Talking It Over by Julian Barnes Page B

looked at Gillian’s jeans with disapproval but without comment. We had tea and discussed everything except the twothings that interested me: the fact that I was in love with her daughter, and the fact that her husband had run off with a schoolgirl. She didn’t ask me what my prospects were, or how much I earned, or whether I was sleeping with her daughter – all of which I had thought of as possible avenues of conversation. She was – is – what people call a handsome woman, a phrase which has always struck me as a bit patronising. (What does it mean? It means something like: surprisingly fanciable if it was socially OK to fancy women of that age. But perhaps someone did – does – fancy Mme Wyatt. I’d like to think so.) That’s to say, she had firm features and smartly cut, possibly dyed hair obviously kept under regular control, and she behaved as if she had known a time when she turned every head and expected you to be aware of this too. I looked at her a lot during that tea. Not just out of polite attention, but trying to see how Gillian would turn out. It’s supposed to be a key moment, isn’t it? Meeting your wife’s mother for the first time. You’re meant either to run a mile, or else collapse back happily: oh yes, if she turns out like that , I can more than handle it. (And the prospective mothers-in-law must be aware that this is going through the young man’s mind, mustn’t they? Perhaps sometimes they deliberately make themselves look a terrible fright to scare him away.) With Mme Wyatt, I had neither of these reactions. I looked at her face, at the shape of the jaw and curve of the forehead; I looked at the mouth of the mother of the girl whose mouth I couldn’t get enough of kissing. I looked and I looked; but while I saw similarities (the forehead, the set of the eyes), while I could understand that other people might take them for mother and daughter, it didn’t work for me. I couldn’t see that Gillian was going to turninto Mme Wyatt. It was completely improbable, and for one simple reason: Gillian wasn’t going to turn into anyone else. She would change, of course. I’m not so silly and in love that I don’t know that. She would change, but she wouldn’t change into someone else, she would change into another version of herself. And I would be there to see it happen.
    ‘How did it go?’ I asked as we were driving away. ‘Did I pass?’
    ‘You weren’t being examined.’
    ‘Oh.’ I felt a little disappointed.
    ‘She doesn’t work like that.’
    ‘How does she work?’
    Gillian paused, changed gear, pursed those lips which were and yet weren’t at all like her mother’s lips, and said, ‘She waits.’
    I didn’t like the sound of that at first. But later, I thought, Fair enough. And I can wait too. I can wait until Mme Wyatt sees me for what I am, understands what Gillian sees in me. I can wait for her approval. I can wait for her to understand how I make Gillian happy.
    ‘Happy?’ I said.
    ‘Mmm.’ She kept her eyes on the traffic, took her hand off the gear-stick briefly, patted my leg, then withdrew her hand to change gear. ‘Happy.’
    We’re going to have children, you know. No, I don’t mean she’s pregnant, though I wouldn’t mind too much if she were. It’s a long-term plan. We haven’t really discussed it, to be honest; but I’ve seen her with kids once or twice and she seems to get on with them instinctively. To be on the same wavelength. What I mean is, she doesn’t seem surprisedby the way they behave and how they react to things; it seems normal to her and she accepts it. I’ve always found children to be OK, but I’ve never completely worked them out. I can’t read them. Why do they go on the way they do, making a huge fuss about little things and then ignoring what ought to be much more important? They walk into the corner of the TV set and you think they’ve broken their skull, but they just bounce off; next moment they sit down very gently