Playing for the Ashes by Elizabeth George
You see, I was something of a disappointment in my parents’ lives although who I was and what I did affected my mother far more than Dad. That’s to say that Mother was more forthcoming with her reactions to my behaviour. She labelled me in capitals: Such A Disappointment. She talked in terms of washing her hands of me. And she dealt with the trouble I caused in her usual manner: by distracting herself.
You read my bitterness, don’t you? You probably won’t believe me when I say I feel little enough of it now. But I did then. I felt bitter in spades. I’d spent a childhood watching her run from this meeting to that fund-raising event, listening to her tales of the poor-but-gifted in her fifth form English class, and trying to increase her level of interest in me through various means, all categorised under the heading Olivia Being Difficult Again. Which indeed I was. By the time I was twenty years old, I was as angry as a cornered warthog and about as attractive. Richie Brewster was my ploy to communicate my feelings of disgruntlement to Mother. However, I didn’t see that at the time. What I saw was love.
I met Richie on a Friday night in Soho. He was playing saxophone in a club called Julip’s. It’s closed down now, but you probably remember it, about three hundred square feet of cigarette smoke and sweating bodies in a cellar on Greek Street. In those days, it sported blue lights on the ceiling, which were very in vogue despite the fact that they made everyone look like heroin addicts on the prowl for a score. It boasted the presence of the occasional minor royal with paparazzi in attendance. Actors, painters, and writers hung out there. It was the place to go if you wanted to see or be seen.
I didn’t want either. I was with friends. We’d come down from university for a concert in Earl’s Court, four twenty-year-old females looking for a break before exams.
We ended up in Julip’s by chance. There was a crowd on the pavement waiting to get in, so we joined them to see what was what. It didn’t take long to discover that about half a dozen joints were being passed round. We indulged ourselves.
These days, cannabis is like Lethe for me. When the future looks the worst, I smoke and drift. But then, it was a key to good times. I loved getting high. I could take a few hits and be someone new, Liv Whitelaw the Outlaw, unafraid and outrageous. So I was the one who tracked down the source of the weed: three blokes from Wales, medical students out for an evening of music, drinks, dope, and twat. It was clear they had access to the first three already. When they met us, they had access to the rest. But the numbers were off, as we all could see. And unless one of the blokes was willing to do a double poke, one of the women was going to end up in the cold. I’d never been much good at pulling men. I assumed from the first that the loser would be me.
None of the blokes appealed to me anyway. Two of them were too short. The third had breath that smelled like a sewer. My friends could have them.
Once we were inside the nightclub, they involved themselves in some serious groping on the dance floor. That was part of the scene in Julip’s, so no one paid much attention. I mostly watched the band.
Two of my mates had already left the place, saying, “See you back in college, Liv,” which was their way of telling me not to wait round while they got themselves stuffed, when the band took a break. I leaned back in my chair and started to light a cigarette. Richie Brewster lit it for me.
How lame it seems now, that moment when the lighter spurted its flame six inches from my face and illuminated his. But Richie had seen every old black and white film in creation, and he thought of himself as something between Humphrey Bogart and David Niven. He said, “Mind if I join you?” Liv Whitelaw the Outlaw said, “Do what you want,” and arranged her face in a perfect display of b-o-r-e-d. From what I could see, Richie was old, way over forty, maybe closer to fifty. His skin was sagging round his jaw, his eyes were baggy. I wasn’t interested.
So why did I go with him that night when the band played its last set and Julip’s locked up? I could tell you that the last train to Cambridge had left and I had no other place to stay, but the truth is that I could have gone home to Kensington. Instead, when Richie packed up his sax, lit two cigarettes, handed one to me, and invited me out for a drink, I saw the possibility of excitement and experience. I said, “Sure, why not?” and thus changed the direction of the rest of my life.
We went to Bayswater in a taxi. Richie said to the driver, “The Commodore, on Queensway,” and he put his hand high up on my thigh and squeezed.
All the manoeuvring seemed so illicit and adult. An exchange of cash at the hotel desk, two bottles procured, a climb to the room, unlocking the door. Through it all, Richie kept glancing in my direction and I kept smiling conspiratorily at him. I was Liv Whitelaw the Outlaw, sexual animal, a woman with a man completely in her power, eyelids drooped and breasts thrust out suggestively. God, what a fool.
Richie unwrapped the plastic from the drinking glasses that stood on a wobbly chest of drawers. He had three short vodkas fast. He poured a longer fourth and drank that down before he poured me a gin. He snatched up the bottles between his fingers and carried them, along with his drink, to the circular table between the room’s two chairs. These were done up in pea-soup vinyl, and the pink Chinese lantern covering the ceiling light turned them the colour of dying leaves on a rose bush. Richie sat, lit a cigarette, and began to talk.
I can still recall his choice of subjects: music, art, theatre, travel, books, and films. I listened, awestruck by his erudition. I made few replies. I later discovered that silence and the appearance of attention were all that were required of me, but at the moment I thought it was pretty bloody something to be round a man who really Knew How To Open Up To A Woman.
What I didn’t understand was that talking was foreplay for Richie Brewster. He had no interest in fondling female bodies. He got heated up by caressing the airwaves instead. When he’d worked himself up to performance level that night, he rose from his chair, pulled me from mine, put his tongue in my mouth, unzipped his trousers, and pulled out his dick. He wrapped my hand round it while he lowered my blue jeans and probed with two fingers to see if I was ready. He backed me to the bed. He smiled at me, saying, “Oh yes” with great meaning, and took off his trousers. He had no underpants on. He told me later that he never wore them, they got in the way. He peeled my jeans and my pants off one leg. He said, “That’s nice, baby,” apropos of nothing. He took my butt in his hands. He raised my hips. He dived in.
He pumped with a lot of energy. He twined my legs round his back. He caught my hair in his fingers. He breathed, groaned, and sighed in my ear. He said God and Jesus a hundred times. And when he came, he shouted, “Liv Liv Liv.”
Afterwards, he went into the bathroom. The water ran, then shut off. He swaggered back with a towel, which he threw to me with a smile, saying, “You always that wet?” I took it for a compliment. He went to the chest of drawers and poured us both another drink. He said, “Hell, I feel good,” and sauntered back to the bed where he nuzzled my neck, murmuring, “You’re something. Something. I haven’t come like that in years.”
How mighty I felt. How insignificant seemed the sex I’d had before. Until this night at the Commodore, my encounters had been nothing more than sweaty clutching with boys, children who didn’t know the first sodding thing about Making Love.
Richie touched my hair. It was dun then, not blonde like now, and long and straight as a railway track. He fingered a length of it, saying, “Hmm. Soft.” He held my gin glass to my lips. He yawned. He rubbed his head. He said, “Shit, it feels like I’ve known you for years,” and that was the moment I decided I loved him.
I stayed in London. I realised I’d never fitted in at Cambridge, surrounded by toffs, by poofs, and by clots. Who the hell wanted a career in social science—that was Mother’s idea in the first place, and hadn’t she pulled every string in the book to get Girton to take me?—when I could have a hotel room in Bayswater and a real man who paid for it and came round every day for some grunt-and-groan on a lumpy mattress?
I was thoroughly pissed when they got there. It was just after eight in the evening, and I’d been drinking since four. When I heard the knock, I thought it was the desk clerk coming up for the rent. He’d been up twice already. I’d told him the money was Richie’s business. I’d told him he’d have to wait. But he was one of those persistent West Indian types—half smarm and half bluster—and he wouldn’t give it up.
I thought, goddamn it you little nig-nog leave me alone. I threw open the door ready for battle, and there they were. I can see them to this day: Mother dressed in one of those sheaths of hers that she’s been wearing in one variation or another since Jackie Kennedy first made them popular, Dad outfitted in a suit and tie as if he was going on a social call.
I’m sure Mother can see me to this day as well: in one of Richie’s shrunken T-shirts and nothing else. I don’t know what she expected to find in the Commodore when she dropped by that evening. But it was clear from her expression that she hadn’t expected Liv Whitelaw the Outlaw to open the door.
She said, “Olivia. My God.” Dad looked at me once, dropped his eyes, looked again. He seemed to shrivel inside his clothes.
I stood at the door with one hand on the knob and the other on the jamb. I said, “What’s the problem?” and sounded like a victim of terminal ennui. I could see what was coming—guilt, tears, and a round of manipulation, not to mention an attempt to get me out of the Commodore—and I knew it was going to be dreary as hell.
She said, “What’s happened to you?”
“I met a bloke. We’re together. That’s the story.”
She said, “The college phoned. Your supervisors are frantic. Your friends are making themselves sick with worry.”
“Cambridge isn’t part of the picture any longer.”
“Your education, your future, your life,” she said. She was speaking carefully. “What on earth are you thinking?”
I pulled on my lip. “Thinking? Hmmm…Of fucking Richie Brewster as soon as he gets back.”
Mother seemed to grow taller. Dad lowered his eyes to the floor. His lips moved on a reply that I didn’t catch.
I said, “Wha’s that, Pops?” and arched my back against the doorjamb. I was still keeping my other hand on the knob, however. I wasn’t a fool. Give my mother access to that room and life with Richie was over.
But she appeared to be heading for a different course, featuring reason and the hope of Bringing Olivia Back To Her Senses. She said, “We’ve spoken to the master and the senior tutor. They’ll take you back on probation. You’ll need to pack your things.”
“No.”
“Olivia—”
“You don’t get it, do you? I love him. He loves me. We’ve got a life here.”
“This isn’t a life.” She looked left and right, as if evaluating the corridor for its potential to contribute to my education and future. She sounded reasonable when she went on. “You’re inexperienced. You’ve been seduced. It’s understandable that you think you’re in love with this man, that you think he loves you. But this…What you’ve got here, Olivia…” I could see she was trying not to lose control. She was trying to seem like Mother of the Year. But she was coming on the stage too late with her maternal act. Faced with it, I could feel my hackles rising.
“Yes?” I said. “What I’ve got here?”
“This is nothing more than cheap gin in exchange for sex. You must see that.”
“What I see,” I said, squinting at them both because the light from the corridor was beginning to burn my eyes, “is that I’ve got a hell of a lot more than you can imagine. But we can’t expect miracles of understanding, can we? You’ve hardly got experience in the passion department.”
My father said, “Livie,” and raised his head.
My mother said, “You’ve had too much to drink. It’s distorted your thinking.” She pressed her fingers to her temple. She closed her eyes briefly. I knew the symptoms. She was fighting off a migraine. A few more minutes and the battle was mine. “We’ll phone the college and tell them tomorrow or the next day. Right now, we need to get you home.”
“No. We only need to say good night. I’m through with Cambridge. Who can walk on the grass. Who wears what gown. Who’s going to pick apart your essays this term. That isn’t living. It never was. This is.”
“With a married man?”
My father took her arm. Clearly, this was the trump card they’d been holding.
“Waiting for when he has time off from his wife?” And then, because she knew how to use the moment, Mother reached for me, saying, “Olivia. Oh my dearest Olivia,” but I shook her off.
I hadn’t known, you see, and Mother damn well knew it. Foolish little twenty-year-old, full of herself, sexual animal, Liv Whitelaw the Outlaw with a middle-aged man eating out of her hand, I hadn’t known. I should have put it all together, but I hadn’t because everything between us was all so different, so new, so down-and-dirty exciting. But when the facts flashed before me in the way facts do when one’s had a shock, I knew my mother was telling me the truth. He didn’t always spend the night. He claimed it was a gig in another city and in a way it was: in Brighton, with his wife and his kids, at home.
Mother said, “You didn’t know, did you, darling?” and the pity in her voice gave me the bollocks for an answer.
“Who gives a shit, anyway,” I said and followed up with, “Of course I knew. I’m not exactly a cretin.”
But I was. Because I didn’t walk out on Richie Brewster then and there.
You’re wondering why, aren’t you? It was simple enough. I saw no choices. Where could I have gone? Back to Cambridge to play at being a model student while every eye watched me for one false move? Home to Kensington where Mother would act noble as she ministered to my emotional ills? Out on the street? No. None of that was on. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was in control of my life and I was about to demonstrate that fact indisputably. I said, “He’s leaving his wife, if you need to know,” and I shut the door. I made sure it was locked.
They knocked for a while. At least Mother did. I could hear Dad saying, “Miriam, that’s enough,” in a low voice that sounded far away. I rooted through the chest of drawers for a new packet of cigarettes. I lit up, poured myself another drink, and waited for them to give up and shove off. And all the time I thought of what I would say and what I would do when Richie showed up and I brought him to his knees.
I had a hundred scenarios, all of them ending with Richie begging for mercy. But he didn’t return to the Commodore for two weeks. He’d got the word somehow. And when he finally showed his face, I’d already known for three days that I was pregnant.
OLIVIA
It’s a clear sky today—you can’t see any clouds—but its colour’s not blue and I don’t know why. It rises like the back of an unpolished shield behind that dreary monolith of wet-sand flats they’ve built where Robert Browning once lived, and I sit here looking at it and letting my mind play with reasons why it’s lost its colour. I can’t remember the last time I saw a truly blue sky and that worries me. Perhaps the sun’s eating the blue away, scorching the sky along the edges first the way flames burn paper, then sneaking inward with gathering speed until all that ultimately will be left above us is a spinning white fireball hurtling towards what’s already become an ember.
No one else seems to notice this difference in the sky. When I point it out to Chris, he shields h
He’s at work on matching a piece of cornice from a house in Queen’s Park. It’s a fairly easy job because the cornice is wood, which he generally prefers to work with over plaster. He says plaster makes him nervous. He says, “Jesus, Livie, who am I to mess about with an Adam ceiling?” I once thought this was false modesty on his part, considering how many people ask him to work on their houses once the word goes out that another neighbourhood’s being gentrified, but that was before I knew him well. I assumed he was a bloke who’d managed to clean the cobwebs of doubt from every corner of his life. I learned over time that that was a persona he adopted when leadership was called for. The real Chris is just like the rest of us, in possession of a score of uncertainties. He has a nighttime mask that he can pull on when the situation calls for it. In the daytime, however, when power doesn’t count as far as he’s concerned, he is who he is.
I’ve wished from the first that I could be more like Chris. Even when I was the most cheesed off at him—in the beginning when I dragged other blokes back here to the barge with that nasty, knowing little smile of mine and shagged them till they howled and I was sure Chris knew what I was doing and to whom—I still wanted to be like him. I yearned to exchange bodies and souls with him. I wanted to feel free to lay myself out and say, “Here, this is who I am underneath all the cock,” just like Chris and because I couldn’t do that, because I couldn’t be him, I tried to hurt him instead. I sought to push him to the edge and over. I wanted to destroy him, because if I could destroy him, then it meant his entire way of living was a lie. And I needed that to be the case.