The Bay of Angels Read Free Page A

anyone’s regrets. Had I been of an age to understand the full implications of this dereliction I should have resented it strenuously. As it was I began to see some virtue in the girls’ remonstrances, though in truth they had little but themselves to offer by way of compensation for her solitude. Therefore, when I put my key in the door one afternoon and heard Millie’s festive voice exclaiming, ‘Now, I’m counting on you, Anne. There’ll only be a few people. Nice people. I know you’ll like them,’ I was inclined to add my own encouragements to hers.
    My mother murmured something placatory.
    ‘Nonsense,’ said Nancy. ‘You have to make a bit of an effort in this life if you want to get anywhere. And as far as I can make out you’re not getting anywhere.’
    ‘Six-thirty,’ said Millie. ‘I’ll send the car for you.’
    After that it would have been difficult to back down.
    My mother’s expression, after they had left, was bemused, resigned, even cynical. I took it as a good sign that she went into her bedroom and opened her creaking wardrobe door. Everything in our flat creaked, a sound I found friendly. Now I saw, perhaps for the first time, that it was rather gloomy, that my mother’s room was in perpetual shadow, too conducive to nostalgia, to introspection. On her dressing-table was the photograph of the young man in the academic gown whom I did not remember. His face was steadfast, obedient, not quite up to the task of growing up, certainly not of growing old. I regretted his absence, as I had not done when still a child, with my mother to myself. Now I had her to myself, but was no longer a child, was beginning to feel a hunger for wider experiences, for a life outside the home, even one as well ordered as ours. Perhaps precisely for that reason.
    ‘Do I look all right?’ asked my mother, on that next Friday evening.
    I thought she looked beautiful, in her simple blue dress and jacket. She was plainly agitated, and had it not been for the car being sent would have thankfully abandoned the whole adventure. When Tom, Millie’s driver, rang the bell, we were both in a state of high concern. It was almost a relief when she left, and I was thankful for the hour or two I could spend on my own before her return. I thought of her among those nice people and hoped painfully, not that she was enjoying herself—that would have been too much to expect—but that she was not feeling too lonely. For a woman as shy as my mother social occasions on which she was unaccompanied were a nightmare. That was why Millie’s pressing invitations, offered, or rather insisted upon for entirely defensible reasons, were, more often than not, gratefully refused.
    But she had not refused this one, and it was at Millie’s party, on that Friday evening, that she met her second husband, my stepfather-to-be, and thus changed both our lives.
    2
    My mother’s fate having been settled according to the archaic principles of natural justice, and the conditions for her redemption having thus been met, I was now free to cast off on my own. I was sixteen, nearly seventeen, and the timing was providential. I had no doubt that we should all be entirely happy. I loved Simon, who, at our first meeting, embraced me with Jewish cordiality, making no distinction between my mother and myself. It was my first contact with genuine expansiveness and I warmed to it. Standing in our flat in Edith Grove he revealed its shabbiness, and thus deducted much of its charm. He was a big man, who seemed to smile all the time, delighted to have found a woman as unspoilt as my mother. He later told us that he too had had to be prevailed upon to attend that epochal party, for, although naturally gregarious, he was aware of the lack of a companion in these most public of circumstances. He was a widower, who, since the death of his wife, had devoted his life to business, or rather to ‘business interests’, as he termed them. He exuded a pleasant air of