Sofka Zinovieff - Putney

As he shuffled into the kitchen, exhausted, fur-tongued and desperate for coffee, Nina handed him an envelope with a recognisable, juvenile script in purple ink. She was not interested in spying or checking up on his stories, but there was a methodical side to her character. She was not stupid.

‘How is young Daphne?’ She didn’t sound as though she required an answer. He knew there had been some discussion between Ellie and Nina about visiting New York. Perhaps she would bring Daphne. It was shocking to hear this idea posited so casually by Nina a few days earlier. He longed for that but also dreaded it. What was the point of making this break if his darling monkey girl was going to follow him across the Atlantic and throw him into even deeper turmoil? He imagined introducing her to Candy and groaned. He put down the unopened letter as nonchalantly as possible – he would read it later in private – then, squinting with irritation at the sunshine that streamed through the windows, he poured himself some coffee and grunted the guttural moan of a vampire caught in daylight.

A few days after Nina’s return to London and her dauntless Florence Nightingale act, Ralph went back to his garden workroom. His agent wanted the corrections completed on a recent composition and he sharpened several 2B pencils, clipped the manuscript to his adjustable, architect’s drawing board and got on with it. The work wasn’t too challenging and it helped to think of something other than his body’s fragility. He loved his shed that smelled of wood like a tree house, but was filled with comforts and small luxuries like his custom-made desk and a chaise longue modelled on Ed’s old one in Putney. The shed had been strictly forbidden to anyone – when the children were young he’d locked the door and Nina understood him well enough to avoid even crossing the threshold. These days, he made an exception for their cleaner Anka’s occasional hoovering sessions, but even then, he’d watch over the pale-eyed, lip-chewing Polish girl and close the door on her with relief.

While Ralph worked, Nina cooked: avgolemono soup with chicken, stuffed peppers, baked butter beans. She made sure he ate yogurt and drank freshly squeezed orange juice. In the afternoons, she took him for slow walks down Primrose Hill and into Regent’s Park. London looked like a green city, with every possible shade bursting forth from the newly grown leaves, the scent of wisteria and fresh-ground coffee in the air. She linked her arm through his and relayed news about their children that they themselves didn’t get round to telling him. He felt she was treating him almost like a fourth child now. Any erotic spark between them had been dampened so long he could hardly remember what it had been like when they’d been lovers. It hadn’t appeared to bother her. Better, in her opinion, to be bound by the bonds of familial affection. Once or twice, he’d wondered whether she might be having an affair – not for evidence of awkward phone calls or indeed anything suspicious, but because she would glow with an internal energy that reminded him of how she’d been as an art student when she fell in love with him.

Periodically, he was overwhelmed by exhaustion, and had to lie down to recover. He took long baths, soothed by the gentle warmth and by the comfortable tones of BBC voices on the radio. It was not always calming. Indeed he experienced a sliver of anxiety when the news reported some retired teacher or scoutmaster hauled off in handcuffs for sexual abuse in the 1970s or ’80s. There was regularly a new bout of shaming some seedy, long-forgotten pop singer, now reincarnated as a molesting predator, an evil fiend. One man of ninety-six was jailed for abusing two children, who were presumably pensioners themselves by now. It would be a comedy if it weren’t so grotesque.

There was one report that disconcerted him more deeply than the others. An art teacher had run away with a pupil of fifteen, and they had travelled incognito to France. The man was eventually arrested and the girl was reported to have said, ‘We are in love.’ Ralph recognised something of his own experiences in what he heard on the radio, but sought to distance himself. The teacher was probably chasing after lots of young girls, he thought. Whereas I worshipped Daphne, body and soul. I wasn’t some Humbert Humbert obsessed with nymphets. And it’s not only that I never did anything against her will, it’s that we met as spirits, Plato’s twinned flames. It was genuine and pure.

Ralph recognised that something had been out of control. Of course it was. We were all changing the world. But now we’re expected to conform like robots or lemmings. Everyone is so conventional. It’s ghastly. Yes, Daphne was young, but so was I. It was my youth too – not just hers. Our story had nothing to do with abuse. To link them is like pouring filth on flowers, like denying the power of love.

It was after eleven and she was sewing and drinking her third coffee of the morning when Libby meandered in. She was beginning to need the incredibly long sessions of sleep that Daphne remembered from her own adolescence, when Ed called her Sleeping Beauty.

‘Hi, Libs. How are you today?’ She secured the needle in the fabric and got up.

‘OK. Did you remember that Paige is sleeping over after Caroline’s party? We’ll get out the mattress, OK? And we’re going shopping first.’

‘Fabulous. What about Chloe? You haven’t mentioned her recently. Is she going to the party? Maybe you shouldn’t just drop her altogether?’

‘Chloe’s fine, OK?’ Libby laughed and Daphne sensed that Chloe’s welfare was the last thing that mattered to her in the guerrilla warfare and tribal alliances of school friendships.

‘Glad to hear it. So, should we order pizzas this evening?’ This was an easy way of getting some appreciation and, sure enough, Libby beamed with innocent pleasure.

‘I’m going to meet her in Putney this afternoon. We wanted to see if we could buy something for the party.’

‘Great. Have you still got some savings from Sam’s Christmas money?’

‘A little bit. But I wouldn’t say no to some more…’ Libby smiled winsomely.

Daphne enjoyed these little negotiations. She acknowledged that her life consisted of simpler satisfactions than the extreme situations of her youth. Internally, however, she heard a needling echo of Jane’s comment: ‘What would you do if a man made Libby love him?’ The answer was obvious: Libby was far too sensible!

As she worked on Putney she remembered the parties she had been to as a girl; in particular, a celebration she had given on the day her O levels finished, which was coincidentally the summer solstice. Ed and Ellie went away for the longest night of the year, and friends started arriving from late afternoon to rig up speakers in the garden at Barnabas Road. By the time the sun was setting there were about fifty teenagers dancing on the grass, jumping into the hot tub in their underwear or climbing up to the tree house, taking turns for a few minutes of privacy. The rule of entry had been ‘bring a bottle’ and, as nobody had thought of getting plastic cups, they were all drinking directly from bottles of beer, cheap wine and rum.

She hadn’t invited Ralph. Why would she? Not only was he separate from the rest of her life, he actually encouraged her (in tones of noble self-sacrifice) to ‘get a little boyfriend’. She agreed it was only fair to juggle him with boys closer to her age, just as he had always juggled her with his family. Her favourite boy of the summer was Martin. It wasn’t love, but she liked his hot white skin and hair dyed sooty black. He smelled of glue and Mars bars. He and his two best friends looked a bit like Johnny Rotten’s gang, though they had just taken their A levels, would get good grades, and were destined for university. It was Martin who lured her and Jane into their brief punk phase, giving them the hair colour he used (very dramatic in Jane’s case) and encouraging them to wear clothes covered with chains, zips and safety pins. They went to concerts where the band spat on the audience and they wandered along the King’s Road making eyes at boys with green Mohicans.