Serena

SEVEN

By the time I had got lost finding the motorway and caught in the evening traffic as I came into London, the whole excursion took longer than I’d planned and I did not arrive home much before eight. Bridget had let herself in some time earlier, and polished off half a bottle of Chablis in the interim. This made her rather sour as she banged around the kitchen making dinner. I cannot now think why I never questioned that she should always cook for me, when she spent her days in an office tussling with important decisions behind a desk, while I lolled around for most of the time, performing needless, invented tasks to fill the daylight hours as I waited for inspiration. In my defence, I don’t remember her ever objecting to the arrangement. If it was my turn we went out. If it was her turn she cooked. Sometimes you just accept things.

‘Your father rang,’ she said. ‘He wants you to call him back.’

‘What about?’

‘He didn’t say, but he tried twice and the second time he sounded rather annoyed that you weren’t here.’

There was a vague but completely unreasonable reprimand buried in this somewhere. ‘I can’t manage my day in case my father might ring.’

‘Don’t blame me.’ She shrugged and went back into the kitchen.

‘I’m just the messenger.’ I was struck, not for the first time, by the tremendous mistake that about half the human race usually finds itself making when it comes to wobbly relationships. The division is not by sex or class or nationality or race or even age, since almost every type is found on both sides of the divide. The mistake is this: When they are in a partnership that is not going well, they attempt to inject a kind of drama into it by becoming moody and critical and permanently not-quite-satisfied. ‘Why do you always do that?’ they say. ‘Now, are you listening because you never get this right?’ Or, ‘Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten again!’

Not belonging to this team, I find it hard to penetrate their thinking. Do they imagine that by being demanding and edgy and cross, they will force you to work harder to make things better? If so, they are, of course, completely wrong. This kind of talk just gives one permission to go. The more dissatisfied they are, the more their gloom will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, the first time you hear that put-upon sigh, ‘I suppose I’m expected to clean this up,’ you know it is simply a matter of time. The irony being that the ones who are truly hard to leave are those who are always happy. To desert a happy lover, to make them unhappy when they were not unhappy before, is hard and mean, and involves guilt of a major kind. To leave a miserable whinger just seems logical.

Of course, this implies it is easy to get up the nerve to end an affair that is past its sell-by date. But for many it is not. They tell themselves they are being nice, or honourable, or adult, in struggling on, but what they are being is weak. I do not mean a bad marriage or when there are children involved. But when we’re only talking childless cohabitation it is plain cowardice to settle for failure. The years spent after we have decided that we will not die and be buried next to this one, are just wasted, so why do we put it off? Is it misguided kindness or false optimism or because we’ve taken a villa for the whole of August with the Grimstons and we can’t let them down? Or even: Where on earth would I put all this stuff? It doesn’t matter. Once the inner voice has spoken and given the verdict, every day spent evading the end is unworthy of you. And when it came to Bridget FitzGerald, I was unworthy.

My father was quite grouchy when he picked up the receiver. ‘Where have you been all day?’ he said.

‘I had to go to Hampshire for lunch.’

‘Why, for God’s sake?’ As any adult child knows, when dealing with an aged parent there is no point in engaging with this stuff.

‘You could have rung me on the mobile,’ I suggested.

‘It’s illegal if you were driving.’

‘I’ve got an ear thing.’

‘Even so.’ Again, silence is the only sensible option. At last, his anger spent, he returned to his topic. ‘I want you to come down and see me. There are some things we ought to talk about.’ In fact, he lived above London on the map, on the border of Gloucestershire and Shropshire, but my father was of that generation where London was the highest point in Britain. So he went ‘up’ to London and ‘down’ to everywhere else. I rather loved him for it. I suppose he went down to Inverness, but I don’t remember trying him on this. I cannot ask him now for he has died since I lived through these events. I miss him every day.

Bridget came out of the kitchen, carrying a plate of food on to which she had already spooned a huge helping of some stew and various vegetables. ‘I’ve served it up in the kitchen. I know you don’t like me to, but we haven’t got all day.’

I always find this kind of talk intensely irritating, draped as it is with self-importance. ‘You are quite right,’ I said coolly. ‘I don’t like having a plate piled up with things I have not chosen since I have been out of the nursery for some years. Nor do I see why we haven’t got all day. What pressing engagement are we racing to meet?’ Having delivered this twaddle, no less self-important than the speech that had provoked it, I sat down at the table.

But Bridget had not quite finished. ‘I’m afraid it’s very overcooked,’ she sighed, as she laid the concoction before me.

It was clearly time to acknowledge that we were having a spat and with that remark she had finally used up the last stock of patience I had kept in reserve. ‘I cannot think why, since I was here before eight,’ I muttered, deliberately using a harsh and frigid tone to combat hers. ‘At what hour were you planning to eat?’ She bit her lip and said nothing.

Of course, as I knew well enough, this was a dishonourable dig. Before meeting me, Bridget had generally tucked into her evening feed at about half past six or seven, and she still found my insistence on dining at half past eight or nine not so much unreasonable as weird. This will be familiar to many who have ventured beyond their home pastures to find a mate. Even in this day and age, even after almost everyone, south of Watford anyway, says ‘lunch’ and when all sorts of foods from avocados to sushi have become ordinary fare, still the time for evening eating can provoke an absolute clash of cultures. To me, early eating can only be explained if food is considered essentially as fuel to strengthen one for the adventures yet to come. So, people will dine at six or six thirty in order to be fuelled by seven, in time to fill the next few hours with fun. This time may be spent in a club or in a pub or keeping fit or studying macramé or learning Mandarin or line dancing or simply watching television while sitting on a sofa. The evening is your oyster and, by eating early, you are free to enjoy every pleasure while it lasts.

The reason this is completely bewildering for the upper middle and upper classes is simply because for them the dinner is the pleasure. It is the apex, the core, the point. If the whole business of feeding is over by half past seven, what on earth is one to do until bed? These people don’t go to self-help groups, or engage in amateur acting, nor do they study art or quilting, or drop into a bar. This is why any role in local government is so difficult for them. It takes place just when they prefer to be sitting at a table for a very different purpose. For those who cross the great social divide, there can be few habits harder to adjust to, whichever direction they have travelled. Certainly, Bridget had found it difficult and now, here I was, deliberately goading her, insulting her, putting her down. I was ashamed of myself. But not, it seems, sufficiently ashamed to regain my good humour. I stared at the plate. ‘And I wish you wouldn’t pile it up like that. It’s so off-putting.’ I whined as I unfolded my napkin. ‘I feel like a tramp being fed before retiring to my cubicle in a Rowton House.’