The Scent of Dried Roses Read online

  On one occasion we head off to the beach at Ponchartrain in Florida. We fool around with beach umbrellas, while Helma takes photos. In some ways, despite – or maybe because of – the tension so obvious within him, I am aware of caring more about him than I ever have before. His vulnerability makes him approachable. I feel a great sadness and empathy, but our habit of rivalry is so deep, I have no idea how to express it. I cannot escape the idea that we are locked into some entirely pointless and self-destructive game which we would both like to stop playing but cannot work out what game it is, or even that it is a game.

  For some reason – some new harsh comment by Helma, some new atmosphere between them that pushes them apart – Jeff does something that utterly shocks me. Right there on the beach, he drops the umbrella, falls to his knees and covers his face with his hands. He looks up at me and says, Tim, I’m so fucked up… so fucked up, and begins to cry.

  I have never seen my brother cry and I feel a great wrenching inside me. I want to fall to my knees and put my arms around him and hug him. I want to tell him what I have never been able to tell him, that I love him. But I am afraid. I am afraid he will shrug me off and turn his back, as it seems he has always done before.

  Helma, also embarrassed and uncertain, says, Let’s go, and takes my arm. I resist for a moment. Jeff is still crouching on the beach, head in hands. I feel sorrow and love, fighting with fear, and it is the fear that wins, as it has too often in my life. We walk away, along the beach.

  When we return, Jeff is standing up and looking brisk and decisive. There is no sign whatsoever that anything untoward has happened. When he speaks, he is tight and matter-of-fact, determined to restore the ramparts: Right. I know this restaurant. And the matter is never spoken of again.

  When I return to England, and university, everything remains unresolved. I have met Kate now on a few occasions. She has insisted passionately that she still loves me and will soon ‘make a decision’ once she ‘sorts herself out’. My weakness occasionally wells up into a kind of tide of firmness, to end the whole thing once and for all. I even know it is what will get her back. But I also know that the very act of making the decision will cauterize my feeling for her. The paradox seems insoluble and I agonize over it endlessly. The very power of decision, of choice itself, seems to be sapping from me and this weakness makes me hate myself.

  One afternoon, a few weeks after the term has commenced again, Becka comes up to me in the library and asks me to go outside. She seems agitated about something. I think as usual how attractive she is, but I have long ago put away any hope of it coming to anything. She takes me out on to the steps and glances around to make sure that no one is looking. Then she says some things I don’t at first understand.

  Look I’ve got something to tell you.

  Hmmm.

  It’s just that… look it doesn’t matter if…

  I look at her, perplexed. I have never seen her like this. She seems to be holding something vital back.

  Come on. Spit it out.

  It’s this. I’m in love. I’ve fallen in love.

  I am surprised to feel a shock of disappointment. I wonder who it could be, and feel envy without even having a focus for it. I am also taken aback, because she seemed so close and committed to her boyfriend.

  Well, that’s great. Who with?

  She looks at me strangely, as if I’m being idiotic. She is walking: stump, stump, stump.

  With you. With you, of course. I’m in love with you.

  My jaw, quite literally, falls open, and I stare at her in astonishment. She begins to gabble.

  Of course, it doesn’t matter if you don’t feel the same, we can still be friends, but I couldn’t keep it in, I had to say something. I mean, what do you… are you…?

  The puzzlement in me grows. The unspoken question within me is this: why on earth would someone like Becka say she was in love with someone who was… what? Absent. For some reason, I am reminded that she is trained as an actress. Ridiculously, I think she is acting. I mutter that I love her too, and I know that I do, that I must do, because she is so like me. She seems transfixed with excitement; already she is making plans. She decides that she will telephone her boyfriend that evening to break off their relationship, but does not want to talk any more, because she feels it will be unfaithful to do anything until he knows.

  We walk to Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Becka, who thinks of herself as a woman of strong morals, nevertheless allows herself a kiss. As I hold her, she seems to become fluid, ecstatic in my arms. I feel her lips against mine. Yet the smooth stone in my chest does not shift, or soften, and it feels as cold as ever.

  That night, Becka leaves her boyfriend, who is devastated and himself proceeds towards an eventual nervous breakdown. Shortly afterwards, and virtually without asking, she moves in with me. In a mirror image of my unquestioning vanity and certainty over Kate, she has no doubt whatsoever that I could be anything but grateful for her offer. She holds nothing back. An extraordinary passion is unleashed. She seems to want to consume me entirely, both physically and spiritually. She tells me quite clearly that she has found the person she wants to spend her entire life with. She stares at me as we walk along, as if enraptured by my very existence. I feel unable to live up to this idealization and it makes me feel uneasy, ridiculous. I retreat a little more. I am only vaguely conscious of my own fear.

  My life is so good now. I imagine that people envy me Becka, my money, my youth, my success. But in a state of depression, the agony lies not in the poverty of your life but the inaccessibility of the goodness of your life. The most natural thing in the world – to have feelings – you have forgotten how to ‘do’.

  Predictably, when Kate finds out about Becka, she desperately and immediately wants me back. Determined to win that battle, I take her back and leave Becka. Somehow and for some reason ‘winning’ has become very important. But it becomes quickly clear that Kate remains unsure, that her hand has been forced. And now I am unsure too. The deadness has spread to encompass my feelings towards Kate too and thickens inside still further and deeper. I feel that I am becoming some sort of robot. After a few weeks, I send Kate away and go back to Becka. She is overjoyed, and I wonder at her ability to feel emotions that for me seem more and more like memories, fantasies. Nevertheless, I know I must give this relationship a try, for it is the one I have always hoped for and dreamed of. I will work at it, although the faith in the future that is so naturally part of my parents’ world continues to elude me.

  I need that faith, for without it the tension between what life should be and what it feels like increases and tightens. What seems to go on inside me is bizarre. It is not that my feelings are absent – I feel my love for Becka, powerful and primal – but I cannot reach them. It is as if they exist behind a protective glass screen that cannot be breached. I pound on the glass, I hammer at it with my fists, but it will not give, not an inch.

  It is not long after this episode that I truly, I think, begin to go mad.

  Up until this point, the 1980s for Jean have been mainly definable simply as a time of ever-increasing leisure. James is nearly grown now, so there is less and less for her to usefully do. Jeff and I, of course, have long left home. With no career other than her job as a school dinner lady, she is becoming, in a sense, unnecessary. To fill this new gapping and loosening of her life, every weekend, and on a Wednesday evening in the summer, she and Jack go to Greenford Tennis Club. It has taken Jean a long time to pluck up the courage to join – she is terrified as always that her wig will be caught in a gust of wind and tumble into the exposing air. Afternoons in the week – for Jack is working only mornings now at the greengrocer’s shop – they go to Perivale Park Golf Club. One or two evenings a week Jean learns ‘art’. The remainder of the time is portioned out between gardening and housekeeping.

  The idea of a tennis club, of a golf club, of an art class, seems to hint at social aspiration and clipped, tight outer suburbia. In fact Greenford Tennis Clu
b is three worn-out courts with faded lines corralled between a square of terraces behind the Greenford Road, decorated with a crumbling Nissen hut, backed on to by gardens with sparse rockeries and creosoted sheds. They manage to survive by holding periodic bring-and-buy sales and themed social evenings. Perivale Park Golf Club is a nine-hole municipal course popular with plumbers’ mates, gas fitters and truanting pupils from the local comprehensive. The art class takes place at Hanwell Community Centre, and sticks mainly to landscapes and still lifes of fruit and flowers copied from books and magazines. This subtopia is still in all essentials respectable working class; philistine, mildly prejudiced, decent, polite, self-sufficient, restrained, ‘up’ have-a-goers. Their lives revolve entirely around their families and their hobbies.

  As I have said, my whole family is competitive, but no one more so than my mother and I. When she plays, despite now being in her mid-fifties, she skips about the court, her jaw thrust forward, her eyes darting. The remotest drop shot, she chases as if her life depends on it. She curses any unforced error: Sugar! or Bum! But she is always polite and well behaved, a good loser, as she has learned to get used to being. I am worse and disgrace myself by shouting forbidden words like fuck and bollocks. I will throw my racquet at the floor or whack balls into the air. We are never angry with others, only ourselves. We are both very determined people and imagine ourselves – wrongly, I suspect – to be in a condition of constantly falling short of our possibilities.

  On one occasion she challenges me to a game of singles. I presume she just needs a knock-up, because I am twenty years younger than her, stronger, coached and more consistent. But she insists on playing a proper set, and it is clear immediately that she intends to win. From the moment the first ball is played, she does not smile. Her face is creased in concentration and she chases everything unremittingly. She still holds the racquet as if she is playing badminton, and because her natural tendency is always to hit down on the ball, as if executing an overhead smash, she is forced to crouch right down in order to hit her shot. She is incredibly tenacious and dogged. As if a challenger at Wimbledon, she does not make eye contact when we change ends and marches across without a word.

  Sometimes, with glorious hubris, after her serves she even rushes the net on her short, stumpy legs in an attempt to volley the return away. Since she is just over five feet tall, I lob her easily, but she tries again. Jean is not one to give up. In the end, I win 6–3, but it has not been as simple as I imagined. I am impressed, but not surprised, at the fight in her, knowing of old that iron streak in her pincushion-soft centre. She stalks off the court, red-faced, smiling only formally, with jaw still set as if something has been proved, which, of course, it has.

  As with all such clubs, certain rivalries develop between particular players. There is one woman, Beryl Hall, who has been at the club longer than nearly everyone else. She has a skin that is leathery, almost always tanned, and a slightly buttoned-up manner that suggests a certain snobbery. Underneath she is nice, Jean asserts, but then she thinks everyone is nice underneath; yet there is a presumption about her that irritates. She is the kind of person who – on this level, at least – always tends to win, in the way that our family, for reasons unknown, always tend to come second. It annoys Jean. Jean is never a top-line player at the club, but year after year she gets close to winning the women’s doubles, playing with her childhood friend Irene Downhill. Yet it is always Beryl, with her partner Marian Melhuish, who squeezes away with the title. And somehow, Beryl always seems to assume that this will always be the case, and, assuming it, makes it so.

  One year around this time, Jean makes the final again with Irene, and, as usual, they are pitted against Beryl and Marian. As always it is close. The first set goes to Beryl and Marian, 8–6, the second to Jean and Irene, 6–4. Irene is wild and aggressive on court, veering between artistry and uncontrolledness. Jean is solid as a rock, chasing back to retrieve Irene’s missed volleys, never making an unnecessary shot. On this occasion she is playing the game of her life. Marian and Beryl are the favourites, but this could go either way.

  Suddenly Irene finds her top form. Everything she goes for flies off her racquet like a bullet, an inch or two above the net and just inside the tramlines. Always temperamental, she is suddenly devastating. Jean raises her game a corresponding notch and Marian and Beryl find themselves being peremptorily crushed. Jean and Irene go 5–2 ahead. They have one game to win for Jean to take the title – any title – for the first time in her life. Her face is a mask of desperate concentration. She is oblivious to everything outside. Jack and Jamie and I are watching, cheering her on.

  A wise tennis player, as he is a wise man, my father is especially tense because he knows that in situations like this, somehow, strangely, games become no longer a matter of luck or talent, but a matter of faith, a test of belief. If you are a certain kind of person, they are defining moments in their way: are you a winner or a loser? If you have always thought of yourself as a loser, do you have the strength of character to transform yourself? An inner dialogue takes place, an urging that transcends the relative trivia of the event. A question is asked. Am I really – really – any good? Do I have what it takes?

  Jean and Irene go 40–15 up in the eighth game of the final set. It is effectively all over. Then Irene nets a simple shot, then another. It is deuce. The wind begins to change. Marian hits a clear winner, then Beryl lobs Jean on to the line: 5–3.

  Now Irene’s game, always mercurial, collapses. Just as every time she touched the ball before she triumphed, now she nets it or sends it flying out of court. Jean watches, grim-faced, faith drifting, as the points are thrown away like husks. She does not falter, but the game is moving away from her now. It is 5–4, then 5 all.

  Now the thrust is with Marian and Beryl, the conviction that is their natural right returns to them. It all slips away: 6–5, 7–5. Game, set and match. Jean, on court, drops her head, then picks it up. She is stiff with disappointment. She shakes hands wordlessly with Irene, then Beryl and Marian, with a smile that uses the wrong muscles. Beryl looks at her, trying politely to conceal the fact that it was always a foregone conclusion.

  Jean comes off the court, stumping, tightly packed. There is an aura about her that means no one tries to talk to her. A few people say ‘bad luck’, but she does not respond. Her knuckles are white around her tennis racquet. Irene is apologizing to her, but she does not respond.

  My heart turns over for her. I know how much this has meant to her, this tiny tournament, in this eighth-rate club. I know she has received final, irrevocable confirmation that she will never, in this, her chosen arena, on her own terms, make the grade. As she approaches me, I reach out to give her a hug. Whenever in my life I have done this before, she has responded warmly, gratefully. But on this occasion she averts her eyes, shrugs me angrily off and mutters, through the tightest of lips, Leave me alone! and then makes her way briskly to the ladies’ toilets, where she locks herself in a cubicle and cries as silently as she can.

  Oh, she is so much like me, my mother, in some ways. She sometimes thinks, despite a spectrum of evidence to the contrary, that she is stupid and not worth very much. She reaches out for a sort of perfection and, always failing to achieve it, beats herself up. Thus winning – doing – takes on some existential importance.

  It’s only a game, says my father, often, infuriatingly. But it isn’t, it isn’t only a game, and he knows it. Everything’s more than it is. Everything, however small, represents something larger.

  Jean feels herself inadequate in other areas. At golf, she goes secretly to lessons in the hope of one day beating my father, a goal which she never achieves. Like all golfers, she finds the game is largely about a tolerance of fate, and suffering silently, an art she has perfected. When she has had a bad game, she walks around the tiny course in complete silence, lost in her own particular emotions, cursing herself and urging herself, Come on, Jean! but she never really improves beyond a certain level.
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br />   As always, it is not others she is competing against but herself. This is most apparent in her art classes, probably the least competitive pastime she indulges in. Yet it remains clear that she is determined to punish herself, complaining that her paintings are not up to scratch. Jack insists on having them framed and hung on the walls to reassure her that they have some value, but she finds them unsatisfying, short, as ever, of what she believes herself to be capable of.

  Every Thursday now she goes to art lessons with Olive and another friend, Margaret, who works at the school with Jean. They go to Margaret’s house or sometimes to the house of the art teacher, Ellen. Ellen has taken them on privately, for free, after the Community Centre class becomes oversubscribed. Ellen is a generation younger, middle class, well spoken, but she becomes firm friends with Olive and Jean, whom she considers both wise and kind. She sees that they are inarticulate, careful with words, but have a way of communicating their goodwill in between the silences in which they paint together.

  Ellen suffers from depressions and undergoes long-term therapy, which she believes finally to be useless. During this time, Olive and Jean listen to her self-lacerations quietly, with sympathy and good advice. Neither ever complains of anything herself. Ellen grows to respect them for their solid kindness and common sense, their lack of self-absorption. She grows, in a way – and it is not too strong a word, for my mother, almost magically, often occasions this response in people – to love them.

  The art classes are always much the same. There will be tea and some kind of cake, and music. If they are at Margaret’s, this will most probably be Mario Lanza, or Paul Robeson singing ‘Ol’ Man River’ and ‘Mighty Like a Rose’. Perhaps Margaret will play The World’s Loveliest Music: The Classical Collection. Jean’s particular favourite is Deanna Durbin’s ‘Spring in my Heart’, or ‘It’s Raining Sunbeams’ or ‘Home Sweet Home’. Most of the time as they paint they will sit in silence, but this is not to say they do not communicate. There are different kinds of silence and theirs is warm, open, connected. When Arthur, my father’s brother and Olive’s husband, dies of a heart attack in 1981, the group closes in and around Olive, supporting her, although the matter is hardly discussed. Jean makes up a room for her immediately at Rutland Road; she can stay as long as she likes.