‘Now, you make no secret of your own sexual orientation,’ said the journalist. ‘Could you tell me –’
She stopped. Maddy came in, carrying shopping bags.
‘Oh. Sorry,’ said Maddy.
The journalist switched off her tape recorder.
Erin said: ‘Maddy, this is . . .’
‘Alison.’
‘Alison, from the Independent on Sunday.’ She turned to the girl. ‘Would you like some tea? Earl Grey, Rosehip, Lapsang?’
‘Lapsang would be lovely.’
Erin smiled at Maddy. ‘Lapsang for both of us, sweetheart. Thanks.’
Maddy left. Alison switched on her tape recorder. ‘I believe you had your daughter Allegra by artificial insemination –’
‘Oh no,’ Erin replied. ‘I fucked the guy.’
‘Oh. Anyway, why did you decide to bring up a child alone? Wasn’t that a very brave decision?’
‘I didn’t want to miss out on motherhood.’ Erin stopped. ‘Hey, that’s a great bracelet.’
Alison glowed. Erin smiled at her.
In the kitchen Maddy, filling the kettle, heard Erin’s voice.
‘. . . living with someone should be a celebration, not subjugation. With no man in the house all the power-games disappear – who’s doing the chores, who’s resenting having to take time off work. Have you noticed how we always thank a man when he makes a meal and never a woman?’
Maddy started to unpack the shopping.
Prudence drove her mother home. It was Saturday morning and the streets of Purley were empty. When she was young the streets had been full of children; now there were just parked cars. Since her childhood, car ownership had doubled and children had disappeared. They were sitting at home, watching the CD Roms her company was producing. Driving past the houses, she mourned her lost youth. The break-up of her parents’ marriage had separated her from her past; it had broken away, like an ice-floe, and drifted into the distance.
Prudence looked at her mother. There had always been something blurred and undefined about Dorothy. She didn’t even look her age. An unremarkable, pretty face if one tried to assess it. Maybe everybody felt that about their mother; they were too close to have a shape, too out-of-focus. But Louise was like that too. Like her flyaway hair there was something fuzzy about her. Perhaps it was because both women had spent the years servicing the needs of other people. Maddy was strong and square; like her father, there was a solidity to her. But Dorothy was a mother and a wife; her own identity had somehow been lost. Now, at the age of sixty-three, she was alone. Gordon wasn’t coming home, Prudence knew it now. How was her mother going to cope? Her sudden flare-up in April’s flat had startled Prudence. Already her mother was revealing a hidden part of herself. In the coming months was she going to disintegrate or grow strong? Was she going to surprise her daughters and those who loved her? Prudence had no idea, and felt panic-struck on her mother’s behalf.
They arrived at The Birches. Prudence unlocked the front door and picked up the letters that were spewed onto the doormat. ‘I’ll put the heating on.’
Dorothy went into the lounge. She had been away for a week – three days in hospital and four days of convalescence with her friend Connie in Harrow. Connie was a divorcée; until recently, such women had been a separate species. Sometimes Dorothy had pitied them; sometimes she had envied them their freedom. She thought: I’ve stepped across the threshold now.
Hunched in her overcoat, she sat down. Her absence had changed the house; it was no longer hers. When her grandmother had died she had sat with her; she had sat beside the bed for hours, unable to leave because she knew that when she returned her granny would be changed into a corpse.
Prudence came into the room. ‘Let me help you unpack,’ she said.
Dorothy looked at the framed photographs, at the forty-four years of married life. She sat, perched on the edge of her chair as if she were just visiting. She wondered whether Gordon would come into the office on Monday. She tried to picture him leafing through invoices and scattering cigarette ash. She tried to make him act as he had always done.
Prudence said: ‘You’re coming home with me.’
‘I’m fine, really,’ said Dorothy. ‘I’ve got plenty to do here.’
‘Come on.’
Prudence’s hand slipped into hers. It was dry and cool. Dorothy stood up like a sleepwalker and let herself be led to the door.
Prudence managed to find a parking space only a few yards from her flat. This struck her – erroneously, as it turned out – as a good omen.
‘Can you wait here a sec?’ she asked her mother. ‘I’ll just, er . . .’
She left her mother, ran to the door, let herself in and ran upstairs. She unlocked her front door and, hearing a whirring sound, went into the kitchen. Stephen stood at the blender.
‘I asked my mum to stay, just for a night or so. Do you mind?’ She kissed his cheek. ‘I just couldn’t leave her in that empty house all by herself.’
Prudence looked at the blender. It appeared to be full of milk shake. She turned. Dirk stood in the doorway.
There was a moment’s silence. ‘Hello, Dirk!’ she said.
‘Kaatya had to go on some course,’ muttered Stephen. ‘Some Saturday workshop or something. I’ve got them till six.’
Dirk poured the milk-shake mixture into a glass and took it into the living room. Prudence followed him. Pieter lay on the carpet, surrounded by sheets of paper.
‘Hello, Pieter,’ she said. ‘How lovely to see you.’
‘What do you know about Bismarck?’ he asked. ‘Dad’s hopeless.’
Prudence hurried back into the kitchen and closed the door behind her. ‘Take them out!’ she hissed. ‘Take them for a walk or something.’
‘I can’t!’
‘She can’t find out about them now. Not in the state she’s in.’
‘She’s got to sooner or later,’ he said.
‘Not now! Put them in the bedroom, just for half an hour. Then I’ll take her off shopping or something.’
She went back into the living room. ‘Listen, chaps. Let’s play hide-and-seek!’
‘I’m thirteen,’ said Pieter.
Stephen gathered up the papers. ‘Please, Pieter. You can do your project in there.’
Dirk said: ‘There’s no TV in there.’
Stephen ushered him towards the bedroom door. ‘And keep really quiet, okay? Is that a deal?’
‘How much will you pay us?’ demanded Pieter.
Prudence stared at the boy. ‘What?’
‘How much, Dad?’
There was a pause. ‘A quid each,’ said Stephen.
‘Stephen!’ said Prudence.
Pieter shook his head. ‘Five pounds.’
‘What?’ Prudence stared at him.
‘Five pounds for the two of us,’ said Dirk.
‘Oh, all right,’ said Stephen.
The two boys went into the bedroom and shut the door.
Dorothy sat beside the eternal flames of the fire. ‘Honestly, I was perfectly all right,’ she said.
‘Don’t be silly. That’s a sofabed, remember?’ said Prudence. ‘You can stay as long as you like.’
Stephen carried in a tray of coffee. ‘Of course you can,’ he said.
Dorothy looked up at him. ‘Forty-four years, Stephen. That’s how long we’ve been married. How could he do it?’
‘Would you like some sugar?’ Stephen asked.
‘You’re a man,’ said Dorothy. ‘Tell me.’
‘I can’t imagine,’ he said, passing her a cup. Prudence looked at him sharply.
Dorothy said: ‘It’s as if he’s just screwed it up and thrown it away, all of it. As if our marriage never happened.’
‘I’m sure he’s feeling terrible,’ said Stephen.
‘You’re so nice,’ said Dorothy. ‘You needn’t defend him.’ She sipped her coffee.
Prudence lifted her cup. Some of her coffee had spilled into the saucer. She watched St
ephen’s foot; it was stirring the fringe of the hearthrug.
‘He’s a foolish man,’ said Dorothy. ‘Innocent, really. He’s brought up three daughters and he still doesn’t know anything about women. First girl who sets her sights on him – God knows why, maybe she is after his money, I don’t know. Maybe she wants a father figure. She makes a play for him, he’s putty in her hands. She’s not even that attractive, compared to some of them.’
‘I’m sure it won’t last,’ said Stephen.
‘How do you know?’ Prudence asked sharply.
‘I don’t know,’ said Stephen. ‘I’m just guessing. Maybe it’s some sort of mid-life crisis.’
Dorothy nodded. ‘He probably thinks – oh, everyone’s doing it nowadays, why not him?’
‘He’ll come home with his tail between his legs,’ said Stephen.
‘You sure?’ asked Prudence.
There was a thump in the bedroom.
‘What’s that?’ asked Dorothy.
Prudence drained her cup. ‘I’m taking you out,’ she said to her mother. ‘We’ll go into town, we’ll have lunch at Fortnum’s and go to a matinée, that Gershwin thing.’ She got to her feet. ‘And we’ll go to Selfridges and squirt ourselves with perfume. We’ll forget about everything and just have fun.’
‘Sure you’ve got the time?’ asked her mother.
Prudence nodded. ‘I’ve got all day.’
Gordon was cut adrift. It was true, what he had told April. His old life had receded, its shoreline barely recognisable. He was helpless – he, Gordon, who had once fancied himself in control, who had spent his life telling other people what to do. Once it had been simple: you laid the foundations, you placed one brick upon another. Who would have guessed how flimsy the structure was, once you shook it, how easily it crumbled?
He had caused terrible pain and was continuing to cause it. His wife had crumpled onto April’s floor as if she had been shot. During those winter days even Gordon, not the most reflective of men, tried to find a reason for what had happened. He told himself that his marriage, though companionable, had quietly died. It had succumbed to decades of familiarity. He and Dorothy had little in common, they had just been cemented by child-rearing and the comforting, blinding routine of daily life. He told April this, trying to make sense of it. But hindsight simplifies the past; in the effort to justify what has happened, one coarsens the preceding events. No marriage can be reduced to clichés but clichés were what he needed to simplify the chaos.
The truth was: he had fallen in love. He had embarked on a great adventure, probably the last great adventure of his life. He and April were lost to the world, but who needed the world when they had each other? Since moving in, just before Christmas, he had met few of her friends. He himself had little contact with anyone for he was an outcast now. He sporadically went to work, driving to his various sites just to reassure his men that he existed. He was impervious to their innuendoes or their disapproval; he blanked himself off to anything but the tasks that demanded his attention. It all seemed irrelevant – had seemed so, in fact, since that day in October when he had had his heart attack.
He knew he had to sort out his life, for everybody’s sake, but he felt paralysed. His brain was locked, for if he dared to think it was insupportable. Dorothy had gone home on Saturday; he should have been there to heat up the house and look after her, as she had looked after him. Instead, his daughters were doing his job and he was walking down Prowse Street, Walthamstow, showing April the place where he had grown up.
‘The coalman lived there.’ He pointed. ‘He had one eye, scared the living daylights out of me.’
‘Where did Kenny live?’
He pointed to a house. ‘That’s his bedroom window, where he used to dangle the messages.’ The houses looked smaller than he remembered – shabbier too, most of the plasterwork was in a terrible state. ‘They had the first TV.’ He linked his arm with April’s. ‘It’s another world, sweetheart, even to me. God knows what, to you.’ He pointed to a used-car dealer’s on the corner. ‘That’s where the air raid shelter was. I sat in there, counting my shrapnel collection. My mum thought we were going to die, but I didn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Kids think they’re the centre of the world, it’s just there for them.’
‘Egocentric little buggers, weren’t we,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘I thought I’d live for ever, and here I am, with you at the end of it.’ He squeezed her arm. ‘So I was proved right, wasn’t I?’
‘Did you bring your daughters here?’
He nodded. ‘Had to drag them. I was just boring old Dad, droning on about the war. When you’re a dad, everything you do is boring.’
‘Even this? What you’ve been doing with me?’
He didn’t reply. He stopped and pointed. ‘That’s my house. Forty-six.’
She closed her eyes. ‘I’m going to imagine you coming out.’
She opened her eyes. The front door of number forty-six opened. A family came out – mother, father, two little girls. They were black. April burst out laughing.
Gordon was a Londoner. He had loved his city for sixty-five years; he felt a Cockney’s proprietorial pride in it. He had delved into its buildings. His work had made him intimate with its past – the craftsmanship of joiners and brickies long since dead. Like most men of his age he felt a nostalgia for what can never be recaptured. April led him into new places which until now he had only heard as a distant throb. Maybe his daughters were right, he had been prejudiced. He preferred not to think about that; he blocked it off, he was good at that. Willingly he was led by April into her world, just as he had led her into his. That afternoon they were shopping in Electric Avenue as if he had been doing it all his life. They walked through the covered market. She waved at her friend Carole who had a hair salon in Second Avenue, next to a spice shop. Dazzling fabrics hung from stalls. Music blared from a shoe shop where an Indian boy kicked a football to and fro, rocking the shoe boxes. Two huge women passed, dressed in tribal robes of some sort, maybe from Nigeria, who knew? He knew little about the place where Maddy had lived. He knew nothing about anything.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said. ‘I love them dearly. But they make me feel stupid. Stupid old Dad.’
April nodded. ‘They are pretty intimidating.’
‘Even when I’ve done nothing wrong. I’ve given them this education, see. Private schools, the works. I wanted them to do well for themselves, I worked hard for that. And now we’ve got bugger-all to say to each other.’
‘You haven’t lost them. Not for ever.’
They stopped at a vegetable stall. It was heaped with strangely shaped objects; they shone in the electric light. ‘Go on, educate me.’ He pointed. ‘What’re those?’
‘They’re yams. And they’re plantains.’
‘How do you cook them?’ he asked.
She laughed. ‘Search me. Fancy a McDonald’s?’
They walked out into the street. ‘Teenagers didn’t exist, see,’ he said. ‘We were little old men wearing little old men’s clothes.’
‘Most of the blokes I know have never grown up.’
‘Can I join them for a bit?’
She nodded, and rubbed her shoulder against him as they walked.
The house had been put on the market. Dorothy and Gordon stood in the lounge. There was a chill, uninhabited air about the place; they both wore their overcoats.
‘You never did finish those shelves,’ said Dorothy.
‘Dorothy –’
She gestured around the room. ‘Frankly, I’ll be glad to get shot of it. It’s far too big, been far too big for years. All that bloody cleaning. And the new people next door making a fuss about the yard.’
‘Aren’t you being hasty?’
‘Me? Hasty?’ She looked at him. She wore the fawn coat he hadn’t seen for years. Why was she wearing it now? He had no idea. Her face looked tighter somehow, there was a hardness about her that he hadn’t k
nown before. Already, she had changed. ‘You can do what you like with the business, I don’t give a damn.’
‘But Dot –’
‘You haven’t even been in this week. It’s finished, Gordon, the sooner we get shot of it the better. I’ll do another month and that’s it.’ Her face softened. ‘No more getting up at six in the morning,’ she said dreamily. ‘No more queuing in the bank, no more blasted VAT. Think I enjoyed all that? I did it for you, Gordon. For us. I’ve been fed up with it for years, not that you’d noticed. I’ve worn myself out and now I’ve had enough.’
‘But what’re you going to do?’
‘It’s none of your business.’
‘But I’m worried about you,’ he said.
‘Oh yes?’ She laughed mirthlessly. ‘I’m going to buy a flat, just big enough for me. Half this house, I’ll get somewhere really nice, with something over. You don’t have to worry about me, I’ll be fine.’
He pointed at the furniture. He couldn’t think what else to do. ‘But what about –’
‘All this? Oh, we’ll sort it out later. I only want that –’ She pointed to the brass lamp ‘– and that, and the desk. You can have the rest for your love nest –’
‘I don’t mean that – I don’t want –’
‘Give it to Oxfam,’ she said. ‘Give it to the girls. I don’t care. But I’m having the photo albums.’ She looked at her watch. He had given it to her on her sixtieth birthday; it seemed the only familiar thing about her. ‘Got to get back,’ she said. ‘I’m cooking Pru and Stephen dinner.’
It was Monday morning. Stephen was travelling to a roofing job somewhere in south-east London. He sat in the front of the van with Frank and a roofer called Phil – another mere boy who made Stephen feel inept. Kendal Contractors seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of these young men. Bounding over scaffolding like mountain goats, they shouted out orders to Stephen in their incomprehensible brogues – Geordie, Irish – and cracked jokes whose punchlines floated away in the wind. The stamina of them! The expertise! After three weeks Stephen had got the hang of the simpler tasks, he had done some of them at home, but the effort of learning new ones, and pretending he knew how to do them when he had been told several times, left him with the sort of headache he had had during Latin lessons at school. At the end of the day he fell into bed like a sack of cement, incapable of any movement, let alone making love to Prudence.