‘Hi, it’s me,’ said Philippa.
‘Is that you, Philippa?’ asked Paul.
‘Of course it’s me, Paul,’ said Philippa. ‘Who else says, hi, it’s me in the middle of the night?’
‘I’m sorry, Philippa darling,’ said Paul. ‘There’s a kind of delay on the line. I think I spoke before the “it’s me” arrived. And your voice is distorted.’
‘Oh well,’ said Philippa, ‘I suppose it would be since the sound has to travel right across the globe to get to you.’
‘The sound waves aren’t travelling across,’ said Paul. ‘They bounce up to a satellite and down again. It’s a shorter distance, if you take the curvature of the earth into account.’
‘I take it everything’s okay your end,’ said Philippa, ‘or you wouldn’t be concerned with the curvature of the earth.’
‘But why shouldn’t everything be okay?’ asked Paul.
‘I thought you might be missing me,’ said Philippa.
‘Of course I’m missing you,’ said Paul. Was the pause longer than the distance merited? Either both spoke at once or waited for the other to speak. It was awkward.
‘But I expect you’re too busy to miss me,’ said Paul, while Philippa said, ‘Though I expect the children keep you busy enough,’ and both remarks sounded insincere to her, each plaiting into the other as they did. Distance made for remoteness, not closeness. Absence, combined with distance, was not the continuation of presence by other means, as she had affectionately and consolingly assured her husband only ten days earlier – it was a kind of blinking out of existence, and all you could do was hope it was a temporary situation. The silence had fallen again. Now neither spoke.
Paul coughed and Philippa had a vision of the sound bursting up and out of the wintry London fog into the night sky, to reach a satellite half-way to the moon before pouring down again here in Auckland, New Zealand, where the sun shone brightly through an ozone-thin sky onto blue, sparkling water. Christmas was nearly upon them. Philippa and Paul had been married for six years and this was the first Christmas they had spent apart.
The hotel where Philippa stayed looked out over a wide harbour: fine lines of white sand marked out a pattern of beaches on its other side: yachts, their coloured sails like halves of party-balloons, lost and regained energy, clustered and dispersed in the foreground. Philippa had no idea how that kind of thing – sailing – was done; she had never had any desire to do it, or anything like it. People here seemed to be happy doing outdoor things, but outdoor things made Philippa feel desolate and awkward. She missed her house, her home, her children, Paul. She missed the winter. If the weather was cold you could put on a jersey to keep warm: but if you were hot all you could do was turn up the air conditioning and contribute another nail in the planet’s coffin. In London, to dislike outdoors was a perfectly natural state of affairs: here in New Zealand it seemed an offence against a hospitable and benign deity. Climate was something to be relished, to be grateful for. To murmur here about loss of ozone and the dangers of sunbathing was simply not in good taste; as mentioning insanity or cancer had not been in her grandmother’s day. Philippa wished she could tell Paul this, but how could she? It would go on too long and words cost money.
Philippa could hear one of the Boondock Boys moving in the next room. It was something that they were stirring. Four of them lived in a suite with three bathrooms and only just enough space in which to stretch their embryo personalities and their squalor: their blackish shirts, their jewellery, hairsprays, overstretched tights, Rizla papers, bondage gear, the knickers of their groupies which they kept as souvenirs, the instruments which they claimed they never let out of their sight but frequently did. Philippa would somehow have to get them to their photocall by two o’clock. They were pleasant enough lads, not very bright, who felt it commercially prudent to act drunk, high and rude. They made her feel like some solicitous and bourgeois grandmother, not the young whizz kid she’d believed she was.
‘So how’s the tour going?’ Paul was asking. ‘Everything okay?’ Philippa counted one, two, three, before saying, ‘It’s a nightmare.’
Her mother had once told her it was unwise to let the man in your life know you were having a good time without him. But since Philippa wasn’t having a good time perhaps she should say she was? Was that how it worked?
‘Well,’ said Paul, ‘you would take it on, leaving us here to have Christmas alone,’ just as Philippa said, ‘Actually, it’s quite a lark quite a lot of the time, and the weather’s glorious.’
It was like being killed by friendly fire.
Paul said, ‘Tell you what, you speak, and wait, and then I’ll speak.’ Except that he went on talking and she thought he’d stopped, so there they were, speaking together again.
‘I thought it would be ten times easier organising four people than it would be forty. But a pop group and a philharmonic are very different animals. At least classical musicians turn up where and when they say they will. And they can read schedules. They may be elderly and boring, most of them, but at least they’re reliable.’
When Philippa met Paul she had been working for the Avon Philharmonic for eight years. She was thirty-three. At an astoundingly young age, she had seized the languid orchestra by its vocal chords, as it were, and shaken it into life. Philippa, the young tyro, the bringer of life and energy, her name in all the papers. This was the role she was accustomed to: now she was the wet blanket, the damper down of creative fires; the one who had to flush the drugs down the loo, empty the whisky into the hotel pot plants.
None of it had been of her desiring, she now realised. Perhaps the timing had been wrong; had pushed her into this situation or that. Marriage to Paul, a first child within the year: handing in her notice when Paul, a consultant architect, got moved on to the Board of Entier Enterprises; thinking it would all work out. Then pregnant again: one baby she could have coped with; two she couldn’t. Entier Enterprises went down the tubes, and where was the family income then? The timing had indeed been always wrong. Not very wrong; but wrong enough.
And the ‘if onlys’. If only Philippa had hung on to her job just a month longer, which she could have if baby Pauline hadn’t been born six weeks early; if Entier Enterprises had only gone bust three months earlier than it did, so that Paul hadn’t had to go to law disclaiming liability for the company’s debts. If only she and Paul had met six months later, so his first wife hadn’t sued for divorce: if only, if only, if only, and all of it to do with faulty timing. If only Philippa hadn’t stopped breastfeeding in order to get back to organise the Avon Phil’s French tour, she wouldn’t have got pregnant with Peter. Peter might have been an easier baby if he’d had a different set of genes. And he could have. Everything was chance and timing, and the two-second pause as their voices bounced across the world confirmed this fact. Apart they were lucky: together they were unlucky. If Philippa had called the Agency a day earlier she’d have got the Ardeche Quartet’s tour in Northern Europe in January: as it was, the Boondock Boys’ Christmas tour of Australia and New Zealand was the only opening left. How could she refuse? Together they needed the money. Paul would house-husband. Philippa would earn. They were lucky to be able to do it. There were many they knew who couldn’t – who’d lost jobs or outlets and slid down the ranks from earning intellectual, productive artist, to non-employed, over-educated dole-taker in three months flat. Women she knew who’d been stay-at-home wives with Volvos were now taking nursing or teaching courses and setting about earning the family’s living, or had gone home to mother while their husbands fell into depressions, left with mistresses, did voluntary work; who spent their time boringly nurturing any redundancy money that was about: working out which was cheaper: split peas or lentils. The Recession of the early Nineties had hit the educated classes as none other had.
If it took the Boondock Boys’ Christmas tour, it did, and that was that. Forget Christmas. If only one could. By rights, at this time of year the days were short, and Yuletide hysteria was mounting; but here yachts just scudded about on the harbour and people with black sweatsuit bottoms with a single white stripe up the outside of each leg jogged along special running tracks, and what gender they were seemed unimportant and what they were spending on Christmas worried no one. Philippa was homesick and jet-lagged and wanted to cry, but the timing was wrong.
‘Pauline’s running a bit of a temperature,’ Paul was saying, ‘but I’m sure it’s okay. She’s just missing you. And Peter got sent home from nursery for biting but it’s the end of term anyway. They couldn’t miss a trick of course; they’re using it as an excuse to say he’s not mature enough to be at nursery. I explained that you were away and they condescended to accept his biting as a temporary behaviourial problem due to maternal deprivation –’ Pause, two, three, four.
‘Paul,’ said Philippa from the other side of the world, ‘if Pauline has a fever, you ought to call the doctor.’ Pause, two, three, four.
‘You have to take the fever to the doctor these days,’ said Paul. ‘The doctor won’t come to the child. Don’t worry. I asked Rosa-next-door to take a look at her. She said she thought it was just the kind of thing children got.’ Pause, two, three, four.
‘I thought Rosa-next-door was seeing her family in the US,’ said Philippa, as Paul said, ‘Rosa came back early from seeing her mother in the States; she got there and found no mother, because her mother had run off with a truck driver, a leading member of the Teamsters’ Union. Here, speak to Rosa. Rosa, come and speak to Philippa and tell her all about it.’
Rosa Wheelwright had found Paul and Philippa their apartment. It just so happened to be next door to her own. Once she’d been Paul’s assistant. It just so happened: everything just so happens, thought Philippa, and failed to wait for the sound to bounce.
‘Don’t bother, Paul,’ said Philippa. ‘I know someone else is paying for the call, but even so. Whatever Rosa has to say can wait. I was only calling to see if everything was okay, and I’m glad it is.’ Pause, two, three, four.
‘Yes,’ said Paul. ‘I’m okay, but I’m not happy without you,’ and the ‘I’m okay’ had an after-echo now, as if he were speaking to her from another universe, not just across the world, and she was left both consoled and forlorn as she heard her own answer, ‘Neither am I’, echo as well, so the mixture of their voices were saying, ‘I’m okay and neither are you’, which seemed to just about sum it all up.