for him?”
Caroline had discussed the issue with Jenny and had received a curious answer. “Because he fascinates me,” Jenny had said. “Like a snake. You know how you go to a zoo and you see these deadly snakes in their glass enclosures and the snake looks at you with his little eyes. And you think: I’m only that far away from a painful death, only that far. If it weren’t for the glass …”
She told James this. He shrugged. “Forgive my saying this, Caroline, but isn’t that the sort of thing that some women—I’m not saying all women, but some women—do? They find themselves fascinated by dreadful men and they stay with them—as employees or wives or girlfriends or whatever. And the horrible men know that this is how they feel and so they just carry on being ghastly because they’re certain the women won’t leave them. And they don’t.”
“Maybe.” And then she added, “Sometimes.” She was thinking of a girl she had known at university who had taken up with a boyfriend who talked about soccer all the time, got drunk regularly at weekends and was ill on the stairs. They had all said that she should leave him, but she had said that he was getting better and that underneath it all he was really very gentle. She had remained with him and they had eventually married; he had been drunk at his own wedding and had threatened the vicar. She shuddered at the memory.
“It’s interesting that it should be like that,” James said. “Men who find themselves with difficult women are far more likely just to leave, aren’t they? They put up with so much less than women do. You people are heroines, you know. Heroines.”
“It’s kind of you to say that, James.”
“Well, I do mean it. The more I think about women, the more I like them. Isn’t that interesting? I used to be wary of girls, you know.” He paused. “You don’t mind my saying that, do you, Caroline? Present company excepted, of course.”
“Of course.”
He leaned back in the chair. “I used to think that women were … well, rather bossy. That’s why I preferred playing with other boys rather than with girls. I didn’t like being bossed about.”
“Understandable.”
“Yes. But now I find that women don’t really want to push me around. I suppose I’ve got more confidence. I know what I want.”
Caroline thought, But you don’t, do you? That’s the whole point: you don’t know what you want. “Did your mother push you around?” she asked. For a moment she entertained an absurd mental image of the infant James in a pushchair, being propelled around a park by his mother and, even then, gazing at the architecture of the park buildings and commenting on the fine ironwork.
For a few moments James was silent. “My mother?” he asked.
“Yes. Your mother. Was she … dominating?”
There was something odd in James’s eyes as he looked at Caroline. “My mother,” he said quietly, “was completely absent from my childhood. I never met her. Not once. Or at least not that I can remember.”
Caroline felt a twinge of anxiety. Her question had been a prying one but she had not expected to uncover something quite as uncomfortable as this.
“You needn’t talk about it if you don’t want to, James,” she said.
He looked at her again. “All right,” he said. “I won’t.”
19. Unknown Boys
AFTER THEIR TRUNCATED conversation about mothers, Caroline and James moved into the kitchen to start baking biscuits. The maternal conversation had been brief, and indeed only covered the mother of one of them. Had the conversation developed more fully, then it might have progressed to deal with Caroline’s own mother, Frances Jarvis, about whom Caroline had a considerable amount to say. Had James merely asked, “What about your own mother, Caroline?” there would have been a brief pause, as if to underline the significance of what was to follow, and then Caroline would have said, “My mother? Oh, James, where does one start?”
James would have smiled. “It’s never a simple question, is it? You never get people saying, ‘Oh yes, my mother. A very normal, integrated person. Nothing to say, really.’ You don’t get that, do you?”
And Caroline would have agreed. “Never. But since you’ve asked about my mother, let me tell you.
“Ever since I can remember—right back—my mother has had ambitions for me. Some mothers, I suppose, bring up their sons and daughters to do great things—to play the piano well, or to become tremendously good