‘Don’t worry,’ she told him softly, reaching out and taking hold of his hand. ‘It can’t be anything too catastrophic. Your mother would have told you over the phone if it had been.’
She didn’t question his decision to go north. She knew him well enough by now to realise how seriously he took his role as the eldest in the family; substitute father-figure to his younger siblings in many ways since his parents’ divorce. She had observed the way not just they but also his mother depended on him and, although her heart ached protectively for him when she saw how much he worried about them, she couldn’t blame them for their dependence on him.
She had only met his family once. He hadn’t really wanted her to… had argued angrily against her decision to accompany him on one of his visits home; but she had insisted, knowing intuitively that, if she gave in, his family and his openly ambivalent feelings towards them and the life he had left behind would act as a barrier between them.
He might have prepared her for their poverty, for the vast gulf that lay between him, with his energy for life, his ambition, his determination, his awareness and control over his life, and their poverty and apathy; but what he had not prepared her for, obviously because it had not occurred to him to do so, had been the shock of discovering that his mother could more easily have passed for his older sister.
He had been nearly twenty then and had looked older. His mother, who had given birth to him days after her sixteenth birthday, was still, amazingly after having five children, small and almost fragilely slender, her anxious eyes turning to her eldest son not just for his support, but for his approval as well, Zoe had recognised on a welling tide of her own emotion.
Ben had only told her the bare facts of his early upbringing, and then half reluctantly. His parents had divorced when he was in his early teens, his father disappearing, leaving the family completely without his emotional and financial support.
Reading between the lines, she had guessed that Ben had taken on to his own shoulders the role abandoned by his father, and then, without knowing her, she had resented Ben’s mother on Ben’s own behalf for her selfishness in allowing such a young child to take such an appalling burden.
Now that resentment had gone, but in its place had been born a determination never to treat Ben as his family did, using him as an emotional and financial support, taking from him instead of giving.
And with that in mind she smiled generously at him now and swallowed her own disappointment at the disruption of their precious shared time.
‘You can have the bathroom first,’ she told him. ‘I’ll go and make the coffee.’
On their days off breakfast together was normally a special leisurely ritual. She made the coffee while Ben went down to the small bakery a couple of streets away to buy fresh croissants still warm and buttery from the ovens.
Zoe acknowledged that she was lucky in never seeming to put on any extra weight no matter what she ate, but then her job was very physically demanding, with long hours and missed mealtimes.
She hadn’t said anything at work yet about their plans. It had been hard enough getting her job as it was. Like everyone else, the large hotel chains were cutting back on expenses and staff. Only the fact that she had among the best exam results in her year had secured her a coveted job as a very junior trainee.
She had been with the company several years now, had completed their training scheme and had been lucky enough to be offered her present job as junior undermanager of their Heathrow hotel.
A plum job with a minute salary and the ferocious expense of travelling by car to work from the flat she and Ben shared. Silly perhaps, when she could have lived in or even at home with her parents, but it was worth all the hassle… all the time, all the travelling… all the hours she spent alone while Ben was still working… worth it for the precious wonderful time they did get to spend together.
Once Ben had gone, she rang her parents’ number. Her mother answered the phone, pleasure quickening her voice when Zoe announced her plans.
‘Darling, I’d love to see you. Will Ben be coming as well?’
‘No. Not this time.’
‘Oh, dear, what a shame. Never mind.’
Zoe grinned to herself as she heard the note of relief underlying her mother’s pretended disappointment. As products of the Sixties, with all that the decade’s culture had embraced, her parents had been determined to bring her up free of the shibboleths, the petty tyrannies and restrictions, the prejudices from whose shackles they and their whole generation had so enthusiastically and gloriously cut themselves free, and she knew how it both astonished and appalled them that they should have suffered such an extraordinary sea-change, such a reversion to the middle-class mores of their own parents, which they had assumed they had successfully thrown off where her own relationship with Ben was concerned.
Valiantly they battled to keep this horribly unegalitarian backsliding into middle-class morality hidden from their daughter, but Zoe was as much a product of her own decade as they were of theirs; she knew them too well, had lived with them too long, had grown to maturity alternately caught between amusement and disbelief at their naïveté and lack of awareness of what the real world, her world comprised to suffer any sense of ill-usage at their reaction to Ben.
As she had laughingly confided to one of her oldest friends, a girl like herself, born to the same kind of free-thinking, liberal if somewhat woolly-minded parents, ‘I think the parents are more shocked at the way they’re reacting to Ben than I am. Mummy said to me after the first time she’d met him, “Poor Ben… He’s been so financially and socially disadvantaged.” She can’t even bring herself to say that he’s working-class, poor darling. She still lives in a world where class differences aren’t supposed to exist. I think she sees my relationship with Ben as some sort of physical desire for some rough manual worker type that will probably pass. She believes I’m oblivious to the class differences between us when of course I’m not. Neither of us is. Poor Mummy, she doesn’t really understand that it’s different now. Ben and I don’t live in some dream-world where we think that love can conquer everything. We know it’s going to be hard… that we’re going to have to work at it. It’s not like it was for our parents, going through life doped up to the eyeballs on pot and sex.’
‘No,’ Ann had agreed wryly. ‘My mother seems to think that because Matthew and I live together we spend our entire lives in bed having sex. She actually apologised for disturbing me the other day when she rang me up at eight in the evening. I nearly told her I’d only just come in from work; that I had a file of balance sheets I’d brought home with me to work on; that Matthew had gone to the supermarket to do the shopping and that we’d be lucky if either of us got to bed before midnight, and that once we did the last thing either of us would feel like doing would be making love. But you can’t disillusion the poor darlings, can you?’ Ann had added, wrinkling her nose.
Zoe’s parents had a house in Hampstead, the fashionable part, bought just before the first of the big property booms with the help of a cash wedding present from both sets of parents who had been delighted and fervently relieved to discover that their offspring were finally legalising their union.
They had met at university; had taken the hippy trail to India together, returning with matching flowing locks and caftans. They had got married in them; scarlet ones. Zoe had seen the photographs, which were not among those now displayed in the plain tasteful heavy silver frames which decorated the pretty antique tables in her mother’s sitting-room.
As an investment banker, her father had done well in the Seventies and Eighties. Zoe had gone to St Paul’s, where she had worked hard enough to get a very satisfactory nine O levels. Her parents had confidently expected her to go on to university and had been shocked when she had told them what she wanted