The Grandmothers

‘He’s very unhappy,’ Harold reported to Roz and to Lil.

‘I know he is,’ said Lil.

‘He thinks he’s no good. He thinks he’s a failure.’

The adults stared at this fact, as if it were something they could actually see.

‘But how can you be a failure at seventeen?’ said Lil.

‘Did we feel like that?’ asked Roz.

‘I know I did,’ said Harold. ‘Don’t worry’ And back he went to his desert university. He was thinking of getting married again.

‘Okay,’ said Roz. ‘If you want a divorce.’

‘Well, I suppose she’ll want kids,’ said Harold.

‘Don’t you know?’

‘She’s twenty-five,’ said Harold. ‘Do I have to ask?’

‘Ah,’ said Roz, seeing it all. ‘You don’t want to put the idea into her head?’ She laughed at him.

‘I suppose so,’ said Harold.

Then Ian was again spending the night with Tom. Rather, he was there at bedtime. He went off to Harold’s room, and there was a quick glance at Roz, which she hoped Tom had not seen.

When she woke in the night, ready to go off to the fridge for a drink, or just to wander about the house in the dark, as she often did, she did not go, afraid of hearing Ian crying, afraid she would not be able to stop herself going into him. But then she found he had blundered through the dark into her room and was beside her, clutching at her like a lifebelt in a storm. And she actually found herself picturing those seven black rocks like rotten teeth in the black night out there, the waves pouring and dashing around them in white cascades of foam.

Next morning Roz was sitting at the table in the room that was open to the verandah, and the sea air, and the wash and hush and lull of the sea. Tom stumbled in fresh from his bed, the smell on him of youthful sleep. ‘Where’s Ian?’ he asked. Normally he would not have asked: both boys could sleep until midday.

Roz stirred her coffee, around and around, and said, without looking at him, ‘He’s in my bed.’

This normally would not have merited much notice, since this extended family’s casual ways could accommodate mothers and boys, or the women, or either boy with either woman, lying down for a rest or a chat, or the two boys, and, when he was around, Harold with any of them.

Tom stared at her over his still-empty plate.

Roz accepted that look, and her look back might as well have been a nod.

‘Jesus!’ said Tom.

‘Exactly,’ said Roz.

And then Tom ignored his plate and possible orange juice, leaped up, grabbed his swimming-trunks from the verandah wall, and he sprinted off down to the sea. Usually he would have yelled at Ian to go too.

Tom was not around that day. It was school holidays, but apparently he was off on some school holiday activity, generally scorned by him.

Lil was away, judging some sports competition, and was not back until evening. She came into Roz’s house and said, ‘Roz, I’m whacked. Is there anything to eat?’

Ian was at the table, sitting across from Roz but not looking at her. Tom had a plate of food in front of him. And now Tom began talking to Lil as if no one else was there. Lil scarcely noticed this, she was so tired, but the other two did. And he kept it up until the meal was over and Lil said she must go to bed, she was exhausted, and Tom simply got up and went with her into the dark.

Next morning, lateish for them all, Tom walked back across the street and found Roz at the table, in her usual careless, comfortable pose, her wrap loose about her. He did not look at her but all around her, at the room, the ceiling, through a delirium of happy accomplishment. Roz did not have to guess at his condition; she knew it, because Ian’s similar state had been enveloping her all night.

Now Tom was prowling around the room, taking swipes as he passed at a chair arm, the table, a wall, returning to aim a punch at the chair next to hers, like a schoolboy unable to contain exuberance, but then standing to stare in front of him, frowning, thinking – like an adult. Then he whirled about and was close to his mother, all schoolboy, an embodied snigger, a leer. And then trepidation – he was not sure of himself, nor of his mother, who blushed scarlet, went white, and then got up and deliberately slapped him hard, this way, that way, across the face.

‘Don’t you dare,’ she whispered, trembling with rage. ‘How dare you …’

Half crouching, hands to his head, protecting it, he peered up at her, face distorted in what could have been a schoolboy’s blubbering, but then he took command of himself, stood and said directly to her, ‘I’m sorry,’ though neither he nor she could have said exactly what it was he was sorry for, nor what he was not to dare. Not to let words, or his face, say what he had learned of women in the night just passed, with Lil?

He sat down, put his face in his hands, then leaped up, grabbed his swimming things and was off running into the sea, which this morning was a flat blue plate rimmed by the colourful houses of the enclosing arm of the bay opposite.

Tom did not come into his mother’s house that day but made a detour back to Lil’s. Ian slept late – nothing new in that. He, too, found it hard to look at her, but she knew it was the sight of her, so terribly familiar, so terribly and newly revelatory, it was too much, and so he snatched up his bundle of swimming things and was off. He did not come back until dark. She had done small tasks, made routine telephone calls, cooked, stood soberly scanning the house opposite, which showed no signs of life, and then, when Ian returned, made them both supper and they went back to bed, locking the house front and back – which was something not always remembered.

A week passed. Roz was sitting alone at the table with a cup of tea when there was a knock. She could not ignore it, she knew that, though she would have liked to stay inside this dream or enchantment that had so unexpectedly consumed her. She had dragged on jeans and a shirt, so she was respectable to look at, at least. She opened the door on the friendly, enquiring face of Saul Butler, who lived some doors along from Lil, and was their good neighbour. He was here because he fancied Lil and wanted her to marry him.

When he sat down and accepted tea, she waited.

‘Haven’t seen much of you lot recently, and I can’t get any reply at Lil’s.’

‘Well, it’s the school holidays.’

But usually she and the boys, Lil and the boys, would have been in and out, and often people waved at them from the street, where they all sat around the table.

‘That boy, Ian, he needs a father,’ he challenged her.

‘Yes, he does,’ she agreed at once: she had learned in the past week just how much the boy needed a father.

‘I’m pretty sure I’d be a father to Ian – as much as he’d let me.’

Saul Butler was a well-set-up man of about fifty, not looking his age. He ran a chain of artists’ equipment shops, paints, canvases, frames, all that kind of thing, and he knew Lil from working with her on the town’s trade associations. Roz and Lil had agreed he would make a fine husband, if either of them had been looking for one.

She said, as she had before, ‘Shouldn’t you be saying this to Lil?’

‘But I do. She must be sick of me – staking my claim.’

‘And you want me to support – your claim?’

‘That’s about it. I think I’m a pretty good proposition,’ he said, smiling, mocking his own boasting.

‘I think you’d be a good proposition too,’ said Roz, laughing, enjoying the flirtation, if that was what it was. A week of love-making, and she was falling into the flirtatious mode as if into a bed. ‘But that’s no use is it, it’s Lil you want.’

‘Yes. I’ve had my eye on Lil for – a long time.’ This meant, before his wife left him for another man. ‘Yes. But she only laughs at me. Now, why is that, I wonder? I’m a very serious sort of chap. And where are the lads this morning?’

‘Swimming, I suppose.’

‘I only dropped in to make sure you are all getting along all right.’ He got up, finished his tea standing, and said, ‘See you on the beach.’

Off he went and Roz rang Lil, and said, ‘We’ve got to be seen about a bit more. Saul dropped in.’