Married Love (2 page)

Hattie frowned and pressed her knuckles to her forehead. — I can’t remember whether she went into the convent or not in the end. Perhaps she did. I can only remember the tea shop, and after that a pub, and trying
to
think of all the things we couldn’t bear to leave behind, and getting gradually drunker and drunker.

— This isn’t the same thing, Duncan said firmly. — And we aren’t at anything like that stage yet, anyway.

Lottie stared at them in genuine bewilderment. — I don’t understand you all, she said. — How can you not want for me what I want?

Noah saw his parents leave the house late in the evening. His bedroom was in the attic, he was sitting on the sill of his little casement window, his feet in the lead-lined gutter that ran like a trough the length of the Georgian terrace, looking down over the stone parapet into the street, four storeys below. Though it was strictly forbidden, he had liked to sit this way ever since he was given this bedroom when he was eight; he used to fit into the small space perfectly, but now he had to squeeze, and his knees were jackknifed up in front of his face. Rain was sluicing down the slate roof into the gutter. In the light of the street lamps, the road shone black; parked cars were plastered with wet leaves from the beeches and horse chestnuts in the muddy triangle of public garden opposite. His mother’s high heels scraped fiercely in the empty street as she crossed to the car: she must have dressed up in her teaching clothes for the occasion. She was hanging on tightly to the strap of the bag slung over her shoulder. She and Duncan dithered around the car under the half-globes of their umbrellas, probably quarrelling about who should drive; they seemed as small as dolls from where he watched. He supposed they were going to try to find Edgar Lennox at his house;
they
had been calling him on the phone all day, without getting through. It was strange to think of the two households, more or less unknown to each other before tonight, connected by this drama, awake in the city when everyone else was getting ready for sleep.

Hours later – he wasn’t sure how many hours, as he’d fallen asleep at his desk while revising for the geography GCSE exam he had on Monday morning – Noah woke to the sound of his mother’s voice in the house again. She sounded like she did when she’d had too much wine at parties: rash and loud, extravagantly righteous. He went out to listen, leaning over the banister and sliding noiselessly down, a few steps at a time. The steep and narrow staircase, the core of the skinny house, drew sound upward. Above his head, an ancient skylight as wide as the stairwell rattled under the rain, leaking into a strategically placed bucket. His parents and Rufus and Em were crowded at the foot of the stairs, in the hallway’s jumble of boots and bikes and baskets, junk mail, umbrellas dripping on the grey and white tiles. His mother still had her fawn mac on.

— I thought he’d be ashamed, she was saying, — if I told him that Lottie was marrying him because she thinks he’s a great man. But it was obvious that he thinks he is one, too.

— Is he one? Rufus asked.

— Don’t be ridiculous. What would he be doing teaching in a second-rate music department at a provincial university?

— I thought you said the department was something wonderful.

— That was before this.

— He does some film and television work if he can get it, Duncan said. — All fairly high-toned. And he writes for the cathedral choir. Anyway, greatness wouldn’t necessarily make him any better, as far as Lottie’s concerned.

— He said that he could see how it must look from our point of view, from what he called ‘any ordinary perspective’.

— How dare he think we’re ordinary? Em raged.

— He said that the erotic drive was a creative force he felt he had to submit to.

— Oh, yuck! Hideous!

— Hattie, he didn’t say that, exactly.

— And what was his wife like? Was she there? What’s her name?

— Valerie. Val, he calls her. She was frosty. She said, ‘Whatever happens, I keep this house’, as if that were something we were after. The house wasn’t what you’d expect, anyway, not arty: stuffy and old-fashioned. I should think the wife’s about my age, but she’s let herself go – grey ponytail, no make-up, one of those dowdy skirts with an elastic waistband.

— She was fierce, Duncan said. — I’d have been frightened of her, in his shoes.

— She wouldn’t sit down; she stood up with her back against the wall, as if she were mounting guard over something. All she said was that Lottie would soon learn. They have a son, about the same age as Noah.

— Did she know about it all already?

— She hadn’t known for long – he’d just told her. She’d been crying.

— We walked in on it all. We were the aftershock.

— Where is Lottie, anyway?

— It has to run its course, Duncan said. — We’re not in a position to prevent anything.

— It can’t be allowed to run its course, Duncan! What if they actually went through with this crazy wedding?

He groaned consolingly. — She’s an adult – she’s nineteen. Worse things happen at sea.

Noah turned and saw that Lottie was standing in her nightdress on the stairs just behind him. She put her finger to her lips; her eyes behind her glasses were black pits. She was shaken with waves of violent trembling, gripping the banister to steady herself, probably because she had swallowed too many of the caffeine tablets she claimed she was addicted to; and no doubt also because she was exalted and frightened at her ability to raise this storm in adult lives. Noah felt a familiar irritation with her exaggerations, mixed with protectiveness. He and Lottie had grown up very close, adrift from the rest of the family in their bedrooms in the attic. He knew how passionately she succumbed to the roles she dreamed up for herself. She won’t be able to get out of this one, he thought. She can’t stop now.

The wedding was held in a registry office, with a blessing at a church afterwards; Edgar insisted on the Elizabethan Prayer Book and the Authorized Version of the Bible. He composed, for the occasion, a setting for Spenser’s
Epithalamion
and one of his students sang it at the reception, which was in a sixteenth-century manor house with a famous garden that belonged to the university. Hattie refused to have anything to do with it all; she shut herself in at home with her detective novels. Noah drank a lot and befriended Edgar’s son, Harold, who had floppy pale hair and a choral scholarship at a cathedral school; he jumped like a shot bird if anyone spoke to him unexpectedly.

Emily said that Lottie’s white suit looked like a child’s nurse outfit – all it needed was a sewn-on red cross. Lottie was wearing contact lenses, and without her glasses her face seemed weakly, blandly expectant. A white flower fastened behind her ear slid gradually down her cheek during the course of the afternoon until it was bobbing against her chin. She clung to Edgar with uncharacteristic little movements, touching at his hand with her fingertips, dropping her forehead to rest against his upper arm while he spoke, or throwing back her head to gaze into his face.

— It won’t last, Duncan reassured his other children.

To Edgar’s credit, he seemed sheepish under the family’s scrutiny, and did his best to jolly Lottie along, circulating with her arm tucked into his, playing the gentle public man, distinguished in his extreme thinness, his suit made out of some kind of rough grey silk. You would have picked him out in any gathering as subtle and thoughtful and well informed. But there weren’t really quite enough people at the reception to make it feel like a success: the atmosphere was constrained; the sun never came out from
behind
a mottled thick lid of cloud. After the drink ran out and the students had melted away, too much dispiriting white hair seemed to show up in the knots of guests remaining, like snow in the flower beds. Duncan overheard someone, sotto voce, refer to the newly-weds as ‘Little Nell and her grandfather’.

Valerie phoned Lottie a week or so after the wedding to ask whether she knew that Edgar had tried the same thing the year before with the student who had sung at the reception, a tall beautiful black girl with a career ahead of her: she’d had the sense to tell him where to go. — To fuck off, Valerie enjoyed enunciating precisely, as if she hadn’t often used that word. Everyone knew about this because Valerie had also telephoned Hattie. When Hattie asked Lottie about it, Lottie only made one of her horrible new gestures, folding her hands together and letting her head droop, smiling secretively into her lap. — It’s all right, Mum, she said. — He tells me everything. We don’t have secrets. Soraya is an exceptional, gifted young woman. I love her, too.

Hattie hated the way every opinion Lottie offered now seemed to come from both of them: we like this, we always do that, we don’t like this. They didn’t like supermarkets; they didn’t like muzak in restaurants; they didn’t like television costume dramas. As Duncan put it, they generally found that the modern world came out disappointingly below their expectations. Hattie said that she wasn’t ready to have Edgar in her house yet.

The university agreed that it was acceptable for Lottie to continue with her studies, as long as she didn’t take any
of
Edgar’s classes; but of course he carried on working with her on her violin playing. Her old energy seemed to be directed inward now; she glowed with the promise of her future. She grew paler than ever, and wore her hair loose, and bought silky indeterminate dresses at charity shops. Hattie saw her unexpectedly from behind once and thought for a moment that her own daughter was a stranger, a stumpy little child playing on the streets in clothes from a dressing-up box. Edgar and Lottie were renting a flat not far from Hattie and Duncan: tiny, with an awful galley kitchen and the landlord’s furniture, but filled with music. Edgar had to pay about half his salary to Valerie to cover his share of the mortgage on the house and the part of Harold’s schooling that wasn’t paid for by the scholarship, so he and Lottie were pretty hard up, but at first they carried this off, too, as if it were a sign of something rare and fine.

— God knows what they eat, Hattie said. — Lottie doesn’t know how to boil an egg. Probably Edgar doesn’t know how to boil one, either. I’ll bet he’s had women running round him all his life.

Noah reported that they often had Chinese takeaway.

Then Lottie began to have babies. Familiarity had just started to silt up around the whole improbable idea of her and Edgar as a couple – high-minded, humourless, poignant in their unworldliness – when everything jolted on to this new track. Three diminutive girls arrived in quick succession, and life at Lottie and Edgar’s, which had seemed to drift with eighteenth-century underwater slowness,
snapped
into noisy, earthy and chaotic contemporaneity. Lottie in pregnancy was as swollen as a beach ball; afterwards she never recovered her neat boxy little figure, or that dreamily submissive phase of her personality. She became bossy, busy, cross; she abandoned her degree. She chopped off her hair with her own scissors, and mostly wore baggy tracksuit bottoms and T-shirts. Their tiny flat was submerged under packs of disposable nappies, cots, toys, washing, nursing bras and breast pads, a playpen, books on babies, books for babies. The tenant below them left in disgust, and they moved downstairs for the sake of the extra bedroom. As soon as the girls could toddle, they trashed Edgar’s expensive audio equipment. He had to spend more and more time in his room at the university, anyway – he couldn’t afford to turn down any commissions. Now Lottie spoke with emotion only about her children and about money.

The girls were all christened, but Lottie was more managerial than rapt during the ceremonies: Had everyone turned up who had promised? (Rufus wouldn’t.) Was Noah capturing the important moments on his video camera? Why was Harold in a mood? With the fervour of a convert to practicality, she planned her days and steered through them. Duncan taught her to drive and she bought a battered old Ford Granada, unsubtle as a tank, and fitted it with child seats, ferrying the girls around from nursery to swimming to birthday parties to baby gym. She was impatient if anyone tried to turn the conversation around to art or music, unless it was Tiny Tots ballet. She seemed to be carrying around, under the surface of her intolerant
contempt
for idleness, a burning unexpressed message about her used-up youth, her put-aside talent.

— She ought to be abashed, Hattie said once. — We warned her. Instead, she seems to be angry with us.

Hattie had been longing for early retirement but she decided against it, fearing that the empty days might only fill up with grandchildren. She believed that in the mirror she could see the signs in her face – like threads drawn tight – of the strain of those extra years of teaching she had not wanted.

— Poor old Lottie, Duncan said.

— Lottie isn’t old. Poor Edgar.

At weekends, Duncan sometimes came home to find Edgar taking refuge at his kitchen table, drinking tea while the children made scones or collages with Hattie. Edgar didn’t do badly with them, considering, but it could take him three-quarters of an hour to get all three little girls stuffed into coats and mittens and boots and pushchairs, ready to go. Physically, he was rather meticulous and pedantic. If Lottie was with him, she would push his fine long fingers brusquely aside and take over the zipping and buttoning. — Here, let me do it, she’d snap. To his credit, Edgar didn’t seem to resent the intrusion of the babies into his life, or even to be wiped out by them, exactly: he gave himself over to their existence with a kind of bemused wonder. He drew himself down to their level, noticing everything they noticed, becoming involved in their childish chatter and speculation as Lottie didn’t have time to be. They adored him – they ran to cling to his legs whenever their mummy was cross. Edgar’s appearance was
diminished
, though, from what it had once been: his white hair had thinned and was cut shorter and lay down more tamely on his head; his clothes were the ordinary dull things anyone could buy in a supermarket. Hattie realised with surprise that it must have been Valerie who was behind the charcoal-grey linen shirts, the silk suits, the whole production of Edgar as exceptional and distinguished.