The Party: The thrilling Richard & Judy Book Club Pick 2018. Elizabeth Day
I nodded, relieved.
‘Yes, yes, of course.’
I drew back. He went home and I returned to my flat. Over the next few weeks, I was careful not to crowd him. We continued going for dinner but I didn’t try to kiss him again. We held hands, his palm cool and smooth. Once, he came back to my flat and we slept next to each other without touching.
I told myself it was an old-fashioned courtship and when, at the end of six months of this, we did finally have sex, it required some subtle manoeuvring. It took a while for Martin to get hard. He needed me to be in a certain position. Again, I told myself it was sweet to be with someone so inexperienced, so needful of my help.
I’d had enough of men who took me as if I were their due, who woke me up with an erection and grunted their way to a satisfactory orgasm. I found Martin’s tentativeness delicate and respectful. He treated me like a piece of fragile china. I was sure, once he got used to me – to us – the sex would become more relaxed, less mechanical. I was beginning to love him, not for his physical prowess but for his mind. I wanted to hear what he thought about everything.
By the end of the year, we were engaged. I felt proud. I had won him over. Me. Lucy. The not-quite. And I was happy, too. Very happy. He saw something in me I failed to see in myself. How lucky that was. How I loved him for it. And how I loved thinking I could be the one to protect him.
Neesha stopped asking me to go outside for fags. We still said hello and goodbye and smiled at each other warmly but I knew it wasn’t the same. It didn’t matter to me as much as I thought it would. I told myself: she doesn’t see the Martin I see. She can’t understand what he’s like away from the office, in those quiet moments where I catch him on the sofa looking sad and lonely and I wonder what’s going on in his head and I reach out and stroke the soft hair at the back of his neck and slowly, he comes back to me, and we kiss and I know there is no one else who can do this for him. Only me.
Martin
Epsom, 1985
MY MOTHER’S NAME WAS SYLVIA. You don’t get many Sylvias nowadays, do you? A shimmery, slippery name for such a big-boned woman. Recently, one of Ben’s children introduced me to a fuzzy-faced toy and told me with pride that it was part of his collection of ‘Sylvanian Families’. I’m not sure whether the animal in my hand was meant to be a rabbit or a mouse or a non-specific mutation of both and although it looked soft to the touch, when I pressed it between my fingers I realised that underneath the thin coating of fur, it was hard plastic. That tallied more with my notion of my mother.
My mother was a perpetually disappointed woman. Her husband – my father – proved the ultimate in unreliability by having the temerity to die before I was born. The worst of it was that his death was entirely unexceptional, thereby denying my mother the one pleasurable thing she might have got out of it – namely, a good story.
It was December and my father had been dispatched to post a clutch of Christmas cards in the letterbox at the end of the road. The weather in Epsom had been bitterly cold, falling below zero the night before, and as he turned left out of the house, my father’s foot made contact with a patch of ice and he slipped, falling over onto his back and hitting his head against the kerb, triggering a cerebral haemorrhage.
A neighbour found him, dead in a spreading pool of his own blood, and alerted my mother who was two months pregnant and in the process of making a fish pie for supper. I don’t know what my mother’s reaction would have been and, not having been a witness to my parents’ marriage, I have no idea as to the extent of her affection or otherwise for her husband. From what I know of her now, I can’t imagine her being in love, but perhaps she was and perhaps it was my father’s death that made her into the bitter woman she became. Allow me to give her the benefit of the doubt on that.
She never spoke to me of my father, of the kind of man he was. There were no pictures of him around the house. He existed in my head as a gap: a burnt hole in a non-existent family photograph which I could not fill with any kind of recognisable physical detail, no matter how hard I tried.
My mother told me the story of my father’s death only once, when I was old enough to have found the words to ask her. I must have been eight or nine. For all of my childhood up to that point, my father’s absence had been explained away by two simple syllables: ‘He died’. This would usually be followed by a sigh and a sense that this had made things very difficult for her and that was all I needed to be aware of.
It had taken me a while to pluck up the courage to ask for further elaboration. I remember I chose my occasion carefully. It was at the end of the day, when my mother had come back from her much-despised job at the local cafeteria and she was sitting by the gas fire, sipping from a mug of Horlicks that I had warmed for her in the microwave. ‘How did my dad die?’ I asked.
She wrinkled her nose.
‘I was wondering what took you so long,’ she said. And then she relayed the whole episode with a sturdy matter-of-factness. I remember not looking at her as she was talking, but instead focusing on the fire’s fake flames sending leaping shadows up the flock wallpaper and the overripe-pear smell of gas as it seeped into the room.
One detail of Sylvia’s story stuck in my mind (she was always Sylvia to me, never ‘mother’). I still think of it now, some thirty years later. My mother told me that after she had called the ambulance, she had gone outside, wrapped up in her outdoors coat, and she had bent down by my father’s lifeless form and she had gathered up the scattered Christmas cards from the pavement and put them in her pocket to send the next day.
‘But …’ I said. ‘Did they have blood on them?’
‘What kind of a question is that?’ She took a slurp of Horlicks and looked away. ‘I wasn’t going to waste my time writing a whole new set, was I now?’
I wonder what they thought, those people who received those blood-spattered cards.
My father’s death meant that it was just the two of us from the start. There is a peculiar kind of claustrophobia that comes from being the only child of a single mother. You learn, quite quickly, that nothing you do will ever be enough to fill your parent’s yawning need for filial devotion. What starts off as love rapidly turns into a sort of inescapable hatred and the hatred is even more needy, even more trapping than the love was. It sucks you dry from the inside.
I think my mother’s obsessive love for me co-existed with contempt for her own vulnerability. She was dependent on me for affection and yet she denied that she needed it. I never met her standards because I never knew what they were. They seemed to shift and change on a whim. All I knew was that I was a source of near-constant disappointment.
I could read this disappointment in the wrinkles at the corner of her mouth, bracketing her lips downward. I could sense it in the way she looked at me sometimes, sideways on as I was doing the washing-up or watching The Generation Game on the television or sitting naked in the bath, a trail of goosebumps down my spine because the water was never hot enough. When she looked at me in this way, she seemed to be analysing me, trying to work me out, like a sceptic attempting to understand another person’s faith.
There was some oddness. There always is in that kind of relationship. For instance, she insisted on dressing me each morning, long after I was old enough to do it myself. She would hold open my underpants so that I could clamber into them, kneeling on my bedroom carpet so that I was uncomfortably aware that my penis was at her eye level. She would brush my hair brusquely and tie my shoelaces and prepare my packed lunch: Mother’s Pride triangles with Marmite and cucumber (which I disliked but never told her I disliked) and then she would walk me to the bus stop on her way to work, waving me off as I took my regular window seat and made the short journey to the local primary school.
I returned from school earlier than she got off work, so I would let myself in. She expected me to make my own supper and then to prepare something simple for her, a chicken kiev or a can of baked beans on toast. When she came back through the front door, I could evaluate her mood from the tread of her feet on the kitchen lino. If it had been a bad day at the cafe,