Cooee (9 page)

For obvious reasons, this particular scenario isn't one I treat myself to except when I'm truly depressed, but on certain occasions it does afford a kind of odd, luxurious enjoyment. In many ways it's a scene I find more immediately attractive than contemplation of either of my weddings, or for that matter anyone else's.

Strange, how we circle around these milestone occasions. We eventually decide they were of significantly less importance than we'd thought at the time (what did it matter whether I married Steve or not, after all, in retrospect?), but still we open the albums, still we dream over the pictures, wondering. Mind you, I've done it only because Sophie has egged me on, but once she's awakened my interest I find I'll spend longer than is sensible poring, and remembering trivia the detail of which had lain slumbering in the farthest recesses of my mind for (for instance) thirty years.

Sophie in her recent pursuit of family weddings has shown little interest in Zoë's, but I suppose that's natural: I'm her grandmother, after all. Zoë's more distant, just a great-aunt. In those days it mattered more, getting married: it was the thing young girls had rammed down their throats, the thing they were taught to regard as the very apex of aspiration, the miraculous consummation of our lives. Zoë and I were lucky that our parents judged we ought to have careers, too, or at least the option of careers: many parents didn't think like that.

And Zoë's five years older than I am (the same distance, coincidentally, as there is between Kate and Dominic, and between Sophie and Liam: the women of our family all seem to wait five years before the progenitive urge returns). But it meant a lot, then, that Zoë was five years older and yet I was married first.

I was aware of the superiority it conferred on me, and I was not above taking advantage of it, either, after all the years of bullying and condescension. She did not marry until two years after I did, at the end of a protracted courtship: she was twenty-seven by the time she stalked down the aisle on Dad's arm. I believe I felt her mortification more keenly than she did herself, to have reached this ripe old age before entering into the holy state of matrimony. Strange, how things change.

At the time of Zoë's wedding I was heavily pregnant with Kate, who spent most of the ceremony alternating between kicking viciously at my bladder and bearing down on it with agonising determination. Zoë had worn an ivory silk thing, which to my mind somehow contrived to shout its understated elegance to the world (with her figure, she certainly couldn't have got away with frills and froth), and Henry had simpered above a tie that didn't suit him.

I found the whole thing fatiguing and profoundly uncomfortable and exceptionally boring; I remembered also feeling disproportionate relief upon reaching the end of the service without Kate's having caused a disaster.

I'd been relieved, though, that I didn't have to play bridesmaid. Nowadays you see young women tittupping down the aisle eight months gone — and they're the brides, let alone the bridesmaids — but in those times it was more rigid, decorous — call it what you will. It wasn't entirely a bad thing, having notions of decorum.

At any rate, I wasn't expected to participate. I sat through the ceremony, breathing heavily and wishing passionately, desperately, that the baby would stop its demoniac activity. Steve beamed beside me. He was so proud: it was hilarious yet strangely moving. I couldn't have had more fuss made of me, more attention drawn to me, if I'd been anticipating a virgin birth. Which I certainly wasn't.

Zoë, entering connubial bliss, seemed largely indifferent. She was an extremely competent bride, avoiding most of the available nuptial excesses, the flimflam and the fairy floss.

I had actually pretended, at my wedding, to be a little more flustered than I really was, in order to present an image of coy feminine confusion calculated (if I had only realised it) to confirm unenlightened prejudices still clung to by the congregation. My blushing uncertainty enabled Steve to assume the manly protective profile for which he yearned. He actually referred to me in his speech as ‘the little woman'. I don't think any element of self-parody entered into this nomenclature.

My sister, by contrast, adopted no girlish strategies, no circumlocutory fluffiness. She was wise enough, I suppose, to know she couldn't get away with it. Businesslike, sturdy, methodical, she superintended such challenges as table arrangements and flowers with military precision. A wedding was like a lesson: it had to be planned and programmed and rehearsed and, finally, got through with minimal disruption, discipline being maintained and the whole proving an edifying experience for all concerned. Henry came along for the ride: that was as much as he had to do with any of it. Zoë steered her way through it all with, so far as I could see, minimal consultation with him. A likely prevision of their marriage, I thought.

Henry was such a puzzle to me. He taught science at the school where Zoë taught history. He still does. When Zoë first brought him home, I couldn't fathom him at all. Even in those days, when (I freely admit) many strange customs obtained, most men of Henry's age, which I suppose was his late twenties, didn't customarily wear three-piece suits.

I'd known Henry for over a year before I saw him in anything else. It made him look like an undertaker. He had a disconcerting habit of tilting his head back, appraising you through the lower half of his spectacles. Balding and bony, slightly stooped even then, a gold filling conspicuous in a front tooth, meticulous in his speech and careful in his movements, he seemed to me desiccated, ponderous and boring.

I recall teasing Zoë about him.

Blind as a bat, bald as an eagle
Henry isn't sexy; Henry isn't regal
Caught like flies in amber in his sober three-piece suit
Henry isn't clever and nor is Henry cute.

I know it wasn't nice of me. Zoë wasn't nice to me, either. Anyway, she didn't see the joke.

My parents liked Henry. Well, they liked Steve, too, so it shows what their judgement in these matters was like. My mother thought Steve's blond, square good looks and his doglike adoration of me made him a delightful and endearing young man, and a suitor of eligibility
par excellence
. The irremediably comic element I detected in Henry was not visible to her.

‘She can't want to
live
with him,' I remember saying, one evening after dinner. I think I was drying the dishes at the time.

‘Why not?' My mother would have been wearing the bright pink rubber gloves that she always donned for this task, drawing them with elaborate care over her tiny hands. She was a slow and careful washer of dishes. It drove me mad, having to hang around while she scrubbed at specks minute as atoms and warily held spotless glasses up to the light.

‘Oh, Lord, Mum. He's so frantically boring. He's such an old man. How could she even think of marrying him?' What I really meant was:
How could she think of going to bed with him?

‘He's a sensible man,' commented my mother.

‘Have you heard the way he tries to tell jokes?'

‘Delivering a good punchline isn't a mandatory skill for a husband.'

‘No, but …'

‘Actually,' said my mother, ‘he has a good sense of humour. Very dry.'

I snorted and my mother frowned.

‘He'll make her very happy.'

‘They're not even engaged yet. Are they?'

‘They will be,' said my mother with quiet certitude. ‘They suit each other. You might find him unglamorous, Isabel, but he's a reliable, good-tempered man with a great capacity for loyalty. And he loves Zoë.'

I think I didn't care enough to argue the point. If Zoë wanted to wreck her future by attaching herself permanently to a tedious freak with bad teeth and bifocals, that was her funeral. I was getting on with my life — or that was how it seemed to me at the time. Amazing though it seems to me now, I was busy planning to marry Steve.

I'm not sure, now, why. It wasn't as if I was completely bluffed by the whole marriage scenario. I wanted my degree; I wanted my career. I wanted it all, I suppose. Well, why not?

It was becoming evident that having it all might be possible: young women of my time, graduating in the early 1970s, were just starting to regard themselves as forerunners to a brave new world where injustice would never again be based on gender and where nothing would dare to intervene between oneself and the star one decided intrepidly to follow. Some of it has come true; a lot hasn't. In those days, there were no templates to follow, no blueprints to study. Not for careers, not for parenting, not for anything much. Mind you, I don't think you learn much about being a parent from anything but workplace training.

Being a grandparent, however, is different. I can't believe how dead easy it is, especially after all the times my own children ate me up alive and smacked their lips over me. It's so effortless, when Sophie wanders into my house in the late afternoon. ‘Hi, Gandie,' she calls, and comes to give me a big hug and kiss. Never anything forced, never anything other than natural and affectionate and loving. It makes it so easy, to love back.

I must say, however, that the minuteness of her attention to the detail of my life is starting to wear thin.
No more wedding snaps
, I pray, silently. I've had my fill of staring down old aisles and those who people them.

But she takes a different tack, the next time. I'd almost prefer the wedding snaps.

‘Look what I found, Gandie,' she says, rummaging in her bag. ‘You'll never guess.'

I wouldn't have, either. It's a photograph, again; but this time it's not of a person but a portrait. It's a photograph of Max's portrait. The original — the portrait, I mean, not its subject — stands face to the wall, covered in brown paper, in my garage. It's a long time since I've taken it out and checked it for mould or rat nibbles or anything else.

The photograph is rather dog-eared and, since it is taken from a lower angle, presents an odd perspective on the painting. Max's head seems, somehow, further away than it ought to be, and his stance appears awkward. Max was never awkward.

‘It's Max, isn't it?'

‘Yes, honey. It's Max.'

‘Did you paint it, Gandie?'

‘Me? Goodness no, darling. I just mess around in watercolours, and all I do are sketches. This is a photo of a proper oil portrait.'

‘Where is it now?'

‘I don't know,' I lie.

‘Did Max take it with him when he went away?'

‘Yes,' I say, relieved to have so neatly packaged a solution ready to hand. ‘Yes, he took it with him.'

‘Who painted it?'

‘Honey, where did you get this photograph?' I've never seen it before. I certainly didn't take it.

Sophie looks equivocal.

‘I just found it,' she says, airily. She sees that I am looking hard at her and shifts slightly.

‘Sophie?'

‘I found it in one of Mum's drawers. I wasn't looking for it, or anything. Mum knew I was looking in her drawer. She was going to lend me some perfume and she told me to go and look for it in her drawer. And this was stuck at the bottom of it.'

‘Does she know you've got it, Sophie?'

‘Well. Not really, I guess. I thought I'd just put it back and, you know, everything would be cool. She wouldn't mind, I'm sure. I just wanted to show it to you, Gandie. Tell me about it, go on.'

I know I should be cross with her, but she can always wheedle me. And I love it when we share a secret from which Kate is excluded. I know this is mean and unworthy of me; I know Kate is her mother and she ought to be more open with her mother. But the fact is, I love it when Sophie says: ‘This is just for us, Gandie, okay?'

But I don't want to talk to her about the portrait. I fudge it, the way I am fudging so many things with Sophie, these days.

‘It was a present,' I say. ‘It was for his birthday.'

‘Which birthday? A special birthday?'

‘Yes, it was his fiftieth birthday.' I am aware that to Sophie fifty must seem astonishingly old, momentously old. But that's what it was for: Max's fiftieth birthday.

We'd grown fond of a gallery in Richmond: one of the artists who exhibited there regularly had caught our eye. She did portraits in oils — rather fluid, elongated things, almost El Greco-ish or even Dobellian, their exaggerated perspectives delicate and witty, their hues gentle, the likenesses in the best of them magical, wondrous things that caught essential quirks and personalities as well as simply registering identities.

Her name was Hilary Jacoby and she was a funny, fey wisp of a woman, with pale puffball hair and hard green eyes that to your immense surprise you found looking right through you, into your innermost soul, just when you'd decided she was right off the planet.

I commissioned a portrait of Max for his fiftieth birthday; he promised to commission one of me for mine. We were going to hang them side by side in the lounge. ‘There'll be a hundred years of life up there on our wall,' he said.

I thought of this when I turned fifty, but wasn't tempted to do anything about it. Why commission a portrait of yourself for yourself? I haven't heard of Hilary for years: she may not even be alive any more. She was only a little older then than I am now, but who knows what's happened to her.