Exciting Times(6)

I rang her one weekend when Julian was abroad.

‘Any news?’ she said, clearing her tone of accusation that I’d only call if there were something to disclose. Mam’s genius was that when she avoided implying something, you could hear her doing it.

‘Not much,’ I said.

‘How’s your one?’

Your one, unless otherwise specified, meant Joan.

‘Grand,’ I said.

‘Your man?’

‘Grand.’

Benny. The first time I’d told Mam about my employers, she’d said: ‘They’ll keep you out of divilment.’ In subsequent phone calls she tried to judge how they were doing, and whether they needed help.

‘Any fellas?’ Mam said.

‘Afraid not,’ I said.

I tried to make it sound like I was looking. Mam had the vague impression that girls in search of boyfriends went to nightclubs, something she liked to picture me, a young one, doing. I could have told her I didn’t go because my boyfriend was twenty-eight, but he wasn’t my boyfriend and I’d always hated clubbing.

‘We’ve a hard time keeping up with you,’ Mam said. This comment rarely bore particular relation to whatever I’d just said, but she found it instructive to drop it in.

‘How’s Tom?’ I said.

‘He’s grand. Did I tell you he’s after moving out?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Good lad. Hardworking. Most boys his age you’d need to push out.’

She didn’t want me to agree that it was good her younger son no longer needed her. Equally, she didn’t want me confirming that she should feel defunct because he was leaving before he’d finished college. Mam dealt in conversational quicksands where moving would only trap you more.

(I’d told Julian this and he’d said he never would have guessed that I came from a line of enigmatic women. I’d said: ‘Why enigmatic women? Why do you think I’m a female-pattern enigma? Maybe the men in my family are enigmatic, too.’ He’d said: ‘But you do acknowledge that you’re enigmatic.’ And I’d said: ‘Maybe, or maybe I was just being enigmatic.’) ‘George is well,’ she added. Her listening comprehension deferred to maternal optimism: she assumed that since I’d asked about Tom, I wanted to hear about both brothers. ‘He’s happy with his bonus, did he tell you?’

‘He didn’t,’ I said.

He did. George was a corporate restructuring consultant. This mostly entailed helping companies make people redundant without having to give them severance pay. He did a robust sideline in finding ways to avoid granting women maternity leave.

‘And they think someone on his team will make senior consultant,’ Mam was saying. ‘He’s a hard worker – him and Tom. A pair of workhorses.’

The phrase ‘workhorses’ made me think of ‘workhouses’, then of how commodiously situated George would be running one in a Victorian novel. With my college brain on, I knew many more people lost their jobs when banks like Julian’s played subprime roulette – but the college brain came with a dial. I turned it up for people I hated, and down for people I liked.

‘What about me?’ I said. ‘Am I a workhorse?’

I was trying to be funny, which was an error. You couldn’t joke with Mam on a long-distance call.

‘You’re not getting enough sleep,’ she said.

*

I liked imagining Julian had a wife back in England. I am a jezebel, I’d think. This wine rack was a wedding gift and I am using it to store Jack Daniel’s because I have terrible taste in everything. She is Catholic – in the English recusant aristocrat sense, not the Irish poverty sense – and will never grant him a divorce, and I cannot in any case usurp her as the woman who loved him before life and investment banking strangled him, creatively.

I asked about the wine rack and he said it came with the flat.

I wished Julian were married. It would make me a powerful person who could ruin his life. It would also provide an acceptable reason he did not want us to get too close. The more plausible reading was that he was single and that while I could on occasion discharge the rocket science of making him want to fuck me, he did not want to be my boyfriend. That hurt my ego. I wanted other people to care more about me than I did about them.

As things really stood, I performed petty tasks in exchange for access to him. He jokingly asked me to organise his bookshelf, and when I actually did, he said I was brilliant. From the conditions of the spines I judged that he liked Tennyson, also Nabokov, though they might have been second-hand copies or ones someone else had borrowed. One weekend I made the mistake of pointing out that he should pack for Seoul, and thereafter he expected me to remind him whenever he went on a business trip.

‘You’re so lazy,’ I said. ‘It’d be easier to do it myself than make you do it.’

‘Knock yourself out,’ Julian said, which wasn’t the response I’d been trying to elicit, but I thought it could be fun, like kitting out a Barbie doll for an improbable profession. His clothes all looked the same and he kept a toothbrush and shaving things in a travel bag. I didn’t include condoms, not because I minded his seeing other people but because I was afraid it would seem passive-aggressive.

I wondered when he spoke to his parents. He alluded to conversations with his mum, but I never heard them talking. Eventually I asked.