He never liked to say to others that he was proud of a piece of work, but he thought it privately. And he was proud of this one, plus it was one of his best pieces – which did not necessarily go hand in hand.
Jake inserted the photograph of the dining-room table into the ring-folder and labelled it: ‘English walnut. Seats 10’. Since he had started up Nicholson Furniture, some of his projects had proved tricky. But this one had come together in a single smooth, interlocking manoeuvre. The wood had been available, the timetable right, and the client had given Jake his complete trust – the sole instruction being that the table had to be in harmony with the Georgian carvers destined to sit at either end. It was the commission Jake craved, which left him free to indulge his visions unfettered. That was, he believed passionately, the only true way for the artist and craftsman.
Sometimes Jake had to stifle a smile as the businessmen, bankers and trustafarians leafed through his manual of furniture design and put together their dream table or chair with, say, Georgian legs, a Victorian top, finished off with a Carolean flourish. The jumble broke the rules and ran contrary to his instinctive urge to protect the integrity of a piece. But if that was what pleased a client, it had to be done, even if it hurt a little.
‘No need to be precious, Jake,’ remarked the ever-practical Jocasta, when he mentioned it to her. ‘It pays.’
To give an extra little puff to his ego, he riffled through the pages … Surely Jocasta could see that the gallery of tables, chairs, book ends and stands possessed a value over and above money?
A sketch of a desk was slotted into the final pocket – and he drew a sharp breath. Mia’s desk: sketched quickly and without hesitation. The design was a simple one with strong, contemporary lines that would please the eye and be as functional as possible – ‘Do one for me, Jakey. Please. None of your respectful, backward-looking stuff. Make me something to live with now.’
Amused, teasing, concerned (always concerned – with the starving hordes, the otter population and the plight of bees), her voice echoed breathily in his memory. The small, copper-coloured head, which matched his (the product of their father’s darkness and Annie’s fairness), and thin hands frequently colonized his vision. He was made from her, and she from him, and Mia was part of him. Just as his legs were part of him: always there and not considered that much – unless they were cut off as Mia had cut herself off.
He shut the ring-folder and added it to the nine others on the shelf above the desk.
It was late afternoon and almost dark. Aside from the relatively clean and tidy desk area where he talked to the clients, the workshop celebrated the aromatic mess of the woodsman. Stacked at one end was a pile of carefully selected stock. Cherry, walnut and rosewood, woods that were fabled and beautiful. The workbench ran the length of the windows and harvested the daylight. Racks of shelving, containing his varnishes, smaller pieces of equipment and reference books, took up the opposite wall. In the bench drawer were his electrical appliances – wire, plugs, fuses – all neatly stacked and colour-coded. This was part of him too. Releasing the inner life of a piece of wood was as necessary to him as breathing, but he liked the idea of the potential power of electrical things and had learned how to deal with them. Plus he had figured out when he was quite small that if he found out about things like electricity he had a chance of impressing his father.
The lighting was subtle: Jake had insisted on that and, this evening, it played over the woods and the tools in a way that pleased him profoundly. Aesthetics were important to him – otherwise he would not have been in the business of crafting commissioned work: he would have gone into mass production and made a lot of money. So he quested continually for exactly the right wood, to understand how it would shape up, and how his skill could release its patina and resonance. This was a demanding process, necessitating time, judgement and faith, which, as Jocasta liked to remind him, did not produce enough money to keep a dog in biscuits.
‘Just wait,’ he promised her. ‘You’ll be surprised.’
‘That’s about the only certain thing,’ she snapped back.
Jocasta saw herself heading up the New Deal – successful working mother and wife – but without the self-consciousness of the early feminists, and he was proud of her toughness and vigour. ‘Just do it,’ she always said. ‘If clients want rubbish they want rubbish. Why agonize?’
Was she right about the dog-in-biscuits level of remuneration? He consulted the order book and a vague question mark turned into a certainty. The orders were drying up.
The ring-folder stowed, he made his way towards the stacked wood for the last check of the week, sniffing at the dry sweet smell of shavings, the sharper acetone varnishes and the richer aromas from the oils. He placed his hand on the adze lying on the bench, its heft and smoothness fitting into his palm like a good friend’s greeting.
After flipping off the lights, he switched on the alarm, locked up and headed for Fulham and home.
The second he opened the front door of their pretty house, Maisie cried out from the kitchen. An already coated and booted Lin shot out from the kitchen into the hall. ‘There you are.’ She glanced pointedly at her watch.
He registered the annoyance. ‘I’m not late.’
She looked a little mutinous. ‘No, but I have a date. You can tell Jocasta that Maisie ate a good supper but she needs a bath.’
Jake would never get used to being instructed in his daughter’s routines by the posse of clock-watching girls hired to look after her. Lin was the latest in the line and, although Jocasta never got home until late, insisted on debriefing her through Jake or by note. ‘You can talk to me about Maisie,’ he reminded Lin. ‘Quite capable.’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’m off. See yer.’ In a trice, she had disappeared out of the door.
When she saw her father, Maisie giggled and waited to be kissed and lifted up. Her head nestled against his shoulder like a baby bird’s and he blew gently into her ear, which made her shriek with pleasure. Bringing up a baby was bound to be hard … but he, Jake, had resolved to do it right. He would come home every day in good time. He would read her stories. He would listen to her. He would say, You are wonderful. You are pretty. Don’t you mind what anyone says about you. He would never allow Maisie to become a stranger. He would never allow her to be frightened of him. He would do things with her.
‘Let’s build a crib together for Mia’s dolls,’ Tom had suggested to nine-year-old Jake. Jake remembered each word for it had been an interlude of pure happiness. ‘I’ll get the wood. We can do this together, Jake. Just you and me.’ It was begun in a rush of father-son fellowship – but never finished.
Jake carried Maisie into the sitting room and balanced her on his knee. ‘This is the way the farmer rides …’ He bounced her up and down. ‘And this is the way the lady rides … clip-clop, clip-clop.’
How miraculous she was. How on earth had Maisie acquired her smudged nose, hair like blonde candy floss, a tiny rodent front tooth and huge blue eyes? How was she the result of a night at a hotel in Positano with Jocasta when babies had been the last thing on their minds?
He glanced round the room. The previous nanny had been obsessively tidy but unloving. Lin was more affectionate but less tidy. A pile of toys had been left under the plasma screen. That evidence of carelessness would annoy Jocasta, who liked to come home to a house from which all traces of baby had been exorcized. In addition, there was the tell-tale discard of an empty DVD case – High Noon at a glance – plucked from Jake’s cherished stack, which meant Lin had been watching it, which she had been asked not to do.
He hauled Maisie on to his lap and tucked her up close. ‘And what have you seen, I wonder? Nothing disturbing, I hope.’ The marker shot up his worry index and Jake frowned. Until Maisie had activated it in a number of baffling ways, he had been innocent of the worry index. Now it was his daily companion and the innocence of his previous life had vanished. For instance: (a) how to gauge what a twelve-month-old baby could take in from High Noon? (b) If it disturbed her, what effect might it have, now and later?
He looked up: Jocasta was watching them from the doorway. ‘Hi. I didn’t hear you come in.’
‘You were occupied.’ She continued to observe her husband and daughter with that shrewd look of hers. Apparently satisfied, she unwound a pale green pashmina from around her neck, took off her power-cut jacket and sat down beside him. After a moment, she reached over and took one of Maisie’s hands. ‘Hi, baby.’ Then she leaned back against the cushions and shut her eyes.
‘Bad day?’
‘You could say that.’
‘You’re looking lovely,’ Jake said, with the uplift her beauty constantly brought him.
Jocasta treated her looks briskly and matter-of-factly. She neither fussed over nor dismissed them, accepting them as part of the package she had been dealt, along with her brains and ambition. She inclined her head. ‘Why’s Maisie still up? She should be in the bath.’
‘I wanted to spend some time with her. I thought you would too.’
‘Maybe.’ Jocasta plucked Maisie off Jake’s lap and kissed her cheek. Maisie grinned. ‘Oh, my God.’ Jocasta thrust her back at Jake. ‘She needs that bath. I’ll do supper.’
So it was with some surprise that Jake, having bathed, dressed and played Maisie a selection of lullaby mobiles, which finally persuaded her to tuck herself into the side of the cot and close her eyes, returned downstairs to find that Jocasta was still in the sitting room and had made no attempt at supper. Instead, she had poured herself some whisky and was consuming it by the window.
‘Gone off duty?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I’m hungry. Get a move on,’ he said affectionately.
But Jocasta was disinclined to move. Eventually she set the heavy crystal glass down on the table. ‘I want to talk to you.’
‘Can’t we talk while we eat? Or can’t we manage both?’
The corners of her big red mouth turned down. ‘You’re no good at sarcasm, Jake.’ She squared up to him, and a frisson of alarm whispered through him. ‘But we have to talk.’ She seemed nervy and extra impatient as she paced the room.
‘Jocasta, whatever it is, it can’t be that bad.’ He held up his hands. ‘OK. I admit. I forgot to put the washing on.’
She swivelled around. ‘I’m leaving you, Jake.’
He grabbed the back of the sofa. ‘Have you drunk too much of that stuff?’
‘I wish.’
‘Not funny, Jocasta.’
‘You’re right, it’s not funny, but it’s the truth.’
The sofa offered some sort of support but not much.
‘For some time now, Jake … I …’ The normally fluent Jocasta fumbled for the words. ‘You know I was never sure about having children … and when Maisie was on the way you persuaded me.’
‘That’s all in the past,’ he said flatly. ‘Now you’ve got her, it’s quite different.’
‘Sorry, but it isn’t. Only sentimentalists, of which you are one, Jake, think …’ She hesitated. ‘I know it’s conventional wisdom and all that, but you must understand that, sometimes, the right things don’t happen.’
Jake unwrapped his fingers from the sofa. ‘Stop it.’
But Jocasta’s words kept coming. ‘I know that you wanted things to work out. And, for your sake, I wanted it too. But you can’t pretend what you don’t feel.’ She was twisting her hands together in a parody of penitence. Jocasta was never penitent. ‘I’m sorry. It’s my fault for allowing you to persuade me to marry you when I got pregnant.’
Jake groped his way around the sofa and sank down into it. ‘Let me get this straight. Because you don’t feel like a mother, you propose to leave me and Maisie?’
‘Actually, that’s not quite it.’
He looked up. ‘Get me some of the whisky, please.’ Jocasta obliged and Jake cradled the glass between nerveless fingers. ‘Go on.’
She had the grace to look away. ‘I’ve met someone …’ She cut off any response from Jake and rushed on: ‘Listen to me, Jake. I don’t suit you. I know that and, if you’re truthful, you do too. I’ve met someone who does, and it will be better for everyone in the long run.’
The bromide slipped off her tongue. Easy.
‘Who?’
‘Another banker.’
‘But who?’ He ran through the possibilities. It couldn’t be the heavy-breathing Nick Fison – could it? Or that woman Lucy’s husband. He was Mr Big at Goldman’s. Wait a minute, there was no time for adultery if you worked for Goldman’s … and, anyway, many banks and bankers were going down the pan and there were no more jobs …
‘You wouldn’t know him, Jake.’ Jocasta read his thoughts, as she sometimes did with uncanny precision. ‘He’s American and I’m going to live with him in New York. He and I have talked it over. We’ll live in the New York flat until his wife moves to LA with the children, and then we’ll move into the house in Chatham.’
He watched the beautiful lips articulate his fate.
‘Everything’s arranged. Noah understands your position and is more than happy to allow me to be generous.’
Jake felt that he had been subjected to a trial without his knowledge and declared guilty and deficient. Then, with a panic he had never before experienced, he thought: Maisie. What about her? ‘And have you worked out what’s going to happen to Maisie?’
She drew up a chair – one of his, a delicate, pretty thing he had built for her in polished cherry wood. She sat down opposite him. ‘Let’s talk turkey.’
‘What else?’
Jocasta’s knuckles whitened. ‘I’ll move into the spare room. OK?’
‘Do what you like.’
She leaned forward and, despite everything, Jake fixed proprietorially on her breasts under her blouse. He knew every inch of that body … the white skin that sheened with sweat when they made love, the slightly too long waist and the mole in the fold of her knee. What didn’t he know? He was familiar with the hard light that sprang into her eye when a deal was mooted. He knew, too, that she was greedy and driven – all of which, perversely, drew him to her.
‘Jake, listen. You know we only got married because I was pregnant. I’m not proud of it. I’m not proud of anything, and I shouldn’t have been sweet-talked into it. I shall go away to New York and leave you in peace. I won’t ask anything of you or Maisie. I’ll speak to the lawyer and tell him he’s to transfer the mortgage to you, and I’ll make sure the divorce is fair.’
‘Let me get this straight. You’re prepared to leave your baby daughter?’
Jocasta flushed violently. ‘Yes.’
‘My God,’ said Jake, each word dropping like a stone. ‘It must have been very, very bad for you to do this. You must have hated every minute of being with me.’
Jocasta did not reply. Skirt hitched sexily up her thighs, she regarded Jake with pity and slight contempt – which was far worse than anything else.
‘I went shopping twice this week,’ Emily confessed to Katya, as they roamed the aisles in Topshop.
‘Did you feel bad? You did feel bad. You knew you’d feel bad.’
‘OK. OK.’
Katya pulled the Therapist’s Face. ‘You’re resolving your role in your family and the confusion is infecting your work.’
Emily’s Therapist’s Face was more convincing than Katya’s. ‘And you’re conflicted between the need for constant hot showers and the masochist’s urge to suffer.’
‘Right.’
She and Katya were pedi-conferencing – an activity stolen from The West Wing. On the show, it involved highly significant ambulatory exchanges, preferably in a long corridor with offices opening off it. In real life a department store substituted just fine.
This morning it was thronged and swift progress was impossible. Crowds of fifteen to twenty-somethings (sizes 6–10) exclaimed over the merchandise on the racks, circled at a distance by wistful forty- and fifty-somethings (sizes 14–18), who didn’t have a prayer of squeezing into any of the stuff.
Katya halted to examine a rack of T-shirts in oranges and yellows. ‘I thought we had a pact that we’d ring each other up if the temptation got too great.’
Katya was a struggling artist, who waitressed at weekends to pay the rent for a room in a concrete block of flats on the edge of Hoxton. There was nowhere to paint in it and no heating. On her more hopeful days, she argued that bodily discomfort was a useful stimulus to creativity. On the not so good days, she confessed to the utter misery of being cold and cramped.
Emily said, ‘We should concentrate on some positive imaging. I’ve worked out that I shop when my confidence is low.’
‘Plus the shops are heated.’
Emily felt additionally guilty that she didn’t have to fight the bodily discomfort problem. ‘Kats, when did you know what you wanted to do?’
Katya looked smug. ‘I was given paper and crayons when Mum potty-trained me. I just knew.’
They went past Swimwear and Emily felt more inadequate than ever. Her Damascene moment, which had commanded her to write, had arrived only recently. She had been finishing an English paper during finals. It had been hot in the hall, her pen was sticky and the paper was smudged and damp. ‘Unlike her sister, Charlotte, who burned for fame and recognition, Emily Brontë rejected the “world without”,’ she wrote. ‘Her rebellion was internal, a battle of the “savage heart” which was “heedless alike of Wealth and Power”.’ At that moment, she felt very close to her namesake – her own heart in turmoil and rebellious – and the thought flashed into her head: I can be a writer too. By that, she did not mean she could begin to approach anything as good as Emily Brontë’s work – the audacity! – but she could inhabit the writer’s undercover role with a huge sense of relief.
If the command had been late in arriving, it was, at least, clear. However, exactly what sort of writing was not clear and Emily spent a long time thinking it over. Biography, for example, was very respectable, particularly with men, who maintained it was the only thing they read. Fiction? As far as she could judge, men regarded fiction, especially popular fiction, as a substratum of pulp, the exception being crime. For some reason, violence and death on the page achieved an intellectual credibility that love and hope did not.
But fiction it had to be. At first her choice had been liberating and joyous and she was surprised she hadn’t considered it before. It wasn’t until she cast back over her childhood and recollected the notebooks filled with stories, which she had kept hidden under the mattress away from the twins, that she realized the foundations of the novelist had been laid.
The thrill of discovering her vocation lasted through the period of intense negotiation with her parents and her retreat to her bedroom/study under the eaves of number twenty-two, where everything was made as comfortable and pleasant for her as she could wish. All of this was before she had plodded painfully to page thirty of the first novel and shuddered to a halt. It was at this point that the silence in the room got to Emily. The air was stifling, the working day endless and her writing stupid. Apart from her mother, everyone was very tactful and kind about it. So much so that Emily ended up feeling like a charity case, which of course she was. In a second flash of understanding, she grasped that if her parents had forbidden her to write, she might have done a lot better.
Still, Emily gritted her teeth and got on with it, which was the only honourable thing to do. However, since the news of her father losing his job, it had occurred to her that, maybe, there were changes ahead.
‘What about this?’ Katya skidded to a halt in front of a rack of skirts and held up one the size of a curtain pelmet.
It was mid-morning and the noise level was rising. Emily felt a slight ache flowering in the back of her head, which she preferred to think was a result of creative tension but was probably more to do with the extra glass of wine the previous evening.
After queuing for twenty minutes to get into a changing room heaving with half-naked bodies, Katya tried on the pelmet and an acid-yellow top. ‘Why am I doing this? I can’t afford it.’
‘That’s lucky – neither suits you.’
They fought their way out of the changing room past the saturnalia of discarded clothes and down the escalator. The pedi-conference recommenced in the basement. ‘I went shopping,’ Emily confessed, in a low voice, ‘because I’m no good.’
Katya switched back to therapist-speak. ‘That may or may not be true, Miss Nicholson. I have no way of knowing because you’ve produced nothing so far …’
‘Hey …’
‘But say it is true, how would you expect to get better?’
Emily clashed the hangers on a rack of short-sleeved sweaters. ‘By keeping going. Practice. Thought.’
‘None of which applies to shopping.’
The hangers made a satisfactory sound. ‘You’re wrong there, Kats. Completely wrong. Shopping requires both.’
She kissed Katya goodbye at the entrance to the Tube and watched her clatter down the steps. At the bottom, Katya glanced back over her shoulder and sent Emily a little smile. Courage.
That was Katya. How she had survived the hell of her warring divorced parents and the gruelling lack of money, Emily didn’t know. It had left Katya sweet, flexible, happy to please, but with a certain hardness at the core which ensured that (to Emily’s envy) she cruised easily through university, where Emily had met her.
‘You’re just like a sister,’ Emily had told her, the first time she had taken her home and watched her mother fuss over the guest and feed her up with steak and chocolate mousse. Adding silently: Far more than Mia ever was.
At that Katya had kissed Emily, her bony fingers digging hard into Emily’s back. ‘Thank you.’ Suddenly Emily realized that, far from relishing her freedom, Katya yearned for a fixed centre and the spider’s web of relations and demands that Emily took for granted.
Not surprisingly, her room at home was as she had left it. Apart from Zosia, nobody entered it except herself. ‘Wouldn’t dare sully the place of creation,’ joked Jake.
Her chair was tucked under her desk. Jake had knocked it up in an afternoon with some plywood and MDF and slotted it into a cramped space. It was not one of his better efforts but it would do.
Originally the bed had had a floral headboard (her mother had the worst taste) but she had tacked an alternative in plain blue over it. It was neatly made up and the edges of the quilt hung in the way she preferred. All traces of her previous shopping had been tidied away, the bags stowed in the recycling bin.
Her books on the shelves were colour-coded – ‘Ridiculous,’ said Jake – her makeup and brushes laid out in the formation she had evolved over the years, and her clothes were bagged or swathed in tissue.
But, to be honest, as a retreat the room sometimes felt barren and infertile. She also felt that she did not entirely belong in it.
The window had been left open a crack and she went to shut it. A streak of dust marred the sill and she wiped it with a tissue. Outside, it was growing dark and, yet again, it had rained. A light from the house opposite shone fretfully into the garden, picking out a clump of leaves and the slick of water on the patio. A wet robin fluffed out damp feathers on the shed, and the local top-cat, a black-and-white bully, stalked towards it.
‘“Life wears away – I shall soon be thirty – and I have done nothing yet,”’ she found herself murmuring and gripped the window-sill. That was one of Charlotte Brontë’s laments. Emily B had not been so prone to more obvious female neuroses and, in some respects, was more robust. ‘And lust of Fame was but a dream/That vanished with the morn …’ was the (far more laudable) line she had chosen to adopt.
Puzzlingly, the transition from undergraduate to adult had been less easy that she had imagined. It should have been as simple as climbing from one step to another but real life was proving to be … well … rather real. It was about the cost of bus tickets and National Insurance contributions and wrestling with pensions for forty years hence. Hardest of all, perhaps, was the realization that, in truth, nothing more was expected of Emily than to launch herself on to the same road as millions of others and to negotiate taxes, retirement and bus tickets. If she permitted it, Emily’s life would be exactly the same as everyone else’s: like a tiny, winking point among the millions of short-lived winking points in the night sky. Then you were gone in an instant – a shadow quickly forgotten. It was precisely the struggle to pin down existence that was where the slippery, exciting, exacting business of writing came in – and, with a burst of renewed passion, she vowed to rededicate herself to it.
There was a knock on the door. Her father poked his head around it. ‘Can I come in?’
‘Sure.’
As he advanced slowly into the room, Emily regarded him with some anxiety and a great deal of painful love. He looked thinner and had shed the vitality that had been so much part of him.
Emily pointed to the bed. Tom hitched up his cords and sat on the extreme edge. ‘Sorry to be so formal but I want a little word.’ He pushed a hand awkwardly through his hair. ‘I’ll come to the point.’ He paused. ‘Money. I’m afraid we’re going to have to make changes.’ She studied his downturned face. ‘I hate this, Ems. I wanted very much to give you a chance … I believed it was important. Still do. But it’s not going to be possible.’
Emily sat down in her chair and folded her hands in a manner she hoped hid her savage heart and any incipient rebellion and conveyed maturity. ‘You want to stop my allowance.’
‘Don’t want to, Emily. Have to.’
Rising to an occasion was always exhilarating – the source of a serotonin lift and a moral tick. ‘I was going to suggest it, Dad.’ This was untrue but her father was not to know that. ‘It’s only right and you’re not to worry about it.’
She went and sat beside him, gazing lovingly into the blue eyes. He was down and beaten, and she couldn’t bear it and ached to protect him. ‘I’m so sorry, Dad, that this has happened. You don’t deserve it.’
‘Little Mouse,’ he said, using the old name, and leaned against her. At that moment, Emily understood that the transition between the all-powerful parent to the one who needed your protection could happen in the blink of an eye – and when it was least expected.
Her father sighed. ‘It was a nice experiment, Emily. I’m pleased you got a bit of time … Most people don’t. Incidentally, those who are jealous are the nastiest critics but never pay any attention to them.’ He leaped up to the window and stared out at the jiggery-pokery, greeneryyallery jumble of pots, gnomes and trellis in the neighbour’s garden, which Emily knew so well. ‘Of course, you can live here, that goes without saying, but I’m afraid your mother and I will have to ask for a contribution to the bills.’
Emily had the curious sensation that she was moving in slow motion. She bent to retrieve a minute piece of fluff from the carpet and dropped it into the bin. She was tasting the bitterness of a lost opportunity – which she had taken for granted and was now to be snatched away.
‘Just one other thing …’ Her father turned round to face her. ‘Keep an eye on your mother, will you? She’s been used to a certain … standard of living. It might be difficult … you know.’ He smiled uncertainly at Emily, and his eyes creased at the corners. ‘She misses your sister. I know this is unlikely … but if you ever did hear from her, you would tell us? You wouldn’t keep it secret?’
Always Mia, thought Emily. Old/young, male/female, Mia had only to fix those eyes on a listener and describe how she had rescued a tortoise – ‘such a darling torty’ – from cruel youths who had dropped it into the canal. Or she was starting a campaign to save the poor pigs/chickens from the wicked conditions in which they were kept. Or babies in Africa were dying from malaria and all for the want of a mosquito net … and everyone fell in love with her and reached for their chequebooks.
‘Of course I’d tell you.’