Other People's Fun, page 13
Already that first evening she was freeing herself from the obligation to love him. After all, it would be madness to love – or like, or even particularly care about – someone who could treat her like this, and she was not mad. Her situation was miserable and unanticipated, and it would distress many people, but she began to suspect it would not, after all, break her. Why had she assumed it would?
She went through to the sitting room and told him to leave.
Big things, little things. The week he moved out she bought new bed linen and a vibrator recommended by Good Housekeeping, and then she went around gathering up all the things he hadn’t bothered to take with him in the great clearing-off (a broken shredder, squash rackets, several Martin Amis hardbacks, a carton of bathroom-cabinet detritus including verruca ointment and indigestion remedies) and put them out by the gate, for him to collect. With every item that she dispatched, she felt her power surging back.
She learned to protect herself. In the early days she was caught out by his status updates, but that was easily sorted: mute, block, unfollow. The words did not do the process justice. It felt tremendous.
Other things had to be reclaimed. The wedding scent, for instance. During their engagement, they’d passed a woman on the street who was wearing the fragrance Clare had been searching for all her life. Clare stopped her and asked for its name, and the next day when he came off shift he went into town and bought her a bottle as a surprise. She wore it for the first time for their wedding, and throughout her marriage the smell evoked the texture of that day, the sun coming out as the car pulled up by the lychgate, the sound of the organ, the raindrops glittering in the yew tree.
For the first few weeks after he’d gone the sight of the fluted bottle with its golden cap frightened her, made her blood run cold. She thought about hiding the bottle in a drawer or offering it to someone – Joe’s girlfriend, perhaps. And then one morning she made herself spray a little on her wrist, and as she did so she told herself, as if incanting a spell, This is mine, I want this back.
Every day for a week, a fortnight, as if participating in a sacred rite, she removed the cap and anointed her throat, her wrists. Before long, catching tuberose and orange blossom as she adjusted her spectacles or typed a referral letter, she was reminded not of her wretchedness, but of her fierceness, her resolve and, yes, her heroism. The wedding scent had become her battle ensign. It had always given her pleasure, and that now came with powerful new associations. It meant more.
But of course she didn’t do it alone. She had support, lots of it. The boys were wonderful. And you can’t get through it, can you, without those women in your corner, women who check in on you and book you up for walks and Sunday lunch and cinema trips, women who let you weep when you need to, and tell you you’re doing brilliantly because you are putting one foot in front of the other. Friendships hold you up at a time like this, don’t they?
Her new life is as full as she wants it to be. It is also peaceful. The sense of tangle and drag – the constant need to consult, cajole and compromise – has fallen away. She had forgotten it was possible to live like this. This is why she has no desire to download an app, create a profile, swipe left or right – although people invested in the concept of coupledom as the natural and superior state will keep asking.
Living with another person can be the loneliest thing in the world, she says.
Sookie once told me much the same thing as she toyed with the notion of jettisoning both the marriage and the lover, knowing she could do so much better. But her tone was rather different.
I look at Clare, who is pink with the wine and the conversation, sitting at her kitchen table, Radio 3 playing quietly on the smart speaker, light from the kitchen cast over the night-time garden, the brick path and the hunched shrubs. What a pleasant life she has started to live here, with her GP’s salary, her settlement, her pension pot. Trying to imagine the orderliness of her finances, I think of one of those antique cutlery canteens, forks and spoons snug in velvet slots, the blades of the knives tilted like rowers’ oars.
Like Sookie, Clare will not lie awake at night wondering if she can justify the boiler service and the MOT, if she can in fact afford the car at all. She will not spend her evenings scrolling through barely affordable flats situated over curry houses and within earshot of the North Circular. She will be out with friends, or at choir, or tending to her raised beds, picking spinach.
I murmur something admiring, and she scoffs, suddenly embarrassed. A cello begins to play on the radio, and her expression changes. ‘I don’t think so,’ she says, clicking through to Spotify, and then something occurs to her, something almost amusing, and she says, ‘Well, of course – you were there.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Fauré’s Sicilienne. The Founders’ Day concert? Oh – so silly, so long ago, you won’t remember.’
‘Remind me,’ I say, but I haven’t forgotten: all the parents – crumpled and grass-stained from the day’s picnicking, possibly also sunburnt and in some cases quite drunk – entering the New Hall in an unruly procession behind their offhand, embarrassed offspring. Seated on the stage with the rest of the choir, I was glad my parents lived abroad, because Founders’ Day, whatever the adults told themselves, was an extravagant adolescent ordeal, a day when we were expected to reconcile the irreconcilable: school and home, friends and family, public and private.
The doors closed behind the final stragglers from the judo display, and then they were thrown open again, to admit the rock star – the most famous Howard parent of our era – plus entourage of mortified child, mortified child’s mother (yé-yé singer now running a Provençal donkey sanctuary) and the current girlfriend (a Brazilian supermodel a third his age and twice his height). A master of the late entrance, the priapic icon strutted down the aisle with his earrings and thong necklace, sleeves rolled up on his green jacquard jacket. Everyone pretended to take no notice as he did his celebrated shimmy along a crowded pew towards some vacant seats. Following behind, his daughter looked as though she wished the ground would swallow her whole.
The hall settled into expectancy; the orchestra finished tuning up; someone sneezed. Spangles of dust twinkled in the pink and green light. Jess Carmichael shivered with the effort of stifling a giggle. Then enthusiastic applause as Ian Waxham strode out in a maroon velvet jacket quite unsuited to the heat.
With his hands, he told the choir to rise.
We rose from the gym benches, and before we were ready it was upon us, the timpani, the brass, the great martial alarum that had, during rehearsals, shaken off the taint of high-street aftershave. ‘O Fortuna!’ we cried. It was impossible not to get carried away. Everyone loved singing this, the squeaky fourteen-year-old boys, the nerds who’d only joined choir because their UCCA forms were short on extracurricular activity, the smokers conscripted as punishment. We sang, and for a moment we forgot ourselves. We were part of something vast and tremendous.
O Fortuna
Velut luna
Statu variabilis…
We raised our voices, and then we dropped them, and as we chanted the violinists plucked away at the strings, redundant bows needling the warm air. The dread excitement mounted. Now I could stare at him frankly, without embarrassment, telling myself he was looking only at me; but because he had selected this piece and everything about him was fascinating, I had done my research (wrestling the relevant volume of the encyclopaedia off the library shelf), so I knew we were singing a lament, railing against monstrous fate and its strange, inscrutable whims. Already, in my heart, I knew better than to believe anything else.
Sweat gleaming at his temples, Waxham held the tension; and then, with a flash of hands and teeth, he shook it free, releasing the strings, the trumpets (not all of whom were exactly in tune), the cymbals, Becky Morris’s gong, and the choir, which summoned all its strength for the long final note.
As the sound died away, he lifted his head and showed us his incisors, preparing us for the next movement. It was at this point that I became aware of a disturbance to my left, an agitation, something falling. I saw his expression, and the expressions on the faces behind him, which were turned up to us like a field of sunflowers, as if we were the sun.
Around me members of the choir were backing away or rushing forward. Through the skirmish, I glimpsed the stillness at the heart of it: Sookie Utley lay on the floor, and the people closest to her didn’t know whether to touch her or let her be. Her face was quite white, her eyes shut. Waxham came over the stage and bent over her, and he seemed to say something none of us managed to catch, or at least not reliably. He said something and he lifted her with a small grimace of effort, which must have been more to do with the angle than her weight. Her cheek was pressed against his shoulder and her arm fell free, the hand limp and loose. Waxham held her like that, and her limbs and long hair swayed like weeds in water. A fourth-year whispered, ‘Is she dead?’
The tenors shuffled back to let Waxham through. As he brushed past, I noticed one of Sookie’s bronze ballet flats was coming off, dangling from a toe, and I saw the tiny controlled movement as she twisted her bare foot in an effort to retain it, but the shoe slipped and fell as she was borne away. There was a moment of shock and uncertainty, and then Jess and some others followed Waxham offstage, thrilling to the panic and spectacle. Music stands fell over. Parents got to their feet and sat down. Clasping her mallets, Becky Morris stood at the timpani, disconsolate.
As the deputy head attempted to restore order, I leaned over and picked up the shoe: Capezio, size six, the soft kid interior printed with heel and ball and five little egg-shaped smudges. (Later on, I smuggled it out under my jacket, and when I came to the Humanities fishpond I filled the toe with pebbles and drowned it among the rushes, by the light of the silvery moon.)
People said Sookie was being taken to the san., or to hospital, that an air ambulance was landing on the Upper Pitch. Someone else said she was in the library, where Miss Carter, the netball teacher, was giving her mouth-to-mouth. Then we were told to calm down and return to our places and Waxham came back with a show-time smile. We rose dutifully to sing the song about fate being bald, but we were no longer in the mood. Perhaps we were worried about Sookie. Or perhaps we felt foolish for forgetting ourselves earlier, allowing the music to ambush us. Now, to show we had never been moved, we smirked and nudged one another and lost our place.
We came to the end, or gave up, and the audience clapped as we sat down. There was no room for the choir elsewhere so we remained onstage, watching Waxham’s expression darken as a variety of flutes and violins toiled through Bach and Paganini. No matter how much energy he put into his piano accompaniment, nothing sounded quite right.
Eventually it was Clare’s turn. As she arranged her music and swivelled the cello on its endpin, we could see Waxham relax a little. There was a sense that Clare – accomplished, conscientious, well-rehearsed Clare – would turn the thing around. He must have been sure she would be the one to send the parents off into the night reassured that their money was well spent. But when her moment came, it was a disaster.
‘Oh, you’re too hard on yourself,’ I say, but in truth it was ghastly: an early confusion at the page-turn, panic starting to shine on her face, the general awareness that she was out of step with the piano, and this note was off, and so was that one. As Clare’s bow dragged and wailed over the strings, some third years began to snicker.
We saw Waxham set his jaw and focus on the finishing line.
When it was over and people began, kindly, to clap, she was already blotchy with tears.
‘They say those moments are character-building,’ says Clare. ‘I thought I’d never get over it, I thought it would haunt me forever – and I was quite right, because here I am, all these years later, rushing to turn it off when it comes on the radio.’
‘Bloody Sookie – ruining everything,’ I say.
‘Poor Sookie,’ Clare says. ‘It wasn’t her fault. She wasn’t to blame.’
How the hell did that happen? Seventeen today. SEVENTEEN!!! Gorgeous girl, you are my sun and my moon. You’ve taught me so much about love and wonder. I am in awe of your beautiful spirit. Every day with you in my life has been a precious gift. Your creativity inspires me and your courage fills me with hope. Darling, the future is ALL YOURS. I can’t wait to see what happens next!!
A baby, a toddler, a little girl, a girl. The last photo in the sequence shows Ava walking down the cobbled mews, away from the photographer, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt printed with the Doors’ 1969 tour dates, an item she probably picked up at Urban Outfitters. You can’t see her face but the set of her shoulders suggests she is in a rage about something. I guess this was the only recent picture Ava would allow her mother to use.
Shortly after the post goes up, Sookie rings me and whispers, ‘I can’t stand it a moment longer – my favourite N.Peal jersey has been missing for weeks, Ava swore she didn’t take it, I had words with the cleaner, she handed in her notice – and of course I’ve just found it, stinking of weed, full of burn holes, bundled at the back of Ava’s cupboard. We’re driving each other nuts… and now there’s a mini-heatwave on its way. I’m going to run away to my parents’ place, do you want to come?’
Her parents’ long-delayed Corfu trip is back on and they’re keen for her to use the house; it’s quite isolated, so they worry less if someone’s there, turning the lights on, watering the garden.
I don’t want to go away again. I certainly don’t want to go away with her. She thinks she’s doing me a huge favour. It’ll be such a treat for me, I’ll be terribly grateful, and then she can cash that in with access to my flat.
I say, ‘Unfortunately I can’t, I have deadlines,’ and she says, ‘Come on, I thought this was the whole point of working for yourself – being your own boss. Say yes, Ruth – live a little! You can set up wherever you like, in the study, the drawing room, the garden. It’s so peaceful there and I promise I won’t bother you. I’m sure you could do with a change of scene. No – I won’t take no for an answer.’
‘I really can’t,’ I repeat, and she says, firmly, ‘You’ve been so kind and now I’d like to do something for you.’
How has this happened? Why must she always get what she wants? Why do the rest of us capitulate? I wonder about this, the weakness of my will in contrast to the shining conviction of hers, as I sit beside her in the car, sealed in with her playlist of Fleetwood Mac, Lana del Rey and Mono, and her grumbles about Ava, whose extended birthday celebrations were followed by a similarly protracted hangover.
‘Oh my God, though.’ Sookie checks I’m up to date on the big news, the fallout from Robbie Shepherd’s memoir, the podcast investigation and the subsequent arrest of Norman Chope on charges of historic child abuse. How terrible, Sookie says, poor, poor Robbie. Of course there were always rumours about Chope – well, more than rumours, because everyone called him Norman Grope, didn’t they? It was a bit of an open secret – but no one really imagined anything like this. Not exactly. The story has blown up because Howard is still a nursery for nepo-babies, kids who almost by accident find themselves fronting Netflix dramas and Marc Jacobs perfume campaigns.
We pass corporate plazas and glassy cliffs of commerce that shimmer in the heat, and then we are funnelled into narrower, dirtier thoroughfares: hipster neighbourhoods specialising in bao and cold brew, which peter out into shabby parades of phone-repair shops and minicab offices. Eventually we reach the point at which the suburbs begin to accumulate, the tangle of flyovers and retail parks, the abandoned roadside semis with boarded-up windows.
It would be polite to ask Sookie about Double You but I feel a stubborn longing not to be polite. It’s pointless; all I’m doing is delaying the inevitable. I’m at her mercy for the next few days, and when she gets around to it – there is no doubt she will get around to it – she will have many things to say on the subject, things that perhaps emphasise Double You’s ardour and her own chaotic ambivalence, and it will be my duty, as her invited audience, to listen and ask supportive questions and allow her to explore her feelings in luxurious detail. The thought fills me with gloom as we leave the motorway. Now there’s a glimpse of the strange, particular line of the Downs beneath milky skies. I say, ‘I saw Clare Snape recently. She says hello.’
‘Clare, Clare Snape,’ she murmurs, changing lanes, adjusting the visor. ‘Yes, no, of course. Oh, wait, she was swotty, wasn’t she? – good at science.’
‘Among other things,’ I say, and then, experimentally I add, ‘She was very musical,’ but Sookie doesn’t bite, and of course she was off the premises when Clare flunked the Fauré; it won’t have marked her memory at all. Or maybe she has simply resolved to steer clear of any conversations that might lead to Waxham, for fear of revelation, because she has started to feel some unease about their relationship, which was sparked into being long ago by a great imbalance of power. Perhaps it’s a secret she is reluctant to share because – no two ways about it – he doesn’t come out of it particularly well. Even if, technically, he never crossed a line.
Either way, I find her detachment annoying, and this increases as I outline Clare’s pleasant house and purposeful life. Sookie isn’t paying attention. Clare wasn’t of much interest back then and matters even less now. ‘Oh – love this,’ she squeals, interrupting me, whacking up the volume: Blondie’s upbeat stalker song about following someone through the mall and buying rat poison.
Off the main road, the landscape is marked with catslide roofs, vineyards, a chalk horse. We drive past water meadows and through a village with a tile-hung pub and a sign saying ‘Slow toads crossing’ and turn down a lane, Sookie pointing out the tall chimneys of the house through the trees. As we come down the drive, I can see it’s a farmhouse very much in the Marie Antoinette mode: no cracked concrete or corrugated iron here, no silage smells or wonky gates fastened with blue rope. There are long windows in a flint facade, lavender hedges, a run of stone urns foaming with white hydrangeas. As we step out into the startling heat, I hear a quiet that isn’t really quiet at all. The air is full of birds and bees and leaves and the faraway wails of sheep.
