At the time, it was all dizzily distant, desirable yet dangerous, and far removed from the codified progression that was used by young teenagers after parties: ‘How far did you go?’ Jane couldn’t quite remember how it went. Was it number 1 = kissing, number 2 = hands on breast outside clothes and 3 = outside down there? At least it defined things and implied a logical system, whereas Daphne had led her into hazardous confusion. Their emergence into the irrational land of adolescence coincided with an era that reinvented notions of what it meant to be free. Entering Daphne’s sphere was like setting off along the yellow brick road. Everything was suddenly in Technicolor; Wimbledon was the black and white Kansas. She knew that even then.
‘It’s all very well to think of the fun and games.’ Jane noticed that Daphne hadn’t answered her question about Libby. ‘Course it’s fun to think you invented freedom and to rush around pushing back boundaries. But you’re ignoring the dark underbelly. The hairy, dark underbelly of those times.’ She was trying to make Daphne smile, though it wasn’t funny. ‘You know? Things like the Paedophile Information Exchange? They campaigned for the sexual rights of children, as in the right for kids to enjoy sex with adults. It was lined up alongside gay rights as though it was the same sort of deal. Sickening!’
‘Oh God, I don’t know.’ She kept saying that, noted Jane. ‘You can’t compare things then and now.’ Daphne appeared relaxed and comfortable. ‘I mean, in some ways we’re more liberal, like not locking up men for being gay. But with teenagers, they’re called “children” almost till they’re able to vote and fight in a war. It’s all mad.’ She leaned back, stretching her arms and running her hands through hair that was luxuriant as ever, even if these days it was tinted a bold, mahogany shade. Just as they’d always done, bangles jangled on her wrists and Greek, hammered-silver earrings swung and glittered.
Jane brought out the Arctic Roll and sang ‘Happy Birthday, dear Daffers’. The lone candle was blown out and Daphne cut two thick slices, exclaiming about the generosity of her friend, whom she kissed. The present was ideal. ‘You’re a darling, Janey. My old favourite. I’ll have scented death baths. Nothing like those to raise morale on a cold London evening.’ They ate another two slices of the roll and Jane was bewildered to find herself enjoying it. She hadn’t tasted the synthetic sponge and cheap vanilla ice cream since she was a girl and the combination transported her straight into the kitchen at Barnabas Road. ‘Looks like we’re going to polish the whole thing off, like in our misspent youth,’ she said.
After Daphne left, Jane felt wired, as though she’d drunk too much coffee. Clearing up, she knocked a glass on to the floor and went through the rigmarole of picking up dozens of jagged slivers. She was relieved the evening had gone well but she was still uneasy. Their friendship had always been like that, she thought, characterised by opposites. As a girl, she had loved and hated her simultaneously. Affection and admiration were threaded through with envy, but also exasperation and sometimes despair. As far as the Ralph business went, she would have to lead her gradually in the right direction. It was impossible to be frank or tell her everything.
She spent almost two hours in bed with her laptop, researching historical child sexual abuse. The amount of data available was almost overwhelming. All across the country, women (and some men), many of her sort of age, were emerging to divulge their grim stories. Unspoken for decades, the words had begun to gush forth with details of sordid events that had been hidden in shame and were finally now being revealed and recognised as crimes.
7
RALPH
It was only when he heard Nina’s key in the lock and her tentative call that he realised he had spent nearly forty-eight hours on the sofa. Following his fourth visit to the hospital, the sitting room looked like a tempting place to rest – the view of freshly born April leaves outside the window was soothing. Then he became rooted there, barely able to stumble to the kitchen to get a drink or some crackers. He’d been told to expect fatigue after the chemo, but this was beyond any tiredness he’d experienced.
‘In here.’ His voice emerged as a croak. He could only imagine what he looked like from the alarm on Nina’s face. She said something incomprehensible in Greek before switching to English. ‘Oh my God. What’s going on? Are you ill?’ She put her hand on his forehead, checking for a fever.
‘No, I’m OK. Well, a bit. Maybe I’ll go and take a bath.’ He suspected he didn’t smell too appetising, having failed to wash or clean his teeth during this period. Upright, it was hard to get a balance.
‘Sit.’ Nina had evidently never realised that, in English, it sounded like an instruction to a dog, but he took her advice. After she removed her coat and gathered up the accumulated mail on the doormat, she returned. ‘OK, let’s get you upstairs.’
While he lay in the bathtub, Nina came back with a mug of camomile tea – her notion of a panacea, and it did make him feel better.
‘Angel of mercy. Thank you, darling.’ He looked up at his wife from the steaming water. Not many marriages lasted this long – forty years in October. Nina was planning a celebration with children, grandchildren, friends gathered across all these decades and from various places. It hadn’t always been easy (find me an easy marriage, he thought), but they’d made it through this great span of existence together. Even in her mid-sixties she looked good: a gentle, pleasing face with kind, brown eyes, and she still had long hair, now mostly grey and wound into a chaotic bun or loosely plaited.
She knelt down on the bath mat and kissed him on the forehead. ‘You should have told me. What’s the point otherwise?’ Nina had become increasingly independent during the years since the children left. She was painting almost fanatically, ever smaller pictures, almost miniatures, which could be pieced together to create something like a mosaic. Wherever he found her, she’d be bent over some tiny creation, using a paintbrush as fine as a butterfly’s antenna. But she was deeply loyal to him. Steadfast. He couldn’t just shut her out. So he told her about the hospital, playing down the return of the illness. ‘A top-up to keep it under control,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a few more sessions over the next months and then it’ll all be fine.’
His system of hiding things was now more often a habit than a vice. The shed in the garden still offered the sense of retreating from the world that he needed for equilibrium and for his composing, but with the house often quiet and unoccupied by anyone but himself, this had become a luxury rather than a necessity. These days, Nina was frequently absent, visiting one of the children, or going for weeks, even months to Greece, where she could work and keep an eye on her old mother. True, she was still remarkably supportive of his music, even after all this time – she never missed a premiere or an important concert of his. And she had always been a guard dog for his composition, keeping people out of his way, taking his phone calls, or organising the practical elements of his life. She had filled books with cuttings about him and his music, going all the way back to when they first met. As he’d become better known, she’d bought larger albums to fit the proliferation of interviews and reviews. He had enjoyed witnessing her pride.
Nina took charge of his convalescence with generous efficiency – mother, nurse, handmaiden and wife bound into one. Nourishing broths simmered on the stove, pots of spring flowers were placed around the house, and within a few days he was edging back to something like normality. It never surprised him to be the centre of attention. When he was young, his mother had joked that all the parties and firework displays on November 5th were a countrywide celebration of his birthday, and he had half-believed her.