* * *
In the car, on the way back to London, I say, ‘Once more, just so I remember, how long were you with Penelope?’
‘Six years,’ says Stephen. ‘God, I hope we aren’t going to go into all that again.’
He takes a long breath, one of his warning signs that we could have a big argument if I carry on.
‘That’s one more year than we’ve been married,’ I say. ‘Not that I’m counting.’
He says nothing.
‘You were supposed to smile,’ I tell him. But he doesn’t smile. And I know why, too. It isn’t that the joke is old – though of course it is. It’s a variation of a Jewish mother joke that my father told my mother and my mother told me. But I can’t pull off the humour any more. Along with everything else, I am losing my lightness, my wit, the thing that always got me through. Inside me I feel as though I am losing a battle in a war that hasn’t even been declared. As for Penelope, I know that Stephen still talks to her, that they are friends. Occasionally she sends us postcards from the faraway places she studies, reporting the concerts she has heard done on instruments made from stones and reeds. But this has always been the case, and no reason for concern.
In a traffic jam on the M40, just outside of London, Daniel wakes up. He wails, angry at the confinement of his car seat.
‘Oh great,’ says Stephen.
‘He can’t help it,’ I say. ‘He hates car seats.’
Stephen doesn’t say anything, not to me, not to Daniel. I tell myself this is only because Daniel is crying so loudly and because Stephen is tired, that’s all. How can he be expected to talk over this noise?
‘All right, I’ll do something,’ I say. I can’t bear it when Daniel screams like this either; there’s no point in pretending it’s only Stephen who is riled. Daniel is knocking his fists into the sides of his car seat. Emily and I name his tantrums the way that meteorologists name hurricanes. Tantrum Annabel, Tantrum Betty, Tantrum Caroline. If I don’t want Tantrum Louise, I have to move fast. So I slip out of my seat belt and go to sit with him in the back.
‘Can I have the front seat now?’ asks Emily.
‘Of course you can!’ Stephen says, patting the empty seat beside him. Emily climbs into the front seat, a smile on her face. ‘Hello, Pretty,’ Stephen greets her. Crouched in the back now with only Daniel, I roll Thomas the Tank Engine around the edges of the car door, on to Daniel’s legs and up to his chin. He screams, bangs his head against the back of the car seat, kicks his feet violently and spills so many tears that he makes his shirt wet. Finally, I unlock the seat belt. While Stephen and Emily discuss what exactly a grandparent is and how Stephen is Granny’s little boy from a long time ago, I quietly lift my shirt and let Daniel find whatever milk might be left in my breasts. He is nearly weaned, but not quite. I have tried – believe me, I have – but among my weaknesses are children’s tears.
‘Oh, come on, Mel,’ says Stephen. He’s watching me through the rear-view mirror. ‘You aren’t breastfeeding him, are you?’
‘I can’t get him to settle.’ In a manner as though I am striking a bargain, I say, ‘Please, let’s just get home.’
‘Are you going to be breastfeeding him when he’s fourteen?’
Cath would say, ‘Oh, shut up, Stephen, you sod. The chap is only a baby, let him be.’ Penelope, whom I have met from time to time, would laugh at him, whisper in his ear that he is only jealous. ‘You’ll just have to wait for yours,’ she’d say, tossing back the fringe of dark hair that decorates her forehead. But I don’t say anything. Daniel has stopped crying, which is what matters to me. And Emily is laughing at the thought of Granny being young and Stephen being a little boy. And that is the only other thing that matters to me.
Stephen dated me at the same time his girlfriend, Penelope, was having an affair with her university professor. I would have learned a great deal about Penelope if Stephen had taken me to his flat, a large floor-through at the top of a Victorian conversion in Belsize Park, as all of her clothes were strewn across the floor’s oak-wood planks, along with various bizarre musical instruments – most of which looked like elaborate sticks or pots. Balingbings and bamboo xylophones, African gourd drums and Romanian pan pipes shared space with a grand piano from 1926, which aged gracefully on one side of the room. Penelope is an ethnomusicologist, which means she studies music such as Manchurian shamanic drumming, Brazilian death metal, Scots pipe music and even some Continental street busking. I wish I could report that she is a dry-thinking, doughy girl who dresses in woollen trousers and enjoys open fires, but Penelope is the sort of person who, though quite capable of pulling off a day at Ascot in a big hat, prefers miniskirts and boots up to her thighs, cuts the necks out of her sweatshirts and wears them hanging about her shoulders, sleeps in the nude amid satin sheets and takes pride in the fact that she can accomplish most sexual acts even underwater. Well, this is what I’ve managed to wheedle out of Stephen anyway – and yes, I wish I’d never asked. Penelope’s parents, as it happened, were believers in the theory that humans evolved from fish, and spent every family holiday risking their children’s lives in scuba gear and wetsuits. Thus, the child had learned at least how to hold her breath.
She is not a beauty, Penelope. She has a hook nose and stringy hair, eyes that seem overly wide apart in her face, like those of a cow. But she has something about her that far outclasses the likes of Stephen, who it must be said is a man who understands his limitations and so, perhaps unwisely, surrounds himself with extraordinary people to lighten his spirits and to give him something to think about other than whatever happens to be on television that week. Even I can see Penelope’s appeal, her showy sexuality, her beautifully articulated vowels. When she met me once by accident on the street, she did not say, ‘Oh, you,’ with haughty disregard, but instead asked me to say a number of words for her: zebra, aluminum, advertisement, Alabama. The sound of these words seemed to fill her with a moment of exhilaration, such that the nostrils of her bony nose quivered, hearing the long ‘a’ of Alabama, the protracted ‘oο’ of aluminum. Like Henry Higgins, she could place an accent without trouble, and she declared correctly that I was mid-Atlantic, but with some time further south, possibly Virginia. To Stephen she said, ‘Hi, pet,’ and then moved on.
But Stephen did not mention Penelope, or give hint to the fact she’d bought that flat with him, nor that his relationship with her was crumbling with the arrival at the University of London of a member of the elite among French ethnomusicologists, Dr Jacques-Pierre Devereaux, world-renowned expert on Asian idiophonic sound, who had whisked Penelope away to do field work in Thailand. He took me chastely to Hampstead Heath, where we sat on the lawn by the lake, watching a fireworks display.
‘What would be your eight desert island discs?’ he asked me. I had no idea what he meant, having not at that time ever heard the Radio 4 show in which celebrities are asked what they’d listen to if stuck on a desert island. I didn’t understand that this question was loaded with the invitation to display a sharpness of mind and deep cultural understanding of classical music.
‘Peter and the Wolf?’ I said. I could not think of a second. Stephen was stretched out on a tartan rug, his chin resting in his hands. Fireworks filled the night air with booming sounds, with bright colours reflecting now against his skin. His face took on an almost tribal aspect. When I declared I had no second choice, he pushed his gaze in the direction of the
