Late Season Page 3

  ‘I miss her,’ she said, without thinking, and saw Martin’s head dip as she said it, eyes closed. She heard him exhale, a hopeless sound.

  Justine thought of the last time she’d seen them together, Evie and Martin, a supper at their pine table piled at one end with the accumulated debris of their daily lives: school reports, circulars, telephone directories, a grey school skirt with a rip waiting to be mended. She and Evie had sat across the table from each other under the low pendent Tiffany lamp that glowed multi-coloured in the warm kitchen. It had been – when? Late spring last year, warm enough to drink a glass of wine in the garden first, warm enough for Evie to be wearing a dark sleeveless dress; as she reached for her glass her long arm was pale and slender. Upstairs music had been pounding in Dido’s room, reverberating in the dark hall and down through the kitchen ceiling, and they’d both smiled over it, the thought of Dido’s mysterious existence shut up in her dark, noisy cavern of a room.

  ‘They’re hard to understand, girls,’ Evie had said. ‘I think boys are different. Louisa says so. I don’t know what goes on in Dido’s head.’ She had looked sad; even, very briefly, lost. Perhaps that was it, thought Justine, that was the moment I should have asked her what was wrong.

  ‘Adolescence,’ was all Justine remembered saying, shaking her head, thinking of the terrible business of growing up. Thinking of herself, probably. She passed a secondary school every day on the way to work, and they seemed like aliens to her, fourteen year olds, suddenly spotty, their noses and ears and chins all too big as though their features grew faster than the rest of them. Some girls with greasy centre partings and flat shoes, eyes cast down and hands jammed in their pockets, while others wore full make-up, the right shoes, and had a boy’s elbow to cling to through the school gates. Not a level playing field, growing up. Looking at Evie in the lamp’s soft glow, it had seemed clear that she must have been one of the lucky ones, with a clear skin and an easy smile. Dido too, probably, although perhaps it was too early to tell. But, looking back, Justine thought maybe she had been wrong about Evie, maybe at school she hadn’t been the girl everyone wanted to take out. Maybe it had been a cover-up.

  Martin had been there, not at the table, but standing leaning against the counter, out of the light, watching them, looking at Evie in that way he had, as though she was not his partner but literally his other half, an extension of his own self. Justine had always thought that romantic: Martin’s certainty, right from the start, that he and Evie belonged together. But she remembered seeing suddenly that evening when, having watched them until he was satisfied, Martin had slipped out of the room, softly closing the kitchen door behind him, that there might be something claustrophobic about it. To be looked at like that, watched hungrily; such passionate intensity seemed out of place in a long-married couple. But Evie had shown no sign of finding it oppressive; it was as though she no longer even noticed, going on with their conversation, about children.

  Darting a sideways glance at Martin now, Justine wondered suddenly how he could possibly have survived it: the loss of Evie. But as they went on with the washing-up, and it seemed to Justine that at least Martin was happy to be with her in the shadow by the sink, to leave the others at the table in the light. They were talking animatedly at first about trips to Siena and Florence, maybe a visit to some unspoilt hill-town Lucien had heard of down towards the Argentarlo coast. Tom mentioned a restaurant he wanted to visit, maybe write a piece about, somewhere in the hills. Slowly the conversation wound down under the effects of the alcohol until, more or less as Martin dried the last plate and Justine put it away, they all came to sleepy silence. Tom made a half-hearted attempt to persuade someone to join him in a glass of grappa, but found no takers and finally they dispersed, each making their separate ways to bed and the delicious, virgin promise of someone else’s clean linen.

  Lying now in the soft, foreign bed, Justine listened to the new sounds of an unfamiliar house and its systems restoring themselves to equilibrium, the pipes ticking and gurgling, the creak of beams and stairs as the building settled back down after the day’s invasion. Someone turning in bed in the next room: Dido or Martin. As her eyes adjusted to the light Justine could see a square of stars outlined by the frame of the window, and a distant ridge of trees silhouetted by the faint, ghostly luminescence they shed. She heard the hollow call of an owl from across the valley, unmistakable despite the fact that it was a sound that Justine, a city girl born and bred, had never heard in nature before. Suddenly she felt the thrill of being in so foreign a place, far more foreign than she had expected; a place where anything might happen.

  3

  Justine and Louisa, and Evie too, despite her absence, were the reason for this holiday: they were the connection. The men had come later.

  The three of them, not in the least like each other, had been friends almost from the beginning, or at least the beginning of their adulthood. They’d met on their first day at university when they’d been allocated the same landing in a huge, dreary Victorian hall of residence in West London; there’d been others on the landing, of course, but they came and went, drifting in and out and making little impression. Justine, Evie and Louisa stuck, for one reason or another.

  Justine, the first of them to take up residence, had met Louisa’s mother Julia before she met Louisa herself. She thought afterwards that if it had been the other way around she might never have taken to neat, repressed, circumspect Louisa. Her mother was a tiny, fragile-looking, lovely woman, elegant as a miniature Cecil Beaton model, with a nineteen-inch waist, lemon blonde hair that curled around her high cheekbones and huge, luminous grey eyes. She was a monster, too. Clever but thwarted, ambitious and snobbish, she had suffered the ignominy of a husband who had promised well but turned out to be a manic depressive, forcing her to settle her considerable expectations on her only child.

  None of this Justine knew on first sight, of course, but as Julia stalked up the grimy stairwell of the mansion block commenting in her languid voice on the ghastly colour the stairwell had been painted, the picture was already beginning to form. And when Louisa appeared behind her mother, the image of a dutiful daughter but with the glint of rebellion in her blue eyes, Justine found herself smiling at her.

  It became obvious that from early childhood Louisa had been the vehicle for her mother’s ambition; Justine, who came from a very different background, quailed even now at the thought of being the focus of such attention, but Louisa had her own way of dealing with it. From the moment Louisa left home for university she began to make her own decisions about what she wore, who she saw, and what she read, making sure in each respect her choices differed from those her mother would have made, and politely she kept her mother at arm’s length. In this light her pink lipstick (denounced by her mother as unflattering), her Laura Ashley dresses (badly made, fancy dress), her neat, short hair (dull), looked like dangerous subversion.

  As they grew older, and saw less of each other, Justine realized that in fact Louisa resembled her mother very closely in some aspects of her character, not least her determination. But to Justine then Louisa’s attention to the detail of her own life, her dedication to quietly resisting her mother’s intellectual snobbery and ceaseless attempts to decide her future, seemed heroic. And then Louisa had married big, untidy Tom Fane, and her mother had given up.

  No one had ever taken the slightest interest in Justine’s future, it sometimes seemed to her; perhaps, she thought on meeting Julia, she should be grateful. The fourth of seven children, Justine had grown up in an unruly, bohemian household in a cramped terrace in Muswell Hill almost unnoticed. Justine’s mother, Sonia, was an art teacher, a romantic, dishevelled woman addicted to the production of children whom she then largely ignored, sometimes looking at them as if she couldn’t quite place them. Her husband Victor, a copy-editor at a large academic publishers, had been more committed in theory to his children as individuals, but distracted from the practical application of his love for them by the effo
rt of earning enough money to keep the household running. Justine had been named for a character in a book, as had her two brothers and four sisters, and at moments of dipping self-confidence she sometimes wondered whether her parents were able to distinguish their offspring either from each other or from their literary namesakes.

  Sonia became a widow at fifty when her husband died suddenly at his little grey desk in Victoria, of a heart attack. Justine, who had been sixteen, had been more grief-stricken than she would have thought possible at the lack of a man whom, for most of her childhood, she had hardly seen – granted only her small share of the hour every evening that separated his return home from work and the children’s bedtime. Secretly, her own overlooked among the grief of so many others, Justine had avidly stored away the few memories she had of her father. The occasional bedtime story read with sound effects and funny voices or her turn on the sofa beside him in front of the television. A day spent in his office once when she had been ill, sharpening pencils with a machine he kept on his desk while he worked beside her; lunch at the Golden Egg and a paperback from Smith’s for a treat.

  The suddenness of her father’s disappearance from her life, having left for work one morning never to return, had left Justine with an abiding sense of how quickly things she had thought immutable could change. It had made her a melancholy schoolgirl, escaping into the rambling, introspective essays she would write for her English teacher and shying away from the risks involved in developing a social life. And then, quite suddenly, she had begun to notice something that was happening to her body: a failure of pigmentation, quite unobtrusive at first, just the odd pale patch with an irregular outline like a white island against her golden skin. The condition was diagnosed as vitiligo. It commonly began around puberty, she later learned, but Justine always connected it, however illogically, with her father’s death.

  Once it had been diagnosed as progressive but not dangerous, Sonia had little time for her daughter’s condition in the aftermath of her husband’s death. Although at the time she seemed more annoyed than bereft by his loss. She was busy enough worrying about being left alone with the children and no money, although most of them, by then, were supporting themselves. And so Justine had taken herself to the doctor, to find out that there was nothing that could be done about the faint markings on her skin, the scattering of white hairs that sprang up one night at the left temple. She learned to ignore it, at least that was how it appeared to her friends, and in fact it was hardly visible as long as she was clothed. Justine applied sunblock carefully and without complaint, wore long sleeves in the summer, kept her clothes on. She kept her head down, and worked.

  Now Sonia lived in a small, dark cottage in Essex which smelled of cats and paraffin, its damp back garden overgrown with brambles and mildewed roses that had begun to obscure the little sunlight available. She still taught art, part-time, at an adult education facility, and often complained to her neighbours that her children never came to see her (as they would inform Justine on her twice-annual visits), and what was the point of having children, after all? The truth was that Justine’s sisters, Juliet, Rowena, Isabel and Tess, with two, two, one and three children respectively, could not stand their mother now that they had children of their own and realized to what extent they themselves had grown up neglected.

  Oscar, Justine’s lazy younger brother and closest sibling, lived on benefits in a Colchester bedsit, endlessly studying, or so he said, for an open university degree in philosophy, and never washing his clothes. Occasionally he went home to his mother to borrow some money; he was introverted, and rarely spoke. Dan, the oldest of them, had died of a drug overdose while at art school aged twenty-one; Justine, eight years his junior, could barely remember him any more. She remembered the shock of being told that he was dead, the disbelief at how easily it could happen, just one mistake and everything stopped. Time up. She had lain in her room and thought of all the things that Dan would never do, now. And every year more of Dan slipped away from her until he was nothing more than a tangle of blond hair and a bedroom full of blue smoke and psychedelic posters. He would have been forty-three if he had lived.

  As is sometimes said to be characteristic of middle children, and perhaps more so if the middle child in question feels herself to have some flaw for which compensation is required, Justine had been – and was still – industrious and determined. She had worked hard at school, often staying behind in the silent, ill-lit school library to do her homework, always scrupulously organized and punctual; when she got home, she would change into jeans and go to the pub, where she had since the age of fourteen had a part-time job collecting glasses. This had allowed her to escape from her family – from her sisters in particular, with whom she fought almost in rotation – and to earn money. When her efforts were rewarded and she arrived at university with three hundred pounds saved to take up residence across that draughty landing from Evie and Louisa, Justine was as happy as she had ever been in her life. The dusty jewel colours of the stained glass on the stairs, the long, unkempt grass of the communal garden, even the roar of traffic on the Fulham Road, everything about her new circumstances seemed wonderful to Justine, and she was ready to make her neighbours her new family even before she had seen them.

  Evie had turned up fashionably late that September, days after Justine and Louisa had bought mugs and instant coffee, arranged their books on their shelves and put up their posters. She had stepped off the bus from King’s Cross, a year older than them, her skin nut-brown and peeling, she said from six months’ travelling across Europe and North Africa. She was carrying a bulging leather suitcase with a broken hinge, and it had burst on the chequerboard tiles of the mansion block’s doorstep.

  Justine thought perhaps some people might have said she wasn’t beautiful at all. You could have said, Justine supposed, that her shoulders were too broad, for example, or her nose a little too long, her hands too big. But there was something she gave out that meant not exactly that you didn’t see those things, but that made them delightful; a kind of ineffable, sweetness, a glow of health and heedless happiness. She was always smiling, it seemed, even when she was commiserating, as she often did, or relating a misfortune, which was rare; she radiated a constant human warmth. It came off her even then, at that first meeting, as she stuffed knickers and scarves and shorts back into her case, laughing up at them as she apologized.

  Evie had said, as they sat over coffee in Louisa’s room, the contents of the suitcase between them in a dustbin bag (Louisa, being organized, already had a stock of them) that she had come from her grandmother’s house in Chalk Farm. An only child, she had been living with her parents in a dilapidated farmhouse in Spain since the early seventies, but the previous year they had died in a car crash on a notorious stretch of road between Malaga and Granada, on their way back from a party. The police had told her, Evie said; it had taken them a while to find her, and she had waited for three days, wondering whether her parents might have just headed off to another party without telling her. They had gazed at her, Louisa and Justine, round-eyed at the tragedy of it. She had smiled at them then, kindly, and talked about something else.

  Louisa and Justine never met Evie’s grandmother, and Evie reached an arrangement with the university accommodation board to be allowed to stay on in the halls of residence when term finished. She would spend the time sunbathing in the communal gardens and prompting calls of complaint from the few remaining non-university tenants of the mansion block, who looked forward to a summer without students and held a particular grudge against golden, voluptuous girls like Evie, stretched straight out like a Bonnard beside the dahlias and not visibly applying herself to academic study.

  Although when Evie had first told them about her parents’ death, Justine had been aghast at the horror of it; once Evie was no longer there to confirm or deny the story Justine sometimes found herself wondering whether it had all been true. The exotic, tragic childhood, so poignant, so perfect a setting for a jewel like Ev
ie, so fully realized in every detail. It might have been something she had dreamed, or perhaps Evie had made it all up and, like the sacred myths of childhood – that one’s mother was beautiful, one’s father powerful – it would dissolve like smoke if subjected to adult scrutiny. Is this what happens when you die? Justine wondered; your garden turns to weeds, your possessions lose their meaning all heaped together on a jumble-sale table, and all your carefully constructed life falls into pieces when you are no longer there to say, this is who I am.

  Certainly Evie arrived in Evelyn Gardens alone; she did not, however, fit their image of an orphan. She was not small and wan but big and beautiful; she glowed with robust health, long shiny brown hair as straight as glass and dark-blue eyes. Evie already knew a great deal more about sex than Justine or Louisa, and was as generous in passing on her knowledge as she was with her spectacular wardrobe, which was stuffed with old satin ballgowns and ragged black mantillas she said she’d bought at Spanish markets. Evie didn’t care what anyone thought of her, or so it seemed then; whatever her background it seemed to have taught her that life was too short to sit and wait for something to come along. There were always plenty of boyfriends, and although none of them, until Martin, was allowed the chance to settle in, Evie was always kind to them, even when she was telling them that she thought perhaps things weren’t working out. To Justine and Louisa she was the model of an adventurer, and they watched, rapt, to see what might happen to her.

  Friends at eighteen, though, are different kinds of friends by the time they are twenty-five. Within five years of the three first meeting Louisa had married Tom in a church off Fleet Street wearing a satin gown with a thirty-foot train of Russian lace her mother, with even more spite than usual, denounced as vulgarly ostentatious. They bought their house in Hammersmith, practically the suburbs; it was a shabby, peeling Regency villa that had only recently been vacated by squatters, and it had been all they could afford at the time. From that point on Louisa divided her time between work, to which she applied herself with fierce single-mindedness, and the restoration of their house, from plaster cornices to wrought-iron railings. Needless to say, she had succeeded in every detail and the house had proven to be an extraordinarily good investment, but there was little time left over for socializing. There was the odd wine-bar sandwich snatched in a half-hour lunch break, and a phone call, now and then, just to keep up, but it wasn’t the same.