The Three of U.S.: A New Life in New York. Peter Godwin
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Sunday, 7 June Joanna
I am still wondering how to tell the office about my pregnancy when Peter raises the issue of telling our respective parents. I know we must, but I am still apprehensive. His, I know, will be thrilled. Having spent their entire adult lives in the Third World, nothing seems to faze them and considering they are both now in their seventies they remain amazingly flexible in attitude.
I’m not worried about my father either – he is the most amiable, patient person I know and, after thirty years of trying to interest inner-city comprehensive kids in Shakespeare, he is resolutely unshockable. It’s my mother who’s the problem. My mother is a vicar’s daughter and a former marriage guidance counsellor who is doing her best to reconcile herself to the fact that both her daughters now live with men to whom they are not married.
‘Go on,’ says Peter, pushing the phone across the dining table. ‘Just do it, I’m sure she’ll be over the moon.’ It is 9.15 a.m. and we have just finished breakfast, so given the five-hour time difference I think they will have finished lunch in Yorkshire.
‘I’ll just tidy the breakfast stuff up first,’ I say brightly, though our caffè lattes and warm blueberry muffins arrived in a bag from Barocco, one of a score of delis within 500 yards which deliver our breakfast, so there is nothing to wash up.
‘Go on, stop playing for time,’ he admonishes, hauling the New York Times onto the sofa and beginning to weed out the numerous sections we never read.
‘Hello?’ My mother answers the phone. She sounds suspicious, a tone which I’ve noticed has increased since she took over management of the local Neighbourhood Watch and now receives long recorded messages from the police about local burglaries, which she diligently transcribes by hand on her blue Basildon Bond pad and distributes to the neighbours.
‘Hello, it’s me,’ I say.
‘Hello!’ she cries. ‘Hang on, and I’ll just tell your father to go and listen on the extension upstairs.’ A good start; at least I’ve caught them together.
‘I’ve got some news,’ I begin awkwardly.
‘Oh yes?’
‘You’re going to be grandparents.’
There is a pause and a sharp intake of breath.
‘Oh,’ says my mother. And then, with a small tinge of hope, ‘I mean, well, I have one question for you. Does this mean you are finally going to get married?’
‘No,’ I reply slowly. ‘I don’t think we are. No.’ I hope this sounds firm.
‘How will you look after it?’ she asks, sounding mildly incredulous.
‘Mum, I’m thirty-six.’
‘Congratulations, duckie,’ my father’s voice booms down the extension, valiantly trying to drown out my mother’s apparent shock.
‘I’m trembling,’ my mother says, dramatically. ‘Oh dear, I had no idea. I need to sit down …’
‘I’m going to be a grandfather!’ Dad says excitedly.
My mother interrupts him. ‘Oh dear,’ she laments again, and I can hear her struggling to say something encouraging. ‘Oh dear,’ she repeats quietly, ‘I think I need a brandy.’
Tuesday, 9 June Peter
Joanna has imbued our unborn child with its own character. It is that of a street-smart, super-competitive, gravel-voiced Manhattanite, already ashamed of its odd, foreign parents.
‘Hey, Dad,’ she rasps in imitation, ‘how come you haven’t got a real job?’ The knowing foetus, her incarnation of it at least, is already withering in its take on our relative lack of financial status. ‘Why haven’t we got an Aston Martin like William’s dad, huh?’ it complains. ‘And what’s with this Village loft? It’s pah-thetic! How come we don’t live in a brownstone on the Upper East Side, like Gus?’
Joanna’s name choices have become ever more bizarre and arbitrary. ‘Obadiah. I like Obadiah,’ she pipes up over supper at Florent, apropos of nothing in particular – pregnancy has made her a mental doodler. ‘Or what about Zebedee?’ She is deep into her Old Testament phase.
We return home to find our answer service bleeping with a message. It is from Andrew Solomon.
When we first arrived in New York we came equipped with an armful of introductions to people we ‘absolutely had to meet’. Most of these meetings have proved rather awkward, contrived affairs, where once the subject of our mutual friend is exhausted, conversation becomes threadbare. So we have lost our appetite for this kind of entrée.
Andrew Solomon, journalist, author, socialite, art collector, is, however, in a class of his own. We have been furnished with his number by almost everyone we know in London. He has an astonishing social span – he is an international Zelig. I have met people in Botswanan game parks and on Caribbean beaches who, on hearing I live in New York, say, ‘Oh, have you met a friend of mine, Andrew Solomon?’
The answer is no. It is not, however, through want of trying. We have been playing phone tag with him for months now, but Andrew Solomon evidently lives his life according to an itinerary packed with ever more exotic and obscure locations.
‘I’m afraid we’ve missed Andrew again,’ I tell Joanna.
‘Oh, where is he this time?’
‘Nassau, Havana and Bogliasco.’
Thursday, 11 June Joanna
Tonight we have supper with Larry and Nancy, two wealthy writers whose TriBeCa loft seems somehow far better designed for actually living in than ours. They too have been forced to partition space, but have chosen quiet wicker screens rather than our solution of messy bookshelves and desks. It seems a triumph of practical but stylish design and I am silently oozing envy as the door buzzes and supper arrives.
‘Oh God,’ I apologize, as Nancy starts removing the cellophane wrapper to reveal a huge platter of sushi, beautifully arranged with ginger roses and zig-zagged green papers to separate the portions. ‘I should have told you, I’m pregnant, and raw fish is the one food which is supposed to be taboo.’
‘Oh congratulations!’ shrieks Nancy. ‘Are you going to get married?’
As she heads over to the kitchen area to make me an omelette, their three-year-old daughter, Danielle, emerges from her wicker-screened den and Larry is instructed to put her to bed.
‘Seriously,’ Nancy continues, ‘you are going to get married, right? I mean, if you don’t it’ll be tough on the kid at school.’
‘Actually, I don’t think we’re going to,’ I say. ‘But it’s a lot more common in Europe to have children without being married than it is here.’
‘Oh, but you must get married,’ shouts Barbara, another guest. ‘I mean you must, for the child’s sake. I’ve been married for thirty years and it just gets better!’ Curiously, her husband is absent.
‘Well, who knows?’ I murmur, anxious to avoid further lecturing.
‘Is Danielle in bed yet?’ asks Nancy as Larry reappears, offering more wine.
‘No,’ he says calmly. ‘She’s watching cartoons and masturbating.’
Peter coughs on a prematurely smuggled sushi.
‘It’s a phase she’s going through,’ Larry explains jovially. ‘She does it all the time.’
Saturday, 13 June Peter
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