Girl From the South (v5) Page 6

  He said, ‘We’ve never had people to stay.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean we’re never going to. We’ve never had the space for people to stay before.’

  Henry said, ‘This isn’t how Paula and I go on, Tilly. We don’t do staying. We do talking. About me going to Leeds or her coming to London, and we do rude birthday cards and joke Christmas presents—’

  ‘Then it’s time you grew up,’ Tilly said.

  She walked past him and put the Evening Standard in the kitchen bin. The bin, Henry noticed, had recently started sporting a liner, a thin inner skin of pale-blue plastic.

  ‘She’s coming on Saturday,’ Tilly said. ‘She’s coming for the weekend. She’s thrilled to be coming.’ Then she took off the bath towel and walked past him out of the kitchen, naked but for her spectacles.

  On Leeds station, Paula bought Henry a tartan baseball cap with a false nose and empty spectacle frames attached beneath the brim and a pair of black gloves with pink marabou cuffs for Tilly. Then she bought herself a litre of mineral water, a bag of barbecue-flavoured crisps and a bumper puzzle book – Paula had been addicted to puzzles ever since she learned to read and write – and found herself a seat in the London-bound train with, as far as she could see, no children within earshot. As a midwife, Paula was fascinated by babies, always had been. It was what babies inevitably grew into that was so depressing.

  She hadn’t been to London, she reflected, for four years. She’d hardly seen Henry in that time, and Tilly even less. In fact, in all the time that Henry and Tilly had been together, she wasn’t sure she’d seen Tilly more than half a dozen times. The last time, when Tilly had come to Leeds on behalf of her magazine, Paula had met her for supper in a brasserie down on The Calls. Tilly had been wearing black, and leopard-print boots. The boots had somehow fixed themselves in Paula’s mind as an integral part of Tilly’s personality as well as her appearance. Hence the marabou-cuffed gloves.

  They’d had a good evening, though, in that brasserie. Paula had told Tilly a lot about their childhood and what Henry had been like as a boy (‘Decent, really. Never a lad, never blokey. But he couldn’t cope with Mum. We neither of us could’) and then, after half a bottle of Rioja, when she wasn’t used to drinking except for the odd binge night out with the girls, about Clive and him wanting to marry her, and her being so terrified of what might happen to her if she married that he went off, just like that, and proposed to her friend Marnie who said yes like a shot and now they had a baby and another on the way. It wasn’t that she wanted Clive or his baby so much, Paula said, as that he couldn’t wait long enough even for her to try and work it out. It made her feel like an object – a wife symbol, a baby machine – not a person. It made her wonder if she could ever surrender enough of herself, enough control, to commit herself to anyone else, ever. Her mother, she told Tilly, went on and on and on about betrayal, about having your precious, unique, beautiful trust broken, so that you were forced to carry these exquisite shattered shards of smashed faith around with you all your life, a fearful burden which was, of course, all someone else’s fault.

  ‘When I was sixteen,’ Paula said, ‘I believed her. Now I just think it’s so much crap.’

  Paula had learned to limit her emotional reaction to her mother. She’d learned to keep telephone calls factual, to switch off when a recital of current grievance began. She hadn’t told her mother about Clive, or indeed, even about having dinner with Tilly. Henry’s method of dealing with their mother was guilty silence. Their mother complained that she hardly saw them, that she scarcely knew Tilly.

  ‘Get on a train, Mum,’ Paula would say. ‘Pick up the phone and get on a train. I’ve got to go. Early shift.’

  It wasn’t advice she took herself, of course. She was fond of Henry, she liked Tilly, but she found that her Leeds life – work, colleagues, friends, her flat, the odd day walking, the odd night clubbing – was actually easier if she didn’t introduce anything much into it from the outside. She didn’t have photographs of Henry in her flat – she didn’t have photographs of anyone much – and although his birthday cards made her grin, she only looked at them once and then left them in the fruit bowl or behind the toaster until the next time she had a clear-out. So when Tilly had rung, early one morning when Paula was only just out of the shower, she’d been surprised at how pleased she’d been.

  ‘Come to London?’

  ‘Why not?’ Tilly said. ‘You must get a weekend off sometimes—’

  ‘Oh, I do.’

  ‘And we have a spare bedroom now.’

  ‘Paula rubbed at her wet hair with the towel in her free hand.

  ‘What happened to William?’

  ‘He went.’

  ‘Did you fall out?’

  ‘No,’ Tilly said. ‘It was time. It was just time.’

  Paula thought. There was something in Tilly’s voice that she couldn’t put a finger on.

  ‘I’d like to. I’d like to come.’

  ‘Good,’ Tilly said. ‘Henry will be thrilled.’

  ‘Amazed, more like,’ Paula said.

  She settled herself now into her train seat and opened the puzzle book. Everyone at work, at the breast-feeding clinic where she was doing a three-month stint, teased her endlessly about puzzles. She didn’t care. It was better than being teased about the size of your bum or your crush on the new junior doctor. Anyway, she knew why she liked them, she knew why doing puzzles made her feel better. Puzzles had solutions. They weren’t like life, full of compromise and unanswered questions. You knew where you were, without any doubt or anxiety, when you’d got to the end of a puzzle.

  Tilly wanted to exert herself to give Paula a good London weekend. There was no point in taking her shopping, since shopping in Leeds was so excellent, but there was Tate Modern and the London Eye and the Great Court at the British Museum. Henry said he wasn’t sure. Maybe she’d be exhausted; maybe she’d just want to lie around and watch videos.

  ‘You can watch videos anywhere,’ Tilly said.

  Henry took her arm gently.

  ‘All I’m saying is just wait and see. Don’t try to make things happen.’

  ‘But then nothing ever does,’ Tilly said. ‘Look at William, look at this flat, look at—’ She stopped.

  Henry let go of her arm. He had an impulse to say, ‘Sorry.’ He said, instead, ‘I know,’ and didn’t look at her.

  When Paula came, she admired the flat, looked at some of Henry’s latest photographs and said, ‘Oh God, more birds,’ and declared that she wasn’t up for any galleries or museums but she’d love a go on the London Eye.

  ‘I’ll take you,’ Henry said. ‘Tilly can’t even look over the edge of the bath without feeling sick.’

  Paula looked at Tilly.

  ‘D’you mind?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not coming—’

  ‘No,’ Tilly said. ‘Not at all. Anyway, you ought—’ She stopped and then she said, ‘I’d like you to have some time together.’

  ‘I dunno about that,’ Paula said.

  ‘You wouldn’t say that if you were an only child like me.’

  Paula looked speculatively at Henry.

  ‘I do like him,’ she said. ‘It’s just that he – doesn’t occur to me very often.’

  ‘Thanks!’

  ‘Well, I don’t to you, do I?’

  ‘I’d miss you,’ Henry said, ‘if I didn’t have you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t because you wouldn’t know what you were missing.’

  ‘I could imagine. Like Tilly does.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Tilly said.

  Paula ruffled her short dark hair up the back of her head.

  ‘Having a sibling helps dealing with parents.’

  Henry said, ‘Does Mum know you’re here?’

  ‘Not yet. I’ll tell her when it’s over. Otherwise she’ll ring.’

  ‘I feel awful about her—’

  ‘She’s good at that,’ Paula said.

  Tilly got u
p to make some coffee.

  ‘She’s been nice to me.’

  ‘Only because she’s afraid of what Henry might do if she wasn’t.’

  Tilly looked pleased. She plugged the kettle in.

  ‘Really?’

  Henry said nothing. Tilly reached into a cupboard for a packet of coffee. She said, with her back to them, ‘Maybe, when we’ve got our own families established, we won’t go on and on worrying about our relationships with our parents. Maybe that’s what simple biology does, switches you from nurturing one generation to another.’

  Paula looked at Henry. Henry was looking at the table. He was holding himself very still, almost tensely. She looked back at Tilly.

  ‘I’ve got absolutely no quarrel with your mother,’ Tilly said, spooning coffee into a glass filter jug. ‘But I rather like the idea of Henry defending me to her, all the same.’

  ‘I think that’s Wembley’s Twin Towers,’ Henry said, peering. ‘Pity it’s such a grey day.’

  There were only about a dozen people in the Eye pod besides them, an American family in gleamingly new white sports shoes and a group of small, silent Japanese with camcorders.

  ‘It’s a bit depressing, isn’t it,’ Paula said, ‘that there’s so much of it.’

  ‘Of London?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, if you can see all the way to Banstead and that’s not nearly the edge, it makes it feel a bit of a monster.’

  ‘I like it, though.’

  ‘Yep,’ Paula said. ‘And I like Leeds. We’d probably like Ulan Bator if we had to make our lives there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She stared out past him at the immense, occupied, veiled grey view.

  ‘We’re kind of laidback, you and I. We accept things, we’re quite tolerant, we take what’s going. Where we’ve got it from, heaven knows, maybe it’s a reaction to Mum being so uptight about everything. But we’re – well, we’re not like Tilly.’ Henry shifted his feet. ‘What’s coming—’

  ‘You tell me,’ Paula said.

  Henry sighed.

  ‘I’ve got eyes in my head,’ Paula said. ‘What’s going on?’

  Henry took a breath. He looked down at the floor of the pod.

  ‘We’ve got to a turning point—’

  ‘Are you surprised? After all this time?’

  ‘No,’ Henry said carefully. ‘I’m not surprised at all. I just don’t know what to do about it.’

  Paula ruffled her hair again. She heard herself saying to Clive, ‘I’m not scared of marrying you, it’s not you I’m scared of, it’s what happens to women when they marry that I don’t know about, how they’re seen, what’s expected of them—’ Clive had put his head in his hands and groaned.

  She said now, ‘She wants you to marry her.’ Henry nodded. ‘And you don’t want to?’

  ‘I don’t exactly not want to. I just am very uncertain that I want to enough.’

  ‘Hold your nose and jump,’ Paula said.

  ‘Can’t.’

  She took his arm.

  ‘Course you can’t. Is – is there anyone else?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Would you like there to be?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Henry?’

  ‘Honestly,’ Henry said, ‘no. I expect if I’d wanted sexual adventure, I’d have had it. I did once. So did Tilly. It’s amazing how little we were affected.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really,’ Henry said.

  ‘Do you’, Paula said, ‘want to be in love again?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Sure?’ Paula said. ‘Men do, you know. They don’t commit in case there’s someone just a tad more fit round the corner.’

  ‘Not me,’ Henry said.

  ‘What’s the trouble then?’

  ‘We’re stale,’ Henry said. ‘Or at least I am. Work is fine but not exactly explosive. Tilly’s job is fine but she could do it with her eyes shut. The flat is fine but not wonderful and not full of potential. We’re fine but we’re not going anywhere.’

  ‘But you could be—’

  ‘No, we couldn’t,’ Henry said.

  Paula looked at him sharply.

  ’What?

  ‘You can’t make something into something it isn’t, just because you want it to be different.’

  Paula pulled her arm slowly out of his.

  ‘What happens now?’

  Henry shrugged.

  ‘I try and sort myself out.’

  ‘And Tilly?’

  ‘I’ll tell her—’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When I know. When I’ve got something to tell her.’

  ‘Coward,’ Paula said fiercely.

  Henry looked down at her.

  Then he shouted suddenly, startling the Japanese, ‘Well, what would you bloody do?’

  Chapter Five

  Susie sat on the edge of Tilly’s desk. She was filing her nails with a purple glitter emery board that had come as a freebie with a magazine she’d bought because it promised to give her a new life plan for her particular star sign within six weeks. Six weeks seemed a long time to Susie. Susie liked things to happen not just now, but almost before she’d thought of them. She liked to be shoved along by life, rather than have to pull it behind her. The idea of a new life plan, that would take an eternity of six weeks to achieve, was only remotely attractive because Susie wanted to stop doing the job she was doing, and do something else, and usually the something else had happened before she got tired of the present job and was forced to think, actually think, about what might come next. But not this time.

  ‘Might there be a job for me here?’ Susie said.

  Tilly was typing rapidly. She didn’t look up.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I have office skills.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good office skills.’

  ‘Susie,’ Tilly said, ‘there’s no work for you here. It’s not a place for people who just want work, it’s a place for people who want careers.’

  ‘Thanks a million,’ Susie said.

  She put a hand out, fingers splayed, and regarded her nails.

  ‘These acrylics are so much bloody work.’

  Tilly went on typing.

  ‘Couldn’t I even be a temp?’

  ‘No.’

  Susie sighed. She dropped the emery board in Tilly’s desk pen pot and trailed over to the window.

  Tilly said, ‘What’s the matter with your present job?’

  ‘I can do it,’ Susie said, ‘I can do it with my eyes shut. I’m the best receptionist they’ve ever had.’

  ‘Why aren’t you there now?’

  ‘Day off,’ Susie said. She laid her hands flat on the window glass and began to jig faintly to an unheard rhythm. ‘I worked three weekends straight off so I’ve got a day off midweek in lieu.’

  Tilly glanced at her.

  ‘You’re annoying me.’

  ‘I am annoying,’ Susie said, jigging. ‘I annoy myself.’

  Tilly’s printer began to hum and chatter.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Susie said, ‘William tells me that all I want is a good time, and that annoys me.’

  ‘Well, don’t you?’

  ‘I’m only having a good time,’ Susie said, turning round from the window, ‘while I wait for something better to turn up.’

  Tilly whipped the sheet of paper out of the printer.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘I want to get really fired up about something. Really-motivated. You know.’ She came and hitched one thigh back across the corner of Tilly’s desk. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘I think I am,’ Tilly said steadily, her face bent over the sheet of printed paper.

  ‘What, this job and Henry and the future?’

  Tilly said nothing.

  ‘William isn’t the future,’ Susie said. ‘At least, I don’t think he is. Trouble is, he’s been the present for so long, he’s sort of turned into the past. Already.’

  ‘He’s lovely,’ Ti
lly said, still reading.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  Tilly turned back to her computer, and scrolled her piece back up the screen.

  ‘D’you miss him?’ Susie demanded. ‘In the flat?’

  ‘As a person, of course. As a presence, no.’

  Susie leaned forward.

  ‘Tilly—’

  ‘No,’ Tilly said.

  ‘You can tell me—’

  Tilly shook her head.

  ‘Aren’t you terrified?’ Susie said.

  ‘Terrified?’

  ‘Yes. Of getting what you want. Of getting Henry to marry you.’

  ‘Go away,’ Tilly said.

  ‘I’m terrified,’ Susie said. She scratched at a small stain on her tight black trouser leg with an exaggeratedly long pale nail. ‘I’m terrified of getting married. Sometimes, I just scare myself about it, thinking of stopping work and having a baby and, well, just vanishing. Everyone’ll just look through me, like they do. Women will – oh God,’ Susie said, getting off the desk and picking up her turquoise tote bag. ‘Let’s not even think about the women.’

  Tilly said, not taking her eyes from the screen, ‘You going?’

  ‘Yep,’ Susie said. ‘What are you doing after work?’

  ‘Going to a party.’

  ‘A party!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I come?’

  ‘No,’ Tilly said. ‘It’s a work party.’

  ‘What sort of work party?’

  ‘Arts magazines.’

  Susie pulled a face. She slung her tote on her shoulder.

  ‘Rather you than me,’ she said and went out, letting Tilly’s office door bang behind her.

  Tilly continued to stare at the screen. Then she put her elbows on her desk and covered her face with her hands. She took several deep breaths, in, out, in, out, in, out. She pictured Susie swinging past the other little rooms in the office, her blue bag bouncing behind her. ‘Hi!’ she’d say to them all, as if she knew them, as if they were all pleased and cheered to see her. Then she’d go down into the street and ring William on her mobile and persuade him to stop whatever he was doing to meet her for something, for coffee, for a drink. He never seemed to tell her he was too busy. Tilly slid her elbows sideways on the desk until her forearms lay flat on the surface and then put her head down, cheek on the pink wool of her sweater sleeve. The trouble was – well, one of the troubles was that she couldn’t get it out of her head that romantic love was in some way good for you, that loving someone else in a way that was both tender and excited transformed you somehow, exalted you. If there wasn’t Henry, Tilly thought, if he wasn’t there to arouse these feelings in me, I’d be a duller person, a lesser person. Loving Henry, being in love with Henry gives everything I do a kind of light, it means I’m not stuck with my same old self, my same old ways of thinking, it means that I have chances and possibilities as a person that I wouldn’t have if he wasn’t there, if I didn’t love him. But what I don’t know, what I used to know, I think, but am not so sure of now, and can’t ask, can’t, daren’t, is: does he feel like that about me?