An Authentic Life Page 5

  “I suppose. But only sometimes.”

  “And Lou will want to see them,” Jeremy points out. “I can take her,” he says, looking at Joanna. She smiles, gratefully. The less she sees of the Rodgers, the better.

  She is relieved that they are united as a family of four. It makes the moment, this notion of Musketeers that they have all held over the last few years. The family is holding strong, no matter the pressure on it from the outside world. Family loyalty will prevail. Joanna has a long way to go with them, but she will survive. They all will.

  Chapter 8

  “Hi. Is that you, Joanna?”

  “Yes,” she replies cautiously, knowing the voice, and not yet placing it.

  “I decided that if Mohamed wouldn’t come to the mountain, the mountain…”

  “Annie?” she says, her voice surprised but welcoming the call. She knows that she has neglected Annie’s attempts to be in contact with her since Stephen died.

  “That’s right. You were going to ring. Remember? Three months ago. You promised you would in your Christmas letter”

  “I did. Sorry.” She is laughing now, letting her caller know that she is embarrassed. “I should have rung.”

  “Don’t tell me. You have been so busy. Spare me the excuses,” her caller laughs. “How are you? Are you getting over it?” Annie’s voice is genuinely concerned.

  Annie was always direct with her. In their time, they knew each other well. There was no point pretending with each other. It was a bit like her and Moira; only it had that extra dimension with Annie. With Annie, she had attraction, something that she and Moira never shared.

  “I’m actually fine. Back at work, pushing water uphill trying to find homes for old folk, listening to tales of woe. You know how it goes.”

  “And the children?”

  “Fine. The boys are two strapping young men now. Jeremy is starting university in the autumn. He’s hoping to go to Dundee. Following in his mother’s footsteps, except St Andrews and Dundee became two universities after I was at St Andrews. Daniel has still to decide, but I think he will go on to university as well. And Lou is just a honey. We all love her to bits and she is definitely queen bee around here.”

  “God. Can they be that old? Jeremy’s not doing Literature, is he?”

  Joanna’s first degree was in literature, her degree far superior to that of the easily distracted Annie. If truth were known, she thinks that Annie was always a bit in awe of her verbal and literary skills and, at the time, Joanna took a mildly wicked pleasure in her superior command of language.

  “No. No, he’s intent on being a doctor.”

  They leave that one hanging in the air. Stephen was a doctor. Jeremy is following in his father’s footsteps.

  “Anyway, how are you?” Joanna continues. “And are you still an Inspector? I have to say, that really impressed me when you told me.”

  “Don’t be. It’s all hard grind and asking social work managers questions they would rather you didn’t, while they pretend all the while that they are really in favour of being inspected in the clients’ interests. They could see you far enough, if truth were known.”

  “But it’s still important stuff.” Joanna is impressed in her turn that her friend from their training days has followed the careerist route. The achievement tables have been reversed.

  She did not achieve in careerist terms. She made first line manager and then followed the usual route of the married woman – babies and return to work to the ‘soft’ bits of social work. That is how she sees it, anyway. She is a sort of modern lady almoner now, and one who can laugh at herself as she sweeps through the hospital.

  “Well, you actually have less discretion working for the Government than you do in the real workplace. You are very bound by policy and advice to Ministers,” Annie responds. Then she changes tack. “Anyway, that’s not why I rang. I really have wondered how you are. It’s a long while since Stephen and all that and I’m beginning to weary of these dreadful Christmas messages people insist on sending.” Annie’s words may be forceful, but her tone is jocular.

  “Point taken,” Joanna concedes. “But no, I’m fine, honestly. It’s good to hear you. What made you call just now?” She wants to know – why now, out of the blue?

  “I’m going to be up in Inverness with Jemmy later in the year and wondered if we could call?”

  “Ah yes, Jemmy – so that’s her name. You said that you were settled. How long?” This is what she wants to know all about. Who was Annie with now?

  “Mm. Well, I was settled, then I was unsettled again. Now it’s Jemmy.” Annie laughs.

  “Oh, I see,” Joanna gives one of her chuckling laughs. “Still playing the field are we?”

  “Not at all. Just looking for something that works.”

  The barb is not lost on Joanna. She and Annie did not work. She ignores it, deciding not to take this as a jibe.

  “And have you?”

  “I think so. Time will tell,” Annie replies, sadness suddenly somewhere in her voice.

  “Do you have doubts?” Joanna asks, responding to the hesitation in Annie’s voice.

  “No. I’m just cautious, especially speaking with you. I once thought that you and I would work, remember?”

  Joanna wonders about the value of talking with this, the first person in her life whom she loved, the one who came into her life at just the wrong time. Why reopen all that? But it is Annie who is clear about the parameters for the call. She has had time to think things out before lifting the phone.

  “I don’t want to frighten any horses up there for you,” Annie goes on before Joanna can respond. “I just feel that we had enough between us in the past to go on being friends. And Moira keeps me up to date from time to time on how you are. We have been keeping in touch, she and I, in recent times. It matters somehow, Jo, that you and I should go on being friends.”

  Joanna has used these words about continuing friendship herself over the years, even if she did not practice what she preached when it came to Annie. She has argued the principle with her Gang of women friends on more than one occasion. They all concluded in the Gang over a few rowdy suppers that it might be possible some of the time for women who were former lovers to go on into friendship, but that it was unusual between men and women. Not, Joanna thinks now, that the Gang members know about Annie and Joanna. It was just conversation in the abstract.

  She wants to deepen this conversation. Annie and she have only had superficial contact since the end of their relationship. For so long, it was just too painful. Stephen would not have countenanced her continuing friendship on any level with Annie. And Stephen and the children preoccupied her. So she neglected Annie; maybe shut her out from her emotions. That was the easiest thing to do. Joanna risks talk of the past.

  “Do you still blame me? And hate Dennis?” she asks, probing. Dennis was the man she was seeing at the same time as she was involved with Annie, whilst they were all postgraduate students in Edinburgh. They were a set of pals as well as lovers. They were at that age when young people move in and out of fluid social groups, exploring relationships and interests, and testing the adults they were each on the way to becoming

  “I never hated you,” Annie protests in answer to a question that Joanna has not actually asked. “But I couldn’t bear the thought of you being with him and then coming straight back to the flat and me. I was naive enough then to believe that you were not having sex with him. That was what kept me sane at the time. But, no, I couldn’t understand. More than anything else, I couldn’t understand. We had such a good time, you and I. We made each other laugh so much. The others in the flat were always complaining about the noise – remember? And the sex was good, even in our experimental youth,” Annie laughs, clearly recalling the good bits of that time. “I couldn’t understand why you needed him as well.”

  Joanna hopes the children never listen in to her phone calls. But she is hooked. Years are dropping away, revealing lost memories of what at the
time was the purest of loves. And she wants, somehow, to go back to that time, back to the experience of being in her early twenties and exploring the mind and body and emotions of an attractive young woman, as Annie was then. It was a voluptuous time, an enervating, exhilarating time, and one that is long since past. If they can talk about it just now, she might reconnect with it and know that it really has been a part of her.

  “We were a pair of innocents, who thought we were ready to take the world by storm,” she reflects out loud.

  “ Innocents, yes, but we were hardly lightweight, in any sense. We were serious, young and emancipated women of the early eighties. You had all your literary background and I had mine and we debated long and hard, I remember. You used to look at my essays for the social work course and tell me that my writing style was a cross between journalese and Latinate. And we argued the merits of existentialist theory over religious nonsense – do you still think religion is nonsense, by the way? And do you remember me all but having a tutorial from you on Casework Methods before one exam? That stood me in good stead, incidentally. I used to tutor the subject at the college I lectured at a few years after I qualified. That was due to your early influence.”

  “Ah well, they wanted us to go out and change the world from that Social Work course, didn’t they? And you seem to be doing that.”

  “And yourself?”

  “Not me! I just plough my inconspicuous little furrow. I give help where I can and then go back home to the kids again.”

  “Joanna, you don’t change, do you? You were always self-deprecating, you know. You were, and no doubt still are, a first rate caseworker. I should know – I listened to your accounts of your work with clients often enough when we were first qualified.”

  But Joanna wants to explore more personal stuff.

  “What happened to you at the end? The end of us, I mean.” She waits in the silence, knowing that this is hard for Annie.

  “I kind of broke down. I saw someone at the University – a counsellor or a psychiatrist – I can’t remember now.”

  “Did that help?” Joanna probes.

  “Yes it did in a funny way. I only went once but he said that it was always worse when a relationship between people of the same sex break down. He said it was always more intense to begin with and so the loss is greater. It helped somehow to have someone just recognise how painful it was; that it wasn’t just a lesbian jolly, if you know what I mean – like you see in the tabloids these days.” For a second Annie sounds bitter. Then, as if dismissing that time in her life, she goes on, “ I picked myself up after that and got on with things.”

  Joanna thinks of Stephen. She thinks of Annie. She wonders if you can say which is worse – to end a relationship with a man or with a woman. But Annie is speaking again, following the same line of thought.

  “I wouldn’t know which is worse, of course. There have only ever been women for me. So I can’t compare. What do you think? Was the psychiatrist right?”

  “I think I plead the Fifth Amendment. It was hard to lose you.”

  “It was?” Annie’s voice is incredulous.

  Joanna realises. How could Annie have known - not the way that she, Joanna, decreed that it was over; not the way she ended it so sharply?

  “Oh yes. I know that at the time I never said, but it was wonderful lovemaking. We were very close. At least I thought so. I would be lost with you for hours at a time.” Suddenly, the memories are too alive and too painful for Joanna. She shuts the thoughts out. Annie has heard, though, because she gives a wistful sounding sigh over the line. “But I had other issues,” Joanna goes on. “It was never a straight choice at the time – you or Dennis. There were so many pressures to marry and have children. The social thing was very important to me then. I suppose I wanted it all and couldn’t have it. When it came to a choice for me, it had to be the conventional route.”

  “And now? Would you go back to women?” Annie is sailing close to the wind. They both know it.

  Joanna sidesteps the question. She would not go back to Annie. That is history. She will not let Annie think that she would.

  “Now I just get on and don’t think of anything like that. I see plenty of women friends, of course, and you know who is who, if you know what I mean. But I keep my distance. My two boys act as a kind of armour. Their existence says to the world that I am not available. And there’s Lou.”

  “And that’s the way you want it?” Annie probes.

  She thinks before she replies. The advantage of speaking to this voice from the past is that Joanna does not have to account for what she says to anyone in her current life.

  “No. I suppose not,” she admits. “But it’s for the best. I have the children to consider. They’ve just lost Stephen.”

  Annie says nothing, as if there is nothing to say to Joanna’s irrefutable logic.

  The conversation drifts. News of parents is exchanged. They talk of Moira and her boys and of the restricting Malcolm. Annie has never met him. She declined the wedding invitation, mainly because Joanna was the friend the two had in common, and with the young lovers’ link gone at that time, Annie let the friendship with Moira more or less lapse. Or so Annie tells her now. There have only ever been occasional phone calls between Annie and Moira, always initiated by Annie. Moira was moving in very different circles.

  Joanna brings the conversation back to Annie’s proposed visit to Inverness.

  “When are you two in Inverness?”

  “Later in the summer. I’m intending to bring Jemmy up to see some of my old haunts. And we will go on over to the west coast to do some sailing.”

  “Tell me about Jemmy,” Joanna prompts her.

  “Drop dead gorgeous, tall, blonde and thirty-five. She’s a teacher and I’m in love.”

  Joanna laughs. This sounds just like the impetuous Annie she remembers.

  “Yes, come and see me. I’d like that,” Joanna says, her tone emphatic as she decides that this is precisely what she would like. It really would be good to see Annie again and she is curious to meet Jemmy.

  Chapter 9

  The last thing she needs is the approaching forms of Martha and, Jake. But there they are, momentarily as much caught off guard as she is as she exits from the bus station after seeing a quietly excited Jeremy off with his school party on the first lap of his long-awaited spring trip by rail and boat to Paris. Martha saw her before she saw Martha and the smartly dressed woman with her dyed white hair is now staring steely-eyed at her whilst Jake, once the friend of Stephen’s and her marriage is as caught off balance as she is. She can see at a glance that he fears an outburst from Martha and he is right. The older woman makes a beeline for Joanna.

  “You killed him,” Martha all but spits in her face, oblivious to the curious glances of passers by. Suddenly the trio finds itself the sole occupiers of the area as the few members of the public who are around give them a wide berth. Mortified, Joanna realizes that the parents of other kids from the school trip are here to witness this, the first encounter of Stephen’s family with her since the funeral. She stands still, unsure what to say or do. She wants the floor to open up and of course it does not.

  Jake, a younger and slimmer version of Stephen stands with an arm on his mother’s elbow, now with a slightly supercilious smile on his face as if he is silently relishing this moment when his mother has her say.

  That letter and its contents are about to deal its first blow on Joanna. All she can do is stay silent. Silent, unspeaking dignity seems best, as she looks straight into the hostile eyes of this woman who hates her so much. She hopes that the moment is over and that Martha will have the good grace to pass on, but her erstwhile mother-in-law comes back at her.

  “You destroyed him. You ate him up and spat him out, just when it suited you. You’re not normal, you’re not.”

  Joanna turns away, determined to say nothing that she will regret. No matter how much she may detest Martha, she has to remember that she is looking at the chil
dren’s grandmother. She wants nothing to go back to them. She wants no one to be able to say that she set the children against Martha, dearly as she might like to. And she does feel some pity for Martha. At the end of the day, she has lost a son. Joanna can only imagine what that must be like, no matter the age of mother and lost son. She speaks to Martha as calmly as she can, with a glance in plea for support to Jake.

  “I’m as sorry as you are that Stephen is dead, Martha. But he took his own life. I had nothing to do with it. He was a weak man, at the end of the day.”

  Martha would love to hit her – she can see that. But Joanna is glad she has said what she has. It is the truth after all. Stephen was a weak man, a man who was cowardly enough to walk out on the lives of his family and a man who was weak enough to walk out on life itself.

  Martha flushes with rage. She looks for a second as if she might just strike Joanna. But Joanna stands firm. It is Martha who walks away. Jake hesitates and hovers, unsure whether to go off in pursuit of his mother or whether to say something to Joanna.

  There is an awkward silence as the two of them watch Martha’s receding back.

  “That was a bit hard, Joanna,” he says now, his eyes searching hers for some sort of rapprochement. But Joanna is cold.

  “It’s true, Jake. It was a coward’s way out. He killed himself. It does not take courage to drive a car at a tree. It takes drink, drugs and bravado. Yes, and exhibitionism.”

  Jake looks at her, towering over her from nearly the same height that Stephen was. They are so alike, these brothers, in physical attributes, at least.

  “He was my brother, Joanna.”

  That is all he says and at once she feels ashamed.

  “Of course. I’m sorry, Jake.”

  For a moment he looks sad and then he smiles almost wistfully.

  “Can we have coffee together?” He looks around him as if looking for a coffee house.