Familiar Passions

Book 56: Virago Modern Classics

by Nina Bawden

Genres: General Fiction; Family Life; Marriage & Divorce; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

After an expensive dinner on their thirteenth wedding anniversary, James calmly announces that he wishes to leave Bridie. A cherished adopted child, she stepped into marriage - and a pet name - at the age of nineteen and has nurtured two step-children and a daughter. The habit of protecting others is strong is Bridie but now, redundant and with her happiness turned into a charade, she is uncertain of her identity. Unless she reclaims a portion of her past, Bridie fears she will have no future. The mysteries and consequences of Bridie's adoption form the bedrock of this enticing and skilfully woven novel. Here, with her characteristic wit and acuity, Nina Bawden peers into the familiar passions of family life, remembered insults, ancient scars and old deceptions.

Release date: May 5, 2011

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 166

Sample

Before James told his wife that he was leaving her, he took her out to dinner. It was their thirteenth wedding anniversary
and he always took her out to dinner on their wedding anniversary. He had chosen this restaurant, he told Bridie, because
it had been awarded a pestle and mortar symbol in the latest Good Food Guide. In fact his secretary had recommended it and
made the reservation, as she always did. She had also bought the bottle of Femme that James always gave his wife on this occasion and put it, wrapped and ribboned, into his briefcase before he left the
office.


Bridie Starr preferred Ma Griffe but she had never said so. James’s first wife who had died, tragically young, in a car crash, had been fond of Femme. When James had married Bridie and brought her to his house, a matron at nineteen, a mother for his children, her predecessor’s
clothes had still been in the closet, her jewellery and toilet things still in the dressing-table drawer. Bridie understood,
humbly, that James had been too upset to touch them. She gave the clothes away, but wore the jewellery and used the scent
as James suggested that she should, insisting she loved Femme, to please him. To say that she preferred another perfume might seem not only hurtful but perverse, a childish desire to be
‘different’, and she wanted to appear grown up in James’s eyes. By the time she realised that he had not been sensitive about poor Angel’s sad belongings, merely lazy – tidying up, like booking tables and buying presents was
not a man’s job to his mind – it had been too late to retract her tenderly intentioned lie. He would have thought her foolish
to have pretended in the first place. Devious, too – and James admired directness. Or said he did, and she believed him.


Happy marriages are full of small deceits, she thought, smiling at him across the table in this excellent, expensive restaurant.
She hoped it wasn’t too expensive. James wasn’t stingy, but he hated to be rooked. She watched him anxiously as, monocle in eye, he scrutinised the
bill. She saw him frown. ‘It was a good meal,’ she reminded him, adding, cunningly, ‘And a double celebration after all! Two,
for the price of one!’ James liked a bargain. (His likes and dislikes were unremarkable and need not be remarked on here,
except to say that to Bridie they were natural obstacles, like mountains in a landscape, and she constructed her life about
them, living in the foothills, secretly, as a slave or child might do.)


‘What? Oh, yes.’ James took out his wallet and removed a credit card. He was still frowning as he made out the bill but in
a vague, abstracted way – not so much at the bill, Bridie decided now, as at some inner thought, some doubt …


The British plastics firm of which James was commercial manager was merging with a Franco-German company and James had been
invited to join the board of the new international company as marketing director. He had told Bridie over dinner and she was
uncertain how he really felt about it. He had seemed delighted but she guessed he must be nervous, too; worrying about this new responsibility. She hadn’t liked to ask him. He
might have thought she thought he was getting old and past it. It occurred to her that even the tentative question she had put could be misinterpreted.
He must have known about the merger for some time. To ask if he were ‘pleased’ about his appointment might suggest to him
that she thought he may have feared he would not get it. (These tortuous considerations were as natural to Bridie as breathing.
She did not know she was afraid of James. If she had been told she would have laughed.)


He said, ‘Of course I’m pleased, you silly goose. Though there are some things we have to talk about. Not now. Later on, when
we get home.’


He rose from the table and put her silk shawl round her shoulders. A tinted wall mirror reflected this courteous gesture.
Looking into it, Bridie saw a handsome, prosperous couple: a tall man with sharp, distinguished features, a fresh-faced woman
with wide, grave, brown eyes. James looked young for fifty and she looked old for thirty-two, she thought, not minding this,
only pleased because she hoped he felt it flattered him. Their eyes met in the candle flicker of the glass. She said, ‘That
was a lovely meal. Dear James. Would you like me to drive home?’ He looked at her long enough for her to wonder if he suspected there was some hidden
condescension in her offer, some suggestion that he was too old, or too tired, or too drunk to take the wheel, before rewarding
her with an open, generous smile and saying, ‘Thank you, goose. I’m glad you’ve had a happy evening.’


He didn’t speak throughout the hour’s drive home. She thought he was asleep but when they crossed the river into the lit,
empty streets of Westbridge, their Thames valley town, she glanced sideways and saw his eyes were open, gazing at her with
a strangely mournful, fixed expression that didn’t alter, even when she smiled at him.


She said, ‘Had a good nap?’ and, when he didn’t answer, an uneasy feeling gripped her. How long had he been awake, without
her knowing it, watching her with that clean, sad, and steady gaze? Why sad?

She felt a familiar anxiety; a pain in her heart, a heavy stone. Driving through the main street of the sleeping town, across
the railway line and up onto Westbridge Hill, she sought a subject to divert and cheer him. She crossed the south side of
the golf course and took a dark, winding, sylvan road, climbing past the Victorian water tower (subject of a preservation
order), the famous pop star’s house, the tennis club. She said, ‘You know that foreign banker, what’s his name, I never can remember?
Van-Something. The one who has the private zoo. Apparently a stream runs through it into the lake at the back of the tennis
club. The lake where the children used to swim. That’s been stopped now. There’s a notice saying that the lake’s polluted.
Do you know what with? With tiger’s pee! Only the notice says urine, of course! But isn’t it bizarre? In Surrey!’


She was glad to hear him laugh. More than glad, enormously relieved: the great, dull, aching weight had lifted from her chest.
Absurd, she thought. She was absurd to feel this crippling anxiety for a grown man’s happiness. Now, certainly. It was just a habit she had fallen
into, early on. She had been anxious in those early days, with reason. He had been so unhappy when she met him, so lost and
despairing. His first marriage had ended in a nightmare. Poor Angel, dragged unconscious from the wreckage of her car, rigged
up to terrible machines for months, a breathing vegetable, a living death. Poor James, visiting her daily, had almost lost
his reason. He had come to hate her, lying there so changed, and loathed himself for hating her. When Angel died, he had wanted
to die too, to make amends. He had had frightening fantasies; dreamed, day and night, of throwing himself in front of trains,
off cliffs. That was why he had gone to see Bridie’s father, for professional advice, and it was in her father’s consulting
rooms that Bridie met him. She had been to the dentist to have a wisdom tooth extracted and Dadda had said that he would drive
her home. He was busy with a patient when she got to Harley Street and James, just leaving, briefly introduced, had taken
her round the corner to a pub and fed her aspirin and whisky. He had been concerned and kind but he had looked so sad, it
wrung her heart. Forgetting her sore mouth and swollen cheek, she had coaxed him to talk about himself; tried, innocently,
to cheer him up, and been so wonderfully relieved when he had smiled at last. That she, a girl in her last term at school,
could ease this sad man’s suffering amazed and awed her. He had said, ‘You’ve done me more good than all your father’s pills,’ and she had felt so proud and happy. The habit of jollying him along had been formed then,
she supposed, and become, like all habits, hard to break. She ought to try, she thought. If James was aware of it, he must
find it burdensome …


She giggled almost silently, too low for James to hear, and turned into their driveway. Lights showed in several windows of
the house and there was the sound of music playing.


The house was empty. An electrical device turned on lights and radio at irregular intervals. This wealthy, residential estate
was good burglar country: badly lit, private roads, large houses in secluded, leafy gardens. Bridie said, as she got out of
the car, ‘I wonder if those tigers keep the villains off the banker’s house. More effective, I should think, than our contraption.’


‘That’s only to keep the insurance people quiet,’ James said. ‘If you’re nervous, you could get a dog.’

‘I thought you didn’t like dogs,’ she said, surprised.

‘Well …’ He opened the front door and stood aside, punctiliously, to let her enter first. ‘It was just a thought. Thank you
for driving. I hope you’re not too tired. Go on upstairs. I’ll bring a drink.’ He smiled at her. ‘Champagne.’


She shook her head. Now he had mentioned it, she did feel tired. A lovely lassitude invaded her; she thought, luxuriously,
of bed. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I only really want to sleep.’


She guessed, seeing his knowing grin, that he assumed this was a sexual defence, He said, ‘A shower will wake you up. And
you can sleep late in the morning. I want to talk tonight.’


His smile had vanished now; his last sentence held a sudden, strained solemnity that made her mind leap to disasters. Her
step-daughter, Aimee, eight months pregnant, had just lost her baby? Adrian, her step-son, had fallen off his motor bike;
been picked up by the police for peddling drugs? Her daughter! Alarmed, she searched his face. That odd, sad look was in his
eyes again. ‘Not Pansy?’ she cried. ‘There’s nothing wrong with Pansy?’


‘No. What a goosey-girl you are! It’s nothing like that. No one is dead, or dying. Go on up and have your shower.’


He went down the passage to the kitchen. Obediently, she trailed upstairs, opened the window in their bedroom, peeled off
her clothes and dropped them on the floor. Naked, she walked to the bathroom. Too lazy to shower, she washed her face and
cleaned her teeth and dabbed Femme – from last year’s anniversary bottle – on her breasts and wrists and throat. She put her nightdress on and brushed her short,
coarse, curly hair, regarding her flushed, high cheek-boned face with a certain puzzled interest. She wasn’t vain; she looked
into the glass as young girls sometimes do, pondering and wondering. Is this really me, this arrangement of bone and eyes and skin and hair? There should be more in her face at thirty-two, she thought. Not sure what she meant by this, she looked, and sighed. At least her clear, dark brown
eyes were beautiful. She wrinkled her nose at her reflection and said, aloud, ‘You silly ass.’


James was waiting in the bedroom with the champagne and the glasses. He had already changed, in his own bathroom, into pyjamas
and the quilted Chinese jacket she had bought at Liberty’s and given him this morning. Above the mandarin collar, his narrow
face was prim and dry. He said, ‘You look very appetising like that, but won’t you be cold, without a gown?’


Immediately, she wished that she had put one on. She felt her limbs exposed, like meat. A meal to tempt a husband’s appetite;
a well-hung pheasant, a ripe peach. She disguised her foolish irritation with a smile and joined him on the sofa beneath the
open window. Half a mile away, one of the banker’s tigers gave a lonely, coughing roar.


James poured champagne He lit a black, Russian cigarette – his fifth, and last, today. Five daily cigarettes was, he considered,
a reasonably calculated risk. He said, ‘This job now. It will mean living abroad. Either Paris or Frankfurt. It’s not decided
yet.’


‘Oh. You mean, altogether? Permanently?’ She thought he watched her anxiously. Poor James! was he afraid she might not want to leave their house? She said, ‘Darling, how exciting! And how marvellous that it should have happened now. I mean,
last year, before Pansy went to boarding school, it would have been more difficult. But I can fly back for half term, that
sort of thing, and she’ll enjoy being abroad in the holidays. I must say, I rather hope it will be Paris, for her sake. Her
French …’


He said, ‘I don’t want you to come.’

‘What? Oh.’ She laughed. ‘I see. You mean, not now, at once. Of course there will be things to settle here. Do you want to sell the house or let it? When
do we have to go?’


He said, loudly, ‘I don’t want you to come at all. I intend to live alone.’

She started. Then laughed again, so wildly that she spilled some of her champagne. Cold drops sprinkled on her naked thigh.

She said, in an absurdly bright, flirtatious tone, ‘Do you mean you’re leaving me?’

‘I suppose you could put it like that.’

She blushed. Blushing, she held her cool glass to her burning cheek. She felt a terrible embarrassment. She said, ‘Do you
want a divorce?’


‘No. No, I don’t. I’ll try to explain what I had in mind. But I imagine, really, that it will be up to you.’

He stopped and waited. She couldn’t speak; her mouth had dried. Her tongue felt thick and rough. James said, with an air of
mild reproach, ‘This is very difficult for me. More difficult than I had anticipated.’ He hesitated, then re-filled his glass.
She held hers out. He filled it. He said, ‘It would be insulting, I suppose, to say I’m sorry. And pointless, you may feel,
to say I’m fond of you, although I am. We’ve had, I think, a happy and a useful life together. I hope you think so, too. The
fact that I want to end it now doesn’t take away from that. When couples separate, it’s usual to assume that there must have
been some fatal flaw in their relationship, that they are both to blame. In our case that isn’t true, so I hope you won’t
look for something, to torment yourself. If it comforts you to blame me, I shall understand, although I hope, when you have heard me out, that you won’t blame me too much. I know you have a generous
heart. I think now – though in my defence I didn’t think it then – that I took advantage of it when I married you. I blackmailed you with my sad widowhood, my children. Took advantage of
your youth and generosity. The best years of your life, as your dear mother will doubtless comment when she hears.’ His pale,
tawny eyes – the colour of dry leaves – lit with sudden, sly amusement. ‘I shall miss your mother and her original remarks.’


He paused – waiting for her to smile, she realised incredulously – then coughed.


She still said nothing: didn’t dare to, now, in case she screamed aloud.

James looked at her ruefully. She saw he was disappointed that his little joke had fallen flat. After a brief interval he
went on, speaking flatly, in a measured voice, like a chairman reading a company report. ‘There are a couple of things I feel
I ought to say. To sum things up. One is, that considered as a parental team, we haven’t d. . .