‘No, that’s not what I meant at all,’ said Indy. ‘But Rory’s tricky.’
‘Rory’s difficult,’ interrupted Eden, ‘always has been. She gets fixed ideas in her head and I know now she’s so into this book that she won’t think about anything else. But time is not always on your side.’
‘Exactly,’ said Indy. ‘Women’s fertility does decline and if you want children and,’ she paused, ‘it kills me to say this because I love you, but if you want children and Rory doesn’t, that’s a serious problem; you will regret it.’
Chantal looked quickly at Eden.
‘I don’t want children,’ said Eden, holding her hands out. ‘Never have. I just don’t think I’d be a very good mum and Ralphie’s ambivalent either way. It’s a choice. We’ve talked about it, but with you and Rory … I get the feeling Rory doesn’t talk about it. She always clams up if anyone mentions it to her.’
‘That’s exactly what happens,’ said Chantal sadly, ‘she clams up, she doesn’t want to talk about it. But I do want children.’
Indy reached forward and placed both hands around one of Chantal’s.
‘We will support you all the way. If you need help in talking to Rory, we’ll be there with you. We love you, Chantal, we love having you as a sister-in-law. But, you have to do what’s right for you and it’s not fair of Rory to make you be childless just because she hasn’t reached that point yet.’
‘Thank you,’ said Chantal, ‘thank you.’
The questions were terrifying. Rory stared at the email with horror.
‘Do you think you could have complex post-traumatic disorder after your upbringing? Because that’s the sense I get in the book.’
Rory was sitting at her desk in the apartment. She’d carved out a little space for herself and Chantal kept it perfectly nice. A cabinet that opened where Rory could put her laptop, where her pens and paper already waited. Where a lovely IKEA lamp beamed warm light down and she could work at night. Now she sat at the desk and felt an absolute fear the likes of which she’d never felt in her life. The question hadn’t come from some random person: this was a respected interviewer from a publishing magazine who wanted to ask her these questions and, because they were so sensitive, had actually sent them over in an advance.
Rory thought fear would kill her.
A cigarette. And a drink. That’s what she needed.
Who cared that it was just after twelve and most normal people never touched alcohol at that hour of the day. Totally immaterial. She went to her and Chantal’s pretty little drinks trolley. She grabbed a bottle of the blue gin and a little tin of tonic, then sat out on the small terrace which Chantal had made beautiful with little baskets decorated with willow and greenery spinning out of them. She sat at the small metal table where there was an ashtray that wasn’t supposed to be used much. Chantal hated smoking.
‘I only smoke occasionally,’ Rory had said in the early days. Which was true. Then. This week, she’d been smoking all the time.
Now Rory threw a fast glug of the blue gin into her glass and added only half the tiny tonic tin. She had no time for the niceties of the lemon and ice now. She lit a cigarette, sucked it into her lungs. The gin barely touched the sides. She drank deeply, as if it was water and she had been crawling through the Sahara for two days. What was she going to do? How could people ask her questions like that? It was ludicrous. The book was fiction. A little bit of it was about her family, sure, but people made stuff up.
It sounded like an excuse, even to herself. Rory sat on the terrace thinking of the chapters in her book. Chapters about arguments at home, chapters about how it had been so difficult to be a young gay woman in a sometimes-homophobic world when her family were in turmoil because her loveable rogue of a father was addicted to gambling. When her mother was pretending to ignore it all but clearly exhausted from carrying all the weight on her shoulders. That part wasn’t in the book. Rory could remember her mother’s tears and Savannah and Indy comforting her.
Rory poured another gin. She didn’t have time to worry about her mother. Mum always bounced back. Look at her now, getting married to himagain. She must have been absolutely mad. Dad would never change. Rory didn’t believe hisI’m not drinkingcrap at all. He liked his drink. Gambling was his real problem. Gambling was what had lost them all their money, lost them the hotel. Lost Rory her safe place, so that she’d been searching for it forever, and she’d found it with Chantal. And now, because of the book, that safe place felt as if it was under siege. Here in her lovely home, beautifully decorated by her darling Chantal, sat an email full of questions she couldn’t answer.
‘Do you still speak to your father? Is the book an indictment of what gambling and alcoholism can do to a family today?’
None of this was what Rory had expected when she was writing. None of this. How dare they ask her this stuff? Yes, how dare they? They’d go on that radio show and she’d tell them that, of course, she didn’t have post-traumatic anything. What a stupid question. Families were complex, this wasn’t all about her real life.
She poured herself another enormous gin, adding only a little bit of the tonic now. Who needed tonic? And she lit another cigarette. She looked at the pack between narrow eyes. They were mild ones. She’d buy a pack of stronger ones later; she was going to need it. After all, there was the wedding, there was the book. She needed her cigarettes. She threw back the gin. Nobody was going to ask her horrific questions about her family; it was none of their bloody business. She had written a book, it was fiction. OK, some of it had been taken from her life, but how dare they imply that the whole thing was true, was her, because it wasn’t. Or was it? said a tiny voice in her mind. A tiny voice that Rory chose to ignore.
Claudia brought Indy, Meg, Eden and Sonya into the cold room in the florist’s.
‘Oh, it’s freezing in here,’ said Vonnie, shivering dramatically.
Eden put her arm around Vonnie.
‘I’ll keep you warm, Aunt Vonnie,’ she said.
Behind her she could hear Sonya snort.
‘More clothes is what you need, Vonnie,’ she said loudly and Vonnie and Eden giggled.
‘More clothes aren’t the point, Sonya,’ said Eden, still holding on to Vonnie’s skinny shoulders.
‘Exactly,’ agreed Vonnie, ‘I don’t do lots of clothes, I do fashion,’ and she waved her arms around dramatically with a clinking and tinkling of bracelets on her spray-tanned arm.
