She was pacing about the room then with her old important restlessness, that still irritated her mother sometimes. She stopped to light another cigarette; the ashtray was already full, they were both smoking. Helen sucked on the cigarettes as if she was drinking the smoke down thirstily.
— Love is such a lie, she said. — In marriage, it’s a lie. You kiss each other goodbye in the morning but actually inside you’re both burning up with anger at things the other one’s done or not done, and relief at getting rid of them for a few hours. I don’t love him any more. I see right through him. All he cares about is his music and actually I agree with him: why shouldn’t he?
— You gave up your dancing.
Helen looked at her in surprise. — I wasn’t very good. Not good enough. I wouldn’t want Phil to give up his music. That’s not the point.
— I thought you were very good.
(In fact she had exerted her utmost powers to dissuade Helen from a career in dance.)
— All those jazz standards about love and women, Helen went on, indifferent for the moment to the long-ago story of her dancing. — But actually they’re only interested in each other, they’re not genuinely interested in women at all. I mean, not once they’ve got what they want. All they’re thinking about when they play all those songs about the women they can’t bear to live without, the beautiful women they’ve lost, is actually what other men think. Am I playing it as well as him? What does he think of the way I did that solo? Is he impressed?
— He does care about you.
— No, he doesn’t. He thinks I’m his enemy. He wants to be free.
— It will seem different tomorrow morning.
— It won’t. Or if it does, then it won’t be the truth. I will be lying to myself again.
Nia woke up very early. She knew at once where she was, from the way a vague light was swelling behind her nana’s lilac-coloured silky curtains. Even though Nia didn’t go to school yet — she only went three afternoons a week to a little nursery where in fine weather they lay on mats in the playground to nap — that lilac-toned light already meant to her a precious freedom from routine. Usually the accompaniment to the lilac light at Nana’s was the sound of car engines starting up in the street outside and then droning deliciously away into the distance; but it was too early even for that to have begun.
Helen was in the bed with her. She had forgotten to wonder where her mother would sleep. Once or twice at home Nia had been put into bed with her when she was ill, but it was a rare, strange treat. Helen had her back turned and her head buried down in the pillows. She was wearing her blue seersucker pyjamas, and snoring slightly; she smelled of cigarettes. Her hair still had some of its backcombed stiffness from the day, only matted and flattened; Nia reached out her fingers and felt it sticky with hairspray. She lifted herself carefully on one elbow, to survey her mother from this unaccustomed advantage of consciousness; everyone was asleep in the flat apart from her. Helen hadn’t taken her make-up off before she came to bed: some of it was smeared on Nana’s pillowcase. She radiated heat, and gave off her usual beloved complicated smell, like face powder and fruit cake. Shut up and inactive behind her closed eyes, frowning in her sleep, she seemed more and not less mysterious. Nia settled down again, pressing up cautiously behind her mother so as not to wake her. Through the puckery material of the pyjamas she could feel against her face the skin of her mother’s warm back; she breathed in and out with her mouth open, tasting her. She wondered if their lives had changed, and if she would be able to sleep with her mother every night from now on. Anything seemed possible.
Some time later she was wakened again by a sound of knocking, then of Jennifer (who wasn’t really Jennifer but Patsy) opening the salon door and speaking crossly to someone with a man’s voice: her daddy. Then the doorbell rang up in the flat. Helen sat bolt upright in bed, as though she came from sleep to full consciousness in one movement; she slithered her legs over the side of the bed and dashed into the sitting room, where she collided with Phil who had just dashed upstairs. She gave out a little moan: of subsidence, remorse, relief. Nia snuggled into the warm space her mother left behind. She could hear Jennifer moving about downstairs, tidying up and running water. She knew that soon the bell on the salon door would begin to tinkle as the staff arrived, and then the customers. If she was lucky she would be allowed down later. The hairdryers were only harmless and comical during the day; she would sit out of the way and play with the perm papers.
Forty years later, only Nia can remember any of this. Sophie was too young to remember. Nana Allen is long dead; and Nia’s father is dead too, in his fifties, of a heart attack. When Nia tells the story to her mother, Helen simply flatly denies it; and Nia is sure she isn’t pretending, that she’s genuinely forgotten. In her late sixties Helen is still elegant and striking-looking, with suffering deep-set eyes and beautiful skin (‘Never use soap on your face, Nia’). She complains about her hairdresser, but he’s good: she has her hair dyed a dark honey colour with silver streaks, cut to fall loose and straight in a boyish look she calls ‘gamine’. People who meet Helen think she must have been something important, a broadcaster or a designer, although actually what she has mostly done in her life is that old-fashioned thing: being an attractive and interesting woman. She has had two significant relationships with men since Phil died, but she wouldn’t marry either of them, although (she says, and Nia believes) they begged her. One of these men died too, and the other went back to his wife. The way she tells it now, the relationship with Phil Cerruti was the true love of her life, because Phil was a true artist. Nia isn’t meaning to challenge this, either, when she brings up the subject of the time they ran away to Nana Allen’s.
— I won’t deny we did fight, Helen says. — We were both pretty passionate people. But no, I would remember it if I’d ever actually left him. I don’t think the possibility would have crossed my mind. By the standards of today, of course I should have left. Everything in our family life had to be fitted around his music; you can’t domesticate a real musician. But I was happy. The women of your generation wouldn’t stand for it, darling, I know. But we’d been brought up to believe you stuck by your husband and that was it. You took the rough with the smooth.
On the other hand, Helen does now sometimes talk about her dancing. It has become part of her story, that she could have had a career as a dancer and she gave it up because that’s how it was in those days, if you married and had children; the way she tells it, you can’t tell whether she thinks the sacrifice was a shame or a splendid thing. Helen and Nia get on reasonably well most of the time these days. When Nia was in her twenties she went through (as she sees it now) a drearily dogmatic feminist phase. She lived for a while as a lesbian, and camped at Greenham Common. She gave herself a new name because she didn’t want to use her father’s, and then when Phil died (suddenly, so that she never said goodbye to him) she went into a depression for two years, and only came out of it with the help of therapy. Now she works as a therapist herself, and has a steady relationship with a man, Paul, although they don’t live together and don’t have any children. (Sophie has two boys and a girl, so Helen isn’t cheated of grandchildren.)
Nia suggested to her mother last Christmas that in the spring the two of them should fly together to New York, to see the exhibition of Rubens drawings at the Met. The teacher at Helen’s art classes had said how wonderful they were; and Helen had never been to America. It should have been one of those brilliant late-night inspirations that crumble to nothing in the light of practicalities, but somehow they really went ahead with this and booked their flights and their hotel. Then it was too late to change their minds, although in the week before they left Nia was consumed with doubt and dismay, imagining every kind of disaster. Her mother who suffered from angina wouldn’t be able to walk anywhere; she would be taken ill, and Nia would have to deal with the American medical system. Or they would quarrel over something and not be able to escape from one another. On the flight over, Nia sat in the window seat and looked down at the unpopulated earth below, wherever it was, Greenland or Canada: for hundreds of miles, nothing but the black whorls and coils of rock, snow and winding rivers and frozen lakes. There was no cloud layer; there must be unbroken cold sunshine down there. She calmed herself by imagining she was translated down into that landscape; though not of course in her hopeless human body, which would only know how to stumble around in it and die.