‘He says you and I made him feel excluded.’
‘He feel excluded! I’ve always felt - left out. All these years I’ve been watching you and Harold and I’ve wished …’ Loyalty had locked her tongue until this moment, but now she came out with it at last: ‘I have a lousy marriage. I have a bad time with Theo. I’ve never … but you knew. And you and Harold, always so happy … I don’t know how often I’ve left you two here and gone home with Theo and wished . . ,’
‘I didn’t know … I mean, I did know, of course, Theo isn’t the ideal husband.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘It seems to me it’s you who should be getting a divorce.’
‘Oh, no, no,’ said Lil, warding off the idea with an agitated hand. ‘No; I once said in joke to Ian - testing him out, what he’d think if I got a divorce and he nearly went berserk. He was silent for such a long time - you know how he goes silent, and then he shouted and began crying. “You can’t,” he said. “You can’t. I won’t let you.’”
‘So poor Tom is going to be without a father,’ said Roz.
‘And Ian doesn’t have much of one,’ said Lil. And then, when it could seem the conversation was at an end, she enquired, ‘Roz, did Harold say that we are lezzies?’
‘All but - well no, not exactly.’
‘Is that what he meant?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ Roz was suffering now with the effort of this unusual and unwonted introspection. ‘I don’t understand, I told him. I don’t understand what you’re on about.’
‘Well, we aren’t, are we?’ enquired Lil, apparently needing to be told.
‘Well, I don’t think we are,’ said Roz.
“We’ve always been friends, though.’
‘Yes.’
‘When did it start? I remember the first day at school.’
‘Yes.’
‘But before that? How did it happen?’
‘I can’t remember. Perhaps it was just - luck.’
‘You can say that again. The luckiest thing in my life - you.’
‘Yes,’ said Roz. ‘But that doesn’t make us … Bloody men,’ she said, suddenly energetic and brisk with anger.
‘Bloody men,’ said Lil, with feeling, because of her husband.
This note, obligatory for that time, having been struck, the conversation was over.
Off went Harold to his university which was surrounded, not by ocean and sea winds and the songs and tales of the sea, but by sand, scrub and thorns. Roz visited him, and then returned there to put on Oklahoma! - a great success - and they enjoyed their more than adequate sex. She said, ‘I don’t see what you’re complaining about,’ and he said, ‘Well, no, you wouldn’t, would you? ‘When he came down to visit her and the boys - who being always together were always referred to in the plural - nothing seemed to have changed. As a family they went about, the amiable Harold and the exuberant Roz, a popular young couple - perhaps not so young now - as described often in the gossip columns. For a marriage that had been given its notice to quit the two seemed no less of a couple. As they jested -jokes had never been in short supply - they were like those trees whose centre has rotted away, or the bushes spreading from the centre, which disappear as its suburbs spring up. It was so hard for this couple to fray apart. Everywhere they went, his old pupils greeted him and people who had been involved in one of her productions greeted her. They were Harold and Roz to hundreds of people. ‘Do you remember me - Roz, Harold?’ She always did and Harold knew his old pupils, like Royalty who expect of themselves that they remember faces and names. ‘The Struthers are separating? Oh, come on! I don’t believe it.’
And now the other couple, no less in the limelight, Lil always judging swimming or running or other sports events, bestowing prizes, making speeches. And there too was the handsome husband, Theo, known for the chain of sports equipment and clothes shops. The two lean, good-looking people, on view, like their friends, the other couple, but so different in style. Nothing excessive or exuberant about them, they were affable, smiling, available, the very essence of good citizenship.
The break-up of Roz and Harold did not disrupt Theo and Lil. The marriage had been a facade for years. Theo had a succession of girls, but, as he complained, he couldn’t get into his bed anywhere without finding a girl in it: he travelled a lot, for the firm.
Then Theo was killed in a car crash, and Lil was a well-off widow, with her boy Ian, the moody one, so unlike Tom, and in that seaside town, where the climate and the style of living put people so much on view, there were two women, without men, and their two little boys.
The young couple with their children: interesting that, the turning point, the moment of change. For a time, seen, commented on, a focus, the young parents, by definition sexual beings, and tagging along or running around them the pretty children. ‘Oh, what a lovely little boy, what a pretty little girl, What’s your name? - what a nice name!’ - and then all at once, or so it seems, the parents, no longer quite so young, seem to lose height a little, even to shrink, they certainly lose colour and lustre. ‘How old did you say he is, she is …’The young ones are shooting up and glamour has shifted its quarters. Eyes are following them, rather than the parents. ‘They do grow up so fast these days, don’t they?’
The two good-looking women, together again as if men had not entered their equation at all, went about with the two beautiful boys, one rather delicate and poetic with sun-burnished locks falling over his forehead, and the other strong and athletic, friends, as their mothers had been at that age. There was a father in the picture, Harold, up north, but he’d shacked up with a young woman who presumably did not suffer from Roz’s deficiencies. He came to visit, and stayed in Roz’s house, but not in the bedroom (which had to strike both partners as absurd), and Tom visited him in his university. But the reality was, two women in their mid-thirties, and two lads who were not far off being young men. The houses, so close, opposite each other, seemed to belong to both families. ‘We are an extended family,’ cried Roz, not one to let a situation remain undefined.
