Consequences (26 page)

“Look—I’m tiring you,” he said.

“It’s all right. Diversion is good for me.”

He sighed. “Molly, once again…if at any point there is anything…”

“I know,” she said. “I know. And thank you.”

When Ruth became a mother she had the universal, unexceptional, hackneyed revelation—she perceived her own mother differently. She also stared backward and saw that almost mythical figure, her grandmother. This experience of her own had been theirs, but it had been otherwise, because springing from different circumstances. She thought of her grandmother, a girl alone in wartime, and of Molly, another girl—alone for another reason. She looked at herself—older than they had been, and with a husband who returned each evening to the Edwardian semi in which machines hummed and bleeped, where wars were pictures on a screen of somewhere far away, where children were a shared concern, and one that drove out most others—a source of delight, anxiety, and exponential expense. It occurred to her that children had assumed power, over the century. Once, they were to some extent expendable; you had lots, in order to end up with a few. Today, they arrived to a safety net of state provision and a status of near sanctity. They had rights and agencies and an elaborate infrastructure of support and protection. As a parent, you enjoyed some of the fallout; you had vicarious status, conferred on you by the children. So long as you performed as was required, you too were privileged citizens, with dispensations and handouts. Until you abused your position, when the guardians would come knocking at your door.

Jess and Tom had appeared to be well aware of their strength, and dictated from day one. Had the children of the past been less assertive, more propitiating, with survival itself in question? This seemed unlikely, given the nature of the beast; presumably their wails were merely background noise, casually ignored, instead of the deciding factor of daily life. Ruth danced attendance when on duty, and worried about the children’s welfare when the child-minder took over so that she could work. The children howled at will, then smiled, and had Ruth at their mercy. Even Peter, whose involvement was less entire, found himself in servitude, early married life now an unimaginable nirvana. He made no complaints, and was briskly competent with the impedimenta of a family excursion, adept with buggies and car seats and travel cots. Once, he said, “It’s amazing, the power they have.”

“I know.”

“An economic phenomenon. Incredible levels of consumption.”

Ruth said, “I was thinking more of the emotional clout.”

“Oh, that too.” Peter was examining the new double buggy. “How much are these?”

“I can’t remember exactly. Expensive.”

“I’m going to do a big piece on nursery products marketing. Mothercare will be hearing from me.”

He was a man who sniffed the breeze, as a matter of routine—an automatic opportunism that made him a successful journalist. Children had happened to him, but could also be put to good use.

Jess is threading beads. She works with intense concentration, small fingers steering the stiff thread into the hole, biting her lower lip. Red bead, then blue, then green.

Ruth observes. “That’s a nice pattern.”

“It’s a necklace for you. To go to parties in.”

Ruth glows. “Can I have some yellow beads too?”

“No,” says Jess. “This necklace doesn’t have yellow beads.”

“Right,” says Ruth. “Fine. It’s lovely as it is.”

Tom is in rapt communion with his police car, lying on his stomach, pushing it round and round, making nee-naw noises. This is one of those halcyon moments when everyone is content, fulfilled. The three of them. Let me stay here forever, thinks Ruth—in this hour, in this afternoon. This is as good as it gets, surely? And then, immediately…no, what a crass idea. No future? No anticipation, no expectations?

What does she anticipate? Expect? She looks at Jess and tries to multiply her by three, shoot her up to fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. She projects an adult Tom, driving a police car, maybe—nee-naw, nee-naw. Jess is five. She lives by the day; past and future are murky areas, which she does not much visit. That is the difference, thinks Ruth: to be grown-up is always to be then as well as now. Most disconcerting.

Somewhere on the rim of memory there flickers an image of a pond toward which she leans, and topples. And then she is on the grass, and Molly is pulling off her legs great strands of slimy green stuff, and she is shrieking. Five? Six? Whatever, it is ineradicable.

She tells Jess, “When I was five I fell in a pond.”

Jess is mildly interested. “Were you drowned?”

“Not quite. In fact, not nearly. I was silly to lean over the pond like that,” Ruth adds, mindful of example.

Jess drops a bead. She drops a bead, tries to recover it, and then lets fall the string of threaded beads, which slide off, the necklace is disintegrating, Jess is distraught, this halcyon moment is shattered, like the still surface of water…like the surface of that pond, which Ruth now sees again, rising toward her as she falls. She gathers up the beads, she soothes. “Look,” she says. “We can put it together again. Now—how did it go? Red, blue, green?”

The Twentieth-Century British Wood Engraving exhibition is crowded. This is the opening view, to which Molly has received an invitation, as surviving family of one of the principle artists featured. But Molly is down with one of these bouts of bronchitis that she gets so often these days, and has passed on the invitation to Ruth. And Peter, who announced at the last moment that he’d come along, too.

Ruth moves around the room. She spends a long time with Matt’s work, so familiar, but looking somehow different here, alongside so much else that is beautiful, arresting, provocative—and holding up well, she notes with pride, with pleasure. He is not just good, he is one of the very best.

Peter is elsewhere. Occasionally she catches sight of him, peering at a label, making a note on that pad he carries always with him. Once, she is alongside him when he is quizzing the curator of the exhibition, who is politely concealing a certain impatience: no, he does not know the current value of a Gertrude Hermes. For that, he suggests, it might be better for Peter to address himself to one of the specialist galleries, or an auction house.

As they leave, Ruth says, “Why were you so interested in prices?”

“A piece on art as investment,” Peter replies, rather shortly. He has appropriated the catalog and is making some notes on the back.

“Art is not just a commodity.”

He gives her a slightly weary glance. “No one said it was
just
a commodity. But it is one.”

Ruth experiences irritation like some physical affliction; it prickles down her spine, it makes her teeth tingle. She says nothing.

Peter scribbles another note and shoves the catalog into his briefcase. “Like any other commodity, it has a shifting value. There are some intriguing comparisons to be made with other investment areas.”

“If you say so.” Ruth’s tone is icy. She holds out her hand. “Could I have that? I want to keep it.”

“What?”

“The catalog.”

“I’ll need it for the editor. We’ll use a print to illustrate.”

They stare at each other. Peter gives a little grunt of exasperation. “I shall return it in due course, Ruth.”

“Don’t bother,” snaps Ruth. “I’ll get my own.” She turns to go back into the gallery. “No need to wait—I’ve got some shopping to do. Oh—and don’t under any circumstances use one of my grandfather’s engravings to illustrate your piece.”

There are apparently people who suffer from this thing called low self-esteem. The condition is spoken of as though it were some kind of debilitating illness. And it is a bad thing to have; those who suffer from it will be quickly spotted, they are losers, they will be passed over for advancement; plus, they make awkward friends and partners. To flourish in the climate of the day, you need to think well of yourself, to walk tall, to put yourself forward, to brandish an emphatic CV.

Ruth knew that she fell short of these requirements. She had never been good at self-advancement, and she did not much care for those who were. But equally, she did not see herself as suffering from low self-esteem. She thought that she was reasonably good looking, competent enough, and she did not lack friends. In a different age, or a different society, she might have been perceived as an exemplary person: unassuming, modest, without pretensions. A Jane Austen heroine, then? Dear me, no—put like that, Ruth sees her persona at once as perfectly modern, of its day, but a variant. She does not conform with contemporary icons. She is not a shrinking violet; just, she is no rampant Russian vine.

Is Peter a Russian vine? Certainly, he has tendrils out all over the media. He identifies a space, picks up the phone, sends out a shoot. His CV would paper a room. All of which is just as well, because it means that he is earning a good deal of money, so it matters less that Ruth is not. So why does Peter’s flair for self-promotion (or his resourcefulness? his endeavor?) bug her the way it does? Why does she find it so unlikeable? When first she knew him, she admired his energy, his drive. Now, that quality has somehow gone belly-up, and is no longer attractive, but has become the aspect of him that she finds most tiresome.

Is she jealous? Well, no, because she does not want to be like that herself. Not in the least. Does she resent his long working hours, his absences? Not really, because his presence can be dismaying: the household is disrupted, the children become unruly, there are suddenly issues about some implement that has gone missing, or a repair that is overdue. He moves impatiently from room to room, he is constantly on the phone, the fax goes into overdrive. No, she does not resent Peter’s absences, because then everything subsides once more, the pace slows up, things calm down.

What, then, is her problem with Peter and his careerism? She knows plenty of others like him who do not have the same effect on her—though she does not necessarily admire them; but of course she does not share bed and breakfast with them, negotiate with them on a daily basis, know everything about them from their taste for pickled herrings to the wart on their left testicle. Could it be that her problem is with Peter, rather than with Peter’s approach to life? That she and Peter are at odds, that Peter no longer looks the way he did when first they were together, that sometimes she wonders why they
are
together?

Could it be that she is in a dysfunctional marriage?

Ruth first heard this term on the lips of a friend—casually delivered, as you might talk of a recalcitrant child, or a rogue element. A cliché, then, but one that had slid so surreptitiously into the language that you had never noticed. Or did someone simply coin the phrase one day, to fill a vacuum, there being a lot of this problem around? As T. H. Huxley allegedly came up with the term agnostic in the late nineteenth century, by which time it was much needed. This arcane piece of information swims into Ruth’s head, grace of her A level English teacher, talking years ago about the evolution of language. Agnosticism arrives when a lot of people find it impossible to concede the existence of a deity; you get dysfunctional marriage when…well, when many couples are in an uneasy alliance. But surely that has been the case since Adam and Eve? So what was it called before? And what was low self-esteem before it became a contemporary malaise?

When Ruth was a teenager she had been successively, and briefly, a vegetarian, a Buddhist, a supporter of Queens Park Rangers, and an environmental campaigner. The environmental campaigning had consisted of sitting with a gang of friends around the base of a tree that was about to be felled by the council on the grounds that it was unsafe; Ruth and her friends had hoped for arrest and public martyrdom, but in the event the tree fellers struck during school hours, when they could not attend, and the deed was done in their absence.

Molly had been cheerfully supportive of all these enthusiasms: “Why not, if that’s how you feel.”

Ruth and her friend Julia discuss love. Julia has been in love three times, she says. In lust—about three, again. The current love, she confides, is qualitatively different.

Ruth lifts an eyebrow.

“Daisy,” says Julia.

Daisy is her two-month-old baby.

“Oh, well, yes,” says Ruth. “But does that count?”

They decide that it does, as an eruption of feeling that is unanticipated, that is mysterious until you experience it.

Ruth finds herself diffident about her own record. She offers a
coup de foudre
when she was a student. No—two. She admits to a couple of lust episodes. “And Peter,” she adds, gamely.

Julia has been sleepless, night after night, she has been unable to eat—starved, she has contemplated suicide.

Ruth remembers hanging about outside his hall of residence. She remembers watching a silent phone.

Julia scoffs. Beginner stuff. Pathetic. “And no way,” she says, “Do I ever want to go there again.”

They laugh.

Once, when eighteen, Julia told a boyfriend that she was sorry but it was over, and he threw up. Just like that. She had been impressed: “I hadn’t realised they could suffer too.”

“So you took him back?”

“Certainly not.”

Ruth’s recollection of a rejected suitor is less telling: righteous offense is what she remembers—as though you had trodden violently on his toe.

“Whatever,” says Julia comfortably. “We’re through with all that, thank God. It’s Daisy now, for me.”

Julia is in happy partnership with Alec, so far as Ruth knows. But what does one know of other people’s lives? What does Julia know of hers?

“Suppose it didn’t happen?” Ruth wonders. She is now picking at the subject in general. Love. Being in love. “Suppose we just mated, like animals. Sensible genetic behavior.”

Julia reckons that we can’t know what animals feel. A dog fox was killed on the road, near them, and the vixen howled at night for a week.

“If it didn’t happen,” says Ruth. “Poets and novelists would be more or less out of business. Maybe that’s where it comes from—we get the idea from them.”