2

Changes

(David Bowie)

‘I KNOW HOW she bloody feels,’ Alex had muttered on that long-ago day when he and Nell had watched Princess Diana confiding to the biggest TV audience in history that there were three people in her marriage. Nell had laughed, told him to leave it alone, for heaven’s sake; it was years ago and he was the one she’d married, wasn’t he?

Alex had given her the usual look and she’d gone into the kitchen to pour more wine and have a private moment of wondering what Patrick was doing now. That time she’d pictured him living on a remote island, possibly in the Outer Hebrides, painting lonely landscapes and communing with otters and deer. No women were in this scene, though she’d allowed him an amicable parting of the ways from maybe two or three over the years. No children, though – he’d always been a hundred per cent sure on that one.

When Nell first met Patrick, they were both eighteen, starting their first day as art students. His look had been somewhere between early Sting and the prettiest one from Duran Duran – all floppy blond hair and too much black eyeliner and casually flamboyant clothes that gave him an attractively piratical look. There were so many boys like him at the time. Nell liked the type. It was a softer look than punk, but not yet the trainee-accountant-on-a-weekend image that would define the New Romantics; vain, certainly, but having spent five school years boarding with girls of varying levels of hygiene awareness she knew what she didn’t want in a potential life partner. Never again, she’d vowed the day she left school, would she share premises with anyone who let their hair become filthy enough to smell of stale cheese, or whose sweaty-hockey-match-to-shower ratio was less than one-to-one.

Nell fancied Patrick the moment she walked into the Oxford Poly (as it then was) Graphics department and saw him slumped on the old sofa in the corner, apparently asleep. It wasn’t what you’d expect from a first-year – as all the group assembled in this room were. Everyone else was alert, upright, prowling, eyeing each other for cool-rating and the possibility of friendship. To Nell, who was mildly frightened of just about everything and everyone on that first day, Patrick’s don’t-care detachment gave him a thrilling aura of confidence and superiority. If he was so casually at home on day one in a new college, he could presumably be enviably comfortable anywhere; she wanted to hang out next to him, to see if that blissful self-assurance was catching.

Patrick’s long, stretched-out body was wrapped in a multicoloured coat of velvet patchwork and he wore lime green snakeskin boots. Beside him on the sofa was a very battered old black leather cowboy hat. You’d need supreme confidence to wear that too, she’d thought, guessing it would look so wonderful on this slim and elegant boy that by the end of term at least three doting acolytes would have bought cheap and less stylish versions of it.

She was immediately certain she had never seen anyone quite as desirable as him before and wished she’d had more practice at sex so that when she eventually got him into her bed (and she was very, very determined here) she would be skilled enough to ensure he’d want a return visit. That was the trouble with girls’-boarding-school life – it was hardly what anyone would term an all-round education, whatever the fancy prospectus claimed. Lacrosse and Latin were all very well, but they completely failed to give you an edge over sexier, worldly-wise day-school girls.

Nell’s experience of sex to date had been just one fumbled summer with another ex-boarding-school pupil – Marcus from the village – who was equally desperate to get the sex qualifications sorted. Both had been using the few months between A levels and college as a crash-course learning opportunity and had spent many stifling hours in the dark in Marcus’s attic den, nervously getting the hang of each other’s body geography. Their parents were bridge-and-tennis friends and there had been an uncomfortable (but unmentioned – something here to be thankful for) underlying certainty that this was very much an arranged and approved-of coupling, that each set of parents had considered this match suitable enough to get the sexual basics out of the way before the two of them moved on to their next stage of education: Marcus to Bristol (law) and Nell to Oxford (art and design). Nell’s mother Gillian was a practical sort: she made sure her daughter left for Oxford equipped with a full driving licence, a copy of Delia Smith’s One is Fun and twelve different-sized sable paintbrushes. It seemed highly likely that Nell’s loss of virginity had also been orchestrated in the interest of getting another practicality achieved before the start of term.

‘Criminal, those boots. What a fuckin’ disgusting waste of snakes.’ A girl who smelled of charity-shop mothballs glared across at the beautiful dozing boy.

‘Is it?’ Nell immediately challenged. She looked at the girl and saw, in spite of the glare, a potential rival. This girl, all pins, rips, lace and Doc Martens, was taking notice of the lovely boy. She might be finding fault but she’d clocked him – couldn’t take her eyes off him. This was only one step away from a change of mind and serious opposition.

‘You know what?’ Nell took a chance, brazenly staking her own claim rather than heading safely for the making-a-friend option. ‘I can’t think of a better use for snakes.’

And so had begun five years of defending Patrick against many, many a critic.

Ed was early for once. Today he wouldn’t be sloping late into the college with the most laid-back of the students (the hungover, the oversleepers, the bus-shelter dope-smokers) and having the principal give him that look that said it was bad enough for the college’s image that he dressed like a Kensington Market hippie, circa 1970 – unpunctuality could be the excuse she needed to get him out and smarten the Literature staff up to standards more in keeping with a thriving business. He stashed a heap of marked essays (War poetry – to be dealt with no more than three at a time in order not to feel suicidal), his iPod and a Doors CD to play in the car into his bag, and took a quick glance out of the window at what the weather was doing. The all-enveloping army coat might be needed, or maybe the biker jacket. Next door’s Golf, he noted, was back in the shared driveway. Mimi and Nell were just going into their house.

‘Oh good. Next door are home,’ Ed commented to his brother. He backed away from the window; he didn’t want to be thought snooping, not by Nell. He’d see her later, at the Mitchells’ party, and would ask her how the holiday went. He hoped it had been therapeutic – she deserved some fun after putting up with a bastard husband for so long. And he wasn’t nosy, of course not. He was just being neighbourly, and in his opinion there should be plenty more of that. If you insisted on minding your own business and never taking an interest, the whole area would end up anonymous, dead. Of course he knew it was all right for him, he was only around here in south-west London in term-time and on weekdays. He’d got his place down in Dorset to take off to for peace and solitude whenever he felt like it, but you wouldn’t want it all day, every day, nobody talking to anyone else.

‘We knew they’d be back today. It’s written on the calendar, just above the Mitchells’ bash. Funny day to have a party, you’d think they’d wait till the weekend.’ Charles didn’t look up from his sudoku. Today was Wednesday so the rating was Fiendish. If he didn’t finish it by the time breakfast was over, the day would be spoiled. That ever-present background worry about Alzheimer’s setting in would creep up over the hours, and by late afternoon he would be able to picture the exact layout of his future care home, the slurried shades of beige on the thin, murkily floral carpet, the dull pictures on the walls – washed-out landscapes of places that looked too cold to visit – the lumpy ochre paint on the banister rails, the spider plants on top of the bookshelves. The terrible, terrible lack of books. There were people younger than him moving into those places, taking their few final-years possessions through the Doorway to Death. He shivered slightly, feeling the ghost of his future sliding by. ‘Whatever happened to spider plants?’ he asked his brother. ‘Everyone had them at one time, didn’t they? You don’t see them any more. I suppose they went the way of peacock chairs and wooden-handled steak knives.’

‘Spider plant: Chlorophytum comosum “variegatum”,’ Ed told him instantly. Charles used to know the Latin name of just about any plant, but recently he’d had trouble recalling some of them. He was a good fifteen years older than Ed: was this a sign that his brain was beginning to delete chunks of information? Ed hoped not. He knew the idea of mental decline worried Charles. Well, it worried everyone in time, he supposed. Even he, still only at the beginning of his fifties, went into a slight panic when he forgot what he’d gone into a room for. The worst thing was, being older and more forgetful meant you also forgot that you’d always done this; even children could sometimes be seen hovering, trying to remember what they’d intended to do next. His daughter Tamsin had done this ever since she was small and she seemed, at nearly thirty, still to have the full use of a functioning brain.

‘Trust you to know that,’ Charles grunted. The bottom right-hand square of the puzzle wasn’t working out. There seemed nowhere for the eight to go. Please, he asked God fervently, don’t let this be a cock-up. Not on a Wednesday, not when the hardest puzzles of the week were yet to come. Was this a sign?

‘Did they look tanned?’ Charles asked. Perhaps if he had one more cup of coffee his brain might be kick-started back into rhythm.

‘What? Nell and Mimi? Hard to say. I only saw them for a second. You’ll be able to see for yourself tonight – I know the Mitchells invited Nell to their do.’ Ed glanced out of the window again, wondering if she would be too tired to go. The Mitchells had invited half the street – which must mean they had some God-awful new consumer durable they wanted admired – but Nell might not be keen to dress up to celebrate a long marriage when hers had just collapsed. No, he thought, she’d probably put in an appearance, to be polite. He’d make sure he talked to her, be cheerful, because if she did turn up it would be a defiant and brave act. Neighbours might prefer to keep their private lives private, but the departure of Alex definitely came under Public Knowledge. The Mitchell house would be full of people asking Nell how she was feeling, all agog that she might come up with something more eye-opening and intimate than ‘jet-lagged’. The sad irony of a wedding anniversary wouldn’t go unmentioned either, especially by the women. They could be such nasty things.

‘She’s left the car out on the drive. I don’t suppose she’ll bother much with the garage now Alex has gone. I hope she fills it up with his leftover possessions. I wonder if she’s cut the sleeves off his suits like that woman in the papers a few years back? If that’s a book she’s taking a leaf out of, we could be in line for his wine collection. We should keep an eye on the front doorstep.’

‘Unlikely.’ Charles folded The Times carefully and turned to the main section. There was still the crossword to be tackled – one final chance for his intellect to redeem itself. Ed could do a lot worse than to start doing those himself. It was all very well playing Led Zeppelin at full volume and reminding yourself of long-ago dope-addled days, but it wouldn’t keep the brain cells ticking over. In fact, Ed was lucky he had brain cells. He’d been quite a wild worry in his time. ‘If she’s got any sense she’ll drink her way through his cellar in no time – if you can call it anything so grand, that cupboard under their stairs. Alex was no connoisseur; there’ll be nothing worth hanging on to. Christmas before last, at that party they had, I’m sure I saw a wine box on the kitchen table.’

‘I expect it would have been one that a guest brought.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Whoever would take wine in a box to a party? Surely a decent bottle of claret would be the very least. Or champagne.’

‘Well, students would, kids,’ Ed decreed. ‘It was probably some friend of Sebastian’s.’ He hoped this didn’t add up to defending the appalling Alex. Too smooth by three-quarters, that one, and certain to have had an entire string of extramarital women on the go, not just the one he went off to live with. Men like that, sleek and always rushing, forever gabbling into their phones as if every word they uttered was monumentally important, it was a mystery how they found time for complicated sex lives. Businesswise they were the type described as ‘thrusting’, as if that was a good thing to be. Not so good when it crossed over into their private life, was it? Too ironically apt a description.

The new woman wouldn’t last, in his considered opinion. Alex would tire. He would either move on to a different one or come to regret opting out of what must have been a pretty comfortable nest. A man preferred the familiar as life moved towards its later stages. Alex would come to realize this in a year or two, when the new one was making noises about starting a family and he was wondering why he was losing touch with the one he’d already got. He would see the whole thing coming round and going round again, and he’d feel dismal and despairing and full of regret. If Nell wanted her miserable excuse for a husband back she only had to wait it out, but Ed sincerely hoped she wouldn’t bother. He, so conveniently next door, could be useful to her, now she was living alone. He would make sure she knew he was always there to take in oversize mail and parcels, to feed her cat when she was away, mend the fence after a gale and such. She might even fancy going out for a drink or meal sometime, just casual, nothing intense. He’d like to be useful and there weren’t so many opportunities for that, these days, not since Tamsin had grown up.

Well, it wasn’t the trauma it might have been, coming home to this Alex-free house. Maybe the mugging had reduced the impact, which made it a strange small mercy to be grateful for. Nell phoned and cancelled the one credit card the boy had made off with (like many shops, it seemed he didn’t take American Express – and he had scorned the John Lewis store card too, making off with only the Topshop one). She then wandered from hallway (calmly blue) to sitting room (dark wood floor, Designers Guild turquoise, pink and lilac-vibrant – her insistence, Alex’s surrender) to kitchen (trippily patterned burr oak, honed black granite) and through to the conservatory in a jet-lagged daze, clutching a bundle of mail that seemed to be mostly junk, bills and catalogues, and half-expecting (and half-dreading) to find evidence that Alex hadn’t packed up and gone after all.

She wouldn’t have been completely surprised to find him sitting at the big old kitchen table with a mug of coffee, going through emails on his laptop, saying, ‘Oh you’re back,’ without looking up, the way he so often and so annoyingly would do. She wondered how she’d have felt if he had still been there, and decided she’d have been furious, actually (as of course, contrarily, she was also furious that he’d gone). That week away had been to avoid the worst of him going, a chance for him to slink out of the house with his possessions – spotted-hankie-tied-on-a-stick style – while she was bravely having fun somewhere else, getting herself ready, mentally, to face this house he’d abandoned. She would have felt completely cheated if, after all that, he’d been there large as life, having casually changed his mind. It was a good thing he’d gone. No question about it. She could almost believe the mean temperature of the house was up by a good few degrees. And that had nothing to do with thermostat settings.

‘Mum? I’m going to do some emails and then get some sleep. Cup of tea would be nice.’ Mimi yawned and slunk away towards the stairs, not – no surprise here – showing any sign of wanting to drag her bag up with her to unpack.

‘This lot won’t be lying in the hallway for the next six weeks, will it?’ Nell called up after her. There was no reply. And nothing was that different, so far. No Alex around, obviously, but the seagrass stair carpet still had the fluffedwire effect on the bottom two steps where Pablo the cat had clawed it. There was still a chunk of gouged-out paint on the wall halfway up where Seb had been carrying a chest of drawers with a mildly drunk friend and without enough care. An irrational corner of Nell’s brain had half-expected these domestic blemishes to have fixed themselves, for the entire place to have given itself a celebratory makeover.

The new start shouldn’t just apply to her. The house – all her own territory now, so long as she could cope with the bills – should be shaping up and joining in too. The paint she had been planning for the kitchen should have somehow got itself bought and applied, and every room should be full of flowers and Welcome to Your New Life cards. Monty Don should be wiring in a fountain as a finishing touch on the back terrace. Flags should be fluttering from every window, like a flamboyant cruise ship boasting its way into port, and sirens should blast all down the street. Instead, silence. Then out of this silence came a full-volume blast of Kaiser Chiefs from Mimi’s room.

‘That’ll be Mimi reclaiming her territory,’ Nell muttered to herself as she went to fill the kettle. She didn’t feel inclined to go and ask her to turn it down because the going-upstairs bit would be where the difference would really show, and where a twinge of pain might kick in. There would be no John Grishams heaped on Alex’s bedside table. His comfort stack of Nurofen packets (Regular, Plus, Caffeine-free and Gel) would be gone. He would no longer leave shoes in dangerous tripping-over positions in every doorway and at the top of the stairs, as he had each day since she’d met him (to the point where, lately, she’d wondered if he had murder on his mind. From his point of view it would have solved a lot). There would be empty drawers containing nothing but crinkled lining paper with drifts of dust, lost buttons and flecks of wool and cotton. Possibly a few shirts that he no longer wanted would be hanging in his wardrobe, waiting to be bagged up for the charity shop. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to take them there himself. A man who had never made himself familiar with the workings of the washing machine wouldn’t have given any thought to the disposal of old clothes.

She would, she decided, repaint the bedroom as well as the kitchen. Farrow & Ball’s Cooking Apple Green would be good – she’d had it in mind for a while for somewhere in the house. Alex hated green. When she’d run the idea past him a couple of years ago, he had said it would make the room feel cold, and besides, it reminded him of ponds and wasn’t magnolia a safer bet? Well, of course it was. And so bland. How typical of Alex, though, whose extramural sex life didn’t lack imagination, to have tried to go for the dull and predictable inside the house and expected her to live with it. An old memory whizzed back to Nell: Patrick’s room in the Oxford flat had been green – the wall behind the bed a vivid lime and the rest painted deepest velvety emerald – and it hadn’t been cold at all. Far from it.

The phone rang while she was shoving bread into the toaster.

‘Eleanor, daaarrrling!’ Only her mother could spin the word out to a five-syllable descending note. ‘So. Has Alex really gone?’

Nell heard the accusation ‘Oh you useless failure of a wife/daughter’ in the sentence. Not for the first time. Gillian Wilkinson had perfected a fine line in disappointment over her entire adult life. It had started, Nell was sure, with the arrival of three daughters but no sons. Nell, as the last of these girls, was by definition the biggest disappointment, for after that there were to be no more. ‘Boys stay so wonderfully devoted,’ Gillian always claimed, with much ill-concealed regret, whenever she was out with Eleanor and caught sight of some elderly dowager being helped into a restaurant chair by what she took to be a loving grown-up son. A generation on, she quite brazenly favoured Sebastian over Mimi, breezily claiming that was ‘natural’; that all indulgent grandmothers spoiled the first-born, whichever sex they were, but this didn’t fool anyone. It would have been just the same if Mimi had been the older one; it would still have been Sebastian who was treated to extra outings, to the bigger presents. Nell had had to come up with a lot of crafty gift additions around birthdays and Christmases when the children were little, to make sure Mimi didn’t feel slighted.

‘Yes, he’s really gone,’ Nell now confirmed. ‘And yes, Mimi and I had a lovely week away in the sun, escaping Alex’s escape, thanks for asking.’ She wasn’t going to mention the mugging. Somehow this would add to her mother’s tally of Nell’s failures. She could do without a lecture on how to hold on to a handbag.

‘And Alex was such a reliable sort.’ Nell’s mother sighed the deep, sad sigh of the reluctant betrayee. It had to be someone’s fault. Guess whose? Nell pulled a knife out of the drawer in preparation for spreading deep swirls of honey on her toast, and wished that phones still had curly cables. How satisfying it would be, right now, to saw right through one.

‘But Alex was not so reliable, as it turned out.’

‘Oh but he was, darling, for very nearly twenty years; dull of course, but …’

‘There is absolutely no “but”.’ Nell cut her mother off before she could get into full regret flow. ‘Alex has gone and I don’t want to talk about him. Let me tell you about the hotel … you’d love it there; it was quite a small place, right on the sea, perfect pool, fantastic seafood, spa …’

‘Yes, yes, but daaarliiing …’ There it was again … that drawn-out note, the ‘but’. ‘What on earth are you going to do now?’

‘I shall come down to Guildford, Mother dearest, and move in with you, of course.’ Nell crossed her fingers suddenly, in case what was spoken in jest was misinterpreted by the spiteful gods as something she’d truly wished for. You had to be careful with that. Losing a husband to a girl who was just a toddler when Pink Floyd played The Wall at Earls Court was bad enough, but being sent by the teasing immortals to live with your mother in the Surrey gin and Jag belt would be a humiliation too far.

‘What? Oh don’t be silly, Eleanor. I meant …’

‘I know what you meant. I’m going to have some toast, tea and then a couple of hours’ sleep. Catch up on emails, see if any work has come in. Order some paint supplies. I’ve got a whole series on vegetables with diseases to illustrate for Home Grown magazine, so I need the right colours for potato blight.’

‘But … if you tried, you know … even now, I’m sure … You see, men at a certain age, they do silly things. They don’t mean them. And you know, Eleanor, it isn’t entirely ungracious to forgive. And of course then you would have the upper hand.’ This was said in almost whispered intimacy that suggested a mutually understood code. Nell didn’t, quite, understand but guessed it might involve the acquisition of valuable guilt presents. That could explain why her mother had such a collection of sparkly jewellery. She really didn’t want to know about any wanderings of her late father, and hoped fervently that Gillian wasn’t planning an intimate lunch at which she would decide it was time to tell all in the interests of trying to spare her daughter a lonely old age. Five years after his death (car crash on the A3, alongside a woman in scarlet dungarees who, it turned out, delivered more than bouquets from the local florist), she really didn’t think such details would add anything helpful to her memories of her father.

‘Mum, are you trying to say that Alex really didn’t intend to move three thousand miles to live with another woman? That he didn’t mean to have had at least four full-on affairs before the great big catastrophically destructive final one? Which silly thing that “they don’t mean” would apply, in this particular case, to Alex?’

Gillian Wilkinson sighed again. ‘Well if you’re going to be like that, Eleanor … But one thing I will say: in spite of everything and the way it’s turned out, I still think you did the right thing, marrying him and not …’

‘Now don’t even start on that!’ Nell warned, feeling her voice rise and wishing she was a more controlled type. Press the right keys and her mother would still always play the same tune, so many years on. ‘Just don’t say anything more. Not a word!’

‘You know what I mean, Eleanor. After …’

‘OK that’s it. Goodbye Mum, I’m going to get some sleep now. I’ve got a party to go to tonight. I want to be awake enough to enjoy it.’ Nell clicked the phone off and wished she hadn’t said that last bit. It smacked of So There defiance, of Look at Me, I Do Have a Life, You Know. Gillian would sense desperation. She had a nose for it. Too late now and so what anyway; Nell opened the fridge. Oh, God bless Andréa – a big bottle of milk. And a massive, massive multipack of Cadbury’s Flakes. Nell’s eyes filled with tears. She wiped them away quickly with the nearest useful item (a damp J-cloth, smelling strongly of Astonish. Never mind, it was probably good exfoliation), took out one of the Flakes and snapped off half of it, sending shards of chocolate to the floor. She wasn’t going to feel sorry for herself. No. Not at all. She would be positive and abide by Chapter Three in After He’s Gone: ‘Treat yourself daily to one item that always makes you feel good’. Just now, to kick things off, she reckoned it would take four to do the trick: toast, honey, chocolate and tea. The well-muscled boy who’d stacked the beach chairs at the hotel would have been a good addition to this list, but hey, you couldn’t have everything.

I am now the Responsible Adult in Charge in this house. Thanks for that, Dad. Mimi thought this as she wriggled her way down beneath her duvet and tried to blot out the shaft of weak sunlight that was searing in through the gap at the bottom of the wooden blind. Neither Adult nor Responsible were terms she was comfortable with. She was way too young. For one thing, if she had to be responsible for keeping her mother’s spirits up, where did that leave her own needs? How was she going to carry on doing Being Fifteen and all the glorious self-centredness that went with it, if she had to think about being careful not to add to her abandoned mother’s woes? She’d had a quick skim through the After He’s Gone divorce book over in Barbados, but the author had carelessly left out a chapter aimed at teenage daughters who were going to have to deal with the fallout from … well, the fallout. There were girls younger than her – she’d seen The Jeremy Kyle Show – who were looking after entire dysfunctional families almost single-handed. Kids with no money, having to juggle the lone mum’s benefits and drug habits and casual loser boyfriends. Obviously she hadn’t got it that hard. But that was the trouble with it not being that hard by regular standards. There just wasn’t any kind of manual for it. And what a number her dad had laid on her: ‘Take care of your mum. Keep an eye on her.’ Final fucking last words before the one-way to New York. Great, so helpful. Lay it all on me, why don’t you?

Mimi closed her eyes and thought of lying in the sea again, weightless and carefree. Her hair still had a slight sandy residue and smelled of sea life and she pulled a thick strand of it across her mouth, tasting salt. This time yesterday … the boy who strolled up the beach in the mornings selling shell necklaces, palm-frond hats and ready-rolled spliffs; the tiny silver-striped fish that nibbled her ankles as she paddled out to the waves. The sun blonding her hair, the heat making her body tender and lazy. All of it was stuff that made you feel good. Not like this huddly cold, not like this late-winter loneliness. What a long, long time it was going to be till summer.