Authors: Bianca Zander
I had forgotten all about Gavin, about the sweepstakes, but came out of the ladies’ loo and there he was, standing with his back to me in a pool of dry ice. He had probably been at the party all night and I hadn’t paid any attention to him—or his costume—but now, silhouetted like that,
he stopped me in my tracks. On his head was a crown, and from his belt dangled a golden cardboard sword. He had on some kind of black britches and purple velvet cape, and he had come to the Christmas party dressed as a king. Despite all that, I still might have missed the significance of his costume were it not for the husky tones of Bonnie Tyler booming out “Total Eclipse of the Heart” across the empty dance floor behind him.
In a faraway land your true love waits . . .
No one took home the sweepstakes that night but a few days later in the tiny tearoom at B, B & B’s, with a breeziness I didn’t know I had in me, I invited Gavin to the movies the following weekend. Immediately afterward, my unexpected confidence vanished. I spent the next five days working myself up into a state of high anxiety, and by the time we stood in line outside the Odeon Marble Arch to buy tickets to see
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,
I was awestruck, not because I was in awe of Gavin, the man, but because of the high expectations I had for our relationship. I was terrified of doing anything that would stop him falling in love with me and therefore jeopardize our destiny. I said everything I could think of to make him like me. I remembered Nelly’s advice about flattery, which I followed to the letter, but also that you had to play it cool, which I tried to add to the mix.
Gavin, for his part, was inscrutable, and strangely quiet. I had expected him to get through our date with maximum efficiency and brio, the same way he answered the phone or replied to a telex, but instead he seemed distracted. After the movie, which I barely watched, he took me back to his
Westbourne Grove bedsit, where he opened a bottle of tart Beaujolais nouveau before carefully unfolding his Japanese futon and guiding me, wordlessly, toward its lumpy, button-pocked surface. The sheet, where I sat down, was graying and clammy and spiked with an off-putting sour odor, but I pretended, with some effort, that I felt no disgust. He did not smell as good as Lukas, I thought, before pushing that reflection to the back of my mind.
I did not feel romantic when Gavin placed his right hand awkwardly on my shoulder and leaned over to kiss me, but I did what I hoped was a good job of pretending. Making it as far as the futon had been the sole focus of my efforts, but now I was confronted with the reality of what had to happen next. I had not prepared myself mentally for sex with someone other than Lukas, and everything about it came as an affront to both my heart and my senses.
The sour smell of Gavin’s sheets, I soon discovered, came from him. He was not unclean—he also smelled of soap—but the sourness never washed off. When he took off his clothes, his flesh was the color of a porcelain sink. He felt cold to the touch and while his breath wasn’t bad, faintly sweet, like peppermints or toothpaste, he tasted of a foreign body, in a way Lukas never had. I tried not to make these constant comparisons, but they kept coming to me, unbidden, almost as though Lukas was in bed with us, looking over my shoulder.
Once I was naked, out of the blue, Gavin changed pace, making love in a hurried frenzy, as though I was a lucrative deal he wanted to close before lunchtime. His stroke was
swift and efficient, and after a few minutes, he came. My desire had not had time to ignite, or even spark, and when he rolled off me, I was still in the nervous, agitated state I had been in when I undressed. Gavin still had his socks on. I was disappointed, but in an optimistic, delusional way. This aspect of true love, I told myself, would improve as we got to know each other. We had the rest of our lives to work on it, after all.
But as time went on, what happened was exactly the same. I accepted the way he made love, and I adapted to his emotional distance. I even got used to playing the role of the person I was around him, to the point where it no longer took effort. I wasn’t being myself but I reasoned that I was becoming a grown-up, and the main thing was, Gavin didn’t seem to notice. He liked the fake me, lapped up my toadying and took as much control of the situation as I threw at him. Within six months, we were engaged, and in the summer of ’85, he took me to meet his parents.
We went by train, late on a Saturday afternoon, to be there in time for dinner. They lived an hour south of London, in a village called Bletchingley, built in medieval times, when, judging by the size of the houses, humans must have been much smaller. The Crawleys’ house was a newer addition at the end of a cul-de-sac that had been built to blend in with its neighbors. In front was a tidy lawn with a small round pond, bordered by a circle of obedient rosebushes. Here and there, someone had hidden odd little statues of dwarves, and when I asked Gavin what they were, he said, “Gnomes,” as though this explained everything,
which it didn’t, not to me. Frosted glass panels framed the front door, and as we walked through it, and were welcomed by Mr. and Mrs. Crawley, I had the immediate sensation of stepping onto hostile territory. Mrs. Crawley—“Call me Janet”—was very pleased to see her youngest son. So pleased that after they had embraced, her eyes remained rapturously fixed on him while I was being introduced. Greetings over, she steered him by the small of his back into the lounge for predinner drinks, and I drifted behind in their wake, feeling puzzled. The moment I had feared most was her appraisal, when she would give me the once-over, but it hadn’t occurred to me that she would decline even to look in my direction.
Gavin’s father, George, poured everyone a scotch, then guided us to the lounge suite, upholstered in moss-green velveteen. George positioned himself where he had the best view of the television set, tuned to a cricket match on mute. His cheeks and nose were ruddy, the scotch deeper in his glass than in ours, and as we settled into our places, the volume of the television crept up in tiny increments though George’s hand, on the remote, had barely moved.
“Mark and Sophie are coming for lunch tomorrow with the children,” announced Janet, “so I do hope it’s a fine day.” She glanced at me, for what seemed like the first time, then gestured to a china cabinet, the shelf crammed with miniature bugle-blowing shepherd boys perched on tiny porcelain hills. “Last time, we had a bit of a disaster, didn’t we, Gavin?”
“They didn’t mean to break anything, Mum.”
Mark was Gavin’s brother, but Gavin had never men
tioned having nieces or nephews. There was a sister too, but she lived abroad. “How old are the children?” I asked. “Are they very young?”
“It isn’t their age that’s the problem,” said Janet, casting meaningful glances at Gavin and her husband. “It’s the way they’ve been brought up. No manners, and they’re allowed to run wild.” She lowered her voice. “Their mother doesn’t believe in discipline.”
“Oh,” I said, at the same moment as Gavin and his father cheered at something that had happened on the television, which Gavin had been surreptitiously watching.
Janet frowned at her husband, a well-practiced expression. George switched off the television, cleared his throat, and then turned to his son. “I read in the paper about a house in South Kensington, by the park, that sold for three times what the couple paid for it. They only had it two years. Can you believe it?”
“Arabs, I expect,” said Gavin. “They’re buying up everything. Ripping out the insides and putting in gold taps, marble floors, Jacuzzis. Bit over-the-top but that’s what they like. Shows the rest of us how much money they’ve got.”
“More money than taste,” added Janet.
I hadn’t heard Gavin speak of other nationalities in this way, and I was appalled.
“What about you lot, though?” said George. “How are young couples meant to get a look in?”
“You don’t need to worry about us. I’ve got shares. We can borrow the rest. The banks are giving away money—you can write your own check.”
George looked worried, then smiled. “That’s a lot to borrow.”
“Dad, relax,” said Gavin. “Everyone’s doing it. No one saves anymore.” He took my hand and squeezed it. “Anyway, that’s enough shop talk. We’ve got some exciting news.”
Oh shit,
I thought,
he hasn’t told them.
George smiled expectantly, while Janet braced herself against the moss-green upholstery.
“Mum, Dad,” said Gavin. “Poppy and I are getting married.”
There was a moment of funereal silence, then George stood up and slapped his son on the back. “Congratulations!” he said warmly, and reached over to hug me.
“Thank you,” I said, hugging him back, and turning to Janet, expecting the same.
“How lovely,” she said, her smile rather wobbly. “We had no idea you two were so serious.” She let me embrace her, enveloping us in lavender soap. When she pulled back, she had tears in her eyes. “My little boy,” she said, turning to Gavin. “I can’t believe you’re getting married.”
“Bloody hell, Mum, there’s no need to panic,” said Gavin. “We haven’t set a date yet.”
She wasn’t panicking, but I was. Until this moment, the engagement hadn’t felt real.
“Poppy, darling, are you all right?” Gavin looked at me with concern.
“Yes, I’m fine. Just . . . overwhelmed.”
Janet had already left the room, something about putting on the brussels sprouts.
“Another scotch?” said George, proffering the bottle.
We had arrived on the Saturday afternoon and left the following Sunday evening but the time in between felt like a hundred years. There was no air in the house, nothing to do, and we were held captive in the lounge with the TV on while outside the rain came down in a deluge. The brother and sister-in-law canceled—one of the wild, undisciplined children had carelessly contracted chicken pox—but Janet insisted on a full Sunday roast regardless, and we sat around the dining table in stiff cooperation.
Janet had gone to considerable trouble with two types of meat and had set the table with crystal stemware, polished silver cutlery, and red cloth napkins folded to look like swans. There was a toast to us, the happy couple, with something sweet and fizzy from a green bottle with a gold label, and afterward, a long and awkward silence broken only by the scraping of silver on fine bone-china plates. I felt as though we were acting out a pantomime and I had failed to properly learn the part of ugly daughter-in-law. When George asked me what my father did, I veered from the script and made the mistake of answering truthfully.
“I don’t really have a father, as such,” I began. “But Hunter, the man who sired me, was the leader of the commune. He founded it with his wife, Elisabeth, who birthed me.”
A forkful of roast beef and peas hovered at the entrance to Janet’s mouth. “She did what?”
“She gave birth to me but I didn’t think of her as my mother. I was raised in a group with all the other kids.”
George leaned both elbows on the table, eyes wide, star
ing at me. Their horrified expressions seemed to egg me on, and suddenly I wanted to make my childhood sound even weirder than it already was.
“They didn’t even tell us which of them were our parents until we were teenagers. They wanted us to grow up loving everyone the same.”
“Poppy,” said Gavin. “You didn’t tell me any of that.”
I hadn’t told him any of that because he had never inquired. Throughout our courtship, Gavin had only ever asked the most perfunctory questions about my background, whether I had brothers and sisters, where I had gone to school, that sort of thing, and I had given him the sketchiest of answers, which seemed to be all he wanted. He much preferred to talk about the future, about the sort of giant house we would live in once he had made his fortune. His favorite topic was money. He could talk about that for hours.
“Do you mean,” said Janet, “that you grew up on a commune?”
“I did.”
“And you were raised by hippies?” Janet pronounced the word “hippies” with unbridled disgust—exactly the way Hunter would have.
“They weren’t hippies. It was a sustainable community—a cooperative farm.”
Janet’s expression went from curdled to confused. She didn’t have the foggiest what I was talking about. She looked to George for help while I continued to dig my hole.
“We grew all our own food without using pesticides or
heavy machinery. No one took acid or was into free love. In fact we weren’t even allowed to drink.”
Drugs! Free love!
Booze!
At the mere mention of these activities, Janet was outraged, no matter that I had been telling her they were prohibited.
“Well,” said George. “That is an interesting way to grow up.”
“You can say that again,” said Gavin.
Janet didn’t say anything, but later on, when I was clearing the dining table, I looked through to the kitchen and saw her locked in a passionate but whispered conversation with Gavin. They were trying to be quiet, but the discussion was getting more and more heated, and Janet was crying. When Gavin tried to comfort her, she pushed him away. “I can’t,” I heard her say. “I don’t think I can tolerate any more savage grandchildren.”
We got through dessert and a brandy in the lounge before Janet said she could feel a migraine coming on (Gavin had warned me that she often came down with one) and would we please excuse her? She retired to the bedroom with a pained expression on her face, and that was the last we saw of her. Gavin went upstairs to the bedroom we had slept in and came down with our bags. We said good-bye to George, who was well on his way to a brandy-induced coma, and then we left.
On the way back to London on the train, Gavin was sullen and withdrawn, and I was troubled by how badly the weekend had gone. I was certain I had failed to impress the Crawleys, including, possibly, Gavin himself. I was even more troubled by the way I felt about them. In Gavin’s
childhood home, among the porcelain curios and serviette swans, in the presence of his suffocating mother and remote, booze-addled father, I had felt unable to breathe. Part of that was my fault. I hadn’t been honest with Gavin about who I was or where I had come from. I had been foolish to think he would never find out, or that he wouldn’t be appalled when he did. But mostly what panicked me was that I had spent the weekend in the bosom of the very sort of nuclear family I had been brought up to disdain, and even if I hated my upbringing more, I didn’t know if I could pass as one of their kind.