Other People's Fun, page 16
‘Do you ever wonder how we got here?’ Sookie asks, and it’s a signal that she’s listened long enough, and now it’s her turn to speak.
So, on Thursday, Ava goes off with the empanada truck to a drum-and-bass festival near Godalming. The following morning, Sookie is prepping for a meeting with Jess (hoping finally to get her to sign off the ‘Authentic Self’ pod proposal) when the call comes through: Ava’s using a friend’s phone because hers got nicked; she’s fallen out with the boyfriend; without Apple Pay she can’t buy food or a train ticket. Sookie cancels the meeting and jumps in the car, ‘and when I arrive she’s dehydrated and hungover and God knows what else. I knew I had to get her to eat something. We weren’t far from Crowfield, and I thought of the Cartwheel. You must remember the Cartwheel? Hot chocolate with swirls of aerosol cream on top, doorstep toast, everyone smoking like mad. The manageress used to ding a bell if a teacher came in. It’s still there! It does flat whites now, and smashed avo with dukkah.’ It’s not clear if that makes her happy or sad.
Sitting in the Cartwheel, watching her daughter eat shakshuka, Sookie is overwhelmed by melancholy. ‘Because of course it doesn’t seem so long ago that I was seventeen – that we were,’ she corrects herself, drawing me in. It’s a cheap trick, but at least she bothered. ‘Like an idiot I said that to Ava, “It seems like yesterday,” and the look on her face… as if I’d used the wrong pronoun or defended J. K. Rowling. Silly, I know, but yes, it hurt. I’d dropped everything for her, and still I’m unbearable, a total cringe, just as my mother was when I was Ava’s age. I always assumed I would be a different kind of mother. But here we are.’
Poor Sookie, so used to affirmation she’ll even expect it from a teenager. I lean towards her, my chair rocking a little on the uneven paving, murmuring soothing things.
‘Oh, you are sweet, Ruth,’ she says. ‘You’re such a good friend. I feel bad about it – you’ve got your own problems, and here I am, dragging you into mine.’ She looks at me, and she might be thinking: sad Ruth with her sorry little existence, no wonder she takes an interest. ‘The things you know about me!’ she says. ‘You know all my secrets.’
‘Not all,’ I say.
‘Every secret worth knowing. You’re the only one.’
‘Ah, but that’s not quite true, is it, I don’t even know his name,’ I say, the cue for her complacent pleasure as she brings me up to date with Double You.
She’s incredibly grateful for today. She wanted to see ‘him’, of course, but she also longed to escape the mews for a few hours. Murray is in town, working out of the Bishopsgate office before they head off to Italy; Finn’s home from school, sleeping and eating and bathing at all the wrong times, burning through milk and toilet roll at a ridiculous rate. And as discussed, it’s heavy going with Ava. The mews house is too small, it’s back-to-back catering and tantrums, Sookie can’t get a moment to herself.
‘What did you tell them you were doing this afternoon?’
‘I said my old schoolfriend Ruth was a bit low because of her nasty divorce, and I was going round to cheer her up – take her out of herself for a bit. That’s what friends are for, right? Poor old Ruth! No, really, I’m just happy I can help.’ I laugh, because we’re pretending it’s a joke.
Anyway. Double You. She can’t remember the state of play the last time we spoke.
I say, ‘Well, you seemed to be… having a bit of a wobble.’
‘That’s right. I was. And then I started to think about something you’d said.’
Sookie asks if I remember how she hurried off after dropping me at the station. Now she explains Double You was on his way to the farmhouse, responding to a message she’d sent late the night before, after our conversation on the terrace. I think of her lying in bed with her doubts, composing her message, pressing ‘send’, and then I think of him waking at 4 a.m. for a piss or a private reckoning, and reading her message in the darkness as Carla slept beside him.
I wonder how Sookie phrased it. Perhaps her message said, We need to talk or I can’t do this anymore or What was I thinking? I can’t live without you.
I also wonder what he told Carla as he threw things into his little rucksack in the morning, but I can guess. I am familiar with the things women are told at these times. The point is, as I was returning to the flat – putting milk in the fridge, opening windows – some great reunion was taking place, a drama worthy of those marvellous rooms. After the cramped proportions of the mews cottage or – even worse – my place, Waxham must have enjoyed the contrast. Thanks to Google Street View I’ve had a look at the estate house assigned to the director of music. A quarter of a mile from the school campus, it has a blocky postwar aesthetic and a rotary airer listing on the lawn. I imagine Waxham standing, as I did, in the drawing room, and being really quite unprepared for the strength of his feelings.
Sookie says he stayed for twenty-four hours, the last gasp of the heatwave. Whenever she attempted to raise pragmatic concerns about their future, he was ready for her, so ardently persuasive that she ‘sort of gave up’. Nothing felt quite real to her, and when he left she felt sick with uncertainty, somewhat dazed by his conviction. It dawned on her then that he truly wanted a different sort of future and was prepared to do all kinds of damage to achieve it, upending the lives of her children, and Murray, as well as the lives of his wife and daughters, like a drunk flipping tables in a saloon.
She goes over it with me. Maybe he’s right and what they have is rare and precious (all the more so because it was lost for many years, and has come back to them at a point when so many things are being shuttered off) – but what if it isn’t? Perhaps this adventure has been built on a misapprehension, a distortion, an echo of something that didn’t happen a long time ago. How is she to know?
As she havers, he’s talking about fresh starts and second chances and how they owe it to themselves to act decisively; the subterfuge is becoming unbearable, and he thinks his wife has some suspicions. He asks her to decide, one way or the other.
Sookie has tried to sound a cautionary note, flag up her unease, but it doesn’t really land. He’s so full on, so emotional. And as she says this, it’s plain that despite the mess and the risk, or possibly because of it, his ultimatum delights her. It makes her feel vividly, thrillingly present; for the first time in decades she can steer the plot, instead of being propelled by it.
Something has been pushing her to the side of her own life. He has rescued her from the margins, restored her to the centre of her existence. It feels good.
‘Look at you – you’re all lit up,’ I say, and it’s not a lie; it’s the truth, a truth that in turn has its own effect, so she glows with its significance and magical authority. I’m the only witness to her adventures, and naturally she will listen to what I have to say, because I’m an old friend who has her best interests at heart.
Still, she shakes her head, murmurs a protest.
‘It seems to suit you,’ I say. ‘Because you’re bloody radiant.’
‘It’s no good,’ she says. ‘It’s going nowhere – it can’t. It’s hopeless. I must let him go.’
Let him go. It’s the language of stagecoaches and heiresses, duelling and moonlight. I think of him in his kagoule, his little backpack slung over one shoulder as he stumped off to the tube.
I say, ‘Are you seriously telling me you’re going to end it?’
She leans forward, knocks fag ash into a spidery bush. ‘Honestly, Ruth, it’s impossible. You don’t know the half of it.’
I raise my eyebrows, daring her. ‘Tell me.’
‘I can’t,’ she says, but after a beat of hesitation, a concession: for the first time she acknowledges the possibility.
‘You can,’ I wheedle, and she considers me through the smoke, assessing the moment. So close. Nearly there.
She’s thinking: where’s the harm in telling Ruth the truth? She has been so careful and discreet for so long, and it’s nearly finished, and this way she could wring a little more drama out of it, and I would understand, because I’m familiar with the Waxham legend, such as it was. But there’s something else. Perhaps she needs me to be shocked. I may well find the enterprise – not the infidelity, which is entirely run-of-the-mill, but the middle-aged hook-up with a teacher – a bit icky and problematic. (One can’t bear to imagine what her children, well versed in the politics of power and consent, would say, were they to find out.) My disapproval may be the push she needs to finally extricate herself, to hop back into her safe and comfortable old life. Just a silly episode. No harm done.
Her protests are weakening. She taps her cigarette again, but there’s no ash. Just nerves.
Here I am. I shall do it.
‘For God’s sake, tell me,’ I repeat, and this time I sound slightly exasperated, as if I might be losing interest.
When she says his name, I make my eyes huge and round, and my mouth opens into an O so I resemble the emoji. ‘Wait, wait!’ I say. ‘What? Say that again.’ She repeats it, the ugly name which is so lacking in glamour of any kind, and then she starts to laugh with embarrassment and relief – it’s crazy, she’s crazy, the whole thing is insane – and I join in, and then we’re both almost crying and gasping for breath. It’s the sort of laughter you only share with a really good friend.
Eventually, when she can, she tells me how it started. How she went to the memorial at Howard wondering if he’d be there, still curious, and, as they met and talked, felt herself being caught up again in the old madness, even though this person was rather milder and more genial than the spectre who’d haunted her since adolescence. How she dared herself to slip him her number, because why not. How he’d called while we walked to the car. She describes that moment, listening to his voice as she stood beneath the oak tree, and how it wasn’t necessarily about him: it was about feeling a sudden connection to her younger self, as if she had been given the chance to put something right, avenge something. ‘Well, you know the rest,’ Sookie says. ‘And now he tells me his marriage is over, they’re simply coexisting, he doesn’t want that old life anymore, he wants me.’
‘OK – wow,’ I say. ‘I was not expecting this. Ian Waxham?’ And then we start to laugh again. ‘When you told me about Double You, you said you had “history”. I mean, of course we all wondered at the time,’ I say, when I’ve collected myself.
‘Oh, that. It’s terribly innocent, really. It wasn’t just me, was it? Everyone was mad about him! He was older, but he wasn’t old; he had that sensitive-poet thing going on. Come off it, Ruth. I bet you had a crush on him too. Admit it.’
This stings like an insult. It’s an intimate joke at my expense, a joke she has no right to make. ‘No,’ I say sharply. ‘To be quite honest, I never really saw the point.’
She pulls a ‘yeah, right’ face. I wait. Someone is calling a child for bathtime. The sun moves in the trees. A plane draws a thread through the sky. ‘In some ways it seems so long ago,’ she says dreamily, ‘and yet it feels so fresh. I can remember all the little details: what I was wearing, how hot it was in the New Hall.’
‘The Founders’ Day concert, when you passed out,’ I say. ‘Or did you? We wondered at the time if it was all a bit of a put-on to get his attention.’
Tit for tat. She doesn’t like that. It was a boiling day, she’d had too much champagne at lunch, the New Hall was stuffy. She remembers feeling sick and dizzy, and everything rushing at her and going black, then she ‘came round’ backstage.
She describes the sensation of proximity, the damp heat of the performance coming off his body, the smell of him; it was overwhelming. At this point her only reference points were Toby Everden and those grotty boys at the Gatecrasher balls. But this: this she wanted. She was weak and overwrought, it had been a long day – and yet she found it in herself, as he lowered her into a chair, to do what she longed to do. She put a hand to his cheek and pressed her mouth to the edge of his.
It was the thing she’d dreamed of for months and months, ‘we’d all dreamed of it, and in a way it felt like I was doing it for all of us – I can’t believe I had the nerve, but I was past caring by that point – I wanted to see what he’d do.’
He turned his head away and as he settled her on the chair he said, kindly but firmly, ‘That never happened,’ and then people were pushing into the wings and swarming around them: her friends, other teachers, her parents.
‘Who did you tell?’ I ask. ‘Because everyone was talking about it,’ and she says no one really, she was absolutely mortified.
‘No one really?’
‘Somehow Jess knew. I may have dressed it up a bit, given her the idea that he’d maybe initiated it – to make myself feel better. You know what girls are like. She was furious with me. We were booked to go interrailing and she sulked all the way to Amsterdam.’
So nothing really happened, and yet it did, all this time later. She and Ian have revisited that moment, comparing their versions, neither of which will be completely reliable.
At the time he didn’t take the incident seriously, certainly not seriously enough to report it either to colleagues or his wife. He was aware he had ‘a bit of a following’ and such things were not unknown. Sookie was leaving Howard in a matter of days and there was no need to add to her embarrassment.
But the episode will have stayed with him because – as we all understood at the time – Sookie was the stand-out star of our year. She was not the brightest, or even the prettiest, but everyone believed she would go on to have the most interesting life because of her marvellous self-assurance, a mysterious and compelling quality that the rest of us mostly lacked. So, yes, he was flattered. He admits he thought of her from time to time, looking out for her name in the Bulletin, casually happening upon her social media every so often.
‘Must have been good for his ego,’ I say.
‘Right.’
She sits back, smoke drifting through her fingers into the dusty leaves.
‘That’s it, that’s the whole story,’ she says. ‘It’s crazy. I’m crazy! What do you make of it? Be honest. You won’t tell me anything I don’t already know.’
I lift my hands in a gesture of helplessness, and impatiently she says: ‘Go on! Tell me this only happened because I was at a loose end, tell me it would destroy the kids if they found out, tell me I’m married to a decent man who doesn’t deserve any of this. Go on, Ruth, say it, say it, say there’s no bloody future with Ian Waxham,’ and then she can’t help it, she giggles again, gassed to be sharing this wild, hilarious secret with someone who can truly appreciate it. ‘Ian Waxham, for God’s sake! He’s on statins, his last holiday was a lecture cruise of the Norwegian fjords! Honestly, what am I doing?’ The laughter runs out at the same time as her cigarette, which she flicks into the shrubbery, heedless of fire. In a smaller voice, she says, ‘Tell me I’m making an idiot of myself, Ruth, tell me to stop.’
I could do that. But is it what she needs to hear? Would it be fair? Mightn’t it be a fine thing, to watch her break free, leaving all bridges blazing behind her? I conjure it: various terrible scenes and then the two of them setting up shop in Shepherd’s Bush or Battersea – her new life will be less comfortable than her current one, for sure, but not that much – where the sitting room will have to accommodate Waxham’s piano, his collection of sheet music. He’s not far off retirement, and the school will push him out early, keen to move on and refresh the music department following the fallout of the Groper Chope scandal. Ava and Finn will refuse to see her; shocked friends will keep their distance. It’ll be just the pair of them, together at last, discovering all the things they have, and don’t have, in common.
I say, ‘Is it a mistake? You keep saying that, but how do you know?’
I am only asking her to examine her assumptions and impulses. Her throat moves as she swallows. ‘Of course it’s a mistake,’ she says, but without force: she is distracted, wondering if she is missing something. ‘There’s no way. I mean, ith impothible.’
‘Is it, though? I mean, after all this time – that has to mean something. Doesn’t it?’
I see her allowing herself to think about this properly, then shying away from it.
‘I couldn’t do that to them,’ she says, and I say, ‘Forget about them, for a change. It’s always about them, isn’t it? What about you? What’s right for you? What do you think you deserve?’
She blinks, thrilled by the question, the reminder of her assiduous sacrifice. She won’t deny Ian has been good for her: not just the sex, but the validation, the excitement and (OK) the sense of jeopardy.
While the flat was out-of-bounds they met once at the National Theatre (quiet in the afternoon, also dramatically underlit and handy for his train). They were standing in the foyer when a group came down from the restaurant, and among them was Dribbler, you know, whatsisname from school. She and Ian made a run for it. Dribbler was unlikely to have spotted them, but still. The adrenalin was wild. Like a bungee jump.
She hasn’t felt like this for years – but what does that count for, exactly? It’s just a matter of endorphins. At moments she’s convinced by their relationship; at other times it seems little more than an elaborate in-joke she’s having with herself. They’re such different people! Today, for instance. When Ian arrived, he held out his headphones and clamped them over her head so he could play her some music, Bach or something, and she had to stand there (in my kitchen) smiling, as if she understood what she was hearing, as if it meant something to her, when in fact she simply felt embarrassed, self-conscious, bored. That was all! And he waited, watching her expectantly, a soppy expression on his face, sure of his gift.
‘I’ve been over this with my therapist,’ she says, ‘and I understand why this thing happened, at this particular moment. I was a little lonely, and without the usual obligations – and I wanted to know if I still could.’ She throws up her hands, scandalised by her recklessness, yet enchanted by it too. ‘Poor Ian,’ she murmurs, as if she pities him for being susceptible to her piratical spirit, as if he never really had a chance. ‘Poor old Ian! With his walking poles, and his dental emergencies… oh God, I wish I could tell Jess. She was so mad about him. I’d love to see the look on her face,’ and as she says this I’m reminded of those faraway girls, the length of their shadows in the late afternoon.
