That Part Was True (8 page)

These discussions, though, about food particularly, for the wedding and engagement party had at least helped to open the way for Eve to talk to Izzy more freely than she ever had. It was an area where respect was being shown to her by her daughter. Izzy seemed genuinely glad of her opinions and sought them. Something was moving between them, re-forming, in a slow drip, like jelly through muslin. Eve felt maybe her therapy had helped her with Izzy, but there was something else, too, something about Izzy. Perhaps marriage, Ollie, and although she would never have said it, the wane of her grandmother's influence, had altered her.

Eve put her glasses down on top of one of the magazines that the house was suddenly strewn with—
Bride
,
Wedding
—and smoothed her hair with her hands. She was still unused to its new length.

“It makes you look years younger,” the girl who'd cut it at the bright little hairdresser's in Sudbury had said.

Izzy, though, had eyed the jaw-length sweep suspiciously, unhappily even. This latest alteration in her mother seemed to strike her as something of an assault. And now Eve was about to introduce another anomalous element, an even more tumultuous one.

“I have had a letter from your father,” she said.

Izzy did not look up immediately from her magazine, but then she did. “Have you?”

Eve was reminded of a time when Izzy, about eight, had stolen some truffles from the larder and eaten them hurriedly standing behind the door. She'd emerged with her mouth and chin still streaked with chocolate. But when asked if she had taken them, she had said, “No,” and shaken her head emphatically with this same expression: guilty. Eve felt suddenly very bad. Why should a child feel guilty about seeing her own parent? About wanting to see him. She had not stolen anything, simply taken what was hers by rights.

“He said he wanted to see something of you, and I was wondering how you felt about that,” Eve said softly.

Izzy put her magazine down and ran her hands across her eyes; it was a simple gesture, but it disclosed a deeper weariness. In Izzy it was mildly shocking. She never seemed anything other than superbly in control, or at least had not until recently.

“Are you all right, dear?” Eve asked, feeling a wave of great tenderness. She fought the rise in herself of that ache, the ache she had felt when she'd broken down that night with Gwen, an ache born of carrying too many things inside for too long. Too many heavy, crushingly heavy things. How selfish she had been not to realize that perhaps Izzy had had her own burdens. She had always seemed so brusque.

Izzy began to cry.

Eve stood and went to her daughter and, mirroring Gwen's gift to her, allowed her to weep while she waited at her side.

Izzy, recovering herself rather quickly, seemed shy about her outburst. She fumbled for a tissue in the pockets of her long cardigan—the color of green olives, it set off her eyes. She got up wordlessly and went into the kitchen. Eve heard the faucet run.

Coming back, Izzy stopped, leaned her long frame in the doorway, and sipped the water before turning and depositing the glass on the top of the cupboard near the pantry door, where Eve kept vases. Then she blew her nose on a paper napkin and took up the same position in the doorway again.

“I suppose you're angry,” she said defensively.

Eve was shocked. “Why would you think that I was angry?” she asked.

“About me seeing so much of him. Simon…Daddy.”

Daddy, how incongruous it still sounded, Eve thought. Although “Dad” would have been just as inappropriate—too familiar, too suggestive of some long, established relationship—the kind of relationship that had progressed through cuddles on knees to playful kisses on the cheek and then back-chat and banter. The kind where school nativity plays and dance recitals had already paved the way to the biggest performance of all: the wedding. Such a lot Izzy had missed and Simon, too. And Eve. Eve had missed all of those things as well. It was Virginia with whom Izzy had shared them. Once, Eve remembered painfully, another parent at a school open day had taken her, Eve, trailing in Virginia's wake, for the nanny. She had failed her daughter as surely as Simon had.

Neither she nor Izzy spoke for a moment, and then Eve said, “Izzy, do you want to spend more time with your father?”

Izzy sank down the door frame and sat on the small raised landing that separated the kitchen from the conservatory. She bent her knees and put her arms around them and rested her chin on top.

“I used to dream that he would come and get me,” she said very quietly. “I used to think that he would come and be all handsome and kind.” She paused to wipe her nose again. “And then, well, now that he has…he is.” She lifted her head to look at her mother.

“Is he?” Eve replied.

“Yes, he is. He's exactly like I imagined him, and instead of making me happy, it's made me so…sad. Sad and confused. I can't explain. It's changed everything. It's changed who I thought I was. Because it's not just him. If it were just him, that would be one thing, but it's not. He has a family,” she finished, almost breathless. Then, suddenly apologetic, she said, “I'm sorry, I don't suppose you like that idea any more than I do.” Her voice had hardened up again when she said this, which dulled slightly the rare bright spot of insight and sympathy toward Eve's feelings.

Eve thought for a moment. Then she said, “Actually, I don't mind. Or at least I don't mind as much as I thought I would. As much as I would have minded once. I'm a bit muddled about it, too.”

“His wife has had cancer,” Izzy said. “Breast cancer.”

“I see.”

“She's all right now, though. Or at least they think she's going to be.”

“It must have been a very difficult time for them.”

“I think he really, really loves her and those boys. He really loves them. When he told me about the cancer, he had tears in his eyes. Real tears. I thought he might break down, and then he showed me photographs of them all, the youngest sons and the other boy from the second marriage. They were all on some beach together…on a beach…on bloody holiday. Why didn't he ever want to take me on holiday? Why didn't he love
me
?” She had screamed this last word, her face racked with pain and turned up to the ceiling.

Eve had felt the scream deep in her gut. Deep in some visceral part of her, hitherto denied or shut down. The mother-love part. The animal mother-love part that had not engaged, lit up, or whatever it was supposed to have done when Izzy was born, and which Eve had deflected with disconnectedness ever since. She got up and went to her child and enveloped her in her arms and felt her tears soak the cotton of her blouse.

“Oh, dear girl,” she said. “We let you down so.”

Jack sliced fennel,
put it into a cut crystal bowl, and added lemon and sugar, vinegar and cream. Then he seasoned it and put the bowl into the refrigerator.

I am cooking these days
, he'd written to Eve:

Eve turned the chili jelly over in her hand and marveled at its color, amber red and perfectly clear when she held it up to the kitchen window. Then she put it down again and thought about Jack's vegetarian. She didn't know why she cared about Jack's vegetarian. And, in fact, had struggled to admit to herself that she did. But she did.

Previously she had given surprisingly little thought to Jack's romantic life, probably because she had none of her own, she thought, with a nip of reproof. But despite this void, she was convinced from the start that the vegetarian represented just that—a romance, a new woman in Jack's life. She found herself searching for mention of them as a pair. Jackson Cooper was the sort of person, she guessed, who was invited to film premières and the like—parties that were written up in newspapers. She could not imagine living in such a world, but then she could not have imagined that she would ever know someone who did.

Of course, she reminded herself, she did not know Jack. Not really.

Certainly Eve did not know that, while he was often invited to the sorts of events she had mentally conjured, Jack rarely went to them. He had tired, some years previously, of that sort of social life, although he had kept it up for a long time after the weariness had set in. Marnie had loved the parties and the people. Jack had not. Jack had dreamed for many years of solitude, and maybe the kind of woman who would look across at him, over a book, once in a while, and smile.

Eve busied herself with the preparations for Izzy's and Ollie's engagement party, although there wasn't much for her to do once the menu had been agreed upon—drinks and canapés in the end.

“She'll have a matron of honor for that sort of thing,” Gwen said sternly when she saw Eve putting invitations into envelopes. She was right, Amy was proving perfectly competent.

“Amy has her hands full with this hen party trip they're going on,” Eve insisted.

Gwen tutted. “I was married in my mother's dress and my auntie made the cake,” she said. “These young women want it all. And you wait, it's not just the wedding. They expect to start married life with everything. All the things we've worked all our lives for.”

“I didn't, Gwen,” Eve said.

But Gwen had already realized her mistake. “I just meant…”

“I know what you meant. You and George
have
worked hard all your lives. I admire that. It's taken me a long time to realize that my own life has been pampered in many ways. I haven't appreciated it. I've spent all my time thinking about what I've lacked and none of it thinking about what I've had.”

“You've always been very generous to me and to my family,” Gwen said. “And now you're doing the volunteering. That's a worthwhile thing. Very worthwhile.”

Eve smiled. She had been working at the Red Cross shop once or twice a week for a month now. But then she leapt up, dropping her pen, and cried out, “Oh, no…,” and ran into the kitchen.

“The shortbread,” she called, sliding her hands into a checked oven glove. She tugged a metal tray from the oven. “Saved!” she announced, holding the tray up to Gwen, who'd followed her. “Thank heavens. Geraldine loves shortbread.”

Her hair, in its new loose style, had fallen across her face. She brushed it back and laughed.

Gwen thought she looked, not only younger, but beautiful.

Jack was intending to serve the fennel salad with a white bean soup and butternut squash ravioli. He'd enjoyed planning the menu, enjoyed having to cook within these new boundaries. But then Adrienne had arrived and presented him with two ears of corn.

“We can have them tonight,” she'd said, laying them, the husks flaking and dry, on the countertop.

Jack had not had the impression that she was making a suggestion, or expecting a response. He had looked at the corn and consciously not made one. Adrienne had so far resisted his food. She ate in the same contained way that she did everything else. Not so much without pleasure, as without need. He would cook the corn.

“You let me sleep again,” she said now, coming into the kitchen. Her hair was hanging straight and smooth over her shoulders as if it had just been brushed. It always looked that way.

“Why wouldn't I? It's a Saturday evening in late September. That's the kind of thing us lazy-ass, middle-class, first-world folks get to do.”

“Are you mocking me, Jackson?”

“No, honey,” he said, kissing her forehead. “Mockery's too cheap for you.”

“You shouldn't go to all this trouble.”

The kitchen was filled with steam and cooking debris.

“Who said it was for you?” he said.

She laughed.

“We don't talk about you enough,” Jack said as they stood later, watching the sun begin its majestic dip below the horizon. They had donned sweaters to eat outdoors.

Adrienne turned and looked up at him, bemused.

“I'm learning,” he said.

“What bit did you want to talk about?”

“Like I say, I'm learning.”

She laughed. “You're good at flirting, aren't you?”

“I had three big sisters and a slew of aunts so I mastered that stuff in kindergarten. It's the talking to women I never got good at. I always got what I wanted from them without it, I guess.” He grinned broadly at her then, in part to mask this confidential tone.

“And now? Are you getting what you want now?”

He pulled her to him. She leaned in, in a lithe embrace.

“Seem to be,” he said.

He served the corn first and watched as she lifted her own contribution to the meal with a circumspect hand and then ran a knife, precisely, along two rows of kernels so that they fell in a pile on her plate. She put the ear down and proceeded to eat the kernels individually, cautiously, as if they were something she was tasting for the first time.

“I've been invited to a gallery opening on Wednesday. I wondered if you'd like to come into the city for it,” she said.

Jack had lifted his own corn and was about to bite it. There was butter on his fingers. He wanted to say no, but a psychological palm raised itself in his brain. Stop, it warned. He liked this woman; what would it cost to make her happy?

“Why not?” he said. “Want some butter for that?” He pushed the dish toward her, but she declined.

“Actually,” she said, “I say that I'm a vegetarian, but in fact I'm considering giving up all animal-based products.”

“I don't think I could do that,” he said slowly. There was no challenge in his voice. Adrienne did not incite challenge in him. “I don't think I could limit my food choices, even if I can, intellectually anyway, accept the concept.”

“No,” she said. “I haven't asked you to.” Her voice, though not adversarial, had assumed a sort of quiet moral high ground.

Jack laughed. “Baby,” he said. “You bring out the good guy in me, you really do. But I'm a red meat kinda guy.”

He was relieved when she smiled.

The gallery opening was star-studded; the artist was connected and on the rise. Adrienne had taken the portrait of him that graced the catalog. From Jack's point of view, this was the most interesting part of the evening. He found the work derivative and the crowd uninteresting. But Adrienne seemed to be enjoying herself and he put on his best face for her sake. She looked stunning in a simple green dress that highlighted the length of her neck and the translucence of her skin. He had not been surprised when the other photographers, standing in a small pack on the pavement, had taken her picture on the way in.

Eve, peering at her computer screen, thought Adrienne—Adrienne Charles, the caption said—looked like a willow, a willow in spring. Jack looked exactly the way that he looked on his book covers: relaxed, tanned, good-looking, and masculine. Very masculine.

I went to a shindig in New York this week
, he wrote:

No, she wasn't.

She was, however, considering the fact that her friendship with Jack was really much emptier than she had convinced herself that it was. Something had been altered by that photograph, that real-time image of him with his hand laid, so evocatively, on the arm of a beautiful young woman. It had been replaced by something she was more familiar with, the feeling that she was in the shadows while somebody else shone.

I have no particular love of city life these days
, Jack wrote:

Eve did not answer this message. Five days later she received this one:

If Jack's visits to the city were buoyed by his delight in visiting restaurants, they were marred slightly by Adrienne's lack of enjoyment in this same pastime. He had taken her to Lucio's, where she had laid the menu down after the briefest peruse before ordering a salad and a mineral water. The waiter, who had described the evening's offerings to them with religious gravity, had repeated Adrienne's order back to her, blank-faced, before turning to Jack with an expression which seemed, with the subtlest of brow movement, to say, “Well, sir, I tried.”

After that, Jack had taken to going out for lavish lunches alone, while Adrienne was at her studio. Then in the evening they would go together, somewhere local, where he would order modestly while she talked about her day, or he would fix himself something simple in her tiny kitchen, which was as clinically immaculate and ostentatiously equipped as the kitchen of every noncook.

They had fallen into a routine where he visited her for two nights during the week and she came to his house on the weekends. It had been, so far, uncomplicated. An undemanding wander along a wide promenade.

One night, walking back to her apartment with a supply of groceries selected by Jack, Adrienne said, “I'm not sure that photography is an art.”

“Sure it is,” Jack replied. But her expression, in profile, was serious. “Anything is an art if you do it right,” he confirmed.

“I like the idea of that, Jack. But I don't know that it's true. Maybe we're just talking semantics. Maybe it's just that we need better words, better definitions for words, but there are some things that have soul in them, and some that do not. There are some things that require a kind of gut response. I don't have that. My approach is quite scientific.”

She had delivered this in her usual measured way without breaking the uniform stride he had become accustomed to, walking beside her, but he sensed, nevertheless, some feeling. A depth of feeling, he realized, that he had not felt from her before.

“I know what you mean,” he said. “I haven't got it either.”

“Yes, you have.”

“Nope, I think I've been looking for it lately, but soul has definitely eluded me.”

“Possibly, lately,” she agreed. She slowed a little then and went on, “I haven't said, because I know I shouldn't, but I noticed that you haven't been working at all. I hope I wasn't the distraction. I don't want to distract you, Jack.”

They had reached Adrienne's building and paused there, beneath the three narrow steps that separated the front door and cramped lobby area from the street.

“You don't distract me, Adrienne. You…” What, he thought, what was it that he got from Adrienne? “You steady me. You're like a nice long patch of smooth sea.”

She smiled dispassionately. “That's nice,” she said. “But I saw that play you wrote, Jack. You're an artist. And I know it's a sensitive area, but I hope you might do something like that again.”