These Days of Ours (13 page)

He was right. She must try harder.
Now I sound like a dim witted schoolgirl.

Dessert was predictably delicious, but Kate barely tasted it. She was eager to be off. ‘Come on, Julian,’ she said, as her spoon went down. ‘Off to Aunty
Marjorie’s.’

‘Oh joy,’ said Julian, rising and dabbing his mouth with an heirloom.

After farewells that adhered strictly to the laws of etiquette, Mumsy waved them off from the front door.

‘That was the first time I’ve heard a harp played live,’ said Kate, as the car ate the country lanes, nearing the light pollution of the suburbs.

‘And the last, let’s hope.’

During one of the times they’d talked without armour, Julian had told Kate
You’re my family now
. For Kate, their marriage lived in those brief interludes of closeness; the
rest of the time it merely survived.

Poking around in the glove compartment for a tissue, Kate found the invitation to the second ‘do’ of the evening. ‘Listen, Julian.’ She quoted Aunty Marjorie’s
distinctive style, somewhat different to Mumsy’s careful formality. ‘
Come as your hero! Or heroine! Mustn’t annoy the feminists!
’ She laughed, fondly. ‘She put
three exclamation marks after feminists.’ Kate shifted in her seat. Her man-made trousers were itchy and uncomfortable and she longed for her new black jeans. She’d hesitated before
buying them, turning round quickly so as to surprise herself in Top Shop’s changing room mirror.
Am I too old for a ripped knee?
she’d worried. Two years off thirty, Kate was
looking older in subtle ways she couldn’t quite place. No wrinkles yet, no crow’s feet, but her bloom was fading. Ironically, she’d never known she
had
a bloom until it
began to fade.

‘Is their place still called Hujorie House?’

‘Yup.’ Kate surreptitiously eyed Julian to see if he was being stern or indulgent. Sometimes her family amused him; at other times she felt him prickle with a toxic mixture of
embarrassment and disdain. ‘Tonight let’s get up to no good. Just the two of us. After the fancy dress party.’ Her hand landed gently on his thigh. She loved the dormant power in
Julian’s body when it was at rest. He was athletically built for a man who spent his days at desks or on the phone.

‘I hate it when you do that.’

‘Do what?’

Julian flicked at her hand. ‘Diarise it. As if sex is on your to-do list. Defrost freezer: tick. Collect dry cleaning: tick. Screw husband: tick.’ He kept his eyes on the white lines
disappearing beneath the car. ‘Although if we’re honest, the freezer gets defrosted with more regularity than we have sex.’

Counting to ten stopped Kate from responding in kind.

Despite how painful it was to talk about it, she’d persevered. So Julian knew why their love life had dwindled. Bit by bit, Kate was able to admit how overwhelmed she sometimes felt. How
weary. How worried. After hours of painful to and fro, she’d found the words to satisfy him that it wasn’t a problem with her heart, nor her loins, but with her brain.

Julian even conceded that after a day calling the shots at work
and
overseeing the refurbishment of their new house, he was often glad to collapse into bed like a felled redwood.

Our libidos are out of sync.
Knowing that arguments wouldn’t help them rediscover their rhythm, Kate stayed quiet until they pulled up at Aunty Marjorie’s gate.

‘We needn’t stay long.’ The usual pre-emptive reassurance.

‘I . . .’ Julian chewed his lip. ‘Look, I’m not coming in.’

‘But . . .’ Kate was dismayed. Her tunic crinkled as she let go of the door handle and turned to face him. ‘So there’s no outfit in the boot?’ This was a new low.
‘We’re always straight with each other, Julian.’ She sensed both their thoughts hopping to the same branch. ‘Well,
I’m
straight with
you
,’ she
said, meaningfully.

‘Not that again, please.’ Julian started the engine. ‘Work’s
fine
, Kate. Got that?’ He closed his eyes, as if he was officially the most patient man in the
world. ‘This is just one party. I usually do my duty. Go in, give your aunt my best, then get a taxi home.’

‘How will I explain your no-show?’

‘I don’t know.’ Julian didn’t sound as if he much cared. ‘Why not say I’m not up for another evening of chit chat about China and cancer?’

When she reached the gravel she heard his shout of
Kate!
but she kept going, past the gnomes, past the fake wishing well, past the garden thermometer shaped like a sunflower. A feral
Marilyn Monroe lay, whimpering, in a flowerbed.

Madonna opened the door. To be specific, the 1990 Jean Paul Gaultier version, with high ponytail and golden conical bra, opened the door. ‘Where have you been?’ said Madonna, in
Becca’s voice.

The house juddered, its walls alive with midlife energy. Through the sitting room door, Kate glimpsed Sitting Bull shaking his booty.

‘Where’s Julian?’ squawked Princess Diana from the kitchen; Aunty Marjorie’s tiara was askew.

‘Working on the house.’ Kate ignored Becca’s sceptical look. It wasn’t the first time she’d employed the handy excuse; in truth, she and Julian were not hands-on
and the house didn’t need them. Kate’s daydream of Julian swinging a sledgehammer while she painted skirting boards, her hair in a scarf and an adorable smudge of emulsion on her nose,
hadn’t come true. Instead workmen and contractors crawled over the Georgian gem like ants. ‘Where’s Dad?’ Always her first question nowadays.

‘He’s fine,’ said Becca firmly. ‘Despite that bloody awful outfit you’re not actually his nurse. Tonight, matron, you’re going to have some
fun
.’

This bossiness would be unacceptable from anybody else, but Kate readily handed the reins to her cousin. Throwing herself around in the fractured light of Aunty Marjorie’s glitterball
would be just the ticket, rocketing her back to school disco days when Becca would fend off lovestruck, spotty boys and Kate would, well, stare at Charlie, mostly. In Becca’s shadow, Kate
felt strong and ready, as if the valiant
joie de vivre
rubbed off on her.

There was Dad. In the corner. Not the blanket-over-the-knees invalid of his fears but nonetheless apart from the action.

Together, Kate and Becca danced kookily around him. ‘Not another nurse,’ he laughed. ‘I see enough of them, thanks very much.’

Beneath the Shakespeare wig – bald on top with fetching auburn border – his hair was poker straight and pure white. Chemotherapy was his stylist; his hair had grown back that way.
The other side effects – tiredness, nausea, a tingling in his palms – had all receded, as the doctors promised, once the course was over.

Becca sashayed away, and Kate crouched at the Bard’s knee, fussing with him, checking he’d taken his 9pm pills. Dad’s failure to thrive after the second, far more invasive
surgery had disconcerted his multidisciplinary team. Sensing her mother’s fatigue, Kate had stepped up. Withstanding Mum’s belief that cancer was some form of black magic, Kate
researched her father’s condition.

She’d gone from having no idea what a lymph node might be to a working knowledge of cancer. The brisk breeze of education blew away the fog of Irish superstition. Scary metaphor was
redundant when reality was formidable enough. Tablets for this, tablets for that, tablets to counteract what the first tablets did to Dad’s beleaguered constitution.

Her father’s moods shifted as he lost his sense of taste, regained it, suffered odd aches in the far reaches of his anatomy. His gums bled. His feet were sore. There was no trick cancer
wouldn’t play, as it toyed with them.

When Dad fell asleep – he nodded off sporadically, no matter how frenzied his surroundings – Kate kissed his forehead and made for the patio.

The massed lookalikes impeded her progress. As ever, Aunty Marjorie had invited far too many guests. Despite her pretensions, Hujorie House was a fifth the size of the Ames home. Through adult
eyes it was not the swanky establishment five-year-old Kate had envied. Reproduction everything allied to terrible artworks and swirly carpet, all of it scrupulously matchy-matchy: Hujorie was
everything Kate’s new home wouldn’t be. Yet she felt perfectly at home there. She loved it despite its faults. Kate hoped people felt the same about her.

The cool of the patio was welcome.

‘Jaysus, you nearly gave me a heart attack!’ Mum’s pale face, draped in voluminous blue, swam in the dark.

‘Is the Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus, supposed to have a sneaky fag in the garden, Mum?’

The back door delivered Aunty Marjorie to them and the cigarette was flicked neatly into the bushes. Even sisters have their secrets.

‘It’s so
hot
!’ Aunty Marjorie fanned her puce face. ‘I’m a victim of me own success with these parties.’

Uncle Hugh, whose last minute application of a bed sheet had transformed him into Gandhi, said, ‘I hear there are storm clouds gathering in the housing market, Kate. Is hubby
worried?’

He was almost knocked off his bare feet by the storm of tutting from his wife and her sister.

Mum was outraged at this slur. ‘Julian’s a smart cookie.’

Aunty Marjorie said, ‘Sure, only the other night wasn’t he talking about the grand profit youse’ll make on that house you’re renovating.’

Uncle Hugh turned to Kate. ‘Isn’t that meant to be your forever home, as they say?’

‘We’re keeping an open mind.’ Some details of the house were not as Kate had envisaged. Concrete worktops were, Julian assured her, very
now
and would add to the
‘sale-ability’. Her campaign for a reading nook off the master bedroom had fallen on deaf ears: family buyers need more bedrooms, and ‘the stupid planning officers won’t let
us extend’.

Secretly grateful to the stupid planning officers, Kate knew that without their veto Julian would have torn off the back of the building and replaced it with a three-storey glass box. He was
right: such boldness would ‘maximise the profit potential’. But it would also desecrate a fine old house. She planned to hang on to the house forever. Profit meant nothing to her in
this instance.

‘You’re lucky,’ said Aunty Marjorie, ‘to have a grand fella like that looking after you.’

‘He’s a good head on his shoulders, all right.’ Mum nudged Aunty Marjorie. ‘He keeps my little eejit on the straight and narrow!’

As they tittered – Aunty Marjorie surreptitiously sniffing Mum’s breath – Kate wondered if they pressed a ‘mute’ button when she talked of the chain of five shops
she’d painstakingly built up. The little eejit contributed half the household expenses, correct to the last penny.

‘S’cuse me, folks.’ Kate’s mobile chirruped and she turned away, into the darkness of the lawn. ‘Hi,’ she said.

‘I’m home,’ said Julian. ‘How’s the party?’

‘The usual. Superman’s crying in the loo.’

There was a pause.

Julian asked, ‘Are you still angry with me?’

Kate sighed. ‘I wasn’t angry.’

‘I was an arse.’

‘I was hurt, Julian. But I wasn’t angry. If you’d said you didn’t want to come right from the beginning I’d have understood.’

‘I meant to go. I wanted to support you. I know you don’t like seeing your dad on the edge of things.’

‘You do support me.’

Another pause. Kate hated having emotional conversations on the phone. She liked to watch Julian’s eyes. It felt a waste to touch on such matters, so rarely discussed, while so far
apart.

She heard the suck of their fridge door opening as Julian said, ‘It’s horrible here. The flat feels empty.’

Kate had seen little of the apartment lately. Her life was a hamster wheel of taking Dad to hospital for his myriad appointments and rushing over to Fulham whenever Mum panicked because
he’d gone a funny colour or seemed oddly drowsy. She knew Julian had missed her when she’d sat up through the night to keep her restless, unhappy dad company after his chemotherapy
sessions.

It was perverse: the power she held over her husband was only illustrated by negatives. By Julian missing her. Kate felt exquisite tenderness at how couples hold each other’s happiness in
the palms of their hands.

Julian said, ‘It’s too damn quiet.’

‘Wish I could say the same.’ Becca had commandeered the karaoke machine.

‘Is that, oh, what’s that song?’ Julian reached for it.

‘
Say My Name
. Destiny’s Child.’ Kate made him laugh by joining in with Becca’s screeched
say-my-name-say-my-name.

She laughed too. When they were daft together, Kate and Julian worked. They made sense. It was when they were both head down, their shoulders tensed, that they were brittle with one another.
Some days Kate’s life felt like one long exam.

Kate had repaid the money Julian had lent her, yet still felt as if she owed him something. When he bristled because he reached home before her and had to pull together a meal of leftovers, half
of her bristled at his male presumption and the other half agreed with it. She would love to please him by flinging open the door and kissing him, the aroma of home-cooked food wafting around
them.

But there’s only one of me to go round.
Only one Kate to belt from hospital to shop to hospital to home. Once upon a time Julian would have scoffed that the answer to that conundrum
was simple: she must give up the shops. He hadn’t said that for a while.

‘Don’t put your fingers in the light sockets or play with matches, will you?’ Did Julian ever notice how she sometimes faked her energy levels around him? He had tumbled to the
bottom of her priorities, simply because he was her husband and therefore always
there
. It wasn’t fair. ‘Most blokes would order a takeaway and watch a brainless action movie
where every other cast member gets blown apart by aliens.’

‘I’m not most blokes.’ Julian would go into his study and knuckle down. ‘I’m the bullying bastard you married.’

‘Shush. We’re over that silly spat now. I’m glad you’re not here, to be honest. This party is so different to the one we just left that it might blow your
mind.’

If Julian’s parents’ legs fell off they wouldn’t
dream
of bothering their offspring. They asked nothing of their grown children apart from a Christmas card and the
occasional dinner. Julian put up with a lot from her close-knit clan.