A Certain Age (11 page)

I gave Daddy a little kiss on his bald head as I walked past, I can never resist it. [
Sings, reedily
] Day by day, to see thee more clearly, love thee more dearly. [
Stops singing
] Bloody Beverley Brayfield. Rings up after all this time and sets me off remembering Roger, and sets Daddy off on admirers. Daddy still harks on about the man from the
GPO, saying I only tried to get the telephone disconnected to get a man in the flat. And that was ten years ago. As for Mr Thomas’s vouchers – I certainly won’t mention them again to Daddy. “Vouchers, Judy? What’s he giving you vouchers for? What have you been up to behind the sausage counter?”

Of course, when I knew Bev, when I did actually have admirers, Daddy used to guard my honour like a pitbull. I once had twelve people in my bedroom – four of them boys – sitting listening to a
Monty Python
record, and he made us all go outside because he imagined some sort of orgy would break out. It was just the way his mind worked. I didn’t even tell him about Roger; I knew he would be wanting to know, “Have you done it yet?” and not believing me when I said I didn’t want to.

Back in the sixth form, Bev was my best friend ever. Sixth-form mavericks, we were. Young hippy-style renegades in flared loons and badly stitched cheesecloth. We got Miss Watson to read out that notice in assembly: “The Non-Conformist Society will meet at midnight in the cupboard in Room Nine.” That was us. Beverley and Judith. Bev and Jude. “Who was it on the phone, Judykins?” Daddy asked when he woke up. “Was it a secret ad—?” [
interrupts
] “It was Beverley Brayfield, Daddy,” I yelled from the kitchen. “The one who neglects her mother and hates all men but you in particular.” “Oh,” he said. “Did those beefburgers seem all right to you?” I said. But when I came in, I found him holding the dead receiver to his ear, looking puzzled.

Scene Two: bathroom echoes, bath running

Since Mag died, I like to feel I’ve made things nice for Daddy. Mag didn’t love him very much; just reminded him all the time what a big sacrifice she’d made bringing me up – when, after all, I was his “by-blow”. Do people say “by-blow” now? Mag certainly did. In fact, she rarely constructed a sentence without it. Having taken in his by-blow (me) she just reproached him about it; reproached him till there was no breath left in her body; reproached him till she died. Now there was a harassed nurse with a sense of grievance. “What about
MY
life?” she used to say. And if I said, “What life’s that then, Mag?” she’d bark, “Why do you always take
HIS
side?” No wonder Daddy worked such long hours running the sweet stall. He was a popular man; no one disliked Daddy except Mag. Mag was deranged. She accused him of seeing other women right up until the end. She said he saw prostitutes and everything. To listen to her, you’d think he had the sex drive of Frank Sinatra.

I went out to work at first myself, of course: got a nice job in Selfridges straight from school selling embroidery silks, fancy ribbons, rick-racks. They said I was a little over-qualified, with my A grades in French, Maths and English Literature, but I told them to disregard that. I was perfectly happy for rick-rack to be my life. I could call it rique-racque and apply calculus to the stock-take if they liked. They had no idea what I was talking about, but took me on. And I was very happy. But then, after about three years, they did the Great Haberdashery Consolidation and promoted me to executive luggage and I left, and I never went back to work again. I have to say they were surprised. Everyone was surprised. I was a bit surprised
myself. But I just said it was only sensible to stay home. Mag was already ill; Daddy was sixty, but still worked from early in the morning till at least seven at night, long after the market closed at three. And of course there was the hair. Hair this long and fine takes three or four hours every morning to dry naturally. Ergo, you can’t really go to work.

Scene Three

There’s been knocking. It’s bound to be her. I’ve had the phone unplugged for two days now – although oddly, when I got home from shopping at midday, the jack seemed to have moved closer to the plug than I remembered it. Daddy shouldn’t be troubled with all this, I mean, he’s eighty. I do try to protect him from what goes on out there. So when the knocking started I said to Dad, sit still, do nothing. Whoever it is will go away. So we watched
Watercolour Challenge
with the sound down and whispered together, “Hannah Gordon’s holding up very well, isn’t she? Do you think she’s had a facelift?” – because you can’t say
NOTHING
when
Water-colour Challenge
is on; it’s just not humanly possible. In the end the knocking stopped, and the letterbox clanged. Beverley had put a note through, asking me to ring her. She adopted a very urgent tone; said she was worried about me. I think she should worry about herself; it’s not normal behaviour, what she’s doing. Hounding people in their own homes, when they just want to be left alone. Turning up to gloat about the life she’s made for herself in the big wide world.

It was weird to think she was outside, right outside
the door. As I said, it’s twenty years since the last time I saw her – on a day I have lots of reasons to remember. We had lunch to celebrate her rather mediocre English degree from York University and her new junior reporter job on a newspaper in Newcastle, meeting in Pizzaland in Oxford Street, where in those days they had alpine murals, pine benches, and waitresses got up like Heidi. It was one of those occasions when I was paying, but she condescended to me. We had a lot of those. Anyway, I remember Beverley said in a loud voice to expect inferior service from the Heidis “because we were both women” - a remark that made a deep impression, not just because she had to bring sex into everything, but because it was the first time I was ever referred to as a woman and I thought she was presumptuous to assume I wouldn’t mind. After all, I don’t much like it now, and back then I was only twenty-two.

We had a couple of glasses of the house red and we talked about her. I’d intended to tell her I’d met this nice chap called Roger in fancy hosiery, and that I’d been offered a promotion, but I didn’t get a chance. It turned out she’d had an abortion in her third year and had done her entire degree on women writers, as a sort of protest against – well, against common sense, obviously – and they’d had to reorganise the course to accommodate her. “I am in the vanguard,” she said. “Oh well, better than being in the guard’s van,” I quipped, rather amusingly. “I was quite famous for making a stand,” she said. “There was a piece about me in the
Yorkshire Post.”
Which, funnily enough, she happened to have with her, protected by a sheet of sticky-backed plastic. It was illustrated by a picture of her demonstrating outside an examination hall during the Shakespeare paper. “This
examination discriminates against women,” it said, on her placard – or almost. “There’s only one ‘m’ in ‘discriminate’,” I said. Evidently she shouted things like “Scab!” and “Quisling!” at fellow female students going in, and was surprised when they had a party afterwards and didn’t invite her.

I remember I said perhaps she should read some Shakespeare, she might enjoy it. Which I suppose was my mistake, because suddenly she was denouncing
ME
as a quisling and a scab. Out of the blue, I was a traitor in the gender war. “There’s a picket line in your own home, Jude. And through emotional debility you side with the bosses against Mag!” Well, I laughed, but she wouldn’t give it up. Emotional debility. Where did that come from? “Who are you reading at the moment?” she demanded. She seemed genuinely angry. As it happened, I was in the middle of an Agatha Christie binge, but I wasn’t going to tell her that, so I said “Milton”. “Ha!” she said. “Another man who tyrannised his females. Although at least he wasn’t sex mad like your dad.”

I pushed a bit of soggy pizza on to my fork, then put it down. “I’m going,” I said. “Bev, I am not a quisling. And my dad is neither a tyrant nor a sex maniac. He’s a warm and loving person.” “Your dad exploits women, Jude,” she called after me, as I got up and left. “You watch. He did it to Mag and he’s done it to you. You’re sexually retarded!” And I walked out of Pizzaland and went back to work in a turmoil. I felt hurt and angry, and I actually made an exceptionally good sale of a calfskin slimline briefcase that afternoon to an Arab gentleman for two hundred pounds, which was a bloody fortune in those days. It was that night I finally let Roger take me to the bedsit; and we drank some Newcastle Brown and I let him put my hand
down his trousers. I remember he wanted me to open my eyes while the business was done but I gritted my teeth and tried to think about rick-rack. It was the day after that I decided to give up work to look after Daddy and never see Roger again, or ever go to Pizzaland for that matter.

Now Bev’s on
Question Time
and
Newsnight
all the time. Writes a column in a newspaper giving equal weight to feminist outrage about equal pay and the three-figure haircuts a modern female columnist simply has to have if she spends half the year in Manhattan. She goes on factfinding missions; turns up on
Woman’s Hour
talking about her novels – so-called “postmodern” historical romances in which Charles the First says things like “As if”, while Henrietta Maria goes salsa dancing. I don’t know, I’ve never read them. I don’t read anything published after 1960. But her mum stops me occasionally at her bus stop to boast about an American book tour or the latest invitation to Downing Street. I asked her how she tracked Bev’s movements and she said, “Oh, I log on to her website.” “That must be a great comfort for you,” I said.

Scene Four

I couldn’t avoid it indefinitely. We’d ignored all the knocking and the notes; we’d left the phone unplugged. But finally she caught me getting out of the lift. “Oh, Jude,” she gasped. “That’s never crimplene?” I have to say it was an odd and rather inadequate greeting after twenty years, but I let it pass, although I couldn’t help thinking a hundred-pound haircut ought to improve one’s appearance rather more than hers was doing.

“Bev,” I said, “what a surprise. I’m afraid I lost your numbers. But I thought you’d probably call again if it was urgent.”

A pause. I assumed an expression of innocence, and challenged her to defy it. She took that challenge.

“I did call again, Jude.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yes.”

“We must have been out.”

“I called twenty-seven times over a four-day period.”

“Good heavens. We must have been out a lot.”

“I also put a note through the door.”

“That was you?”

“Look, Jude, I feel you’ve spent the last four days deliberately avoiding me.”

“That’s rather an arrogant way of looking at things, don’t you think? Daddy and I have been busy, that’s all. None of us leads our lives for other people, you know.”

If she had been anticipating a pleasant expedition down Memory Lane, she wasn’t getting one. In the end, we went to Starbucks for a cappuccino but I kept my guard up. I watched her at the counter, in her sharp leather jacket, moleskin trousers and knitted silk scarf in shades of dove and lilac. Italian shoes, high heels. Unnaturally flat stomach. I thought, who’s colluding with the enemy now, then, eh? “You never cut your hair!” she said, brightly, as she plonked the cappuccinos down. “Well observed,” I said, flicking it over my shoulders. “I have to say, I hope you don’t mind, but whoever cut yours seems to have done it out of spite.”

She didn’t say anything. Stirred her coffee. She struggled with some kind of emotion. I scooped off the chocolate and ate it. I tried not to imagine how I looked to
her, in the poncho I crocheted during free periods in the sixth form. She stirred her coffee again. This was getting rather tiring.

“I haven’t seen your mum recently,” I said, at last. “She all right?”

Bev’s face crumpled. Evidently this was not the safe conversational area I had expected it to be.

“Oh no,” I said.

She put her hand on mine, and her lip started quivering. “That’s why I—. She died, Jude.”

Suddenly there was a flurry of handbag activity as she found a tissue and pressed it to her face.

“Oh Bev, I’m sorry,” I said. And I meant it. Despite all the boasting about Bev, I really admired Bev’s mum. You’d never get Daddy surfing the net to find out what I was doing.

“They called me back from a book tour. Can you imagine? I was in … I was in
CHICAGO!”

Evidently the location was significant, although I couldn’t see why. If she hadn’t been in Chicago, she’d have been in Tel Aviv, or Edinburgh, or Paris, or somewhere else.

“I wasn’t here! I just can’t stand it that I wasn’t here!”

“Bev,” I said. “That’s such a silly thing to reproach yourself with.”

“Is it?” she sniffed.

“Of course,” I said. “Let’s face it, you were
NEVER
here.”

“Jude, I’ve wasted my life, sacrificed it to fame and success! I’ve got to change everything!”

She clutched my hand and made gagging, snuffling noises into her tissue. “I’m going to change my life, Jude.”
I saw now why she had sought me out. Not to gloat. She wanted me to endorse a new, caring non-working Bev, to make her feel better. Well, as Charles the First’s best mate the Duke of Buckingham apparently used to say, “No way, José.”

“I want to be like you,” she said. “Give myself to the people I love. It’s the most important thing to do with your life.”

Just then, a woman came up and said, “Are you Beverley Brayfield?”

Bev wiped her nose and admitted she was.

“I just wanted to say I loved your book, what was it,
Bodice Rip
?”

“
Bodice RIP
,” Bev corrected.

“Yes, of course,
Bodice RIP
! I just wanted to say it changed my life. I left my husband, took up taekwondo and got a siamese, and now I’m doing PR for a pharmaceutical giant. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. She’s very good, you should be proud,” the woman said to me, touching my arm, assuming I was Bev’s granny, I suppose; in any case, assuming I wanted to be impressed by the adoration Bev could elicit from a gullible, unethical cat-loving bolter with obscure martial arts interests.