Girl From the South (v5) Page 4

  ‘Cool it,’ Boone said.

  Gillon glanced at Ashley.

  ‘Me,’ she said, trying to laugh. ‘In every department.’

  ‘No,’ Ashley said faintly. ‘Not true—’

  ‘True enough,’ Cooper said. He was still smiling. ‘Where’s your healthy spirit of sibling rivalry?’

  ‘Enough, buddy,’ Boone said.

  ‘Hey, what’s enough? I’m only kidding, only kidding my intellectual feminist big sister—’

  Martha picked up her wineglass.

  ‘I think we should toast Ashley. Ashley and Merrill. To a safe pregnancy and a healthy baby.’

  Gillon took a swallow of water.

  ‘You know what?’ Cooper said to her. ‘You know something?’ He raised his hand in a little gesture of triumph. ‘Gill, even Gloria Steinem got married!’

  Martha stood up. Boone rose too. He came round the table and put a hand on his son’s shoulder.

  ‘Mama’s going to fix us some coffee and dessert. Meanwhile, you and me got something to discuss.’

  Cooper stood too.

  ‘Only kidding,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Martha said. She handed Gillon a dripping dishpan from the sink.

  Gillon looked away.

  ‘About what exactly?’

  ‘Oh, dear, just everything about tonight—’

  Gillon held the dishpan well away from her.

  ‘You mean about Ashley’s baby and Grandmama being so thrilled and Cooper being such a schmuck?’

  Martha said carefully, ‘Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite like that.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I could see it was hard for you.’

  ‘Mother,’ Gillon said. She dried the dishpan and set it on the counter. ‘Will you please understand that I have not so far met anyone I even remotely want to marry?’

  ‘I understand a lot,’ Martha said. ‘I understand that longing in the abstract, in the theoretical, can be quite as painful as longing in the particular.’

  ‘I’m not longing,’ Gillon said.

  Martha turned back from the sink. She had put on her Jane Austen pinafore again and a pair of pink rubber cleaning-up gauntlets. When Cooper had offered to drive Ashley home, and Boone had escorted Sarah out to his Mercedes parked in the street, Martha had asked Gillon to stay.

  ‘To help me,’ she said. She looked at Gillon now, through the tortoiseshell eyeglasses her patients found so reassuring.

  ‘You’re not happy, Gill.’

  ‘Oh!’ Gillon cried. She slapped the cloth she was holding against the nearest cabinet. ‘Oh! Don’t do this to me, Mother! I don’t want wise, sorrowful stuff from you of all people—’

  ‘But I care about you—’

  ‘Yes, yes! And I care about me, too! I care what happens to me, what choices I make. Of course I care! We all care. Even stupid Cooper cares. Poor Gillon, almost thirty years old, no home, no guy, no career, no prospects. How do we not all care about that?’

  Martha pulled off the pink gauntlets and laid them precisely parallel on the counter.

  ‘If you were my patient, I could probably do something for you. I could persuade you, as I do dozens of people, that you were actually free to choose, that you were at the controls of your own life. But as you’re my daughter, I can’t seem to do that. I can’t seem to help you. I seem to have to stand here and watch you suffer.’

  ‘Am I suffering?’

  Martha moved the gauntlets one half-inch to the left.

  ‘I would think so.’

  Gillon said nothing. She leaned against the kitchen cabinet beside her and closed her eyes.

  ‘Sometimes life is just timing,’ Martha said. ‘Sometimes you can’t find what you want because the time just isn’t right.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’ve had any right time yet—’

  ‘I don’t want to watch you going through this pregnancy of Ashley’s,’ Martha said. ‘I know you’ve made your choices and I know you know about having to shoulder the consequences of those choices, but sometimes we are asked to bear things in which we have had no choice at all.’

  Gillon moved away from the cabinet and stood next to Martha. Even at her warmest, Mother was not someone you touched easily. Daddy was the one you touched. Daddy was as easy to touch as a baby or a teddy bear.

  ‘Thank you,’ Gillon said.

  ‘I think about next winter, next November,’ Martha said. ‘I think about how it will be for you, when the baby comes.’

  ‘November—’

  ‘Yes,’ Martha said. ‘November 7th. That’s the due date.’

  Gillon picked one gauntlet up and put it floppily on top of the second one.

  ‘Oh. You don’t need to worry about that.’

  ‘Not worry—’

  ‘No. Not about November. I – well, I shan’t be here, in November.’

  Martha looked at her.

  ‘Gillon—’

  Gillon took a little breath. Then she looked at her mother. She was smiling.

  ‘I’m applying for a job,’ she said. ‘A job in London. London, England.’

  London

  Summer

  Chapter Three

  The train back to London from King’s Lynn was crowded. Henry couldn’t think why. Surely a train from north Norfolk to central London should only be crowded first thing in the morning, or possibly on Sunday nights when people were returning to work after weekends with their parents or their girlfriend’s parents. But a Thursday afternoon should have been empty, easy. On a Thursday afternoon, after two days of drizzling summer rain, waiting for enough light to take even the least promising of pictures, there should have been room enough for Henry to find a seat with sufficient space either beside or above it to stow his camera case. But there wasn’t. Every seat was taken, mostly by people who had smug reserved tickets stuck in special slots behind them, people with foresight, people with absolutely nothing better to do than, weeks ahead, plan on reserving two forward-facing seats on the 3.52 p.m. from King’s Lynn to King’s Cross, and then sit in them, looking self-satisfied.

  Henry packed his camera case in the shaking space between two carriages, outside a lavatory door bearing an ‘Out of Order’ notice. He sat down awkwardly on it. It was a big camera case – containing a new Nikon F3 camera for which Henry had had to mortgage his soul as well as his foreseeable future – but it wasn’t, all the same, big enough to make a reasonable seat. Or, at least, not reasonable for somebody of six foot three who was not exactly delicately built. Photographer friends of Henry’s who specialized, with the sort of careless self-consciousness peculiar to their kind, in the reporting of conflict and disaster always said he was too big to have made a war reporter. He’d have been too clumsy, too conspicuous in a war zone: he’d have taken up too much space, consumed too many rations. No, they said, surveying the labels from Kosovo and Sierra Leone and East Timor on their own camera kits, Henry Atkins was far better employed stalking wildfowl in the fenlands and waiting for the perfect storm off the south Cornish coast. And of course, he was brilliant at it, they said. Brilliant. There weren’t many wildlife and landscape photographers to touch Henry. If, that is, landscape and wildlife photography was your kind of thing, in the first place.

  Henry put his elbows on his knees and stared at the toecaps of his boots. They were big boots, huge, of the type worn by construction workers, and the leather had worn away to reveal the shiny dome of protective metal underneath. In the interests of camouflage, Henry had painted the metal with the kind of olive-green enamel paint sold for military model kits, but the paint was flaking off after too much exposure to water and weather. He would paint them again, he thought. He certainly wasn’t going to buy new boots. He wasn’t, at the moment, going to buy new anything except for film, and possibly, if he could engineer another loan, a Benbo tripod for his camera. Until the present project-a commissioned book on great English wetlands – was finished, and the last three projects actually got round to paying him (newsp
apers paid better than magazines but were very nonchalant about paying on what Henry considered time), Henry couldn’t see how he was going to have money for anything. Anything at all. Rent, food, transport, all those sorts of basic anythings; let alone extra anythings like drink, or movies or this holiday Tilly had been going on about since January, six months of talk about sunshine and chilling out and discussing something other than how tired they were and whether, useful though his paid share of the rent was, their life together would be quite different without William in the flat.

  Henry straightened up a little and put his hands on his knees. He liked William. He’d liked William since their first encounter at university – Henry reading art history, William reading business studies with Spanish somehow loosely attached in a very William-ish way-when they’d found themselves talking to each other at some fearful freshmen’s get-together for the simple reason that they were both, it seemed, a foot taller than anyone else there. William was thin, however. William was made up of a collection of bony spokes and angles, rather, Henry thought, like a large broken umbrella. In their second year, they’d shared a discouraging basement flat in Leamington Spa and it was there, at a forty-eight-hour party that neither of them remembered instigating, that Henry had met Tilly.

  Tilly wasn’t at university. Tilly was already working. Tilly had gone straight from school into a lowly advertising acquisition job on a teenage magazine. By the time Tilly met Henry – taken to the party by another girl, a fellow student of Henry and William’s who had written a surprisingly astute piece on gap-year culture – she had graduated to features editor, and occasional features contributor, on a small circulation monthly newspaper directed at women. It was called Candy. The sweetness and lusciousness implicit in the title, Tilly said, was intended to be ironic. In bed with Henry twelve hours after meeting him, she admitted that the irony wasn’t very successful.

  ‘What about the opposite, then,’ Henry said, his voice muffled against the skin of her right breast. ‘What about calling it “Tart”.’

  Henry had abandoned university before his finals to do a photography course at an art school in north London. Tilly had a tiny flat by then, off the Archway Road, and although she always insisted that she had never invited him to live with her, he always seemed to be there, occupying vast quantities of space and time and emotion. Not that she didn’t want him to. She longed for him to, for him to want to, too. She hadn’t been able to believe, at that awful, squalid party, that she could find a man, at first sight, so attractive. So attractive that she couldn’t look at him, or think about him, without a dizzying sliding sensation in her insides. Seeing Henry fast asleep across three-quarters of the bed in the Archway flat had given Tilly a feeling of such joy and triumph that she realized, for the first time in her life, that she didn’t want to be any other person in any other place at any other time whatsoever.

  That was seven years ago now, over seven, nearly eight. In fact, it was nearly ten since twenty-year-old Henry, the wrong side of several joints and a bottle of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon, had peered across the smoke-hazed atmosphere of his disgusting student sitting room and seen a tall, delectable girl with slippery tortoiseshell hair held in a crooked knot on top of her head with a black lacquered chopstick. He managed to kiss her that night; in fact, he’d kissed her before he’d had the first impulse even to ask her name. And then they’d made love the next day in his single bed – he remembered feeling a mild, passing anxiety about the condition of the sheets – and after she went back to London, he found the black chopstick on the floor and carried it everywhere with him, for weeks, like a lovesick puppy.

  Archway Road had given way to a shared house in Lavender Hill, then two rooms off the North End Road and now a second-floor flat in Parson’s Green. Tilly had progressed to being features editor of a small current affairs and arts magazine and Henry to being a freelance photographer. The Parson’s Green flat had two bedrooms, the smaller of which was occupied by William who had started up a courier company with a friend, from one room in Soho. Sometimes William’s girlfriend, Susie, shared the smaller bedroom and borrowed Tilly’s make-up cleanser and body lotion in the bathroom without asking. Sometimes Tilly left text messages on William’s mobile, or scribbled ones on the pillow, reading ‘Clear the kitchen or you’re OUT’. Sometimes William brought Tilly flowers or took Henry out for a beer and told him he was bloody lucky. Sometimes, when Henry was away on an assignment, Tilly would drink too much wine and put her feet in William’s lap while they both sat on the sofa and tell him that she earned more than Henry did and had been earning for twice as long as he had and was a completely independent person and that all she wanted was for Henry to marry her.

  ‘I’ve told him,’ William said.

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Not very forcefully—’

  ‘Well,’ William said. ‘We’ve all got mixed feelings about marriage.’

  ‘Have we?’

  ‘Course we have. All these divorced parents. No tax incentive. What’s the point?’

  At this juncture, Tilly would whip her feet out of his lap and go into her bedroom and slam the door. Then she would come out again and pour herself another glass of wine and cry, and William would say, ‘I’ll marry you.’

  Tilly always told Henry about these episodes. She’d wait a few days, usually until they’d had sex again, and then she’d say, into his back, or chest, or shoulder, ‘William proposed again.’

  Now, Henry only grunted. At the beginning, his whole body had stiffened and he’d said, ‘What?’ in outrage. Then after a while he said, ‘Bloody cheek,’ in quite an indulgent tone, and now he hardly said anything at all. He patted Tilly instead, absently, as if she were a three-year-old who’d got the colour ice lolly she wanted. To William, he said nothing. There was nothing to say, really. William was his friend, his old friend. William had Susie. William was famously busy trying to launch this sparky little company. Of course William appreciated Tilly’s beauty and charm and accomplishments-you’d have to be seriously weird not to – but William knew Tilly was Henry’s. Or, as Henry used to say exultingly to himself, ‘Mine.’

  Mine, Henry thought now, shifting his position on the camera case. Mine, except for a brief skirmish with an Italian fashion photographer on her part and an exciting but disconcerting fling with a girl who bred and trained falcons on his, for nearly a decade. A decade that was shortly going to end with their thirtieth birthdays. Henry shut his eyes. Thirty. From where he sat on his camera case in this grubby, stuffy, crowded train, thirty and the Grim Reaper seemed almost indistinguishable from each other. Where had twenty-nine years gone? What had he got to show for them? God, at thirty, even Henry’s father – not someone he cared to think about much – had had five-year-old Henry as a trophy of achievement. Henry, and baby Paula. It was Paula, Henry’s mother said, who was the last straw. It was Paula who proved to Henry’s father that the prison gates of family life had finally clanged shut upon him, and sent him spinning off to Australia to start a new life with a girl croupier in Brisbane, leaving Henry’s mother to cherish her resentment as tenderly as a rose garden. Tilly’s mother, on the other hand, had left Tilly’s father when Tilly was eleven, and remarried. Twice, in fact. It was Tilly’s father who was still on his own, living a life of ferocious precision and regularity and pretending, Tilly said, that her arrival had been of the virgin variety, involving no known human woman and certainly not Tilly’s mother. William’s parents were expatriates, moving round the world at the dictation of the oil company William’s father worked for. They were at present based in Malaysia. William said that they seemed perfectly nice but he didn’t really know them very well. Once, when he was drunk, he told Henry that they had both behaved like tomcats and that it was amazing that a) they’d ever been faithful to each other long enough for William and his brother to be conceived and b) that they saw any shred of remaining value in staying married. William’s older brother, Ben, had mar
ried when he was twenty-three and lived in a semi-detached house in Slough with his wife and three children and a dog. He wanted William to settle down, too. He took a deep, if anxious, interest in William’s work.

  ‘If I’ve got a fucking father,’ William had said morosely, pulling the tab on another Stella Artois, ‘it’s bloody Ben.’

  Henry’s knees were hurting. He stood up stiffly and flexed them. Two small boys in Arsenal followers’ strip came through the sliding door from the rear carriage and looked at his camera case. Then they looked at him.

  ‘Got your lottery win in there, then?’ one of them said.

  Henry flexed his knees again.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Tilly shut down her computer and took her spectacles off. Her optometrist had told her that if she wore her contact lenses eighteen hours out of twenty-four for days on end, there was a serious risk of danger to her corneas. She had been much alarmed, and ordered a pair of spectacles with designer frames and Swiss lenses that cost more, she reflected, than a holiday. She tried to wear them, conscientiously, at least half the week, but they made her feel uneasy. Uneasy and imprisoned. She asked Henry what he thought of them and he said, ‘Fine. Nice.’ William had been more candid. He said, ‘Cool glasses, but better without, really,’ which gave Tilly the feeling that that’s what Henry meant, too. She wore her spectacles slightly defiantly round the flat, especially when she wanted the men to pick up all the scattered newspapers or take the sheets to the launderette. In the office, oddly, wearing her spectacles gave her the illusion that she was working harder.

  She got up and went round her desk to the window. It was a narrow slit looking down into an alley between buildings and, if she pressed her face to the glass, she could just see sideways into Regent Street and the black and red flashes of taxis and buses going past. It had been raining most of the day, half-hearted, drifting, soft summer rain, the kind that lay in a mist on your hair and clothes and caused a greasy slick to form on the pavements. She thought about the journey home, on the tube, and how full and damp and human and horrible it would be. She thought about Henry’s being home after three days in Norfolk, which he said had been an absolute washout, photographically speaking. She thought about Tina and Rob’s engagement party, which she wanted to go to, and Henry wouldn’t want to go to – he had become rather unenthusiastic about parties, recently, after years and years of being almost the most insatiable party animal she had ever known. He said parties were all the same now. He said they were full of the same people behaving the same way as they had five years ago, and he was tired of it. But mostly, her face pressed sideways to the window glass and her spectacles in her hand, Tilly thought about her plan.