Left of the Bang

Chris was already on his feet. ‘It’s fine, really, I’ve got plenty – I’ll get it. Please, allow me,’ he added as Tamsin made to protest. ‘It would be my pleasure.’

These last words seemed an absurd imitation of someone older. Tamsin started to laugh; but when she saw the discomfort in Chris’s face, she softened the laugh to a giggle that was inescapably flirtatious – becoming, without quite meaning to, a girl being bought a drink by a boy who wanted to buy it for her.

He came back with a bottle this time. ‘Friend of mine, he did a gap year working in Bordeaux, just picking grapes to start with, bloody hard work … anyway, we’re meant to be tasting, what was it, blackberries, and some sort of spice, oh, it was clove, and something else a bit weird – leather, I think…’

Tamsin watched Chris’s mouth while he talked. She was trying to work out whether she fancied him. He was undoubtedly good looking and, to her, a little exotic – his Japanese father, his Hong Kong childhood. But in spite of Chris’s charm and the off-beat romance of this impromptu date, she wasn’t entirely sure she liked him. There was something in him that couldn’t function without outside approval. He wasn’t a show-off, exactly, but he needed an audience.

(Later, she would forget this. In the edited version, only the romance would remain.)

Chris’s hand hovered near the book of Beethoven Sonatas, now lying on the table underneath Tamsin’s bag. ‘Uh, may I?’

He opened it gently. ‘All these notes … I tried once, but I was no good. Think I just about made Grade 5.’ He shook his head in admiration. ‘I’d love to hear you play. Seriously, I think musicians must be the closest thing to angels.’

For a moment Tamsin thought it was a bad pick-up line; but one look at Chris’s face told her he was in earnest. She decided that she didn’t fancy him.

‘Are you going to be a professional?’

Tamsin nodded, then remembered to add a modest grimace. ‘If I make it. It’s pretty tough.’

Chris was impressed. ‘What about the rest of your family? Are they musical, too?’

‘My – yes, my mum’s a singer, actually. And my sister plays the oboe.’ Tamsin found herself reluctant to say who her father was.

Chris’s thoughts were rather more straightforward. He did fancy Tamsin, and he wanted to kiss her. She was tough and edgy and – a word that had powerful mystique for Chris – artistic. He was entranced. The more they talked, the more certain he felt that they had been brought together by fate and irresistible mutual attraction. Everything about the evening seemed tinged with inevitability.

They had had nothing to eat. By 9 p.m. when they stood up to leave, they were both fairly drunk. On the stairs, Chris dared a hand in the small of her back. Not wanting to embarrass him, Tamsin let it stay there; though she had a dim premonition that this would mean more serious embarrassment for both of them later.

But later never came. As soon as they reached ground level, Tamsin’s phone began to buzz.

‘Shit, loads of missed calls. Sorry—’

Tamsin wedged the phone between ear and hunched right shoulder, leaving her hands free to fumble with the zip on her parka. Chris could hear the low chirrup of the dial tone.

‘Mummy? Mummy, is that you?’

Her face went tight as she listened. ‘Okay. I’m coming home.’

Tamsin pocketed her phone and started on the zip for a second time. ‘I have to go.’ Her voice was hard and strangely adult, different from any other tone he’d heard her use that evening.

‘Is everything all right?’ Something warned him not to touch her again.

‘I can’t explain. Sorry. I have to go.’ It was a pedestrian-only road but she checked for cars out of habit, three quick pecks of the head. Chris called after her but she was already gone, over the street and into the bright tiled mouth of the tube station.

He didn’t have her phone number. He didn’t even know her surname.

And so for Chris – who never had the chance to discover that Tamsin didn’t want to be kissed – the evening retained all the allure of unrealised possibility. Time magnified her charms in his memory. Tamsin informed his type; he looked for her height in other women, her slightness, those small, widely spaced breasts that had barely nudged the fabric of her T-shirt. To say he thought about her constantly would be an exaggeration, but she was, in a sense, always there – as an ideal, a measure against which everyone else was found wanting.

* * *

On the phone, her mother had been unintelligible. Tamsin assumed she had somehow uncovered the affair, but in fact, her father had simply announced that he was leaving and that he had been planning to leave for years. The trigger? Serena’s sixth-form scholarship to the Purcell School: Bertrand had wanted to wait until both his daughters had a secure future ahead of them before disrupting their home environment. Now that Serena’s musical career was more or less assured, he felt free to leave.

This was what he was explaining to his wife, for the fourth time that evening, as Tamsin came through the front door.

‘My god. My fucking god.’ Roz’s voice was muted with disbelief. ‘You actually think you’ve been considerate, don’t you, you shit—’

In the hall, Tamsin hung up her coat; she felt as if she were preparing for an interview. The house smelled like it always did: wood polish, old suppers, stargazer lilies, home.

When she stepped into the sitting room, both her parents turned to look at her. Her mother was dressed, incongruously, in a ritzy black cocktail number with a swishy little fringe of bugle beads around the hem. Her usual five-inch heels had been kicked off; standing in her bare feet on the thick carpet, Roz looked very small indeed. The corn on her middle right toe shone in the lamplight.

‘Your father’s leaving us. He can’t wait to get away, apparently. He’s been sick of us for years, apparently.’

Bertrand took a step towards his wife, one hand raised. ‘Roz, that’s not fair, that’s not what I said—’

‘But luckily for you, he’s deigned to stick around till now. So as not to disrupt your home environment. Now, isn’t that nice of him, Tamsin? Aren’t you going to say thank you to your father?’

‘Roz, this is between you and me. I won’t have you using Tam like this—’

‘He says there’s no one else, but I almost wish there was. I almost wish there was.’ Roz fought down a knot of hysteria. ‘I think I could understand that better than this, this dismissal—’

‘Valerie Fischer.’ Tamsin kept her voice as clear and steady as she could. Even in her anger, she was aware of the need to enjoy this longed-for consummation. ‘It’s Valerie Fischer, isn’t it, Dad?’

Father and daughter held one another’s gaze like lovers for three, four, five seconds before they remembered Roz.

She was motionless, a visionary staring through them to a strange new past.

* * *

From then on, everything was different. Roz was unable even to choose between red and green pesto without consulting her daughter. There was no longer any question of Tamsin leaving home; Roz needed her too much. She attended the Royal College of Music as planned, but stayed in her old childhood bedroom at home in Holland Park. After years of friction, mother and daughter were now inseparable. Tamsin acted as spokesperson, supplying all the fury and indignation and disgust that Roz herself couldn’t seem to muster.

‘Tamsin’s my sellotape,’ Roz would tell her friends. ‘She’s the only thing holding me together.’ She gave her mirthless laugh.

Tamsin’s friends were wary of her, unnerved by the thought of her long silence. She was newly inscrutable. She even looked different: gone were the Nirvana T-shirts and the belly-button rings. At first, her new role – as her mother’s counsellor, comforter, guard dog – felt like dressing up. Then she became it, and it grew harder and harder to remember a time when she and Roz hadn’t been bound to each other in this way. The scar above her belly button faded, from aubergine through lavender to a little raised sickle-shape the colour of clotted cream.

It was around this time that Roz retired from singing, after twenty-four years as a soprano soloist. When she and Bertrand first met, Roz had been a rising star in the opera world, already well known for her unexpectedly powerful vibrato. Her size was her USP: it seemed extraordinary that such a small person could make such a big noise with apparently so little effort. It also helped that she was beautiful. ‘Aha. Roz Andersen, the siren with the siren,’ Bertrand had quipped when they were introduced. Two weeks before their wedding, The Sunday Times ran a picture of Roz on the cover of the colour supplement, playing Desdemona in a big-budget ROH production of Verdi’s Otello. Then Bertrand’s career really took off, and together they became moderately famous. They were the golden-haired golden couple of music, rarely absent from Tatler.

Cigarettes had always been an occasional pleasure for Roz, a guilty secret kept carefully hidden from the agency that insured her voice. After the break-up, though, she took up smoking in earnest. A pack a day, then two packs. Everyone was worried. Roz lost count of the times she was warned about ruining her voice. Her response was unvarying: ‘I know. I don’t care.’ She took grim solace in this deliberate self-sabotage, which seemed to her to correspond with the magnitude of Bertrand’s crime.

(In fact, Roz’s voice was going anyway. Killing it off with a nicotine addiction induced by the trauma of separation was marginally preferable to watching her reputation fall into a slow, age-related decline.)

It was Tamsin, with her own unlimited supply of anger, who finally persuaded her mother to convert grief into rage. After three months of crying and smoking, Roz put on her sequinned Louboutins and climbed up onto the roof of Bertrand’s precious Merc, with a steely Tamsin and two fearful, admiring neighbours (both women) looking on. The next day, she distributed his wine cellar amongst her friends.

During the divorce process the Daily Mail got in touch, hoping for photographs. Together, Roz and Tamsin sifted through two decades’ worth of holiday snaps to find the perfect pose: Bertrand on the beach, off-duty, paunch relaxed, clutching a can of Boddingtons. The amphitheatre of his gut. In a second photograph he and his moobs reclined on a deckchair. A third showed him sad-arsed under a beach shower, muffin-tops slopping over the waistband of his designer trunks. The Mail ran all three. The headline was ‘Conductor in the Odium’.

When Roz moved out, Tamsin moved with her. Bertrand offered to pay the rent on a separate flat, closer to the Royal College; but this, like all his attempts at rapprochement, was met by the cool, almost professional hatred that had come to define Tamsin’s relations with him.

There were no boyfriends during the Royal College years. On her one, brief visit to Roz’s therapist, in the immediate aftermath of the divorce, Tamsin had been diagnosed with ‘trust issues’. ‘That’s unoriginal,’ Tamsin had told the shrink, feeling herself equally unoriginal even as she said it: the privileged rich kid from a broken home, wisecracking back to her jaded psych. Since then, several of her friends had suggested the same thing – that her father’s behaviour made it hard for her to have any faith in men. Tamsin had another explanation: the Royal College boys simply weren’t to her taste. They were too precious, too aware of their own talent. She slept with a couple of them, but more out of a sense of obligation to a hedonistic student lifestyle than any real desire. Mostly, though, she was at home with Roz, or working at her piano.

Occasionally she still thought about the boy on the train. The faint aversion was gone. She remembered only that he had been good looking, and that there had been wine, and candlelight, and an exhilarating sense of adventure. Most of all she remembered herself, with the disconcerting feeling she was remembering someone else.

Then she graduated from the College, fell in love with a history teacher several years her senior, and forgot about Chris completely.

* * *

When Tamsin was nineteen, her shoulders lost their angles; her arms and legs filled out; her nose and jaw took on a solidity that was unmistakably Bertrand’s. Her hair darkened to his exact shade of dirty gold, and even her newly swollen breasts appeared to belong more to her father’s side of the family than her mother’s.

Alarmed by the weight gain, Tamsin went to see her GP. She certainly wasn’t fat, but she was a lot bigger than she had been six months ago. Was it the Pill? Dr Lott didn’t think so. She scrolled briskly back up through her notes, rows of Listerine-green data on a convex black screen giving their laconic account of Tamsin’s life. Menstruation had started late, hadn’t it? This was probably just the tail-end of a mildly delayed puberty. ‘It happens sometimes. Nothing to be worried about. You’re a healthier weight for your height now, actually. It’s really not a problem.’

But it was. The mirror gave her back her father’s face, leonine, handsome, hated.

Four

The history teacher was called Callum Dempster. He and Tamsin met in the canteen of St Timothy’s, the East London comprehensive where Callum was deputy head of humanities. Newly graduated from the Royal College, Tamsin was playing keyboard in an Arts Council-funded workshop designed to introduce children from disadvantaged backgrounds to classical music. Callum was embarrassed that he’d never heard of her famous father; she was delighted.

After five years at Cambridge, one year in Berlin and nearly a decade in London, Callum’s Glaswegian accent was as strong as it had been when he left home. He hadn’t consciously held on to it, but he’d never tried to lose it, either: in his experience, it had always been a social advantage. At Cambridge, many of his privately educated peers felt reassured by his background. If someone like Callum could make it from a high rise on the banks of the Clyde to rooms in King’s, then the system wasn’t entirely unfair. He also added colour. Making assumptions based chiefly on Trainspotting, people would talk to him about drugs – only to learn that he didn’t even smoke. But a paracriminal prestige had clung to him anyway. Callum was tough, Callum was authentic, Callum was somehow more real than anyone who came from Wiltshire or Surrey or Hampstead.

Tamsin was a member of the Socialist Workers Party – something Callum teased her about so mercilessly that, six months into their relationship, she stopped going to the meetings. But she still read the email newsletters, and Callum still represented, for her, a vague yet unequivocally positive concept she called ‘the Real World’.

So she was disappointed when he landed his dream job: teaching Classics at a prep school near Chalfont St Peter, about an hour’s fast cycle ride outside London.

‘I don’t understand why you don’t want to make a difference. Those children at your school, what’s going to happen to them if people like you give up on them?’ She was washing up, something she only did when she was angry.

Callum explained, patiently, that he wasn’t making a difference at St Timothy’s, he was just marking time. ‘And anyhow, Tam, even if I could make a difference, it would never be big enough to justify how shite the job is. I’m not interested in crowd control. I’m interested in teaching. I’m not being defeatist here, I’m being realistic. And honest. I want to enjoy my life.’

The job at the prep school, Denham Hall, provided him with small classes of well-behaved children and a salary that meant he could finally put down a deposit on a flat. In the long holidays, he had time to start writing a book he’d been thinking about since his Masters: a study of the culture of combat in Roman society, and its impact on modern conceptions of warfare.

Once again, his accent came in handy. It was as classless at Denham Hall as it had been at St Timothy’s. In both schools, it won him unworked-for respect.

* * *

Callum’s Cambridge friends had long since abandoned their Braudel and taken jobs as bankers, lawyers, management consultants. All of them were home-owners; and, with a few exceptions (Will Heatherington, devoted playboy; Colin Warner, probably gay; Leo Goulding, fledging neurosurgeon and workaholic), all of them were married.

And then Leo got engaged, to a pretty, plump anaesthetist called Bex. They celebrated with drinks at their new house in Herne Hill. Tamsin went to the party with Callum, a little reluctantly. She was eight years younger than him and she found his clever, older friends intimidating.

She also resented the ridiculous fancy dress that Callum’s friends found so amusing. It seemed absurd that all these intelligent people, now mostly in their thirties, should want to make themselves foolish in this way. Tonight’s theme was A&E: many guests had simply come in lab coats or pilfered scrubs, but there were also plenty of full-blown head wounds, pregnancies, crutches and stethoscopes. The room was decorated with crepe bandages and surgical masks. Even the playpen set up in the corner for the few couples who already had babies had been draped with a Red Cross flag. Tamsin had let Callum stick a plaster on her cheek, but that was as far as she was prepared to go.

‘No no no that’s precisely the problem. The privileging of a university degree over all other forms of higher education,’ said a short girl wearing a tight white tank top covered in fake blood. Tamsin had met her several times before but she couldn’t remember her name. ‘If that doesn’t encourage elitism, then…’

Leo, their host, shook his head impatiently. ‘I just don’t think we can begin to understand what the world might look like to someone without certain basic advantages. And I’m not just talking financially.’

Tamsin had been stuck in this conversation for over twenty minutes and she was bored. Neither the girl, whom she didn’t like, nor Leo, whom she did, had thought to ask her opinion at any point. She went to drink her wine but her glass was empty. Callum was nowhere to be seen.

‘Tamsin Jarvis! Looking as ravishing as ever!’

Will Heatherington inserted himself between the girl and Tamsin and deposited a loud kiss on each of Tamsin’s cheeks. He was one of Callum’s closest friends; for three years at Cambridge, they had been on the university water polo team together.

For once, Tamsin was pleased to see Will. She actually knew him independently of Callum: his family had lived near hers in Holland Park, and Tamsin had encountered Will at intervals throughout her childhood, mostly at their parents’ parties. She remembered him as a boisterous teenager, teasing her unkindly about her skinny legs. Now thirty-two, Will was good-looking in the most obvious way: tall, with naturally olive skin, glossy dark blond hair, Bambi eyes and strong cheekbones. He could have been a mid-nineties boy-band pin-up. Only the full mouth was out of register. There was a hint of the predator about his pout, a complacency that was somehow aggressively expectant.

‘Tamsin, you’re dry, we can’t have that.’ Will produced a bottle of champagne and started to fill her glass. These days he was scrupulously polite to Tamsin; but there was always something in his tone that gave her the impression he was secretly laughing at her. ‘Hope you don’t mind, Leo, I invited some reinforcements for later. Including two hot lesbians,’ he went on, turning to the girl in the blood-stained tank top.

‘I’m not gay any more,’ she said.

Will grinned and ruffled her carefully styled hair, which was already sparked with grey at the sides. ‘I’ll believe that when I see it, darling.’

‘Reinforcements, yes, that’s fine,’ said Leo, detaching himself from the little group. ‘Sorry – got to go rescue Bex – she’s been cornered by those orthopods she was too nice not to invite—’

‘Sooooo,’ said Will, resting one forearm on Tamsin’s shoulder and the other on the un-lesbian lesbian’s, as if they were all jolly chums. ‘Isn’t this nice? Leo and Bex, the beating of two tender hearts as one, the unimpeded marriage of true minds, etcetera, etcetera?’

‘Mmmm,’ said Tamsin, who never quite knew how to respond to Will’s florid speaking style.

‘Talking of true love,’ he went on, ‘has my secretary managed to keep her paws off your boyfriend?’

‘Leah’s not your secretary,’ Tamsin replied evenly. She was remembering why she disliked Will so much.

‘Leah?’ asked the un-lesbian, suddenly interested. ‘As in Jonno-and-Baz-in-one-weekend Leah?’

‘The same.’ Will bowed his head.

‘Has she been trying it on with Callum?’ the girl asked Tamsin. She looked amused.

‘No, she’s just his flatmate.’

‘What, like they live together?’

‘Mm-hmm.’

The girl raised one dark eyebrow. ‘And how do you feel about that?’

Leah was a PR officer at Will’s law firm, referred to by Will either as his secretary or ‘our resident serial shagger’. But despite the girl’s reputation, Tamsin didn’t feel threatened. In fact, Tamsin never felt threatened by anyone where Callum was concerned: he adored her, and she knew it. Now, though, under the pressure of scrutiny, Tamsin found herself incapable of communicating this conviction. She took an overlarge gulp of champagne and blinked to clear the tears that the fizz brought to her eyes.

‘Leah’s cool, we don’t see that much of her, but she seems cool,’ she heard herself say, lamely. The un-lesbian stared at her for a moment, then turned back to Will.

‘I heard she fucked Charlie Huffman.’

Tamsin held out her empty glass for more champagne. She was, if possible, having even less fun than she’d anticipated.

Callum, on the other hand, had been having a wonderful evening. He was not generally prone to sentiment, but tonight, fondly, tipsily, surely, he felt everyone he loved in the world was here, in this room. There was little Jake Simonson, excitedly telling everyone about his first architectural commission. There were Victor and Caitlin, a serious, hard-working pair of actuaries, deeply bronzed and full of stories from the year-long trip to India that everyone thought they’d never make; Zander Pownall, messing about in the playpen with his two-year-old son, no trace of the long depression he’d suffered in his mid-twenties; Antoine Namani, another neurosurgeon, making everyone laugh with his medically inflected rap (‘I’m malignant, you’re benign, when I lay down a rhyme, I metastasise straight into yo’ spine’). And, of course, Tamsin, his Tamsin, beautiful tonight in a long wrap skirt tied high at the waist, her sulkiness visible only to him – which in itself felt like something precious. It was, thought Callum fuzzily, a roomful of happy endings.

Fetching a fresh beer from the drinks table, Callum noticed a tall man he’d never met before, dressed in a vamped-up nurse’s outfit: tiny white skirt, choppy blonde wig, lumpily stuffed fake breasts. Under a grainy layer of foundation, the ghosts of several large freckles were visible. It was easily the most outrageous costume of the evening. When Callum complimented him on it, the man thanked him by lifting up the skirt to display a pair of women’s knickers, his penis squashed obscenely behind the sheer fabric.

‘Practically standard issue these days,’ the nurse-man said cheerfully. ‘No self-respecting officer seen dead at a party without see-through panties.’

‘You’re in the army?’ Callum was immediately interested.

‘Yes, sir. Just finished at Sandhurst,’ said the man with irrepressible pride. He tugged off the wig, revealing a full head of closely-cropped black hair, which he proceeded to scratch with the innocent abandon of a dog shaking itself after a swim.

‘And how did you find Sandhurst?’

‘Still recovering from the final exercise. It was a total CF.’

‘Is that the ten-day one? Diamond Victory?’

‘Dynamic Victory. It’s a beast.’ The boy looked impressed. ‘How do you know that?’