“You . . .
are
. . . amazing. You’re an incredible person. One in a million. When we get on, we get on brilliantly. We used to have such a laugh. And we thought we wanted the same things. And, yes, don’t look at me like that. Yes, Dad’s offer, it was kind of en- ticing. It might have speeded the process up. But I was at that stage of my life anyhow. Kids, family . . .”
Cheap shot. Stevie wiped away an angry tear. What if she
had
been pregnant, what then?
“How was I to know that I was capable of feeling
this
.” Jez slammed his fist against his heart, like a Shakespearean actor rising to soliloquy.
“Good timing.” The ground seemed to fall away from her feet, her soles tingling vertiginously. She steadied herself on the sofa, quietening. “Did you have doubts before we got married?”
Jez shuffled from one foot to the other. “Doubts?” He paused.
“Okay, yes. If you really want to push me, if you want to make this really ugly,
yes
I did, kind of. But I thought, well, you know, that things would work themselves out, as they do. But, to be honest, it was hard to tell what the fuck I felt after my dad died . . . it was all such a blur of freaking emotions and shit.”
Stevie snorted, inhaling snot and tears down into her throat, try- ing to regain some composure. All that time. All that agonizing. It was so grossly unfair. “Right.”
Jez stood up and walked to the window, arms flapping loosely at his sides, as if his new emotional state hadn’t yet found its physical expression. “But I am
trying
to do the right thing here, can’t you see that? I could have had an affair. I could have lied to you. But I owe you more than that.” He turned to face her, his raw pink face streaked with tears. “All my life I’ve fucking pretended . . . done things because I thought that was what Dad wanted me to do. Gone through the fucking motions. With my career and every- thing. Did I want to marry? I think so. But I don’t know if I ever wanted to work in marketing. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time because Dad approved. ‘The next best thing to going into the city,’ he said.” Jez wiped a tear that bulged in the corner of his inner eye. “And since he’s died, it’s like I’ve been cut free. It’s like I can feel something, like,
real
, for the first time ever. I feel like I can do what I want.”
Stevie shook her head in disbelief. Her marriage had come to this. It felt like she’d been kicked in the teeth.
“I never thought I’d say this, but you know what? I admire your mate Sam. I do. I admire him for walking away from the cor- porate bollocks, for sticking to his guns.” He snorted derisively. “It’s no wonder your face lights up whenever he walks into the room.”
“What do you mean?” But she knew. She stared at the floor. “You’ve never looked at me like that, ever.”
Stevie dug her nails into her palms. “And Katy does?”
He paused. “She does. And it’s my turn to do
my
thing now. Maybe I want to be an organic farmer. Maybe I want to bring up potbellied pigs, like that guy on the telly. Maybe I want to move to the country. Who knows?”
Potbellied pigs? Stevie almost laughed. “What the hell are you talking about, Jez? Have you had a personality transplant or some- thing?”
“Listen,” he said quietly. “I feel connected to the real me, for the first time in my life. Katy’s changed me. She’s woken something up. I don’t know how or why. But I do know that I can’t walk away and ignore it.” He looked at her, his eyes bright. “Tell me you understand.”
Yes, she understood. She almost wished she didn’t. It would be easier if Jez had behaved like a total arse. Her bottom lip quivered. “What about me?” How pathetic she sounded.
Jez walked over, knelt by her knees. “You?” he said, gently, lov- ingly even. “You don’t want
me
, not really. I can’t make you happy.” “I married you.” That meant something, didn’t it? It
had
to
mean
something
.
“You don’t need me.”
She couldn’t argue with him. “And Katy does?”
“Yes. And I need to be needed.” Jez studied the maple laminate flooring. “I know that sounds wanky.”
In any other circumstances, Stevie would have laughed. Instead she squeezed her eyes shut tight. The truth, she realized, was that he needed weakness to feel strength.
“Stevie, pumpkin, don’t you understand?” he whispered. “There is no baby. It’s like we’ve been given another chance.
Both
of us. You might feel like this about someone one day, too.”
She suddenly thought of Sam and Lara. A strangulated howl tore silently through her throat. But nothing came out.
THIRTY-SIX
Æ
patti wedged a tray on her hip and knocked on
her daughter’s childhood bedroom door. “Darling, I’ve brought you some tea and some flapjacks. Can I come in?”
Stevie put on a weak smile, in an attempt to minimize the emo- tional impact she might have on her already overemotional mother. “Is it safe? Has Rita gone now? I couldn’t bear to see her told-you- so face.”
“Yes, she left after Jez phoned. But she was genuinely sad, you know. I think she’d just come to the conclusion we weren’t all such a bad bunch after all.” Patti, wearing a voluminous smock that was stiff with splattered paint and clay, placed the tray on the floor and sat down on the side of the bed. She wore her hair tied back, se- cured with a wide printed headband. She smelled of mother smells: lentil soup, incense, and glycerine Body Shop soap. “Oh, my honey bun, my baby,” Patti muttered, stroking Stevie’s cheek. Stevie tol- erated it for a few seconds, then brushed her off. “It’s not the end of the world. I
know
it feels like it. But it’s not.”
“I know.”
“You’re a beautiful young woman. You’ve got your whole life in front of you.”
Stevie hugged her knees tight. “I’m five months, six days from my thirty-fifth birthday.”
Patti smiled tenderly. “That’s a seedling.” “It’s kind of not, actually.”
Patti leaned toward her daughter. “Are you thinking babies?” “In the abstract. I’ve just got to adjust to a new . . . a new way of
thinking, that’s all. I’ll be fine, Mum.”
“Cherie Blair had babies at forty-five. Madonna . . .”
“Don’t.”
Stevie pulled the duvet up around her neck. Despite the blazing sunshine outside, she couldn’t warm up. “I . . . I’ve only been married a few weeks.” Her voice cracked. She inhaled, re- claimed it. “It’s so humiliating, Mum.”
As if reading this as repressed emotion, and thus an invitation to get up close and personal, Patti enveloped Stevie in a hug. “It’s a scandal,” she muttered, her breath tickling her daughter’s neck. “A scandal. Women are criticized for ‘leaving it too late,’ but it seems to me that in your generation it’s the men who don’t want to settle. Why would they? They have it too good.” She sighed. “Or they’re scared off by the financial burden of having a family in this ridicu- lously expensive country. They’re a scared generation.”
“Mum, you’re sounding more and more like a backbench Tory.” “I fear I may be getting more conventional in my dotage, darling.” “Let’s hope so.”
They sat in silence for a few moments. Patti coughed. “Perhaps this is my fault.”
“How did you work that out?” Many things were her mother’s fault, but she reserved the right to claim full responsibility for screwing up her own life this time.
“Seeing you like this . . .” Patti’s eyes filled. “All through your childhood, I was saying to you and Poppy, ‘Girls, get a career, se- cure your financial independence. Don’t be like poor old Aunty Janet.’ Do you remember?”
“Yes.” Stevie smiled. “It was good advice, Mum.”
“Was it?” Patti looked unconvinced. “Recently, oh, I never thought I’d say this, but recently I’ve been thinking that I should have given you the confidence to choose a family first, if that’s what you wanted, you know, have kids early, go back to work later.”
Come again. Did her mother just say that?
“Like Poppy,” Patti continued. “She ignored me, didn’t she? And part of me has always thought it was a shame, that she hasn’t ful- filled her potential in that way, but . . .”
“She’s okay, Mum.”
“She
is
. And she’s a brilliant mother. Most important, she is happy being a full-time mother, in a way that I never was. And she’s filled her potential in her way, I can see that now. I think what you have to deal with is worse, feeling the clock ticking, time running out.” She sighed. “You know, it never occurred to my generation, all this biological stuff, it really didn’t. Our main concern was
not
getting pregnant.”
Stevie’s eyes watered now. Her mother’s misgivings were gen- uine, even if they came rather too late. And, really, would she relive her life any differently? No. She wouldn’t. If she had reproduced at her prime age, she’d be tied for life to Aaron, the canker in the rose of her early twenties who’d once shouted “goal” during sex. She’d never have traveled to India or New York. She’d never have met Lara and all those colorful, bitchy, but life-affirming characters who made office hours go by faster. In fact, she’d never have found
a job she loved. Because you can’t start work experience at thirty, can you? And yet. Would she encourage her own daughter to do the same as her? Tough one.
“Are you okay, Stevie? I don’t mean to upset you.”
“Don’t worry. I’m just thinking. I feel like . . . a . . . a failure, I suppose that’s it.” She gulped, allowing herself to plunge into self- pity in the way she only could with her mother. “It’s hard to believe I’ll get another chance.”
“Life has a funny way about it. In my experience, when you think things can’t get worse, they flip. Let me tell you something.” Patti whispered to her daughter’s ear, assuming a soft, book-at- bedtime voice, “Before I met your father I was with a guy called Jean. As in French . . .” She pursed her lips.
“Jean.”
“The one in advertising? Yeah, you’ve mentioned him.” She really wasn’t in the mood for nostalgic flashbacks from the late sixties.
“Well, I loved him, goodness,
how
I loved him.” Patti sighed wistfully. “I thought we were going to be together
forever
. We’d be old hippies, living in a large house in Provence, surrounded by ba- bies and chickens and big bushes of lavender.”
Stevie had to restrain herself from an insolent “Whatever.” “Then, a year into the relationship, he ran off with my best
friend.”
Stevie sat up a bit. She hadn’t heard this one. “Who? Not Sandy?”
“No, of course not! Agnes. You’ve never met her. She wasn’t . . .” Patti’s face clouded. “. . . sisterly. I could forgive Jean, not her.”
“Hmmm.”
“I thought I’d simply die of a broken heart,” continued Patti, eyes shutting dramatically as she recalled her
grand
Gallic betrayal.
“And I do know what you’re saying about the humiliation. But you must remember that people are just feeling sorry for you, that’s all.”
“I don’t want to be an object of pity.”
“I thought I’d just fade away.” Patti pressed on, caught up in the slipstream of her story now. “I stopped going to parties and read- ings and all the things I’d loved—things that we’d done together. Just to avoid gossips or bumping into him and Agnes. I hid away, couldn’t be bothered to do anything. So . . .” She pulled a curtain of glossy black hair from her eyes, her face lined by the harsh sunlight beating through the window. “I decided to become a lesbian.”
If Stevie had been a child, she’d have clamped her hands over her ears at this point and squeezed her eyes shut. She’d heard rumors— from a school friend, mortifyingly enough—about her mother’s sapphic experiments. “O-kay.”
“She was a nice enough girl . . .” “Too much information.”
“Oh, I didn’t get very far. Because out of the blue . . .” Patti clapped her hands together, her silver bracelets clashing. “I met your father! There he was at Hilary’s Sunday lunch party—nerdy, tall, and skinny in those days with this fifties-style hair. He wasn’t at all who I thought I wanted, quite the opposite of Jean. I only agreed to go out with him as a distraction. But I fell in love with him on the third date in a little Greek restaurant off King’s Road. Head over heels in love.”
“Right.”
Patti grabbed Stevie’s hands urgently. “And life started
again
. And I had you three. And I may not have been the best mother, but you’ve been the best kids.”
Stevie was oddly touched.
“Don’t you see? You never know what’s around the corner, dar- ling.
Never
. Now, have a flapjack.”
Stevie bit into the flapjack, realizing it was the first thing that had passed her lips in hours. “But, let’s face it, even your tale hasn’t quite the romantic ending, has it?”
Patti shut her eyes for a second, revealing two lids quivering with petrol-blue eyeshadow. “Things have been better between me and your father, I admit that. I’m not going to attempt to pull the wool over your eyes.”
“I wouldn’t bother. You’re a terrible liar.” Stevie frowned and spoke quietly. “You’re going to split this time, aren’t you?”
Patti stroked the peak of her daughter’s bent knee beneath the duvet. “We want different things, darling. You know your father. He’s
so
stuck in his ways. He wants to spend the rest of his life in the library. You’ve all left home . . . we’ve got a little savings . . . there’s no need! I’m desperate to go away, to travel, to see the world. There’s no reason to start living like a pair of bloody pen- sioners. Honestly, I really think he’d be happier with someone like Rita Lewis.”
“Dad was never going to be Jean, Mum.”
Patti looked up, a little startled, as if the idea had not occurred to her before. “No, I suppose not.”
There was a knock on the bedroom door. “It’s me.”
Poppy leaned wearily against the doorframe, blond and fragile in a blue-and-white-striped Toast shirtdress. “The doctors have sent me home. Said I needed to rest.”
“The most sensible thing they’ve ever said,” remarked Patti, who had yet to lose her suspicion of the medical establishment. She stood up, rearranging her smock. “I’ll leave you girls to it, then. We’re having my famous Spanish stew for supper!”