I saw my family increasingly less frequently in what was a gentle separation of ways rather than a falling out. Work took over from family, friends and colleagues from parents and siblings. Wanda celebrated this – my forging, as she called it, of an adult life: she considered it confirmation that I had grown up, that I had found myself and created an identity of my own. It didn’t feel that way to me; it felt more that the strings that had held me in place were being cut before new ones could finish being tied.
Mie’s arrival on the scene shook things up for me. Her complete freedom and autonomy showed me the life I could be leading. Instead, I lived the independent life through her as I accompanied her to department stores and helped her furnish her apartment, but not altogether satisfactorily: she and I had different tastes and I often wondered why my recommendations, which were good enough for my other friends and family, weren’t good enough for her. I found her conservative and old fashioned, not chintzy but austere: her finished furnished apartment seemed anything but to me. She made me feel frivolous.
My college friends welcomed Mie unquestioningly into our little group. She had an earnestness that they found amusing at times and perplexing at others. Over a drink or dinner Mie would quiz us on English authors we had more often than not never heard of or, if we were lucky, had encountered only because of a set text in our English O level curriculum. She’d ask about art-house films we might have caught on a rainy Saturday afternoon on BBC2, or about music and bands that we only knew from our parents’ record collections. She would take guidebooks from the shabby handbag she insisted on keeping and ask our advice on whether to visit Bath or Cambridge on a coming bank holiday weekend. It wasn’t that she showed us to be ignorant – more that she made us see how much everything we knew was contemporary, mainstream or local. Whenever we did happen to have a recommendation, she would write it down studiously, which had the effect of discouraging further contributions in case they turned out to be wrong in some way, or not as good as we’d thought. Without her meaning to, I was sure, she had the effect of making me feel less secure, as though the level of meness that had been slowly filling up the form that was me had reversed its rise and was slowly declining as a consequence of my incomplete knowledge. Departing from us after the restaurant or pub, declining our appeals and invitations to join us in the nightclubs and scuttling off to the nearest tube, her back turned on fun and the opposite sex, she would leave me with a sense of inadequacy, of social and intellectual deficiency.
‘You should try a Japanese restaurant. We could go one evening,’ said Mie casually as she, Gavina, Monica and I were settling a restaurant bill. ‘Next time.’
‘Are there any in London?’ asked Monica.
‘There’s one in Swiss Cottage,’ said Mie.
‘Swiss Cottage? But that’s North London!’ Gavina reminded me of Dad in her fixation on the South and North London divide.
On the rare occasion of our forays north of the river, Dad used to say, as we climbed into the family car, ‘Right. Have we got our passports? I’ve checked the oil, the tyres and the petrol. Seamus, are the blankets and spade in the boot?’
Despite myself and in spite of Monica’s and Sarah’s liking North London for its cool music clubs and markets, some of Dad’s prejudice must have rubbed off on me, as I heard myself saying, ‘Surely, there must be a closer one.’
‘I must warn you, it is expensive,’ said Mie.
Monica expressed the most enthusiasm. ‘What a great idea!’
A month later, the four of us sat down to a distinctly unfamiliar menu in a restaurant that appeared both functional and formal and yet warm and welcoming.
‘How nice to be able to clean your hands on this fresh little towel after the tube ride,’ I said, placing it on a wooden tray held by a waitress in a kimono.
‘I might need some help here,’ said Monica, staring wide-eyed at the Japanese menu.
‘You can ask me anything you like,’ said Mie, ‘even though everything has been translated into English.’
A Japanese waiter bowed and stood to attention by our table.
Gavina closed her menu and said, ‘I’ll have a lasagne.’
The startled waiter repeated the word. ‘Lasagne? We don’t have lasagne.’
‘Very well then, I’ll have spaghetti bolognese.’
The bewildered waiter looked around for help.
Monica and I couldn’t help but laugh and then I said, ‘Come on, Gavina, make it easy for him.’
Gavina waved her menu about. ‘I don’t understand a word of this!’ She opened it. ‘Okay, what’s this? I’ll have this.’
The perspiring waiter leant over to read the item Gavina was pointing at. ‘The sashimi?’
‘Yes. What is it exactly?’
The appeased waiter straightened. ‘It’s little pieces of fish, madam, raw fish.’
‘Raw fish! I want mine cooked.’ Gavina handed the menu to him.
‘Cooked? Cooked!’ The now extremely disconcerted waiter hopped from one foot to the other, refusing the proffered menu. ‘Perhaps madam can choose another dish?’
Gavina huffed and puffed and rolled her eyes. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘What’s this?’ – pointing at another menu item.
‘Yakitori?’
‘Yes, yakitori. What is it?’
‘It’s chicken on a stick with soy sauce, madam.’
‘Is the chicken cooked?’
‘Oh, yes, madam, very cooked!’
‘Good! I’ll have some cooked chicken on a stick,’ decided Gavina, thrusting the menu at the relieved waiter.
That evening and the few subsequent ones when the five of us met were never quite the same after that. Mie, who had remained impassive throughout the exchange, had clearly taken offence, and despite Gavina’s best efforts to make up for her interventions, what little warmth there had been between them cooled. Certainly, their relationship wasn’t helped by the accounts of our adventures that percolated from Monica’s lips over coffee at the end of our restaurant meals, during which she would have consumed a bottle of wine or two in addition to the Babychams and Cinzanos she’d knocked back in the pub. Monica had found herself a boyfriend and succeeded in airbrushing herself from our history of sexual conquest as she told stories in which Gavina was depicted as a floozy, single-mindedly in pursuit of men, and I not much better. I saw Gavina and myself through Mie’s disapproving eyes, to my double discomfort: not only discomfited for being considered loose by her, I was unhappy with my ongoing inability to anchor myself in a value system of my own.