We are a good group in our office anyway. It's not an earthshaking place—most of us think we might like to be somewhere more glittery by the time we're thirty.
But come on, it's a job and the place has a good name in the business, so what the hell.
I like it, and I share a big bright flat with two of my colleagues.
My sister rang the office one day and asked to speak to John. "Do you mean Generous John or the other John?" they asked. She said she thought she must mean the other but she was wrong.
Amy was surprised. "You're not generous," she said accusingly.
"No, but I'm not mean," I said. She admitted that was true and we talked on easily.
Are we close as brother and sister? Not really. Well, there's the bond of course that we survived our upbringing. And we've lots of shared memories. But we have lived very different lives.
Amy went to one of those fancy secretarial colleges that teaches women to dress well and social skills as well as office procedure. And she learned well, she's as slim as a pencil, wears very smart designer jackets. Very groomed and cool-looking. She has only one blind spot—that guy Tim.
Tim has a wealthy wife, a huge house, a couple of kids at ruinously expensive schools. He has a demanding job as CEO of his company, so he wasn't going to risk the package by going off into the sunset with my sister, glamorous as she may be and trophy wife material as she undoubtedly was. But Amy couldn't or wouldn't see this and by the time she did see it, it would all be too late.
I tried to tell her this one night when we had supper together but boy, did it fall on stony and unwelcoming ground. I was told pretty sharpish that it was none of my business, that I didn't understand the first thing about it.
I was also reminded rather firmly that when I looked at myself in the mirror I would realize that I was no great advertisement for true and undying love. I had never had a proper girlfriend at all.
This was not strictly true and I was annoyed by what she said. But Amy and I papered over the cracks and never talked to each other about our private lives again.
Then I met Linda. After that of course I wanted to talk about my private life to everyone.
Linda was a fantastic-looking girl who had been transferred from head office to us for six months. She never actually went back. She was Irish actually but very together—none of all that drippy Irish colleen thing. She was bright as a button and very popular.
And of all the guys she could have had, which was most of them, she actually fancied me. Which was very pleasing.
One Friday over the smoked salmon she actually asked me straight out how did Generous John spend the rest of his Friday night, and I heard myself saying in this awful voice that whatever Lovely Linda suggested would be fine with Generous John, and we went out to an Italian restaurant. And then we saw a lot of each other.
She took me home to meet her parents. Her father was an Irish banker with some huge job in London and they lived in a big house with a garden, and an orchard and Labrador dogs.
They didn't quiz me about my family—but Linda did.
"When am I going to meet them? Ever? In this century, maybe?" she kept asking.
Now I wasn't so stupid as to pretend that my people were classy like hers were or anything, that sort of thing is only laying up heartache ahead. No, indeed, I had told her that I was born in a small terraced house, and my parents were working-class. But I couldn't bring her to meet my mother and father. Not yet.
Dad's awful sister Dervla would want to come in and inspect her. My mother's nosy cousin would find an excuse to come round. They would be talking about places back in the Old Country and trying to find links with Linda's family. It would all be too awful.
I would be apologizing for them and then hating myself for feeling that way.
No, keep them apart as long as possible. That was best.
Now, meeting my sister, Amy, that was another thing. I invited Amy to a sushi bar to meet Linda and she brought the dreaded Tim. He kept running his hand through his hair and saying he had to be at the next place. Amy was looking at him as if she had suddenly been turned into a spaniel dog instead of a highly efficient personal assistant, which is what she was.
When they left I shrugged at Linda and apologized for him. "I don't know why she puts up with him."
"I do," Linda said.
I was amazed.
"Because she loves him," said Linda as if it were obvious.
And to my huge regret Linda didn't stay with me in my room in our big airy apartment. Girls often stayed overnight; with my roommates I would have been so proud to see Linda drinking freshly squeezed orange juice for breakfast, wearing my dressing gown.
But no, she was adamant, and I couldn't stay in the flat she shared with another woman either. We could spend the odd overnight in a hotel when we were away somewhere, so it wasn't sex itself that was out. No, it was what Linda called "dreaded domesticity."
We must wait until we were sure, she said, and then get our own place.
I kept saying that I
was
sure but she said, nonsense, I couldn't be yet, and meanwhile, could she meet my parents? I wondered, would they be worse at home or if I brought them here to London? It was a puzzler. At least in London awful Aunt Dervla wouldn't be around and half the street would not be peering at and examining us. But then they would be so lacking in confidence in London.
I put it off and off.
One day Linda rang from a business trip to say she was only fifteen miles from my hometown and she'd love to call and see my parents. I lied to her, I told her they were away. When she came back, I began to bluster about what a pity it was they had missed each other, but she cut straight across me.
"I didn't miss them, John, I went to see them," she said.
"But they were away," I gasped.
"They must have come back," she said.
"And?" I asked.
"And we had tea and cheese on toast and I told them a bit about what kind of work we do, you and I, and your aunt Dervla came in and she said maybe we would all meet at The Silver sometime. What's The Silver, John? Is it a hotel or a pub or something?"
"I don't know, I suppose so," I muttered.
Linda had met my parents, been to my house, met Aunt Dervla and survived it. This must be love.
I tried to tell Amy but she was very worked up about a visit to Paris with Tim and she didn't really listen. I wondered, should I ask my parents to London sometime? After all, they had met Linda now so the worst bit was over. And they might not be so ill at ease as if she was a complete stranger. But there was never any real time for it, and there was a lot else going on.
We worked long hours and then on the weekends we windsurfed all summer long. Some of us were planning deep-sea diving in the autumn. And okay, I did feel a bit bad sometimes when I thought how little they had and how much I had. But honestly, that's the way things are. Look at people out in Africa, they have nothing at all. And we can't cure it. So what's the point about feeling bad all the time?
Linda was always going home to see her family, but it was different for her. And not so far away. She was always telephoning them, telling them nonsensical things. I didn't ring them at my home because Bob and Pearl were really the kind of people who would panic when there was a phone call. Always thought it was bad news, and they'd be warning me to save my money even though I was phoning from the office. And I did mean to book them a show, some musical, you know, that they'd like and an overnight in a hotel. But as I say, the time just passed.
And then I get this phone call from Amy completely from left field, saying that we were meant to have arranged some awful silver wedding party for them. So that was what they meant when they said to Linda that they would be seeing her at the silver. It wasn't a pub at all. It was a bloody twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.
"Shit!" I said several times to Amy, and she was in total agreement.
"If they had only said," she repeated over and over. "They never say anything and expect us to be inspired about everything."
I thought for a moment about the big birthday cards they sent me every year with a linen handkerchief tucked inside or a bookmark or something useless. But then of course people would remember their children's birthdays—when I have children, when Linda and I have a son and daughter, we'll remember birthdays too. Though I must say she's always dashing off for something for people's anniversaries or birthdays at home. But then girls are different.
Which is why it's so annoying about Amy, that
she
should have remembered this goddamned silver wedding. I said, okay, okay, damage limitation, let's do something for them in London, have a dinner, champagne or something, send a limo for them. But oh no. Amy can't be there. She and Tim have some weekend in Paris that just can't be canceled. She is so selfish, Amy, at times, and foolish. Very foolish.
There was some kind of psychobabble about making the pearl wedding Mum's big celebration, because of her name and everything. A pearl wedding is thirty years, apparently.
God knows where we'll all be by then. Linda and I will be married, that's for sure, and Tim will be on to a newer, younger model than my sister, that's also for sure.
So I said, let's send a bouquet each to awful Aunt Dervla's house, and I said that maybe they were better off in Blackpool on their own, and I said we'd do a big number for the pearl wedding but somehow I didn't entirely convince either Amy or myself.
I told Linda all about it that evening. She listened to me very quietly. She looked at me as if she had never really seen me before.
I didn't really like the look. It was as if there was some kind of mark on my head.
"What's wrong?" I asked her anxiously.
"Nothing, nothing at all," she said. "Go on, tell me more."
So I went on talking and told her that my mother and father were of course—as she knew because she had met them—the salt of the earth. But what they were was too easily satisfied. It was pathetic, the way they set store by little things. And my mother liked looking well in front of her cousin, of all people, a dreadful woman with no grace, no style, no standards. And they were in awe of Aunt Dervla, my father's bossy elder sister, who thought she knew everything but had only been south of Watford twice.
They were perfectly happy with their little house up there instead of finding somewhere proper to live. Times had changed, people had moved on, they just didn't realize it. If the world had been full of people like them we would still be living in caves.
Linda's face showed nothing. Normally she was animated and she agreed or she disagreed. But she sat there blankly and you know the way it is, the less somebody talks the more you talk? I heard myself telling about how my parents had thought chicken and chips was a great treat, how they put up big colored paper chains all over the house at Christmas so that we could hardly move.
And still Linda said nothing so I told her all about Mum working extra hours to get us new bicycles and awful Aunt Dervla coming to give us milk and biscuits. Little by little I saw Linda moving her feet down from the sofa and slipping them into her shoes, which was odd because we had the flat to ourselves and it wasn't nearly time for her to go.
And then she said she had to be off.
And I said, "You can't possibly go now—what about the guinea fowl I bought for us to eat with a bottle of really good claret?"
And for no reason at all Linda asked me, had I ever cooked guinea fowl for my mother and father, and I explained that you couldn't cook in their kitchen and anyway they liked such awful things that they would be sick if they had guinea fowl. Her face looked so different somehow.
So I said stupidly, "What's wrong, Linda? What is it?"
And she looked really sad as she sort of touched my hand before she left. "Oh, John," she said, "Generous John, you really don't know, do you?"
And she left.
And I didn't know and I don't know.
I mean, that's what's so difficult about people—you never really know, do you?
Going to the Pub
Poppy
When I was young our gran lived with us and we adored her. She was far more entertaining than our parents and she understood things. She was much more interesting to listen to, having been around for so long and having seen so much. She used to take Jane and myself on long rambles through Whitethorn Woods, always finding something interesting to show us. Like a tree house built years ago by her brothers, or how to press flowers in a book, or best of all St. Ann's Well. She said we must never laugh at the people praying there because one day we would undoubtedly come here to pray ourselves.
That's what happened. When she was young she thought they were all mad to mumble and mutter and leave mementos but oddly it became comforting once she got older. She taught us to listen to people. Well, she taught me, anyway. That's probably where I got the idea of working with older people.
There wasn't much enthusiasm at home.
"You'll have to get some kind of qualification first," my dad said.
"Old people can be very demanding," my mum said.
"You'll never meet a fellow if you get stuck in geriatrics," said my elder sister, Jane.
Jane had turned out to be very different to me—she wore blusher and eye shadow properly and had a steam iron for her own clothes. She took great care of her shoes, always stuffing them with newspaper and polishing them with shoe cream. My friends and I used to call her Elegant Jane.