“No.”
He could hear music, faint and distant, something she was listening to, guitars. “Is it too late,” he asked, “for you to meet me for a drink?”
Twenty
Hannah had gone to the smaller of the two Broadway cinemas that afternoon and seen a Tunisian film, The Silences of the Palace; herself and perhaps half a dozen others watching a woman returning from exile to a newly independent country and slowly coming to terms with the demands of present and past. The woman, a singer, among other women for whom silence was the only option. Hannah had sat at the end of one row, close against the wall, trying not to fight against the deliberately slow passing of time, fighting her prejudice against the harsh sounds of Arabic. Gradually, the film had won her over, so that, by the end, she was immersed in its rhythm, and when she left, the voices and the movement in the Café Bar next door seemed relentless and loud. She resented the traffic and the crowds out on the streets. Crossing the end of Clumber Street towards the Old Market Square, she thought she spotted Sheena Snape among a group of half a dozen or so girls, noisily blocking the pavement outside the bank.
There were young men in the square wearing football shirts with black and white stripes, threatening to push one another into the fountain. Hannah maneuvered around them and walked up St. James Street and past the Tales of Robin Hood, heading uphill towards Lenton, where she lived in a terraced Victorian house overlooking a swathe of grass and a children’s playground, a church, and a crown bowling green.
The light was blinking twice on her answerphone.
There were people, she supposed, who could take off their coat, change their shoes, put on the kettle, empty the rubbish, do any number of other things before pressing the button marked “play.” She was not one of them.
The first voice was her father’s, calling from the French village to which he had moved three years before. Now his time was taken up in restoring a crumbling barn with the woman for whom he had left Hannah’s mother, an architectural student and would-be writer almost ten years younger than Hannah herself.
“She’ll leave you, Dad,” Hannah had said, out there to visit last year, the pair of them sitting in the shade while Alexa busied herself inside. “You know that, don’t you?”
He had taken both Hannah’s hands in his and kissed the bridge of her nose. “Of course she will. In time.” He winked. “Just so long as we get this place finished first, eh? Then at least she’ll leave me with a roof over my head to be miserable under.”
On the tape, his voice was robust, happy; happier than she could ever remember him seeming in that commuter town in Kent, in every day on the seven twenty-three, home on the six fifty-four.
Hannah thought the second caller might be her mother, the family symmetry perfect, but it was Joanne, a colleague from work; she had a doubles court booked at the tennis center at ten tomorrow morning and someone had dropped out, did Hannah want to take their place? Hannah thought that she might; she dialed Joanne’s number, but the line was engaged.
She would try later. Now she made the tea and drank it with a slice of coffee-and-almond cake and that day’s Independent. There was a frozen lasagna she could pop into the microwave, the makings of a salad, two piles of folders on the table waiting to be marked. She had treated herself to the new Marge Piercy and it sat, fat and white, on the arm of her chair in the window, asking to be read. The Longings of Women. Ah, yes, Hannah thought, we all know about those.
She was just pouring herself a glass of wine when the phone called her into the other room; certain it would be Joanne, checking about the tennis, she was ill-prepared for her mother’s brittle cheeriness, wanting Hannah’s advice about holidays-walking in Crete or painting water colors at Flatford Mill? Hannah understood it was her mother’s way of saying, see how well I’m surviving, being positive, still turning your father’s desertion into an oasis of opportunity. Go to Crete, Hannah wanted to say, you’re more likely to meet a man. Some swarthy shepherd who will adore your trim, well-articulated body and white skin. As if that were all she-her mother-any of them-needed. The Longings of Women indeed!
Fifteen minutes later, not unkindly, Hannah told her mother there was marking she had to finish, replaced the receiver, and took wine and book upstairs to the bay windowed room which she used as her study and which looked out over the park. She had arranged a wicker armchair stuffed with cushions close against the window and, curtains open, she liked to sit there in the evenings, reading, glancing out at intervals to watch the light fading through the tops of the trees.
Her father had met Alexa in the same year that she had started living with Jim, her second attempt at a stable relationship and, she had been certain, the one which would succeed. Jim’s predecessor, Andrew, had been a volatile Irishman she had met when he was on a sabbatical from Queen’s College, Belfast: a robust, round-faced scholar who wrote long, earnest-and, Hannah now realized, extremely bad-poems about the blackness of peat and the saving grace of the pudendum. Andrew, who on a good day could put an entire bottle of Jameson’s away without blinking, and whose idea of good sex was to push her up against a convenient table and hoist her skirt up around her neck. On the first couple of occasions, though she thought it was politically incorrect to admit it, Hannah had found this distinctly exciting; after that, it had been a case of diminishing returns until all she associated Andrew’s love-making with were sore thighs and bruised hips.
Jim was different: a peripatetic music teacher whom she had first encountered schooling a nervous thirteen-year-old in National Health glasses through the first movement of the Mozart clarinet concerto. Jim had taken Hannah’s musical education in hand, too, had got her to realize there was more to Benjamin Britten than his love affair with Peter Pears and that it was possible to see a day of concerts featuring all six Bartók string quartets as more than an endurance test. They had lain in her bed and listened to Schubert, talking about where they would live when they were married, making up names for their children-Bela and Tasmin had been Jim’s favorites-and laughing about which reed instruments they would learn to play. A little less than two years later, Hannah still found signs of him around the house, a clarinet reed stuffed down behind the cushions of the sofa, the score of Billy Budd among the dusty folders in which she kept her old college lecture notes. Peripatetic had proved to be the word.
At the end of another chapter, Hannah closed the book and stood for a while at the window, gazing out. Lights blinked like fireflies from across the park. Downstairs, she called Joanne and said yes to tennis, picked up a folder of work and put it back down, told herself she shouldn’t really have another glass of wine, and then, after she had poured it, crossed the room to the stereo and rummaged through the piles of CDs which, since Jim’s departure, had resumed their previous disorder. Mary Chapin Carpenter, Nanci Griffith, Rosanne Cash? She thought “Blue Moon with Heartache” might be a little difficult to take. “Shut up and Kiss Me!”, though, that was positive, nothing wrong with that. Maybe she should buy an extra copy and send one to her mum, something to put in her bag for Crete, along with sunblock and a Greek phrase book. Hannah had just set Mary Chapin Carpenter to play when the phone rang again. She nearly decided to ignore it.
“Hello?”
“Hannah?”
“Yes.” She had no idea who it was.
“I didn’t think you’d be there.”
Then why on earth did you call, she thought, still trawling through the file of possibilities. Someone on the staff? A friend of Joanne’s? Her partner for tomorrow? “Who is this?”
“Charlie Resnick, you remember me …”