An Authentic Life Page 6

  She cannot deny him this. And she wants the comfort of being at ease with at least one member of the Rodgers family. She nods silently and he leads her out into the street and to the pedestrian crossing. A few minutes later, he is carrying a tray with coffees and a milk jug to the table of a less than salubrious downtown café.

  “The best that the bus station area could do, I’m afraid,” he smiles at her.

  She acknowledges this with a shrug and accepts the cup he offers her, waiting for him to speak. Just for a second as she looks at him, she sees Stephen reflected in his brother. And that brings a pang for the attraction she once felt for the man she loved. As the vision passes and it is once again Jake sitting across from her, she remembers happier times when she and the two brothers played together before the children were born, sometimes camping and walking in the Scottish glens, sometimes sailing with Jake and his wife once he married.

  “Mum will get over it. Give her time.” Jake comments, unaware of Joanna’s train of thought.

  “I doubt it,” she replies and he gives a rueful grin back at her. He knows perfectly well that Martha will never speak in positive vein to Joanna again.

  For a few moments, he stirs his coffee as if deciding what to say.

  “I don’t believe it, you know.”

  “What don’t you believe, Jake?” she half challenges him. She knows what is coming.

  “What Stephen said in the letter. You know. That you are queer, in some way.”

  “Jake,” she glares at him, “I really do not think that it is anything to do with you, one way or another …”

  “I just meant that I could protect you, Joanna. You don’t want any rumours like that going round. Not when you have the kids to consider. Especially Lou.”

  She stares at him. A penny is beginning to drop. Jake always had a wandering eye and on at least one occasion over the years, a wandering hand. That was the reason she cooled the friendship with him - that and the disintegration of her marriage.

  He leans forward, half tentative, half over-confident.

  “We would be good together, Joanna.”

  He places a hand over hers on the table. She is tempted to snatch it away. Instead she leaves it there, inert under the pressure of Jake’s. She glowers at him, her message unmistakable. He has no option but to take his hand away.

  “Do you think for one minute that I would get involved with you, Jake?”

  “I can protect you,” he repeats.

  She is furious, cold and furious. This is tantamount to blackmail.

  “I do not need your protection. Not now. Not ever.” She stands to leave, concealing her shaking anger as best she can. She wants as far away from this man as she can get, as quickly as she can. He sits still, knowing that his proposition is going nowhere.

  “I think you will find that you did need my protection, Joanna.”

  It is said quietly to her back as she leaves the café. But it is quite distinct. And the menacing tone is equally distinct.

  Chapter 10

  She is feeling uncomfortable with the way the conversation round the room is going. This is her weekly meeting of the reading circle. They come together over the winter weeks, this disparate group of women from all walks of the city’s life. To be fair, there is always one book under serious discussion, although the level of literary critique is far removed from anything that Joanna or her academic friends from undergraduate days would recognise. But Joanna would not miss this session for the world. It is her one treat over the last months, away from her duties of the children and work. Her big financial indulgence is paying for a sitter for Lou. And the reading circle helps to keep her away from the red wine as she dutifully tramps though the next book in readiness for the weekly session. In the six months or so since Stephen died, this has been the only new aspect to her day-to-day routine. It engages her mind, if not her emotions, and it is a good antidote to the pressures of the social work task at the hospital, a task she sometimes finds overwhelming since that terrible day when she was herself a next of kin in the accident and emergency ward of the Royal. At that point, she crossed over the line from being a professional to being a member of the public. All that dreadful experience might well have happened in the sister hospital to the one where she works, but sometimes the situations she finds herself dealing with at work resonate too closely with her own trauma. Angela, her boss, may generally be considered a dragon, but she and Geraldine, have quietly seen her through the difficult times at work. So this neutral setting of the reading circle, something new in her life, has been both a welcome activity and a diversion. Sometimes she feels she cannot be bothered to make the drive to whichever member of the circle is hosting the evening, but once she makes the effort, she enjoys the focussed discussions.

  The reading material is as disparate as the membership, since every one has their say about which novel they would like to discuss. She prefers to tramp through the shortlists for the round of annual major awards to make her suggestions, although some of the group simply accuse her of literary snobbery and then baulk at the comments she has to make. One of them even charged her with picking up the literary supplements at weekends and quoting them, rather than using her own judgement. Since the criticisms mainly come from those in the circle who would not dream of touching a broadsheet, she just smiles at teasing taunts like these and lets them believe what they will, giving one of those quips of hers that can bring a gale of laughter round the room. She is clever with her mix of sardonic humour. It has no malice to it and engaging people this way is one of her noted attributes - not that it is ever described in these terms.

  It is this same capacity that makes her so ruthless in a serious argument and she has floored many an adversary in interpersonal conflicts at work in the past. That was how her first encounter with Stephen went, after all. She can find just the right word and tone to leave the other person speechless. But in humour, it is engaging and makes her a natural focus of these meetings. If she is not there, they tell her, the reading circle just does not have the same zing.

  The numbers coming to the circle fluctuate from week to week. There are seven of them here this evening. Tonight they are in Janie’s lounge. She is a single woman who is a senior manager in the Headquarters of the Education Department. It was she who wanted to review ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ after the film was re-run on TV about a month ago. Joanna remained silent when the suggestion was made, then suggested ‘Lantern Slides’, one of the shortleated books in the Scottish Women’s Literature Awards. But she had to acquiesce when the others at that session said that they had all seen the ‘Brodie’ film and thought it would be a good subject for discussion.

  They do not know that she could just about quote it verbatim. And she has stayed quiet most of this evening, whilst they have speculated on the nature of influence, gullibility and political persuasion to which the author alludes. She tries a red herring of comparing the influences in the book with those of ‘Lord of the Flies’ but even Sarah, the middle aged mother who is doing undergraduate studies by distance learning, looks surprised at this.

  So it turns, inevitably, to the sexual orientation of the character of Jean Brodie and she listens as Janie and the others draw out the evidence in the book that makes the supposition likely that the heroine was repressing her emotional attraction to her schoolgirl charges.

  Pam is having none of it. Pam is appalled at the very notion. She is a very married solicitor whose own girls are fifteen and seventeen. She does not want to think that the influences on Jean Brodie’s girls at their impressionable ages are anything more than educational and mind expanding.

  Jinny disagrees. And she is blunt. This is a writer, she argues, talking about a repressed lesbian who was working in an environment and in an era where her interests were diverted, but none the less, really homosexually motivated. Her character’s interest in men and theirs in her are diversionary tactics on the author’s part and the reader has to see this, surely? What does J
oanna think?

  Joanna’s one failing in hiding her emotions is her uncontrollable reaction of blushing. They do not know how significant this book is. They do not know that she and Annie read it together in that first summer of delightful closeness. But they can see that she is uncomfortable. Her mind has flitted back to the multiple quotes from the book that Annie used to delight in trotting out. Annie used to look down on her as she lay in bed and say things like ‘give me my Joanna at an impressionable age and she is mine for life’. How sadly that quote failed to live up to its promise in Annie and Joanna’s case.

  Sally, across the room, looks at her now, long and hard. Joanna has long thought that Sally was ‘a friend of Dorothy’s, as she likes to think about it. ‘Lesbian’ and ‘dyke’ are such harsh words, depending on who uses them. They were so robbed of their true meanings when used by bigots in pejorative vein. Even their retrieval by feminist lesbians does not detract from the negative inference they carry. At least that is how Joanna feels. She would hate to describe herself to anyone as a lesbian, no matter how faint hearted she would be accused of being for feeling like this. Sally is looking at her, with a long new look of beginning recognition. Sally has twigged.

  Sally smiles, looks away and pushes the boat out. She is a librarian, and already well respected in this group for her general knowledge of literature. She is the one in the group whom Joanna considers anywhere near on a par with herself when it comes to modern literature.

  “For those who like that sort of thing, it’s the sort of thing they like. Sorry to misquote, but I do think that there are multiple points in the book where there are at least signals about O’Brien’s intentions for this character.”

  Pam bristles. She has just not thought of this; not read the book this way. That is clear. Sally is pressing on, knowing that their hour is nearly over and that coffee will be served soon. She wants to hammer home her point. She speaks over Pam who is about to come in to register her resistance.

  “I really enjoyed ‘The Prime’, but it is dated, don’t you think? Maybe we should have a look at more contemporary lesbian literature. We spend plenty of time on feminist stuff. From one perspective, this is only one step forward. Woman as friends, then woman as more than friends. We could look at romantic relationships between women, couldn’t we?”

  “What about the ‘Well of Loneliness’?” This is Gayle speaking, the retired physiotherapist in the circle.

  And it raises a simultaneous howl of protest from Sally and Joanna.

  “I said contemporary, not something from the early part of the last century,” Sally almost shouts.

  “And all that misery and victim stuff,” Joanna agrees, eager to kick into touch the idea of reading this particular novel.

  Sally looks at her. It is obvious to her that Joanna knows her lesbian literature.

  “There are plenty examples of modern lesbian literature, surely?” the librarian suggests.

  No one dissents, except Pam who says,

  “But it’s all pornography, surely?”

  This swings the group. Everyone disagrees with Pam now. Joanna listens as they agree that they want to look at some recent work of a lesbian writer. She stays silent, except to try to put the focus back to feminism.

  “Well,” Sally comes back, “How about looking at the link between the two? That should appease our Pam here from worrying that we’ve all gone into soft porn.”

  There is a ripple of laugher and Janie gets up to switch on the kettle in the kitchen, suggesting they leave it to Sally and Joanna to come up with a suitable title. Joanna lets Sally take the lead. She does not want the group to know just how well read she is. They put aside suggestions of looking at Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein as too literary and too much like ‘The Prime’, both agreeing that there is too much gender disguise and too much encoding in each of these literary giants’ works. With an unspoken concession to the difficulty that Pam is having with all this, they go instead for the relatively lightweight but still highly acclaimed ‘Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit’. Both of them know it well – it was published just a few years ago and it is a good insight into the adjustment of a young woman. Joanna reckons it will give insight to her fellow circle members without being too explicit in its detail. But Pam does not like the nuance in the title and is still not sure. They reassure her. It is a book that could be left lying around. They end on that note as Janie arrives back with the coffee.

  Later, as she is driving home, Joanna wonders why, after all these years, she is still so uncomfortable with all of this. She knows that here in Inverness, she is known purely and simply as a wife and widow. Her bisexual orientation has never come to the fore, in a way that would cause people to reappraise her. She has always found it easier to let people make their assumptions in the wider world. And the wider world, at work and in her social life, always takes it for granted that she is heterosexual. Of course it does. That is the way the world works. She is Mrs Rodgers, after all, and the mother of three, the wife, and now widow, of a local doctor and a well-respected member of the intelligentsia society of Inverness. She has left people with their assumptions over the years, living the life out of a woman who is at one with her unquestioned sexuality. That has been the way of it these last twenty years or so since she started work in social work, Annie dispatched from her life in Edinburgh and the remnants of her relationship with Dennis playing itself out till he finally accepted that she would not marry him. He then took off to make a life in Canada. She never spoke of Annie to anyone, not even to anyone in the Gang. But she referred often enough to her past with Dennis. He still keeps in touch by letter and he seems to be a successful cattle farmer now, having dropped out of professional life as an engineer and gone native in the high country, somewhere near Calgary. Sometimes she regrets not being a part of that life.

  No, she stayed here and ploughed the social work furrow as best she could in those days where caseloads were at the giddy fifty plus levels. She was soon promoted to Senior. Sometimes she would say that length of service alone would guarantee someone a promotion in those days, but in her heart she knows that is not true. She was good at what she did and went on to be good as a team leader. So there she was, in her early mid twenties, symbol of the establishment, working crazy hours, sharing a flat now with a cat and available for the Bohemian social lifestyle of the era – the strictly heterosexual Bohemian life.

  And she socialised hard, attending every party and dinner she was invited to, able to play till midnight and still be at her desk by eight thirty. Her stamina and liver were in better order then. It was the trendy, narrow-trousered, longhaired young men of the time who attracted her. She steered well clear of women. In those days they were either/or - either women looking for husbands or women looking for women. They did not mix. And she kept well clear of the women who did approach her, those who saw beyond the veneer of her dress and self-presentation. She had set her heart on marriage to the right man and she worked hard during her twenties to find him.

  She flirted outrageously and slept with several men, sometimes after too much to drink at someone’s house, sometimes with due consideration. The men liked her for her intellect, tempered as it was by her humour and attention to them. She knew not to frighten them. And she had a cute face in those days, even if she always was, and no doubt always would be, on the plump side. Her turned up nose belied the brainpower behind the face and she could play it whatever way she chose – serious and intelligent, humorous and intelligent or humorous and flighty. The choices were there at her disposal.

  But it was a time of lows as well as of hard living. Looking back, she knows why. She was denying parts of herself in her very determination to lead a particular life. In truth, she did not think about Annie, though occasionally heard a bit from friends about how she was fairing. But people lost touch with Annie for a while and the information dried up. Then Joanna heard at some national conference that Annie had gone to work in England. She forgot about her. If anythi
ng, it was more Dennis, good looking, interesting, full of drive Dennis for whom she pined. As her friends began to marry and as the socialising changed from swinging singles events to weddings and then to christenings, she began to think that she had made a big mistake. As you do when you are in your mid-twenties, she thought that she had missed the boat and that she would end up on the shelf, an old maid forever delivering social work to failing families.

  And sleeping around depressed her. It was still the era when people were experimenting as much with liberal ideas as with sex itself. It carried a price to sleep with someone outside marriage, especially given her strict middle class, stuffy upbringing. The parent in her head always punished her. Looking back, her gregariousness was her way out of that depression, her wilder behaviours her way out of the restrictions of her early, pre-university days. It might have looked to the outside observer that she was an altogether modern child of her era, but inside, she carried early scars from her past with Annie and Dennis to this time. And she would carry the scars from the Bohemian Period, as she would later refer to it, into the marriage with Stephen that was to follow.

  It was only to her very closest circle of friends, those friends of whom Stephen became so jealous, that she would allow any hint of her full personality to emerge. There were Bobby, Michelle, Geraldine and Wendy. This ease was because she had known them for so long, since just after her Bohemian era. She talked social work issues with Bobby. She met Michelle who was working at the time in the poorest area of the town, respecting her for the way she was working miracles as a teacher with deprived youngsters. She had even been on an encounter group with two of them, Geraldine the psychologist, and Wendy, a nurse manager. And in that setting of psychodynamic interpretation of every nuance of communication, there was no concealing the nature of man-to-man feeling, woman-to-man feeling and woman-to-woman feelings. That was how she had become friendly with Geraldine and Wendy in the first place. They all three carried friendship out of the encounter group into real life. And it was not attraction. It was just recognition of other possibilities. All three of them were married with children and simply came to have that closeness that comes from recognition.