The gentleman, the other girls called him: here comes Gretta’s gentleman, they’d sing to each other behind the Lyons’ counter when they saw him come in the door, his black coat immaculate, his shoes polished, a spray of flowers in his hand. When he asked her to marry him, on the top floor of a bus heading along Pentonville Road, she had to hold his hand, her eyes closed, without saying anything, because she didn’t want the moment to be over and gone.
Gretta slides the paperclips and the coins back inside the jacket pocket. She lowers herself to sit on the bed, his side of the bed, and looks out at the street, at the sky, at the ladybirds crawling on the windowpane.
She remembers, after they announced their engagement, being struck by how solitary he was. No parents, no siblings, no cousins or friends: there seemed to be no one for him to tell about their marriage. It was a shock to her because she was the sort who gathered people around her, wherever she was. How was it possible for someone like him to get so far in life and yet be so utterly alone? There had been a brother, he’d told her once, but he’d passed away, and just from the way he said it, Gretta could tell that he’d been mixed up in the Troubles and met his end there. Robert never spoke of the brother again and Gretta never asked him. That was the way of it.
How beautiful Monica had looked the day she’d married Joe. The way she’d come down the stairs, cautious in those ivory satin heels, her dress hitched up around her, as if she was an angel sitting on a cloud. Robert had cried when he saw her, cried and cried. He’d had to clutch the banister; she’d had to go and fetch an extra hankie. She’d hustled him into the downstairs’ toilet and shut the door, the two of them in that tiny space, her in her new suit with the matching hat. What is it, she’d said to him, taking his hand, what ails you, her pulse tearing, tearing at her neck. Robert, you can tell me, she’d said, you know you can. She’d waited a good five minutes in there, him sitting on the toilet seat, her standing over him, and when it became clear he wasn’t going to say anything, she’d said, pull yourself together now, because the house was full of people, because they had to get to the church sooner or later. But he couldn’t stop and Gretta had felt she was looking into a fissure that had opened, a fissure that was deep, dark and unnavigable, Monica out there in the hallway, all ready to go, her flowers in her hand, Aoife wriggling in her frock, saying, what’s wrong with Daddy?
Michael Francis had said at the gate that he needed to pop to the newsagent’s to buy a paper. But the truth was that he had needed a moment away from them all.
Aoife and Monica had gone into the house together, without looking at each other, and he had hurried off down the road, hardly aware of where he was going but feeling an immense surge of relief that number fourteen Gillerton Road was behind him and he was moving away from it.
In the newsagent’s, he stares at the paper rack, at the rows of chocolate bars, at the jars of sweets lined up on the shelves. It enters his mind to buy a treat for Hughie and Vita. Because he is going back there tonight to see them. He hesitates for a moment in front of the jars because Claire has an only-on-Saturdays rule with sweets. Dare he violate it?
Bugger it, he thinks, and asks for a quarter-pound of sherbet lemons, Hughie’s favourite, and some pear drops for Vita. Bear drops, she used to call them when she was small, and the recollection of this makes him smile as he searches his pockets for change.
Outside, he dithers for a moment about where to go now, the paper under his arm, his pockets weighed down with sweets for the kids. He slips a pear drop into his mouth, the surface gritty, cratered against his tongue.
He is opposite a bus stop that would take him to Stoke Newington. He could wait there, get on a bus, go to the house, see Claire. But how can he, when he has to get back to Gillerton Road? And how can he, when his wife cannot seem to bear the sight of him?
He feels it again, that precipice, the proximity of the possible end, as he stands outside the newsagent’s. He is aware, again, of the presence of Gina Mayhew sliding by him, like someone in a hurry to get past.
Joe had walked past them on the pavement as the three of them stood there. A new wife, a baby, a whole other life. It seemed the very essence of strangeness to see Joe like that when he had been a part of their lives for so long. He’d been coming to their house for years, taking Monica out when they were all teenagers. Michael used to be proud sometimes, when he was out, to see Joe, who was a couple of years older than him, with a cigarette in his mouth, with his lunchbox under his arm, because Joe was working, he was an apprentice, he wasn’t at school any more, and he’d nod at him and say, all right, Michael Francis. His voice was always more London, more glottally stopped, than when he was in the house. Michael had loved it when he did that, especially if any of the boys from school were near. For him to know someone like Joe: there was nothing as good as that when you were fifteen and bullied a little bit at school for getting good marks. And then Joe had married his sister; Michael Francis had had his first ever drink at their wedding; Aoife had been a flower girl, admittedly not a very good one because she’d talked to herself all the way through the ceremony and lost the flowers. Joe had been with them every Christmas, every Sunday for dinner. He used to play Happy Families with Aoife, teasing her by not saying ‘please’, then letting her win. He used to help Gretta shell the peas she grew in the flowerbeds, setting a sieve between his knees on the back step and saying, now, give us a handful there, Mrs R. It was unaccountable that he had slipped out of the fabric of their lives, unbelievable that he was now walking about the city with another woman, another family.
Was it possible, he wonders, as he retraces his steps back to Gillerton Road, that this could happen to him and Claire? That they might be parted, torn asunder, separated, divorced? That he would go and live – where? Some flat. See the kids at weekends, come back alone every night, cooking meals for one, he and Claire speaking strainedly on the phone to make arrangements, times, places.
It was unthinkable. It must never happen.
And yet he doesn’t know where to go from here. The argument had been one from which there seemed no way back.
‘You’re back’, was what she’d said, in a tone of surprise, as if she’d received news that he was taking a round-the-world cruise. He’d gone back home from dealing with his mother, from talking to the police, from tracking down Monica and Aoife. He’d gone home to pick up his night things because he knew he should stay over with his mother, keep her company until his sisters got there. He’d gone back to his house and it was late and he had imagined that he might sit for a moment with Claire, with a beer perhaps, on the sofa, her hand in his. They used to do this early in their marriage, before they had a television, in the two-roomed flat off the Holloway Road, Hughie a wrapped bundle in the carry-cot in the corner and him and Claire just sitting together, contemplating the shape of their new lives. One of the things that had surprised him about Claire when they first lived in that flat was her stillness, her quietude. He was used to a house in which people clattered from room to room, shouted down staircases, banged open doors to yell, what time do you call this, where people threw themselves into chairs, slammed down teacups, used more words than perhaps they needed to. Moving in with Claire back then was like stepping from an overcrowded train into a stirring, cool mountain air.
So, he had arrived back at his house, wanting to feel again that touch and brush and curled warmth of her fingers: was that so much to ask? It was late and the children were in bed and his mother had cried and cried and he wanted to sit on his sofa, with his wife, for a few minutes, just like they used to. But Claire was in the kitchen, snipping herbs into a bubbling saucepan. She had an apron on over what he recognised as her best dress, a paisley number he’d always liked, with a fitted bodice. Her lips were stained dark with lipstick and bangles clattered up and down her wrist as she stirred her concoction: it was releasing heavy clouds of beef and wine and garlic into the air. For a heartbreaking moment, he thought she’d done this for him, that she had pr
epared a dinner for him, that she’d put on her paisley frock for him, and the lipstick and the bangles.
‘That smells good,’ he’d said.
Claire had looked up and he’d seen it, the fleeting expression of dismay, before she’d said it: You’re back.
They had spoken on the phone earlier; he’d wanted to keep her in the loop with what was happening and he’d also wanted to hear her voice, to reassure himself that he had a life outside the family he’d been born into, that the family he’d created for himself was still there, still available. She had been solicitous, concerned about his father, asking lots of questions and listening to his answers and saying, I’m so sorry, Mike. She even said, your poor mother, which was not a sentiment she often expressed.
But now everything was different. She did not seem like the person he’d spoken to on the phone, the person who’d said, let me know if you hear anything, who’d said, your poor mother. This person was all dressed up, the table behind her laid with silver and folded cloth napkins, this person was saying things like, she hadn’t realised he’d be back tonight, she was so sorry, and was he intending to stay because her study group were coming round for a discussion over supper?
‘Now?’ he’d said, slumping sideways in the doorway, knowing that the frame would catch him, would offer him the bodily support he needed. ‘At this hour?’
Claire licked her lips quickly, brushed the hair off her face. ‘I’m really sorry, Mike. It never crossed my mind you’d be back. If I’d known . . . You see, everyone thought there was more space here and I said you’d be out so everyone thought—’
‘Everyone thought, everyone thought, is that all you can fucking say?’ he had yelled suddenly, because he’d spent hours holding his mother’s hand while she wept, because his father was gone, which was unbelievable and beyond strange. Because all he’d wanted was to come and sit with Claire on his sofa, in his front room, and he was being told that was impossible, that at any minute people were about to sit themselves down and discuss the First World War, as in some fevered nightmare where the pupils he most dreaded would invade his house and sit around the breakfast table, staring at him, telling him that school had been moved here for the foreseeable future.
‘Oh, that’s right,’ Claire had shouted back, and he was shocked because Claire never shouted, it wasn’t in her, didn’t come with her DNA. ‘Abuse me with – with phallocentric language.’
He laughed, a loud explosion from somewhere deep in his chest. ‘Who are you parrotting when you say things like that? What’s happened to you? Why are you even doing this course? I mean, you’re intelligent, you’re educated, you—’
‘Only partially!’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You know.’
‘No, I don’t. Please tell me.’
‘My degree,’ she said, and tears sprang into her eyes. She dashed them away angrily. ‘I never did my degree. And why was that? Whose fault was it?’
He was tempted to shout: ours. It was both of us. We were both there. But he suddenly saw himself from the perspective of her new, about-to-arrive friends: Claire’s awful, shouty husband – look at the way he yells at her, tells her she can’t have us here. He couldn’t bring himself to discuss that right now, with all those places laid and ready at the dinner table.
‘Claire,’ he tried to take his wife’s hand – he had the urge to shake it, to try to rouse her in some way, to try to make her see that what was happening here should not be happening, to try to bring her back, ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have shouted. It’s just been a terrible day and this . . . supper party. What about the children? Won’t they be woken up by all the noise?’
At the word ‘children’, she raised her head and looked at him. Claire loved her children; he was constantly amazed by how much. Constantly aghast at the sight of her getting out of bed at three a.m. to fetch Vita a drink, at her giving Hughie all her lunch, if he wanted it, at the selflessness and sacrifice of it all, at the effort she put into a nativity-play costume, at the patience, the sweet, angelic patience of her, when Vita was raging about having her hair brushed or wanting those socks not these socks or just needing her, Claire, to sit by her for hours on end, reading book after book after book. She was a marvel to him and he wondered if there was some way he could communicate this to her, via the touch of their skin.
But she said, ‘The children will be fine. If they wake up, they wake up. It’s good for them to meet new people. It’s good for them to have a mother who is fulfilled, who is stretched. They’re too cocooned as things are, don’t you think?’
Cocooned, he wanted to say, cocooned? But I want them to be cocooned. I want them to be sheltered, safe, insulated, protected, now and for ever. If it were up to him, he would sew his children into eiderdowns so they could never hurt themselves, he would never let them leave the house; he would stop them going to school, even, to avoid the slightest possibility that someone might say something unkind to either of them. Cocooned didn’t even begin to cover what he wanted for them.
‘Anyway, it’s not as if,’ she said, pulling her hand from his, ‘they’ve always been your first priority, is it?’
And there she was again, Gina Mayhew, among them. Claire put down her spoon and rubbed at her neck, as if she, too, was aware of Gina gliding into the room, taking up a place at the dinner table, crossing her legs and looking up at him with the preoccupied gaze that he’d noticed that first day in the staffroom, as if she were absorbed by something no one else could see or understand, as if she held some fascinating secret that no one else could even guess at.
He wanted to say, but I never meant it to happen. He wanted to turn to his wife and say, I didn’t mean it and I’m sorry. But could he put his hand on his heart and say that this was entirely true?
Gretta is in the bedroom, pulling things off the top of a wardrobe, when she hears Monica coming up the stairs. She can tell, in the careful hesitancy of each step, that it’s Monica in her strappy sandals. Then she hears Aoife, who’s been in the bedroom, burst out on to the landing to accost her. Gretta frowns. She’d been hoping that Aoife was having a nap.
‘What did you mean,’ she hears Aoife demand, ‘when you said that thing about Joe – and me?’
A pause. Gretta can imagine Monica doing her cool, interrogative eyebrow-arching thing.
‘What thing?’
‘That Joe and I were “so close”. What did you mean?’
‘Well, you were, weren’t you?’
Another pause. Gretta wants to get down off the box she’s standing on and tiptoe to the door, but she’s afraid she’ll give herself away, that whatever is taking place on the landing might be interrupted, diverted. She stays exactly where she is, stock still, her hand on a hatbox that contains, she thinks, old shoes of the children’s. She’d thought perhaps Claire might want them for her two. Might be something in there that fits Hughie. Big feet, that boy has, just like his dad.
‘Monica, are you saying you think . . . something . . . happened . . . between me and Joe?’
‘Didn’t it?’
‘Jesus, Monica. Of course not. What do you take me for? You’re out of your mind if you think—’
‘I don’t mean,’ Monica says, tightly, ‘that kind of thing. I mean . . .’ She trails into silence.
‘What?’ Aoife demands. Always demanding, that one, from the minute she was born. Never taking no for an answer. Couldn’t be more different from her sister, who was a clamshell, just like her dad.
What Monica says next she says so quietly that Gretta isn’t sure she heard her right. It sounds like, ‘That you told him.’
Aoife doesn’t say, told him what. She doesn’t say anything at all. Gretta leans forward on her perch, she lets go of the shoe hatbox to be sure of this. And the fact that Aoife doesn’t say, told him what, sinks down through Gretta like a stone dropped into a pond because something she has always half suspected comes into sudden focus. As if a lens has been twisted on a bl
urred scene, Gretta suddenly sees everything clearly. She runs her hand down the wood of the wardrobe; she removes a stray mothball from its top.
‘I didn’t tell him,’ Aoife says, in an unsteady voice. ‘Of course I didn’t. Why would I?’
‘Well, somebody did.’
‘It wasn’t me.’
Silence, thick as fog, rolls in from the landing. Gretta feels that she could put out her hand and touch its cold form.
‘So, that’s why he left,’ Aoife whispers. ‘Because he found out. And you thought I’d—’
‘He left because you told him,’ Monica spits out and Gretta wants to go to her daughter, to touch her on the shoulder and say, it wasn’t her – it wasn’t your sister, believe me, Aoife wouldn’t do that.
‘Monica, I did not tell him,’ Aoife says. ‘I swear.’
Gretta hears Monica turn, go back down the stairs. She hears Aoife stand a while longer on the landing. Then she moves into the bathroom; Gretta hears her rattling about in there, sipping water from the tap, though, God knows, Gretta has told her to use the mug a thousand times, then rip toilet paper from the roll, muttering to herself inaudibly. Strange she hasn’t lost that habit, even in adulthood. Then Aoife returns to her room, banging the door. Gretta hears the squeal of bedsprings as Aoife hurls herself to the bed and the sounds make her smile, despite herself.