Family Album (34 page)

Ingrid does not much revisit that time—the time she went away. She remembers working in a café. The man she remembers only vaguely. It is a long time ago now, but she does remember that there had been that sense of deracination, as though she were in the wrong place. And so eventually one night she had walked through the Allersmead front door once more, suitcases in hand, and that was that.

She remembers this, but without great interest. These days, she is interested in vegetables. She will grow curly kale this year, and salsify, and this new kind of carrot that they say does not get the fly. She does not know the word for salsify in her own language.

 

 

 

 

S
andra sits watching models undulate along a catwalk. She is thinking about bathroom suites and light fittings. When at last the undulations cease she realizes that she has made no notes, that she has not—to put it bluntly—been involved at all.

Can this be? At thirty-eight can she have entirely lost interest in fashion? Ex-fashion writer, ex-fashion correspondent of a daily newspaper, manageress of a thriving Rome boutique, is she in fact a sham? She rather thinks that she is, and does not care. She will order one or two garments for the boutique, guided by a well-honed instinct, because commerce must continue; she will greet a few acquaintances with exaggerated delight, and then scarper, thinking black marble and rose-tinted uplighters. People want the works, the wow factor. Italians especially.

Property development is
so
fun. This is her third flat, her third buy-low, sell-high (you hope). She is fascinated by the numbers, by the elegant conversion of
x
number of euros into
x + y
euros, which you then plunge into the next property so that in due course you will have
x + y + z
. She enjoys the juggling of mortgages and builders’ quotes, the pas de deux with the builder, the site manager, the bank manager. She positively revels in kitchen designs, underfloor heating, and precise shades of paint. She has immersed herself in the literature, and is now an expert in cutting-edge Italian interior decor. She knows exactly what will lure the kind of person who will buy this kind of flat: chic, pricey, enviable.

The show dealt with, she is now free, having negotiated herself a four-day week at the boutique. Free to develop property. She has a flat to look at, though in fact she is some way away from her next purchase, but you need to keep an eye on the market, and then she must visit the site, to talk black marble and other matters with Luigi, the builder.

The flat that she sees is not especially tempting, though the price is informative. She drives to the site—if absorption into the hectic progress of Roman traffic can be called driving—and finds a parking space, by a miracle. The building is an old one, its half dozen apartments mostly decked out for the twenty-first century, except for Sandra’s, which was inhabited until recently by an elderly widow and is ripe for the full treatment. It is now a wasteland of trailing wires, unplastered walls, and builders’ rubble, through which she picks her way to locate Luigi, who receives her with enthusiasm. She and Luigi get on. This is their second project together. Luigi likes feisty women and knows a sharp lady when he meets one. Sandra’s fluent but occasionally deficient Italian is a matter of amusement to him, and he has made it his business to extend her vocabulary into the more arcane regions of builder talk.

Together, they pore over some brochures. Luigi approves of black marble; he too knows the market. There is a slight skirmish over door fittings—a question of price and the budget. Then Luigi’s mobile goes and he steps over to the window, with an apology.

There is an excited conversation. He returns; his daughter has just been delivered of her baby, a son. A first grandchild. Luigi is exuberant, but then checks his rapture. He is remembering that Sandra is without children—some tact is in order. It would not occur to him that her childlessness might be by choice. He returns sternly to the matter of doorknobs.

Sandra is not fooled. She had noted Luigi’s complicated expression of condolence when her lack of
bambini
cropped up, a while ago now. A man—Mario has occasionally answered the phone when Luigi has rung her at home—but no
bambini
. Luigi has five, and has refrained from mentioning them too often, from then on.

Last week, Sandra had an abortion. Her second. The first was twelve years ago and she had thought that couldn’t happen again, no way, but evidently it could, and did. So she has had to take an unscheduled holiday, and go to London. No doubt there are ways and means, in a Catholic country, but she hadn’t the time to hang around and find out, so it was a matter of some phone calls and a flight booking, and an unpleasant couple of days in London, incognito and incommunicado. You do not really ring up old friends to say: “I’m over briefly for an abortion—let’s do lunch.”

Luigi would be appalled. Mario is something of a lapsed Catholic but even so he wasn’t too happy about it. He and Sandra have been together for two years, and it was clearly understood that Sandra did not intend to have children, and Mario—who is a few years younger—wasn’t bothered either way at the moment. But when it came to Sandra’s terse announcement some atavistic response kicked in. There were a few protests, not too convinced, which faded away in the face of Sandra’s calm resolve and, perhaps, thoughts of his own about the implications of a baby. Mario is a photographer, and likes the good life.

Sandra changes men about every three to four years. She is not especially proud of this record, but it is the way she is, so what can you do? There comes a moment, always, when he has become a bit irritating, a bit boring, when she knows that their time is up. There has then to be a process of detachment; she tries to minimize damage and complications. The men find that they have been gently distanced rather than discarded and, if realistic, will move on of their own accord. Since Sandra always makes sure that their current shared home is in her name, it is the men who have to go elsewhere, rather than her. Once, there was sufficient fallout from the breakup to make it a good idea for Sandra to look for a radical change. This brought her to Rome, a few years ago, when the world of London journalism became rather too small a pond for both her and her ex-lover. She had always relished Italy; she had always fancied the idea of running a boutique. So go for it, Sandra.

Sandra tends to succeed, for perfectly good reasons. She is resourceful, she can work hard; she is also personable, shrewd, and capable of opportunism. When young, she prospered in fashion magazines, rocketing from tea girl through copywriter to an editorial chair. But she is also restless; just as men become a touch tedious in time, so also do jobs. When magazines grew stale, she moved into mainstream journalism, purveying fashion for a high-circulation daily. And now there is the boutique, whose owner has found Sandra’s skills as a buyer, along with her exotic English charm—and good looks—an irresistible combination to customers. The boutique does not know about Sandra’s new interest—none of their business—and so is unaware that perhaps its days are numbered, where she is concerned.

Mario does know about Sandra the property developer, and has remarked that if she goes on at this rate she is on track to becoming a wealthy woman. Sandra points out that you can also come a cropper, in this game, so don’t count on it. Mario jokes that nevertheless he will hang in there, in the hopes of becoming a kept man. But he knows Sandra, and is well aware that she does not carry passengers; he appreciates the nature of their relationship, and will probably jump before he is pushed. Sandra’s recent visit to London gave pause for thought; he saw that she meant it, about children, and he might in time feel differently himself. He is an Italian male, and has a mother who drops hints. She has made it apparent that she did not think much of Sandra, when he took her to visit: too old, too foreign, undoubtedly deficient in domestic skills.

Sandra has never taken Mario or, indeed, any of her men to visit Allersmead. She does not much go there herself—blows in once in a while with a fistful of expensive presents: classy wine, gastronomic delicacies. The presents, she fully recognizes, denote unease of some kind, or guilt, or the need to compensate, or all three. She sends lavish flowers on her mother’s birthdays.

She found herself thinking of Allersmead, of family, over the time of the abortion, and sees this as an indication of weakness, of regression. Abortion is notoriously traumatic. She had remembered a period of weakness on that previous occasion, when she was much younger. She had been caught weeping in the loo by a colleague on the magazine, and had confided. The colleague was all sympathy and worldly wisdom, and advice: “I mean, some people go for counseling, and you may want to think of that but quite honestly I think a long talk with someone close to you . . . Does your mother know?”

And Sandra had cried, “It’s because of my mother that I don’t want to have children!”

Is it? Sandra today would be more circumspect, more worldly-wise herself. She does not want children because they would not be compatible with her preferred lifestyle, she feels no particular affinity with children (luckily), and, yes, because of that bedrock of memory, that place in the mind, which has triggered certain reactions, certain reservations, certain revulsions.

Never, ever, will she live with a bathroom that is infested with plastic bath toys. Never will she spoon gooey slop into a gaping dribbling infant mouth. Never will her home be a shrine decked out with child art, crude clay animals, customized mugs, and an acreage of commemorative photography. And all right, that is Allersmead, but how otherwise would she know what she must avoid? She was trained by Allersmead, habituated, and thus she knows what she does not want. Perhaps that is why, right now, she is creating Roman apartments that are as far removed from Allersmead as a penthouse from a beach hut. Though, that said, when she looks at Allersmead with detachment, with new eyes, she can see just what she could do with it: that Edwardian stuff is the business nowadays, you’d beef that up with period features—more stained glass, freestanding baths with claw feet, mahogany-paneled bathrooms—landscape garden, tennis court, croquet lawn.

But the house was just the backdrop. What went on in it was
her
creation, in every sense. Motherhood was her profession, and I have no idea if she fell into it or planned it from the moment she was a five-year-old with her first doll. Suffice it that that was what she did. My mother—our mother—set out to be the archetypal mother, the universal lap.

Sandra can remember sitting on that lap, just. She can remember trying to push Gina off it. She loved her mother, maybe she still does, but she finds it odd now that that one word covers such a range of feeling. Love of a parent has absolutely nothing in common with love of chocolate, say, or love of nude bathing, let alone—let absolutely and definitely alone—sexual love.

And one must not confuse sexual love with love of sex. Do I, Sandra, love sex? Well, I certainly enjoy it, but not in the abstract, not the activity per se; it has to be carried out with the right person, it is an exchange, it involves two of you. Which is where the love aspect comes into it. What you are feeling about the other person conditions the success of the sex.

She remembers that boy at Crackington Haven. Of course: the initiation.

Such a letdown. The disappointment. Life’s first climactic moment, one had been led to believe, and, instead, a few minutes of embarrassed probing and grunting. As for climax—forget it. But of course one felt nothing for the boy—liked him well enough, I suppose, but love was still well out of sight. Falling into it, falling out of it. First time
that
happens you’re in grown-up country, oh dear me, yes. And the one thing you recognize is that this is entirely unlike anything you’ve ever felt for another person before. The prefix does help a bit—
in
love. You are not so much engaged in loving someone, you are consumed by the emotion, drowning in it, barely able to surface for long enough to function normally. And one wouldn’t really want to go back there either.

Actually Sandra still falls in love, but it is nowadays a more tempered process, more considered than those untamed onsets of youth; she would be capable of pulling back if she saw that this was going to be a thoroughly bad idea. But she requires that each new man should provoke something of the old fever; if not, this will be nothing but a sexual deal, and Sandra considers that poor taste. Perhaps she is a romantic?

Romantic or not, she finds monogamy hard to understand. Just one relationship, till death you do part?

Allersmead again. Look at them. Mum and Dad. We can’t be talking romance, surely? Love? Well, who’s to know, who’s to have the shred of an idea? Other people are inscrutable, aren’t they? Especially those you know best.

But one person? When there is all that variety out there; all those intriguingly different men.

Sandra does indeed have monogamous friends and acquaintances, and they do not seem to be in a state of permanent frustration. She accepts that it is perhaps she who is out of step but is not bothered by this. She has chosen to live thus—a serial partner, if you like—and it has suited her very well. She has even managed to remain on amiable terms with her former men, except for that London journalist who took exceptional umbrage when the curtain fell.

She is thinking of him, with a certain indifference, when she leaves the site after her consultation with Luigi. She had picked up an English paper at a kiosk and saw his byline.
Plus ça change:
same paper, same theme. He is a political commentator, and she is only too ready to agree that politics is an infinitely more compelling subject than fashion, but it is equally driven by winds of change over which you have no control, and it was this feature of journalism that had eventually become tiresome to Sandra—the way in which you were obliged to react to remorseless circumstance. There comes a point when it is hard work to drum up an enthusiastic commentary on the new season’s catwalk offerings.