The Reading Group Part 28

'Oh, Maggie.'

'It went on for about two years without me having a clue, you know? Can you believe that?'

'I suppose I can, if you didn't want to recognise the signs. How did you find out in the end?'

'I caught them together one day.'

'Oh, Christ.'

'No, no, not like that. Not in bed or anything. I went in to his office one day I don't remember what for. They were there, not kissing or anything, but I just knew, you know? You could tell from the way they were together. Standing too close, maybe. Don't know. That night at home I asked him about it and he said it was true. He didn't apologise. He said he was glad I'd found out, it had been a burden, keeping it from me all those months.'

'What did you do?'

'I said I was glad he'd been able to unburden himself, slapped his face, and left the house, the street, Melbourne. Never went back.'

'That was brave.'

'D'you think? Pretty stupid, if you ask me. He got the house, pretty much everything in it, and the receptionist. I got b.u.g.g.e.r-all.'

'Is that when you went to Sydney?'

She nodded. Susan remembered when Maggie had moved. She just hadn't ever told them it was without Greg.

'Why didn't you tell us?'

'Pride, I think. That and shame. I know it sounds ridiculous, but in those days I was young and naive enough to think I'd get divorced and find someone else. I figured if I waited until I was married to another guy, you wouldn't worry about me or dwell on the failure.'

'But you never did?'

'I guess he screwed me up more than I thought he had.'

'I'm so sorry, Maggie.'

'See, Suze? That's why I never told you. That face. I don't want pity. I don't want sympathy.'

'Why not? They're part of love, Maggie, part of caring about someone else. What's so wrong with that? Do you think I show the boys sympathy when they're hurt, when they've failed an exam or been dumped by a girl they liked, or dropped from the football team?'

Maggie shrugged.

'Of course I do, and not because I see them as weak, or failed, but because I love them.'

Her sister gave her a half-smile that got nowhere near her eyes. 'See, Suze? I told you. I'm a lost cause.'

'You're not a lost cause, Maggie.' She came and sat beside her.

Margaret bristled a little. 'I'm not a project, either.'

'For G.o.d's sake, I'm not trying to treat you like one. I'm trying to treat you like a sister, if you let me.'

Margaret smiled properly at this time. 'We could try that, I suppose.'

Susan nudged her, gently, with her shoulder. And Margaret nudged back.

October.

Reading Group.

Rebecca.

DAPHNE DU MAURIER 1938.

'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...'

Working as a lady's companion, the heroine of Rebecca learns her place. Her future looks bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Max de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise. She accepts, but whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to the ominous, brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory of his dead wife Rebecca is forever kept alive by the forbidding housekeeper, Mrs Danvers...

Not since Jane Eyre has a heroine faced such difficulty with the Other Woman. An international bestseller that has never gone out of print, Rebecca is the haunting story of a young girl consumed by love and the struggle to find her ident.i.ty.

'I have news about Clare, everyone,' Susan said. 'She's decided what to do with herself Mary told me yesterday. Clare asked her to let us know. I think Mary half hoped she would come along and tell us herself, but I guess she can't face that.'

Polly looked down at the book on her lap.

'What, then?' Nicole asked.

'She's jacked in her job at the hospital. She's going to Romania with one of those aid agencies Save the Children, I think Mary said to work in one of those orphanages. She trained as a nurse before she went into midwifery, of course, and they're still crying out for medical staff over there. Mary says just because it's dropped out of the world's consciousness it doesn't mean the problem's gone away. She'll be there for at least a couple of years, Mary thinks.'

They could all recall what they had seen on the news hard for anyone to forget, let alone a mother. The rows and rows of high-sided cots with tattered bedlinen occupied by thin, haunted-looking, hollow-eyed children whom no one wanted, no one loved. The sense of Clare's decision was obvious to all of them, but this didn't underestimate what it meant for her to do this. It meant she had accepted that she wasn't going to have children of her own. It meant she had recovered to the point where she could see a world outside her own misery, and could want to do something about it. It was huge, and they all felt humbled by it.

'b.l.o.o.d.y good for her.' Harriet was the first to speak. 'She'll be brilliant.'

'She will. Her parents must be so proud of her.'

'They are,' Susan said, 'except that they know they're going to miss her horribly, and worry about her constantly.'

'She'll be fine. She was always a lot stronger than she looked inside, I mean,' Nicole said. 'It'll probably save her.'

'I hope so.'

'I'm glad for her.'

Harriet was remembering a day about three years earlier. She'd been sitting in a coffee-shop in town, having palmed off the kids on her cleaner. She'd been desperate for a break. She had a serious baby belly left over from Chloe, was wearing no makeup, and had just picked up a copy of the Daily Mail, which someone had left on the seat beside her. She'd heard her name, and turned to see a girl she knew from college Sarah. She'd always liked her, but their worlds had only ever overlapped, and they hadn't stayed in touch after graduation. She looked fabulous, all ethnic and stylish and thin, and Harriet had wanted to hide behind the Femail guide to bikini diets and die.

Sarah had given no indication that she was appalled by Harriet's appearance, or reading material, had ordered herbal tea and sat down beside her. It turned out she worked for the United Nations in Africa, co-ordinated all the charity contributions. She'd been living in Mombasa and Nairobi for the last six years and was home on her annual trip to stock up on Marmite and Tampax. 'And what about you?' she'd asked, all open-faced and interested. 'What are you up to these days?' Harriet had pulled out the credit-card holder from her Louis Vuitton handbag and shown Sarah the pictures of Josh and Chloe. That was it. Harriet had tried to tell herself that Sarah would probably swap it all tomorrow for a husband, a couple of cute babies and an Aga. She had told herself she was a Judas for denying the children, denying the joy and the fulfilment and the satisfaction of being their mother. But she hadn't even convinced herself. For the last seven or so years she'd been having Josh and Chloe, been making a real hash of raising them. And that was it. That was all. Didn't feel that much, that morning. And it didn't now. Not with Tim gone. Not with Clare doing this amazing, brave, selfless thing. She couldn't remember ever having been more miserable.

The red lights on the baby monitor began dancing, and Spencer's insistent cry was broadcast into the moment. 'Sounds like someone wants to join the reading group. Has he finished the book, though?' Susan said.

Polly was secretly pleased she had hoped he would make an appearance so that she could show him off to the others. Harriet and Nicole hadn't even met him yet. He was a sociable little thing; he'd probably woken for a cuddle, rea.s.surance. She excused herself and went upstairs.

Spencer turned his head as he heard the door open and stopped crying. Polly could hardly wait until he was old enough to stand up in his cot and hold out his arms to be picked up that was the best welcome in the world, even at five in the morning. She held him up to her shoulder and stroked his bald little Friar Tuck patch. 'Are you coming down, then, little man? Did you want to meet Granny's friends? Well, all right, then.'

Downstairs, Susan was pouring more wine, and the oven timer was going off. Polly handed Spencer to Nicole, who was in the armchair nearest to the door. 'Here. Could you take him while I go and switch that off?'

Harriet jumped up between them. 'Me, me! I'll have him.'

Nicole smiled at her, but said, 'You wait your turn, Harry. I'll take him, Polly.'

'Thanks.'

Nicole couldn't believe how small, warm and solid he felt. She couldn't conjure up the feeling of her own children when they had been this small. She put him against her neck to smell him. She remembered the fragrance. Harriet came and sat on the arm of her chair, watching her. 'He's gorgeous, isn't he?'

'He is. Absolutely lovely.' She didn't want to hold him any more. She laid him flat and pa.s.sed him up to Harriet. 'You take him.'

'Okay.' Harriet stood behind her, jiggling him. He felt like heaven. Her big sister Charlotte, the one who lived in Canada, had given birth to her first child, Fergus, when Harriet was about twenty. She'd been with a girlfriend Natalie from college at her parents' house in Shrops.h.i.+re for Natalie's twenty-first birthday when he'd been born. She'd been so happy, she remembered, and she'd delighted in giving all these details date, time, name, weight, length to Natalie's mother. He was the first baby in the family, Harriet had said, and she couldn't imagine how he felt. Natalie's mother had wrapped Aga-warmed old-fas.h.i.+oned weights in a few terry tea-towels, seven pounds' worth, and handed the bundle to her. 'It feels a bit like that,' she had said, and Harriet had sat with it on her lap, imagining the new life.

Now she looked at Spencer and remembered Tim talking about a new baby. She had dismissed the idea out of hand. First it would have meant regular s.e.x with him for a few months and second, she had been so sure she didn't want to go through it all again. The vast bulk of herself beforehand. The agony and indignity of childbirth, and then the leaking b.r.e.a.s.t.s and st.i.tched bits. The sleeplessness. And the cycle of babyhood: lying inert, then rolling over usually from the bed to the floor, which was how Harriet had discovered a new level of mobility in her children. Crawling. The back-breaking just-walking stage. And those were the easy bits. Screaming and rigid in pushchairs, snotty and sullen in supermarket trolleys.

Holding Spencer now, she thought she would give everything she had to be cradling Tim's baby, with him beside her.

'So how many people had read this before we just did it for group?'

The others shook their heads. 'Just me?' Nicole said. 'I'm surprised. Clare was a fan, I remember. I just a.s.sumed we'd all have read it as younger women I was only about fifteen when I first read it and I was interested in how we'd read it as older women.'

'I always meant to, a bit like War and Peace,' Harriet said. 'I just never got round to it.'

She wasn't her normal self this evening, Susan thought. Quiet. And she looked awful, all grey round the edges. Perhaps the shock of Josh's accident was catching up with her. She knew from Roger that it could happen like that. She'd try to s.n.a.t.c.h a chat with her later, see if she was okay.

'I've been waiting for the miniseries.' Polly laughed. Under the circ.u.mstances Polly was looking pretty good. No sleep, ex-boyfriend who wasn't quite ex enough. She looked to Susan as if she had all the hormonal glow of a new mother without the jelly tummy and didn't seem tired at all.

'Verdicts, then?'

'Loved it. It was great. It had everything. Drama, tension, mystery, rugged hero, arch villain...'

'You're making one of the great Gothic novels of modern times sound like a James Bond.'

'Sorry, but I like something that makes me keep turning the pages. I didn't get it either, that he had killed her. Even when they found the body buried in the boat. I just thought she must have had a lover or something.'

'I didn't really understand why he had married her in the first place. Did I miss something, or do you usually not marry people you can't stand then kill them when you've had enough?'

'Artistic licence, Suze, please!'

'I thought Max was cruel. And I thought there was a quite stunning lack of communication in that marriage. Not at all how a relations.h.i.+p would work in reality. I know she was a mouse, and that she was in awe of him, and then in awe of the house, and the lifestyle and everything, but I had trouble accepting that she was so pathetic she never asked him a single thing about Rebecca, and that he was so cruel he never told her about it, even when it was obvious that she was suffering and confused...'

'I know. It should be a Relate prescribed text, shouldn't it? "The Damage That Miscommunication Can Do To A Marriage". If they'd talked it through in the South of France, things would have been a h.e.l.l of a lot simpler. I mean, they don't even do it, do they, until after he's told her?'

'I missed that.'

'Me too. I rather thought they hadn't done it at all.'

'And there'd have been no book. Hardly a gripping plot, is it? Man who has been unhappily married finds contentment with young second wife? I think you've got to stop applying modern values to it and enjoy it for what it is a splendidly creepy, atmospheric story. De Winter is in a tradition of great heroes, all of them emotionally r.e.t.a.r.ded, who have a bit of mystery and an edge of cruelty like Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre, Hamlet...'

'Here she goes.' Nicole rolled her eyes and c.o.c.ked her head towards Harriet.

'Seriously, though, if you're talking about what makes a "cla.s.sic", doesn't it have to be timeless? Don't you have to be able to apply what you call modern values to it and still find something relevant and pertinent in it? Isn't that the whole point of people like Shakespeare that once you strip away the puffy shorts and the incomprehensible language, he's talking about stuff that still applies the biggies love, jealousy, ambition...'

'And that's true here. Jealousy runs through its core. The new wife, de Winter himself, the deeply twisted Mrs Danvers...'

'Jealousy is more motivational than love here, isn't it, almost?'

'Aha but can you be jealous of things you don't love?'

'No. It always comes down to love in the end, doesn't it?'

'Stop the car!'

Harriet slammed on the brakes. 'What for?'

'Because I can't stand it, that's what for. Can't stand us. Not for another minute.'

'What do you mean?'

'We're doing my head in. Isn't this crucifying you too?'

'Of course it's crucifying me too. I just don't know what to do about it.' Tears were very near the top of Harriet's agenda.

'Don't you cry! Don't you dare.'

Harriet sniffed melodramatically.

'I'll tell you the first thing we're going to do about it. We're going to go in there and have a drink.' Nicole was gesturing at the wine bar ahead.

It was smoky and trendy, and attracted a young, fun crowd, which included a couple of minor celebrities from children's cable television. Harriet looked at Nicole as if she were mad. It was ten thirty. 'Why?'

'Well, because I'm in no hurry to get back to my house, and there's sure as h.e.l.l nothing for you at yours except a surly babysitter, who'll get happier with each extra fiver she earns from you staying out, so why not?'

'I'm not sure a drink is the answer.'

'Yeah? Well, since you don't appear to have any better ideas, I'm prepared to give it a chance. I'm not pregnant, am I? I can drink as much as I want. So can you. We could stay there until closing and get absolutely off our faces, if that's what we wanted to do. There's no one to stop us.'

Harriet still looked unsure. Nicole persisted. 'We used to have fun, you and me. We used to laugh all the time. Now, we've had a fairly f.u.c.king miserable autumn, and I've had enough. I want to have a laugh with you, Harry.'

'I've had two gla.s.ses already, at Polls.'