The Couple’s Secret

‘Stephen needs to work hard,’ James says. ‘He’s aiming for the best. Of course, if he’d gone to Eton like we originally planned, things might be more certain.’

When I married him, I’d been quietly confident we wouldn’t turn into one of those couples who make digs at each other across the dinner table – bring up old disagreements to wound the other. My parents did that throughout my childhood. And now, here’s James, making a little jibe about my problem with Eton. It’s deliberate. And it hurts.

‘Oh, I couldn’t agree more,’ Diane says. ‘There’s a reason it’s world-famous. But it’s amazing what he’s done to pull himself above the rest at that new-fangled place he’s at.’

I almost choke on my food. ‘Westminster is older than Eton, Mom. As if that matters. Especially to you.’

She looks affronted. ‘Of course my grandson’s education matters to me. And I did think the decision was made a little rashly. After all, James does know about these things.’

‘Well, it was all years ago now,’ James says. ‘And nobody doubts Westminster is a great school.’ He gives me one of his warm smiles, probably worried he’s upset me. I automatically send one back his way without thinking. Usually he’s pretty good at presenting a united front when my mother’s here. I just wish he was doing better today.

‘You do realise you’re all talking about me like I’m not here.’ Stephen’s looking sullenly into his food.

James lets out a laugh. ‘I’m sorry, you’re right. You must excuse us. It must be tiresome to have your old folks wittering on about you.’

‘Less of the old!’ I say, trying to sound more cheerful than I feel. James gives me a chuckle in response but Stephen and his grandmother remain stonily silent. I even see Diane raise one of her perfectly plucked eyebrows a little, as if to say, Well, you’re not exactly young. She then turns to talk to Stephen and asks, ‘What are you planning to do with your Christmas holiday?’

He looks disconcerted by the question, as if it’s a trap he might fall into. Taking a fleeting look at his father, he proceeds to give a mumbled list of his homework assignments, social arrangements with his school friends, and how he plans to stay at his boyfriend’s house in the gap between Boxing Day and New Year.

‘How is William?’ James asks. ‘We haven’t seen him for weeks. Busy revising, is he? He’s determined to get into Oxford, Diane. Such a hard worker.’

‘Just like Stephen is,’ I say, coming to his defence before his father’s digs become too blatant.

‘Well, I imagine Stephen’s a dead cert for Oxford, too. First my daughter, then my grandson, both off to the best university in the world. I’m so proud just at the thought of it.’

That niggle in my head is back again. The sense of resentment that only now, decades later, can my mother suggest she is ‘proud’ I got in to Oxford. On the day I found out I’d won a place, she’d acted like it was merely another big task she could tick off her to-do list. Daughter into Oxford: check.

‘I think,’ I say, choosing my words carefully, ‘that Stephen is keen to go to the college that suits his skills the best and offers the course he most likes. He won’t be going anywhere just because Will is.’

My mother looks so horrified it’s almost comical. ‘Julianne, are you telling me you’re actively trying to dissuade the boy from attending the greatest—’

‘Oh, spare me the greatest university in the world talk, Mom. There are plenty of other great universities.’

I can see James moving food around his plate with sharp stabs of his fork. I’ve pissed him off now.

Stephen looks around at us. ‘You’re all doing it again. I’m still here you know.’

Nobody laughs this time. My mom is looking around her as if trying to suss out where in the argument she could fit in. ‘I’m sensing some tension,’ she says eventually.

‘How observant of you,’ I reply, not looking at her.

‘I’m sorry, Diane,’ James says. ‘We can’t be much fun tonight. Julianne is clearly stressed with Christmas and everything …’

‘Am I?’ I say, looking at him. ‘You’ve decided that, have you?’

‘… and Stephen,’ he says, ignoring me. ‘I think he must be getting worried about his mountains of coursework.’

Stephen shakes his head. ‘I’m not that worried.’

‘Then why, may I ask, have you been sitting at this table like a grumpy teenager all evening?’

James is doing his strict-parent voice now. I’ve never understood why Stephen takes it so seriously and rarely answers back when his father gets angry. To me, it sounds like someone in a play, just pretending, speaking the lines they think they should say without being totally sure how they should be saying them. He’s never been the loud, forthright one – that’s partly the reason I fell for him, back when I was just nineteen. He was more the quiet, brooding type, exerting a quiet confidence rather than a forceful one. The more show-offy bursts of emotion he’d left to his friends, Ally and Ernest.

Stephen doesn’t immediately respond to his father, but carries on staring at his food. I’m growing steadily more worried about him. While I’m desperate to talk to James about what I’ve just seen on his computer, I would very much prefer Stephen not to be present and, if possible, minimise his part in the whole thing. The thought of my mother being within hearing distance is mortifying.

‘I’ve … I’ve just got a lot to think about,’ Stephen says, and then carries on eating his food.

Silence resumes for the rest of the meal.

After dinner, my mother is keen to gravitate towards the lounge pretty quickly, and it becomes clear, as she locates the Christmas bumper issue of the Radio Times, that there’s a showing of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel she’s keen to see. She often stays to watch something with us on TV after dinner, but it’s rarely longer than an hour and a full-length feature film is certainly not the norm. ‘It’s rather long,’ I say, looking at the listing in the magazine, noticing that, with commercials, it will run for two and a half hours.

‘Oh, it’s a glorious film,’ James says, settling down in his usual spot on the one-seater. Back when we first bought the house, he and I used to snuggle together on the sofa, sometimes with toddler Stephen between us. As the years had gone by, however, it’d become just Stephen and I sitting together at each end of the long sofa, and James on his own at the other side of the room. Thinking about it now, I wonder when that happened. When did he first make the move to sit alone? I can’t place the moment in my head. The change just seems to have slipped into my life without my noticing it.

‘I’ve been wanting to see it for ages, ever since Susana at the swimming club told me how much she and her husband love it. It’s become one of their favourites, apparently. I was worried I was going to miss it when you invited me round to dinner; then I thought it might be nice for us to watch it together.’

A flash of panic courses through me. I’m not sure I have the energy to watch something right now. I need to clear my head. Get things sorted. Talk to my husband. As I turn towards the television screen, my mind flicks back once again to that clinically cold list of details about those young women, their haunting faces, their lack of family or friends or proper employment. I know people live like that. I know not everyone is as lucky as I am. But who would want to collect all that information and pool it into one horrible document?

‘You don’t mind, do you, Julianne? I’d hate to miss it.’

My mother’s voice snaps me back to the present. She’s brandishing the TV remote at me. I’m tempted to remind her of the state-of-the-art Sky Q facilities she has at home and how, if she was so desperate to see this particular film, she could have easily recorded it. Instead, I resign myself to another few hours of her company and try to get myself in the frame of mind to watch Judi Dench and Bill Nighy smile and joke their way across India, knowing it’s the last thing I want to do.

Chapter 8

Holly

Oxford, 1990

My dad once told me that friends come and go and you never really know which ones mean the most until they abandon you. Strong words for a father to tell his seven-year-old child, but that was my father for you: inappropriate and unaware. My mother overheard him and came to tell me that Daddy had actually had a bit of a mix-up and forgotten to mention that most people grow up to have a great group of friends they can have a fun time with. Dad stood back as Mum set about correcting his statement, looking slightly puzzled. When my mum walked back into the kitchen – we had been standing in the corridor, me swinging precariously from one of the lower banisters – he had sighed deeply and then just said, ‘Maybe I was wrong. I’m sure you’ll work all this out for yourself, little Holly.’

Although I probably wouldn’t say this conversation caused me to be a loner throughout the rest of my childhood and most of my teenage years, it was probably a contributing factor. I always found I could never quite trust someone enough, whether it was Stephanie and George in art class, who liked to chat endlessly about popstars and trashy movies, or Greg, the first boy I thought that, in another world, I could have dated. None of them managed to install a framework of trust within me. There was no pattern of reliability; not because they continually let me down – more because I never gave them much of a chance not to.

When Ally suggested she thought I should spend more time with her, Ernest, James and Peter, I saw this as proof my mother had been right, but also, at the same time, a challenge to the gods of fate to see if my father would be right as well. I did test them privately on this, when I used the communal telephone in the hallway. Mum got one version of the story: I had met a lovely group of people, very posh but not bad posh, and I was having a good time discussing my interests with them, most of which they shared, and we had nice outings and food together (‘The Wimpy! I know, so strange, but really fun’) and I thought there might be something of a romance blossoming between one of the boys, James, and me. That last bit was pure exaggeration. My feelings for James had grown more intense by the day, to the point where I had started to pull out a couple of strands of my hair to take away my nerves each time I went somewhere I knew he would be. Not enough for there to be bald spots on my head. Just one or two. I found it helped. But I didn’t tell Mum that part.

Dad, on the other hand, received a different version of Holly’s Time at Oxford University. He was told that I’d sort of befriended a group of posh people I didn’t think he would like. I didn’t like them much either, but I was focusing mostly on my studies and they were good for me to sound ideas off. No, I wouldn’t be bringing any of them home over the Christmas holidays, he didn’t have to worry about that. Boyfriend? No, there wasn’t anything much like that on the horizon. Maybe a boy I liked, but it wasn’t anything worth mentioning.

Some people might have found the way I approached occasional phone calls home to my parents odd, but it worked for me. Each conversation was crafted so it lasted long enough to make the call worth the money but not so long as to bore any of the parties involved. The details that would most impress Mum were emphasised and the parts that would least appeal to Dad were played down or excised completely. All in all, I did a pretty good job of giving each of them what they wanted.

So when I found myself going on my third outing as part of ‘The Ally Club’, as I continued to call it in my head, I found I was judging conversations and how people reacted to me through the dual perspective of my parents. Or, rather, through my own filtering mechanism, deciding how I would relay the event to each of them if I were to call them when I returned home (which I wouldn’t be doing, since I had phoned them only four days previously).

We were going to Blackwells, in Broad Street. I knew it was a famous bookshop – I had been there with my parents when we’d looked round the university and read the little plaque on the wall saying it had been opened in 1879 – but I still nodded and seemed interested when Ernest told me this. He was frequently doing this; treating me as if I needed the world explaining to me (and not even just the posh aspects of the world; sometimes things as mundane, though curiously unmanly, as how best to get stains off clothes). I usually just smiled and nodded and said the right things. I’d always been good at doing that. And that’s why I quite enjoyed occasionally doing the complete opposite and challenging what people said. A lot of pleasure could be derived from being the mouse that roared.

Ally and I had arranged to get a milkshake from a small café before meeting the boys at the bookshop. The purpose of the visit was to stock up on reading material for the Christmas holidays. Over their school breaks, Ernest and James had always held a competition: which of the two could read the most pieces of literature. They had devised a points-based scoring system, too. Five points per book under six hundred pages. Ten points per book over six hundred. Two points would be deducted if the book had been written after the turn of the century, with the exception of those that had won either the Booker or the Pulitzer, or were by authors who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Five points would also be deducted from the total amount if the participant failed to include a ‘reasonable spread’ of genres, periods of writing and nationalities. Ally gave me a thorough explanation of all this on our way to buy the milkshakes and while we drank them. ‘Apparently the teachers at Eton egged them on, rather. Kept recommending books they should add to their lists. They like competition, Etonians. They’d turn everything into a game if they could. God, they even turn masturbating into a competitive sport.’

I realised I’d pulled a face at the word ‘masturbating’ but Ally seemed spurred on by it. I got the feeling she’d come to like shocking me. ‘Oh yes, apparently they all stand around in a circle with a biscuit on a table in the middle. Then they pump away at themselves and the first person to spill his seed, so to speak, is the winner. The last person is, well …’

‘Well, what?’

‘The loser.’

I grimaced. ‘And what happens to the biscuit?’ I said, thinking I could probably guess the answer.

‘The loser has to eat it.’

‘That doesn’t sound very appetising.’

Ally chuckled. ‘I don’t think it’s meant to be. Just a bit of fun, I’m sure.’

‘Can’t you get AIDS that way?’

She tilted her head to one side and took a sip of her milkshake, apparently considering this. ‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure, to be honest. I doubt it. Otherwise I think most MPs would be on their deathbeds!’

She laughed loudly at her own joke.

‘So, do you know which books they’ll be picking this time?’ I said, keen to get the conversation away from boys consuming their own, and others’, semen.

‘Well, they have a bit of trouble now, since they’ve read so much already, so there’s naturally a bit of double-dipping. They haven’t really found a way to control that side of things, so they just try to make sure their lists are made up of a healthy majority of titles they haven’t read before, and the ones they have they aren’t supposed to have read for a good few years.’

The book lover in me liked the sound of this, although I knew I wouldn’t be able to compete with Ernest and James in a million years. They both seemed to swallow literature, or inhale it like a long drag on a cigarette, relishing it as they went. I read for pleasure, first and foremost, whereas they seemed to see it primarily as a form of self-nourishment.

‘Do you ever join in?’ I asked.

‘Christ, no. I wouldn’t be able to keep up. It would be a humiliation.’

Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Ally with a book, or even properly studying. Perhaps she was one of those people who just sailed through coursework and exams without ever really having to try. There had been a couple of girls in my school like that. I’d envied them greatly.

We tried to enter Blackwells, but didn’t get very far. A young bookseller, in the midst of neatly arranging copies of a Stephen King novel on a small table, looked up and told us we’d need to finish our milkshakes before we came any further. Ally rolled her eyes at him and for a minute I wondered if she’d ignore him and just march in, but to my relief she stepped back outside. A few minutes later, having discarded our empty milkshake cups in a wastepaper basket the bookseller had helpfully offered us, we walked purposefully, with me following Ally’s lead, through the store towards the back. It was a vast shop, and went further back than I remembered. We found the section marked ‘Classics’ pretty quickly. I noticed it was divided up into ‘English Literature’, ‘World Classics’ and ‘Modern Classics’. Each one was full of a vast array of volumes, most of them sporting the black or light-turquoise spines that characterised a sizeable chunk of Penguin’s publishing output. There were hefty, more academic volumes of famous novels mixed in too, no doubt containing annotations, guides to the text, essays, lists of further reading and various other extras. I was about to start perusing the shelves properly when Ally tugged at my arm.

‘Come on, round here.’

She steered me around the corner of one of the shelves towards a small alcove with a table and set of armchairs. Ernest and James sat side by side on one of them, the former lounging back, his head buried in an extremely large book which I recognised as The Count of Monte Cristo. James, on the other hand, was leaning forward, running an index finger down what appeared to be a long list, written in a leather-bound exercise book.

‘Ding dong merrily, my little Christmas readers!’ Ally said loudly. I glanced around, slightly embarrassed, but there wasn’t another person in sight and the alcove was well-hidden from view of the main part of the shop.

‘It isn’t Christmas. It’s October, sis.’

Ernest didn’t even bother to lower the book as he spoke. James’s reaction was friendlier. ‘But she is indeed right that we are here with Christmas in mind.’ He nodded towards the empty sofa in front of him and then looked back at us. ‘Sit down, you two. You can join in the fun.’ Not for the first time, his eyes lingered on me slightly longer than Ally. I could feel myself reddening, so sat down quickly on the sofa, with Ally following suit slightly less gracefully.

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