Authors: Sarah Bilston
I burst out laughing—suddenly we were in
Gone with the Wind
—and, surrendering, sat down. “Hardly. My two older sisters are married, and I can’t say I fancied either of their husbands.”
“Really? What was wrong with them?”
I shook my head at her. “Nothing’s wrong with them. Just not my type.”
“So what is your type?” Her china-blue eyes were disconcertingly wide.
“My boyfriend is called Dave,” I explained carefully, “and he is—he is—oh, I don’t know. Hard to explain, really. Very friendly. Fun to hang out with.”
“And your sisters’ husbands aren’t either of those things, I suppose?”
This old woman was quite exasperating! “I didn’t say that,” I returned awkwardly. “That’s not what I meant. But my older sister’s husband is too work-obsessed, too ambitious for my taste, and my middle sister’s husband is—very solid. Dependable. Boring, to be frank.”
“I see. So you like men who can’t keep a job and aren’t reliable. Do I have that right?” Her wrinkled face was politely bland.
“I wouldn’t put it like that—I didn’t mean—I just—oh, I’m only twenty-four!” I said, realizing as I spoke that I’d given the same answer to someone else not so long ago. I felt my face flush; Sue-Ellen put her head on one side, looking for all the world like a bright little bird with golden plumage.
“I’m sorry, my dear, I’m just teasing you,” she remarked after a moment or two, laughing a little as she took my hand in hers. “I was the youngest of three myself, you see, and we
did
compete over beaux. You should have seen me! I was just dreadful! Whenever one of my sisters brought home a young man, I couldn’t stop myself, I just
had
to have him. Or his older brother. Well, you know how it is…And I didn’t feel bad, because the other two did just the same thing. It’s a miracle straight from the Lord that we got married at all—but we all did, you know. In fact, I was married three times.”
“And your sisters? Did they get married too, or did you steal their husbands away?”
“No, my dear, certainly not,” she replied seriously, “once God had joined them together, it was a different matter entirely. I wouldn’t have dreamed of getting between them. Tilly was married twice, and Grace—that’s the oldest—has been married for fifty-five years. So you see, my dear, we were terrible teenagers, but quite respectable once we were grown-up. Although—”
“Can you believe it? Time just
flies by
here!” Mrs. Forrester trilled suddenly, dropping her hand on my shoulder, her fuchsia scarf vibrant in the sunshine. She smiled down at me kindly, mouth wide, perfect white teeth sparkling. Sue-Ellen shrugged, and allowed me to be steered gently to the door, past the little chattering groups of bridge-players and crocheters, all of whom waved as I passed. I stole a cookie from the kitchen, then let myself out of the building and walked back along the coastal road (the one Paul and I walked along a few days earlier), feeling thoughtful. Quiet Lanes was, in some sense, worse than expected—more claustrophobic, more smelly, and definitely more pink. But the job itself wasn’t too bad, I thought to myself, as I let myself back into the house.
It was just a shame (as I explained to Alison, an hour or two later) that it would prevent me from spending time with Dave. I’d be away most afternoons during his visit, helping out at Quiet Lanes. “I
wouldn’t worry about that, darling,” Alison replied earnestly across the vast crackling distance between us. “He’ll be delighted to see you engaged in geriatric care, I’m sure. After all, someone placed as he is—the situation with his mother—will be extra-sensitive to the need for
quality
volunteer work in elder homes. Don’t you think?”
Which was really an excellent point, one I determined to make to Dave himself if he got uppity about my working when he actually arrived.
Q
M
y cell phone thrummed and jigged on the breakfast table. It was Fay, the partner from Schuster and Marks. I hadn’t heard from her—or from anyone at work—since Caroline’s party.
Her voice on the other end of the phone was like an echo from another life, rising thinly, almost inaudibly, through vestigial soup. “Hello, hello? Where the fuck are you, Q—you sound as if you’re on the moon.
Where—?
Fuck, you might as well be. What are you doing in…none of my business, I suppose. Look, I’m calling because you’ll be back from maternity leave in two weeks, and things are happening fast these days. I wanted to bring you up to date on the
cases you’ll be taking over—we’ve got, like, zero time to prepare the Mingge Brothers case, and then there’s the Castle One Properties merger we agreed you’d take over, and I want to run through the details of
Alliance Construction v. Gettysfield Industries.
So it might be easiest if we meet up, you can get right up to speed, hit the ground running the day you return. Are you going to be available any time in the next week?”
I fought down the panic. Actually we were thinking of coming to the city in a few days, as it happens, I told her faintly. I’ll come into the office Friday and we can talk then. I let her think we’d be just chatting about cases, there was no need (I decided) to hint at Any Other Subject just yet, so I walked carefully around the holes in my words and jogged determinedly onto the safer ground available to women and colleagues (how’s Arlene, when’s Chris getting married, what’s up with Susan’s house—
no!
It didn’t! She
didn’t!).
At the end of the conversation I hung up the phone, then stared at it.
What had people been saying about me behind my back? The thought of the complicated office politics, of what my colleagues say about women who begin the long slither
down
the greasy pole, made me feel briefly sick. I thought of Caroline’s eyes, sharp as glass, of Michael’s supercilious blandness. I thought of the fraught clients, the mind-numbing hum of the air-conditioning, the freaked-out terror of the junior associates, the nervy behind-closed-doors jockeying of the partners…And then I thought of the bigger gossip network, of the two-way flow of news from Crimpson out into the legal community. Tom had already put in a request for another week’s leave on the grounds of Samuel’s ill health. People were bound to be talking.
But how impossible it would be now to leave my son, to hand his small, frail body over for someone else to hug and smell and love twelve hours a day, to unclip my bra in the office and spill my breasts into plastic cups and bottles. Impossible to deal with the second-
by-second crises of a firm struggling in a recession, while thinking every second only of
him
…
I saw, in a single moment of absolute clarity, the conversation I must have with Fay.
We were going down to the city on Tuesday—in four days’ time. Our time there would be busy; apart from my meeting at Schuster, and Tom’s emergency rendezvous with Luis at Crimpson, Lucille and Peter were planning to come and “see how you folks are doing.” And we had lunches penciled in with our friends Brianna and Mark, while Paul said he wanted to bring us dinner one night.
Jeanie stared at us in frank bewilderment when we told her about the trip. “You’re leaving me here?” she asked incredulously.
“All alone
in Connecticut?”
I wrinkled my forehead at her. “No, you’ll have Dave,” I replied, surprised, and her mouth hung open.
“But you said you wanted to see more of him…” she began accusingly.
“I know, I know,” I returned apologetically, “but we have to go into work, there are—well, good reasons I promise, and we also have an appointment for Samuel at the doctor’s. I would suggest you come with us, but there isn’t room for five of us in the apartment, not for a full week, and anyway you have your new job, right? You can’t skip that. Plus I can’t imagine Dave will want to make the trip up and down from New York
four
times in the course of ten days…”
She looked briefly as if she was being strangled. “I see. I see.”
“And look, if you want, you could both come at the end of his trip, he could leave for London straight from New York,” I went on. “We can squeeze for a night or two in the apartment, I’m sure, and you’ll have finished your first stint at the Home by then.”
It was sweet, I decided, that she was so desperate for Dave and me to get to know each other. No matter what was going on in my life, I felt I’d have to make a serious effort with him this time.
Jeanie
’
E
ll, love,” he said, standing on the doorstep, looking strangely out of place against the Connecticut sky.
I looked round his shoulder into the driveway, fully expecting to see a police car and an armed officer grimly waiting, but there was nothing, just a cardinal hopping in the grass and a few gray squirrels scaling the trees. “How did you get here?” I asked suspiciously.
He stared at me. “The heavens opened and put me here. I got in a time machine. How d’you bloody
think
I got here? I flew,” he returned crossly. “On the eight a.m. flight, landed at ten thirty New York time. Then I hitched a ride with some bloke who works in insurance up in Hartford. Nice bloke. Didn’t even know that planes contributed to the greenhouse effect—can you believe it—he does now—I met him on the flight, we had a nice chat, he says he’s going to tell his bosses all about it the next time they want him to fly to Tallahassee. Anyway. Can I come in, or what?”
I stood back silently to let him come into the house, but he stayed still for a moment, staring at me. I gazed back mutely. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” he asked impatiently.
“Sorry, I—?”
“A bloody kiss, Lady Muck, I’ve flown round the world to be here
with you,” he said, with a catch at the back of his throat, and I flushed, apologized, leaned forward, and brushed my lips against his cheek.
He turned his face, and our mouths met; his arms went around me, and he pulled me close. I’d forgotten the taste of him.
“Now, isn’t that nice—oh I’m
sorry
to interrupt—but I just wanted to say how pleased we are to have you here,” came Tom’s voice from behind me, and he emerged from the sitting room with Samuel clutched and sprawling under one arm. “Dave—it’s so
great
you could come,” he went on cheerfully, rather overdoing it I thought. “Where are your bags—Christ, is that all you brought, very impressive, I always seem to end up with a dozen garment bags—still, it helps if you don’t carry suits, doesn’t it—can I help you—yes, and this is Samuel…”
Dave peered uncomfortably into Samuel’s face, then took a step backward as the baby began to howl. “Don’t mind him,” Tom continued, “he does this all the time. Now, how about something to drink, Dave? Tea, I presume?”
Q was out shopping, but when she appeared half an hour later she literally threw her arms around his neck. They’d obviously had a conversation up in the privacy of their darkened, muddled bedroom last night about “making him feel welcome,” but Dave looked a bit startled, as well he might, since the last time he saw her a year or so previously she was hissing at him like an overwrought cat about how he was “taking advantage” of me and was (I think I have the phrase correctly) “a work-shy, weak-kneed layabout.” Now she effectively laid out a red carpet into the bosom of our family. “We’re so delighted you’ve come all this way to see us, you must be exhausted, please don’t think about us, if you need to go and sleep, just feel free…
“And how is your mother?” she went on, pouring him a third cup of sweet tea and producing some chocolate chip cookies from her shopping bag. “I hear you’ve been a real rock for her these past few
years.” She arranged her features into an expression of sympathy and simultaneous admiration. As well she might; Dave was an exemplary son.
“She’s not doing so good,” Dave explained soberly. “Not good at all. It’s no surprise, of course; we’ve been waiting for this to happen. Alzheimer’s—it’s a terrible disease.”
“When was she first diagnosed?” Tom inquired solicitously.
Dave shrugged. “While I was at Uni in Manchester, but she was mostly all right then,” he explained. “She served up a bloody good Christmas meal that year, just a few weeks after the diagnosis: turkey, fifteen trimmings, homemade Christmas pud, brandy butter, you name it. We all thought, maybe she’ll be the one to beat it, you know? Maybe it won’t
get
her. But it was later that night, while we were still cleaning up the dishes, she forgot Dad’s name for the first time, started talking about Stan, some bloke she was engaged to before she met Dad, who died of meningitis.” Unused to so much warmth from my family, he was becoming expansive. “Dad was really upset, because he always suspected she loved Stan best. It was horrible—him in tears, Mam’s bewildered face above the turkey carcass…‘course, it was just the beginning. Dad couldn’t handle it, any of it, and neither could m’sister, but thank God Mam’s cousin Brenda was willing to move in and help. She’s been bloody marvelous, don’t know what we’d have done without her, and God knows what Dad’s been able to pay her. Her stepdaughter Ellen’s been helping these past few years too, when she can. She works in a home for adults with disabilities and comes to help Brenda with Mam on weekends and at nights. You remember Ellen, don’t you Jeanie?” He smiled sweetly.
Actually, the first time I saw her I nearly fell off my chair; I’d imagined, from the family description, that she would be a soft-footed, gentle young lady, prompted by an almost spiritual calling to take care of the elderly. She was, in fact, bottle-blond and twenty,
with the kind of plump-cheeked, big-bottomed cuteness reminiscent of a 1960s
Carry On
film. “’Ello, Dave,” she said when she arrived for lunch, kissing him loudly on the cheek, pressing her D-cup boobs into his chest. She chattered merrily throughout the meal, forking great loads of fish and chips into her big, round, lavishly lipsticked mouth with appreciative smacks. God knows what she was saying, I was too busy staring at her cleavage. White shirt open to her nipples, or thereabouts, and tucked into a short navy skirt that bulged over a generous tummy. Every time she sat down or crossed her legs, she exposed the thick tops of a pair of black stockings fastened with pink plastic suspender clips. Dave, exposed to the sight of these undergarments just as he was trying to serve her a cup of tea, was so flummoxed he spilled the hot liquid over the table, which for no reason that I could see required Ellen to peer down her cleavage and say, “No harm done to these fellas, I’m pleased to say! Eh? Eh!” and nudge Dave furiously with her elbow.