Playing for the Ashes by Elizabeth George
I’m ashamed of the person I was. Chris says there’s no point to shame. He says, “You were what you had to be, Livie. Let it go,” but I’m never able to do that. Every time I think I’m close to opening my hand, spreading my fingers, and letting memory spill out into the water like sand, something jars me and stops me. Sometimes it’s a piece of music I hear or a woman’s laughter when it’s high-pitched and false. Sometimes it’s the sour smell of laundry left unwashed too long. Sometimes it’s the sight of a face gone hard with sudden anger or a glance exchanged with a stranger whose eyes look opaque with despair. And then I’m an unwilling traveller, swept back through time and deposited on the doorstep of who I was. “I can’t forget,” I tell Chris, especially if I’ve woken him when the cramps take my legs and he’s come to my room with Beans and Toast at his heels and a glass of warm milk, which he insists I drink. “You don’t have to forget,” he says as the dogs settle on the floor at his feet. “Forgetting means you’re afraid to learn from the past. But you’ve got to forgive.” And I drink the milk even though I don’t want it, with both hands lifting the glass to my mouth, trying to keep from groaning with the pain. Chris notices. He sets to with massaging. The muscles loosen again.
When this happens, I say, “I’m sorry.” He says, “What’ve you got to be sorry for, Livie?”
There’s the question, all right. When I hear him ask it, it’s like the music, the laughter, the laundry, the sight of a face, the casual exchange of a glance. I’m the traveller again, swept back and swept back to face who I was.
Twenty years old and pregnant. I called it the thing. I didn’t see it as a baby growing inside of me as much as I saw it as an inconvenience. Richie saw it as an excuse to clear out. He was gracious enough to settle the account with the desk clerk before he disappeared, but he was ungracious enough to let the desk clerk know that I was officially “on my own” from that time on. I’d burned enough bridges with the Commodore’s staff. They were only too happy to evict me.
Once I was on the street, I had a cup of coffee and a sausage roll in a caff across from Bayswater Station. I considered my options. I stared at the familiar red, white, and blue of the underground sign until its logic and the cure for my ills became apparent. There it was, the entrance to both the Circle and District lines, barely thirty yards from where I was sitting. And just two stops to the south was High Street Kensington. What the hell, I thought. I decided then and there that the least I could do in this lifetime was give Mother a chance to drop her Elizabeth Fry act in exchange for a good bout of Florence Nightingale. I went home.
You’re wondering why they took me back. I expect you’re one of the sort who never cause their parents a moment’s grief, aren’t you, so you probably can’t fathom why someone such as myself would have been welcomed back anywhere. You’ve forgotten the basic definition of home: a place where you go, you knock on the door, you look repentant, and they let you in. Once you’re inside with your bags unpacked, you break whatever bad news has brought you there in the first place.
I waited two days to tell Mother about the pregnancy, coming upon her while she was marking papers from one of her English classes. She was in the dining room at the front of the house, with three stacks of essays piled on the table in front of her and a pot of Darjeeling tea steaming at her elbow. I picked a paper from the top of a stack and idly read the first sentence. I can still remember it: “In exploring the character of Maggie Tulliver, the reader is left to ponder the distinction between fate and doom.” How prophetic.
I tossed the paper down. Mother looked up, raising her eyes above the level of her reading glasses without lifting her head.
“I’m pregnant,” I told her.
She set her pencil down. She took off her glasses. She poured herself another cup of tea. No milk, no sugar, but she stirred it anyway. “Does he know?”
“Obviously.”
“Why obviously?”
“He’s done a runner, hasn’t he?”
She sipped. “I see.” She picked up her pencil and tapped it against her little finger. She smiled for a moment. She shook her head. She was wearing gold earrings in the shape of coiled ropes and a necklace to match. I remember how they all glittered in the light.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said. Another sip of tea. “I thought you’d come to your senses and broken away from him. I thought that’s why you’d returned.”
“What difference does it make? It’s over. I’m back. Isn’t that good enough?”
“What do you intend to do now?”
“About the kid?”
“About your life, Olivia.”
I hated the schoolmarm in her tone. I said, “It’s my business, isn’t it? Maybe I’ll have the kid. Maybe I won’t.”
I knew what I intended to do, but I wanted her to be the one to suggest it. She’d been posing as a woman of Great Social Conscience for so many years, and I felt the need to unmask her.
She said, “I’ll need to think about this,” and went back to her papers.
I said, “Whatever,” and began to leave the room.
As I passed her chair, she put out her hand to stop me, resting it for a minute—and I suppose unintentionally—on my stomach where her grandchild grew. “We won’t be telling your father,” she said. So I knew what she meant to do.
I shrugged. “I doubt he’d understand. Is Dad clear on where babies come from in the first place?”
“Don’t make a mockery of your father, Olivia. He’s more of a man than what walked out on you.”
I used my index finger and thumb to remove her hand from my body. I left the room.
I heard her get up and go to the sideboard; she opened a drawer and rustled round for a moment. Then she went to the morning room, punched some numbers into the phone, and began to talk.
She made the arrangements for three weeks later. Clever of her. She wanted me to stew. In the meantime, we playacted at something between normal family life and a guarded truce. Mother tried several times to engage me in conversation about the past—largely dominated by Richie Brewster—and the future—a return to Girton College. But never did she mention the baby.
It was nearly a month after Richie left me at the Commodore when I had the abortion. Mother drove me, with her hands high on the steering wheel and her foot pumping the accelerator in fits and starts. She’d chosen a clinic as far north in Middlesex as one could go, and as she drove us there through a dreary morning of rain and diesel fumes, I wondered if she’d picked this particular clinic to make certain we didn’t come across any of her acquaintances. That would be exactly like her, I thought, that would be utterly in hypocritical character. I hunched in my seat. I shoved my hands into the opposite arms of my jacket. I felt my mouth tighten.
I said, “I need a fag.”
She said, “Not in the car.”
“I want a fag.”
“That’s not possible.”
“I want it!”
She pulled over to the pavement. She said, “Olivia, you simply cannot—”
“Cannot what? Can’t smoke or it’ll hurt the baby? What shit.”
I wasn’t looking at her. I was staring out of the window, watching two men unload dry cleaning from a yellow van and rustle it into the doorway of a Sketchley’s. I could feel Mother’s anger and her attempt to master it. I enjoyed the fact that not only was I still able to provoke her, but that she had to battle to keep her persona in place whenever she and I were together.
She said with great care, “I was going to say that you cannot go on like this, Olivia.”
Brilliant. Another lecture. I settled my body and rolled my eyes. “Let’s just get on with our business,” I replied. I gestured towards the road with a wiggle of my fingers. “Let’s move it along, Miriam, all right?”
I’d never called her by her first name before, and as I made the shift from Mother to Miriam, I felt the balance of power swing my way.
“You take pleasure out of pe
“Oh please. Let’s not start.”
“I don’t understand that sort of nature in a person,” she said in her I’m-the-voice-of-reason tone. “I try but I can’t understand it. Tell me. Where does your nastiness come from? How am I supposed to deal with it?”
“Look, just drive. Take me to the clinic so that we can get on with business.”
“Not until we talk.”
“Oh Jesus. What in hell do you want from me? If you expect me to kiss your hand like all those sods whose lives you’re messing about with, it’s not going to happen.”
She said reflectively, “All those sods…” and then, “Olivia. My dear.” She moved in her seat and I could tell she was facing me. I could imagine well enough what her expression was because I could hear it in her tone and I could read it from her choice of words. My dear meant I’d given her an opening to display a rush of comprehension and its attendant compassion. My dear set my teeth on edge and skilfully wrenched the power back. She said, “Olivia, have you done all this because of me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Because of my projects, my career, my…” She touched my shoulder. “Have you been thinking I don’t love you? Darling, have you been trying to—”
“Christ! Will you shut up and drive! Can you do that much? Can you bloody well drive and keep your eyes on the road and your sticky hands off me?”
After a moment to let my words bounce round the car for maximum effect, she said, “Yes. Of course,” and I realised I’d played the game her way once again. I’d allowed her to feel the injured party.
That was the way things were with my mother. Whenever I thought I had the upper hand, she was quick to show me what was really what.
Once we arrived at the clinic and filled out the paperwork, the procedure itself didn’t take long. A little scrape, a little suction, and the inconvenience in our lives was gone. Afterwards I lay in a narrow white room in a narrow white bed and thought about what Mother expected of me. Weeping and gnashing of teeth, no doubt. Regret. Guilt. Evidence of any kind that I had Learned My Lesson. A plan for the future. Whatever it was, I wasn’t about to accommodate the bitch.
I spent two days in the clinic to take care of some bleeding and an infection that the doctors didn’t like. They wanted to keep me for a week, but that wasn’t on as far as I was concerned. I checked myself out and went home by taxi. Mother met me at the door. She had a fountain pen in one hand, a buff-coloured envelope in the other, and her reading glasses on the end of her nose. She said, “Olivia, what on earth…The doctor told me that—”
I said, “I need cash for the taxi,” and I left her to deal with it while I went to the dining room and poured myself a drink. I stood by the sideboard and gave serious thought to what I was going to do next. Not with my life, with the evening.
I tossed back one gin. I poured another. I heard the front door close. Mother’s footsteps came down the corridor and stopped in the dining room doorway. She spoke to my back.
“The doctor told me there was some haemorrhaging. An infection.”
“It’s under control.” I swirled the gin in my glass.
“Olivia, I’d like you to know that I didn’t come to see you because you made it quite clear you wouldn’t have me there.”
“That’s right, Miriam.” I tapped my fingernail against my glass, noting how the sound got deeper when I moved from bottom to top, in direct reversal of what one would expect.
“When I couldn’t bring you home the same night, I had to tell your father something so—”
“He can’t deal with the truth?”
“So I told him that you’ve been in Cambridge, seeing about what you’ll need to do to be readmitted.”
I laughed through my nose.
“And that’s what I want you to do,” she said.
“I see.” I drained my glass. I thought about having a third drink, but the first two were acting on me more quickly than I had expected. “And if I don’t?”
“I imagine you can guess the consequences.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That your father and I have decided we’re willing to support you at the University but nowhere else. That neither one of us is going to stand by and watch you throw your life away.”
“Ah. Thanks. Got it.” I set my glass on the sideboard, crossed the room, and pushed through the doorway.
“You can think about it until tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll want your decision in the morning.”
“All right,” I said and I thought, Stupid cow.
I went upstairs. My room was on the top floor of the house, and by the end of the climb my legs were shaking and the back of my neck was damp. I stood for a moment with my forehead resting against the door, thinking, Fuck her, fuck this, fuck them all. I needed to get out for the night. That was the cure and the ticket all at once. I headed for the bathroom where the light was better for fixing up my face. That was when Richie Brewster phoned.
“I miss you, baby,” he said. “It’s over. I left her. I want to make you feel good again.”
He was phoning from Julip’s, he said. The band had just signed on for a six-month gig. They’d been playing a circuit in The Netherlands. They’d scored some decent hashish in Amsterdam, they’d smuggled it out, Richie’s share had Sweet Liv imprinted all over it, it was just sitting back stage waiting for me to smoke it.
He said, “Remember how good things were at the Commodore? It’ll be better this time between us. I was a fool to walk out on you, Liv. You’re the best thing that’s happened in my life in years. I need you, baby. You make me make the music like no one else.”
I said, “I got rid of the kid. Three days ago. I’m not in the mood. Okay?”
Richie was nothing if not a musician. He didn’t miss a beat. He said, “Oh, baby. Baby. Oh hell.” I could hear him breathing. His voice got tight. “What can I say? I got scared, Liv. I ran. You came in too close. You made me feel things that I didn’t expect. Look, what I felt was too much for me. It was like nothing I’ve ever felt before. So I got scared. But my head’s on right this time. Let me make it up to you. Let me do things over. I love you, baby.”
“I don’t have the time for this sort of bullshit.”
“It won’t end like before. It won’t end at all.”
“Right.”
“Give me a chance, Liv. If I balls it up, I lose you. But give me a chance.” And then he just waited and breathed.
I let him do both. I liked the possibility of having Richie Brewster right where I wanted him.
He said, “Come on, Liv. Remember how it was? It’ll be better.”
I weighed the alternatives. There seemed to be three: a return to Cambridge and the noose-round-the-neck life that Cambridge implied, a stint on the streets trying to make it on my own, and another try with Richie. Richie who had a job, who had money, who had dope, and who was telling me he also had a place to live now, a ground-floor flat in Shepherd’s Bush. And there was more, he said. But he didn’t have to tell me what it was. I knew because I knew him: parties, people, music, and action. How could I choose either Cambridge or the streets when, if I merely took myself to Soho this moment, I’d be in the middle of a real life?
I finished working on my face. I grabbed my bag and a coat. I told Mother I was going out. She was in the morning room at Grandmother’s davenport, addressing a stack of envelopes. She took her glasses off and pushed back her chair. She asked me where I was going.
I repeated myself. “Out.”
She knew, the way mothers always do. “You’ve heard from him, haven’t you? That was he on the phone.”
That was he. English teachers. Even in a crisis, they keep their guard up against the grammar police. I didn’t reply.
She said, “Olivia, don’t do this. You can make something of your life. You’ve had a bad time, darling, but it doesn’t have to mean the end of your dreams. I’ll help you. Your father will help y
I could tell that she was building up a good head of preaching steam. Her eyes were taking on that fiery look.
I said, “Save it, Miriam. I’m out of here. I’ll be back later.”
The last was a lie, but I wanted her off my back. She quickly changed directions. “Olivia, you’re not well. You’ve had a bout of serious bleeding, not to mention an infection. You’ve had”—was it my imagination or did her lips have a hard time forming the word?—“surgery only three days ago.”
“I had an abortion,” I said and was pleased to see the shudder of aversion pass over her.
“I think it’s best that we forget and go on.”
“Right. Yes. You forget your way back to your envelopes while I go on.”
“Your father…Olivia. Don’t do this.”
“Dad’ll get over it. So will you.” I turned.
Her voice changed from reason to calculation. She said, “Olivia, if you leave this house tonight—after everything you’ve been through, after all our attempts to help you…” She faltered. I turned back. She was clutching her fountain pen like a dagger although her face looked perfectly calm.
“Yes?”
“I’ll wash my hands of you.”
“Get out the soap.”
I left her working on the appropriate bereft-mother expression. I went out into the night.
At Julip’s, I stood by the bar, watched the crowd, and listened to Richie play. At the end of the first set, he shouldered his way through the bodies, ignoring everyone who spoke to him, his eyes fixed on me like lead to a magnet. He took my hand and we went to the back, behind the stage. He said, “Liv. Oh, baby,” and he held me like crystal and played with my hair.
For the rest of the evening, I stayed back stage. We smoked hash between sets. He held me on his lap. He kissed my neck and my palms. He told the other blokes in the band to shove off when they came near us. He said that he was nothing without me.
We went out to a caff for coffee when Julip’s closed for the night. The lights were bright there, and I noticed right off that Richie didn’t look good. His eyes were more like a basset hound’s than they’d ever been. His skin was loose. I asked him had he been ill. He said that breaking off with his wife had been tougher on him than he thought it would be. He said, “Loretta still loves me, baby. I need you to know that because there’s not going to be any lies between us any longer. She didn’t want me to leave. She wants me back even now. But I can’t face things that way. Not without you.” He said the first week without me had shown him the truth. He said he’d spent the rest of the time trying to get up his courage to act on the truth. He said, “I’m weak, baby. But you give me strength like no one else.” He kissed the tips of my fingers. He said, “Let’s go home, Liv. Let me do it right.”