by Alison Booth
‘Oh cheer up, Sal, don’t spoil it for me!’ He kissed me. ‘And guess what, they said how talented I am, and what a lovely family I’ve got.’
Still I said nothing.
‘Let’s go downstairs, Sal. We mustn’t wake Charlie.’
Jeff took my hand and guided me downstairs to the living room, and he sat me down on the sofa. Then he knelt on the floor in front of me.
‘I’ll get some champagne, Sal. That’ll cheer you up.’
He lent forward and undid the buttons of my green and white striped shirt. As he lifted my breasts out of the nest of my bra, at last I began to feel something. I felt that my love was dead.
I looked down at his smooth blond head as he suckled at my breasts like a baby. He was a stranger to me, this man my husband. I did not know this man. Perhaps a dozen times he had struck me in six years of marriage, two blows for each year. Looking back on these incidents of violence, on each occasion it had been a small, apparently trivial, incident that had set him off. And each time it was the same story afterwards: he would make passionate love to me. To begin with I had thought this was because he was trying to wind back the clock, trying to restore us to the gentle love we had known at first.
At this instant I realised that this was the wrong explanation. Jeff’s violence was the instinctive response of a weak man, a man who couldn’t control his anger.
And was it really always the same story after an act of violence? While Jeff teased my nipples with his busy tongue, I realised that something new had emerged. Jeff now seemed to think that his violence was my fault, almost as if I had mutilated myself through some careless action like walking into a doorpost. It was almost as if he were merely the vehicle through which my clumsiness would be punished.
Jeff undressed me and I felt too passive to resist, although he was a stranger. And then I let this stranger fuck me, right there on the living room sofa.
Chapter 22
NOW
Early Monday evening in Kentish Town and I’m sitting on my bed with a pile of unmarked assignments in front of me. There’s no sign of my mother yet, though she promised she’d be back by five. Having her stay makes life easier. There is laughter every evening, the kitchen is always tidy and we never run out of anything. But I know without her telling me that she’s ready to go home, to my father and their garden, to the familiarity of her own bed rather than the strangeness of the sofa bed in my study.
Though I love having my mother to stay, I did grumble to Charlie about having to move my work things out of my study before she arrived.
‘That’s a small price to pay,’ Charlie told me, around a large mouthful of muesli. ‘You’re lucky having a study of your own most of the time. If you’d lent it to me for this year, you wouldn’t have had to move out of it.’
‘I bring in the bacon and I’m entitled to a study of my own,’ I said rather too loudly, crashing crockery into the dishwasher in a staccato accompaniment.
Charlie looked puzzled at my grumpiness. ‘I’m at the gateway of my career,’ she said, trying to make me laugh with the imitation of her form mistress that usually has me in stitches. ‘What I do in the next five or so years will have a more profound effect on my future than at any other time.’
I didn’t even smile. ‘You’re too smart by half. I hope you’re not trying to blackmail me into being even nicer to you than I already am.’ I knew I was being unpleasant but couldn’t keep the irritation out of my voice. Although after my last session with Helen I felt unburdened, this feeling lasted barely twenty-four hours. Since that time my life has felt out of control; too much is happening and yet nothing is happening.
‘You’d think having this Blake bloke call you all the time would make you, like, happier,’ Charlie said softly, as if she were talking to herself rather than me, but wanting me to hear nonetheless.
‘That’s got nothing to do with anything,’ I said. ‘Haven’t you finished your cereal yet? It’s gone eight o’clock.’
Poor Charlie didn’t respond. She concentrated on finishing her breakfast and getting out of the house as quickly as possible.
* * *
I finish marking the set of assignments and put them away in my briefcase. When I open the bedroom door, Charlie is standing there on the landing, her hair concealed by the red bobble hat that she wears while she’s studying. ‘I got the parcel from Marge today,’ she says. ‘I would have told you earlier but you were too busy.’
Too busy? My heart starts to race so fast I can hear blood drumming in my ears. This is the moment I’ve been dreading for so long. Behind Charlie, on her bed, is a large padded envelope. Plastered with brightly coloured stamps and airmail stickers, it has already been ripped open. Suddenly dizzy, I seize hold of the banister. The palms of my hands are sweating.
‘Are you OK, Mum? You’ve gone white.’
‘I’m fine. What was in the envelope?’
‘Lots of pictures.’
Photographs are piled on top of her desk. When I try to speak, my voice cracks. At the second attempt, I manage to say, ‘Can I look at them?’
She nods and pulls out the chair for me to sit on. After wiping my damp hands on my skirt, I lift the photos and look underneath.
No newspaper clippings there.
‘What are you looking for, Mum? Don’t you want to see the photos?’
‘Of course I do.’ The twitch under my eye has started again. I begin to flick through the pictures with shaking fingers. There are dozens of them. Many are of Jeff when he was young. There is one of Jeff holding Charlie. He looks so young, younger than twenty-five. On his face is an expression of tenderness. Charlie is only a couple of weeks old, her features delicate, her head covered with the palest fuzz. I can feel that soft down on my lips now: I loved to caress her head with my mouth, to inhale the lovely freshly-bathed scent of her skin. I look more closely. There’s a blob of sick on Jeff’s arm next to Charlie’s mouth, and a dribble on his shoulder. How could I have forgotten that she was a colicky baby who cried a lot in those first few weeks?
I riffle through more photos. There are many of Jeff’s parents, his stepmother Marge, and some cousins too. And there are a few of Jeff and Zoë, though not with the family. I didn’t expect to see this. His arm is around her and they’re smiling at the camera. There are palm trees behind them.
‘I didn’t know Zoë knew Dad.’ Charlie is standing beside me.
‘She was his friend first. I only met her later.’ I stare at the photo, not wanting to meet Charlie’s eye.
‘After you met Dad?’
‘Yes, after I met your father.’
‘Funny that she’s never said anything.’
‘Why should she?’
‘No reason.’ Charlie hesitates before saying, ‘There aren’t any pictures of you, Mum. That’s a bit funny. Didn’t he like you?’
‘Who?’
‘Grandpa.’
‘I don’t think he did.’
After Jeff’s funeral, his father and I lost touch, although he – and later Marge – sent Charlie a card and a fifty-dollar note every Christmas and birthday. At the funeral, looking bent and older than his years, he’d seemed distant, devastated. I recognised that my role was ambiguous to him. The separated wife who’d inherited Jeff’s share of the house, and who was the mother of his grandchild. The separated wife who so tastelessly turned up for the funeral in the company of Zoë, whose photos he’d kept while keeping none of me.
‘Was there anything else in the envelope, Charlie?’
‘Only these pictures.’
‘Any letters or stuff like that?’
‘There was a nice note from Marge but that’s all.’
No letters from Jeff. No newspaper cuttings. Relief washes over me. This is the time to tell her some more about the past. ‘There’s something I need to talk to you about,’ I say. ‘It’s about…’
At this moment I hear the front door open and the click-clack of my mother’s high-heels. ‘Charlie!’ She
shouts up the stairs. ‘Are you there, Charlie?’
‘Hi Granny!’ Charlie started calling her that as a joke a couple of years ago, instead of the grandma that my mother preferred, and it has stuck. ‘Have you had a good day?’
‘I’ve bought loads of lovely things. Would you like some coffee?’
‘I’ll be down in a minute.’ Charlie puts an arm around my shoulders. ‘What were you going to say?’
‘Thanks for showing me your things, Charlie.’ I feel a sense of reprieve; the parcel from Marge wasn’t the disaster I’d feared. Tomorrow I’ll tell Charlie about how her father died. Tomorrow night after my mother has gone.
Am I imagining an expression of disappointment on Charlie’s face? Or is it relief? Perhaps I should wait for the weekend; I don’t want a scene during the week. I kiss her cheek before running down the stairs.
Chapter 23
NOW
The kitchen is cold and I turn up the central heating. My mother, still wearing her raincoat and a plaid scarf wound around her neck, is busying herself with the cafetière. She is surprised to see me home. I give her a big hug. She feels tiny even wrapped in her raincoat; I hope she isn’t shrinking. ‘I’ll make the coffee,’ I say. ‘You sit down.’
‘I’m not past it yet. You’ve been working all day. You sit down.’
Charlie comes bursting into the room, her hair still concealed by the bobble hat. She kisses her grandmother.
‘Not Christmas yet, Charlie,’ says my mother, clutching the bobble on her hat and yanking it off. Charlie laughs as her blonde hair falls around her face; suddenly she looks grown-up, much older than seventeen. She will be gone soon and my mother will be gone soon. But here we are, in this instant, three generations of women captured in almost tangible form in my mind, like insects in amber.
Charlie’s cat Tico comes yowling into the kitchen. He wraps himself around my legs and deposits a few white hairs on my black tights.
‘OK, Tico, time for your food.’ I scrape some of his special minced meat into a bowl.
‘Do you remember how you locked Tico up all those years ago, Charlie?’ my mother says.
‘Yes.’ Charlie smiles: she and my mother love to reminisce. Charlie used to stay with my parents every half-term but gave that up just before her GCSE exams. In a way I’m sorry that she got too old for that. She used to love going down there and I loved the chance to be alone for a week too. They spoiled her rotten and allowed her to do almost anything she wanted, apart from take the boat out on her own.
My mother embarks on the story of how, years ago, Charlie and I couldn’t find Tico. We searched everywhere until at last I heard a little mewing sound coming from Charlie’s bedroom. There I found the kitten shut up in the drawer.
‘Poor little Tico.’ Charlie picks up the cat, who has finished his dinner. ‘You know Gran, I didn’t actually forget him.’ When she stops stroking him, he immediately starts swishing his tail and looking offended. She peers out the kitchen window at our overgrown back garden. I watch her; she is going to tell her grandmother the truth about that day. ‘I’d done something naughty,’ Charlie says. ‘I can’t even remember what it was now.’
‘Neither can I,’ I add.
‘And Mum decided to punish me by making me stay in my room for a while. So I took it out on poor Tico. And when Mum let me out, I thought I’d give her a bit of a shock by pretending Tico was lost, when I’d actually shut him in my drawer. I’m only surprised Mum hadn’t heard him meowing before she did.’
‘Direct transferral,’ I tell my mother. ‘I’d shut up Charlie so she locked up her little kitten. A funny thing, the human mind.’ Charlie must have thought she was punishing me indirectly for punishing her.
I’d been horrified by that incident, a horror that was out of all proportion to the event. It had made me think of Jeff, although Jeff wouldn’t have punished me obliquely. When I’d discovered Tico, I told Charlie what she’d done was nasty. She replied, with the logic she’d possessed from an early age, that what she’d done to Tico was no worse than what I’d done to her, shutting her up for an offence that neither of us can remember.
‘Mum said what I’d done was cruel,’ Charlie says. ‘She told me I should guard against all violence.’
My mother and I exchange glances.
‘Mum said I shouldn’t ever hurt anyone who can’t defend themselves. And yet I hadn’t actually hurt Tico. And I never would.’
‘I was worried that you might have, Charlie.’ I lift the cat onto my lap and rub him under his chin. He starts to purr very loudly, his mouth slightly ajar in an undignified fashion. His breath smells of cat food.
My mother and Charlie embark on another long anecdote. I let their conversation wash over me, and only half-listen to its ebb and flow. For some reason I start thinking of the last time I saw Celia. She’d guessed by that time what my marriage was like.
But I never did have a chance to talk to her about it.
Chapter 24
THEN
Celia lived in the old section of the residential care home. It had once been a private house, a nineteenth-century Gothic revival structure of some thirty rooms. Its exterior was a mass of gables and roof planes, pierced by a forest of tall chimneys, each of a unique design. Yet the whole was given a surprising unity by the round tower, placed at the peak of the roofs, and capped by a bulbous dome sheeted in scalloped slates. The building’s fragmented nature must have made its conversion difficult. Inside, convoluted passageways disorientated the visitor and frustrated the staff. Yet the old part of the home lacked the institutional character of the new wing. This had been added at the back by an architect sensitive enough only to perceive the hideous nature of their design and to conceal it from public view.
Celia’s room was painted in shades of pink. I found it oppressive: the pink absorbed the light and made everything appear dingy. Celia lay propped up on three pillows. All the flesh had gone from her face: it looked very close to being a skull, and her thin yellow skin was stretched across the fine bone structure. Her hair had recently been set. Tight blue curls framed her face and clashed with the different blue of her eyes. Jeff kissed her wrinkled hand that was gnarled with arthritis; it must have been a couple of years since he’d last seen her. At first Charlie stood back from the bed but Celia beckoned her forward and Charlie moved closer.
‘Hello, my dear,’ Celia said.
‘Hello.’ Charlie’s voice was solemn. I thought how old Celia’s ninety-one years must seem to a five-year-old.
Celia looked at Jeff. She had always been fond of men. But now she was no longer able to sparkle for anyone, even my handsome husband.
‘How are you?’ Jeff said.
Celia grimaced.
‘Jeff’s practice is doing really well.’ I felt it necessary to intervene, whether to protect my husband or Celia was unclear.
Celia’s taut skin loosened sufficiently to allow her to pucker her forehead with intense concentration. It was an effort but she managed to say, ‘How nice for him.’ Abruptly the words jerked out. Charlie giggled. Celia looked at her in amazement.
‘Give Charlotte some sweets,’ she said, much as one might suggest that monkeys at the zoo be given peanuts. ‘Then send her outside into the garden.’
‘I’ll take her out in a minute,’ Jeff said quickly.
‘But what about the sweets?’ Charlie looked hopefully at Celia.
‘I haven’t got any.’ I said. ‘Give Celia a kiss.’
‘I’m not senile,’ Celia said. ‘There are some in my locker.’
I gave Charlie two black and white striped humbugs.
‘I’ve never believed in over-indulgence for the young,’ Celia said. ‘It’s only when you reach the peak and start the downhill run that you should over-indulge. And that’s merely to distract you from what you suspect lies at the bottom. When you reach the bottom, there’s no point in any sort of indulgence.’ She was muttering quickly to herself. Her words were hard to catch and she seeme
d to have forgotten our presence. I exchanged glances with Jeff.
‘I’ll take Charlie out into the garden,’ he said.
‘It’s been nice to see you, Jeffrey.’ Celia held out her hand. Jeff took it in his before kissing her cheek. ‘I do hope you enjoy your new job,’ she said before shutting her eyes.
‘Would you like me to stay on for a while?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’ Celia opened her eyes again and looked at me with her piercing blue eyes. ‘What are you thinking of?’
I felt disconcerted, as I’d been thinking about death. I switched my train of thought onto a different track and began to tell her some little anecdotes about my life.
In the middle of one of these she interrupted me, as if she hadn’t heard a word, or perhaps she was simply bored. ‘Why don’t you go back to university?’
Too surprised to do more than let my mouth hang open, I stared at her.
‘Your mother told me you’re having trouble finding a job. But you’ve got a first-class degree. You’re much too smart to be wasting your time now Charlotte is at school. Why don’t you do some postgraduate work?’ She had certainly not lost her old perspicacity.
‘You know, I’ve been thinking the same thing.’ I paused, and rested my hand on hers. ‘It’s the sort of work I could easily do while Charlie’s at school. And today I got the offer of a postgraduate studentship.’
‘Did you? Well done! Take it. Don’t always do what other people expect of you. Especially Jeff.’
The inflexion in her voice when she spoke the last two words was impossible to miss and it came as a great surprise. For years I’d assumed that she liked my handsome blond husband but now I began to have my doubts.
‘You always were the loyal child,’ she said, ‘and very inclined to protect people. Think of your cousin when I took the two of you to the zoo. He pushed you over, it was as clear as anything, but you said it was your fault. You need to protect yourself too, Sally.’
I held her hand and wondered if I should tell her what Jeff was really like. I was preparing the words when she began to mumble. It was impossible to make any sense of what she was saying. She seemed to have lapsed into confused memories that meant nothing to me. I made noises of agreement as she murmured on, but it soon became clear that she was no longer aware of my presence. Gradually her muttering petered out. She was almost asleep. I looked at my watch. It was time to leave.