Free Faustine by Emma Tennant Page A

after meeting Harry, Jasmine goes on, in this account (of which I feel wary) of my mother’s life. Haven’t I had enough, sent out to distant relatives 12,000 miles away, growing up without a mother and deprived ofmy grandmother, without hearing of Anna’s romance? And how does it bear on the story of Muriel, which I’m told I need to hear before I’m reunited with her at supper tonight?
    Nothing, it seems, will stop Jasmine, and I suspect she’s one of those vicarious sex-lifers, who get their kicks from seeing the joys and pains of others.
    – Anna even gave up some of her evenings that were dedicated to the collective, Jasmine says, with a chuckle which I consider to be in bad taste, even if I have little sympathy with my mother’s feminist good works. Is she going to be made out now as a foolish romantic, a traitor to her cause?
    – Harry even got Anna to go dancing! Jasmine says, her smile widening and the little vertical lines above her mouth gathering together and fanning out again like a concertina. And that meant, of course, getting out of those eternal jeans and wearing a dress from time to time!
     *
    Something, something I don’t like at all, stirs in me at the mention of this. I can’t think what it can be when the name Harry triggers off nothing in me. But then, truth be told, I don’t remember Jasmine either, and she assures me she was round countless times, even reading stories to me in bed if Muriel was busy elsewhere. I will banish this half-worm of a memory, as it crawls on to the skeleton of my infancy twenty-four years ago. I tell Jasmine I’m glad to hear Anna had enjoyed herself, but I don’t remember Harry at all.
    Now it’s Jasmine’s turn to be shocked. Can it really be true that I don’t remember Harry? Surely I must.
    – He was the most wonderful looking man, Jasmine says. Well, you’re much too young to have gone to the movies in those days, but you’ve seen them on TV, even in Australia (and here Jasmine made the country where I had grown upa penal colony still, so that I sided with Maureen in my mind, resolving to tell her of the decadence of this English country house, given over to the worship of dead icons of a too-permissive age).
    – Marlon Brando, Jasmine is saying, or maybe to go back a bit, Clark Gable. It was always hard to make up your mind with Harry – he looked different from one day to the next: very black, blue-black hair, such a charming smile.
    – I don’t remember anyone called Harry, I say.
    Now Jasmine’s lurking malice begins to show itself more clearly. She thinks, no doubt, that I’m playing games with her, that I can remember perfectly well the Galahad who came along and rescued my poor mother from the clutches of rabid lesbians (as Jasmine probably sees the collective), and that I’m jealous, pure and simple. I wanted her attention for myself. I resented the lover. It’s all first-year sociology stuff. For the first time, I feel a slight – very slight – twinge of sympathy for Anna.
    – No, you wouldn’t remember him very probably, Jasmine says, as I’d seen she was going to say. I mean, he and Anna went out all the time together.
    – And I was in the nursery, or tucked up in bed, I say, with some of the same bitterness Jasmine shows, with her face of one who has had to swallow neglect and humiliation – much as I have, I suppose. But I have one sacred thing: Muriel. I have her in a place no one can ever touch. In all probability Jasmine has nothing and no one like that to provide a nugget of warmth in the cold world.
    – Of course, Muriel took care of you more and more, Jasmine says, and not for the first time, I feel she has some unpleasant gift of looking into your mind and seeing what’s going on there.
    – No more evenings out for me and Muriel, she goes onwith a light laugh, and through the haze of smoke from the cheroot she leans forward and chucks a pine cone on the fire.
    I stare at the burning cone, and I think of the