Alys, Always (7 page)

‘Have you seen Hester and Charlie recently?’ my father asks.

I say I babysat for them a few weeks ago, and we talk a little about Toby and Rufus. I quite enjoy my nephews, as long as I don’t see them too often or for too long. Overexposure is never satisfactory, not least because I’m frequently rather dubious about some of Hester’s parenting techniques. But I know from experience that my parents don’t want to hear about that. My parents are always more enthusiastic about the idealised notion of the grandchildren than they are the
noisy, messy reality. That much is clear when we all congregate here or at Hester’s house at Christmas.

I sometimes suspect that, as far as my mother is concerned, the real purpose of family is to ensure she always has something to talk about if she bumps into Mrs Tucker at Tesco.

As is customary, she only half-listens to what I am saying about Toby and Rufus. My mother has never been a very engaged listener. Other people’s speech is useful mainly as a prompt. So when I mention Toby’s passion for Playmobil, she launches on an anecdote about a den Hester and I once built together using the clothes horse and all the clean towels in the airing cupboard – a story I’ve heard countless times before (although I now have no memory of the actual incident). I wonder how much of a connection my mother makes between the child I once was and the adult I now am. Usually she talks of my childhood as if it’s something that really happened only to her, as if I were only distantly involved.

We have crème caramel in stemmed glass dishes for dessert, and then I help to clear away. The evening stretches ahead of us: acres of it, as flat and featureless as the fields around the house. None of us can decently go to bed for hours.

We fill the time with coffee and mint chocolate thins in little slippery envelopes, and my mother lays the table for breakfast, and then we watch several finalists competing for a part in a London stage musical, and after that there’s a film, an action movie set in ancient Rome. My mother fidgets uneasily during the fight sequences and the sex scenes. In the second commercial break, she collects the cups and chocolate wrappers and says, ‘Well, Frances, I hope you have everything you need. Sleep well, dear.’ Then it’s just my father and me, sitting side by side in the darkened room, eyes fixed on the screen like astronauts preparing for countdown.

From time to time, I can hear the dog barking. It’s a less
angry sound now, as if she has started to adjust to her new status, as if she is now merely disconsolate.

We don’t watch the end of the movie, but switch over for the ten o’clock news.

Later, as I move around my room, picking the plastic film off the soap (as tiny and pearly-pink as prawn dim sum), brushing my teeth at the rinky-dink basin and running the flannel over my face, I hear my father escorting Margot through the house and ushering her, with a strange sort of chivalry, out of the front door (‘Come on, old girl, time for some fresh air’). I poke back the curtain an inch with a finger and watch the pair of them beginning a circuit of the village green, moving slowly between the benison of the lamp-posts, a stout elderly man and a stouter elderly dog, out in the wind and the dark.

Fifteen minutes later there’s the slight reverberation as the front door clicks. Lying in bed with the novel propped open on my chest and a notebook and pen ready on the bedside table, I hear Margot’s nails skittering down the corridor and my father’s muttered good night as he shuts her in the sunroom and then comes upstairs, wheezing faintly on every step.

The buzz of the bathroom extractor fan, the toilet flush, the fan switching off. Finally there’s silence.

This is the house where I grew up, and it means nothing to me, just as I mean nothing to it. There’s no sense when I’m here of being safe or understood. If anything, this is the place where I feel most alone, most unlike everyone else.

I learned to talk and walk here; I sat at the dining-room table painstakingly crayoning letters on sugar paper; I sowed mustard and cress upon thick wet layers of kitchen roll; I came down on Christmas mornings and received dolls and roller skates and bikes and, as time went on, book tokens and jeans that I’d picked out myself; and I lay on my stomach on
the lawn underneath the elder tree, reading and reading; and then I moved away, and it was as if I’d never lived here at all.

The radiator gurgles as the central heating shuts off for the night. I shift position in the narrow bed, looking at the shadow the pendant lampshade casts across the ceiling, trying to remember what it felt like, growing up in my parents’ house. I don’t remember being especially happy or unhappy here. Childhood just happened to me, as I suppose it happens to most people. At the time, I suppose it seemed an endless succession of fears and dreams and secrets, but from this distance it looks as dull as the life I’ve gone on to lead. Did I tell my mother when things went wrong or well at school? I’m fairly sure I did not. She was never at leisure to be interested in me. She had other things to worry about.

Hester was always kicking off, throwing down challenges, sneaking out to meet boys. I remember the general relief when she went off to university. But I wasn’t like that. I was the good girl: biddable, compliant. I did what I was told, I kept my nose clean, I was no trouble to anyone. But the farther I travelled from the house where I’d grown up, the less I seemed to belong; the less it looked like home.

The Pearsons are coming for a quick drink before Sunday lunch. And Terry and Val Croft might look in, if they have time, although there’s an antiques fair at Fulbury Norton that they’re hoping to visit. Before retirement, Terry and my father were partners. Thorpe & Croft Solicitors. The office was on Beck Street, between the precinct and the leisure centre.

While I was at school, if I missed the bus home, I used to head up there and wait for my father to give me a lift back. There were two wing-backed chairs in reception and I’d sit on one of them and do my French homework on the coffee
table, clearing a space between the elderly Sunday supplements with the recipes ripped out of them. If she happened to be in a good mood, Penny, the secretary, used to make me a cup of tea and slip me a pink wafer from the tin she kept in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. I wonder what happened to Penny. There was always something funny about her, and then one day I realised that she wore a hair-piece.

My mother is almost beside herself with anxiety.

‘You’ll have to find your own way around, I’m afraid, dear,’ she says, with an air of extravagant restraint, as I appear for breakfast. ‘You know where everything is. I’m a little tied up, as you can see … Weetabix in the cupboard, muesli, cornflakes, so on and so forth. No, not that milk, dear, there’s one open on the lower shelf. Bread in the breadbin. Jam’s in the cupboard, or perhaps you’d like Bovril?’

The dishwasher is roaring away, there are pans on the stove, and the counters are covered with trays of glasses and napkins. As I pour milk on my cereal, my mother drains the green beans and pops them into the top of the oven, ready for lunch in three hours’ time.

My father has been out to buy the paper – they don’t take the
Questioner
, it’s too left wing – and now sits on the sofa, systematically working his way through it. Every so often, he’ll laugh or shake his head, and when I’ve come through to join him, he starts reading out random paragraphs to me: stories about a killer virus afflicting horse chestnuts, or the latest transgressions of a minor royal, a particularly withering passage in a restaurant review. ‘Listen to this one, love,’ he says, wrestling the paper into shape. ‘You’ll like this.’

‘Don’t bother to strip your bed,’ my mother calls through. ‘Just leave it. I’ll do all the sheets on Tuesday.’

‘Right,’ I say, getting up.

I’ve just stepped out of the bath when I hear the doorbell.
The Pearsons and the Crofts have arrived simultaneously, and when I get downstairs, I see my mother has her special social carapace on: glassy panicked smile, apricot lipstick and lots of Elnett.

I tour the room, kissing people and shaking hands. Stewart Pearson addresses me as Hester and then looks rather put out when he’s corrected. ‘Of course – you’re in journalism,’ he says. I always wonder how much spin my parents put on my career. Hester, who teaches history at a well-regarded London girls’ school, does not require their help.

‘If you can call it that,’ I say. My mother inserts a dish of crisps between us. Terry Croft switches his glass of beer from right hand to left, and helps himself.

‘Not a good time to be in newspapers, I imagine,’ he says, compassionately.

‘No, that’s true,’ I say. ‘We’ve just been through one round of cuts, but we’ve been warned to expect more.’

‘Well, I’ll bet you’re a survivor,’ Stewart Pearson says, very jovial. ‘What’s your technique? How do you make yourself indispensable?’

‘Oh – just keep your head down, I suppose,’ I say. ‘Lie low. Dot the eyes and cross the tees. Hope for the best.’

‘Are you working on anything interesting at the moment?’ asks little Val Croft, looking up over her schooner of sherry with shiny impressionable eyes.

This sort of question always throws me. If I told her the truth – that I spend my days correcting spelling mistakes and moving commas around – she’d barely believe it. ‘Well, I’m reviewing a book at the moment,’ I say, rather liking the sound of the words, despite myself. ‘Just getting some thoughts together. Sunil Ranjan’s new novel.’

‘Oh, the Indian chap?’ says Stewart Pearson.

‘Bangladeshi,’ I murmur into my glass of sweetish white wine.

‘I hear he’s a terrific wordsmith,’ he says encouragingly. ‘On my list. Definitely on my list. Just wish I had the time to read. I don’t know when people fit it in.’

And then they’re off, talking about all the other claims on their time: golf, fishing, Rotary fund-raising, church committees, the evening lectures at the local institute. The implication being that reading is a frippery for dilettantes.
Salt of the earth
, I think, listening to them.
Pillars of the community
.
Jesus wept
. I find myself wishing we could talk about something – anything – else: the new vicar, the proposed bypass, Mrs Tucker’s teenaged granddaughter’s pregnancy. As the competitive self-justification goes on, I think I’d even welcome the question I dread more than any other:
So
,
is there anyone special at the moment?

‘Well. With all that to keep you busy,’ I say eventually, to the room at large, ‘it’s a wonder you find time to draw breath.’

As I say it, I see my mother looking at me with her mouth slightly open, as if she’s catching the sound of a distant detonation, and I know I’m on the cusp of going too far.

‘To be fair, though,’ says Terry Croft, ‘Val’s a reader. Always got her nose in a book. Isn’t that right, Val?’

Val Croft flushes pink. ‘Well … I do love my Judy Arbuthnots,’ she admits, in a small embarrassed voice. ‘Not … literature. You couldn’t call it that. Frances wouldn’t, anyway.’

I give her a big understanding smile and then I ask her whether she is still helping out with the local Brownie pack.

‘How is that dog of yours?’ asks Sonia Pearson, dusting pastry off her jersey, as the barking starts up again.

‘Oh – Margot loves it when the children visit,’ my mother sighs, clasping her hands together in front of her, as if she’s about to say a prayer or burst into song. ‘After they go, she always mopes about the house – doesn’t she, Robert? –
looking behind the sofa, trying to find them. She simply adores Frances.’

I hear her saying these things, mouthing these lies, and I look at my father, who hasn’t reacted but continues to sip his lager while staring out of the window at the shrubs thrashing around; and then I feel a tremendous urge to laugh, to expose my mother’s ludicrously conventional little fantasy. But I don’t. And driving back to London that afternoon, passing first the sign to Biddenbrooke and then shortly afterwards the white rectory with the stile at Imberly, I think:
Maybe it’s not really lying if you barely know you’re doing it
.
It should be true
.
It’s the way it should be, in an ideal world
.

I submit my review to Mary.

A few days pass before she gets around to reading it. Storm clouds are gathering over the
Questioner
again. Sitting at my desk, I hear people assembling in indignant knots by the printer, talking about pay freezes and voluntary redundancy schemes and the ridiculous amount Robin McAllfree, the tiny little bullet-headed editor, is splurging on Gemma Coke, his new star columnist. (There’s a general assumption that he must be screwing her. Her copy is certainly not worth the figures being bandied about.)

Emergency meetings are convened in the Albatross. Our inboxes fill up with emails from the managing editor and the Director of Human Resources and the company CEO and the mother and father of the NUJ chapel, and none of them are saying anything remotely reassuring.

Even Oliver is getting twitchy. Over the last few weeks, as well as making more of an effort to get in on time, he has been doing his best to stick around until the moment when
Mary departs for the day. And he’s diligently covering his arse, as people tend to when they feel vulnerable.

On the Monday morning, just after Mary has arrived on the fifth floor, he walks over to my desk holding Sunday’s paper, which he has folded back to one of the books pages. He drops it down on my keyboard, his finger stabbing at his review of the latest Jane Coffey, specifically at a typo which has somehow sneaked past me. ‘This looks pretty shabby, doesn’t it, Frances?’ he says, in a voice loud enough to reach the desks on the other side of Books, which are occupied by TV and Travel. ‘It rather spoiled my Sunday. I mean, fuck’s sake.’

TV and Travel, I can tell, are sitting up straight and nudging each other, enjoying the prospect of someone else getting a bollocking for a change.

I feel faintly nauseous, as I always do when I’ve made a mistake. In these situations, it’s best to hold up one’s hand and accept responsibility, even though it wouldn’t have happened if Oliver had filed on time, rather than at the last possible moment, and if he’d bothered to read his copy through before sticking it in the queue. But really, there is no excuse. So I pick up the paper and look at it and say, ‘God, I am sorry. That really shouldn’t have happened.’