Playing for the Ashes (15 page)

“It’s under control.” I swirled the gin in my glass.

“Olivia, I’d like you to know that I didn’t come to see you because you made it quite clear you wouldn’t have me there.”

“That’s right, Miriam.” I tapped my
fin
gernail against my glass, noting how the sound got deeper when I moved from bottom to top, in direct reversal of what one would expect.

“When I couldn’t bring you home the same night, I had to tell your father something so—”

“He can’t deal with the truth?”

“So I told him that you’ve been in Cambridge, seeing about what you’ll need to do to be readmitted.”

I laughed through my nose.

“And that’s what I want you to do,” she said.

“I see.” I drained my glass. I thought about having a third drink, but the
fir
st two were acting on me more quickly than I had expected. “And if I don’t?”

“I imagine you can guess the consequences.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That your father and I have decided we’re willing to support you at the University but nowhere else. That neither one of us is going to stand by and watch you throw your life away.”

“Ah. Thanks. Got it.” I set my glass on the sideboard, crossed the room, and pushed through the doorway.

“You can think about it until tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll want your decision in the morning.”

“All right,” I said and I thought, Stupid cow.

I went upstairs. My room was on the top floor of the house, and by the end of the climb my legs were shaking and the back of my neck was damp. I stood for a moment with my forehead resting against the door, thinking, Fuck her, fuck this, fuck them all. I needed to get out for the night. That was the cure and the ticket all at once. I headed for the bathroom where the light was better for fixing up my face. That was when Richie Brewster phoned.

“I miss you, baby,” he said. “It’s over. I left her. I want to make you feel good again.”

He was phoning from Julip’s, he said. The band had just signed on for a six-month gig. They’d been playing a circuit in The Netherlands. They’d scored some decent hashish in Amsterdam, they’d smuggled it out, Richie’s share had
Sweet Liv
imprinted all over it, it was just sitting back stage waiting for me to smoke it.

He said, “Remember how good things were at the Commodore? It’ll be better this time between us. I was a fool to walk out on you, Liv. You’re the best thing that’s happened in my life in years. I need you, baby. You make me make the music like no one else.”

I said, “I got rid of the kid. Three days ago. I’m not in the mood. Okay?”

Richie was nothing if not a musician. He didn’t miss a beat. He said, “Oh, baby. Baby. Oh hell.” I could hear him breathing. His voice got tight. “What can I say? I got scared, Liv. I ran. You came in too close. You made me feel things that I didn’t expect. Look, what I felt was too much for me. It was like nothing I’ve ever felt before. So I got scared. But my head’s on right this time. Let me make it up to you. Let me do things over. I love you, baby.”

“I don’t have the time for this sort of bullshit.”

“It won’t end like before. It won’t end at all.”

“Right.”

“Give me a chance, Liv. If I balls it up, I lose you. But give me a chance.” And then he just waited and breathed.

I let him do both. I liked the possibility of having Richie Brewster right where I wanted him.

He said, “Come on, Liv. Remember how it was? It’ll be better.”

I weighed the alternatives. There seemed to be three: a return to Cambridge and the noose-round-the-neck life that Cambridge implied, a stint on the streets trying to make it on my own, and another try with Richie. Richie who had a job, who had money, who had dope, and who was telling me he also had a place to live now, a ground-
flo
or flat in Shepherd’s Bush. And there was more, he said. But he didn’t have to tell me what it was. I knew because I knew him: parties, people, music, and action. How could I choose either Cambridge or the streets when, if I merely took myself to Soho this moment, I’d be in the middle of a real life?

I finished working on my face. I grabbed my bag and a coat. I told Mother I was going out. She was in the morning room at Grandmother’s davenport, addressing a stack of envelopes. She took her glasses off and pushed back her chair. She asked me where I was going.

I repeated myself. “Out.”

She knew, the way mothers always do. “You’ve heard from him, haven’t you? That was he on the phone.”

That was he
. English teachers. Even in a crisis, they keep their guard up against the grammar police. I didn’t reply.

She said, “Olivia, don’t do this. You can make something of your life. You’ve had a bad time, darling, but it doesn’t have to mean the end of your dreams. I’ll help you. Your father will help you. But you must meet us halfway.”

I could tell that she was building up a good head of preaching steam. Her eyes were taking on that fiery look.

I said, “Save it, Miriam. I’m out of here. I’ll be back later.”

The last was a lie, but I wanted her off my back. She quickly changed directions. “Olivia, you’re not well. You’ve had a bout of serious bleeding, not to mention an infection. You’ve had”—was it my imagination or did her lips have a hard time forming the word?—“surgery only three days ago.”

“I had an abortion,” I said and was pleased to see the shudder of aversion pass over her.

“I think it’s best that we forget and go on.”

“Right. Yes. You forget your way back to your envelopes while I go on.”

“Your father…Olivia. Don’t do this.”

“Dad’ll get over it. So will you.” I turned.

Her voice changed from reason to calculation. She said, “Olivia, if you leave this house tonight—after everything you’ve been through, after all our attempts to help you…” She faltered. I turned back. She was clutching her fountain pen like a dagger although her face looked perfectly calm.

“Yes?”

“I’ll wash my hands of you.”

“Get out the soap.”

I left her working on the appropriate bereft-mother expression. I went out into the night.

At Julip’s, I stood by the bar, watched the crowd, and listened to Richie play. At the end of the first set, he shouldered his way through the bodies, ignoring everyone who spoke to him, his eyes fixed on me like lead to a magnet. He took my hand and we went to the back, behind the stage. He said, “Liv. Oh, baby,” and he held me like crystal and played with my hair.

For the rest of the evening, I stayed back stage. We smoked hash between sets. He held me on his lap. He kissed my neck and my palms. He told the other blokes in the band to shove off when they came near us. He said that he was nothing without me.

We went out to a caff for coffee when Julip’s closed for the night. The lights were bright there, and I noticed right off that Richie didn’t look good. His eyes were more like a basset hound’s than they’d ever been. His skin was loose. I asked him had he been ill. He said that breaking off with his wife had been tougher on him than he thought it would be. He said, “Loretta still loves me, baby. I need you to know that because there’s not going to be any lies between us any longer. She didn’t want me to leave. She wants me back even now. But I can’t face things that way. Not without you.” He said the first week without me had shown him the truth. He said he’d spent the rest of the time trying to get up his courage to act on the truth. He said, “I’m weak, baby. But you give me strength like no one else.” He kissed the tips of my fingers. He said, “Let’s go home, Liv. Let me do it right.”

Things were different this time, just like he’d said. We weren’t dossing in some smelly dump three floors up with carpet squares on the floor and mice in the walls. We had a
fir
stfloor conversion with its own bay window and posh Corinthian pillars on either side of the porch. We had a fireplace decked out in ironwork and tiles. We had a bedroom and a kitchen and a bathtub with claws. We went to Julip’s each night where Richie’s band made the music. When the place closed down, we went on the town. We partied, we drank. We did coke whenever we got the chance. We even hit on some LSD. We danced, we shagged in the back of taxis, and we never once got home before three. We ate Chinese take-away in bed. We bought watercolours and painted on each other’s bodies. One night we got drunk, and he pierced my nose. In the late afternoons Richie jammed with the band, and when he got tired, he always turned to me.

This was it this time. I wasn’t a ninny. I knew the real thing when it slapped me in the face. But just to make sure, I waited two weeks for Richie to cock things up. When he didn’t, I went home to Kensington and collected my things.

Mother wasn’t there when I arrived. It was a Tuesday afternoon and the wind was blowing in gusts that came and went in that waving kind of pattern that always feels like someone in the sky is shaking out a big sheet. I rang the bell
fir
st. I waited, shoulders raised against the wind, and rang again. Then I remembered that Tuesday afternoons had always been Mother’s late day down on the Isle of Dogs, when she tutored the great minds from her fifth form classes, willing them to be unlocked so she could fill them with Truth. I had my house keys with me, so I let myself in.

I skipped up the stairs, feeling with every step like I was shedding yet another aspect of constipated, constrictive, bourgeois family life. What need had I for the smothering tedium prescribed by generations of English womanhood—not to mention my mother—doing the done thing? I had Richie Brewster and a real life to take the place of everything implied by this looming mausoleum in Kensington.

Out of here, I thought, out of here, out… of…here.

Mother had anticipated me. She’d gone to Cambridge and collected my gear. She’d packed it, along with every other possession of mine, in cardboard boxes which sat on my bedroom floor, neatly sealed with Sellotape.

Thanks, Mir, I thought. Old cow, old girl, old mackerel tart. Thanks ever so much for seeing to things in your competent fashion.

I went through the boxes, decided what I wanted, and dumped the rest on the bed or the floor. Afterwards, I spent a half-hour wandering round the house. Richie had said that money was getting tight, so I took what I could to help him out: a piece of silver here, a pewter jug there, one or two porcelains, three or four rings, a few miniatures laid out on a table in the drawing room. It was all part of my eventual inheritance. I was merely getting a head start on things.

Money stayed tight for months on end. The flat and our expenses were tallying up to more than Richie made. To help out, I took a job stuffing jacket potatoes in a caff in Charing Cross Road, but for Richie and me holding on to money was as easy as chasing feathers in a gale. So Richie decided the only answer was for him to pick up a few extra gigs out of town.

“I don’t want you working more than you already are,” he said. “Let me take this gig in Bristol”—or Exeter or York or Chichester— “to set us right, Liv.”

Looking back, I realise that I should have seen what it all meant: the tightness of
fin
ances in combination with all those extra gigs. But I didn’t, at first. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t allow myself to. I had far more than money invested in Richie, but I wasn’t about to consider that. So I lied and donned blinkers. I told myself we were hard pressed for cash and it was reasonable that he might have to travel to make it. But when the cash got tighter and his travelling didn’t make a difference in what we were bringing in, I was forced to put the facts together. He wasn’t bringing it in because he was laying it out.

I accused. He admitted. He was drowning in expenses. He had his wife in Brighton, he had me in London, he had a tart called Sandy in Southend-on-Sea.

Not that he mentioned Sandy at
fir
st. He wasn’t a fool. He kept me focussed on his wife, the martyred Loretta, who still loved him, couldn’t make herself part with him, was the mother of his children, and all the etceteras. He’d taken to dropping down to Brighton for a visit now and again, as any dutiful father might. He’d extended his visits with three or four—or was it
fiv
e, Richie?— safaris into Loretta’s knickers. She was pregnant.

He cried when he told me. He said what could he do, they’d been married for years, she was the mother of his children, he couldn’t turn away from her love when she offered it to him, when she couldn’t get over him, when she’d never get over him…It didn’t
mean
anything, she didn’t mean anything, together the two of them didn’t mean anything because “You’re the one, Liv. You make me make the music. Everything else is crap.”

Except Sandy, as things turned out. I found out about Sandy on a Wednesday morning, directly the doctor explained how what I thought was an inconvenient and uncomfortable infection was really herpes. I was through with Richie by Thursday night. I had just enough strength to throw his belongings down the front steps and make arrangements to change the lock on the door. By Friday night, I thought I was dying. On Saturday, the doctor called it “a most interesting and prodigious infection,” which was his way of saying he’d never seen anything like it.