Except that tomorrow Mike Frame will be fifty, five weeks after me. This life, this Michael Frame life, has been it. This is what I have had.
I flush the toilet and wash my hands at the basin, trying not to look in the mirror. What will happen to Miranda? Will she have to move away? She’s put so much into this house. If she’s very lucky they might leave her alone. Maybe it won’t make any difference to the world at large, what I did. Maybe it will end with the
two of us. And maybe she’ll find a way to feel we did have a connection. Although there were things she didn’t know, there were also things she did, which were important and real. I could say that to her. I could say, Maybe one day you’ll come to understand and find consolation. But would I believe it? Not really. And would she? I don’t know. Because I don’t know if it’s true about understanding and consolation. And I’m not certain we had anything at all.
Miranda will be back soon. She has allowed Sam to drive her to the shops in her nineteenth-birthday present, a second-hand Fiesta. An act of faith on Miranda’s part: she’s a nervous passenger and Sam only passed her test a few weeks ago.
Sam’s room is just as she left it at the start of term; the neat row of shoes in front of the cupboard, the pile of outgrown soft toys on the bed. An orderly and rather conventional room. Only the backpack and the Discman dumped on the bed signal that, despite the argument we had last week, she’s come down from university for Mike’s officially-becoming-ancient party. I can’t imagine what this will do to her, the media circus, the betrayal of trust. There’s a chance she might just shrug it off. She’s a practical girl, and startlingly worldly for a nineteen-year-old, at least as I would have judged a nineteen-year-old of my generation. Certainly Sam isn’t your idealistic type of law student, interested in righting injustice or fighting for the little man. She says she wants to “do corporate” because that’s where the money is. And, I think, because she knows it scandalizes her mother and me. Little Sam and her embarrassing hippie parents; by now “Soma” will be off her passport too. She hasn’t allowed us to call her that for years.
Fuck. I can’t do it. I can’t face you, Sam. There’s no way.
Working quickly, I open closets and pull out a sports bag, start stuffing in socks, underwear, a couple of shirts. I need to move fast, before they get back from the shops. My passport is in the study, in a box file. At least, that’s where I think it is. I check and find it isn’t and for the first time since Miles left I lose control. When you panic you forget to breathe and your heart rate rises. I know this; I tell it to myself; but things start to speed up and soon
I’m sweeping papers onto the floor, pulling out drawers and sobbing with rage and frustration. Outside there’s the sound of a car and I freeze, but it isn’t them, just one of the marquee riggers. At last I spot the passport on a bookshelf. Frame. Michael David. British citizen. 10 April/Avril 48. “British citizen” is the only part that is true.
Five minutes later I’m in Miranda’s big silver BMW, approaching the junction with the bypass. I head out of town and along the coast toward Newhaven, obsessively checking the rearview mirror to see if I’m being followed. A blue Sierra preoccupies me, then disappears at a set of traffic lights. I’m so busy staring at it that I narrowly avoid rear-ending the car in front as it slows for a turn.
What am I worried about? By now Sam and Miranda will have gotten back home. Before long they’ll realize I’ve gone. So what’s left to salvage? At the port I pull into the ferry terminal and park between cars packed with luggage and fighting children, all waiting to be transported across the Channel for the holidays. I only really admit to myself where I’m heading as I line up for a ticket.
Last year I made this journey with Miranda. She was exhausted. Over time the business, which once involved filling little bottles on the kitchen table, has grown, slowly but steadily, into a substantial operation. It now consumes all of her energies. Bountessence sells beauty products — face cream and shampoo and conditioner and massage oil and so on — through a network of telemarketing agents, mostly women, some working at home and others in an office above a tanning salon in the town center. When I met her, Miranda was making the stuff herself, boiling witchy cauldrons on the stove at her flat. Now “her ladies,” as she insists on calling them, sell factory-made “natural botanicals” on commission to customers whose names appear on a list she rents from a marketing agency in London. A surprising number of people don’t seem to mind being phoned by strangers to talk about moisturizer, and lately Miranda has begun to glimpse a grand and lucrative future.
I insisted on the holiday. I wanted to slow things down. She’d just secured funding for further expansion and was looking at space
in an industrial park. There was talk of online sales and meetings with a brand consultant, whatever one of those is. When she came home from signing the contract with her new investors (a pair of ambitious local lawyers) I expected her to be elated. Instead she sat and sipped pennyroyal tea in the garden, fidgety and withdrawn.
Unlike me, Miranda has a knack for living in the world. Almost effortlessly she seems to find herself on the crest of whatever preoccupation is currently sweeping the lunch table or the Sunday supplements. I’ve come to think of it as a gift. It isn’t something she works at; Miranda certainly isn’t a modish person, at least not consciously. In the last few years everyone around us has become very excited by money and, sure enough, her talent has led her to it, like an ant following a pheromone trail. There used to be a contradiction between money and Miranda, a short circuit. Like me, she belongs to a generation whose selfishness was tempered by a more-than-passing interest in renunciation. We had the notion that in some variously defined way, simplicity was glamorous, hip. So although she’s now a thrusting entrepreneur of the type celebrated in the glossy magazines she buys with increasing frequency, Miranda remains conflicted about consumerism. I diagnosed her silent tea drinking as a symptom of guilt, the unease of a woman who’d once spoken about alternative lifestyles with the emphasis on “alternative” rather than “lifestyles.”
Or maybe she was just tired. Either way, I could tell she wasn’t sure that expansion was what she wanted — and I had my own private reasons to worry. I was being stretched thin by Miranda’s ambitions. It was increasingly hard for me to keep a channel open to something important, something I don’t really have a name for any longer. An ideal, maybe, though I’m not comfortable with the word. A vision of the future? Perhaps just to a person, someone I never was but once hoped to become.
It was clear we both needed space to breathe, so I rented a holiday apartment in the Languedoc and in my best stern-but-loving tone ordered my common-law wife (a charmless and apparently legally
null phrase that winds Miranda up whenever I use it) to take ten days off. She complained bitterly. Didn’t I understand it was a crucial moment for the company? I was insane if I thought she could just pack up and leave, we weren’t kids anymore, and so on and so forth. I held firm, tried various arguments, told her she had to think about her life holistically — meaning, in Miranda-code, that her work was getting in the way of her relationship with me. That got her attention, to an extent.