That Part Was True (12 page)

He tossed some thyme into the onions, cracked three eggs into a bowl, and added cream and salt and pepper.

Eve made the bed as precisely as she did everything else, and drew the same sense of pleasure from its smoothed surface as she did from the rows of preserves labeled and dated in the pantry. She was feeling terribly, unaccustomedly content; she had the weekend to herself. She had enjoyed the visits from Ollie and Izzy, so much more frequent lately, but quiet had always been restorative to Eve. The thought of a whole weekend alone in a well-stocked house, with just a book and a fire for company, made her feel calm, protected from sudden eddies. Despite her progress, she still needed these havens.

She went downstairs and made herself a second pot of tea and some toast, which she buttered while the tea brewed on the Aga edge. She spread the toast with some of last year's bramble jelly and cut it diagonally and put it on a porcelain plate that matched the teapot and her cup and saucer. It was her favorite china—exotic little birds frolicked across it, their ebullient pink and orange plumage subdued by serene greens.

She put the breakfast things on a tray and took the tray into the library, where she had already lit the fire. She poured herself some tea and sat down and opened her book. One of Jack's. She still thought of reading in the morning as an indulgence, but Beth had taught her to allow herself a few of these.

Outside, it was a heavy day, drizzly with low clouds. She got up and switched on an extra lamp and then she put on some music. And then at 9:38 a.m. on a wet Saturday morning in November, Eve Petworth, dressed in a knee-length wool skirt and a camel cashmere sweater, held her arms out to an imaginary lover and, slowly and prettily, her light feet skimming the Turkish rug as if it were parquet, closed her eyes and danced.

Jack awoke at 4:44. He got up and got himself a glass of water from the bathroom faucet and drank it. He went back to bed, but sleep eluded him. He lay for a while letting his eyes adjust to the dark and staring at an empty picture hook next to the bedroom door, Marnie had removed a photograph from it and Jack had never refilled the space. The empty hook, imbued with the dolefulness of the hour, took on a cumbersome significance that engulfed him briefly and then condensed, concentrating itself into a physical discomfort in his chest. He sat up and the discomfort settled a bit, but then intensified again, quickened by the lack of daylight. He got up and walked around for a bit, pressing at his sternum and willing it to ease. Heartburn. He went back to the bathroom and took some Alka-Seltzer. Then he went back to bed again at 5:15.

It was no good.

He sat up and switched on the light and then he got up and put on a plaid robe and went downstairs and fixed himself some coffee and looked at the dark windows and felt blue. He wasn't sick and he wasn't broke, and when he finished it with Adrienne, as he knew he would, he would no longer be able to blame a single one of his run-of-the-mill inadequacies on anyone else. If he took Henry's advice and just headed into old age, or crossed its threshold anyhow, alone, he was gonna have to take responsibility for everything. Everything. Damn, he thought. Here it is at last. Adulthood.

“What are you up to?”

“Not a lot, as it happens.”

“Well, I thought I'd come out…Jack?”

“Uh-huh?”

“Shall I come out?”

“I'm not…uh…”

“It was just an idea.”

“Maybe I'll come in to see you instead.”

“Jack. Are you trying to break up with me?”

Adrienne had delivered this inquiry with an utter lack of hysteria. Why couldn't he simply say yes? Jack thought. Because he was a coward. Because he wasn't ready for the void that breaking off his relationship with her would leave. Because Adrienne would leave cleanly. He was sure of that; she wasn't like other women. There'd be no 2:00 a.m. phone calls full of recriminations, no little telltale female flotsam left dotted about his house. She would go.

“I'm just busy, Adrienne. Nobody said anything about breaking anything off. I never understand why women have to dramatize the smallest adjustment in a plan.” Even as he said this, he knew it was grossly unfair. But he'd jumped already, so he kept jumping. “I wanna work. You're the one who's at me all the time to work.”

There was a moment's silence, thick on his side with unacknowledged deceit. She cut right through it.

“Jack, if this relationship is not what you want, I'd rather you said so. I am certainly not interested in some clichéd breakup routine in a public place. That is the sort of thing immature men do to protect themselves from immature women's hysteria. I hope, Jack, that neither of us fits into those categories.”

He could feel the accusation over the line, measured as it was. To leave an intelligent woman was a colder, more aware business than the cut-and-run kind of operation he'd fallen into these past few years. Care would be required for this new sort of departure. And then, in its wake, he would be left, not wallowing in murky, stale failure, but instead, spotlit by the clean, direct glare of accountability.

“Honey,” he said, “I'm just not in a frame of mind for socializing. I'll see you on Thursday. We'll talk then.”

“All right, Jack.”

“Thursday, then.”

“Thursday.”

Jack hung up, aware of the corner he had painted himself into.

Jack lay the featherweight of Eve's writing paper in his lap and spread a palm across it, protecting the bare confession in those ingenuous, poignant words; as lovely and moving as light through stained glass, and thought, it is me that your moment of haste has served, Eve, me.

“I'm not going to let you do this, Jack.”

“Do what exactly?” Jack leaned against the countertop in Adrienne's kitchen. A kitchen that had only ever been used for cooking by Jack, and then in the most limited way.

“Sabotage yourself.”

“Sabotage myself.”

“Stop repeating what I say. You know what I mean.” She took a sip of her wine, unruffled. That trait in itself held a great deal of appeal for Jack. An appeal he was trying not to give in to. He had come into the city and booked himself into a hotel and tried to get Adrienne to meet him somewhere, but she had insisted he come to her apartment. He drank, too, feeling defeated.

“You're sabotaging yourself and looking around you for some external problem. You're trying to find some outside source of your difficulties, but there isn't one, Jack.”

Jack sighed. “Adrienne, you may be right. In fact, I strongly suspect that you are right, but it doesn't change the fact that I need to…”

“That's the trouble, isn't it? You don't know what you need to do. But
I
know, Jack. You need to write. You need to write something real. You can stop protesting about this. I know it. I know you want to write something that you're genuinely proud of. That's all I've tried to do, Jack. Help you to write.”

She stood then and put one of those perfect hands of hers on his chest and looked into his eyes. It was a gesture more deeply loving than any she had proffered the length of their relationship. Her hand was warm through his shirt; desire rose up in him like a cobra to music. He took her shoulders firmly in his two hands and gently stepped her backward before he could act on it.

She understood.

“Have it your way, Jack,” she said.

It was late and he was hungry. He walked through the city feeling the bite of early December through his overcoat. The build to Christmas was starting in earnest and the streets were thick with holiday crowds. There were white lights on the trees and gold decorations in the store windows and little gangs of cheerful people choking the pavements, dressed for nights out.

Jack decided to go and eat, and to try not to think. He walked down to Lucio's. On the way he gave a fifty-dollar bill to a guy in a doorway, who looked at him as suspiciously as he looked at the bill, before he shrugged and tucked the cash inside the oversized, military great coat he was wearing and grinned. It was a crazy grin, maniacal. He tipped an imaginary hat at Jack, and Jack was grateful for a whimsical moment in an otherwise leaden day.

“What is it that you want, Jack?”

“More bread.”

“Always with the smart answers.”

“You sound like Suzanna, Henry.”

“Yeah, well. That happens.”

“It never happened to me.”

“Maybe you never wanted it to.”

Henry's house had an even better view than Jack's. And more books and more paintings. It was the house of an old man who had read a lot, listened to a lot of music, and looked at a lot of nice pictures and seen a bit of life.

“I want it now. I wonder why I never looked for that kind of relationship from a woman. I always looked for women I couldn't be friends with.”

“If it's any consolation, I've noticed plenty of women doing the same thing.”

“Have you?”

“Sure. The ones who are as dumb as you are.”

Jack put a hand to his chin and lowered it again, laying it flat on the tablecloth and studying his fingertips. “I realize it's kind of corny to have this sort of crisis around your fiftieth birthday,” he said. “But here I am, a walkin' talkin' cliché.”

Henry, watching him, said, “Listen, Jack. I'm eighty-two now and what I have mostly learned is that there's a lot of stuff I don't know, but I'll tell you this much for free: If you wait around for life to come and get you out of bed in the mornings, you're waiting a long time. You gotta get on with something, Jack. Make a plan, write, cook, travel, do something you want to do because woe-is-me loves a blank space.”

“You're a good friend, Henry, and I've neglected you.”

Henry shrugged and smiled. The maid came in to clear the soup things. “You got good health and good friends, Jack. A lot of the time, that's enough.”

Jack only had romaine lettuce so he didn't make the soup, but he thought that he might.

I like the idea of the ice water plunge
, he wrote:

“I'm not saying
over, Ollie. I'm saying postponed…”

“It sounds like Over.”

Izzy began to cry. She was sitting on the little sofa that she had bought for the alcove window just a few months after she'd moved into her flat, crying. She couldn't believe she was crying again.

Neither could Ollie. He loathed it, loathed the clouds in the hitherto scintillating eyes. He preferred anger from Izzy. Much preferred it. You knew where you were with Izzy's anger; it was a straight road. He liked that. He had never felt, faced with even the worst of her temper, unsure. But this new gulf she was leading them into was dingy and unfathomable. It unnerved him. He threw up his hands, hoping to prod her toward a burst of lucid outrage, and said, “Not more tears. Izzy, you've been blowing your nose for two months.”

“And you've been emotionally distant for two months.”

Ollie sighed, but felt, too, some relief; in the current circumstances, petulance was an improvement. “What the hell is emotionally distant, Iz? What is this rubbish? Where's it coming from?”

“I don't know,” she said sadly.

Ollie sat down, destabilized again, dropping the last few inches. He looked exhausted. They'd been arguing since breakfast and it was 11:00 a.m. now. It had started over toast. Izzy had complained that he never made the toast, and then, when he'd done nothing to redress this situation or even deny the charge, she had moved on to: “Is this what it will be like being married to you?” with a swiftness that had blind-sided Ollie. It was a Saturday morning and he was mildly hung over. He had known, from Izzy's tenor, that it was a risk, but he had fallen back on habit; snatching the toast that she'd already made and spreading it with some of her mother's excellent gooseberry jam, he'd bitten into it oafishly.

“Probably,” he'd said.

Izzy had lifted the bread board, with half a loaf of bread still on it, and hurled it across the kitchen. That was at around 9:00 a.m. and no progress had been made between then and now.

“Iz,” he said. “Why don't you just go and take a shower and get dressed and we'll go out for lunch somewhere.”

But Izzy looked at him with those opaque eyes again, eyes that frightened him, and shook her head.

“You go,” she said flatly. “Call Rob, or someone, if you like. I just want to be on my own.”

Eve had read Jack's letter a total of six times. When she first opened it, she read it three times and then later she read it again, twice. Just now, she had read it again. She couldn't believe that someone, anyone, let alone someone who was talented and successful and good at all the things that she was not good at, should seek her opinion in this way. She could not define the sense of accomplishment it gave her, the confidence.

She went into her kitchen and prepared for herself a planned, and extravagant, lunch. A soup whose particular ingredients—celeriac and a single black truffle—she'd ordered from a supplier in London. They'd arrived, to her delight, the day before.

She set the chopped celeriac to simmer in some milk and thought about Jack some more. A writer. A real writer. A species hitherto mysterious to her. She'd known a woman, vaguely, years before, who had written a novel, but that, it had turned out, had been a case of early promise, not a career. Eve had read the novel, but she could not remember it. Jack's books were far more affecting. The characters were real. You felt for them. When you weren't reading, you thought about them. When you finished reading, you didn't want to read about anyone else for a while. She could not understand why Jack would want to stop doing that. But then there was probably a great deal she didn't understand about a creative life; hers had been so deliberate and prosaic.

By the time she had finished lunch, at the place she had laid for herself with the meticulous care of a Victorian servant, the sky had brightened and she decided that she would go for a walk. It was too late in the year for mushrooming, which was her favorite sort of walk, and the woods were boggy, but she could stick to the lane, climb up to the high part, and look back at the view and her house and the winter garden and think about what to say to Jack. It was important to her, very important, to tread carefully on this breakthrough in their friendship. A lovely friendship. A friendship, like her celeriac and truffle soup, that was decadently sumptuous, and all her own.

Eve had already put on her coat and scarf when the telephone rang and she almost didn't answer it. Then, when she did, she thought it was a wrong number, or a hoax call, but Izzy's voice was recognizable after a moment through the sobs.

“Izzy?”

“It's off, Mummy. I've called off the wedding.”

“Oh, Izzy,” Eve said.

“Mummy, can you please come up?”

“To London?”

“Yes, to London. Now.” Her voice broke again.

Eve, hating herself for it, hesitated.

“Please, Mummy. I can't take any time off work, but if you could just stay here for a few days and help me to—”

“Of course. Of course I'll come,” Eve said. “I'll come this afternoon.”

There was a train at 4:30 that she could intercept if she drove to Westcastle. It would get her in around 7:00 and she could take a taxi to Izzy's flat from the station. But while she packed, Eve wondered whether, by the time she got to London, the whole thing wouldn't have blown over. That was what Gwen had said, when she'd telephoned her to let her know she was going.

“Our Carly did exactly the same thing,” she assured Eve. “Broke off her engagement to Ben twice before they made it down the aisle. Drove her father up the wall.”

“I hope you're right,” Eve said.

“I've been through three of them. Honestly, give them the price of the airline tickets and let them elope. Easier all round.”

Eve had given no thought to how crowded the train would be. She so rarely traveled on a Sunday evening, so rarely traveled at all, that these things didn't occur to her. It was evidently the last week of some sort of school break, and there were families and students crowding the platforms. On the train were no seats. She was pinned, as it pulled out, against a large black plastic suitcase that someone had propped sideways on a too-full luggage rack near the doors. She was hot and uncomfortable in her winter coat. She tugged at her gloves and shoved them in her pocket, but even that was difficult. There was barely room to move her elbows.

“It's these weekend fares,” she heard a woman complain loudly. “It shouldn't be like this in First.”

A woman with a young child saw Eve then and scooped the child up and motioned to her. “Chloe,” she said. “Move your things.”

The little girl, about three, reluctantly lifted a coloring book from the tray in front of her seat just as a man with a broad, aggressive face pushed forward and stood squarely in front of Eve, forcing her even farther back against the mass of luggage, the coarse straps of a bulky backpack plucking at her calves. The man's chest, encased in wadded nylon, blocked Eve's view and her path. Trapped, she became acutely aware of the pulpy warmth of the crush around her and the sour smell of something that somebody was apparently eating farther up the aisle. Those were her last cogent perceptions.

It was an older woman. An organized older woman, with a reserved seat and four nicely packed cheese and ham sandwiches in a recycled paper bag, who knew what to do.

“Just breathe, dear,” she said. “That's it.”

Eve allowed the woman to cover her mouth and nose with the paper bag, now emptied of its contents, although she was terrified momentarily that the woman was trying to suffocate her. Something was. She felt as though she were dreaming, although the symptoms were, of course, well known to her. The paper bag helped and her breathing leveled, but she still felt dreadful.

She went on feeling dreadful, and apparently looking it, given the concern of the poor young mother. Eve had been helped to the seat beside her. “What's the matter with her?” she heard the little girl ask. But the mother, settling the child on her knee, shushed her and directed her attention out of the window.

After that, Eve feigned sleep for most of the trip.

“Will you be all right?” the woman who had helped her asked as the train finally shunted to a stop, whining over an arrival announcement, in London. Eve, with no choice, stirred.

“Yes,” she said. Though she knew this was far from true. She began to gather her things. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you very much. I don't know what came over me. I expect I was hungry,” she lied.

The woman looked at her as if she did not believe this, but smiled anyway. “Take care, then,” she said as she lifted her small, boldly labeled suitcase and turned to leave.

Eve waited until everyone had got off, nodding a weak good-bye to the mother and little girl. The little girl paused and turned back to look at her over her shoulder. Her coat had a hood with a fluffy collar that obscured her chin. Her mother tugged her hand to urge her on.

Eve stood for a minute in the empty carriage. And then walked to the luggage rack, where her bag lay toppled on the floor. Her legs were still weak beneath her, and she felt profoundly unwell.

“Pull yourself together,” she said out loud, though she knew, from her sessions with Beth, that this was the sort of lofty rationality that distress paid no heed to. She wished that she could go home. Go home and lock the door and sit in silence all alone, but she couldn't.

Izzy was still looking unkempt when her mother arrived. She knew this and she knew her mother would disapprove. Or thought she knew it, she wasn't sure really, and her unsureness was further charging her desire for drama. Izzy felt that her life was in crisis and some drama, some substantive concern, openly manifested at the sort of level her grandmother had always been able to rise to, so easily and conspicuously, would be curative.

Eve was terribly pale when she got to Izzy's flat and had paid for her taxi with shaking hands. She was still suffering light flushes of—not nausea, but the sensation that she might pass out, coming over her at regular intervals. She was very shaken. She would have liked to go into the spare bedroom, where she was to sleep, where she had never slept before, and lie down on the ivory bedspread, on which small piles of Izzy's summer clothes and an out-of-favor jacket lay, and bury her head.

Izzy did not offer her mother a drink, and so, after she had stowed her things, Eve went into the kitchen and found some chamomile tea and the pair of them, mother and daughter, sat silently for a moment drinking it. Izzy, having stood only to press the door opener when Eve had buzzed, had gone back to sitting morosely on the little sofa, which was dented by now with her weight.

“Aren't you going to ask me why?” she said after a while, in a sulky voice, a voice Eve recognized from her childhood.

Eve set her tea in front of her, on a coffee table covered with books and magazines and a small collection of trinket boxes. “Do you want to tell me?” she asked. Her own voice lacked strength.

“I'm just fed up with it all,” Izzy said.

“Fed up?”

“Yes, fed up with doing everything myself. With feeling as though I'm the parent.”

“Is that how you feel? I'm sorry.”

“Well, of course it's how I feel.” She stood up with a little spring and began to pace agitatedly around the room. “Having to organize these cozy get-togethers between you and my father. Having to sit there with his second wife and those boys, as if they were my family. People I've never met in my life. It's my wedding and it's being taken over by the past. Your past.”

“Yes,” Eve said, lifting her tea again, twisting the cup carefully on its saucer. “I can see how it might feel for you.”

“Can you? I don't know if you can. You're as bad as Ollie. Off in your own little world, like you always have been. I bet you've already arranged to get back to that Charity Shop of yours. That volunteer thing that you treat as if it were a proper job. I bet you didn't even want to come.”

Eve was struck by the truth in this accusation.

“I
wish
Gin-gin was here!”

Eve was aware that Izzy had intended to wound. She was surprised that she had not. The small jolt of the words charged her a bit, though, and she recalled, for the first time since the awful moment on the train, some of the things she had learned from her sessions with Beth. She sat up straighter and did not react to Izzy's ferment.

“I'm assuming you've talked to Ollie about all this,” she said, keeping her voice low, steady.

“Well, that just goes to show how well you know him. Ollie is hopeless, absolutely hopeless. He won't even telephone his mother to find out if she's coming.”

This made sense to Eve. These two offspring of messy families had found each other.

“Izzy, do you think that it's the wedding and all this family business you're upset about? Or is it that you don't want to be married?”

Izzy stopped pacing and looked at her mother as if she had never considered the possibility that these two things were unrelated.