One "It is our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person." Marcel Proust Living in suburban North London was nothing but an act of pragmatism for my parents. Whenever I asked them why they chose to leave East London for the suburbs when I was ten, they would refer to functionality: it was a bit safer, you could buy a bit more space, it was near the city, it was near lots of motorways and close to schools. They talked about setting up their life in Pinner as if they had been looking for a hotel that was close to the airport for an early flight--convenient, anonymous, fuss-free, nothing special but it got the job done. Nothing about where my parents lived brought them any sensory pleasure or cause for relish not the land-scape, nor the history of the place, not the parks, the architecture, the community or culture. They lived in the suburbs because it was close to things. They had built their home and therefore entire life around convenience. When we were together, Joe often used his northernness in argu-ments against me, as a way of proving he was more real than I was; more down to earth and therefore more likely to be right.
It was one of my least favourite things about him--the way he lazily outsourced his integrity to Yorkshire, so that romantic implications of miners and moors would do all the hard work for him. In the early stages of our relationship, he used to make me feel like we had grown up in separate galaxies because his mum had worked as a hairdresser in Sheffield and mine was a receptionist in Harrow. The first time he took me home to his parents'' house--a modest three-bed in a sub-urb of Sheffield--I realized just what a lie I''d been told. If I hadn''t known I was in Yorkshire, I would have sworn we were driving around the pebbledash-fronted-leaded-window gap between the end of London and the beginning of Hertfordshire where I''d spent my adolescence. Joe''s cul-de- sac was the same as mine, the houses were all the same, his fridge was full of the same fruit-corner yogurts and ready-to-bake garlic bread. He''d had a bike just like mine, to spend his teenage weekends going up and down streets of identical red-roof houses just like I did. He was taken to PizzaExpress for his birthday like I was. The secret was out.
"No more making out that we''ve had completely different upbringings, Joe," I said to him on the train home. "No more pretending you belong in a song written by Jarvis Cocker about being in love with a woman in a tabard. You no more belong in that song than I belong in a Chas and Dave one. We grew up in matching suburbs." In recent years, I''d found myself craving the familiarity of home. The high streets I knew, with their high density of dentists, hair-dressers and bookies, and total lack of independent coffee shops. The long walk from the station to my parents'' house. The women with matching long bobs, the balding men, the teenagers in hoodies.
The absence of individualism; the peaceful acquiescence to mundanity. Young adulthood had quickly turned into just plain adulthood--with its daily list of choices to confirm who I was, how I voted, who my broadband provider was--and returning to the scene of my teenage life for an afternoon felt like a brief holiday back in time. When I was in Pinner, I could be seventeen again, just for a day. I could pretend that my world was myopic and my choices meaningless and the pos-sibilities that were ahead of me were wide open and boundless. Mum answered the door like she always answered the door--in a way that demonstrably made the point that her life was very busy. She did an apologetic wonky smile as she opened it to me, portable landline pressed up to her ear on her shoulder. "Sorry," she mouthed, and rolled her eyes. She was wearing a pair of black jersey-fabric bottoms that didn''t look assertive enough to be trou-sers, weren''t tight enough to be leggings and weren''t slouchy enough to be pyjamas.
She wore a grey marl round-neck T- shirt and was decorated in her base-coat of jewellery: thick gold bracelet, one gold bangle, pearl stud earrings, snake chain gold necklace, gold wedding band. My guess was she was coming from or going to some form of physical exercise--my mum had become obsessed with physical exercise since she turned fifty, but I don''t think it changed her body by even half a pound. She was wrapped in a post-menopausal layer of softness, a small bag under her chin, a thicker middle, flesh that now spilt over the back of her bra, visible through her T- shirt. And she was gorgeous. The sort of big-bovine-eyed gorgeous that is not hugely exciting but evokes familiar magnetism in everyone--like an open fire or a bunch of pink roses or a golden cocker spaniel. Her espresso-brown bob, although sliced with grey strands, was lus-ciously thick and her golden highlights shimmered under the light of the overhead IKEA lamp. I inherited almost nothing of my looks from my mother. "Yeah, fine," she said into the phone, beckoning me into the hall-way.
"Great, well, let''s do coffee next week then. Just send me the dates. I''ll bring you that teach-yourself-Tarot kit I was telling you about. No, not at all, you can keep it actually. QVC, so easy enough. Okay, okay. Speak then, bye!" She hung up the phone and gave me a hug, before holding me at arm''s length and examining my fringe. "This is new," she said, looking curiously at it, like it was 3 down on a crossword.
"Yes," I said, putting down my handbag and removing my shoes (everyone had to remove their shoes on arrival, the rule was more stringent here than at the Blue Mosque). "Got it before my birthday. Thought it would be good for covering my thirty-two-year-old lines on my thirty- two- year- old forehead." "Don''t be silly," she said, flicking it gingerly. "You don''t need some mop on your head for that, you just need some effective foundation." I smiled, unoffended but unamused. I had got used to the fact that Mum was disappointed by quite how ungirly her daughter was. She would have loved a girl with whom she could have gone shopping for holiday clothes and gossiped about face primer.
When we were teenagers, and Katherine came round, Mum would offer her all her old jewellery and handbags, and they''d sift through them together like two gal pals at a department store. She fell deeply in love with Lola the first time they met, purely on the basis that they both felt particularly passionate about the same face highlighter. "Where''s Dad?" I asked. "Reading," she said. I looked through the French doors of the living room and saw the profile of my dad in his bottle-green armchair. His feet up on the foot-stool, a large mug of tea on the side table next to him. His strong chin and long nose protruding--the chin and nose that also belong to me--as if they were competing to get to the same finish line in a race There was seventeen years'' difference in age between Mum and Dad. They had met when Dad was the deputy head of an inner-city state school and Mum was sent there by her secretarial agency to be the receptionist.
She was twenty-four, he was forty-one. The gap between their personalities was as large as their age gap. Dad was sensitive, gentle, inquisitive, introspective and intellectual--there was almost nothing that didn''t interest him. Mum was practical, proactive, logistical, straightforward and authoritative. There was almost nothing she didn''t involve herself in. I took a moment to take him in from behind the glass doors. From here, he was still just my dad as he''d always been, reading the Observer, ready to tell me about where rubbish goes in China or ten things I may not have known about Wallis Simpson or the plight of the endangered falcon. My dad who could instantly recognize me-- not the face of me, but everything of who I was--in a nanosecond: the name of my childhood imaginary friend, my dissertation sub-ject, my favourite character from my favourite book and the road names of everywhere I''ve ever lived.
When I looked at his face now, I mostly saw my dad, but I sometimes saw something else in his eyes that unsettled me--sometimes it looked like everything he under-stood had been cut into pieces and he was trying to configure them into a collage that made sense. Two years ago, Dad had a stroke. It only took a couple of months after he had recovered for us to realize that he wasn''t entirely better. My dad, always so sharp and cerebral, had slowed down. He''d forget the names of family members and close friends. His easy confidence and ability to make decisions dwindled. He''d regularly wander off on days out and get lost. He often couldn''t remember the road he lived on.
Initially, Mum and I wrote it off as an ageing brain, unable to face the possibility of something more serious. Then, one day, Mum got a call from a stranger to tell her that Dad had been seen driving around the same large, busy roundabout for twenty minutes. Eventually, someone managed to get him to pull over--he''d had no idea where to turn off. We went to the GP, he did a range of physical tests, cognitive assessments and MRI scans. The possibility we were dreading was confirmed. "Hi, Dad," I said, walking towards him. He looked up from the p ap er. "Hello, you!" he said.
"Don''t stand up." I bent down to give him a hug. "Anything inter-esting to tell me?" "There''s a new film adaptation of Persuasion," he said, holding up the review to me. "Ah," I said. "The thinking man''s Austen." "Correct." "I''m going to go help Mum with lunch." "All right, love," he said, before reopening the newspaper and arranging himself back into the repose I knew so well.