Becca couldn't take it in. It was impossible. Her parents' marriage was a fact of life, like dogs walking on four legs and credit-card bills being larger than expected. Yes, you knew there was the possibility of variation - she'd seen a photograph of a dog who'd lost his back legs and had been kitted out with a two-wheeled carriage for his rear end - but you didn't expect it to happen. And not to her parents. Perhaps she'd misheard her mother.
'Did you just say...?'
June nodded. 'I'm leaving Frank.'
Becca gawped at her. Everything seemed to have gone into slow motion, but still her brain couldn't keep up. 'But why?' was all she could manage.
'Because... Oh, I don't know. It's difficult to explain.' June gave an apologetic smile and sat down at the kitchen table, as if hiding behind a chunk of scrubbed pine would protect her from awkward questions.
'Try to - I want to understand. I thought you were so happy at the party. Both of you.' Becca clasped June's hands, feeling her finger joints, hard and bony. She looked up at her kitchen pinboard; among the clutter of discount offers from loyalty cards, Crystal's postcard, the programme for the Theatre Royal, was a photograph taken at the party. There they all were, Becca, Martin and Lily, Joanna, Norman, all their children, and at the centre, Frank and June. Everyone was smiling in the summer sunshine. Genuine, unforced smiles - of course, they'd already had a couple of glasses of champagne at that point so it was hardly surprising they were happy, but it really had been a golden day for a golden couple. Frank and June, and their descendants. The family unit.
'Funnily enough, it was the golden wedding party that made up my mind,' June said. 'I looked around at everyone and thought: is this it? Everyone's being lovely, but no one expects anything more out of me and Frank except to go on living and not making too much fuss out of it. My generation put up with what we got and didn't expect too much from our marriages. And a good thing too - Frank and I have nothing in common. At the party, all the talk was of what you young people were doing, and I realised I hadn't done anything with my life. I don't regret having been nothing more than a wife and mother, but the fact is you've got your own lives. You don't need me to be there any more. It's OK for Frank, he's had his career, and now he wants to vegetate, but I don't want to be a cabbage. I've got at least ten years of good health left to me, if I'm lucky, and I want to do things.'
'What sort of things?'
'I'd like to travel.'
'You could do that with Dad.'
June snorted. 'Hardly! He's determined not to move more than a hundred yards from home - he says he's seen everywhere that's worth seeing.'
That rang true. 'You could travel on your own.'
'But then, what's the point in being married? Everything I want to do, he doesn't. And I don't want to do the things he does. Why do we have to stay together, simply because we're older?'
Becca wanted to say, 'Cos you're my mum' like a little child would. She shook her head to try and clear the confusion. 'Have you talked about this with Dad?'
'I don't have to ask his permission to go,' June said tartly.
'No, I didn't mean...I'm sorry, I'm being really stupid, but it's such a shock. I'm completely thrown. I never expected this.' This feels like a dream, Becca thought. This isn't happening to me. In a minute, I shall wake up, and everything will be back to normal. She looked across at June. 'Is there anything I can do?'
'What do you mean?'
'I don't know,' Becca lied, because she did know. She wanted to wave a magic wand and make the clock go back, she wanted June to go back to just being her mother who would always be there for Becca. But that was selfish. June was a person with her own wants and desires. Just because she was older, as she put it, she had every right to expect as much as someone younger. 'Is this a trial separation or are you just moving out for a bit? Perhaps you need a holiday... leaving sounds so permanent - are you certain?'
'Oh, Becca, what do you think? I'm not leaving your father for fun. It's taken me years to get to this point, and now I'm going, I want...' She stopped, her face suddenly less defiant, more pleading. 'I want your support.'
Becca gripped the edge of the table, trying to shut out the wail of no, no, no that rocked her body. I don't want to support you, I don't want you to leave my dad, I want life to carry on, safe and secure. I want to be your child, not a reasonable adult. 'You're my mother,' she said quietly, trying to keep the reasonable adult Becca in control.
'That's not an answer,' June said, sharp as lemons.
'I know.' Becca fiddled with her necklace. The catch was always getting tangled in her hair. Think. 'You're my mother, and I love you, so of course I'll support you. I'll do whatever you want,' she said, then looked directly across at June. 'But I also love my dad.'
'So you're on his side?'
Becca squeezed her eyes shut then opened them. 'I'm not on anyone's side. Or I'm on both of your sides. I don't know, Mum, I can't think straight.'
June leaned forwards. 'You don't have to think straight, Becca. It's not your decision. It's mine.'
She needed to stall for time. 'Have you spoken to Joanna?'
June shook her head. 'Not yet - I will later.'
Becca glanced at the clock. Two in the afternoon here, two in the morning on the other side of the world. What would Joanna say? But it didn't matter, time was short. Becca would have to do this on her own. She looked across to June, and couldn't think of a single thing to say.
They both jumped as the back door burst open and Lily arrived, lugging her bag over her shoulder as if she was hauling a sack of coal. Coal was appropriate as she was dressed in black and her eyes were rimmed with soot, although her hair was the same light brown as Becca's. Somewhere underneath was Becca's pretty, fresh-faced, fourteen-year-old daughter but at times it was hard to see where.
'I had to wait for ever for the bus,' Lily said, dumping her bag in the middle of the kitchen table. 'Hi, Gran.'
Becca darted a warning glance at June. She mustn't say anything to Lily, not now, not yet. Lily would be shocked, upset, and Becca wasn't sure she could cope with her own emotions, let alone Lily's. 'Gran just popped round for a cup of tea,' she said brightly.
June raised her face to be kissed, just as normal, just as if she hadn't made her extraordinary announcement. 'Hello, love. Have you been into town?'
Lily slumped in a chair next to her grandmother. 'Me 'n' Grace went shopping. This woman, you wouldn't believe, it was really sly, she was like trailing us round the shop, like we were going to steal something, it was like, so random.'
It was all as normal and yet things had changed. Becca realised she was shaking. She cleared her throat. 'I thought you wanted me to pick you up at three.'
Lily looked as if her life force was dwindling to nothing. 'No one was around, so I came back.'
Becca glanced at the clock. 'Have you had lunch?'
'Kevin gave me some of his pizza,' Lily said. Despite most of her mind being on June and Frank, Becca clocked Lily's cheeks getting pinker and her eyes brighter. Obviously Kevin was someone significant.
'Is that enough? Do you want something more to eat?'
'What is there?'
Becca opened the fridge door. It was full to bursting as she'd squeezed in a megashop on Friday afternoon, and yet her brain seemed to have stopped making connections as if the synapses had fused. All this food, and she couldn't think of a single thing to make. She tried to concentrate. Lunch, lunch for Lily. 'Cheese on toast?'
'No thanks. What else is there?'
'I don't know.' Becca stared at a pack of yoghurts as if they might hold the answer as well as a healthy dose of friendly bacteria. Perhaps they did. 'Yoghurt?'
Lily pulled a face. 'Yeah well, like I said, I had some pizza.'
June pressed her lips together. 'It doesn't sound like much for lunch.'
'I don't think she's going to starve just yet,' Becca said shortly, shutting the fridge door.
Lily looked between the two, picking up the undercurrents, but disinterested in them, being covered in a layer of self-absorption as soft as puppy fat. With a surge of sudden energy she bounded from her seat, and shot off into the sitting room. 'See ya.' The door slammed behind her.
'I must be going too,' June said, getting up. 'I only dropped in to tell you the news face to face.'
'Mum, don't go. Stay and we can talk some more. I'll make a fresh pot of tea and...' She waved her hand, realising she hadn't got round to making the first pot, trying to think of something more enticing than tea. Something that would make June stay. 'I feel like you sometimes,' Becca said quietly. She swallowed to try and rid herself of the great lump that had suddenly turned up in her throat. 'I think every married woman with children knows the feeling of suddenly turning round and thinking - where have I gone? And sometimes, sometimes, you feel the only way of finding out is by leaving the situation.' She glanced up at the photo. Martin had his arm around her shoulder and she was smiling up at him. Lily stood in front of them, shyly smiling at the camera. Her family. 'But leaving isn't the answer. It really isn't.'
June sighed and stared out of the window. 'Let's have that tea.'
Becca realised she had been holding her breath. She busied herself with making the tea, finding release in the noise of clattering the cups, and the water whooshing out of the tap and into the kettle.
'Tell me about this audition,' June said.
'It's nothing,' Becca said, as she poured boiling water into the pot. 'Silliness, really. It was just an impulse to do something a bit different.'
'You always liked acting at school. Thanks,' she added, as Becca handed her a mug of tea.
Becca sat down with her own mug. The tea was pale - she hadn't left it to brew long enough - but it was hot and refreshing which was all she needed. She looked across to June and realised that in her agitation she had given her the mug that had been Martin's joke Christmas present to herself a few years ago. 'A Mother's Place is in the Wrong' was emblazoned in red across it. 'Don't go,' she whispered. 'Don't leave us.'
'Oh, Becca.' June reached out for Becca's hand, her face creased with anxiety.
'Sorry,' Becca sniffed. 'I don't know why I'm so upset. I'm behaving worse than Lily.'
'I'm sorry it's such a shock. Didn't you have any idea?'
Becca shook her head. 'None. It never occurred to me...' But now, thinking back she could remember little things - the expression on June's face when Frank had said going to New Zealand would be ridiculous, for example. She took a deep breath. 'You have to do what's right for you. And whatever that is, I will try - I really will - I will try to be supportive about it. But please, don't do anything in a hurry. Give Dad a chance. He does love you.' Becca said the words, but then she thought - how do I know that? I just assume he does.
'I didn't expect you'd be so upset,' June said slowly. 'I thought you'd have realised years ago that me and Frank weren't happy.'
'Never,' Becca said. 'Never.'
June lifted A Mother's Place is in the Wrong and sipped. 'This is a dreadful cup of tea, hardly worth the name,' she said, putting the mug down and standing up. 'I must go. I've got things to do.' She snapped on her gloves, shooting her fingers to the ends. Supple brown leather, good quality, bought to last a lifetime. She arranged a scarf around her neck, one Becca hadn't seen before, rainbow colours in a fuzzy chenille-type wool. She turned to Becca. 'I'll think about it. I don't think I'm going to change my mind, but I will think about it. And I promise you that I won't do anything in a rush.' She prodded the mug. 'I expect that's Martin's idea of a joke.'
Becca nodded. 'I didn't realise I'd given it to you.'
'Don't worry.' June kissed Becca's cheek. 'Don't worry about anything. It'll all be fine.'
- ooo -
By the time Martin came home Becca felt as explosive as a shaken bottle of lemonade, though distinctly less sweet. The fact that June had said she was going to think again about leaving Frank inhibited Becca from discussing the situation with anyone else, such as Crystal, let alone Lily. Lily would be devastated by the news. The only person she felt she could freely talk to, apart from Martin, was Joanna, but June hadn't yet told her. Perhaps the whole thing would blow over, she thought, brightening. Perhaps it was a momentary lapse.
The choice seemed grim: June was either serious about leaving Frank, or she'd got senile dementia. She rang Martin, but his phone was switched off. She left a message: 'Ring me. It's urgent.' All her plans for making the most of her more or less commitment-free Saturday went out of the window. Stuff culture, all she wanted to do was talk to someone, anyone. And eat chocolate. At the local mini-supermarket she had a compulsion to pour out her woes to the checkout girl. It took all her willpower not to babble about her mother, and keep the exchange at the till to a three-second conversation about the weather. Where was Martin? Busy bonding with his team. Typical bloody man, she thought, knowing she was being unreasonable, feeling close to tears again. Why can't he be here when I need him? She checked her watch, although she knew he wouldn't be back until eight at the earliest.
But he didn't come back. At ten, Becca started getting ready for bed, still hoping that at any minute she'd hear his key in the lock. She turned to the comfort of Jane Austen and Sense and Sensibility but gave up when she realised she'd read the same paragraph three times. Reluctantly she turned the light off. She thought she'd never sleep, but had just dropped off when she was woken by Martin stumbling over the corner of the bed.
'Martin?' she mumbled, groping for reality from a complicated dream state.
'Sorry, love,' he whispered, switching on his bedside light. 'Didn't mean to wake you.'
'Did you have a good day?' Becca said, snuggling back into a foetal position, arms tucked across her chest.
'Yeah, it was brilliant, but God, I'm knackered. They're all about half my age, you know,' he said with a yawn, sitting heavily on his side of the bed. 'I'm going to be covered in bruises tomorrow.' He pulled his sweater off and examined his right side. 'Look, you can see where Helena shot me, the cow. God, that woman's tough. I got her back though.'
'I thought paintballing was a guy thing,' Becca said.
'Don't be sexist.' Martin pulled on his T-shirt. 'In fact, the girls were worse than the men, totally ruthless.'
'My mother's leaving my father,' she said suddenly.
Martin swivelled round to her. 'What?' He looked blurred, his hair unruly. 'Relax', his T-shirt said. Becca felt she would never relax again. 'What about their golden wedding party?'
'She said that was the trigger. She said Dad wanted to vegetate, and she didn't want to be a cabbage.'
'Blimey. She's got a point, of course - your dad's hardly a New Man, and your mum's all into her art but...you don't think about people splitting, not at their age.' Martin ruffled his hair so it stuck up on his head like a parrot's. 'So she's going to leave him, just like that?'
'We talked a bit, and she said she wouldn't do anything in a hurry.' Becca thought back to her mother, her determined face. 'I'm frightened she means it.'
He turned his light off, then swung into bed. 'Poor you, having to deal with it. You should have rung.' His body was cold against hers.
She tucked her warm feet away from his. 'I did, but your phone was off.'
'I'm sorry - we were in some forest, miles from a signal.' He stroked her hair. 'Poor Becca.'
She twisted round to face him. 'I'm confused, Martin, I don't know what to do.' She snuggled into him, feeling like a child searching for comfort in his physical presence. With Martin holding her, cuddling her, she would be safe.
'Do you have to do anything?' He kissed her head, and she could smell the beer on his breath. 'Your mum's an adult, she can do what she pleases.'
'I know.' It was so hard to articulate the confusion she felt, the mix of worries, anxieties, to distinguish what was childish fear, what was irrational, what was anger. It would be worse if she were Lily's age, of course it would, but that didn't mean she found it easy to be a rational adult about it. Martin's hand moved to her breast. She shifted so his hand missed its target. 'Not tonight. I'm all wound up.'
'It'll relax you.' His hand resumed.
Becca felt like a kit that he'd once assembled and had now memorised the instruction manual. A minute here, a minute there, then, with the foreplay boxes ticked, a heave-ho and he would be on top. She gave a more decisive push. 'No it won't. I need to be relaxed first.'
He tensed, then twisted away from her, rejection in the outline of his shoulders. 'Fine.' She could hear the hurt in his voice.
She put her arms around him, feeling his back against her chest. Everything felt jangled and wrong, she needed him to smooth out the sharp edges, to console her. She nestled into his back, needing the comfort of his body, stroking his chest as if she was soothing his injured feelings. 'Can't we just cuddle?' she whispered.
Martin sighed deeply and half turned to her. 'I'm too tired for all this - do you want to, or not?'
Perhaps he was right. Perhaps it would relax her. 'Yes.'
He rolled right round to her at that, lurching at her body. They had been married a long time; she knew the routine. She wanted to get there, she needed the release, but the more he pushed at her, the less engaged she felt. Relax, relax, she told herself, but her muscles tightened into hard dense knots, determined not to be unravelled. Her body felt dry, not just inside, but outside, as if she were made of brittle bark as Martin's body sawed against hers. And when it was over, she held him in her arms, like a mother with a child at her breast. His breathing, relaxed and untroubled, changed into the deeper rhythms of sleep. He meant well, she thought, stranded in no-man's-land.
What had June said at the party? Something about there not being a right man, just settling for what was about at the time. And they'd all laughed. Becca didn't feel like laughing now. Poor Frank, being the man June had settled for. She frowned, not wanting to believe that's what June had felt fifty years ago. Besides, in a way, it was logical that you 'settled' for whoever was about - you couldn't go out with a man who wasn't there, whom you hadn't yet met. A bit like house-buying, you had the choice of what was on the market at the time of looking. You couldn't just decide you liked a particular house and demand to buy it.
Martin twitched and rolled over. Becca looked at his back, wondering if she had settled for him. At the time, he had been her saviour, her rock, her steady shining light. Her best friend. He'd been there for her when everyone else had let her down. Becca rolled over on to her side, her back against Martin's, remembering.
It had been her second year at university and she'd fallen desperately in love with one of her lecturers. In tutorials she'd lose track and watch his hands, his mouth as he talked, and drift off into daydreams of love. Then the miracle happened at the beginning of her third and final year. He noticed her, and their affair started. They had to keep it quiet, of course, because of his career. They met in pubs outside the city, or more frequently, at his house. He wasn't married, and said his previous partner was living in America. What she didn't realise was that what he called his previous partner was in reality very much his present partner, but one who was taking a sabbatical year. Just before Becca's finals the lecturer's partner turned up at the house where Becca and the lecturer had spent so many lazy Sundays lolling in bed amid the Sunday papers. The lecturer was apologetic, but clear: he thought Becca had understood, had realised that he was committed elsewhere in the long term.
Becca hadn't.
She finally understood why people said their hearts were breaking. Hers had been slowly torn apart. She'd pictured it like tearing a crusty baguette, the spongy inside separating, the chambers like air holes, all dripping. The pain was incredible. It was hard to believe that it was entirely in her head and not some physical amputation without anaesthetic. She could hardly stand, kept sliding down walls into a foetal position, hugging her knees to her chest and weeping burning tears. She'd missed half her final exams, wrote nothing on at least one paper that she did turn up for. Her flatmates had kept her supplied with tea and sympathy, and shoulders to cry on. Becca had closed the curtains and left them closed. She lay on her bed, face turned towards the wall, hearing her flatmates come back from a night out, full of giggles and chat. She didn't blame them for wanting to be with their boyfriends. Life was carrying on, but hers was over.
Except that Martin was there. Reliable, gentle Martin, who listened to her maundering on about the lecturer with tolerance. Who held her head on the night she got drunk and was sick. Who finally and decisively told her it was time to let the sunshine into the room, wash her hair, have a shower and come out to the pub. She'd wept at his cruelty, but allowed herself to be steered towards the bathroom, to be taken down the road, her knees as wobbly as a newborn calf, and for a pint of Guinness to be plonked in front of her while Martin told her she was a wonderful person who didn't want to waste a minute more of her precious life weeping over a complete toe rag. It had taken time to wean herself off the idea of herself as dramatic, wronged heroine, but gradually she realised that she wasn't Marianne from Sense and Sensibility, but Elinor. Or if she was Marianne, then Martin was her Colonel Brandon, and they married two years after graduation. It hadn't occurred to her then that she was settling for Martin, and if it was a rebound relationship, it had been a successful one lasting for nearly twenty years. And yet... and yet... now in the darkness she lay and wondered if in her own marriage there should have been something more.
- ooo -
The next day, after Sunday lunch (which they always had together, as a family), Becca dragged Lily out of her festering bedroom - it was appropriate that her favourite band was Cradle of Filth, given the state of her bedroom, the land the Hoover had forgot - and to the local museum where an archaeologist was demonstrating flint- knapping. Lily put up a token protest, saying it was the last day of the holidays and she'd rather die than go to a museum, but Becca insisted, knowing that history was one of Lily's favourite subjects at school and, until the last few months, a trip to see an archaeologist demonstrate flint-knapping would have been a treat, not an appalling example of abuse worthy of a call to Childline.
The archaeologist selected his flint and examined it closely, looking for the best place to strike. The flint was a dull and chalky white on the outside, knobbled and ugly. Yet he turned it gently in his hands to find the hidden axe head beneath. Then, using another flint, he struck a sharp tap on the side and a chunk flaked off. Then another and another, each time turning the flint in his hands to see the best place to strike, judging the fault lines. The blows started hard and the chunks big. Then they diminished in scale until the last blows were like feathers and the pieces minuscule and in his hands he had a thing of great beauty, an axe head, the dull brown translucent at the edges, edges formed by scallops like overlapping scales. The whole thing was so perfect, so lovely Becca found it hard to believe it had been created there in front of their eyes. And this thing of beauty would have been used to chop trees or whatever, and as it blunted more would be chipped off until it diminished in size and finally was no longer of use. 'At which point it would be discarded and chucked away for an archaeologist like me to discover four thousand years later,' the man said.
'Wasn't that interesting?' Becca said to Lily when it was over.
'No,' Lily said with a yawn. Once she'd have wanted to find her own flints and experiment herself but those days had gone.
Mind you, Becca thought as they walked to the car, I'm not sure I'd have been that interested in flint-knapping at her age. Or, if I had been, I wouldn't have been able to admit to it. She drove them back home, thinking about life's phases. Perhaps we start out as interested, outward-going children, get derailed by sex and relationships, and then gradually revert to being interested, outward-going adults. Maybe that's what's happening to June, she thought. She's done with the relationships bit, and now wants to explore the world with a child's curiosity. And I'm somewhere adrift in the middle.
The phone started ringing as she turned the key in the back door, and carried on ringing. Where was Martin? She pushed the door open, and grabbed the phone. 'Yes?' she said crossly, not bothering with any niceties of phone etiquette. It was bound to be someone selling double glazing anyway.
'Is that Becca Woods? It's Paul Fitzwilliam. Is this a bad time?'
It took her a few seconds to realise who he was, and then her heart started thumping so hard she could hardly hear what he was saying. 'No, it's fine. Goodness. How are you?' Don't get excited, this is the 'thanks, but no thanks' call, she told herself.
'I'm fine. I was phoning about the auditions. As I'm sure you were aware, lots of people auditioned for this production...' Becca braced herself for the rejection. 'I was phoning to see if you'd like the part of Lady Fidget.'