No One Could Have Guessed the Weather (6 page)

“My mother died, and I've been on an aeroplane for twenty-six hours.”

“Don't start—”

“The springs on my old bed are completely useless. Should have known you'd grab the only decent mattress in the house.”

He sat on the edge of her bed and swung his legs beneath him. Lucy knew he was controlling an urge to suck his thumb.

“I wish Cordelia and the kids were here,” he said.

Lucy, by contrast, did not wish Richard and the boys were there at all. She had always wanted to keep them as far away from all this as she possibly could. George stared out the window for a moment. Lucy followed his gaze, wondering if he was thinking the same thing as her, remembering the weekends they roamed the park behind the house together while Mother lay in bed.

“There's something I want to run by you. Obviously, Mum has left the house to the two of us.”

He paused. Lucy looked at him, curious.

“I'll get it valued before I leave, and then . . .” He hesitated. A brown moth fluttered against the glass, futilely crashing against it. Lucy reached for a magazine, rolled it into a baton, and raised her arm, but George opened the top window and tenderly guided the disorientated insect outside. As it flew away, he continued, carefully, as if he had been practicing. “Cordelia and I would like to buy your share. Whatever the estate agent says, we'll give you. In fact, we can get a few valuations and then average them.”

“Okay.”

“No, I want you to talk it over with Richard—”

“Richard won't have a problem.”

“It's just Cordelia knows a brother and sister who did this, and then ten years later when the house had tripled in value one of them came back for more money, and we couldn't have that; it would be a once-off thing.”

(
Gosh,
thought Lucy,
maybe it is true that there's no such thing as the perfect family?
)

“I said it's okay.” Lucy suppressed her urge to pat him on the head and moved the conversation on. “What will you do with the house?”

George looked at her, surprised.

“We're going to come back and live here. We've been thinking about it for a while, and now . . . I love this house. I had happy times here. I can't think of anywhere better to bring up my kids.”

Lucy did not know what to say. It seemed unspeakably inappropriate to start listing reasons why they had had a terrible childhood. So instead she replied, “That's cool.”

“Cordelia knew you'd be fine with it. She sees auras round people, and she's says yours is yellow.”

“Is yellow good?”

George nodded. Lucy decided to peel the smiley-face sticker off the royal wedding commemorative plate. Cordelia could have it if she really wanted it.

“George. It's only seven o'clock. You must be exhausted. Why don't you lie down in here and I'll bring you some breakfast? It's going to be a horrid day.”

“Thank you, Lucy.”

“And George . . . I'm sorry—”

“For what?”

That I could not sacrifice myself to save you
,
she thought, but she said, “For everything. Everything that happened. Everything you went through that I didn't.”

Lucy pulled an old school sweatshirt she had found in the bottom of her wardrobe over her nightshirt and headed for the door.

“Did I tell you Cordelia's training to be a therapist?” said George.

Lucy turned, unsure what she felt about this piece of news.

“Anyway, the first thing they said to her in therapy school is that everyone of our age has to give their parents an amnesty. No one had a clue about parenting in those days, so they just muddled through and did what their parents did to them. The challenge for us is not to repeat the mistakes they made. Cordelia thinks Mum and Dad were completely useless. The important thing is that we shouldn't blame each other.”

“That's actually very helpful, George.”

And she walked down the stairs to the kitchen, thinking about Cordelia and her exemplary perception, until George shrieked and she turned and rushed back upstairs.

“That robin
is
looking at me strangely,” he said, amazed.

•   •   •

L
UCY IS STANDING
holding a plate of wilting egg-and-cress sandwiches and avoiding her portly second cousin who stuck his hand up her skirt at her eighteenth birthday party. As she looks around the church hall she thinks this, this strange cocktail party bit, with the complimenting on the organization and the sausage rolls, and the peals of laughter from corners of the room, is the very worst bit of the day; worse than having to sit next to a coffin containing the body of someone in whose body you grew; worse than watching George choke on tears as he read out a letter his eldest daughter had written to her grandmother; worse than watching people struggle to describe this difficult, disliked woman in euphemisms; worse than the hideous
Wizard of Oz
curtain moment at the crematorium.

She looks over to see George towering over Aunt Eva, deep in conversation, probably about the house and his return to England. She watches her father, his face red and puffy, sitting isolated on an uncomfortable chair at the side of the room, forever the villain, with Paula beside him, holding his hand, occasionally getting up to bring him another cup of tea. She feels his bemusement that his life should have turned out like this and Paula's relief that their remaining years on earth together will be free of the tormenting phone calls, the demands for money, and the guilt, the interminable guilt of it all.

Lucy wishes them well.

She puts down the sandwiches, asks the two sweet teenagers from the Tasty Bite to make more coffee and tea, and heads to the ladies' bathroom, pausing to splash water on her face before going into the disabled stall and sitting down for a few moments.

Outside, the door opens and a familiar clip of heels and a high-pitched whisper indicate the entrance of Camilla, who has driven down with Rose to support Lucy, for which she is grateful. Camilla goes straight to the small window and opens it, and Lucy hears the click of a cigarette lighter, a deep inhale, and there is a bustle as Camilla climbs on the sanitary towel disposal unit so she can stick her head and shoulders out and smoke while Rose pees loudly, ending with a few intermittent splashes to strengthen her pelvic floor.

Lucy remains silent, gripped with curiosity, listening as Rose comes out and washes her hands.

“Do you think we can go now?” Rose says.

“Absolutely,” replies Camilla. “We've done our bit for poor dear Lucy. She looks dreadful.” She pauses to climb down onto the tiles. “George turned out surprisingly attractive, though, didn't he?”

“That's it, we're leaving.”

But Camilla is having a reflective moment.

“You know the worst thing about these sort of funerals, funerals of people who were just awful, is that everyone has to stand up and say how great they were, and how it was all the fault of the ‘illness,' how they really did love their husband or their kids despite everything. But the truth is, I never saw Lucy's mum smile except when a large bottle of chardonnay was heading toward her. Do you remember her performance at Lucy's twenty-first, when she tried to pick up one of the waiters?”

“Don't remind me. We picked up the pieces of that one for days afterward—”

“She was a total bitch.”

“CAMILLA!”

And they giggle guiltily, Lucy craning her ear against the metal door for further illuminating tidbits as they leave. She thinks for a moment. And then she makes a decision.

She walks out and goes to the cloakroom, where she puts on her coat, throws her bag over her shoulder, and takes the keys to the hired car out. She walks back into the church hall and says good-bye to her father, Paula, and Aunt Eva, and wraps George in a huge hug, telling him she is happy for him to do whatever he wants, and George, seeing her the way she actually is and not through the prism of their mother's resentments, hugs her back and smiles. She tells him she's done everything she can and now she wants to go home.

She walks out and throws her bag playfully onto the backseat of the car. She jumps in and turns on the engine, driving through the roads of her childhood to the motorway, where a sign for the airport soon appears.

She switches on the radio; she starts singing along, loudly, her upper body dancing as much as a person can dance while holding a steering wheel with at least one hand. She is free.

She realizes that she, Lucy, has not yet surrendered.

I
f Julia had been writing what happened as a script, which was unlikely, as Julia avoided “woman-y” stories and much preferred
Apollo 13
to
Beaches
, she would have started with a voice-over, and sought an arresting opening sentence to catch the audience's attention.

Julia liked voice-over as a dramatic device; it was an economical way of setting a scene and creating a tone. And tone would be critical to the retelling of this episode, as Julia would seek to replicate her very particular sense of regret and disbelief as she looked back in anger.

There were several options. She could have chosen

WOMAN'S VOICE (OOV)

During her month's vacation at the Wellness Center in Connecticut, Julia devoted many sessions with the family therapist to her complicated feelings about motherhood. . . .

but would have rejected it immediately. Too much setup, far too earnest, and, most important, “complicated” wasn't the right word to describe her feelings, as, without any qualification, it felt too negative. Julia had been surprised how happy motherhood had made her. It was all the other crap that had done her in.

She might try

WOMAN'S VOICE (OOV)

So every day they went out walking, the ugly dog and Julia—

which, in theory, could be good, particularly if juxtaposed with a series of striking images of downtown, a sort of “woman with dog on First Avenue” opening, but Julia wouldn't have liked it. There was no subtext.

No, in the end Julia would have hit upon an introduction over three mojitos one Tuesday night with Lucy, as she explained the dramatic reversal of her fortunes.

It was

WOMAN'S VOICE (OOV)

Everything changed because Courtney from upstairs turned thirty-nine and got a dog
.

and while others would have dismissed it as too quirky, too self-conscious, or too left-field, Julia liked it, and she had been a writer long enough to know that if you find a sentence you like, you go with it.

You always fear you might not get another.

•   •   •

E
VERYTHING CHANGED
because Courtney from upstairs turned thirty-nine and got a dog.

Of course, as these two events coincided, Julia assumed it was a cute, fluffy, baby-substitute dog, most likely a bichon frise, the
chien du jour
, apparently, although the growling and scrabbling she heard from upstairs never sounded cute. There was something feral, urgent, and enraged about the canine noise that she recognized instantly. It was how she felt at that time, after all.

Although Courtney and Julia had owned apartments in the building for nearly twelve years, they were neighbors, not friends. Before Julia and her family moved to the loft on Rivington Street, they had all lived there and Courtney had managed not to learn either of the children's names, quite an achievement in a four-unit co-op with communal entrance hall. Julia and Courtney had both made a decision to cultivate a cordial, if distant, relationship, far easier to manage if there were any disputes in the building about floor coverings, noise in the hallway, or unsuitable new tenants. But as the years went by they became united, mainly because their apartments nestled on floors two and three of the 1895 town house, sandwiched between the basement with outside space (owned by two elderly Marxist academics who harangued them at the annual co-op meeting about making property history) and the penthouse with roof garden (owned by Michael and Johannes, the litigious and unpleasant life coaches, who wanted the other freeholders to sell in order to make the property all theirs).

So when Courtney broke her ankle in a freak accident and looked around for help from her neighbors, she realized that there was only one possible candidate. Courtney decided to take a chance that Julia, who had recently reappeared in the building on her own, had a better nature (not something she could have known for certain at that point) and asked if she would walk the dog.

Her gamble paid off. Julia's better nature recalled the sound of step THUD, step THUD, step THUD on the stairs outside her bedroom and agreed.

And then Julia met the dog.

The dog was without doubt the ugliest animal Julia had ever seen.

She was called Marjorie.

The bastard puppy of mastiff and bull terrier, with perhaps a little pug thrown in, Marjorie looked like she had been the unfortunate result of an experiment in a film like
The Fly
where the Mad Scientist combines DNA from excrement on the ground of the dog run in Tompkins Square Park and this was what grew in the test tube. And unfortunately this animal was not compensated for in the personality department. Courtney announced, with a slight tremor in her voice, that Marjorie had had a difficult childhood and certainly there had been failings in her parenting. No one had taught her to cultivate a winning manner, an affectionate demeanor, a perky wagging of a tail. In fact, she emanated the most extraordinary noise, a low, vicious growl, and did amazingly potent farts. But as they sized each other up across the reclaimed floorboards, Julia decided she liked this bitch's style, and if the truism that people choose dogs that mirror their personalities was actually true and not an “ism,” she was getting an insight into Courtney that she would never have imagined. Only a very uncompromising sort of woman would walk past all the cuddly puppies in the rescue pound, nose round the half-chewed cages at the back, and choose this thing.
Interesting.

So every day they went out walking, the ugly dog and Julia. And Julia discovered that, in contrast to the experience of pushing an ugly child through the streets, where people have no idea what to say once they've peered at it (an all-too-frequent occurrence, really, as one of her witty novelist friends once said, as few babies are
objectively
attractive), there was plenty of conversation to be had on the subject of the dog's repellent aspect. A man playing folk guitar dropped his plectrum, a couple of schoolchildren sniggered in horror, and then, as they started walking along the East River, Julia became conscious of admiring glances from a group of tough men loitering under the Manhattan Bridge. One came over to stroke Marjorie, resting a huge hairy hand on her head, and she growled so ferociously, Julia felt compelled to admire the penmanship of the Tough Man's tattoos. He just laughed, nodding at dog and owner approvingly. It was all very curious, and Julia walked away imagining herself in the smog-filled streets of the East End of London in 1838, her mastiff beside her, like Bill Sikes and Bullseye in
Oliver Twist
. (It is a measure of Julia's mental state at the time that she saw herself as Bill Sikes and not Nancy.)

Sometimes Julia bought Courtney a coffee and a double-chocolate cupcake, and, Marjorie dozing at their feet, they would talk about Courtney's troubled relationship and her codependency issues—with New York. The city was the only serious relationship Courtney had ever had. She had met it at age twenty-five, full of dreams, a highflier, adored. After ten years in the advertising agency she had gone freelance, designing, copywriting, consulting. She had bought her apartment, she could afford occasional weekends in the Hamptons and frequent microdermabrasion, but Gotham had turned into a cruel and demanding lover, requiring serious money and total commitment. There was no room to consider another way of life when, if you paused to look over your shoulder, you could slip from winner in Manhattan to loser in Hoboken. And Julia had been right about the baby-substitute thing. Courtney had had her ovaries checked, her blood tests were perfect, there was just no man, and, as freezing your eggs is a dodgy business, it was now or never.

Courtney knew she had to do something big, she wanted to
break free
, she said, she thought about moving. There were other fantastic cities in America, after all; what about San Francisco, or Miami, or Chicago? Julia did not dignify this with a response. They both knew that for a true New Yorker, wherever they come from, only New York will do. She herself thrilled to the dirt and the smells and the noise, for as a young woman silence had terrified her and she had run from the gardens and the convenient two-car driveways of the suburbs to the only place she had ever felt truly at home. She explained it simply as a passion, one beyond logic, for of course one could live sensibly in San Francisco, or Miami, or Chicago. As the children had got older, whenever Kristian tentatively suggested that what passed as bad behavior in their school, or at home (to be discussed at great length or pored over in parenting manuals), might simply be due to the fact that they lived like caged animals, Julia went pale and refused to talk about it. How could she leave the shrimp rolls at Luke's Lobster? The perfect coffee shop? The life she had lusted after for so many years?

Courtney told Julia she was haunted by a trip to a psychic on West Houston she had made with a group of drunken girlfriends in 2002. The first card the bescarfed woman had dealt Courtney was reversed (Julia knew this meant Courtney was unlucky in love, as she had once written a whole story line about a psychotic transvestite fortune teller), and Courtney was sure this had prophesied her disastrous romantic destiny. Her last boyfriend had moved to Vermont and become an apple farmer and produced cider and children once a year. “Why wasn't it me?” she asked. “Why didn't he do that with me? (They had once had a furious argument about nonorganic cleaning products in front of Julia, which she thought was the answer rather than a gypsy curse, but as it was a rhetorical question, she let it go.)

So Courtney had got the dog. Her mother, a devotee of Oprah's magazine, had suggested it. It might help her get in touch with her maternal side, and she would attract a man who wanted to impregnate her.

Julia thought for a moment, then said the two words she knew would calm Courtney down.
Susan Sarandon.
Courtney nodded vigorously. And then they found a copy of
People
and went through the pictures of all the female celebrities with their children and worked out their ages. Courtney was soon feeling much better, particularly when Julia pointed out that most female celebrities, apart from Susan Sarandon, lie about their age so some of them were popping out babies at nearly fifty.

“Oh, Julia,
”
she said. “I knew you would be the perfect person to talk to about these things. It's always struck me from how you deal with Curtis at the management company that you are a very practical person.”

In fact, it was not Julia's practicality that was helping her. Julia was a kind person, which she attributed to her Episcopalian upbringing. She assured Courtney that New York wasn't just a place that could make you forget to have children. It was a place that could make you forget them if you did.

•   •   •

D
URING HER MONTH'S VACATION
at the Wellness Center in Connecticut, Julia devoted several sessions with the family therapist to her complicated feelings about motherhood. Although generally she approved of the “holistic hotel”—it was very A-list, and the food came in on china plates, so it wasn't for real crazies who might smash the crockery and attempt to slit their wrists—the sessions did not go well at first.

Julia was used to her weekly counseling with Dr. Jenny on the Upper West Side. Dr. Jenny was in her sixties, white-haired and wise; sometimes she held Julia's hand, she always had lotion-filled tissues available, and when Julia told her she had left Kristian and the children, they cried together. Occasionally Julia worried about the intensity of the bond between them; she loved Dr. Jenny and she felt Dr. Jenny loved her back. She said to her best friend, Christy Armitage, that going to Dr. Jenny wasn't like seeing a counselor, more like visiting the mother you always wished you had. Christy said, “But you have to pay her?” and Julia decided from then on to keep that opinion to herself.

By contrast, the family therapist at the Wellness Center kept at least a five-foot distance from Julia at all times, expected her to bring her own handkerchief, and asked her leading questions, even when she was crying
.
Finally Julia, sitting crumpled in the leather armchair, a ball of sodden toilet roll in one hand, announced querulously that she thought the sessions were meant to be
nondirective
. The Family Therapist looked at her with exaggerated calm and said that the Wellness Center program was therapy boot camp, designed to get results for even the most self-indulgent clients who were used to counseling as
reassurance
.

Julia took this personally and felt defiant. She folded her arms and stared at the picture of a waterfall on the door opposite.

Inevitably, the discussions encompassed Julia's childhood and her feelings about her family of origin. Julia had always been her daddy's little girl, and when she brought her kids, Romy and Lee, home to Westchester to see their grandparents, she noticed that her father's teenage boxing trophy had been placed right in front of Kristian's side of her wedding photo. If anyone accidentally mentioned Kristian's name, Julia's father would pound on a sofa cushion, the veins on his muscular forearm throbbing, the gray hairs bristling over the tattoo he had got in Korea, and demand, “What did that man ever do for you?”