Unfaithfully Yours (22 page)

Barbara, of course, was never there. She was never there for rugby matches or school plays or one-to-one chats with Miss Pimm or Mrs Hughes about whether Jas and Josh could be prevented from excessively competitive behaviour on the sports field. ‘All they want to do,’ I remember Mrs Hughes saying plaintively, ‘is win! There is more to sport than that!’

So it was always me and you in the line outside Myfanwy’s office or on those hideously uncomfortable chairs in the school hall, watching Elaine Dimmock hammer her way through some basic Mozart. We became friends, I suppose, without really realizing it; and though, later, the eight of us became the Goldsmiths, the Larners, the Prices and the Dimmocks, we were always, somehow, slightly apart from all that camaraderie.

Is it Barbara’s appalling letter that is making all this clear to me? Or have I always known it? I think I must always have known it but it is only now, as I write, that I really understand what I think and feel. You discover these things by trying to describe them and, though I am no writer – one in a family is enough – I think I can now say, no, write, with complete confidence, something that I never knew before I began this sentence. That I love you. Have always loved you. In a hopeless, hopeless way.

I can recall the precise moment when it started.

It was at a nativity play at St Jude’s. Always an occasion to get the hard-nosed lawyers, surgeons and bankers blubbing like babies. ‘Little don-kee . . . little don-kee on the dusty road . . .’ Jas and Josh were Israelites. They spent the whole performance thumping each other and trying to take the tea towel off Herbie Rosenbaum’s head. Conrad was a Roman soldier. Well –
the
Roman soldier, actually. The only one who spoke.

‘I am Marthelluth!’ he began – his lisp was terrible in those days, ‘and I have thped to Jewuthalem to thlay thith Thon of the Jooth, the Thaviour ath they thay – Jethuth Chwitht! Where ith he?’

No one seemed to know.

The Baby Jesus, a jumble of old face flannels and dishcloths, wrapped in a piece cut off one of Mrs Hughes’s old cardigans, was, in fact, being hastily assembled offstage by Miss Pratt and Tallulah Fanshawe, who had been chosen to play the Virgin Mary because, in Mrs Hughes’s own words, ‘It might make her feel better about herself.’ I had never quite understood why Tallulah should have benefited from stepping, so soon, into the role that was clearly waiting for her in the world outside St Jude’s, i.e. Eternal Virgin.

Conrad glared about him and started to wave his plastic sword in the air.

‘Where ith thith Jethuth?’ he snarled. ‘Thaethar theekth the Thon of the God of the Jooth!’ There was still no answer. ‘I want him!’ Conrad went on. ‘Right now!’

People started to laugh. Conrad, clearly, thought this was a very good thing. ‘Thtop mething awound!’ he continued, moving now into what sounded like a pretty good impression of Mr Loop, the games master. ‘I will not thtand for mething awound, you thtupid Jooth! I am going to thlithe Jethuth into thmall pietheth!’

By now the laughter was becoming more general. At first, I could see, you were worrying the poor little bloke might burst into tears or run off the stage to hide his shame but, in fact, he was buoyed up by the audience’s laughter. As his gestures became wilder and you could see he was courting the attention, enjoying his role as clown, I saw your expression lift gracefully and your eyes start to shine with pleasure. You have a lovely smile, Elizabeth, and it wasn’t often that Conrad was the cause of it.

Jesus – imagine having Gerry as a father. No offence. But it must have been hard.

‘I am going to count to ten, Jethuth,’ said Conrad, moving on from his Mr Loop impression to an even better one of the headmistress, ‘and then I am thlithing! I am thlithing you into thmall pietheth! I am going to thtart with your legth!’

Prolonged laughter. Conrad does a bit more sword-waving. Even more laughter.

‘Nectht cometh the toeth and all the bitth that thtick out!’ More laughter. ‘And then I will thtick my thword in hith thtomach! And hith . . . hith . . .’

Expectant giggles from the audience.

‘Hith bowelth!’

Prolonged laughter and applause gracefully acknowledged by Conrad. He was now working the audience like a stand-up comedian. The more serious he looked the more they laughed; but they knew the seriousness was only a pose. They were allowed to laugh. They were not laughing at him, they were laughing with him.

You were laughing, now, too. As Conrad went into a sort of gorilla mating dance around the stage, waving his sword and putting one small hand on his paper helmet in order to make sure it stayed in place, you laughed for sheer joy that your boy had shown that he, too, had a talent, even if he was so frightened of his father he had never dared to show it in public before.

I think I fell in love with the love I saw in your face that day. I fell in love with your kindness and your tolerance and your ability to take pleasure in the world. I watched you later as the four of us – you, me, Gerry and Barbara were the centre of the group in those days – became closer.

When our three boys were at prep school, I remember standing at the school gates, waiting for Jas and Josh. It must have been some time in the late eighties. I think Margaret Thatcher was in power. There are brown leaves heaped up in the gutter and the sodium streetlamps have come on as Jas and Josh and Conrad emerge in their bright black blazers. Orchestra for Conrad, I imagine, and football for Jas and Josh. Jas’s hair flops forward over his eyes and he looks, as always, contained and amused by it all. Conrad looks like a man weighed down by the troubles of the world. When he sees you he bites his lip. I wonder whether someone at the school is bullying him. I wonder whether it might be Jas.

It’s impossible to tell with children. What happens between them is something we will never know. They will not even remember much of it themselves.

You move towards him and I can see you want to put your arms around him, but that isn’t done. Not at the gates of the Royal Collegiate School, Putney, anyway.

‘How was school?’ you say.

‘It wath all wight!’ said Conrad. His lisp is one of the many endearing things about him but I don’t imagine it goes down too well at the Royal Collegiate School, Putney.

He is not going to say any more than that. You put your head to one side. You have long, auburn hair in those days, like a forties film star. You have big blue eyes and your eyes betray you. You love him too much. You are so frightened for him, and for all of us. In your eyes I see something that is in short supply at home – tenderness. Perhaps, in the still gloom of that autumn evening, my face, too, betrays me. Jas is looking at me oddly.

‘You comin’?’ he says. He loses the ends of words in those days. It is supposed to be cool and Jas is good at being cool. Josh is bent over some early draft of the computer game. Game Boy, perhaps.

(I don’t remember. All I recall is the way the children looked and the way you looked and the way I felt, which was that I had married the wrong person and it was too late to do anything about it because it was not something I could ever dream of saying to you.)

‘Of course!’ I say, because, like you, my first loyalty is always to the children. So we go to the car and he tells me how he
smashed
Roger Frayne when he tackled him in second-eleven practice, and I drive off, but as I turn the corner I look back and you are stooped over little Conrad and your arms are going round him and he is standing quite stiff, like a good soldier on parade, and I think how much you love him and how much I love you and how hopeless it all is, and then I ask Jas about the game and he tells me.

I am sorry I am saying all this. I probably wouldn’t be even thinking these things, let alone writing them down, if it were not all over between Barbara and me, which it is, but I have faced that now and I can say what I like and what I feel honestly and freely. If you want to write back, even if it is only to tell me to stop bothering you, the above address will find me. I am doing nothing apart from taking long walks, reading books and lying on my bed staring at the ceiling. I have told the practice I will not be back for a month. I have not told Barbara where I am and I do not want her to know.

Love

John Goldsmith

From:

Elizabeth Price

112 Heathland Avenue

Putney, SW15 3LE

18 November

To:

John Goldsmith

Hôtel du Levant

Rue Gobineau

Béziers

France

My dear John,

I cannot tell you how nice it was to get your letter.

Gerald left me around two weeks ago. I had had no warning whatsoever that anything like this was about to take place. There are have been times in our marriage – I think, overall, a period of, say, eight or nine years out of the forty – when each of us viewed the other with almost total contempt, but for the last year or so I had thought we were getting on fairly well. He just failed to return one evening and left me a message saying he had ‘gone away to think about our relationship’. Why one needs to go away to think about anything I really do not understand.

He had seemed rather upset to learn about the death of Pamela Larner. I couldn’t really understand why. That sounds callous, but she was widely disliked when alive. I fail to see why death should improve a person’s character. Mike Larner, he told me, seems to think she was murdered; I am sure there was no shortage of candidates for the role of ending the Putney Supermother’s life.

I was fairly sure she was having an affair with Sam Dimmock. The way she howled with laughter every time he started on one of his funny stories about gum disease. The way she propped that odiously small chin of hers on one of her tiny fists and looked up into his face when he started on why it was that Maggie Thatcher was a good thing and we were all effete Londoners who knew nothing about life whereas he was a West Country lad in touch with the sea and the soil.

She was a woman who in spite, or perhaps because of, the lip gloss and the nail varnish was a byword for malevolence and the worst kind of competitive mothering. I seem to remember, one evening in San Marco di Stefano, Barbara and I playing a game in which we had to count the number of sentences she spoke that began with ‘Barnaby’. She seemed, as far as I recall, to have embraced almost every subservient role offered to women apart from that of air hostess. And that perky little walk! And the tiny, tiny bottom! And, oh, God, the trouser suit! And the way she shrieked on receipt of the most trivial kind of information!

She couldn’t spell, either. I don’t know why that should have irritated me so much – but it did.

His hearing about her death seemed to cast him into gloom. He kept gnawing his fingers and muttering about how we none of us had got that long and he should have been nicer to her. ‘You haven’t seen her for years!’ I said. ‘And when you did know her I don’t think you could possibly have been nicer to her. I am assuming you drew the line at sexual intercourse.’

He didn’t say anything to that. I have always assumed that Gerald went off and screwed people from time to time. His testosterone level has always been way off the scale. Whenever he stopped trying to bamboozle me into having anal intercourse and started bringing flowers home, I assumed he had found someone else to penetrate. So long as he didn’t bother me with the details it didn’t really worry me.

He said, in his phone message, that there wasn’t anyone else; and, for some reason, I am inclined to believe him. Unless, of course, he has found someone young. That thought does give me a chill. I don’t think I could bear to watch him prance around with someone of Julia’s age. Older men are such fools, aren’t they? Except you, of course.

I can’t say that what you said in your sweet letter came as a surprise. I think we all pretty much know what everyone is thinking about everyone else for most of the time, don’t we? We have to pretend we don’t, of course. The world would be an orgy of sex and recrimination if we admitted or listened to or – God help us – acted on our awareness of this very simple fact; but I do remember so many times with you, as our children were growing up, when I found myself thinking, Suppose I wasn’t with Gerry. Suppose John wasn’t with Barbara.

And now that seems to be the case; and I don’t know what I think about it.

Well, I’m glad it’s out in the open. I am glad about that. I’m glad, too, that you spoke so eloquently in your letter about a subject that is dearer to me than any other. Children, as an American writer says somewhere, are all, and yet our society persists in treating them as an alien species. For me the greatest joy in life has been watching my children develop. I can hear Gerry’s voice in my head as I write that: ‘Develop? Is that the right word for what Conrad did? Develop?’

My own parents, both of whom were teachers, often muttered dark things about the basically evil nature of humanity – especially when you were talking about eight-year-olds – my mum, as I think I once told you, ended as a primary-school headmistress in Salford. As a teacher myself, I never felt that. Perhaps because the girls at Dame Veronica’s came from nice homes and their parents paid thousands of pounds a year for the privilege of being taught Tacitus by the likes of me – but I don’t think it was just that. Virtue is not only the ornament of the poor, whatever the Marxists may say. My middle-class pupils amaze me every day with their capacity for joy and charity; perhaps I should be surprised to find such charm among the daughters of estate agents, bankers and high-powered solicitors, but I am not. I’m simply grateful for it and every day, for me, it is a privilege to be facing the young, with their energy, their endless questions and their capacity to look at things in a different way from me.

We think the same about life, you and I. I’ve felt, at times, writing this letter, that we had never really met at all and we had made contact with each other through a dating agency. Maybe writing letters teaches you that you do not really know your correspondent, even if they are someone with whom you have been reasonably intimate for years. This oldest and most trusted path to communication, perhaps because it allows us time to consider our thoughts before trying to make sense of them for other people, allows us to remake our relationships, even with friends of long standing, as we grope our way through each sentence.