Free Swimming to Ithaca by Simon Mawer

… together?’ Is his probing getting too obvious? But you need to reconnoitre the battlefield, see where the enemy lies in wait. She chews, swallows, takes a further mouthful, picks delicately from her mouth a piece of chicken tendon and places it on the side of her plate, looks up at him.
    ‘Sometimes. What about you?’
    ‘I’ve got a son, called Philip. Phil. He’s thirteen.’
    Is there a flicker of concern in her expression, a narrowing of the eyes, a subtle shift of attitude? ‘You’re married?’
    ‘We split up. One of those amicable divorces.’
    A nod. ‘That’s what happens with marriage.’
    ‘Not my parents’. Till death them did part.’
    ‘It’s a generation thing, isn’t it?’
    ‘Perhaps.’
    ‘I read somewhere that nowadays marriages last about the same time as they used to in Tudor times; only then they were finished by the death of one of the partners. Sorry, that’s a bit nerdy.’
    ‘Tell me,’ he says encouragingly.
    She shrugs again, embarrassed. ‘It’s just that most times the survivor got married again. But now it’s divorce that finishes them. If you see what I mean. So actually people have the same number of partners, more or less, whatever era.’
    ‘That might be right.’ The noise of the bar intrudes. Someone pushes past, heading towards the lavatory. ‘I think she had a love affair,’ he tells her. ‘My mother. About the time of that picture.’ It surprises him to say it out loud like that, to a complete stranger, but Kale merely sniffs.
    ‘I expect she did. What’s the big deal about that? I expect she had lots of offers.’
    ‘Do you get lots of offers?’
    She looks at him thoughtfully. ‘Some.’
    ‘And you think my mother would have had lots, even in the nineteen-fifties?’
    ‘Was it any different then? Didn’t people fuck, just like they do these days?’
    The word ‘fuck’ brings its little tremor of shock, even now. Someone at the next table glances round to see who has spoken.
    ‘Perhaps not quite as often. Not with different people at any rate.’
    ‘Isn’t there a report? That’d tell you. Masters and Johnson, isn’t it?’
    ‘Kinsey. Masters and Johnson was the sixties.’
    ‘Kinsey, then. Anyway, good luck to her, if she did. Why should you worry?’
    Why indeed? But it is his mother they are talking about. It was she who lavished (the word has a wonderful, expansive feel about it) her love on him, who made him who he is, and who he is not. And there is also the disturbing fact that when he looks at the photos of her as she was then, he sees her through the sphinx-like eyes of an adult, the riddled gaze of Oedipus.
    They order coffee. ‘I’d love a ciggy,’ Kale confesses. ‘But I’m trying to give it up. For Emma’s sake, really.’
    ‘Perhaps we can do this again?’ he asks when her cappuccino has been drunk and it’s time to go.
    ‘Do what?’
    ‘Have lunch.’
    ‘P’raps.’ She’s looking for her bag underneath the table, rummaging among her things. ‘Sorry, I must go to the toilet.’
    He watches her make her way through to the back of the bar. ‘Toilet’ was one of his mother’s hates. She insisted on ‘lavatory’, the rationale being that ‘toilet’ is a genteel euphemism. But so is ‘lavatory’. So is everything, really, except shit-pit. One generation’s euphemism is another’s vulgarity. One generation’s ‘making love’ is another’s ‘fuck’. What would his mother have thought of Kale? The word ‘fuck’ expressed with no more import than if she had said ‘eat’; and speaking with food in her mouth; and going to the toilet; and showing the line of her knickers beneath her skirt. And being called Kayley. ‘No, Mother, it’s spelled K-A-L-E.’
    ‘Well, I don’t see why. It’s just a vulgarism. Might as well call her Kylie and be done with it.’
    ‘People can’t help their names. It’s the parents you’ve got to blame.’
    ‘It’s not the parents, it’s the social climate.