The Grandmothers

Ian resented and feared Saul. He had said to Roz, ‘He wants to take Lil away from us.’ ‘You mean, from you.’ ‘Yes. And he wants to get me too. A ready-made son. Why doesn’t he make his own kids?’

‘I thought I had got you,’ said Roz.

At which Ian leaped at her, or on her, demonstrating who had got whom.

‘Charming,’ said Roz.

‘And Saul can go and screw himself,’ had said Ian.

Saul waited until the two had gone off down the path to the sea, and said, ‘Now, listen. I want to put it to you both. I want to get married again. As far as I’m concerned, Lil, you’re the one. But you’ve got to decide.’

‘It’s no good,’ said Roz, and Lil only shrugged. ‘We can see how it must look. You’re just about as good a bargain as any women look for.’

‘And you’re talking for Lil, again.’

‘She’s often enough spoken for herself.’

‘But you’d both do better with a bloke,’ he said. ‘The two of you, without men, and the two lads. It’s all too much of a good thing.’

A moment of shock. What was he saying? Implying?

But he was going on. ‘You are two handsome girls,’ said this gallant suitor. ‘You’re both so …’ and then he seemed to freeze, his face showed he was struggling with emotions, violent ones, and then it set hard. He muttered, ‘Oh, my God …’ he stared at them, Lil to Roz and back again. ‘My God,’ he said again. ‘You must think me a bloody fool.’ His voice was toneless: the shock had gone deep.

‘I’m an idiot,’ he said. ‘So, that’s it.’

‘What?’ said Lil. ‘What are you talking about?’ Her voice was timid, because of what he might be talking about. Roz kicked her under the table. Lil actually leaned over to rub her ankle, still staring at Saul.

‘A fool,’ he said. ‘You two must have been having a good laugh at my expense.’ He got up and blundered out. He was hardly able to get across the street to his own house.

‘Oh, I see,’ said Lil. She was about to go after him, but Roz said, ‘Stop. It’s a good thing, don’t you see?’

‘And now it’s going to get around that we are lezzies,’ said Lil.

‘So what? Probably it wouldn’t be the first time. After all, when you think how people talk.’

‘I don’t like it,’ said Lil.

‘Let them say it. The more the better. It keeps us all safe.’

Soon they all went to Saul’s wedding with a handsome young woman who looked like Lil.

The two sons were pleased. But the women said to each other, ‘We’re neither of us likely to get as good a deal as Saul again.’ That was Lil.

‘No,’ agreed Roz.

‘And what are we going to do when the boys get tired of us old women?’

‘I shall cry my eyes out. I shall go into a decline.’

‘We shall grow old gracefully,’ said Lil.

‘Like hell,’ said Roz. ‘I shall fight every inch of the way’

Not old women yet, nor anywhere near it. Over forty, though, and the boys were definitely not boys, and their time of wild beauty had gone. You’d not think now, seeing the two strong, confident, handsome young men, that once they had drawn eyes struck as much by awe as by lust or love. And the two women, one day reminding themselves how their two had been like young gods, rummaged in old photographs, and could find nothing of what they knew had been there: just as, looking at their old photographs, they saw pretty girls, nothing more.

Ian was already working with his mother in the management of the chain of sports shops, and was an up-and-coming prominent citizen. Harder to make a mark in the theatre: Tom was still working in the foothills when Ian was already near the top. A new position for Tom, who had always been first, Ian looking up to him.

But he persevered. He worked. And as always he was charming with Lil, and as often in her bed as he could, considering the long and erratic hours of the theatre.

‘There you are,’ said Lil to Roz. ‘It’s a beginning. He’s getting tired of me.’

But Ian showed no signs of relinquishing Roz, on the contrary. He was attentive, demanding, possessive, and when one day he saw her lying on her pillows, love-making just concluded, smoothing down loose ageing skin over her forearms, he let out a cry, clasped her, and shouted, ‘No, don’t, don’t, don’t even think of it. I won’t let you grow old.’

‘Well,’ said Roz, ‘it is going to happen, for all that.’

‘No.’ And he wept, just as he had done when he was still the frightened abandoned boy in her arms. ‘No, Roz, please, I love you.’

‘So I mustn’t get old, is that it, Ian? I’m not allowed to? Mad, the boy is mad,’ said Roz, addressing invisible listeners, as we do when sanity does not seem to have ears.

And alone, she felt uneasiness, and, indeed, awe. It was mad, his demand on her. It really did seem that he had refused to think she might grow old. Mad! But perhaps lunacy is one of the great invisible wheels that keep our world turning.

Meanwhile Tom’s father had not given up his aim, to rescue Tom. He made no bones about it. ‘I’m going to rescue you from those femmes fatales,’ he said on the telephone. ‘You get up here and let your old father take you in hand.’

‘Harold is going to rescue me from you,’ said Tom to his mother, on his way to Lil’s bed. ‘You’re a bad influence.’

‘A bit late,’ said Roz.

Tom spent a fortnight in the university town. In the evenings a short walk took him out into the hot sandy scrub where hawks wheeled and watched. He became friends with Molly, Roz’s successor, and with his half-sister, aged eight, and a new baby.

It was a boisterous child-centred house, but Tom told Ian he found it restful.

‘Nice to get to know you, at last,’ said Molly.

‘And now,’ said Harold, ‘don’t leave it so long.’

Tom didn’t. He accepted an offer to direct West Side Story in the university theatre, and said he would stay in his father’s house.

As always, the young women clustered and clung. ‘Time you were married, your father thinks,’ said Molly.

‘Oh, does he?’ said Tom. ‘I’ll marry in my own good time.’

He was in his late twenties. His classmates, his contemporaries, were married or had ‘partners’.

There was a girl he did like, perhaps because of her difference from Lil and from Roz. She was a little dark-haired, ruddy-faced girl, pretty enough, and she flirted with him in a way that made no claims on him. For here, so far from home, from his mother and from Lil, he understood how many claims and ties bound him there. He admired his mother, even if she exasperated him, and he loved Lil. He could not imagine himself in bed with anyone else. But they bound him, oh, yes, they did, and Ian, too, a brother in reality if not in fact. Down there – so he apostrophised his city, his home, so much part of the sea that here, when he heard wind in the bushes it was the waves he heard. ‘Down there, I’m not free.’

Up here, he was. He decided to accept work on another production. That meant another three months ‘up here’. By now it was accepted that he and Mary Lloyd were a unit, ‘an item’. Tom was passive, hearing this characterisation of him and Mary. He neither said yes, nor did he say no, he only laughed. But it was Mary who went with him to the cinema or who came home with him to his father for special meals.

‘You could do a lot worse,’ said Harold to his son.