The Grandmothers

Now Victoria was in a job she liked better than anything so far, a big music shop, in the West End. She had earned more in other places, but this was where she belonged. The music, the people who came in, the other assistants – all perfect, all a pleasure, and she told Phyllis and Bessie that this time she would stick.

One afternoon who should come in but Thomas Staveney: for a moment she again thought she was looking at Edward. She watched him wander about the store, at his ease in it, familiar with everything: he picked up tapes and put them down and finally bought a video of a concert from The Gambia. Then he arrived in front of her, and said, ‘You’re Victoria.’ ‘And you’re Thomas,’ she rejoined smartly. He was eyeing her but not in a way she could object to: of course he must be surprised: she knew what he was remembering. She stood smiling, letting him come to conclusions.

Then he said the last thing she expected: ‘Why don’t you come home with me and have some supper?’

‘I’m not free for another hour.’

‘I’ll come back for you.’ He sloped out. His style was one no one need notice in this place, more Jimmy Dean than Che Guevara; there was a hole at the knee of his jeans, and another in his sweater elbow.

When the two left the store, as it closed, they were an incongruous pair, for she was in a sleek black leather jacket, a black leather skirt, heels like shiny black chopsticks. Her hair was straight now, like black patent leather.

They took a bus, another, and were soon outside that house that had been inhabiting her dreams for ten years.

She was now nineteen, he, seventeen. They knew to the month how old each was. He looked much older, and she did too, a smart young woman, no girl, this.

As he went up the steps she lingered, to grasp the moment. She was here with the tall fair boy she had been dreaming of, yet it was like those dreams where a familiar figure comes towards you, but it is not he, this is a stranger; or with what delight you see across a room your lost sweetheart and she turns her head with a smile you don’t know. This was Thomas, and not Edward, and the theme of deception continued as she tripped fast up the steps to join him at the opening door: the hall which had stayed in her mind as a place of soft colours and lights was smaller, and the spring afternoon sent a cold light where she remembered a warm diffusing glow. She remembered a reddish-rose softness, and here they were, old rugs, on the floor and on the walls, but she could see white threads where the light highlit worn patches. They were shabby. Yes, pretty, she supposed: could not these rich people afford new ones? At once she put the remembered room, unchanged, into another part of her mind, to keep it there safe, and condemned what she saw as an imposter. Now they were in the enormous room she remembered she had been told was a kitchen. It still was – nothing had changed. A child, she had not taken in all the cupboards and the fridge and the stove, which could easily appear in a magazine that endorsed such things, and here was the table, large, yes, as she remembered, and the chairs around it, and the big chair where she had sat on Edward’s knee and he had told her a story.

Thomas had put water into the kettle and switched it on, and reached into a vast refrigerator. He brought out various items which he deposited on the table, and said, ‘But if you’d like something else? I’m making coffee.’

At Phyllis’s, coffee was drunk, often and copiously, so she said, ‘Coffee, please,’ and sat down, since he had not thought to suggest it.

If she could not stop herself sending glances of enquiry, and then confirmation, at him, he could not stop looking at her. She thought he was like someone who had bought something special at the supermarket and was pleased with his buy.

‘Where’s your brother?’ she asked, half afraid to hear what he would say, since the answer was bound to confirm that this was not Edward, nor ever could be.

‘He’s in Sierra Leone, gathering facts’, was the reply, and she could not miss the resentment that was supposed to be concealed by indifference. ‘Gathering facts as usual’ he added. And then, deciding that politeness needed more, ‘He’s a lawyer, these days. He’s with a lawyer’s outfit that gathers facts about poverty – that kind of thing.’

‘And your ma? Does she still live here?’

‘Where else? This is her house. She comes and goes at her own sweet will. But don’t worry, she keeps her distance.’

In this way her suspicion was confirmed that there was something clandestine about this escapade. After all, he was seventeen. He must still be at school somewhere. She was the prize got at the supermarket.

For all of Edward’s tumultuous decade of growing up, Thomas had been the very pattern of a younger brother. He belittled and he jeered and he mocked, while Edward championed this cause or that, filling the house with pamphlets, brochures, appeals and quarrelling with his mother. Yet Jessy supported Edward, on principle, and Thomas might go off with both of them to a concert of musicians from South Africa or Zanzibar. At one of these shows Thomas, aged eleven, fell in love with a black singer and thereafter went to every black concert or dance group that came to London. The secret torments of teenage lust were all directed towards one black charmer after another. He said openly and often that he thought white skins were insipid, and he wished he had been born black. He collected African music from everywhere, and from his room when he was in it came the sounds of drumming and singing, as loud as he could get it, until Edward shouted at him to give it a rest and his mother complained that her sons did nothing by halves. ‘If only I could have had a nice sensible girl,’ she mourned: this was very much the note of the women’s movement of the time.

Thomas had in a thousand fantasies come up those steps with some delectable black star or starlet and when he saw Victoria in the music shop his dreams in one illuminating moment came close and smiled at him.

Victoria asked if he remembered she had slept in his room that long ago night. He did not, but he grasped at this gift from Fate and said, ‘Would you like to see it?’

Up the stairs they went and into a room no longer like a toy shop, but full of posters of black singers and musicians. Never has an old sweet dream of something unobtainable turned so sharply to say: But I was not that, I was this all the time. She knew all the performers from their recordings, and now she sat on the bed to listen to music from Mozambique, staring around at the posters, while Thomas stared at her.

Victoria was not entirely a virgin, because she had only just escaped from the predatory photographer number two. Thomas was not pristine either, because he had managed to persuade a waitress – black, of course – that he was older than he was. But he was inexperienced enough, and nervous enough of this cool black chick, to delay and put off and then put on another tape, and another, until Victoria got up and said, ‘I think I should be getting home, it’s late.’

But he jumped up and grasped her arms and stammered, ‘Oh, no, Victoria, please, oh, do stay.’ So he gabbled, and she stood, helpless, because it was not Thomas just then, but Edward who held her. He began kissing her on her neck, her face and then, well, you could say it was inevitable, given that years had gone into the making of the moment.

Since both were so unskilled, they had to confess, and that made conspiring innocents of them, and so she stayed, while he begged her not to leave him, and stayed, and it was hours later that she crept down those steps, with his arm proudly around her, he hoping he would be seen, she hoping she was not. When she got home Phyllis accepted her apologies with a sigh, and she was saying to herself: So, that’s it, I suppose I should be glad she’s been safe until now.

It was a long summer, a warm good summer, and Thomas, who should have been studying for his final exams, was meeting Victoria at her music shop every day, and going home with her, and up to his room, where they made love to the sounds of music from most of Africa, not to mention the West Indies and the Deep South of America too.

Jessy found them at the big table, drinking strong black coffee.

‘Make me some,’ she told her son, and sat, falling back into her chair, eyes shut. ‘What a day,’ she said. When she opened them a large cup of strong black coffee steamed in front of her and she was looking into a face she seemed to know.

‘I’m Victoria,’ said Victoria. ‘You let me stay here one night, when I was little.’

Jessy had had children of all ages in that kitchen for years, and some had been black, particularly more recently, during Edward’s Third-World phase. Who was this frighteningly smart black girl? She was feeling a generalised warmth, reminiscent, even nostalgic: she had enjoyed that time of children, who came and went and slept over.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s nice to see you again.’ And having swallowed the coffee with a grimace – it was much too hot – she jumped up. ‘I’ve got to get to …’ But she was already gone.

You might be tempted to say that two people whose deepest secret fantasies had been made flesh in each other were in love, had to be, even that they loved. Never has anything been more irrelevant than being in love, or loving. Thomas was not Edward: this was a rougher, coarser-fibred creature – not a man, he was still a boy after all. And Thomas was not finding in Victoria the luscious sexy black charmers of his fantasies. She was a careful correct young woman, who walked as if afraid of taking up too much space, who hung her clothes on the back of the chair, folded nicely, before getting into bed. She was pretty, oh yes; he adored that warm brown skin against the white sheets; she had the nicest little face, but she was no siren, no temptress, and he knew that sex could be different from this – wilder, hotter, wetter, sweeter.

In short, no two people who have spent a summer making love most afternoons could have learned less than they did about each other’s minds, lives, needs.

The summer began to dim for autumn, and he would have to go back to school, and Victoria was pregnant.

She at once told Phyllis, who was neither surprised, nor angry. The boys were out, doubtless raising hell, Bessie was at her hospital. The two were alone: they did not have to lower their voices or watch for an opening door.

‘And is the father going to stand by you?’

‘He’s white.’

‘Oh, my Lord,’ said Phyllis, and her dismay was not so much for the weight of history she was managing to put into those three syllables, but for much nearer trouble.

‘Oh, Lordy-Lord,’ she said again, with a sigh from her depths. Then she summed up, ‘There’ll be problems.’

‘I don’t want him to know.’

Phyllis Chadwick nodded, accepted this, while she sighed and frowned – brows puckering, lips woeful – knowing what Victoria was in for: the girl herself didn’t. The end of her butterfly time – well, that had to happen, and it had been too short, but Victoria could have no idea how her horizons were going to tighten around her.

‘I can manage,’ said Victoria, and now Phyllis’s face showed some humour that was meant to be seen: Victoria would manage because Phyllis would help her. But the young woman had got further ahead in her thinking than the older woman knew.

‘As a single mum I’ll be entitled to my own place,’ said Victoria. She knew all about it because she had heard it from her aunt and from Phyllis: girls got pregnant because they wanted to escape from their families, most often their mothers.

‘I hope that is not why you let yourself get careless?’

Careless? Thomas used condoms and she had no idea if he had been careless or not. ‘No. But when I knew, that was when I thought I can have my own place.’

‘I see.’

‘I can work in the music shop till the baby. They like me there.’

‘And so I should think, that they like you. You’re such a good girl.’

‘And they said I can go back when the baby’s old enough.’ Phyllis was smiling, but there was something there that made Victoria slip off her chair and crouch beside the older woman like a child needing to be held. Phyllis held her, and Victoria began to cry. What she was crying for Phyllis could not possibly guess: if Edward, if that tall fair kindly boy, had been the father of this child, then Victoria would have told him.

‘We’ll start seeing about your own place,’ said Phyllis. ‘I’ll speak to the housing officers.’

There were waiting lists, but when the baby was three months old Victoria moved into a flat in the same building, four floors up. You could say she had a perfect situation. Phyllis, who would help with the baby, was so close. Bessie, a nurse, would be on hand too. The two boys, growing up fast, tearaways and bad lots, were delighted with this baby, ‘A penny from heaven,’ they said, and promised to babysit and teach her to walk.