘Christ,’ I said, when Joy had headed to the bathroom. (‘My bladder’s never been the same since I had Alison; it’s a price to pay for only three years of life.’) ‘Is she like this all the time?’
Claire nodded. ‘I’d come home and have hurt myself or broken up with my boyfriend, and she’d say, Wait till you’ve lost a child. Then you’ll know what it’s like to suffer. You see why I don’t do this too often.’
Even Claire’s level-headedness had its limit, and it was apparent that she was approaching it as we cleared the plates.
‘You all right?’ I asked.
‘I’ve been better. I’m going to need some time out very soon.’
‘Say you’re not feeling well.’
‘I can’t leave you with her.’
‘Course you can.’
Claire made her excuses and went upstairs. Joy led me to the front room, sat on the sofa and pointed me to the armchair.
‘Can I make you a tea?’ I said.
‘I’m all right. Would you like a glass of brandy? I keep some for cooking.’
I tried to conjure up a picture of Joy flambéing a baked Alaska.
She began to get up, then said, ‘It’s in the sideboard in the dining room. You’d better pour me one, too.’
I poured two and brought the bottle over. We talked for a couple of hours, about the work she did with the local hospital, about Claire’s late father, who had been a real-estate agent, and about her desire to stay where she was living until her death. She would not be led on Claire, but nor did she mention Alison except in the context of keeping the house. After the second refill, she even smiled a bit. It seemed that the depression and obsession with Alison were reserved for Claire.
Finally she got up, steadily enough considering what she had drunk. We had not discussed the sleeping arrangements.
‘There’s a spare bedroom?’ I asked.
‘Oh my God, no, you can’t sleep there,’ said Joy. ‘But you should see it.’
By the time I followed her upstairs, I had guessed what would be behind the door of the middle bedroom, but not the extent of the creepiness factor. Faded wallpaper with Beatrix Potter characters, a single bed with clothes laid out, a few soft toys and dolls, a big box. Just an ordinary child’s room from 1958. I was happy to sleep on the couch.
Joy closed the door of Alison’s room. ‘I haven’t been much of a mother to Claire. Are you two thinking of having children?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I hope you do. Claire’s always wanted children.’
Then, while I was taking that in: ‘You don’t need to sleep on the couch.’
Perhaps thinking I might misunderstand her and bunk down on the single bed with the teddy bear and dolls and little-girl’s clothes, she added, ‘You can sleep in Claire’s room. Just don’t tell her I let you.’
Sunday morning, driving out of Norwich, Claire was quiet and I found myself reflecting on her concerns about motherhood. I had uncritically accepted her decision not to have children because it sat well with my own, Angelina’s reassurances notwithstanding. But her mother’s revelation rang true.
I ran the flag up the pole. ‘Seeing your mum reminded me of what you said about having children.’
‘Well, now you know why.’
‘Not really. You’ve turned out all right.’
&nb
sp; ‘Glad you think so. But—’
‘So, even with a mother like that, you got through. If we had children, they’d have a better start than you did.’
‘Adam. I don’t know where you’re going with this, but I thought I made it clear at the outset…’
‘Date number three. We’ve come a way since then.’
Claire was driving, eyes fixed on the road ahead. ‘You’re telling me you want a family? Now? After—’
‘You’d only be half the equation,’ I said. ‘I’d be there. I’d do what it took to make it work.’
‘You’d be there? Should I take that as some kind of promise?’
‘Claire, you know I love you. I’ll be here as long as you want me to be.’
‘But you really want children? With me?’
‘Only with you.’
Claire drove in silence for about ten minutes, then pulled off the motorway.
‘You okay?’ I said.
‘I’m fine. I just thought that if we’re going to make it permanent, I should meet your family as well.’
Then, four hours later, parking outside my mother’s house: ‘Adam, I’m really not sure about this.’
‘We’ve come all this way. You have to meet her now.’
‘You know what I’m talking about.’
‘I’ll be there. We’ll look after each other. That’s what love’s about. You do love me, don’t you?’
‘I’d have thought you’d have worked that out by now.’
Over the next few weeks, Claire would bring up the topic then drop it, showing none of the certainty and confidence that characterised the rest of her life. It seemed clear enough to me that she did want children. So did I. Though neither of us expressed it with any clarity, we felt that being a mother would give Claire a chance to show the part of herself that she held back in the adult world. I wanted to see it more often, too.