Authors: Elizabeth Buchan
‘You’re right, it’s not funny, but it’s the truth.’
The sofa offered some sort of support but not much.
‘For some time now, Jake … I …’ The normally fluent Jocasta fumbled for the words. ‘You know I was never sure
about having children … and when Maisie was on the way you persuaded me.’
‘That’s all in the past,’ he said flatly. ‘Now you’ve got her, it’s quite different.’
‘Sorry, but it isn’t. Only sentimentalists, of which you are one, Jake, think …’ She hesitated. ‘I know it’s conventional wisdom and all that, but you must understand that, sometimes, the right things don’t happen.’
Jake unwrapped his fingers from the sofa. ‘Stop it.’
But Jocasta’s words kept coming. ‘I know that you wanted things to work out. And, for your sake, I wanted it too. But you can’t pretend what you don’t feel.’ She was twisting her hands together in a parody of penitence. Jocasta was never penitent. ‘I’m sorry. It’s my fault for allowing you to persuade me to marry you when I got pregnant.’
Jake groped his way around the sofa and sank down into it. ‘Let me get this straight. Because you don’t feel like a mother, you propose to leave me and Maisie?’
‘Actually, that’s not quite it.’
He looked up. ‘Get me some of the whisky, please.’ Jocasta obliged and Jake cradled the glass between nerveless fingers. ‘Go on.’
She had the grace to look away. ‘I’ve met someone …’ She cut off any response from Jake and rushed on: ‘Listen to me, Jake. I don’t suit you. I know that and, if you’re truthful, you do too. I’ve met someone who does, and it will be better for everyone in the long run.’
The bromide slipped off her tongue. Easy.
‘Who?’
‘Another banker.’
‘But
who
?’ He ran through the possibilities. It couldn’t be
the heavy-breathing Nick Fison – could it? Or that woman Lucy’s husband. He was Mr Big at Goldman’s. Wait a minute, there was no time for adultery if you worked for Goldman’s … and, anyway, many banks and bankers were going down the pan and there were no more jobs …
‘You wouldn’t know him, Jake.’ Jocasta read his thoughts, as she sometimes did with uncanny precision. ‘He’s American and I’m going to live with him in New York. He and I have talked it over. We’ll live in the New York flat until his wife moves to LA with the children, and then we’ll move into the house in Chatham.’
He watched the beautiful lips articulate his fate.
‘Everything’s arranged. Noah understands your position and is more than happy to allow me to be generous.’
Jake felt that he had been subjected to a trial without his knowledge and declared guilty and deficient. Then, with a panic he had never before experienced, he thought: Maisie. What about her? ‘And have you worked out what’s going to happen to Maisie?’
She drew up a chair – one of his, a delicate, pretty thing he had built for her in polished cherry wood. She sat down opposite him. ‘Let’s talk turkey.’
‘What else?’
Jocasta’s knuckles whitened. ‘I’ll move into the spare room. OK?’
‘Do what you like.’
She leaned forward and, despite everything, Jake fixed proprietorially on her breasts under her blouse. He knew every inch of that body … the white skin that sheened with sweat when they made love, the slightly too long waist and the mole in the fold of her knee. What didn’t he know?
He was familiar with the hard light that sprang into her eye when a deal was mooted. He knew, too, that she was greedy and driven – all of which, perversely, drew him to her.
‘Jake, listen. You know we only got married because I was pregnant. I’m not proud of it. I’m not proud of anything, and I shouldn’t have been sweet-talked into it. I shall go away to New York and leave you in peace. I won’t ask anything of you or Maisie. I’ll speak to the lawyer and tell him he’s to transfer the mortgage to you, and I’ll make sure the divorce is fair.’
‘Let me get this straight. You’re prepared to leave your baby daughter?’
Jocasta flushed violently. ‘Yes.’
‘My God,’ said Jake, each word dropping like a stone. ‘It must have been very, very bad for you to do this. You must have hated every minute of being with me.’
Jocasta did not reply. Skirt hitched sexily up her thighs, she regarded Jake with pity and slight contempt – which was far worse than anything else.
‘I went shopping twice this week,’ Emily confessed to Katya, as they roamed the aisles in Topshop.
‘Did you feel bad? You did feel bad. You knew you’d feel bad.’
‘OK. OK.’
Katya pulled the Therapist’s Face. ‘You’re resolving your role in your family and the confusion is infecting your work.’
Emily’s Therapist’s Face was more convincing than Katya’s. ‘And you’re conflicted between the need for constant hot showers and the masochist’s urge to suffer.’
‘Right.’
‘Right.’
She and Katya were pedi-conferencing – an activity stolen from
The West Wing
. On the show, it involved highly significant ambulatory exchanges, preferably in a long corridor with offices opening off it. In real life a department store substituted just fine.
This morning it was thronged and swift progress was impossible. Crowds of fifteen to twenty-somethings (sizes 6–10) exclaimed over the merchandise on the racks, circled at a distance by wistful forty- and fifty-somethings (sizes 14–18), who didn’t have a prayer of squeezing into any of the stuff.
Katya halted to examine a rack of T-shirts in oranges and yellows. ‘I thought we had a pact that we’d ring each other up if the temptation got too great.’
Katya was a struggling artist, who waitressed at weekends to pay the rent for a room in a concrete block of flats on the edge of Hoxton. There was nowhere to paint in it and no heating. On her more hopeful days, she argued that bodily discomfort was a useful stimulus to creativity. On the not so good days, she confessed to the utter misery of being cold and cramped.
Emily said, ‘We should concentrate on some positive imaging. I’ve worked out that I shop when my confidence is low.’
‘Plus the shops are heated.’
Emily felt additionally guilty that she didn’t have to fight the bodily discomfort problem. ‘Kats, when did you
know
what you wanted to do?’
Katya looked smug. ‘I was given paper and crayons when Mum potty-trained me. I just knew.’
They went past Swimwear and Emily felt more inadequate than ever. Her Damascene moment, which had commanded her to write, had arrived only recently. She had been finishing an English paper during finals. It had been hot in the hall, her pen was sticky and the paper was smudged and damp. ‘Unlike her sister, Charlotte, who burned for fame and recognition, Emily Brontë rejected the “world without”,’ she wrote. ‘Her rebellion was internal, a battle of the “savage heart” which was “heedless alike of Wealth and Power”.’ At that moment, she felt very close to her namesake – her own heart in turmoil and rebellious – and the thought flashed into her head: I can be a writer too. By that, she did not mean she could begin to approach anything as good as Emily Brontë’s work – the audacity! – but she could inhabit the writer’s undercover role with a huge sense of relief.
If the command had been late in arriving, it was, at least, clear. However, exactly what sort of writing was not clear and Emily spent a long time thinking it over. Biography, for example, was very respectable, particularly with men, who maintained it was the only thing they read. Fiction? As far as she could judge, men regarded fiction, especially popular fiction, as a substratum of pulp, the exception being crime. For some reason, violence and death on the page achieved an intellectual credibility that love and hope did not.
But fiction it had to be. At first her choice had been liberating and joyous and she was surprised she hadn’t considered it before. It wasn’t until she cast back over her childhood and recollected the notebooks filled with stories, which she had kept hidden under the mattress away from the twins, that she realized the foundations of the novelist had been laid.
The thrill of discovering her vocation lasted through the period of intense negotiation with her parents and her retreat to her bedroom/study under the eaves of number twenty-two, where everything was made as comfortable and pleasant for her as she could wish. All of this was before she had plodded painfully to page thirty of the first novel and shuddered to a halt. It was at this point that the silence in the room got to Emily. The air was stifling, the working day endless and her writing stupid. Apart from her mother, everyone was very tactful and kind about it. So much so that Emily ended up feeling like a charity case,
which of course she was
. In a second flash of understanding, she grasped that if her parents had forbidden her to write, she might have done a lot better.
Still, Emily gritted her teeth and got on with it, which was the only honourable thing to do. However, since the news of her father losing his job, it had occurred to her that, maybe, there were changes ahead.
‘What about this?’ Katya skidded to a halt in front of a rack of skirts and held up one the size of a curtain pelmet.
It was mid-morning and the noise level was rising. Emily felt a slight ache flowering in the back of her head, which she preferred to think was a result of creative tension but was probably more to do with the extra glass of wine the previous evening.
After queuing for twenty minutes to get into a changing room heaving with half-naked bodies, Katya tried on the pelmet and an acid-yellow top. ‘Why am I doing this? I can’t afford it.’
‘That’s lucky – neither suits you.’
They fought their way out of the changing room past
the saturnalia of discarded clothes and down the escalator. The pedi-conference recommenced in the basement. ‘I went shopping,’ Emily confessed, in a low voice, ‘because I’m no good.’
Katya switched back to therapist-speak. ‘That may or may not be true, Miss Nicholson. I have no way of knowing because you’ve produced nothing so far …’
‘Hey …’
‘But say it is true, how would you expect to get better?’
Emily clashed the hangers on a rack of short-sleeved sweaters. ‘By keeping going. Practice. Thought.’
‘None of which applies to shopping.’
The hangers made a satisfactory sound. ‘You’re wrong there, Kats. Completely wrong. Shopping requires both.’
She kissed Katya goodbye at the entrance to the Tube and watched her clatter down the steps. At the bottom, Katya glanced back over her shoulder and sent Emily a little smile.
Courage
.
That was Katya. How she had survived the hell of her warring divorced parents and the gruelling lack of money, Emily didn’t know. It had left Katya sweet, flexible, happy to please, but with a certain hardness at the core which ensured that (to Emily’s envy) she cruised easily through university, where Emily had met her.
‘You’re just like a sister,’ Emily had told her, the first time she had taken her home and watched her mother fuss over the guest and feed her up with steak and chocolate mousse. Adding silently:
Far more than Mia ever was
.
At that Katya had kissed Emily, her bony fingers digging hard into Emily’s back. ‘Thank you.’ Suddenly Emily realized that, far from relishing her freedom, Katya yearned
for a fixed centre and the spider’s web of relations and demands that Emily took for granted.
Not surprisingly, her room at home was as she had left it. Apart from Zosia, nobody entered it except herself. ‘Wouldn’t dare sully the place of creation,’ joked Jake.
Her chair was tucked under her desk. Jake had knocked it up in an afternoon with some plywood and MDF and slotted it into a cramped space. It was not one of his better efforts but it would do.
Originally the bed had had a floral headboard (her mother had the worst taste) but she had tacked an alternative in plain blue over it. It was neatly made up and the edges of the quilt hung in the way she preferred. All traces of her previous shopping had been tidied away, the bags stowed in the recycling bin.
Her books on the shelves were colour-coded – ‘Ridiculous,’ said Jake – her makeup and brushes laid out in the formation she had evolved over the years, and her clothes were bagged or swathed in tissue.
But, to be honest, as a retreat the room sometimes felt barren and infertile. She also felt that she did not entirely belong in it.
The window had been left open a crack and she went to shut it. A streak of dust marred the sill and she wiped it with a tissue. Outside, it was growing dark and, yet again, it had rained. A light from the house opposite shone fretfully into the garden, picking out a clump of leaves and the slick of water on the patio. A wet robin fluffed out damp feathers on the shed, and the local top-cat, a black-and-white bully, stalked towards it.
‘“Life wears away – I shall soon be thirty – and I have
done nothing yet,”’ she found herself murmuring and gripped the window-sill. That was one of Charlotte Brontë’s laments. Emily B had not been so prone to more obvious female neuroses and, in some respects, was more robust. ‘And lust of Fame was but a dream/That vanished with the morn …’ was the (far more laudable) line she had chosen to adopt.
Puzzlingly, the transition from undergraduate to adult had been less easy that she had imagined. It should have been as simple as climbing from one step to another but real life was proving to be … well … rather real. It was about the cost of bus tickets and National Insurance contributions and wrestling with pensions for forty years hence. Hardest of all, perhaps, was the realization that, in truth, nothing more was expected of Emily than to launch herself on to the same road as millions of others and to negotiate taxes, retirement and bus tickets. If she permitted it, Emily’s life would be exactly the same as everyone else’s: like a tiny, winking point among the millions of short-lived winking points in the night sky. Then you were gone in an instant – a shadow quickly forgotten. It was precisely the struggle to pin down existence that was where the slippery, exciting, exacting business of writing came in – and, with a burst of renewed passion, she vowed to rededicate herself to it.
There was a knock on the door. Her father poked his head around it. ‘Can I come in?’