To Have and to Hold (25 page)

As he drove, the word hit him: adultery. That sound was so ugly; he pushed it down, out of sight. Besides, it was hideously inaccurate. Nobody had felt like this. If they had, how could they bear it?

The sun blazed on the school windows. It hurt his eyes to look. The dull modern building was aflame with her.

‘It's a big commitment,' said Derek.

Ann nodded. The pipe smoke made her feel sick. Through the haze she heard Mr Fowler speaking.

‘If you'd like to go away and think it over . . .'

She shook her head. She felt, rising within her, the familiar reckless despair. Why not take the job? There was no hope in anything else. Stupid of her to have ever believed there was.

She turned to Mr Fowler, or Tony. ‘No,' she said. ‘I'll take it.'

‘Really?' asked Derek. ‘Are you sure?'

She nodded. They all stood up and shook hands.

IT WAS THE
hottest June for years. On the roads the tarmac blistered; children wrinkled it up, pushing it with their sandals. In fumy high streets women sought refuge in the beige chill of Marks and Spencers. Plants drooped in cracked flowerbeds; policeman perspired in shirt-sleeves. People, as always, complained. At Viv's school, bosomy sixth-form girls lay on the grass like porpoises and came into classes reddened.

In the two households the windows were opened to catch the breeze, sunlight flooded the front rooms in the mornings and the back rooms in the afternoon, work was done and strawberries eaten but nobody spoke. Nobody spoke because they feared the answers. It is always easier to be distracted by other things, and there were plenty of them. Ann's new job began, within two weeks of the meeting with Mr Fowler, and she started bringing home work in the evenings. Zenith, the firm that employed Ken, became even more damaged by the recession and crises kept him busy; besides which, he disappeared for lengthy lunch-hours nobody knew where, and then there was his Youth Club, for which his wife had questioned his fitness. He seemed much preoccupied and, startling Ann, shaved off his moustache. His bald face looked vulnerable. Viv, still slowed by nausea, was involved with school exams and her thirsty allotment and caring for Rosie, who suffered not only from asthma but hay fever too, worse than ever this summer, as if infected by something troubling in the air besides pollen. Each of the four was subdued by guilt, as if a lid had been lifted, revealing, within, unwelcome mirrors they preferred not to inspect. And all the time a child grew remorselessly, innocent of the tumult it was causing. It lay, suspended in rosy silence.

Perhaps, who knows, Ollie felt the most guilty. One day, coming home from work, his children rat-tatted him with invisible machine guns. He escaped upstairs.

Instead of hanging cherries round his own girls' ears he hooked them around Ellie's. As the two of them came in from their lunch-hour he took them off and popped them into his mouth.

Diz met him and remarked: ‘You look all flushed and replete.'

‘It's just the sun,' said Ollie. ‘Look.' He unbuttoned his shirt to show his sunburn. ‘I've got a red V.'

Diz said: ‘How Blackpool.'

‘Watch it,' said Ellie. She left for the cloakroom.

Diz said: I've never seen such a sexual glow.'

‘Will you stop making snide remarks?'

Diz paused, then said: ‘Only when you stop coming in late, my son, and taking two-hour lunches, and spending a fortune on phone-calls to your wife. You do have a job here, this isn't just a telephone exchange, even if you are shagging the switchboard operator.'

‘Ssh!' said Ollie, looking round.

‘And you'd better pull a finger out with the theatre section. It's late.'

Diz was right. Ollie's work was suffering. He had lost that chancy precision with words upon which he had built his career. Troubled at home, he no longer had the confidence to write, and expect ears to listen. When he himself was behaving so badly, how could his words be worth even the paper upon which they were typed?
Words, words!
he had shouted at Viv. What did they possibly mean? They were just a sleight of hand, a trick of the wrist. Viv stood there, carrying within her an alien growth, and he flinched from looking into her eyes.

It was worse, of course, with his marriage. He could tell himself it was going through a bad patch. The words were such clichés that they might have sounded reassuring, but they didn't convince him. On the other hand, to admit, even silently, that his marriage was breaking up would be too painful, and besides, then something must be done. The old door would close and he would be in a new room, there would be no turning back. Until then, like a TB sufferer who tells himself he simply has a slight cough, until the day comes when he starts
spitting blood and can no longer avoid naming his own disease – until then Ollie spent more time with Ellie, lying on her bed during those stuffy evenings while she rubbed cream into his sunburn and soothed his heart. He knew he deserved to be machine-gunned by his daughters.

It was not until the beginning of July that Ann walked past Viv's house. Until then she had taken a detour home from work to avoid the street. She hadn't told Viv about her promotion, though no doubt Ken had done so during one of the long tête-à-têtes that kept him so frequently out of the house – these trysts being described, for Ann's benefit, as ‘troubles with the Hornsey Road site' or the all-purpose ‘crisis at work'. When he spoke of his day, she froze. Nobody knows, until it happens to them, how terrible it is to find your husband is capable of lying.

But she could bear it no longer and one evening walked past. Quite apart from anything else, she had been painfully missing her nieces.

As she had expected, they were playing in the street. Her heart quickened. They detached themselves from their friends and ran up.

‘Auntie Ann!' cried Rosie. She took her hand and started pulling her into the house. ‘I've got a newt.'

‘Is your mum here?' asked Ann.

‘She's gone to the shops.'

Ann paused in the living room. She felt weak, both from relief and disappointment. She was led to the newt. The room was in even more of a mess than usual. On the pegboard was pinned a chart, with tasks to be done: Washing Up, Feeding Rabbits, and the names of Rosie, Daisy and Mum.

She pointed to it. ‘Why's your dad not there?' she asked ‘Isn't that sexist?'

‘He's always out.'

‘What?' She stared at Rosie.

‘With his girlfriend.'

‘Girlfriend?'

Daisy said. ‘They took us to McDonald's. She ponged.'

‘What of?'

The next day Ann rang Ollie at work but he wouldn't speak, except to say that he knew he was behaving badly but Viv didn't want him, she never had, she'd finally achieved her ambition and made him redundant. He sounded belligerent and drunk.

Phoning Viv was harder. Despising herself, she put it off until the next week. It was a great deal easier to manage a building society than to dial that familiar number.

‘I didn't know about Ollie,' she said at last. ‘I'm so sorry.'

‘Come round to lunch,' said Viv. ‘We must talk.'

‘Can you manage? Shall we have lunch here?'

‘Of course I can manage,' said Viv.

Ann put down the phone. They had arranged it for Saturday. Ken, she knew, would be coaching the Youth Club team, so he wouldn't know where she was. At times she thought of the man in the car, and wondered why she only felt the smallest tweak of guilt.

Ollie had now taken to spending some nights with Ellie, and had gradually changed into almost a visitor at his own home. He was not at the ringing-bell stage, but he did hesitate upon the doorstep. When crises strike there are those who confront and those who escape, and it will only take a crisis to reveal them. At university he had been heavily into drugs, releasing himself into heightened oblivion. Not blurry – people thought that who'd never taken them – but sharper. He knew he was weak, but that didn't make him feel any better.

He was no longer presumed to be in on a Saturday, just ‘mucking about', as the girls put it – reading
Private Eye,
getting his dry-cleaning, attempting perhaps yet again to find the bits for their Scalextric. Now he was inclined to take them out for treats. Though the household knew about Ellie, the official reason for his absence was that he was trying to get to grips with his novel, an explanation that the girls seemed to accept with the surprising
sang froid
of the young.

On Saturday he came to the house and the girls leapt up like puppies.

‘Take us to Hamley's,' they said. ‘You promised.' They had always been mercenary, but recently – either from circumstance or natural development – they had become worse.

‘I thought Windsor Safari Park.' He eyed Viv, who stood at the liquidizer. The table was laid for two.

They started whining. ‘We went there last time.'

‘This time we'll bribe a monkey to sit on our bonnet.' Viv passed him the car keys; the girls ran outside. He looked at the table, raising his eyebrows. ‘What's all this in aid of?'

She pushed the liquidizer. It whirred. He waited.

‘What?' she asked.

‘Our Kenneth coming to lunch?'

She paused. Sunlight slanted through the window. Her skin was pale and sheeny. ‘You'd like that,' she said. ‘Wouldn't you? Salve your conscience.'

‘Who is it?'

‘Ollie.' She rested against the kitchen unit. ‘I need no longer tell you who it is. It is no longer your business. My gazpacho belongs to me and whoever I decide to share it with.'

‘Look, I –'

‘It's Ann.'

‘Ann?'

She poured the pink liquid into two bowls and started chopping up parsley. She didn't look up. ‘You might prefer me to have an adulterous little
déjeuner à deux,
but I'm actually having lunch with my sister.' She spoke with the clipped tones in which he pictured her addressing an errant fourth-former. ‘Just one thing,' she went on, scraping the knife across the board and pushing the parsley on to the bowls. ‘Are you going to be in tonight? Where're you going to rest your troubled little head, in the study or in your love-nest in that delightfully soignée locale known as Crouch End?'

‘Shut up.'

She sighed. The sunlight touched her shiny face. ‘You may be finding yourself, or paying me back, or suffering the male
menopause, or whatever it is you're doing, but there's one thing I'd like you to realize.'

‘What?'

‘Life has to go on. I don't mean this,' she pointed to her stomach. ‘This is going on whatever us stupid fuckers are doing. What I mean is . . .' She paused. She spoke with the precision of a prepared speech. This made him feel more guilty. ‘What I mean is, while you're out there finding true love, there are children to be looked after, washing to be done, hamsters to be cleaned out, car to be MOT'd, milkman to be paid, dentist to be gone to –'

‘Affairs to be had?'

‘Oh go on!' She spat the words out. ‘Go to your funfair, play around with your silly little girlfriend; you're just a child.'

He paused at the door, the car keys hanging from his finger. ‘I'm certainly not a man,' he said theatrically. ‘You've seen to that.'

He pocketed the keys and went off to his monkeys.

Ten minutes later there was a ring at the door. For a mad moment Viv thought it was Ollie, transformed into a gentleman caller who would woo her afresh. But it was her mother.

‘You're looking peaky,' she said. ‘You weren't like this with the others.'

‘I know,' said Viv.

‘Still, this one's different, isn't it?' She looked around. ‘Where is everyone?'

‘Er, they've just popped out,' Viv lied. ‘Shopping.'

‘Thought I'd see how you were. Must go back in a moment, I'm up to me eyes.'

‘At the salon?'

Viv shifted from one foot to the other, willing her mother to leave. It was one o'clock.

‘Oh look,' said Irene, inspecting the table. She smiled. ‘Told you it'd be all right, didn't I?'

‘What?'

‘Knew you were a softie at heart.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Just you and Ollie, is it? You usually forget.'

‘What?' asked Viv.

‘Your wedding anniversary.'

There was a pause. Viv realized the date. ‘Ah,' she said.

‘Fourteen years,' said her mother. She pinched Viv's cheek. ‘So underneath those dungarees there beats a heart.'

‘Two hearts, actually.'

Her mother laughed. ‘What about the kids?'

‘What?'

‘Oh, little garnishes too.' She popped an olive into her mouth. ‘You celebrating tonight? Want me to take them off your hands?'

‘No really –'

‘All right, be like that.'

‘I don't mean –'

‘Won't come often, that sort of offer,' she said. ‘Not from me, anyway. Probably will from Vera. It's called sucking up to your step-daughter. She'll be taking out the kids and stuffing them with sack-whatsit –'

‘Sachertorte.'

‘She'll be giving him a heart attack.' She paused. ‘Still perhaps he'll die happy.' She stood up to go. ‘Men,' she said. Her friend Frank was gay. ‘All men want is chocolate cake and no questions.'

A few minutes later Ann arrived. Because she had seen her so seldom, it still gave Viv a shock to see her new haircut. Shorn, her sister carried herself with poise.

She took a summer pudding out of the carrier-bag. ‘Hope it's OK,' she said. ‘Haven't made one of these for ages. Don't seem to bother with puddings nowadays.'