But she was not suited to single life in the twenty-first century, loathing the idea of speed dating, Internet dating, plotting her so- cial life around the likelihood of meeting single guys as if she were a dog in heat that needed studding, hanging out in bars, being overlooked by men for her prettier friend, when she’d rather be at home reading or watching
Lost
. And as for the endless, painful waiting by the phone, well, she wouldn’t do it. She hated that pre- scribed passivity. So she would call men to ask why they hadn’t called her. Disastrous move, always. So, yes, as her grandmother had declared over a tea-dunked biscuit at the announcement of her engagement, Stevie was lucky. She had managed to get under the wire,
just
in time.
“Cuggle,” demanded Finn, sensing her attention wavering. “Want cuggle.”
A what? Stevie looked down. A cuddle? How lovely. Of course.
Her body ricocheted with endorphins as she pulled her nephew to- ward her, kissing him behind his ear and inhaling deeply. Only like this, she realized, buried in her nephew’s infant deliciousness, could she exist solely in the moment. Only like this did she feel that there was a
point
in anything. It was all very weird. Shit, she was broody.
THREE
Æ
“
kiiiiiiiidzzzzzz
, lunch!” yelled stevie’s mother,
Patti—abbreviated from Patricia after a drug-enhanced encounter with Patti Smith at a party in New York City in 1969. Her husky voice soaked up by the crowd of coats in the hallway, the unravel- ing Egyptian tapestries on the wall, the dusty weeping figs and African statues, limbs long since amputated by her son Neil’s mar- ble shooter. “I’m not running a bloody hotel!”
In different corners of the large Victorian house, members of the Jonson family prepared themselves for interaction. Stevie, wonder- ing if her mother would stop referring to her as a kid once she was married, jumped out of the bath, toweled herself down quickly, scrabbled around in her suitcase for some clean clothes—ancient bootleg jeans, Topshop
Charlie’s Angels
T-shirt—and thundered down the stairs, one hand on the once-grand curving wooden rail. She skipped the third step, where the carpet runner had been shredded by the family’s incontinent cat in an artfully toe-catching way.
At this point—holey-socked foot hovering above the second-to-
last step—Stevie had no idea that downstairs, beneath a framed poster of a fifties-housewife type in an apron and a Lichtenstein- style speech bubble declaring, “Fuck Hoovering!,” her childhood crush Sam Flowers straddled a pine dining chair and picked at pis- tachios from an earthenware bowl, curling his tongue into the cra- dles of their shells, sucking off the salt.
Sam’s dark eyes flicked from pistachio bowl to Patti, observing her intently as she bustled about the kitchen, long amber beads swinging above the volcanic casserole that spat fatty, rosemary- scented pellets of stew across the kitchen. Obviously once very beautiful—in the hall, there was a picture of Patti in a fedora in the seventies, looking like Jane Birkin—she was now startlingly hand- some, her patent-black hair still thick, long, and swishy, framing the kind of cheekbones that defied age, creased only with laughter lines. She had a surprising beauty. Just like Stevie’s.
“I insist you drink some wine, darling.” Patti filled Sam’s Mo- roccan green tumbler, her widest, most winning smile stretched across her face like a hammock. “Or
vin
, should I say?”
Sam smiled. “Twist my arm, Patti.”
“It’s so good to see you again.” Patti bent over and kissed Sam lightly on his stubbly cheek. She couldn’t help but adore this young man, the onetime schoolboy who’d shot up fast as bamboo and devel- oped this delicious throaty laugh that seemed to come from a place deep inside, like a tremor. There was nothing faux about Sam. No posturing. No brisk, masculine tics like her son, Neil, seemed to have, revealing, she suspected, insecurity in the company of powerful women. (She feared that inviting her hairiest feminist friends to her son’s birthday parties back in the eighties might have been counter- productive.) And she couldn’t help but be impressed, and slightly in
awe, of Sam’s benign ethnicity, his dark gold skin and springy curly hair—half afro, half Botticelli angel—which she longed to ping. His father, a bit of a scoundrel she’d heard, was American-Irish and now settled on Long Island in New York. His mother, Pearl, dear Pearl, was part French, part Caribbean (Jamaican? Dominican?). Much as she adored her own children, they had come out exceptionally Anglo-Saxon looking, like Gerber babies.
Despite
her ancient American-Indian roots (that’s if you believed Grandma Yates’s ver- sion of familial genealogy, which she most certainly did). “To think that we haven’t seen you for over a year, or is it two now? Goodness, doesn’t time just march on heartlessly?”
“Two years, I guess.” Sam was only half-listening, focused in- stead on the postcard-studded kitchen door and the fuzz of long brown hair emerging from behind it.
When Stevie entered the room, she visibly started. “
Sam?
What . . .” Her pale, creamy skin flushed. She looked down at the floor, collected herself, and smiled shyly. “Hi.”
“Patti invited me over,” Sam explained, tucking a pistachio shell discreetly into the corner of his cheek with his tongue and wonder- ing when he’d have a chance to spit it out. “I’ve been hanging out at Mum’s.”
“Right.” Stevie knotted her hands together. There was a pause.
She tried to think of something to say to fill it, but couldn’t. “Thank you for the wedding invitation, by the way.” Sam
rubbed his jaw, in his almost sleepy way. “You’re coming?”
“Of course.”
“Really?
Oh, wow. I am so pleased. I hadn’t heard. I as- sumed . . .” Stevie flicked an airborne lump of lamb stew off her
arm and grinned. The day was improving. “When do you go back to Paris?”
“Finis.
I’ve taken my last Eurostar.”
“Really?” Was his French girlfriend here in Oxford? Had they split up? Stevie blushed again, fearing her thoughts transparent. “How come you’ve . . .”
“Oh, Paris,” interrupted Patti, voice swooning then rising. “Paris. Paris. How I love that city. The little macaroon shops. The Left Bank. The riots. It’s one of the few places in the world willing to stand up and say, ‘No more globalization.
Enough!
’”
Enough indeed! Stevie glared at her mother. When would she stop interrupting? Her mother’s habit of inviting her—Stevie’s— friends over without warning had always really pissed her off. (All her friends adored Patti, always had. She was one of those mothers who were fabulous if they were not yours.) And she really would have appreciated some warning this time. In Sam’s unexpected presence, she was suddenly aware that she was wearing a T-shirt with white deodorant stains under the arms, part of her old Oxford wardrobe that was left at her parents’ house and composed of clothes too tattered or unfashionable to wear in London. She did not want Sam to think she was letting herself go just because she was getting married. Like all her male friends, she wanted him to feel at least a pang (preferably, a large painful one) that she was marrying, a sadness for not snapping her up while available. “You’re staying here? In Oxford?”
Sam raised his eyebrows and laughed. “No. Next stop, New York.”
“America? Well, well.” Patti frowned and shook her head. “Still, New York’s not like the rest of the country. Greenwich Village. I had a wonderful time there. Have you heard of the Village?”
“Mum, of course he has.”
“I’m here for a couple of weeks first.” Sam fisted his hands to- gether on the table, bent forward, and pressed his chest against them, tensing. “Nana’s not well.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” So was the French girlfriend relocating to New York, too? Stevie smoothed down her bed-frizz hair with the palm of her hand and sucked in her tummy.
“It’s crap being that old, man.” Sam shook his head. “You know what my Nana’s like—a teenager trapped in a ninety-four-year-old body. She wants to go back to St. Elizabeth. She hates being de- pendent.”
“Run me under the bus when the time comes, Stevie,” said Patti, shutting her eyes for comic effect, revealing lids shimmering with leaf-green eye shadow.
“Will do.”
“And make sure I’m wearing decent underwear.”
“Yes, Ma.” Stevie exchanged a “nothing changes” look with Sam and sat down next to him. He poured her a glass of water from the chipped blue glass jug. A sense of déjà vu clicked in her head as de- cisively as the shutter of a camera. She could be eighteen. Twenty- four. Thirty. It was the same scene: Sam and various family members around her parents’ kitchen table, the same conversa- tions, the little-evolved tensions, the same chipped, badly washed- up blue jug. What was it about being with friends from your teenage years? They made you feel reassured, that nothing had changed. And Sam, in particular, would always remind her of being the young, freewheeling teenager who rambled on Oxford’s Port Meadow and wove daisies into her hair and screeched with delight when the mud sucked her Wellington boot from her foot and Sam had to pull it out of the mud. They’d fallen back laughing with a
muddy squelch and run home to Sam’s mum’s house like swamp monsters, and Sam’s mother had fed them hot banana-chip-like things and lent her an orange dress to wear that smelled like her own mother’s Body Shop coconut body creams. Of course, now things had changed irretrievably. Her life was about to take a sharp left turn.
“Wedding plans going well?” Sam asked, negotiating a gritty lump of organic homemade bread. He winked at Stevie. “You’re all still talking, at least.”
“It’s going to be wild,” said Patti.
Stevie rolled her eyes. “I’m not Billy Idol, Mum.”
“Oh, darling. Chill. Have a glass of wine. Now, who’s your plus one, Sam? Who is the lucky lady?” purred Patti, as if barely able to restrain from putting herself forward for the role.
“Minus one now, I’m afraid. Me and Camille finished last month.”
Stevie felt instantly uplifted by this news, then, a few moments after, disappointed in herself. She wasn’t single now. She should be more generous. But the idea of Sam’s French girlfriend—surely an Emmanuelle Béart lookalike who lived on steak tartare and Gauloises—had irrationally irked her when news of his Gallic bliss had filtered through the London grapevines last year.
“Oh, I
am
sorry, honey.” Patti put an arm around Sam’s broad shoulders, thrusting his curly head against the soft crepe of her dé- colletage. “But if it ain’t right, it just ain’t right. You can’t force it.” She looked thoughtful. Then gave a lightbulb smile. “But, hey, wait a minute! I have an idea. The scrumptious Lara! Lara is a great friend of Stevie’s, Sam. A journalist. Terribly glamorous. She’s stay- ing for the weekend. You simply
must
meet her. You two will get on famously. Darling, where is she?”
“Meeting whatshisname at Balliol or something,” said Stevie. The whatshisname in question was Jake, twenty-two, blond, with a rower’s shoulders and a devastating knowledge of postwar Ameri- can poetry, which he used like a kind of open sesame to access women’s underwear. He was the brother of a friend from London whom Lara befriended at a costume party in a Shoreditch loft last month. He was dressed as Simon Cowell, she the fairy queen from
Lord of the Rings;
unlikely bedfellows. “Should be back later.”
“Yes, of course, of course. Brain like a colander. Now, where are my boys?” Patti tossed the salad she was preparing with deter- mined flair, mesclun flying, silver bracelets crashing. “Neil. Is that you?”
Accompanied by a loud flush of the toilet and a pungent farm- yard stink, Neil ambulated in, navigating the flap of his parachute- baggy combat pants and dragging the smell of stale pot into the kitchen. He collapsed on an old pine chair, as if exhausted from a day of hard physical labor, and poured himself a glass of merlot. As the last born in the family by some years (Patti forgot her pill one month), Neil acted the part of perennial adolescent, testing Stevie’s tolerance. He treated his childhood attic bedroom—all ornamental bongs and posters of Pirelli girls and murdered American rappers— as a pleasant second home, a clean retreat from his permanent resi- dence, a squat in a large, fully furnished Edwardian house in East Oxford. Stevie had already noted his attic bedroom’s distinct soupy sock odor seeping through the floorboards into her room earlier that morning.
“Why don’t you ever come when I call? I’m losing my voice, Neil,” said Patti, exasperated.
“I was listening to Fifty.” Neil yawned and stretched his arms above his head. “When are we eating, Ma? I’m starving.”
“We’re waiting for your father. Oh, here his lordship comes . . .” Her father, a bespectacled, still-handsome, stooped sixtysome- thing with a gray mop of hair and bushy, excitable eyebrows, ap- peared in the kitchen doorway. He took off his tortoiseshell glasses and rubbed the pink pinch-mark on the bridge of his nose. “Hello,
family.”
Patti moved quicker around the kitchen now, energized by the sight of her husband. She prodded him in the tummy with a salad server. “Chris, we need to talk about Jez’s mother.”
He looked up, aware that this was a siren call to realign his coor- dinates to the unexpectedly time-consuming “wedding matters” and not the socioeconomics of eastern Asia, despite the latter being more interesting and demanding less fiscal resources. “Yes, Patti,” he said, as he had said trillions of times during the tempestuous course of their long marriage. “What is it?”
“The question is . . .
please
do not eat bread like that, Neil. You’re
not
starving. . . . Is the spare bedroom on the first floor suit- able for Madam? I don’t want to cause friction here.”
“Friction?” asked Sam.
“It’s fine,” said Stevie, stealing a glimpse at Sam—noting the way his smile curled up at the edges, exposing just a sliver of pinky-brown gums. “Leave it, Mum.”
Patti didn’t leave it. She fluttered her long black lashes as she brought the stew to the table. “The Lewises are just not . . . how should I put this, Sam . . .
our
kind of people, that’s all. I fear the furniture, what remains of it after your party, Neil, will not be to Rita’s fragrant taste.”