— Then couldn’t their mother live here instead?
— She can’t, because of what happened.
— But what about you? Don’t you get to have a say?
I let her know about the difficulties between me and Mac. When she asked whether Barbara was awful, I tried to convey how she was really the nicest person, impulsive and imaginative and kind: which made everything worse. — It was a sort of quixotic thing, when she left Mac. She had an ideal that she shouldn’t keep him if he loved someone else — even though we hadn’t seen each other for several years. And Mac believes that too. He believes passion is a life force you have to submit to. I don’t know what I think. It’s a force for a while and then you can step past it. (I was thinking of Sheila’s brother Andrew. She had told me he was married with children, and had given up drinking, and was writing a book.)
Sheila thought that passion was a story people dreamed up to save themselves from boredom. — I’d lived all along as if I was acting out some turbulent drama; then I woke up one day and found I’d stopped believing in the play. Since then my life is saner and more manageable, but it’s thinner — as if this whole colourful noisy troupe alive inside my head had upped and left. I am quite empty sometimes.
— You’ve had a baby. That’s dramatic.
Right now, having a baby seemed more like the end of the story, she said. I asked her again then who Ester’s father was, but Sheila claimed he didn’t matter, she said she couldn’t even remember his name. It had all been a misunderstanding, she said, entirely her own fault; and he didn’t even know Ester existed. Anyway, a baby was not the end, I promised her. I could see that she was studying us, to see how to make a family; she had plenty of friends in Brazil but she had lived alone, and liked it. When she laughed about Mac with friendly scepticism, I felt a defensive pang as if I betrayed him. — He’s like a busy engine, isn’t he? Sheila said. — With you lot all yoked on behind, his caravanserai. Determinedly on his way somewhere: so there’s a lot of heat and dust. Still, it’s better than just turning round in the same space, as I do.
Sheila hadn’t seen Rowan since he was a few days old; as a teenager, he looked startlingly like his dead father Nicky, whom he’d never known. How could it be, she and I wondered together, that these characteristics had been stored in Nicky’s DNA, waiting to unfold inside his son’s separate life: the impatient way Rowan turned a tap full on, then gasped through a hasty glass of water, spilling half of it, with the tap still running; or his careless swaggering walk; or dragging at his school tie as if he needed air? I thought Sheila was almost afraid of Rowan at first, because of how he brought Nicky back and yet didn’t. But she was good at talking to the boys, they liked her. Rowan sang and played his guitar for her. (— Oh, he’s good, he’s really good, she said.) Luke claimed to remember her from the commune, though he was only four when it broke up: and he did have an extraordinary memory, which was part of his personality — open, accepting of everything he found, storing it away. He remembered visiting the zoo, on the day Nicky was killed. His frank gaze was full of irony mixed with tolerance: his hair was still childishly blond, though darkening, cut short in a thick pelt I loved to push my fingers through. Rowan was taller than Luke was already (and they were both taller than me); Luke was stocky, popular, good at rugby, clowning for his friends with a quick humour, not cruel. He’d been through several girlfriends already, though he’d been protectively uxorious in turn towards each one (and I didn’t think any of them good enough).
Luke brought Sheila the white quartz stone I’d always kept, which we had used in our discussions in the commune, passing it round between the speakers. Sheila hesitated to take it from his hand. — I’m afraid to touch it, she said.
— Why? he asked with interest. — Because it all ended badly?
— It wasn’t our fault, I insisted. It felt so important, that they didn’t carry the wrong story forward. — You do know that, boys? Nicky’s death was just the most terrible accident. The man who killed him was ill.
— It’s not that, Sheila said. — It’s because I hate the idea of my youth. I was so wrong about everything, and so sure I was right. I’m frightened when I remember myself. I worked in a factory making meat pies, out of solidarity with the working classes.
— What’s wrong with meat pies? Luke protested.
— That was quite honourable, I said. — I liked you for it.
— It wasn’t honourable, it was insufferable. How dared I, play-acting other people’s real lives? And of course the women who had no choice about working there hated me, and I didn’t know how to talk to them. It was such a sham.
Rowan remarked that his father had worked building a road.
— That was different. Nicky was different, everything he did was graceful and the right thing. Anyway, he wasn’t doing it out of politics, he just needed the money. I needed the money too; but I could have earned it doing something less ostentatious, something I was actually good at. I was so hopeless, with the pies. I made such a mess of it, I was always dropping them.
We had to go to a family party one Sunday lunchtime: my Auntie Andy’s silver wedding anniversary. Mac complained ungraciously. He thought he was reasonable, and didn’t see any point in submitting to an occasion so utterly against his nature. Wouldn’t it be awful? Weren’t Phil and Andy boring? Couldn’t we just send a cheque? I explained how these obligations weren’t optional, they were the ritual that bound my family together. We weren’t connected because we found one another interesting. Offence was taken even if you forgot to send a birthday card or write a thank-you letter, and my mother and stepfather were always too ready anyway to be offended by Mac; they didn’t really like him, he frightened them. Mum put on an arch, unnatural voice when she was talking to him, as if she was flirting; Gerry was hollowly hearty, hot inside the neck of his shirt. Gerry wasn’t much older than Mac, and yet with his strained good manners and fading handsomeness (inky smudged features, thick head of iron grey hair) he seemed to belong to a different era. He and Mac couldn’t even discuss sport, because Gerry liked football and Mac was a rugby man. The complication was that my parents would expect to be superior themselves, at Phil and Andy’s party. They thought of themselves as having moved into a quite different social tranche — golf, the Masons, even dinner parties; whereas Andy had worked on the production line at the chocolate factory until she retired. Mac blundered across the subtlety of all this, not even noticing he was condescending.
The party was in a function room in a hotel in town, a stuffy low-ceilinged basement with florid carpets and gold drapes arranged across blank walls. Before we arrived Mac was already martyred, because we’d had to drive around for twenty minutes before he found anywhere to park. The boys were chafing to be free of our tension. I threw myself into the occasion and drank a couple of glasses of wine quickly. (Mac took one look at the wine and stuck to beer.) Circulating round the family I hugged and chattered, probably overdoing it.
— Why are you talking like that? Mac asked me at one point.
— Like what?
— Putting on that Bristol accent.
— This is my accent, I said. — It’s the other one I’m putting on.
I was wearing a mauve top over black jeans, with green silk tied in my hair: my mother said the top reminded her of a bedspread she once had. These days, she said with a jollying air to make it seem as if she was joking, couldn’t I have afforded something smarter? (Her attitude to Mac’s money was peculiar: partly complacent on my behalf, partly affronted, as if it was an offence to moderation. If I’d told her how much my top cost she’d have been horrified.)