And Susan said to Lucy, ‘So you see, it hasn’t been that easy for your father.’
Lucy could remember her father still trying hard, despite his confusion. Grandpa Arthur had always said, proudly, that Agnes was a jolly good musician. So her father bought a piano. But Agnes never played it. He bought various records, but Agnes never listened to them. In that conventional period of family calm, after Sunday lunch, the piano and records became a silent accusation. The lid had not been lifted; the records were still wrapped in cellophane. It was Lucy who first pressed the keys and introduced ‘Chopsticks’ to the house. It was Lucy who scratched Fauré’s ‘Romance sans parole’, anxious because of the simmering politesse among the grown-ups. The scratching was a symbolic mishap, because the second of those three little piano pieces was her grandmother’s favourite melody. That was why Freddie bought it.
It seemed to Lucy — not surprisingly — that her father’s attempts to reach his mother became more deliberate and dutiful, his need constrained by a thin skin of self-protection. And yet, simultaneously, as Agnes grew older her oscillations in mood were replaced by a more moderate inaccessibility. But by then it seemed to be too late for Freddie. He could not slough the skin. Lucy’s memory of Grandpa Arthur at this time was of a tired man, endlessly patient and exquisitely gentle with Agnes but a man who had learned to live more or less alone. He died quietly in his sleep one day, after a sudden stroke, as if he had slipped out of the back door in his slippers, unnoticed.
Agnes was strangely composed until the funeral, when her grief broke out like a flood. Then it sank away like a stone beneath flattened water. However, she refused to stay in the family home and sold up within two months, moving to a spacious flat in Hammersmith, by the river.
The loss of Grandpa Arthur left Freddie bereft. And Agnes, of all people, could not help him.’ The remaining links between them began to fragment, and Freddie’s anger at his mother began to break out. He snapped at her more frequently, his outbursts becoming less of a protest and more of an accusation: for being his reluctant mother.
2
Even as Lucy received and experienced the living history of her family she understood that her father’s problems had juddered wholesale into Susan, and embrangled her own most formative years.
What should have been a playground for a child had turned out to be more of a No Man’s Land, strewn with adult debris. As she’d tried to romp around she’d snagged herself on unseen obstacles, until she’d learned by experience to locate and map out the specific danger spots between all her relations. By the age of fifteen Lucy had acquired the ability to move among her family with the supreme ease of a sophisticated adult. She became the deft one, prodding people away from plotted minefields. She seemed wise.
It was this shining characteristic that led her father to speak so unguardedly, and her mother to say more by way of further explanation. They didn’t mean any harm, but they said enough to take, inadvertently, the glow off Lucy’s innocence. Only Agnes and Grandpa Arthur left her alone.
So, it was not surprising that, after Grandpa Arthur died, Agnes and Lucy were imperceptibly drawn to one another, without effort, decision or the swapping of inner wounds. They grew to enjoy each other’s company, neither of them placing demands upon the other. There was no weighted expectation. Long periods of silence could be shared, punctuated by clipped, comfortable conversation. It was obvious to anyone else in the same room that there was an alliance of sorts between them. But this only triggered a jealousy within her father that he could not bring himself to acknowledge, but could not stop himself from expressing, even when something far more serious was at stake.’ As he did when Lucy announced she was leaving home to live with a man:
‘A man?’
‘Yes.”
‘Could you be more specific?’
‘Tallish…’
‘Don’t be cheeky to your father,’ said her mother, flushed.
‘Have I met him?’ he pursued. ‘No. But Gran has.’
‘Gran has?’ said her father, incredulous, and lowered his head.
‘Only once, Freddie, by accident,’ said Agnes apologetically from her chair by the fire.
‘He’s called Darren and he’s thirty-seven.’
‘But you’re only twenty,’ Susan said, pale and desperate, smoothing her blouse. ‘Darren, you say?’
Her father collected his coat and left the room, saying, ‘Lucy, I’m going home. You can tell me as much as you see fit when you feel like it. Or maybe Gran can tell me next Sunday.’
He apologised profusely that evening for his petulance, by which time he’d got to grips with the anxiety that really troubled him. At the time of her announcement Lucy had recently dropped out of Cambridge, after winning a scholarship at King’s to read Economics. It had been more of a triumph for Freddie than for her — she had made it to the same college to read the same subject as he had done. It was just marvellous … even though Lucy’s interest lay in literature, not the science of wealth distribution. When Lucy left university at the end of her first year, her father entered a sort of mourning. So did Lucy; she wore black and dyed her hair. For a short while she attacked the structure of Capital by drawing Income Support. Her father spoke to his old college ― the place was open for the next academic year. But she found a job as a finance clerk for a small company that manufactured pine chairs. Pine chairs? Freddie cried. Yes, and a few tables. Oh my God, he said. Her mother bought a rocker. And then, at a party, Lucy met Darren, who had a lively interest in Lenin. He was the only person she knew who’d read the lambent phrases of Joseph Schumpeter. He introduced her to the vast, liberating plain of Other People’s Misery but he quarried his authority from Lucy’s lack of self-esteem. Age and force of manner overwhelmed her innate, cultured sophistication and she became a disciple. The large house called Home fell under the heavy sword of ideological scrutiny. She moved out. There was little Freddie could say. Her mother cried and cried.
The most interesting aspect of this episode was that Agnes didn’t like Darren either. But she knew instinctively that it had to run its course. As a consequence, while Lucy knew Darren she kept visiting her grandmother; she rarely went home. That was the thing about Agnes, and in it lay a mystery: while she was inaccessible to ‘normal’ people the route was left open for ‘outsiders’; like the bag-lady she frequently met in the park; like Lucy, in a way
Then, long after Darren had left the scene, Lucy turned up at Chiswick Mall, Agnes’ home, while her father was listening to the cricket (he’d lately discovered its secret joys, but only after the other two ‘had been bowled out’).
‘Dad, I’ve got a place to read English at King’s College.’
‘Cambridge?’ he said, alight.
‘No, London.’
He smiled broadly At least it had the same name as his alma mater. Susan baked a cake. And Agnes, the person who had always been there, to whom there was never a homecoming, pretended nothing had happened.
3
In leaving the cut and thrust of chair sales and becoming an undergraduate, Lucy entered another sort of No Man’s Land that was not altogether unattractive. She had made no lasting friendships in the office and her new youthful companions at King’s were broadly interested in drinking and running through the preliminary stages of an emotional crisis that would probably flower in the second year. This was familiar, uninviting territory. And so, in her first year studying English, aged twenty-five, Lucy found herself between a life she had left behind and a future that was yet to find a shape.