What You Will

‘All about insurance probably.’ Hilary puffed out the words in even bursts. ‘Just like the States.’

‘Getting like that here. How people think they can be insured against nature, against what grows, I don’t know. There are just so many of us on the planet now. Everything, everyone, has to give way. In the country, you know, those trees would have room to achieve their true shape. It’s why I can’t paint here, except to finish things. I have to have the countryside. The city doesn’t feel big enough. Or even – convincing. All hemmed in and restricted.’

Hilary called out to her as Gwen trotted ahead: ‘I don’t go fast any more, Gwen.’

‘Neither do I. Don’t worry.’ Gwen tempered her pace ever so slightly, her feet making almost no sound as she loped along. ‘Your legs are so much longer than mine, I thought you’d be tripping over me.’

‘Why’d you move from the cottage, then? I thought you guys liked the city?’

‘We like it. We need it anyway. Maybe people need a lot of things, not just one thing. It seemed like a question of survival for me – to grow. Some kind of abrasion. I was alone too much. And the company out there wasn’t any you’d really choose on purpose. But now that we’re here in town, I actually spend a lot of time trying to avoid people because there are just too many around. Especially if you have a child. All the school stuff. And if you really want to get any work done.’ Gwen’s voice grew expressionless with conserving breath.

For a little while, Hilary followed her in silence, feeling her brain sigh and expand with physical relief, feeling muscles let go that she hadn’t realised were tense. Her back was stiff, her ankles were swollen, but these were local irritations, aeroplane-wear; underneath them, she felt strong, a flow of energy starting as her skin grew warm and damp.

At the Great West Road, by Hammersmith roundabout, they had to wait for the lights to get across the rush of traffic. They stamped around, hands on hips, elbows flapping, then crossed underneath the thumping flyover and the cool, stony shadow of the church, its great, gold-rimmed clock almost on noon. The wide world and the bright air opened all around them as they bounded on to the pale green arch of the bridge; the long slings of cable swooped up over their heads, the silver-brown river slid long and slow through the broad, exposed mudflats beneath, their shaking footsteps were lost in the size and glory of it all. Cars and buses roared by, and the acrid exhaust mingled in their noses with the salt stench of the ebb tide.

Down they plunged on the far bank, through the translucent, yellow foliage and the dank air hovering under the bridge, then settled their pace side by side on the pebbly path. Seagulls wheeled and called over the lonely, squint-making shine of the river, foraging the urban bend as if it were the ocean’s edge. A pair of clean white swans nestled and waddled in the algae-streaked pools.

Hilary and Gwen grew easy with one another, slimy with sweat, breathing the layer of air that runners breathe, a chin length higher as the head tilts up and back ever so slightly. And in the depths of the mind, they were beginning to swim the channel of blue thought which grooves deeper, more vivid, with heartily coursing blood.

‘I can’t believe I never did this all summer,’ Hilary said, happy. ‘When was the last time we ran together?’

‘Before Will?’

‘But it reminds me of college. Along the Charles. When we used to train for crew.’

‘And see – a boat appears before your very eyes as if you had summoned it.’ Gwen stuck her jaw towards it. ‘Maybe boys from St Paul’s? There are boathouses back there, and more further along. Lots of crews working out here all the time.’

They were getting inside each other’s heads now, inside the same flash of memory, locked in step as the boat slid towards them among the trees. They both heard the sucking slap as the pale blades cut the water, both delighted at the sudden, mighty thrust of speed as eight lean backs curled hard and round and the prow shot towards them, blades kicking free of the water again, flattening in the air with the deep, unison thunk against the oarlocks. Then again. And again. The boat wobbled a little between strokes, the boys’ long, knobby bodies awkward, uncertain, as they came up their slides, arms and legs pretzeling crazily around their neat, clinging hands, the cox shouting, restless, his elbow flexed rigid up behind him in the stern.

‘The cox is overruddering,’ Gwen grunted. ‘Throwing off their balance between strokes.’

She spun around and jogged backwards a few steps in the scatter of fallen leaves, looking on as the boat receded upriver, and she saw the fresh, devoted faces, tousle-haired, of the stroke, the seven, suffused with the blood of effort, eyes down, determined, bearing it. Then Hilary’s face came between her and the boys as Hilary ran along towards her, so that she remembered how Hilary used to dive and pull, dive and pull, facing her in the stroke seat, her every movement perfectly matched to Gwen’s commands. And behind Hilary, seven more gigantic, muscled Venuses, bulging, nearly cracking, with conviction as their thighs and stomachs doubled up then exploded, doubled up then exploded, lungs raging for air, nausea scorching chests and throats, arms and backs racked out to the edge of violence, and the hard pads of their calluses rubbed and eaten at by the slippery, fat, unquenchable wood of the blade handles.

Hilary used to be taciturn then, Gwen thought, pudgy and enslaveable. But that beastlike willingness pointed out to Lawrence, like the plunging salaams, had given way to something more sceptical, more self-regarding. And she was thinner now, Gwen noticed, lithe with maturity.

‘You could still do it, couldn’t you, Gwen? Cox that boat. You’re light as a twig. Look at you, scuttling all around me like a spider. And your voice – big as ever.’

‘I could cox a boat,’ Gwen agreed, turning back to run alongside her.

It was exactly what Gwen had said the day they had met. ‘I could cox a boat.’ There had been no maybe, no hesitation.

‘Remember when I came up to you in our Greek class, that first time?’

‘On your quest for short people?’

‘Was it just because you were short?’

Hilary had noticed her up in the front row and brought her along to practise the same afternoon, like a prize. Around this time of year, a few weeks earlier. Indian summer, humid, bright. The delirium of starting college still on them. Everything new. Everything desirable.

The others had treated them like a pair: here was Hilary’s friend she was introducing. Which had made them intensely aware of each other.

In the shadowy quiet of the boathouse, a dozen or so big girls leaning up against the long, smooth-hulled shells overturned on their racks, a few more sitting on the concrete floor, bare legs crossed or negligently splayed, the coach droning on about trials. In their innocence. Most of them were there because it was offered. None of them had a clue. They were all nervous, eyes on the floor, faking cool, glancing up now and again to check the postures, the expressions, the chemistry of the group, furtively hunting for anything that could be pegged, judged.

We played along with it, Hilary thought, side by side through all the sizing up. And she could remember the anxiety, as the impatient seconds ticked by, filled with talking rather than the doing craved by every physique in the room. What did we know about each other? Only a hunch. And we both kept silent, poker-faced, made the same bet. That’s how it started. Over the gruelling months that followed, unimaginable sweat and exhaustion, they privately crept towards the commitment they publicly seemed to have made already.

Those girls knew how to do what they were told; Gwen quickly learned how to tell them. In no time at all, she vaulted upwards a level in the team hierarchy, practically a coach herself. But she did the same training as the others. She was knitted into the boat by it, felt the challenge. And Hilary, at stroke, remained her inward captain. Setting the beat, silently communicating to Gwen what was physically possible – how quick, how long, how many – and Hilary had to make it happen, bring the other seven with her, pull their oars in time with Gwen’s commands. Gradually, Hilary and Gwen took complete possession of one another; it had to work between them or the whole boat failed. The adrenalin of the training, the races and victories, worked on them like a drug. They flew on it, face to face in the back of the boat.

‘Don’t you ever feel sorry about leaving early?’ Hilary asked. ‘Missing our last year?’

‘Never.’

‘I remember it as if you had been there, you know? That other girl who coxed after you, senior year. She was fine. But it wasn’t the same. She never mattered.’

Gwen felt hit by this. But she fought it. ‘Maybe I was there enough, if we both have such good memories. Maybe another year would have been less intense.’

‘I just mean I can’t picture her face, that girl. I can only picture yours, shouting abuse.’ Hilary laughed. ‘You were unbelievable, Gwen. If we could have harnessed your willpower –’

‘If you could have harnessed my willpower, maybe I wouldn’t have left!’

‘You had us all completely under your control, Gwen. Your face was all I could ever see out on the river – my whole world was inside the boat. You could see all of us and the race, all the other boats alongside, out in front.’

‘Other boats were never out in front for long, babe; you guys saw them all, too, once we passed them!’ Gwen barked out, ‘Power ten,’ and sprinted away in front of Hilary along the path, playful. But then she slowed down sheepishly and waited.

‘It was a pretty big surprise,’ Hilary said, catching up with her, ‘you going off with Lawrence. Actually leaving the country. Like the boat, in a way – because to me, it felt as though I had my head down over work, over the school slog, and it turned out that you were looking around and seeing so much more. Seeing all the possibilities.’

‘I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, Hil. If you ask Lawrence, he’ll tell you. I wasn’t as sophisticated as you might think – trying to pick up some visiting professor.’

‘You went to his office hours. I would never have had the nerve.’

Gwen laughed out loud, broke stride. ‘Well, that’s what they’re for – office hours! I refuse to be embarrassed by that.’ And she laughed again. ‘You were no shrinking violet, Hil, shacked up with Mark by the end of freshman year as I recall. Maybe otherwise you would have had more nerve. Give me a break! I had questions for Lawrence. Who else was I going to ask? I hated what I was doing, and he guessed – I’ve told you that? Wrote it on one of my papers: “You seem to hate Pliny. Why are you doing this?”’

‘Probably you could sue for that now,’ Hilary chuckled.

‘Yeah. And how could suing be better than falling in love, dropping out, running away together?’

‘It seemed so womanly and grown-up – or no – old-fashioned. That’s what surprised me. Because we were all such tomboys, you know? The romance between you and Lawrence was something someone would do who wore skirts to class, or who wasn’t in college at all. Like something out of the 1950s, or even the nineteenth century.’

Gwen was a little stunned, irritated even. ‘Why? Because he was English? I’m still a tomboy. Look what I’m wearing.’ It was true; she had on men’s track shorts made from heavy, dark blue cotton, probably ten years old, a once white T-shirt turned grey with washing, holes under the arms and along the edge of the neck band where the material had disintegrated with use and with sweat. It was all far too big for her. ‘Not exactly a gym bunny’s exercise outfit. Not a stitch of Lycra. I’m out here to sweat, not to vamp anyone.’ She turned her head and looked Hilary up and down as they passed the Barn Elms boathouse.

Hilary was wearing a shirt she had borrowed from Mark and never returned; she looked at it now, smarting with dismay. And she had on skintight black stretch leggings, cropped at the knee, about which she self-consciously observed, ‘I think the high-tech stuff is OK if you actually exercise in it. I know people go around in sports stuff as a fashion thing, at least in New York they do, and it looks like a state of undress. Running around town in pyjamas. But if you sweat in them and ache in them, you get to love them, like anything.’ Next she said, ‘Maybe I just never got the difference between a tomboy and an actual boy.’

‘I found out the difference when I had Will – what a shock – that made me realise I was a girl. Man, I fought it – needing help. Needing anything at all. Maybe you’ll be better prepared than I was. But sometimes I think our whole generation is confused about it. Did we think we were boys? I swear. Do you remember how, when all the schools in the States were going co-ed, it felt like we could go to college anywhere we wanted? And the real girls went to the women’s colleges where they could be girls together, but the ones of us who went to the men’s colleges – we went as boys. Hiding our femininity. Why did we do that?’

‘Because the women’s libbers were so goddamned embarrassing.’ Hilary coughed up a laugh. ‘So political, so filled with vengeance, so covered with hair. And because the only company they were ever going to have was each other’s.’

‘But if we wanted to pull men, why didn’t we just become cheerleaders?’

‘Didn’t you have to be from the Deep South to do that? Surely it never crossed your mind? Anyway, pulling men – on purpose?’

‘You’re right. Never.’

‘So you see what I mean about you and Lawrence … ? It looked like the real man-woman deal. Like something in a French movie. Adult. Or I guess it would have to be an English movie – one of the Michaels, Caine or York, or Charles Dance – with the wounded, pale-eyed glamour and the Shakespearean voice.’

‘Lawrence has been telling me you have a thing for Englishmen.’ Gwen smiled, thinking of Roland, dark as he was, his shambling brilliance.

‘You and Lawrence started a whole mythology. We were awestruck. I was anyway.’

There was a little pause, their outbreaths whinnying, their shoes skiffing more lightly over the paved road as they passed the long row of boathouses at Putney: Vesta, Westminster Boys’ School, Dulwich College. There were flags fluttering, powerboats and dinghies on wooden trailers outside open doors, boats moored along the waterfront, a jaunty, maritime air.

‘But we were adults then, on the verge of it,’ Gwen said at last.

And Hilary asked, ‘Do you think we’re getting too old to be tomboys?’

‘Jeez. I haven’t got any other self-image handy. Can’t start primping now. I don’t have time.’ Gwen’s tone was arch. After another pause, she said, ‘Besides, Hil, the sort of guy we were interested in wasn’t attracted to a woman already spit-shined and curled on a tray, fully cooked. Maybe we were embarrassed. Maybe we were being defiant. Or maybe we were saving the potent thing – like for a rainy day. For a man we really wanted. The gem in the rough – do you really want it cut, faceted? Cool was wearing the most disgusting clothes you could find because you knew you could dress up if you ever wanted to.’

‘If you ever met a man you really wanted,’ Hilary said sardonically. ‘But, yeah. Maidenliness – it’s girl macho, isn’t it? Too easy if you use sex to get a guy. Any girl can use sex. Maybe even love is too easy. I got stuck there for ever with Mark – good friends who have sex on the side. The best I can say about it now is that it was completely reliable.’

This observation produced a brooding hiatus. They became a little separated as they threaded their way among the passers-by on the narrow pavement leading up on to Putney Bridge. The traffic swelled and crashed remorselessly; then they ran down on the other side among the faded roses at the edge of the grounds of Fulham Palace.

Gwen started in again with something bland and positive. ‘You look better anyway than you looked then. I guess you know that. Your hair looks better, too.’

‘We didn’t have haircuts in those days, did we?’

Gwen laughed. ‘I still don’t have a haircut.’ It was loose brown strands around her shoulders, some straight, some wavy, no obvious parting, fairly tangled, not even tied back to go running, wind-whipped, dark with sweat underneath.

‘Mine doesn’t cut anyway, even when the hairdresser uses scissors.’

‘But among ourselves, we were comrades, hey, Hilary? That was a good thing about those days. How we were friends?’

‘Not a lot of girls around, really. You had to be comrades.’

‘And no rivalry.’

‘Competition,’ Hilary objected.

‘It’s not the same. Remember the girls who came from wherever on the weekends? They had haircuts. Hairdos, even. How they were desperate for dates – to get engaged before they graduated. And only the pretty ones had a prayer. That was rivalry. Completely poisonous.’

‘It’s funny, though, how when you left –’ Hilary paused.

‘When I left?’ Gwen was waiting for a revelation, which she thought might be something funny; maybe Hilary and their classmates had all begun to pay great attention to their hair or to their dress during senior year. But what she got was more of a spear thrust.

‘It – felt like the ultimate move. That’s all. Finished us off.’

Just then, under the long canopy made by the old London plane trees lining Bishop’s Park and spreading without restraint over the paved embankment towards the river, they came up behind a woman walking with a baby in a pushchair. The baby was five or six months old, bright-eyed, alert, sitting up facing the woman with a little white blanket tucked up to its chest, its arms free and waving about sturdily with the joy of its ride and the excitement of the dappled golden light moving before its eyes. The pushchair bounced and lunged, its wheels catching against the blocks of the pavement, which were lifted at harsh angles here and there. The baby lurched forward then back, laughing and gurgling, as the woman strode steadily, wearily on along the green-railinged river.

‘Hello,’ said Hilary, stepping around the pushchair.

‘Hey,’ breathed Gwen.

But the woman said nothing as they turned and glanced at her. She stared ahead, into her baby’s eyes, vague-faced under fair, bedraggled hair, blue circles under her own eyes, half smiling, bearing it.

When they were out of earshot, Gwen said, ‘She needs a good night’s sleep. I can remember being exactly like that with Will.’

‘What – a zombie? You have to tell me more about Will.’

‘My ultimate move?’ Gwen let the sarcasm sink in, but then she softened. ‘It was just like that, you know. He was my cox. That woman back there, me, any mother – we’re all galley slaves. You force the pushchair over the ruined paving, over whatever. Anything at all to keep the boat moving. The baby gives all the commands, shouts, shits, steers – whatever. Nothing else seems to matter. You can’t hear the world, don’t notice your husband. I guess from the baby’s point of view it must be like trying to control a giant: the monster mother. Scary. Uncertain. Which is maybe why the baby is so ruthless in its demands. And you submit to it. Willingly. You throw yourself down, betray the man you love, whatever it takes – to please the child. It’s a big deal. It’s crazy.’ She looked sideways at Hilary, half smiled with the slack corners of her heaving mouth. ‘I’m ranting, aren’t I?’

Hilary said, ‘We’ve been out a while. It can happen – with the exercise.’

‘Now. We have to go around this,’ said Gwen, gesturing up to high white walls and fences marked Fulham Football Club.

On they ran into the silent neighbourhood, between the staring front windows of empty, midday houses, a deserted newsagent’s, then weaved back once or twice to the north bank of the river, past outdoor lunches on pub terraces and gleaming café tables, laundry hanging out to dry, phlox spilling its clash of fuchsia over dark brick balconies above their heads, then at last back into the traffic, in rhythmic delirium, tired, surviving.

CHAPTER 4

The growing feeling of comfort between Hilary and Gwen made it seem easy, in the end, to sit down for dinner with Lawrence and Roland a few days later. Gwen didn’t have to insist.

Will was still orbiting around his mother in the kitchen as she turned on the pair of gas burners underneath the shiny, submarine-shaped poaching pan, unwrapped the salmon, poked at the little potatoes rolling about in their cauldron. He managed to make himself the centre of everyone’s attention for a good half-hour after Roland arrived with Lawrence, so that the jittery business of greeting, introducing, pouring drinks, was made even more chaotic than usual.

Will had a stacking top: five individual tops which could be made to spin as one if they were wound up and dropped in precisely the right way – accurately, quickly – before any of them stopped spinning. One by one, hosts and guests got down on the floor, giggling, absorbed. Nobody could get beyond three tops piled up and spinning at once – until they started helping each other out. Gwen was fastest at winding the tops, but Will had the surest touch for stacking them. The little group fell silent when mother and son got four of the tops going together. Then Will, his heavily lashed green eyes hooded and still, dropped the last tiny top on the whirling stack. The sharp point of the big, fat top at the bottom buzzed loudly like a little drill against the polished wood as the stack leaned ever so slightly and began to inscribe a slow hard arc across the floor, moving faster, becoming more and more unstable, alarmingly angled. At last it shot under the kitchen table, struck one of the legs and blew apart.

A deflationary ‘Oh …’ seeped from them all, the air going out of their game.

Then Hilary cried out, ‘Look, they’re still going!’

‘Cool!’ squeaked Will. Because three of the tops had landed upright and went on spinning separately, moving freely over the floor.

‘Centripetal force,’ Roland observed in his deep, imperturbable voice.

‘Dead cool,’ Gwen said, smiling, rising to her feet. ‘We can do it all again tomorrow. Time for bed.’

She made no move to enforce this, but walked away to the stove, stuck a fork into the potatoes to see if they were cooked, then hefted them from the burner to the sink and poured the boiling water away.

Will grabbed up his tops, which were wobbling now as they spun themselves out, and took them to his father. ‘Daddy, will you wind them up one more time? Pu-leeeze?’

And so Lawrence did, and the game began again, but with more tension now that bedtime was looming; everyone’s hands were stiff and unsuccessful with it. The tops racketed crazily around the room, under the chairs, under the table, and Will fired the smaller ones carelessly at the bigger ones like bombs, laughing hilariously until he collapsed on the floor. His five-year-old stomach and its irresistible plughole of a belly button bulged unguarded where his striped pyjamas separated at the waist, and he was made the victim of a tough tickle from his father’s big, relentless fingers, until he was overcome, and screamed, ‘Stop, stop.’ His legs kicked ferociously as he lay on his back; his arms flailed and swatted.

Lawrence stopped.

Then Will screamed, ‘Do it again! Do it again!’ tears showing along the corners of his grin.

Gwen slipped the fish into the simmering pan and replaced the long lid. ‘C’mon, you guys. Bed.’

As Gwen moved with Will towards the door, Hilary said, ‘I could read Will a story?’

‘Do you want to?’ Gwen turned, grateful.

‘While you do the fish?’

‘The fish is OK, actually,’ said Gwen. ‘It has to cook for a few minutes.’

Will said, ‘I want Mummy to read me the story.’ He took hold of Gwen’s hand.

‘It’s going to be a short one, Will, since we’re having dinner.’

‘Two short ones?’ he said engagingly.