Consequences (20 page)

Occasionally Molly reflected upon the nuclear family and wondered how far they had lost out. Oh, there were advantages, obviously: mutual support, a shared bed, a man to carry the shopping and be handy with a screwdriver. On the whole, society still expected people to step out in pairs, nicely bonded in perpetuity, but increasingly that was not quite what happened. She observed marital fission on all sides; her friends and acquaintances seemed to be particularly prone to it. Sometimes, she would find herself briefly involved with the free-floating man of one such breakdown, as her kindly solace was negotiated by him into something more fulfilling, and anyway she needed sex from time to time herself. But it was always she who slammed shut the door, in due course.

She worked as soon as it became feasible to make child-care arrangements for Ruth, experiencing the statutory guilt but knowing also that, whatever the circumstances, she could not have done otherwise. There was too much out there that was inviting, challenging. She managed a small independent bookshop until there came a falling-out with the proprietor. Then there was a stint with a feminist publishing house. And then she discovered a talent for entrepreneurial activity, and flung herself into the world of arts administration. It was exhilarating to conjure up a music festival in a market town that had not even realized it needed one, to persuade bemused local businessmen that their reputations would founder if they had not been seen to contribute, to negotiate with fixers and performers. The purveying of culture had become a public good; state subsidy was on offer, so you could dip into that pot also. Between the Arts Council and the intimidated members of Rotary Clubs and Round Tables you could drum up enough to dispatch artists to places that had never before been confronted with a performance poet or an exhibition of avant-garde sculpture. In the process, you came across an assortment of frequently capricious people, some of whom you would willingly clobber, but professional integrity required a permanent smile and steely tolerance. Sometimes the wearily obliging Rotarians, writing out another check, seemed preferable to some egomaniacal performer, demanding hothouse nurture for a fragile talent. There is much abuse of the term art, Molly decided—but never mind, the real thing is also around.

She knew that she herself was not a frustrated artist, despite the occasional insinuations of disaffected practitioners, who tended to resent the hand that steered them. You had to put up with that, in this role of manager, patron, and chaperone. She had not the least desire to be any of these people whom she dispatched around the country, though some of them she admired and respected; rather, she enjoyed the idea of making something happen, the creativity in pulling off an event, the venture of exposing provocative wares. Success and failure ran in tandem; you could find yourself with a platform of three writers and an audience of five in a church hall in Carlisle, or an exhibition in Ipswich would suddenly become the talk of the day. Either way, you moved on; some other project filled the horizon. There was no place either for chagrin or for routine, but a constant onward thrust that satisfied Molly’s need for change. A different rush of ideas; new faces, new places.

But what had happened to youth? She was forty-three—not old, oh dear me no, not even edging into middle age, but she had forged beyond that invisible, undefined barrier. No longer young. Youth had whisked by while she sold books and made books and changed nappies and wheeled Ruth in a pushchair on the last leg of an Aldermarston march and wore miniskirts and took the pill, which had arrived just too late to scupper Ruth’s conception, thank God. From time to time, looking at Ruth, the thought would come: you so easily might not have been. And then Ruth’s emphatic presence seemed to make nonsense of chance, of happenstance.

Ruth shared her father’s dark good looks, and was a vigorous, outgoing child, but had also a conflicting tendency to lapse into abstraction—sudden withdrawals into some private reverie. When small, she would commune with herself for hours, quietly crooning nonsense narratives; as she grew she did well enough at school but teachers uttered warnings about lack of concentration, daydreaming. “What do you think about?” Molly would ask, looking for clues, and Ruth would stare: “It isn’t really thinking. It’s going somewhere else.”

Occasionally, Molly had contemplated being with a man. A young woman on her own with a child was in an ambivalent situation—both available and yet conspicuously fettered. To go out in the evening, she would require a precarious infrastructure of babysitters; a lover who stayed overnight must run the gauntlet of toys strewn about the place, and Ruth’s assessing gaze in the morning. Any man who survived this test of character was to be taken seriously. There was a divorced publisher, with a son of Ruth’s age, who looked for a while to be a real option. Some time later, a sculptor whose work she had promoted seemed to be becoming a fixture, until she realized to what extent she was starting also to support him. A professional commitment to art did not mean that one had also to subsidize it out of one’s own pocket, which was not so very deep. Besides, and most importantly, she knew that her feelings for him, though fond, were not much more than that.

You do not want to admit that you have never been in love, at forty-three. That the most compelling experience going has somehow passed you by, that you are a kind of emotional virgin, that when you read great literature, one of its central themes is mysterious to you. When Ruth was born, Molly had had an instant and awesome clap of understanding: she knew now what it was that drove the world, what it was that people felt for children. But, at the same time, she remained significantly ignorant. All right, she thought, so be it—I am disqualified, for some reason.

Youth was gone, then, which was occasionally dismaying but a truth that could be confronted, and faced down. More provocative was the erratic process whereby you went in one direction rather than another, did this, not that, lived here, not there, found yourself with this person and not someone else quite unknown, quite inconceivable. How did this come about? Oh, you made choices, but in a way that was sometimes almost subliminal, at others so confused that, in recollection, the area of choice is obscured entirely: what was it that was not chosen? And, sometimes, choice is not an option.

The television sits menacingly in the corner of the room. She does not want to switch it on, but she must; one o’clock, six o’clock, nine o’clock—each news bulletin. There come the pulsating concentric rings that announce the BBC news, and each time she watches them, she goes cold again. She holds Ruth, and the rings give way to the newsreader, to aerial photographs of the Soviet missile sites in Cuba, to the faces of Kennedy and Khrushchev, to film of the Soviet ships forging toward Cuba. If she opens a newspaper, she reads of families who have fled to the west of Ireland, to the depths of Wales or Scotland.

Each day creeps onward, subsumed into what is happening. The world is intense; the autumn leaves are fiery, children’s voices in the school playground are so loud and clear, London buses are brilliant, paint-box red. Molly pushes Ruth through all this in her pram and thinks: she may never be a child, a person.

Ruth has been to France with James and Claudia. There is this converted mill, with a swimming pool. She is rather quiet, on her return. Has she not enjoyed herself?

“Yeah. It was fine. Mum?”

“Yes?”

“Why didn’t you marry Dad?”

Ah. This was bound to come. Molly flounders. “Because…” She searches for what might be acceptable.

“He says you didn’t want to live like he does.”

So it has been discussed. Molly nods, overtaken. “That was…well, that certainly came into it.”

Ruth’s long straggly dark hair curtains her face. She is staring into it. What is she thinking? I might have had a swimming pool. I might have gone to a posh school. I might have a wardrobe full of trendy gear.

Ruth peers out of her hair. “Did you sort of toss a coin, or what?”

Eh? “Certainly not. I thought about it very carefully…”—
did I?
—“We talked it over…”—is that what we did?—“It was a question of what would be best for everyone in the long run.” Was it?

Ruth sighs. She is squinting at a piece of hair. “You know—I
do
have split ends.” She looks at Molly. “I don’t
mind
that you didn’t marry him. If you didn’t want to.”

Molly stands in a rank of women outside the school gates, waiting for Ruth. She thinks: I am older than my mother was when she died. I am older than my mother ever was. For most people, the mother that they remember is middle aged, or old. That is a mother figure. For me, a mother is a person younger than myself.

She has hardly any photographs of her parents. There is a snap that Lucas had taken of Matt outside the Fulham house: a young man—a very young man—in rather baggy trousers and an open-necked shirt, squinting into the sun. Thick, darkish hair that fell forward over his forehead, strong features. Handsome. And there was one of Matt and Lorna together, sitting on a pebbly beach, also taken by Lucas; Matt is laughing, Lorna looks more serious, she has an apple in her hand and was perhaps about to take a bite, she looks up at the camera—at Lucas—a small face framed in short, dark hair. It is not Molly’s face. Molly used to study this photo with detachment and think: she was prettier than I am, much prettier. I am not bad, but there is a more solid look to me—I have his features, and perhaps they are less suited to a girl.

No wedding photographs. Nothing of the commemorative cargo carried by most couples. There is Matt’s portrait of Lorna, which Molly now has: she looks straight at you—at him, as he painted—rather serious, that face, the dark straight hair, a blue dress, and her hands folded on her lap. And there is just one more snap of Lorna, now with a toddler, Molly, on her lap—Lucas again, no doubt. Small Molly is looking to one side, distracted by something; Lorna is smiling, her hair is rather longer, she looks—well, she looks, quite simply, happy. This is 1938. Before everything.

The sculptor’s studio is a section of a disused warehouse in Rotherhithe. At first glance, you would think workshop rather than studio, since the sculptor’s raw materials are wire netting, sheets of aluminium, lengths of iron pipe, chunks of scrap metal. There is an anvil and a blast furnace. Molly’s relationship with the sculptor has now gone beyond professional contact, but she has not yet allowed him into her bed.

The sculptor stands in the light of a grimy window, showing her a drawing. He is a skinny man—it seems surprising that he can move all this metal around. He is explaining a new project to her. It involves old railway sleepers and chain-link fencing, in a way that she does not quite follow, and is making a statement about freedom. The Vietnam War is in full swing, and this work has some connection with that but is more a general celebration of (or comment on, or meditation about) the human spirit and its triumph over circumstances.

The sculptor is holding forth rather, and perhaps at this very moment their eventual parting is heralded, before ever they have come together, the end implied at the start, as Molly listens and feels some instinctive resistance to what seems to be a paean of self-determination. In the last resort, he is saying, we all do what we are going to do, come what may, whatever cards are dealt, whichever way the cookie crumbles. We are free souls.

“No,” says Molly.

The sculptor looks at her, quizzically.

“Unless you’re talking religion,” she says. “Life after death. That sort of thing.”

The sculptor shrugs. He is an atheist, it seems.

Molly stares at the chain-link fencing, the tangled metal. This is one of those moments when art loses its appeal—temporarily, one trusts. She does not as yet know the sculptor all that well, but well enough to protest.

“Don’t tell me that people direct their own lives. My father was killed in 1941—not at his direction. My mother died having a baby. She wanted the baby—she didn’t plan to die.”

The sculptor seems to find this outburst sympathetic. He places a placatory arm around her shoulder. “You’ll come around to it—you’ll see. You’ll get what I’m at when the piece is further along the road.”

“Actually,” says Ruth. “I don’t
mind
having a peculiar family. I mean, I suppose it’s just that I’m used to it, but actually Lucas is rather fantastic, as a sort of grandfather person. And Simon’s okay, too.”

Molly eyes her. Such truths come out, from time to time, and can be reassuring, like this one. “All the same, you have been somewhat short-changed where relatives are concerned. A bit thin on the ground.”

“There’s Aunt Bryony.”

“There is indeed.”

They reflect on Bryony, who is a headmistress, and occasionally visits when she is in London, attending some professional gathering.

Ruth giggles. “I always feel as though she might be going to give me a conduct mark.”

“Don’t worry—she’s retiring next year. She wouldn’t be able to then.”

In fact, Bryony is amiable enough, but her calling is manifest. And there is little common ground—none of the “Do you remember…?” and “How is…?” with which relatives paper over an awkward session. Just that mystic blood link; the communal genes. And the shadow of a person whom neither Molly nor Bryony knew for very long.

Bryony’s parents have died. As for the Bradleys…

“Did I ever see your other grandparents?” says Ruth.

“Oh, you did, you did. It wasn’t a huge success.”

Marian Bradley has elegantly waved and silvered hair. Gerald is large, genial, compressed into immaculate tailoring. Molly has not been to Brunswick Gardens for several years. Contact was always tenuous; the occasional card from Marian suggesting lunch or tea, a little gift at Christmas. Ruth appears awed by her surroundings, and sits tranquily on Molly’s lap.

“And here is Ruth,” says Molly.

Marian’s smile is effusive. “Well, this is such a surprise. We didn’t even know about your marriage. You should have
told
us.”