It’s three in the morning in Sussex, and it’s snowing. Julia, unable to sleep, pulls back the curtain at the front window and looks across the cobbles to the moonlit churchyard, where the grass and the sprawling bare branches of the catalpa tree are covered in a fine white blanket. She has put on her thick dressing gown and two pairs of Tom’s socks, but it’s cold here at the front of the house. She lets the curtain drop and goes back to the kitchen, where she has opened up the front of the Aga, and pours herself a good-sized brandy.
She is unbearably restless and rather irritable. It’s ridiculous, she thinks, sipping the brandy, holding up the crystal balloon so that she can see the fire through its prisms. It’s ridiculous that she’s spending the first hours of the new century worrying about two men who are fast asleep upstairs.
Is this what it’s come to? All that studying and writing, speaking at public meetings, letters to The Guardian, papers she’s written on the status of women, and on nuclear weapons and the arms race, and on starting and building a business. And here she is in the kitchen, wearing Tom’s socks and worrying about men. Well, not worrying about them exactly because they, of course, are perfectly fine. What she’s worrying about is being fenced in by their needs and their wretched plans; their sixty-eight project and now Tom’s mad idea of buying a place in the Algarve. Is this how it is to be from now on, now that Hilary is no longer there dispensing her moderating influence? Does her future lie in cooking roast dinners, while they talk about how they’d run the country if it were up to them? Listening to Tom’s analysis of Gordon Brown’s pernicious plan to sell off the gold reserves, and Richard’s raving about why NATO had to bomb Kosovo, and how it was a good thing that Clinton survived impeachment?
How, Julia wonders, is it that she – a woman who chained herself to the fence day after day at Greenham Common, spent a week in prison and slept for months under canvas with hundreds of other women through torrential rain, gales and sweltering heat to protest about cruise missiles – is now being dragged, once again, towards a life resembling her mother’s?
‘He’s a dear man,’ Hilary has said of Tom on so many occasions, ‘the armchair politician, the intellectual activist. That’s our Tom, rarely a man of action, bless him.’
‘Bless him, indeed,’ Julia says aloud now, ‘I’ll brain him if he doesn’t shut up about the Algarve.’
He’d started banging on about the Algarve again at dinner; ‘beautiful coastline, great restaurants, tennis, golf’. Julia loathes all games, especially those that involve equipment. In fact, she hates most physical activity, with the exception of walking. At school she frequently forged notes from Anita asking that she be excused from hockey and netball due to a heavy period or any other excuse she could think of. Crashing around on an ice-bound hockey pitch or shoving her way through a game of netball was never her idea of fun. And these days, the only one thing she would enjoy less than playing tennis or golf in Sussex is playing tennis or golf in the Algarve with a lot of ageing expats.
Julia pours herself another drink, remembering a bright September morning in 1981. She was sitting on damp grass, her bum numb and cold, while chained to the fence of the US air base at Greenham Common and longing for someone to bring her a mug of tea. Then she saw Tom walking towards her. She remembers the look of joy and amazement on his face. And she remembers his words.
‘I had to come, Julia. I saw you on the nine o’clock news; you looked absolutely amazing. You are amazing.’
Julia’s memories form a lump in her throat as she recalls him sitting beside her on the damp grass.
‘I can’t tell you what it means to find you again,’ he’d said. ‘Have you . . . could you . . . do you think you could ever forgive me?’
That Saturday he’d stayed all day at the peace camp and, later, when it was someone else’s turn to be chained to the fence, they’d gone into Newbury, and there, in a small café, Tom had told her about the stillborn baby and the subsequent breakdown of his marriage to Alison. ‘I doubt we’d have lasted together even if the baby had lived,’ he said looking at Julia. ‘I meant what I said that last day in Paris; it was you I loved, you I wanted to marry, that didn’t change.’ He inhaled sharply, sitting up straighter. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘what about you Julia? It seems such a weird place for you to be. From millionaire’s wife to Greenham Common. I mean, what are you really doing at a peace camp?’
She’d given him a long, hard look. ‘I’m a millionaire’s ex-wife, Tom,’ she’d said, ‘and I’m protesting about US nuclear weapons. Remember you told me there are two sorts of people, those who watch from the sidelines and those who get involved? Well, I’m getting involved. What about you?’
He never had got involved in a practical way, although his interest was unquestionable and he’d always supported her in everything she did. He was generous and encouraging, but he was the analyst, who could deconstruct everything, explain the pros and cons, even predict what would happen next. His eyes would burn with enthusiasm, but he had never overcome his reluctance actually to get out there and rattle a few cages.
The odd thing, Julia realises for the first time, is that back when she and Tom first met, the difference in their ages hadn’t mattered. And it hadn’t mattered when they met again twelve years later and got married. But she’s starting to wonder if it matters now. Although he’s only sixty-eight, Tom seems to be delighting in the role of old codger, cheerful, generous, intelligent, occasionally belligerent, and he wants to take her along with him. Julia takes a big swig of her drink. Well, she isn’t having it. She’s only fifty-four and has important stuff of her own to do. In the months since Hilary’s diagnosis and then her removal to the hospice, she, Julia, has lost her focus, but she’ll get it back. She is not going to let Tom paddle her into the still waters of the elderly, and she is certainly not decamping to Portugal as her parents decamped to the Costa Blanca in the seventies, drinking cheap gin and patronising the Spaniards.
And then, as if all this isn’t enough, there’s Richard, ringing up a few days before Christmas and saying he thinks he’ll pop home for the holidays, as it’s bloody freezing in New York. She’s pleased to see him, of course, as is Tom; he’s delighted to have someone to open his best claret for, someone to help him put the world to rights. But since he arrived, Richard’s either been shaking his metaphorical stick at anyone who disagrees with him, or getting drunk and maudlin about being single at sixty. He’s still making noises about getting back with Lily but doesn’t seem to have talked to her yet. What is it with these men as they get older, Julia wonders? Are they becoming their fathers?
Well, today there’ll be some changes. They can cook their own bloody lunch; she’s going to the hospice. She knows that it’s Hilary’s deteriorating condition that is making her short tempered with the men; there has to be someone to absorb her distress. So, when she’s seen Hilary, she’ll go for a long walk – it doesn’t matter where, because somewhere out there, she’s going to find her old self and bring it back. If she doesn’t, the next thing she knows, she’ll be sighing again – this time all the way to the grave.
It is after nine when Richard wakes and stumbles out of bed to the bathroom, only to find Tom occupying it.
‘Get a bloody move on, man,’ he calls through the door. ‘And isn’t it time you put in a second bathroom?’
‘And where exactly would I put it?’ Tom replies, to the sound of running water. ‘On the roof? There’s always the one in the outside laundry, it still works.’
‘It’s fucking snowing,’ Richard says, longing momentarily for his centrally heated Manhattan apartment with its two bathrooms.
‘Well, come in then,’ Tom says, ‘you haven’t got anything I haven’t seen before, unless you’ve grown a second one.’
‘I should be so lucky,’ Richard says, opening the door and hurrying across to the lavatory. ‘Although it wouldn’t make much difference; these days, I rarely get to use this one for anything interesting.’
‘Might be different with two, though,’ Tom muses, studying his lather-covered face in the mirror. ‘You’d be a curiosity. Women would probably pay you.’
‘Bring it on!’ Richard says, turning his back to him, clutching the one in question and pointing it in the right direction. ‘Beats paying for it.’
‘Do you?’ Tom asks. ‘Pay for it, I mean?’
‘That’s a rather personal question.’
‘Yes, well, you are peeing in my space.’
‘Okay then; for the record, no,’ Richard says. ‘Not these days, not for years. I did occasionally in the past, when there was a complete drought. You?’
Tom shakes his head. ‘Never. I thought about it, especially when I was doing all that travelling – Amsterdam, Berlin, Geneva. Some of my colleagues used to add it to the expense account. But I’m a chronic recidivist when it comes to actually doing things. Ask your sister.’
‘I don’t need to,’ Richard says, crossing to the basin and edging Tom aside so he can rinse his hands. ‘She’s always complaining about it.’
Tom holds his razor under the stream of warm water and then bends over the basin to slosh the lather from his chin. ‘I know. Can’t help it, I’m afraid. I’m not like you; never did have the desire to leap the barricades or fight off the truncheons.’ He wipes his face on a towel, and the two of them stand side-by-side, looking at their reflections.
‘Two thousand, eh?’ Richard says, shaking his head. ‘Another century. We made it.’
‘Brothers-in-arms,’ Tom says, grinning. ‘Project sixty-eight: the book, the documentary, the fame and fortune.’
Richard rolls his eyes and, mimicking Julia, says, ‘Whenever are you two going to grow up?’
They fall about laughing at themselves, and then Tom slaps Richard on the shoulder. ‘Happy New Year, new century,’ he says, ‘I hope it’s a good one for you.’ He holds out his hand, and Richard shakes it with both of his.
‘You too, Tom, all the best, all the very best.’
And they are serious for a moment, fleetingly embarrassed to find themselves half-naked in the bathroom being serious, wordlessly acknowledging how fond they are of each other.
‘Er, yes . . . must get on,’ Tom says, unhooking his dressing gown from the back of the door. ‘I’ll get started on the breakfast. Bacon sandwiches, I thought.’
‘What about Julia?’ Richard asks, pulling a toothbrush out of his wash bag, which is standing on the corner of the bath.
‘Gone to the hospice to see Hilary; won’t be back for a while, she says. I’m in the doghouse.’
‘The Algarve?’
Tom nods. ‘She thinks I want to cart her off to some geriatric Stepford Wives enclave. Trouble is, she won’t bloody listen. All I want is to get some nice little place, somewhere warm, with a glorious view, so we can pop over from time to time and get some sun. Maybe you can make her see sense.’
Richard puts the plug in the basin and turns on the taps. ‘It’d be the first time ever,’ he says. ‘Sounds brilliant to me. Take me instead.’
Tom laughs and walks out of the bathroom. Richard hears him singing softly in the bedroom, in French, the ‘Marseillaise’ of all things, word perfect, accent perfect.
He’s an odd cove, Tom, Richard thinks, even though he’s now not only his brother-in-law but his best friend. Hugely intelligent, socially progressive – even a lifetime in banking hasn’t driven him to the right. He looks around the bathroom at all the signs of two people living an intimate life – the toothbrushes, towels, medications, perfume and aftershave – and he thinks of how he has watched their relationship grow over the years. He has seen them fight and make up, challenge and support each other, laugh and cry together, and he envies it. More than anything, he thinks, he envies the trust and the companionship. It must, Richard believes, be wonderful to know that there is at least one person in the world for whom you always come first.
Years ago he had greeted with considerable cynicism Julia’s tale of how Tom had seen her on the television news coverage of the peace camp and raced out to Greenham Common to find her. But, as he watched Tom’s relentless efforts to wear down her resistance until she agreed to marry him, he knew he was watching love, once lost, being rekindled until it burst into a beautiful flame. Greenham Common, he thinks now – well, Tom certainly acted then and it won him what he wanted.
Richard splashes his face with water, pats it with a towel, considers trimming his beard and decides against it. ‘The thing is,’ he says aloud to himself, ‘that Tom thinks about everything but does nothing. While you, my friend, think about nothing and rush headlong at things and crash into walls – particularly when it comes to women.’
A few weeks earlier the prospect of spending Christmas with Martin Gilbert and his wife in Vermont, surrounded by loving couples, suddenly seemed more than he could cope with. So he’d apologised and mumbled something about needing to go home to see his father. Then he’d rung Julia and asked if he could come for Christmas as it was bloody freezing in New York.
‘And I suppose you think it’s gloriously tropical here,’ she’d said. ‘Actually, the central heating’s on the blink. Tom was supposed to be getting the man in to fix it but it’s taken him three days to think about making the call, so I’ve done it myself.’
‘So, you don’t mind, then?’ Richard asked.
‘Of course not. It’ll be lovely and you can talk Tom out of his latest scheme, which involves us living in Portugal, trotting from one trattoria to the other eating tapas and patting the locals on the head.’
‘Do they have trattorias in Portugal? That’s Italy.’
‘Whatever. Wherever it is, I’m not going. You can talk some sense into him.’
So, here I am, Richard thinks, as he pulls on the very nice navy blue cashmere sweater that Julia gave him for Christmas, commissioned by both to talk sense into the other. This triggers a feeling of emptiness and he sits on the bed and studies the pale shapes of his cold bare feet on the carpet. They play this game from time to time, Tom and Julia; this pretence of being at loggerheads when, in fact, they are devoted to each other, lucky buggers. And, as always, he is alone and, frankly, pretty bloody lonely most of the time, thanks to his ability to shoot himself in the foot when it comes to women. His mind whizzes through a series of flashbacks ending, as always, with his ruthless actions after Zoë’s baby was born. If only he’d given it more time; if only he’d gone back to Delphi Street again instead of just waiting and hoping she’d call. Instead, he’d convinced himself that she’d found Harry, and that Agnes, learning about the baby, had left. He’d tortured himself with images of Zoë and Harry together; sometimes he even thought he saw them pushing a pram or carrying the baby that should have been his.
Martin had been offered a juicy contract in New York and was leaving the BBC. On the spur of the moment, Richard, needing to get away from London, had applied to join the foreign correspondents’ team. A few months later, he was in Vietnam, discovering that there was nothing like a war zone to take your mind off your failures. It worked until he got too close to a land mine and was sent home to hospital in England.
‘I can go back as soon as you like,’ he’d told the foreign editor once he was declared fit for work.
‘No way,’ Mike Lennox had told him.
‘But I was doing a good job . . .’
‘You were wounded, Richard, quite badly wounded; largely because you refused to follow the rules and took yourself and the cameraman into a fucking minefield. Or have you forgotten that?’
‘But I’m okay now. The medics said . . .’
‘Look, just shut the fuck up. You’re not going back; the BBC, the union, they’d castrate me. You go where you’re sent, and I’m sending you to Washington.’
‘Washington? I thought maybe the Middle East . . .’ Richard began.
Lennox raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m sure you did. But you’re going to Washington because we need someone politically astute there, and because the only minefields in Washington are political ones.’
He’d wondered how he would cope, whether he was ready to have time to think about anything other than survival. But at least Washington wouldn’t be dull. And then, a few days before he was due to fly out of London, he’d bumped into Claire, at the opening of a photo-journalism exhibition, and learned what Zoë had learned years earlier in Glasgow.
‘Harry? Dead?’ he’d said. ‘I can barely believe it. I assumed that he and Zoë . . .’ His heart was pounding furiously at the sudden possibility of seeing her again. ‘So, is Zoë still in London?’
Claire shook her head. ‘They went back to Perth last year.’
‘They?’
‘Zoë and Daniel.’
‘Of course,’ he said feeling stupid. ‘And she’s happy there?’
‘I think so,’ Claire said. ‘She’s got a job and Daniel’s started school.’
Richard nodded, crestfallen. ‘That’s good news, then,’ he said. ‘Well, give her my best next time you write.’ If only he’d gone back just one more time.
His feet are really cold now, and Richard gets up and finds some clean socks. There is a tantalising smell of bacon wafting up from the kitchen, and Tom has stopped the ‘Marseillaise’ and started on the nostalgia medley he’s known to break into at parties: Sinatra, Perry Como, Tony Bennett. He has an excellent voice; a strong tenor that Julia professes to remember rising above the sounds of riots in Paris. As he runs down the stairs to the kitchen, Tom launches into ‘Make Someone Happy’, which stops him dead. He is assailed once more by the terrible emptiness that gripped him in the bedroom. He has only made any woman happy for a very brief period of time, he realises; as they grow to know him better, he makes them very miserable. Richard hesitates at the foot of the stairs, trying to control something that feels like a sob building in his chest, and then strolls into the kitchen just as Tom reaches the bit about love being the answer.
‘For Chrissakes, Tom,’ Richard says. ‘Perry-bloody-Como on the first day of a new century?’
‘Who better?’ Tom says, flipping bacon onto slices of thick toast.
Tom puts a plate on the table, and obliges by changing key and launching back into song. Richard joins him now, reaching as he does so into the top cupboard and pulling out a bottle of whisky.
And together, hips and shoulders swaying, they circle the kitchen table, singing about being old enough to fight but not vote, about the world exploding in violence, until they reach the final line of the chorus and, at this point, all movement stops and they sing louder now, drumming their hands on the table in time to the music, shouting the final words ‘. . . eve of destruction’. And then they stop.
‘Bloody dreadful song for a new century,’ Tom says, sitting down at the table.
‘Even more relevant now than it was in sixty-five.’
‘So, shall we slit our wrists now or later?’
‘Later, I think,’ Richard says, thinking that now would be as good a time as any. He pours himself a shot of whisky and puts the glass down alongside his bacon sandwich.
‘Bit early for that, isn’t it?’ Tom asks, biting into his sandwich.
Richard tosses off the drink and leans back in his chair. ‘Never too early,’ he says, ‘or too late, come to that.’