Cooee (7 page)

I am poor Gandie, too. The episode upsets me and I spend the next day or so dangerously close to tears. It doesn't do, to stir all this up. Borrow senses my distress and shoves his damp muzzle into my hand, making those high-pitched staccato noises that are his way of saying:
Never mind
.

Strangely enough, however, the memories Sophie's interest awakens aren't so much of Max as of my mother's opposition to him. She was dying at the time: it gave her pronouncements an unfair and entirely spurious moral authority. Dying but not yet bedridden, as she was by the end: I remember her, engulfed by my father's old recliner chair, clasping and unclasping her tiny hands that always reminded me of the paws of some small and ineffectual animal: a rabbit, perhaps, or a guinea pig.

I hadn't left Steve yet, but I knew I was going to. I'd brought Max to meet her the previous day, and now I'd dropped in to gloat, to savour her capitulation to his glamour.

To my astonishment, she had failed to succumb. At once suave and earnest, unfailingly courteous, sober and gentle and intelligent, he had sat with her for over an hour, but she was unmoved by him.

‘I don't like him,' she says, her hands starting their nervous wringing. She is looking down: she won't meet my eyes.

‘Sorry?' I am completely taken aback.

I knew Zoë didn't like Max, but I put that down to jealousy and to the puritanical elder-sister streak that had so frequently during our lives snuffed out the small flickering flames that had given me pleasure.

‘I don't like him. He's a con man, Isabel. I think he's a con man.'

‘You've been listening to Zoë,' I say, contemptuously.

‘What if I have? She's got sensible things to say. Why shouldn't I listen to her?'

‘She doesn't see straight on this.'
As on so much else
, I feel like adding.

‘It's not Zoë that isn't seeing straight.'

‘Mum,' I say. ‘Mum, I can't believe this. He's a gorgeous man, a lovely man. Can't you see how kind and thoughtful he is?' And how sexy, I wanted to say — how ravishingly, gloriously sexy. ‘Can't you see how we love each other?'

She shakes her head. ‘Zoë says he's very rich,' she offers, peeking at me suspiciously.

‘What's that got to do with it? It's not his money I'm in love with.'

‘No, Isabel: I know that, darling. I'm not accusing you of being mercenary. But where did he get his money from?'

‘He's an investor,' I say. ‘He's an investor, an entrepreneur.' I don't at this stage have a clue where Max's money comes from, but I don't want to admit it to her. He could have blown up the Mint, for all I know or care. It doesn't matter.

The recliner creaks slightly as my mother rocks. As she becomes more agitated, she rocks faster. ‘I don't know what's got into you, Isabel. You've got a lovely husband, lovely children. You've got everything a woman could possibly want. Career, money, security. And you're throwing it all away on this — this — mountebank.'

She releases the archaic word with a mouselike squeak. I say nothing. I am ridiculously disappointed.

‘I'm glad your father isn't still alive,' she says, almost vengefully. ‘He would be so upset. He loved you so much, Isabel. He was so proud of you.'

I think this is below the belt, and say so. My mother shrugs, weakly, peevishly. I know the cancer is causing her excruciating pain: the oncologist has told Zoë and me that she can't survive more than a year. I know this fact on its own should lead me to treat her kindly, but I am filled with anger at the unfairness of it all, and I say, more shortly than I mean to, that her opinion of Max is in any case quite immaterial, since he is in effect the summation and pinnacle of my heart's desire, all I have ever wanted in life, and nothing will change this.

I probably don't put this argument as well as I could; and inside me some small voice to which I am not listening tells me it isn't a convincing argument anyway. I am, however, by now irretrievably committed and, no matter how little I intend to wound my mother, I find myself launched on a tirade about the general unreasonableness of my family and the degree to which it has (especially Zoë) always conspired to ruin my life.

My mother may be a shrunken and vulnerable old woman, but she is stung by my remarks and retaliates with remarks of her own. From this point the outcome is predictable, and five minutes later I am slamming out of the house, leaving my dying mother weeping.

Zoë rings me that night (when I am in the middle of a stand-up battle with Steve) and bitterly rebukes me for my selfishness and cruelty.

‘I couldn't help it,' I say. ‘I can't help it if nobody likes what I'm doing, if nobody likes the new direction my life is taking. I can't help it if you don't try to enter into my feelings, if you don't try to sympathise with me and support me.'

‘I've never done anything but support you,' snaps Zoë.

This is so manifestly and thoroughly untrue that I cannot think of any way to respond. Zoë misinterprets my silence as shamed acquiescence and, ill-advisedly, continues, in what she considers a softened tone.

‘Minky, dear, you must think harder about all this. You're throwing your life away for nothing more than an infatuation. Think of Steve and the children. Think of all you've achieved together. You're not thinking of other people's lives, Minky.'

‘Nobody's thinking of my life,' I reply, right on the cusp between screaming and sobbing. ‘You're all talking as if I've engineered this whole thing. It's not my fault. I can't help it, that this has happened to me.'

‘That's what you've always said,' says Zoë. ‘
I can't help it. It's not my fault.
' She modifies her voice to produce a self-pitying whimper with which she intends to parody me. ‘It's what you've always said. Nothing's ever your fault. You know what I think? I think it's time you grew up.'

I slam the phone down.

None of it is edifying. Even I can tell that. But to me my fate seems so inescapable. I cannot begin to understand why nobody likes this glorious man who has entered my life and so thoroughly transformed it; but, since they don't like him and are therefore unable to sympathise with my feelings, they leave me no choice. I was prepared to meet them halfway, to explain and elaborate and perhaps even (to some minuscule extent) compromise. But it's their fault: they won't meet me, so I'm left with no option.

Why can't they see it? It's as if they view the world — or me, anyway — from behind the wobbling curtain of a giant heat-haze, and the vibrations through which they gaze, discontentedly squinting and peering, distort their vision. And the more they gaze, the worse it gets, and the more mistaken they are. I'm the only one with clear vision.

The next time I see my mother, we more or less make up. But she's still brimming with disapproval, and I'm still full of love (though not for her) and despair, and we are each profoundly dissatisfied with the other.

And, suddenly, everyone's on
Steve's
side. Nobody, so far as I can tell, cares about
me
, about what I might have had to put up with in this marriage, about the blanknesses and gaps that have grown and stretched into cavernous black holes during the seventeen years of our alleged connubial bliss. Nobody is even interested in hearing my point of view.

Dominic, certainly, has never been interested. Locked in his dark, elegant shell, double-insulated against the insistent disharmonies of life, as remote from me as if he lived in the Himalayas, Dominic doesn't care. He never has.

With every meeting a skirmish, each of us caught in increasingly plastic rules of engagement where nothing, really, is off-limits any more, we meet in a kind of no-man's-land from which all mother–son tetherings have been ruthlessly stripped. Not by me, I might add. I don't know how it came to this. We meet; he has a go at me; I have a go back. What am I meant to do when he's so consistently aggressive? Ignore him? Curl up and whimper?

I certainly won't give up on him. One day, I'm sure he'll return to me. Well, approach me might be more accurate: he hasn't ever been near enough to me to return, precisely.

But I really tried with Dominic. We had lunch one day. I suggested that he meet me at Southbank. He works in the city, so it wasn't far to ask him to come. When I rang to invite him, he hesitated. I suppose he was simply surprised, which was not an unreasonable response. I hadn't ever made a request like this before; but it was shortly after I'd had a brief exchange with him — at some family occasion, I suppose — during which I had thought I'd detected in his eyes, in his voice, in his expression, some sentiment not totally alien to, let us say, mild affection. It seemed worth a try.

‘It's all right,' I said, trying to make it sound bantering rather than testy. ‘I don't have nefarious designs.'

He gave a small cough that might have started as a laugh. Or might not. ‘No, I'm sure you don't. It's only that it's a busy week, and I'm just not sure …'

‘Make it next week, then,' I offered. ‘It's not urgent.'

He seemed to debate with himself over this. I pictured him, pencil poised over diary. Except, of course, that he probably does all this kind of thing on computer, or palm pilot.

‘No,' he said, finally. ‘No, let's make it this week, then.'

I'm always very proud of Dominic, when I'm with him publicly. He's so spruce, so damn good-looking. I always think, well, even if I was a bad wife to Steve (not that I admit that, not on balance anyway), I gave him this glorious son.

It's interesting, the categories we invent for ourselves. Bad wife, good wife. Good mother, bad mother. When I married Steve, I intended to be a good wife. It was an explicit resolution I made. When I had the children, I promised myself quite passionately that I would be a good mother. I was determined in this endeavour. I'm still not sure where it all went wrong, at what point these naïve aspirations started to trip each other up.

Good mother, bad mother.

Dominic is six minutes late, but I forgive him as I see him striding across the restaurant. I see women watching him, as he approaches me. One woman — just a girl, really, with blonde shoulder-length hair, in a rather pretty purple shirt — turns to look at the person with whom Dominic is lunching.

I've gone to trouble, of course. I'm wearing a black pant suit with a biscuity-coloured shirt and an expensive silk scarf with a kind of butterscotch and cream pattern of leaves on it. Whatever Dominic thinks of me, I don't want him to think I'm daggy. It's important to me that he doesn't mind being seen with me, even if he minds being
with
me. The purple-shirted blonde decides I'm hardly competition and transfers her attention back to Dominic.

We don't kiss, of course. We never do. He nods, warily. I try to beam. He looks alarmed. I modify my expression.

I suppose I have imagined this as a leisurely and perhaps anecdotal lunch, both of us relaxing over a good wine, the river sparkling outside the restaurant's windows on this cool, sunny afternoon. It has seemed to me entirely possible, in this atmosphere, that all kinds of boundaries might be crossed, all kinds of fences knocked flying. In fact, as soon as Dominic sits down he glances at his watch.

‘Sorry I'm late,' he says, but cursorily, as though he doesn't really mean it. ‘It's a hell of a week. There's a lot happening.'

‘We could have made it some other time,' I say, trying not to sound vexed. ‘I told you, it wasn't urgent. We could have made it next week.'

He runs his hand through his hair. ‘The thing is, Isabel, there's always a lot happening. It's quite hard to plan ahead. It seemed better to do it straightaway.'

The waiter looms and distributes menus. I study mine, and pass the wine list to him.

‘Oh no,' says Dominic, as though shocked by the mere suggestion that he might imbibe an alcoholic beverage. ‘I'll just have a mineral water, thanks. You have a wine, if you'd like: they do it by the glass here.'

‘You don't want even a glass?'

‘No, honestly. I've got to work this afternoon, you know.'

‘Well, yes, but just one glass …'

Dominic is shaking his head, and I break off. If he doesn't want a drink, he doesn't want a drink, and naturally I'm not going to heckle him about it. But it's a bit of a shame, because it makes me feel that if I have a glass of wine I'm somehow dissipated (bad mother), and, because I'm nervous, I want a glass of wine. It'll settle me down.

I try not to look disappointed, and study the list of trendy little entrées and mains. Dominic pushes the menu away almost immediately. The waiter materialises at his side. What's his secret? I can't usually get hold of a waiter within fifteen minutes minimum.

‘I'll go for the pasta of the day,' says Dominic. ‘Isabel?'

I haven't actually made up my mind, but I say I'll have the same, entrée size.

‘Have a glass of the house white,' says Dominic. ‘It's good.'