When Edith got pregnant that summer, she’d already had her offer from Cambridge.
It would be quite wrong to suggest Ian made her get rid of it, but his silences over the dinner table forced them all to contemplate how seriously everything was hanging in the balance. Ian had a way of making his face say, ‘I am shattered by my disappointment,’ which could sting you to the heart. Ian was Edith’s raised bar. She strained to please him, and in that striving she did well, Miriam admiring the discipline of their work together because it counterbalanced the elastic feel of her love. Miriam was forever wavering, uncertain of where she should draw the line with the children, while Ian had been made of sterner stuff. ‘Never back down when it comes to children,’ he would say. ‘It’s the beginning of the end.’ And she thought, what rot. They’re people – why on earth shouldn’t they win sometimes? Have one over on you? Get away with it?
Edith got her four As and her place at Cambridge, and she had gone about with Jonti and got pregnant. Miriam stood silently beside Ian’s disapproval, not because she was angry, but because she felt a baby at eighteen was nothing to wish for. Edith’s ‘death instinct’, someone had said – was it Patty, who was doing a course on Freud? Miriam thought it was a more complicated mistake than that – more ambivalent, less destructive.
Miriam and Jonti sit amid the forest of turned wood in two rocking chairs. He has turned the ‘closed’ sign on the door and made her some green tea, which is foul but she sips it so as not to hurt his feelings.
‘I’m so sorry, Mrs H,’ he says, and she likes it that he’s calling her that again. She had liked being the mother of teenagers – their sweet, ungainly hulks taking up all of her kitchen, like little children in dressing-up bodies.
‘Thank you, Jonti. Your work – all this – it’s so impressive. How have you done it?’
‘Built it up slowly. I was an apprentice for a long time for a nice old chap in Whitechapel. I’ve only had this place a couple of years. There are still quiet periods where I think it’s going to go belly-up, but so far I’ve had a lot of return business and good word of mouth, so touch wood.’ He doesn’t have to reach far.
‘Well, I’m not surprised. I mean, the craftsmanship is extraordinary. I saw Christy yesterday. She said she was saving for a sideboard. Oh, Jonti, she’s got lovely children – two girls.’
His face darkens and she realises she has been insensitive. After the abortion, Edith had become dissatisfied with him. ‘No ambition,’ she’d told Miriam, and Miriam thought it was Ian talking. She witnessed Edith being cruel – putting Jonti down when they discussed politics or literature during family meals. ‘Like you’d know,’ she’d said to him when he’d once ventured an opinion on Iraq, and Jonti, in his mild way, had sloped off out of their lives, rather bruised but without rancour.
‘I’m sorry she was cruel to you,’ Miriam says now.
Jonti shrugs. ‘It’s in the past. I’ve made peace with it, Mrs H. I hope she’s all right, really, I do. I think about her a lot since it was on the news.’
‘You’ve not heard from her?’ she asks, though it is pointless.
He shakes his head. ‘I’d have told you straight away. Haven’t seen her since that summer. That was not a good time. It took me a long time to, y’know, process what happened and then to let it go.’ Jonti’s mother talking. Miriam remembers how she used to moo on about ‘emotional auras’, with her frizzy black hair and post-divorce depressed face. She was learning about aromatherapy and healing, and fed him nothing but lentils.
‘But you did,’ Miriam says sadly. ‘More’s the pity. I thought you two could have made a go of it.’
‘Did you?’ he says. ‘You never let us know that.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I didn’t, did I?’
Edith has missed out on this gentle man with his big hands and his slow pace and his tolerance. She could have had that sideboard in her lounge, for starters. He would have laid her a lovely floor, put up shelves. There are worse things.
They have fallen into silence and Miriam realises she and Jonti don’t have anything to talk about. That period is gone and they can’t even reminisce fondly, so sour did it turn. Another thing she has forgotten in the swim of nostalgia: Jonti is humourless. Perhaps it wouldn’t have worked out between him and Edith after all – you need a sense of humour to get through marriage.
For a time, she and Jonti sit among the herd of sideboards and chests of drawers, sipping horrid green tea as the buses rumble past outside.