Four of them. A father and stepmother, a mother and stepfather. As I’ve mentioned. So I’d have to subject you twice over. Both couples and their sets; very boring people. I haven’t wanted to do that to you.
Julie. We are together — five months now, yes. We are still all the time only with your friends.
No. I thought we’re alone together.
Yes, we are together, living in your place, everything … More than five months. If a woman chooses a man for this, or a man chooses a woman, it is time for the parents to know. To see the man. It’s usual.
Maybe where he comes from. For the first time, the difference between them, the secret conditioning of their origins, an intriguing special bond in their intimacy against all others, is a difference in a different sense — an opposition.
I have to tell you. You’ll hate it. I wouldn’t know which to choose first, my father and his new wife, my mother and the casino owner who’s her latest husband.
Just to confirm: You have no sisters and brothers.
No, she is not part of that constellation of siblings which, she sees, he probably knows himself in even though it is not visible from under these skies where he and she lie together.
My life is my life, not theirs. And she repeats, not knowing how to say more: I didn’t want to subject you to them.
He sulks; or is it lonely sadness in that profile? She is distanced and distressed. Love engraves a profile definitively as the mint does on a coin.
She is ashamed of her parents; he thinks she is ashamed of him. Neither knows either, about the other.
Chapter 7
The next time her father invites her to Sunday lunch (without for some months at least a telephone call from his daughter) she says she’ll be bringing someone with her. The phrase is intended as a hint, a preparation: the ordinary formulation would be that she will be with a friend. Not that this was customary, anyway; her father rarely was brought into contact with whoever these friends were, though he no doubt could judge, by her attitudes towards him and his wife, what sort of alternatives they might be.
— Will that be all right? With Danielle.—
She knows that the elaborate social life of her father’s house is convened by the social talents of his wife.
— Good Lord, of course. You can bring anyone you like, your friends are always welcome, you know that.—
He hasn’t caught the nuance; and there is one of his own, here: the slipping in of a reproach that his daughter keeps him out of her life.
In order to start off on the right foot in her father’s house it is a good idea to observe some convention for guests — even if she is supposed not to be a guest in her own father’s house, her ‘someone’ is — so on the way she asks him to stop the car at a corner where a flower-seller has a pitch, and she buys a bunch of roses. You dump them in the hands of Danielle so that she may not raise them, so to speak, against you. This is not something one shares with the young man she is beside. Another hint she thinks — hopes — might be caught by anyone seeing her car come through the security gates to the house, is that he, the Someone, not she, is in the driver’s seat.
Don’t be too sure you know what’s to come, that set struck and rebuilt for the same scene every Sunday all over The Suburbs. These guests are not exposed, in every sense, half-clad to the sun on plastic chairs round a swimming pool, her father is not bending a belly over grilling meat. This is a different level of suburban entertaining. The guests are on a cool terrace opening from a living-room that leads through archways to other reception rooms of undefined function (to accommodate parties?), and the cushioned chaises longues and flower arrangements are an extension rather than a break from the formal comforts, mirrored bouquets and paintings in the rooms. The food, already set out by the time the daughter of the house arrives, is the cold poached Norwegian salmon with sauces and kaleidoscope-bright salads that Danielle has taught the cook to produce perfectly. The margaritas (host’s speciality) have their rime of salt and the pewter beer mugs and wine glasses are misted by contrast of temperature between the warm day and their chilled contents. It is all very pleasant, the offering of this kind of Sunday, make no mistake about it; Julie comes upon it as always: sinking into a familiar dismay. But he is at her side, one of those invisible shields that turn aside arrows and keep the bearer intact.
When her father was introduced to her Someone there was across his face a fleeting moment of incomprehension of the name, quickly dismissed by good manners and a handshake. What was the immediate register? Black — or some sort of black. But what she read into this was quickly confused by what she had not noticed — there already was a black couple among the guests — amazing: the innovation showed how long it must have been since she came to one of the Sunday lunch parties in that house Nigel Ackroyd Summers had built for his Danielle. Her father’s pragmatic self-assurance knew easily how to deal with half-grasped names now common to the infiltration of the business and professional community by those who bore them. She might have realized by now that her father, as an investment banker in this era of expanding international financial opportunities and the hand-over-fist of black political power on the way to financial power at home, must have to add such names to the guest lists for a balance of his contacts. He let her complete the introductions: —This is my daughter Julie, and her friend …—
It was the name that was not his name that he responded to.
There was the bob this-side-and-that against her cheek that Danielle would have given without noticing, if she had a figure from a shop window placed before her for greeting, and then she turned to whoever it was Julie had brought along: her welcoming upward tilt of the head and smile. Either no reaction other than hostessly; or more likely one of no surprise that the girl would turn up with what was no doubt the latest wearying ploy to distance herself from her father. The Someone Julie produced smiled back, and this convention matched that which each one had at hand, in the reflex, purely aesthetical, sincerity irrelevant, the facility of a particularly beautiful transformation of the visage. (He smiled at Julie, out of his reserve, in the sombre greasy shades of the garage, or was it in the street, that first time.) And Danielle— her smile was a kind of personal announcement of her beauty. She was beautiful; trust the father for that. Her social intelligence was well managed to suggest, to anyone able to appreciate this, that her real intelligence went drier and deeper. Her stepdaughter saw her, as so often, drawing away with the bait of some flattering request a female guest from a man being bored by chatter on matters the poor thing knew nothing about; moving with a sway of her graceful backside (she had been an actress, interpreter of sophisticated comedies set in London, Paris or New York, out-dated now by the changes that had also changed her guest list) as she mingled the guests like the deft shuffle of a pack of cards, slipping in a remark here and there (… I want you to come and tell that amazing …) particularly among the men, to show that she read the newspapers, was privy to gossip about entrepreneurs and politicians; picking up, among the usual three or four women whom nothing could induce to leave their huddle, variations on domestic anecdotes, and teasing an unsuspected elderly feminist who suddenly stood, glass in hand, to heckle two males who were enjoying men-talk witticisms about women members on their Board.
Apart from replenishing his rounds of margaritas, her father left this general company to his Danielle. He and what must be the principal guests he was cultivating (his daughter believes she knows him well) were gathered round the issues of the day, the week; for her, their lives were always in control, these people — talk around her, ‘buying into futures’ (whatever that might be) was a mastery they took, from the immediate present, of what was to come: the future, of which any control for the Someone beside her did not exist. The emanation of his presence, bodily warmth and breath, was merely a haze which hid him from them; their reality did not know of his existence.