Separate Lives (22 page)

It was a fun evening, calling to mind another evening of the not-too-terribly distant past, but for one distinct difference.

“So, how is, um, Alex? And, er, Susie?” I whispered at Lisa as I followed her into the kitchen, in search of a napkin. I was on my second glass, I felt relaxed, I didn't particularly need a napkin but I also didn't feel this was a wildly inappropriate question to ask, six months down the road. However, Lisa attempted to furrow her brow—always a bit of a challenge for the cosmetically-tampered-with, though I got the general idea.

“You know they moved to the seaside, right?” Lisa all but hissed.

“I didn't know that, no. How would I know that?”

“Well, ah, you might still be in touch with Alex?”

“No, no, Lisa—absolutely not. Not my style.”

“Well, OK, I figured probably not, but scratch the surface and you never know what's going on in other people's lives, do you?”

“No. And I didn't know what was going on in theirs. So . . .”

“Yeah, they've bought a fuck-off gorgeous Grade 2-listed house with sea views. Alex is practically welded to a drill when he's not busy on the computer. And Susie, well, I guess she's . . . busy. She's always busy. So . . .”

“Which seaside? Brighton, I assume?”

“You assume wrong. No, they're in Random-on-Sea. A town where East Sussex bumps into Kent. My God, it takes forever to get there but I gotta say that when you do it's totally another country. You'd never know it's only sixty miles from London.”

“Well, whatever, that's great for them. So about this alleged wedding . . .”

It was time to change the subject but at the same time my brain was busily multi-tasking. So, Alex and Susie had decamped to Random-on-Sea. Who'd've thought it? I had Susie down as the kind of woman who might start clawing at the air as a precursor to a coronary if she was ever forced to venture beyond the M25—or indeed anywhere further than walking distance from a flat white. And it wasn't as if Alex was exactly Mr. Small-Town, either.

But why, of all places, I wondered, had they chosen Random-on-Sea? Did they have friends there? Some sort of family connection, maybe on Susie's side? Had I ever mentioned anything to do with Random-on-Sea to Alex? I wracked my brains but couldn't recall a thing. Then again, why would I? My connection to Random was not only ancient, but long-since severed, while my memories of the
town were practically sepia-tinted. Nonetheless, I had spent quite a bit of time in and around Random-on-Sea as a kid, because that was where Nana lived.
Your
mum.

As kids we saw Nana quite a lot. I remember she died in her sleep—which is as it should be—just the week after Elvis died, in the summer of 1977. She was seventy-seven. I had always liked the fact that she was the same age as the century. Nana managed not only to stick around long enough to celebrate the Queen's Silver Jubilee but (she was pretty plugged-in, Nana) also to “tut-tut” over the Sex Pistols being at number one.

Anyway, the last time I'd been anywhere near Random-on-Sea was to attend Nana's funeral in a pretty little village church nestled in a valley somewhere to the east of the town. Though I couldn't recall the funeral itself, I had vague memories of us all driving home after a sumptuous and very un-funereal tea of which Nana would have approved, and of we kids being respectfully far quieter than normal while wedged into the back of the mustard-colored Volvo estate.

I hadn't really thought about Random-on-Sea for years, and when I had it had been in relation to Nana. In fact up until now Random had only ever existed in relation to Nana, though of course I was now slightly curious about the place.

I couldn't remember too much about it, other than the fact that Nana had lived in a little doll's house with far too many stairs on a steep street in the picturesque Old Town. I'd loved Nana's house as a kid, partly because it was on a Wonderland-meets-Portmeirion sort of scale and made me feel Alice-ish, if not exactly “Prisoner”-y, but also because it was full of Nana's lovely things, and lovely smells, too—of bracingly briny sea air gusting through open windows and, particularly, of a combination of baking and potpourri.
Indeed, the only potpourri that smells remotely like Nana's uniquely heady mixture is the gorgeous and insanely expensive Santa Maria Novella, to which I treat myself at Christmas.

Anyway, much later back at home and fueled by a glass or two, I started searching through some of your old family photograph albums, Mum, unearthing all those faded snaps I hadn't recalled looking at since shortly after they'd been picked up from Boots in 1970-whatever. Here we all were: you and Dad, me and Simon and Beth, squinting into the sun in front of the Volvo; presumably Nana had taken that one? And again, with Dad taking the picture and Nana inserted into the group. And here were some of us in Nana's tiny sun-trap of a walled garden, and of us kids wearing shorts and eating toffee-apples on the pebbly beach, with those distinctive black fishermen's net huts in the background. For a while, I was intrigued by the pictures but soon enough the old photography-phobia set in and I couldn't look at our smiling faces without seeing all of our futures . . . Mum and Dad splitting up the year after Nana died, Me and Beth falling out over a “shared” boyfriend in our teens, Simon leaving home to live with Dad . . . and worse.

And though looking at old pictures didn't—couldn't—reveal any of these forthcoming seismic shifts and schisms, the images' mosquito-stuck-in-amber quality both thrilled and, it must be said, slightly terrified me. Three of the people in these pictures were of course now dead, while the other three were . . . what? Walking wounded?

I sighed and packed the pictures away. I'd only started looking at them in order to trigger some old memories of Random—memories which, I suppose, (had I thought any of it through, which I hadn't) I imagined could bring me
somehow closer to Alex's “surprise-surprise!” of a new life. But of course there were other ways of doing that, which is how, the day after Hal had flown off to be with his dad and the day before I flew to the Canaries, I found myself negotiating hellish mid-morning cross-town traffic, negotiating the Blackwall Tunnel while trying not to think too hard about the Thames doing something involving disaster movie-ish SFX above my head and then driving down the A21 to Random-on-Sea. For the first time in over thirty years.

Out of season, even the loveliest seaside towns and villages have a slightly desperate Last Resort feel about them and Random-on-Sea was not, on a gloomy day in December, one of the loveliest seaside towns. Whereas I'd imagined a sort of pocket Eastbourne—twee and Tory—Random's front line reality was un-pretty, pretty gritty and whatever is the opposite of twee.

And though the architecture was of the once-gracious variety, the atmosphere was gloomy, down-at-heel, borderline seedy. It was hard to imagine Alex here, or Susie—actually particularly Susie, who had “smart Metropolitan chick” written all over her—though I supposed they were tucked away in some lovely middle-class enclave, not here on this frankly miserable-looking chippie-and-chip-paper-strewn promenade.

Things perked up a bit in the Old Town, however. Its homely proportions and villagey atmosphere were, certainly for a woman from Belsize Park, much more attractive than the bleak and windswept multi-story rows of Victorian stucco terraces further west. The Old Town also felt less transient, with a proper community nestling among its shabby-chic, vaguely boho little shops. There certainly hadn't been any organic bakeries and vintage clothes shops when Nana
was alive. In fact, “organic” and “vintage” weren't even words in common usage, much less words that applied to shopping.

I parked in a near-deserted car park directly facing a bleak, gunmetal-gray sea at high tide, and then I wandered for a while along the seafront, gulping ozone and feeling my internal cobwebs clearing. En route to wherever, I passed a couple of joggers, plenty of drunks and several young girls pushing buggies. With a start, I realized I was a long way—much further than the sixty-odd miles on the odometer—from Belsize Park and that these sweet-faced teens were—
d'oh!
—not au-pairs but mothers.

It was easy to find Nana's old house. I'm a great believer in “muscle memory,” effectively trusting your body to do something when you think your brain has forgotten how. Even after the best part of a lifetime it turned out that my brain could easily remember where Nana lived; my muscles simply got me there.

I couldn't quite believe that Nana had died well over thirty years ago. I think she had already been a widow for about ten years by then, so the house was sold out of the family and the money divided between you, Mum, and Auntie Pam. When Pam died of breast cancer in the late 1980s, leaving no children, her share passed straight to us and was kept in trust until we were eighteen, when we three grandkids ended up with about £10,000 each. I used my money as a deposit on the purchase of my first tiny flat in Shepherd's Bush so, when I set eyes on “Nana's” house—now even prettier than I remembered it, having been re-pointed and the old back door repainted a hot pink—I realized I had a great deal for which to thank Nana, quite aside from the best lemon drizzle cake I have ever tasted. And perhaps it was
also an old “muscle memory” that, in a very out-of-character moment, found me spontaneously knocking on the front door.

I suppose a part of me must have expected the door to be answered by a Nana-ish old lady, not by a stylish, Ugg-wearing (and wasn't that a pair of Seven For All Mankind jeans?) thirty-whatever brunette with her hair piled messily on her head and decorated with tinsel. Just behind her lurked a toddler, clutching her mother's thigh.

“Oh, hi!” I said. “Look, ah, I'm so sorry to just, er, bang on your door like this. Actually I half expected nobody to be in—which makes it even more mad, really—but, anyway, I was just sort of passing and the thing is, my grandmother used to live here, and she died in 1977, and, well, I was just curious.”

“Oh, wow. Do you want to come in and look around?” She glanced at my handbag and boots. “You don't look as if you're casing the joint. Not that there's much to case. And if you are, I'm fresh out of Chloé bags, more's the pity.”

“Oh yes, well, that would be lovely. Are you sure that's OK? Thanks very much.”

So here I was, standing in a stranger's hallway and predictably paralyzed by Englishness. It wasn't even as if I had the excuse of being sent by an estate agent; instead I was patently just nosy. But my accidental hostess didn't seem to mind.

“You said 1977? Well in that case, after your Nan died I think this house must have been sold to my parents-in-law, though they've since decamped to a bungalow in Bexhill. My husband and I have lived here about three years now and we've done it up bit by bit. It's nearly finished but I don't suppose it looks very much as you remember it?”

“Well, yes—and no.”

I peered around, drinking in the house's loveliness, the white-painted floorboards and walls, highlighted by pale greys, in contrast to Nana's wall-to-wall carpeted swirls, dark wood furniture and heavy curtains.

“The proportions have changed a bit. Or rather, my proportions have changed, so I'm having a kind of
Alice in Wonderland
moment.”

“Well if you want to have a ‘Drink Me' moment, I was just about to make a cuppa.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I'm sure. Zoe—this is my daughter Zoe, who is two-and-a-bit—Zoe I were about to do some baking. Which makes me sound like some sort of yummy-cliché though I do feel I ought to point out, even to a woman with a Chloé bag, that we have never done baking before, on the grounds that I am usually working and Zoe is either at nursery or hanging out with her gran. In fact the baking is kind of my fantasy of what being a good mother is all about, though of course it's probably not Zoe's. I'm Ruth, by the way.”

“Hi. Yes, I'm Pippa. Baking—how lovely.”

I was totally disarmed by this woman's—Ruth's—friendliness and openness. I couldn't imagine it happening in London. And yet Ruth was so sophisticated I couldn't imagine her not being a Londoner, which, I realize, says more about me and my deep-seated metropolitan prejudices than it does about either Ruth or Random-on-Sea. Nonetheless, I sort of needed to know.

“Have you lived here long?”

“Well, as I say, nearly three years. Three years in February.”

“No, sorry, I meant here in Random-on-Sea?”

“Yeah, a while. OK, my whole life, apart from uni—and even then I only got as far as Brighton. Sad, isn't it?”

Why did I find it so surprising that a woman born and raised sixty-odd miles from London might also know her pukka jeans brands and be able to spot a Chloé bag?

“Sorry, of course, why shouldn't you? I am dumb. And such a Londoner!”

“No worries. We're not all horny-handed sons and daughters of toil, soil or, uh, fisherfolk. But you—” Ruth did air-quotes while smiling—“‘DFLs' do tend to think we are.”

“DFLs?”

“Down-from-Londoners.”

“Oh, OK. I am such a DFL. Apologies.”

“No problem. I'll make some tea while you poke around upstairs if you want. I only wish I'd baked some madeleines.”

“Ha. Yes I am having a bit of a Proustian moment. You really don't mind if I go upstairs?”

“You'd be mad if you didn't, now you're here.”

Having knocked on Ruth's door on a whim, I felt very privileged to have been rewarded with something that, far from trampling on my childhood memories—or indeed my memories of Nana—somehow enhanced them. Ruth's house was not to Nana's personal taste, but I knew Nana would've recognized that this version of the house was also somehow “right,” if only because it had been achieved so lovingly and with such attention to detail.