32. Before
Before
My favorite times are when both families are together, which happens, without fail, on Bobby’s birthdays. He is seven today and it’s doubly special because tonight Jimmy is introducing us to his new girlfriend, Nina.
They met a couple of weeks ago when she was lost in a maze of identical-looking fields and flagged down his tractor. When he heard she was the new publican’s daughter, Jimmy said he’d give her a lift home.
“In that?” Nina said, looking skeptically at the Massey Ferguson with its coating of mud, cow shit, and various other substances.
“Too posh for it, are you?” Jimmy said, riling her before they’d exchanged more than a couple of sentences.
“Hardly,” she said, clambering up next to him.
They’ve been seeing each other ever since and David, Frank, and I are trying our best not to show our relief. The three of us have had plenty of conversations about how best to keep Jimmy on track. Most of the time he’s fine, but there are the drinking sprees that come out of nowhere and often end in trouble. We are all hoping Nina is going to be the answer.
My parents and sister arrive first with a carload of presents. Eleanor is down from London, she always takes the day off on Bobby’s birthday. She is a hotshot solicitor these days, after fighting her way to the top of the firm she first joined as a secretary. She’ll take over one day, I have no doubt about it. She has a flat in Parsons Green, which I have yet to see, and earns more money than Frank and I could dream of, but I wouldn’t swap lives with her, nor she with me. We’re very different these days, Eleanor and me.
“Where’s my favorite boy?” she says, swooping Bobby into her arms.
Her presents are always the best, partly because she can afford it, but mostly because she puts so much thought into choosing them.
When Bobby unwraps her package, he screams: “Oh, my God, Elly!” and Eleanor beats her palms together like a seal; she loves to please him. Inside is a battery-powered record player. Bobby has become obsessed with music in general and Elvis Presley in particular. The farmhouse throbs to the sound of “Hound Dog” and “All Shook Up” turned up so loud, I sometimes wonder if the windows might shatter.
It wouldn’t take much: The frames are mostly rotten, the glass thin and cracked in places. Fixing up the farmhouse has always come bottom of the list.
My mother, Eleanor, and I are cooking tonight’s feast. We’ve become rather good at it. My mother hated cooking when we were growing up and mostly left it to my dad, but she’s a different woman as a grandmother. She rings up weeks before the big day to “menu plan for our prince,” as she jokingly calls him. Tonight it’s beef stew followed by pineapple upside-down cake, Bobby’s favorite. My dad has brought red wine to go with it and Coca-Cola for the birthday boy.
While we cook, Bobby and my father start work on an Airfix model he has given him, peering in confusion at a bag of plastic parts. I hope Bobby never grows out of Airfix, because my father certainly won’t.
One time, watching them together, I asked him if he’d wanted a boy instead of two girls.
“Absolutely not,” he said, not missing a beat. “I’m strictly a ladies’ man. Can’t you tell? But this boy, you would have to admit, is rather special.”
The men come in from the farm at five and take it in turns to wash and change, and by six, we are all assembled around the big oak table, Bobby at the head, wearing a white cowboy hat Eleanor brought down from London.
Nina is not like me at all. If I were walking into a house filled with someone else’s family, I might feel some trepidation. I remember the first time I met David—he barely looked up from his copy of Farmers Weekly . Afterward, Frank told me he had been depressed ever since Sonia died and that was why. But it was a long time before I was able to relax around him, and it wasn’t until Bobby was born we finally became close.
Nina walks through the front door, not bothering to knock, and stands before a table of strangers, a parcel in her arms that is wrapped in gold paper and tied with a red ribbon. “I don’t suppose there are any Elvis fans here?” she says.
“Me!” Bobby shoots his hand up, as if he’s at school.
“Then you’ll be needing this.” She hands over the parcel.
Inside are a pair of blue suede boots she found in a charity shop, a couple of sizes too big for Bobby but fine with a thick pair of socks.
“I’m never taking them off,” he shrieks, parading around the kitchen, showing each of us in turn.
Jimmy scoops up his nephew, lifts him high up onto his shoulders, and runs around the kitchen with Bobby shrieking in delight. And then, of course, it’s imperative to play “Blue Suede Shoes” on the new record player and it transpires that, as well as giving perfect presents, Nina also knows how to dance. She teaches Bobby to shimmy his shoulders and rotate his hips, Elvis style, the two of them snaking across the kitchen floor in their socked feet, while the rest of us look on, laughing.
I will always say afterward that Jimmy fell in love when Bobby was seven years old—and Bobby did too. For the rest of the evening, he watches Nina with eagle-eyed devotion. I can see the thoughts running through his mind: Who is this firecracker and how long can we keep her for?
Dinner with my loved ones follows a familiar pattern. The more wine we drink, the louder we become. There is constant laughter and the odd tense moment when the conversation veers toward politics. When Eleanor becomes heated, slating the Tories, whom David vehemently supports, my mother steps in with a neat subject change.
“Actually we’ve got some news. I’ve been offered a head teachership. But I can’t decide whether or not to take it.”
“Of course you should,” Eleanor says. “High time you had a promotion.”
My mother pauses and I notice how my father is fiddling with his wineglass, twirling it between his fingers.
“It’s in Cork,” she says.
“You mean Ireland?” I can’t keep the shock from my voice. They have a grandson now. How could they consider living anywhere other than Hemston?
“That’s fantastic,” Eleanor cries. “It’s always been Dad’s dream to live in Ireland.” She fixes me with her stern big-sister stare and I offer my reassurances.
“Of course you must go.”
“Really?” my father says, looking up at me.
He knows me so well.
“Absolutely,” I say, firmly. “Time you did something for yourselves.”
“It won’t be forever,” my mother says. “Just a few years. An adventure while we’re young enough to enjoy it.”
She glances at Bobby. “But we will miss this young man so much.”
As the evening wears on, I see how Jimmy and Nina touch one another constantly, her palm resting on his knee beneath the table, his hand sneaking out to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. I catch their secret smiles and handholds, read their longing to be on their own. Nina hasn’t stayed at the farmhouse yet and I doubt her parents would welcome an overnight visit from Jimmy—the affair has been a strictly outdoors, rural one, just like Frank’s and mine at the beginning.
We are all of us transfixed by the new lovers, especially Bobby.
“Are you in love?” Bobby asks Nina.
“Yes,” she says, confidently. “I am.”
Jimmy flushes and looks as if he might erupt with joy.
“Do you think you’ll get married?” Bobby says.
“What is this, twenty questions?” Nina laughs. “We’ve only known each other a few weeks.”
“My mum and dad got married when they were young. They hardly knew each other.”
“Not true,” Frank says. “I’d been ogling your mum on the school bus for years.”
A look of satisfaction passes over my father’s face. He couldn’t bear my heartbreak over Gabriel, seemed almost as devastated as me. At the time, my sister and mother were quick to denigrate him. Understandable, but not what I wanted to hear.
“He was completely wrong for you,” Eleanor said.
My mother told me it was a lucky escape. “Now you know what he is capable of, you’re better off without him.”
But my dad, who’d watched me crash full pelt into my first love affair, without care or caution, the way I always was back then, didn’t criticize Gabriel once.
“People make mistakes, particularly when they are young,” he said. “I believe Gabriel will come to regret it.”
It wasn’t long before Frank began calling for me at the cottage. Our love affair was sweetly old-fashioned in comparison and my parents adored Frank from the outset. When I discovered I was pregnant, I was worried my parents would think it was too much, too soon. Frank and I hadn’t been together very long. But they were elated we were providing them with a grandchild years before they expected one and, as soon as he was born, Bobby became their new favorite person.
Bobby has changed us all.
“Is it normal to love one person your whole life like you and Daddy?” Bobby asks me, out of the blue. “Or can you love other people first?”
As his sweet, innocent voice carries across the table, the other conversations fade away. I feel it, a shimmer of awkwardness in the room, see Nina’s look of perplexity as she picks up on something she doesn’t understand. No one moves to speak, and it is left to me to answer him.
“It’s simplest when you do,” I say. “But the only thing that matters is finding the right person to spend the rest of your life with. However you get there.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Frank says, holding my gaze until I smile and look away.