Dear Mrs Jackson, I haven’t the faintest idea what to advise. We seem to have bred a generation that expects food simply to fall into their mouths without their working for it. With sincere regrets, Aunt Vera.
Julia was getting up. She gathered up her bag, her gloves, a newspaper, and as she came past Frances, nodded. Frances, too late, got up to push a chair towards her, but Julia was already gone. If she had handled it properly, Julia would have sat down – there had been a little moment of hesitation. And then at last she might have become friends with her mother-in-law.
Frances sat on, ordered more coffee, then soup. Andrew had said that if one was lucky with one’s riming and ordered goulash soup, you got the thick part at the bottom of the pot, like stew, very good. Her goulash when it came was evidently from the middle of the pot.
She did not know what to write for her third piece. The second had been on marijuana, and it was easy. The article had been cool and informative, that was all, and many letters came in response.
What an attractive crowd this was, the Cosmo crowd, these people from all over Europe, and of course, by now, the kind of British attracted by them. Many of them Jews. Not all.
Julia had remarked, in front of ‘the kids’ when one of them asked if she had been a refugee, ‘I am in the unfortunate situation of being a German who is not a Jew.’
Shock and outrage. Julia’s fascist status had been confirmed: though they all used the word fascist as easily as they said fuck, or shit, not necessarily meaning much more than this was somebody they disapproved of.
Sophie had wailed that Julia gave her the creeps, all Germans did.
Of Sophie, Julia had remarked, ‘She has the Jewish young girl’s beauty, but she’ll end up an old hag, just like the rest of us.’
If Sylvia-Tilly was coming down to supper then the food had to be right for her. She could not be given a dish different from the others, and yet she did not eat anything but potato. Very well, Frances would cook a big shepherd’s pie, and the girls who were slimming could leave the mash and eat the rest. There would be vegetables. Rose would not eat vegetables, but would salad. Geoffrey never ate fish or vegetables: she had been worrying about Geoffrey’s diet for years, and he was not even her child. What did his parents think, when he hardly ever went home, was always coming to them – rather, to Colin? She asked him and he said that they were quite pleased he had somewhere to go. It seemed they both worked hard. Quakers. Religious. A dull household, it seemed. She had become fond of Geoffrey but was damned if she was going to spend time worrying about Rose. Careful, Frances: if there was one thing she had learned, it was not to say what one will accept or refuse from Fate, which had its own ideas.
But perhaps one’s fate is just one’s temperament, invisibly attracting people and events. There are people who (probably unconsciously, when young, until it is forced on them that this is their character) use a certain passivity towards life, watching to see what will arrive on their plate, or drop in their lap, or stare them in the face – ‘What’s wrong with you? Are you blind?’ – and then, try not so much to grasp it as wait, allowing the thing to develop, show itself. Then the task is to do your best with it, do what you can.
Would she have believed, aged nineteen, marrying Johnny when there was no reason to expect anything ever but war and bad times, that she would find herself a kind of house-mother – but ‘earth-mother’ was the current term. Where along the road should she have said (if she had been determined to avert this fate) ‘No, I won’t.’ She had fought against Julia’s house, but probably it would have been better if she had succumbed much earlier, saying yes, yes, to what was happening, and consciously saying it, accepting what had arrived in front of her, as was now her philosophy. Saying no is often like those people who divorce one partner only to marry another exactly the same in looks and character: we carry invisible templates as ineluctably ourselves as fingerprints, but we don’t know about them until we look around us and see them mirrored.
‘We know what we are …’ (Oh, no, we don’t!) ‘… but not what we may be.’
Once she would have found it hard to believe that she could live chaste, without a man in prospect … but she still cherished fantasies about a man in her life who would not be a mad egotist, like Johnny. But what man would want to take on a tribe of youngsters all ‘disturbed’ for one reason or another. Here they were, congratulated on living in Swinging London, promised everything the advertisers of at least two continents could think up, yet if ‘the kids’ did swing – and they did, they were off to the big jazz concert on Saturday, tomorrow – then they were screwed up, and two of them, her sons, because of her and Johnny. And the war, of course.
Frances took up her burden, heavily loaded carrier bags, paid her bill, went home up the hill.
A pearly post-Clean Air Act fog floated outside the windows and bedewed the hair and eyelashes of ‘the kids’ who came into the house laughing and embracing each other like survivors. Damp duffel-coats loaded the banisters, and all the chairs around the table except two on Frances’s left, were occupied. Colin had sat down by Sophie, saw that he would be next to his brother in the third empty chair, and quickly moved to the end where he stood by Geoffrey, who sat opposite Frances, and now Colin claimed the important chair by pushing Geoffrey out with a thrust of his buttocks. A schoolboy moment, rough and raw, too young for their almost adult status. Geoffrey then came to sit on Frances’s right, without looking at Colin. Sophie suffered from any discord, and she got up to go to Colin, bent to slide an arm around him, and kissed his cheek. He did not permit himself to smile, but then could not prevent a weak and loving smile at her which then included everyone. They all laughed. Rose … James … Jill – these three seemed to be ensconced in the basement; Daniel was next to Geoffrey, head boy and his deputy. Lucy was next to Daniel, having come up from Dartington to spend the weekend with him, here. Twelve places. They were all waiting, ravenously eating bread, sniffing the smells that came from the stove. At last Andrew came in, his arm around Sylvia. She was still inside the baby shawl, but wore clean jeans, that were loose on her, and a jersey of Andrew’s. Her pale wispy hair had been brushed up, making her look even more infantile. But she was smiling, though her lips trembled.
Colin, who resented her being here at all, got up, smiling, and made her a little bow. ‘Welcome, Sylvia,’ he said, and tears came into her eyes at their chorus of ‘Hello, Sylvia.’
She sat down next to Frances, and Andrew was next to her. The meal could begin. In a moment dishes filled all the space down the table. Colin got up to pour wine, forestalling Geoffrey, who was about to do it, while Frances put food on to plates. A moment of crisis: she had reached Andrew, and next would be Sylvia. Andrew said, ‘Let me,’ and there began a little play. On to his plate he put a single carrot, and on to Sylvia’s, a carrot. He was solemn, frowning, judicious, and already Sylvia was beginning to laugh, though her lips still made nervous painful little movements. On to his plate, a little spoon of cabbage, and one for her, ignoring the hand that had gone up instinctively to stop him. For him, a mere sample of the mince, and the same for her. And then, with an air of recklessness, a rather big lump of potato for her, and for him. They were all laughing. Sylvia sat looking at her plate, but Andrew, with a determined let’s-get-this-over look, had taken up a spoon of potato and waited for her to do the same. She did – and swallowed.
Now, trying not to watch what went on, as Andrew and Sylvia fought with themselves, Frances raised her glass of Rioja – seven shillings a bottle, for this pleasant wine had yet to be ‘discovered’ – and drank a toast to Progressive Education, an old joke which they all enjoyed.
‘Where’s Julia?’ came Sylvia’s little voice.
An anxious silence. Then Andrew said, ‘She doesn’t
