That Was Then Read online

  ‘So …’ he flopped down on the bed, hands behind his head, ankles crossed. ‘Was it a good holiday?’

  ‘It was a wonderful holiday. Mel was absolutely great, considering she was working most of the time.’ I put the coffee down and unzipped the case.

  ‘She’s a workaholic.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that, but she’s got a responsible job and she’s very conscientious.’

  ‘Workaholic. Has she got a bloke?’

  ‘No one special. Plenty of men friends, though.’

  ‘No bloke. What about you?’

  ‘Me?’ I stuffed underwear into a drawer.

  ‘Any dinners under the desert stars?’

  ‘Yes, but not the way you mean.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said Ben. ‘I’m not sure I’m ready to be kicked out yet.’

  At eleven, Ben went into HMV. Having unpacked and put the washing in I sat down on the sofa with the telephone, the mail and the list of messages.

  Everyone had been in touch. Ben, though he had quite understandably wiped my phone messages along with his own potentially embarrassing ones, had been scrupulous in capturing their exact flavour. Sabine was desperate for tennis on Saturday. Desma ditto. Helen, who described herself as an emotional wreck, said she didn’t know where I was, but if I could see my way to giving her a ring that might well be the only thing to stand between her and a messy end. Ronnie had sent a welcome home card. Even the presence amongst my mail of several bills and a hefty parking fine incurred by Ben (he must have been in my car) couldn’t tarnish the glow of happiness I felt to be back. People had occasionally said that friends were the most important thing in life, and I now knew this to be true. Love and marriage, even passion and romance, were all very fine in their way and in their place, but friends were indispensable.

  It was Friday, and I wasn’t due back in the office till Monday, but I decided to give Jo a ring. Her voice rose heartwarmingly.

  ‘You’re back!’

  ‘Yes, early this morning.’

  ‘And you couldn’t wait to call work.’

  ‘Well, I thought I’d just check that I still had a job.’

  ‘You’re joking, the place has practically fallen apart without you. Did you have a great time?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll bore you with my photos, don’t worry.’

  ‘You must – why don’t we go out for a drink after work on Monday?’

  ‘You’re on,’ I said. ‘See you Monday.’

  I called Sabine and Desma, who were both out, and left messages saying yes to tennis. Then I tried Helen who was, naturally, at home.

  ‘Sorry to be a pain and a drag,’ she said in her flat, drawling voice.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ I said, ‘ you’re not a drag.’

  ‘I know you’re all burnished and bucked up from your holiday, but do you have any entrenched objection to mixing with someone who isn’t?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘You don’t have to do anything but sit there.’

  ‘Sounds fine, why don’t you come round?’

  ‘Oh—’ she sighed wearily – ‘ car’s in dock. I can’t possibly ask you to come out here on the very morning you get back, can I.’

  It wasn’t a question, but I answered it anyway. ‘Certainly you can, and of course I will.’

  ‘Be a dear,’ said Helen, not one to demur once an offer had been made, ‘and pick up a bottle of something restorative on the way and I’ll settle up when you get here.’

  I was just about to walk out of the door when the phone rang. I picked it up, interrupting the message.

  ‘So you’re there.’

  ‘Mel! Yes, we were a bit delayed, but no serious problems.’ I wasn’t going to enlarge on Pearl at this stage. ‘And thank you for everything darling – I’ll be writing.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ she said, getting that out of the way. ‘Cliff Mansions still standing?’

  ‘Rather more than, actually. I suspect he hasn’t been here much.’

  ‘No signs of last-minute plastering or re-glazing?’

  ‘None whatever.’

  ‘Well hush my mouth, what a suspicious cow I am.’

  ‘Not at all, I was fairly trepidatious myself.’

  ‘OK, look, I’m calling from the office so I’d better go. Catch you later.’

  ‘I’ll write – and thanks again, for everything – ‘bye love.’

  As I left I wondered whether I’d been correct in detecting the tiniest hint of disappointment in my daughter’s voice at the lack of domestic disasters this end. Sibling rivalry simmered away, it seemed, even where there was no obvious reason for it. What a good thing it was that my offsprings’ paths were so divergent; that Mel was several thousand miles away earning a small fortune in the desert, and Ben was here where I could keep an eye on him.

  I went into the supermarket and picked up a couple of bagfuls of necessities as well as the restorative suggested by Helen – a Clancey Creek sauvignon. I chose it mainly because it was on special, and in spite of Helen’s promise to reimburse me I knew she’d forget and I wouldn’t dream of reminding her. My watch, though not my well-travelled stomach, told me it was lunchtime, so I added a bag of tortilla chips and some salsa dip. Then I drove the five miles inland to the village of Hawley End, thanking my lucky stars that I didn’t live there any more.

  Helen opened the door of her rented tied cottage – kept at just-habitable level by the local landowner – and at once retreated into the dusky interior, apologising half-heartedly for the mess. Come to Helen for an effusive welcome and you’d be disappointed. I closed the door and went with her into the kitchen, clearing a space on the table and putting down my offerings.

  ‘This is quite incredibly sporting of you,’ she said vaguely. ‘Corkscrew’s in the drawer. I just need to bore the pants off someone with my gloom, and you’re so good at being bored without looking it.’

  ‘I shan’t be bored,’ I assured her.

  It was true. Whatever Helen’s shortcomings, she was never dull. And one would have to have been born on another planet not to recognise that her life was a mess. That the mess was largely of her own making didn’t stop it being pretty frightening. They say it’s a mistake to give advice to friends, in case they take it. In Helen’s case there was no temptation to do so: you were lost for words.

  I uncorked the Clancey Creek, opened the tortilla chips and popped off the lid of the salsa dip. Helen got two tumblers off the draining board.

  ‘Fire away,’ I said, ‘I’m all yours.’

  Most of what she told me amounted to a rerun of events leading up to her present situation. What it boiled down to was this. Helen and Clive Robinson were academics who’d met at Cambridge, stayed together, and enjoyed a long, cultured, child-free marriage. Clive, who was the younger by two years, had risen to become Professor of Middle English at Sussex, and Helen was a freelance editor for an academic publisher. In happier times they lived in what Ian used to refer to as The House That Time Forgot. It wasn’t especially old – the same age as Cliff Mansions probably – its development had been arrested at some point in the twenties. The porch contained old-fashioned wooden tennis racquets, mostly warped, an iron boot-scraper, a threadbare brown leather football, though no one had seen either Clive or Helen engage in any sport other than croquet, the equipment for which lived in a wooden shack in the garden, known as the summer house. The Robinsons’ long canvas capes and strange hats hung on branching hooks, with galoshes, of all things, beneath. A Morris Traveller leaked oil on to the drive, but its owners preferred to cycle wherever possible on their sit-up-and-beg bikes, both with capacious baskets.

  Inside were thousands of books, many dusty plants, a G-plan radiogram passed on to them by a student, and the same carpets and curtains they’d bought with the house in the late sixties. There was neither television, computer nor microwave – no form of domestic technology, in fact, other than the cooker and fridge.

  In spite of their elective fogeydom, th
ey were a likeable couple. They gave good parties, which consisted in them simply stating a date and time, buying whatever was cheap at the off-licence, and opening their doors. If you wanted anything other than the plonk and ploughmans liberally on offer you brought it yourself and were never made to feel the least embarrassed about doing so.

  Helen was tall with a peculiarly English type of drab, unadorned good looks. She was pale, with eyes as grey as channel fog, a long nose, and chiselled colourless lips. Her hair was straight and reddish and had for as long as I could remember been chopped off just above shoulder length, and hooked back behind her ears. Her complete lack of any sense of personal style had, with middle age, turned into a style all its own. It was impossible to imagine her in anything but her trademark droopy kilts and felted handknits in funny colours. She didn’t even have a sense of herself as a mildly eccentric bluestocking. She had, we considered, no sense of herself at all.

  Clive was as fat and florid as his wife was thin and pale, but no more worldly. He favoured bow ties, but we always felt that was because some of his more sophisticated colleagues did. He was like a happy, Bunterish child, doing exactly as he liked and being paid for it. His contentment amounted almost to hubris, and he was destined to pay for it. He thought Helen was the most beautiful woman in the world and seemed to imagine that everywhere she went she inflamed passions and unleashed a riot of almost ungovernable priapism. The rest of us thought ‘How sweet’.

  Until it really happened.

  It was simple and corny, almost a cliché if it hadn’t been so agonising. The House That Time Forgot began to leak to the point where even Clive and Helen noticed it. A new roof was needed, and the boss of a local building contractor came along to give them a quote. Well, not strictly speaking ‘them’, since only Helen was there that day. The builder drove up in a Mercedes sports. He was brown-eyed, and well set up, and thirty-six years old. Somewhere between the cup of instant and the final estimate, something happened. Ten days later Helen left Clive for John Kerridge who, she claimed (with a telltale hint of colour in those pale, hollow cheeks), had made her realise what it could be like.…

  The trouble was that John Kerridge was married, with a nice house outside Brighton and two kids at private school. He was happy to accept the attentions of this belatedly awakened academic, but not to make any adjustments to his life to accommodate her. Helen didn’t care. All she knew was that now she had tasted the best she could settle for nothing less. It would be not just dishonest, but unfair to both Clive and herself, to continue in a marriage which fell so far short of her new, exacting standards. The rest of us looked on in astonishment as this hugely intelligent woman took the brave, mad, pathetic step of becoming John Kerridge’s bit on the side.

  And the result was everyone was wretched. Kerridge, his bluff well and truly called, didn’t know what to do with this unwanted grand gesture. Clive was like an orphaned child, pitiful in his grief. Helen was miserable on account of having made so many people unhappy when she felt she’d done the only decent thing.

  Sometimes she cheered up. John was still ‘a revelation’. But she was not a woman who blossomed with independence: she was lonely and bereft in the cultural desert of Hawley End. Much of the time, unsurprisingly, she could not imagine what the future held. And neither could the rest of us.

  So the nature of her emotional troughs didn’t really alter. You just sat there in the hope that as she talked she would suddenly see the light and return to Clive, and The House That Time Forgot, and sanity.

  ‘… I wish the clouds would part and a bearded deity, to whom all things are known, would make them all clear to me,’ she said now, between glum gulps of Clancey Creek. ‘If he would only oblige I should believe in him from this time forward for evermore.’

  ‘But that’s not going to happen,’ I reminded her gently, ‘so perhaps it’s time to be pragmatic.’

  ‘By which you mean go back.’

  ‘Either that or go forward. You, Helen, go forward, with or without John. Do what you want to do.’

  ‘But I don’t know what that is,’ she said. ‘I only know what I can’t do.’

  ‘I know.’ We’d been through all this so often, and to no avail.

  ‘Have you seen Clive at all …?’ she asked, staring set-faced out of the smeary window.

  ‘No. But then I’ve been away for two weeks.’

  ‘Yes, you said, how egocentric I’m getting.’ She glanced at me. ‘Have got.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said sturdily, refilling her glass. ‘But it would be nice to see you happy again.’

  ‘You mean content. Not the same thing.’

  ‘Well, not in despair, as you seem to be – whatever you like to call it.’

  ‘Eve …’ She lit a cigarette with big, bony, trembling hands. ‘I didn’t know what happiness was until I met John. And now I’ve experienced ecstasy.’ It was the oldest, corniest scenario in the history of human relations but she imbued it with the grandeur of Greek tragedy.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked, giving the tortilla chips a push.

  She ate her way through them. While her mouth was full I told her about my holiday.

  ‘What fun,’ she said, who would have hated every moment of it. ‘How does it feel to be back?’

  ‘Very nice. Home’s best.’

  ‘You know,’ she said, staring at me as though seeing me for the first time, ‘it’s remarkable how you’ve come out of all your difficulties. I can’t tell you how I admire you, Eve.’

  It was four o’clock when I got back and Pearl was sitting on the steps outside Cliff Mansions, with her back against the railings.

  ‘I got a lift with a friend,’ she explained as though I might have been worried about her.

  ‘Ben’s not here,’ I told her. ‘He’s gone to HMV.’

  ‘He told me he had the day off.’

  ‘Did he? I don’t know.’ I opened the door. ‘That’s where he told me he was going.’

  ‘Do you mind if I wait for him?’ she asked, coming into the hall and closing the door after her.

  I set off up the stairs. ‘No – no, of course not, if you don’t mind me getting on with a few things.’

  ‘I’ll go and sit in his room.’

  ‘You don’t have to do that,’ I said over my shoulder. ‘ Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  She did go to Ben’s room to begin with, but as I began putting the shopping away she came and stood around in the kitchen. I didn’t mean to keep saying ‘Excuse me’ but that was how it worked out – she was always in the way. It didn’t seem to bother her. She had obviously recovered, and was in a mood to talk.

  ‘So do you like having Ben here?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes I do as a matter of fact.’

  ‘You should talk to my Mum,’ said Pearl, ‘she’d kill to get me out the house.’

  I could believe it. ‘We get on fine,’ I said. ‘Ben’s very easy.’

  ‘That’s what I hear.’ There was a glitter of sarcasm in her voice which I chose to ignore. She was fishing, but she’d get nothing from me.

  ‘He tells me you’re doing retakes,’ I said, putting her in her place. ‘What subjects?’

  ‘English and Art. But I don’t know if I’ll go back in September, I’d rather get some money together, go backpacking.’

  ‘Time spent travelling’s never wasted.’

  ‘Yeah, and I need to meet some new people,’ she said.

  I devoutly wished her out of my kitchen and off my back, and she must have read my mind, for shortly after that she went back to Ben’s room and put on his cherished reggae album. ‘No woman, no cry …’ I didn’t somehow think that Pearl was easily reduced to tears.

  When Ben got in he came into the kitchen, jerking his head in the direction of his room.

  ‘Who’s here?’

  ‘Pearl.’

  ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘For how long?’

  ‘An hour? Something like that.’


  ‘Shit,’ he said again, ‘better go and lick backside.’

  I couldn’t make out from his tone whether he was pleased or horrified at her presence. But some twenty minutes later their voices began to rise, and ten minutes after that a full-scale row was in progress.

  She came out first, belatedly lowering her voice to a hiss to tell my son to fuck off as she crossed the hall. The front door crashed shut behind her. The music continued steadily. When Ben emerged I called:

  ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Yup,’ he said. ‘No big deal. Going out, OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  I’d made lasagne, so he could heat some up when he got in. Looking in my handbag for a biro I came across the A A Milne postcard. It had now crossed the world twice, and in recognition of this fact I pinned it to the top right-hand corner of the kitchen noticeboard.

  Chapter Three

  If success with the opposite sex was to be calculated in numbers, Ben was phenomenally successful. He’d been going out with girls since he was fourteen, usually more than one concurrently. The passage of arms with Pearl notwithstanding, he had the unusual talent in one so young of being able to free himself from liaisons that were becoming irksome without acrimony. Girls I remembered from two or three years ago would still from time to time turn up on the doorstep asking for him.

  As a very small child, still in his pushchair, he’d been admired for his looks and winning smile. When women said ‘Look at those eyelashes – he’ll be a heartbreaker’, it did my own heart good. I didn’t pause to consider whether the breaking of hearts was something desirable, and if I had I suspect that the question wouldn’t have detained me for long. I quite liked the idea of my son being a bit of a romeo. Better that one’s son should be fancied and faithless, than nice, nerdy and forever overlooked. I had to admit that his girlfriends weren’t picked for the size of their intellects. From first to last they were stunners with attitude, to whom the things of the mind were a dusty irrelevance.

  I’d read somewhere that boys tended to be attracted to girls who reminded them of their mothers, but if that were so Ben was the exception that proved the rule. Even (perhaps especially) my most devoted friends would not have described me as beautiful. I was interesting-looking, and now, in my late forties, I was perfectly happy with that.