go and make the coffee.’
On their days off breakfast together was normally a special leisurely ritual. She made the coffee while Ben went down to the small bakery a couple of streets away to buy fresh croissants still warm and buttery from the ovens.
Zoe acknowledged that she was lucky in never seeming to put on any extra weight no matter what she ate, but then her job was very physically demanding, with long hours and missed mealtimes.
She hadn’t said anything at work yet about their plans. It had been hard enough getting her job as it was. Like everyone else, the large hotel chains were cutting back on expenses and staff. Only the fact that she had among the best exam results in her year had secured her a coveted job as a very junior trainee.
She had been with the company several years now, had completed their training scheme and had been lucky enough to be offered her present job as junior undermanager of their Heathrow hotel.
A plum job with a minute salary and the ferocious expense of travelling by car to work from the flat she and Ben shared. Silly perhaps, when she could have lived in or even at home with her parents, but it was worth all the hassle… all the time, all the travelling… all the hours she spent alone while Ben was still working… worth it for the precious wonderful time they did get to spend together.
Once Ben had gone, she rang her parents’ number. Her mother answered the phone, pleasure quickening her voice when Zoe announced her plans.
‘Darling, I’d love to see you. Will Ben be coming as well?’
‘No. Not this time.’
‘Oh, dear, what a shame. Never mind.’
Zoe grinned to herself as she heard the note of relief underlying her mother’s pretended disappointment. As products of the Sixties, with all that the decade’s culture had embraced, her parents had been determined to bring her up free of the shibboleths, the petty tyrannies and restrictions, the prejudices from whose shackles they and their whole generation had so enthusiastically and gloriously cut themselves free, and she knew how it both astonished and appalled them that they should have suffered such an extraordinary sea-change, such a reversion to the middle-class mores of their own parents, which they had assumed they had successfully thrown off where her own relationship with Ben was concerned.
Valiantly they battled to keep this horribly unegalitarian backsliding into middle-class morality hidden from their daughter, but Zoe was as much a product of her own decade as they were of theirs; she knew them too well, had lived with them too long, had grown to maturity alternately caught between amusement and disbelief at their naïveté and lack of awareness of what the real world, her world comprised to suffer any sense of ill-usage at their reaction to Ben.
As she had laughingly confided to one of her oldest friends, a girl like herself, born to the same kind of free-thinking, liberal if somewhat woolly-minded parents, ‘I think the parents are more shocked at the way they’re reacting to Ben than I am. Mummy said to me after the first time she’d met him, “Poor Ben… He’s been so financially and socially disadvantaged.” She can’t even bring herself to say that he’s working-class, poor darling. She still lives in a world where class differences aren’t supposed to exist. I think she sees my relationship with Ben as some sort of physical desire for some rough manual worker type that will probably pass. She believes I’m oblivious to the class differences between us when of course I’m not. Neither of us is. Poor Mummy, she doesn’t really understand that it’s different now. Ben and I don’t live in some dream-world where we think that love can conquer everything. We know it’s going to be hard… that we’re going to have to work at it. It’s not like it was for our parents, going through life doped up to the eyeballs on pot and sex.’
‘No,’ Ann had agreed wryly. ‘My mother seems to think that because Matthew and I live together we spend our entire lives in bed having sex. She actually apologised for disturbing me the other day when she rang me up at eight in the evening. I nearly told her I’d only just come in from work; that I had a file of balance sheets I’d brought home with me to work on; that Matthew had gone to the supermarket to do the shopping and that we’d be lucky if either of us got to bed before midnight, and that once we did the last thing either of us would feel like doing would be making love. But you can’t disillusion the poor darlings, can you?’ Ann had added, wrinkling her nose.
Zoe’s parents had a house in Hampstead, the fashionable part, bought just before the first of the big property booms with the help of a cash wedding present from both sets of parents who had been delighted and fervently relieved to discover that their offspring were finally legalising their union.
They had met at university; had taken the hippy trail to India together, returning with matching flowing locks and caftans. They had got married in them; scarlet ones. Zoe had seen the photographs, which were not among those now displayed in the plain tasteful heavy silver frames which decorated the pretty antique tables in her mother’s sitting-room.
As an investment banker, her father had done well in the Seventies and Eighties. Zoe had gone to St Paul’s, where she had worked hard enough to get a very satisfactory nine O levels. Her parents had confidently expected her to go on to university and had been shocked when she had told them what she wanted to do instead.
‘Hotel management… but why, darling?’ her mother had asked, obviously perplexed.
‘Because I like looking after people,’ Zoe had told her calmly. ‘I enjoy organising them… being bossy and managing.’ She had given them a wide laughing smile. ‘Of course I won’t always be working for someone else,’ she had assured them. ‘One day I shall have a hotel of my own. Perhaps somewhere abroad… Spain… Benidorm,’ she added teasingly.
Of course they had been disappointed, but eventually they had given way, as she had known they would. They knew nothing of discipline or coercion and had no defences against her stubborn insistence that she knew what she wanted to do.
Against all the odds, Ben liked them, although he considered they were no match for her.
She knew that if she had wished it her father would gladly have financed her, giving her an allowance, buying her a better car than the ten-year-old Mini which took her to and from work… even paying the rent on a decent flat; but once she had made up her mind to move in with Ben she had decided that she would live on what she earned. Not that Ben resented her parents’ wealth. To do so, he had once told her, would harm him much more than it could harm them.
Her mother picked her up from the station. At forty-six she still showed traces of the pretty girl she had been, the prettiness now softened and transmuted into a polished elegance.
As she kissed her affectionately, Zoe said, ‘You look good! I like the new hairstyle, it suits you.’
Heather Clinton smiled. ‘I wore it like this in the Sixties, straight and bobbed.’
‘Only then it was the same colour as mine,’ Zoe teased. ‘Not blonde.’
And then she had gone braless, and worn skimpy little shift dresses that showed more of her body than they concealed, and in those days her body had been worth showing, her skin glowing with health and youth, honey-tanned, sleek and firm.
Now, despite her aerobics classes, despite the expensive body preparation she used, she was beginning to be aware of the first beginnings of an unflattering loss of tone, an awareness that, no matter how hard she tried, it was impossible for her to recapture that golden, silky-skinned glow which David had loved so much.
Had
