are they doing?’ Ian seriously asked Tom.
‘What are they doing?’ echoed Tom, owlishly, joking as always. He jumped up, peered down at the open page, half on Roz’s, half on Lil’s knees, and returned to his place. ‘They are admiring their beauty when they were nymphets,’ he reported to Ian. ‘Aren’t you, Ma?’ he said to Roz.
‘That’s right,’ said Roz. ‘Tempus fugit. It fugits like anything. You have no idea – yet. We wanted to find out what we were like all those years ago.’
‘Not so many years,’ said Lil.
‘Don’t bother to count,’ said Roz. ‘Enough years.’
Now Ian captured the album off the women’s thighs, and he and Tom sat staring at the girls, their mothers.
‘They weren’t bad,’ said Tom to Ian.
‘Not bad at all,’ said Ian to Tom.
The women smiled at each other: more of a grimace.
‘But you are better now,’ said Ian, and went red.
‘Oh, you are charming,’ said Roz, accepting the compliment for herself.
‘I don’t know,’ said the clown, Tom, pretending to compare the old photographs with the two women sitting there, in their bikinis. ‘I don’t know. Now? –’ and he screwed up his eyes for the examination. ‘And then.’ He bent to goggle at the photographs.
‘Now has it,’ he pronounced. ‘Yes, better now.’ And at this the two boys fell to foot-and-shoulder wrestling, or jostling, as they often still did, like boys, though what people saw were young gods who couldn’t take a step or make a gesture that was not from some archaic vase, or antique dance.
‘Our mothers,’ said Tom, toasting them in orange juice.
‘Our mothers,’ said Ian, smiling directly at Roz in a way that made her shift about in her chair and move her legs.
Roz had said to Lil that Ian had a crush on her, Roz, and Lil had said, ‘Well, never mind, he’ll get over it.’
What Ian was not getting over, had not begun to get over, was his father’s death, already a couple of years behind, in time. From the moment he had ceased to have a father he had pined, becoming thinner, almost transparent, so that his mother complained, ‘Do eat, Ian, eat something – you must.’
‘Oh, leave me alone.’
It was all right for Tom, whose father turned up sometimes, and whom he visited up there in his landlocked university. But Ian had nothing, not even warming memories. Where his father should have been, unsatisfactory as he had been with his affairs and his frequent absences, was nothing, a blank, and Ian tried to put a brave face on it, had bad dreams, and both women’s hearts ached for him.
A big boy, his eyes heavy with crying, he would go to his mother, where she sat on a sofa, and collapse beside her, and she would put her arms around him. Or go to Roz, and she embraced him, ‘Poor Ian.’
And Tom watched this, seriously, coming to terms with this grief, not his own, but its presence so close in his friend, his almost brother, Ian. ‘They are like brothers,’ people said. ‘Those two, they might as well be brothers.’ But in one a calamity was eating away, like a cancer, and not in the other, who tried to imagine the pain of grief and failed.
One night, Roz got up out of her bed to fetch herself a drink from the fridge. Ian was in the house, staying the night with Tom, as so often happened. He would use the second bed in Tom’s room, or Harold’s room, where he was now. Roz heard him crying and without hesitation went in to put her arms around him, cuddled him like a small boy, as after all she had been doing all his life. He went to sleep in her arms and in the morning his looks at her were demanding, hungry, painful. Roz was silent, contemplating the events of the night. She did not tell Lil what had happened. But what had happened? Nothing that had not a hundred times before. But it was odd. ‘She didn’t want to worry her!’ Really? When had she ever been inhibited from telling Lil everything?
It happened that Tom was over at Lil’s house, across the street, with Ian, for a couple of nights. Roz alone, telephoned Harold, and they had an almost connubial chat.
‘How’s Tom?’
‘Oh, he’s fine. Tom’s always fine. But Ian’s not too good. He really is taking Theo’s death hard.’
‘Poor kid, he’ll get over it.’
‘He’s taking his time, then. Listen, Harold, next time you come perhaps you could take out Ian by himself?’
‘What about Tom?’
‘Tom’d understand. He’s worried about Ian, I know’
‘Right. I’ll do that. Count on me.’
And Harold did come, and did take Ian off for a long walk along the sea’s edge, and Ian talked to Harold, whom he had known all his life, more like a second father.
‘He’s very unhappy,’ Harold reported to Roz and to Lil.
‘I know he is,’ said Lil.
‘He thinks he’s no good. He thinks he’s a failure.’
The adults stared at this fact, as if it were something they could actually see.
‘But how can you be a failure at seventeen?’ said Lil.
‘Did we feel like that?’ asked Roz.
‘I know I did,’ said Harold. ‘Don’t worry’ And back he went to his desert university. He was thinking of getting married again.
‘Okay,’ said Roz. ‘If you want a divorce.’
‘Well, I suppose she’ll want kids,’ said Harold.
‘Don’t you know?’
‘She’s twenty-five,’ said Harold. ‘Do I have to ask?’
‘Ah,’ said Roz, seeing it all. ‘You don’t want to put the idea into her head?’ She laughed at him.
‘I suppose so,’ said Harold.
Then Ian was again spending the night with Tom. Rather, he was there at bedtime. He went off to Harold’s room, and there was a quick glance at Roz, which she hoped Tom had not seen.
When she woke in the night, ready to go off to the fridge for a drink, or just to wander about the house in the dark, as she often did, she did not go, afraid of hearing Ian crying, afraid she would not be able to stop herself going into him. But then she found he had blundered through the dark into her room and was beside her, clutching at her like a lifebelt in a storm. And she actually found herself picturing those seven black rocks like rotten teeth in the black night out there, the waves pouring and dashing around them in white cascades of foam.
Next morning Roz was sitting at the table in the room that was open to the verandah, and the sea air, and the wash and hush and lull of the sea. Tom stumbled in fresh from his bed, the smell on him of youthful
