Natural Flights of the Human Mind (14 page)

It’s dark by the time Doody finishes mowing the playing-field, and she’s still shovelling wet grass on to the compost heap at the back of the school when it starts to rain. She is not obliged to cut the grass, it’s not in her contract, but the council parks department is unreliable, so she does it in exchange for fruit and vegetables out of Doris Hollyhead’s garden. The sharp, damp smell rises aggressively from the compost heap, making her sneeze, and her hands ache with the cold. So much for summer.

The phone is ringing as she enters the house. She picks it up, smearing the receiver with grass stains. ‘All right, all right,’ she says. ‘It’s done now, Philip. Wait until it’s light tomorrow and you’ll see the lines are straighter than usual. One of my better attempts, I think—despite the appalling weather conditions.’

‘Imogen?’

‘Oh, Jonathan.’ She feels self-righteous, and wants some appreciation. ‘I’ve just cut the grass.’

He doesn’t reply immediately, and she understands the delay. It takes him time to adjust to the practical events in life that don’t involve money. ‘Well done,’ he says.

‘Don’t be so patronising.’

‘All I said was, very good.’

‘No, you didn’t. You said, “Well done.” ’

‘So, what’s the difference?’

There probably isn’t a difference. They sound equally patronising when Jonathan says them. ‘What’s on tonight, Jonathan?’

‘On? What do you mean?’

She’s not fooled. She can hear television voices in the background, cutting off abruptly when he zaps them with the remote control. ‘Are they demonstrating spinach and dandelion salad? Pasta with walnut sauce? Ciabatta bread? Who’s coming to cook with you tonight?’

‘Imogen, what do you want?’

‘You phoned me, remember?’

‘Oh, yes.’ He’d forgotten, and a bubble of pleasure leaps up inside her. She loves to witness Jonathan’s weaknesses. It almost makes her feel warm and protective towards him.

‘Never mind,’ she says. ‘I expect you’d like to know about the roof.’

There’s a silence. ‘Oh,’ he says, just as she’s thinking about replacing the receiver. ‘Yes, the roof. The offer’s still open, you know. I could lend you some money for a bit if you’re desperate.’

There. His original generosity has already devalued itself. Doody congratulates herself on having read the situation correctly. Too many ex-wives to cater for. ‘Veronica and Gill will be relieved.’

‘Sorry?’

‘It’s OK. The roof’s taken care of. Thanks all the same.’

‘Oh. Good.’ She can see him lying there on the settee, his eyes on the walnut sauce, his mouth watering, wandering down the aisles of Sainsbury’s in his mind, looking for dandelion leaves, sun-dried tomatoes, or tomatoes on the vine, whichever sounds more expensive to him.

‘I’ve got dandelion leaves in my garden. Hundreds of them if you want to come and pick them.’

He doesn’t reply.

‘You know Oliver d’Arby? Do you reckon he had other things to leave? That he left them to someone else?’

‘I think you were the only beneficiary…’ He pauses for three seconds. She counts them. Got you, she thought. ‘How would I know?’

‘You opened my letter, didn’t you? It came to you first.’

‘It was addressed to you, not me.’

‘That didn’t stop you opening it, though, did it?’

‘Imogen!’ His voice goes up a perfect fifth. He’s stopped thinking about sun-dried tomatoes. ‘I hope you’re not suggesting—’

‘No, Jonathan, of course not. But did you know there were tenants in the cottage after he disappeared? What happened to their rent?’

‘Really? That’s interesting. Do you want me to find out?’ She knows that he will think only men could do important things like write to solicitors.

‘Yes, please, Jonathan. Could I leave that to you? I’d be really grateful.’

‘Of course. I’ll let you know what happens.’

He doesn’t ask for the name of the solicitor. Exactly as she suspected. Further proof of his guilt. ‘Sackville, Sackville and Waterman. Nice man.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The solicitors. You’ll need to know who they are.’

‘Good point.’

‘Must go now. Haven’t eaten all day.’ Not true. But she doesn’t want to give him the impression that she’s anxious about money. If he isn’t offering, she isn’t asking.

‘I’ll speak to you later.’ He’s already turned the sound up again on the television. He’ll enjoy writing to the solicitor.

‘ ’Bye, then.’

There’s a pause. ‘Maybe the solicitors have used the money on legal expenses.’

He would think of that. She puts the phone down. It’s the right time for Mr Hollyhead to phone and thank her. He and Doris the Lion Tamer should have just finished watching
Peak Practice
.

The phone rings almost immediately. She picks it up. ‘Philip! I thought you’d never ring.’

‘Imogen, it’s Jonathan. I know why I phoned.’

‘Yes?’

‘Can you phone Mother some time? She’s complaining that you never speak to her.’

‘Fine,’ she says, and cuts him off. Why was it always her fault? Why shouldn’t her mother contact her directly, instead of through Jonathan?

She dreams that Harry comes back. He flies over the cottage and lands on the road outside. She runs out of the front door, down the path and flings open the gate. ‘Harry!’ she cries.

He is climbing out of the aeroplane, unzipping his leather jacket, grinning like he did when she first knew him. ‘Imogen!’ he calls and opens his arms for her. ‘Know any good jokes?’

She hesitates, struggling to think.

Why did the chicken—

There was an Irishman, an Englishman, a Welshman—

What do you get if you cross a kangaroo with—

A noise behind her makes her turn round and Straker is there, his eyes blue and intense. He is holding two tiles from the roof, offering them to her, almost smiling.

As she wakes, she turns back to Harry and he is fading, thinning out. She can look straight through him to the other side of the road.

‘No,’ she cries.

Once she is properly awake she gets out of bed and goes straight to the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee, which she drinks before it cools down. It burns the roof of her mouth.

Occasionally, in a tiny corner of her mind, she unearths an unwelcome desire, a painful longing that Harry will turn up one day. She’ll answer the door and there he’ll be. ‘Hi, Imogen,’ he’ll say. ‘Shall we have another go?’ And she knows
—although her logical mind resists the thought—that she’ll say yes. That she’ll leap straight into his arms and rediscover happiness.

Most of the time, she locks up that part of her mind with a large, expensive padlock. She hates to dream about him. Why would she want him back? He taught her all about disloyalty and abandonment. Because of him, she has had to learn about the comfort of anger, how to be self-sufficient, how to survive. What more could he possibly offer her?

When Doody returns to the cottage, she sees immediately that Straker has visited. The roof looks different. She walks round, examining it, unable to work out which are the new tiles and which the old. They’re all equally weathered, but there are no visible holes. A shaft of victory pierces her. The cottage is safe: it can dry out and it’s hers.

She goes indoors and upstairs, resolving to clear a bedroom and make it habitable so that she won’t have to sleep on cushions every time she comes. She’s brought a screwdriver and an old knife, with the intention of opening a window before she does anything else. She scrapes away at the painted catches, pushing and shoving until it suddenly, happily, swings open, and she is left hanging over the windowsill, breathless with pleasure.

With the fresh air, a change enters the room. As if the dust and stagnation of the last few years have given up, stopped resisting and allowed the present to reassert itself. The room no longer belongs to someone else. The air is chilly and damp after early-morning rain, but she doesn’t mind and stands looking out. The lighthouse is visible from here.

Will he come back?

She has brought dusters and brooms. Cleaning is an art that she has only slowly come to appreciate.

When Imogen was first married, and Harry was away working, she would clean one room of their tiny flat every day. Sometimes he would be on call for eight days in succession, and when he came home, each room had been cleaned twice. She didn’t know how often it should be done, how other people organised these things. Nobody had ever told her. Her mother stopped cleaning after Celia died, and she couldn’t remember what it had been like before, when her father was still alive. Maybe her mother didn’t clean then either. Imogen has a vague memory of a cleaning lady called Miss O’Malley, who kept going outside to smoke. The smell drifted round the garden and reached Imogen in the yew tree. She remembers the cigarettes more than she remembers Miss O’Malley.

She didn’t think about cleaning as she grew up, until she became conscious of sticky surfaces on the kitchen work tops, and the fact that she had to do some washing-up if she wanted a clean plate. She was preparing her own meals then—baked beans on toast, egg on toast, pilchards on toast. She didn’t know when her mother ate, or Jonathan, because they were seldom in the house at the same time as her. Or if they were, they were in the lounge in front of the television, silently absorbing
Starsky and Hutch
or
Monty Python
. They never laughed. That was the puzzling thing about them. They sat in silence, Mother on the sofa and Jonathan on the rocking-chair, staring at the screen as if it were their source of nourishment. As if it would solve all their problems.

Sometimes if Imogen came in late, she hoped her mother might say, ‘What time do you call this?’ But she never did. Imogen tried later and later. Midnight, one o’clock, two o’clock. Her mother would be bound to notice. But if she’d finished watching television, she went to bed. There was no hall light to welcome Imogen back. No voice from her mother’s room. Nothing to indicate that she ever noticed if Imogen was there or not. In the end, Imogen gave up and came home earlier. She got too tired of hanging around after parties
when everyone else had gone home, or too cold sitting on a wall round the corner waiting for midnight.

Harry’s mother taught her about cleaning. Imogen and Harry came in one day while she was washing down the skirting-boards, and Imogen was amazed. She’d never noticed that there were such things as skirting-boards.

‘Hello,’ she said, as Imogen stood watching her.

‘Hello.’

They didn’t have much to say to each other—Harry’s mother was always polite, but distant. She didn’t like Imogen. She thought she was thick. She was wearing an apron, a scarf to tie back her hair and yellow rubber gloves. She scrubbed the skirting-boards with a wet cloth, which she kept rinsing in a plastic bowl of water. Imogen thought she looked like a real mother. For a brief moment she wanted to go and give her a hug. The moment passed.

‘Don’t slip on the kitchen floor,’ she said, turning away from them. ‘It’s wet.’

‘Why’s it wet?’ Imogen whispered to Harry.

He thought this was hilarious. ‘Because she’s cleaned it,’ he whispered dramatically.

The kitchen was full of home baking. Containers of peanut cookies, lemon cake, ginger cake, mince pies, brownies, flapjacks. Harry had three brothers, so they must have needed an endless supply. Imogen had never before tasted such wonderful food, and would have spent hours in the kitchen, sampling new things, if Harry had not been so anxious to get out again before his mother came in and started to challenge her to an intellectual conversation. This was normal procedure. She wanted to show Harry that Imogen was too stupid for him.

‘Do you think Margaret Thatcher will do anything about this European Community? Sort the money out properly? Terrible business, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. What do you think?’

Imogen couldn’t think anything. She would stand on one leg and look past her. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

Harry’s parents did try. They invited her to Sunday lunch, and tried to find out what she was interested in, but she didn’t know what she was interested in except their son. She concentrated on the food, and let the boys talk. They spent a lot of time arguing about nothing. Imogen always had second helpings. They knew when she was ready for more, and after a few weeks, they didn’t bother to ask. They simply passed her plate over and loaded it up again.

‘Why don’t you talk to them?’ Harry asked one day.

‘I don’t know.’ She had nothing to say. There was plenty to say to Harry—about films, music, documentaries they’d seen on the telly—but nothing to his family. She knew they were only pretending to be friendly, and didn’t see why she should contribute to the fiction.

But when they were married, and he came home for his breaks, she had to be sure that everything was the same, so that he wouldn’t feel he was missing anything. The cake tins were full, the skirting-boards were clean, there was no dust under the bed.

‘What do you do all day?’ he said to her once.

‘Oh, clean,’ she said. ‘And cook.’

He brought her books home then, because he thought she needed to be educated. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë. Imogen wanted to please him, show him that she was capable of fitting into his life, so she read them and thought about them, but didn’t know what he wanted her to say about them. She felt too exhausted to think original thoughts.

‘You’ve changed,’ Harry said to her one day, when he came home pale and tired.

‘What have I changed?’ she asked, in a panic.

‘We used to laugh all the time. You were so funny.’

Imogen didn’t know she used to be funny. She didn’t know
how to do it again, because she didn’t know how she’d done it originally. She cleaned harder. She looked for more interesting things to cook. She searched her memory for jokes, but nothing seemed funny. She tried so hard.

She is drawn back to Oliver d’Arby’s bureau. There’s something so comforting about it, the way the front comes down so solidly to make a desk, the smell of ink. It reminds her of her father, although she can’t remember the context. He must have had a fountain pen that he used when he sat in his study and they thought he was working, filling in all those forms, writing out the cheques that should have been paying their bills. He must have spent hours composing letters to people who were owed money, while he siphoned off more and more for his gambling. A small, gentle man, who used a fountain pen in a world of biros and quick bets, where television screens flashed up the results. Whatever had made him go into the betting shops in the first place? How had he discovered the thrill of it all?