Growing Season

by Seni Glaister

  Sam thought about the words Danny would have read in that blog. The anger and disgust she’d discharged into the world, her utter contempt for not just the mothers who had judged her, but for all mothers. The mothers she hadn’t met, the mothers with the power to heal her, her own mother, and all the mothers before them. There was no woman that she hadn’t expressed revulsion for.

  ‘How much of it did you really mean?’ he asked.

  ‘Of the words I wrote?’ She thought about it, trying to imagine the words, all of the words and failing dismally to recall anything much more than her most recent post. ‘Some. Not all. Definitely not all.’

  ‘Fifty per cent? Less? More?’

  Sam laughed hollowly at Danny’s predictable requirement to quantify the hatred. ‘I can’t put a number on my anger, Danny. I can’t fit my emotional range into a spreadsheet for you, my love, as much as you’d like me to. I don’t know. The anger was there – is there. I’m still angry. But some of it wasn’t me. Some of it was Libby.’

  ‘Libby? That’s the name you write under? A pen name?’ he asked, now recognising it from the blog title.

  ‘Yes and no. A pen name but she began her life as a real person. Libby was in my English class at uni. You met her, I think. Liberty?’

  ‘I don’t remember her. I only had eyes for one English student. I didn’t really fraternise with the humanities lot.’

  Sam smiled, remembering the humourless and staid young maths student who followed her around devotedly until, one day, she fell into step with him and they were never really apart again. ‘I’m sure you’d remember her if you thought about it. She was an activist if you can call a first-year student that. Passionate. Vehement. She was so driven and so just and so consistently right. She never let anything go by in class. She was sort of a bit of a joke actually, because she was poised to correct us all at any given moment, but I think everyone secretly admired her too because she was just never afraid to call it. A visiting lecturer said something vaguely sexist, she’d call it. A fellow student casually offended a minority, she’d call it. She was way ahead of her time – or certainly ahead of me. I felt that Libby was the last hope for womankind, that she’d fly the flag so the rest of us didn’t have to. Lazy, I know, but those fights weren’t for people like me. I wasn’t going to interrupt a professor to campaign for non-gendered toilets at university. I wanted all those things to happen, believe me, I really did, but I kind of thought that those issues were on Libby’s desk not mine. She was obsessed with Radclyffe Hall, I remember.’

  ‘Who’s he?’ asked Danny, genuinely interested.

  Sam glanced up at her husband to see if he was joking. She shook her head, exasperated. ‘She! Who was she! God. Poor old Libby, that was what she was up against all the time. I never had her energy to constantly admonish, chide, correct. You’d be lucky to get an eye roll from me.’ Sam rolled her eyes and looked devastated by her own apathy.

  ‘What became of her? Did you stay in touch?’

  ‘God, no. I honestly don’t know what became of her. She didn’t come back after the first year. I think something awful must have happened. She cared so deeply, had so many feelings that could have toppled her at any moment so when she didn’t return I couldn’t help myself imagining some grisly finale at Beachy Head because of an injustice served by one underclass or another. I never did find out though.’

  ‘But I am still not sure where she fits into your life now? To this blog. Is that her or you?’

  ‘I borrowed her identity and gave her a new life. I stole it really. I had a picture of her from that time Simon Armitage visited university.’

  ‘Who’s she?’ quipped Danny.

  Sam looked up sharply and saw he was joking. ‘Funny. No really, that was actually quite funny.’ She paused, recalling the visit. ‘We had a group picture taken with all of us. I Photoshopped a hat on to her so she wasn’t really identifiable. You can only see a bit of one eye and her hair falls around her face.’

  ‘That’s the woman in a hat on the blog,’ said Danny, sounding pleased to be piecing things together but still anxious about the outcome.

  ‘Yes, that’s a little bit of Libby’s face under Radclyffe Hall’s hat. I know, I know, childish really. Anyway, once I’d created this identity, I started blogging. There was no way I could have said half of that under my own name. I’m far too much of a coward and the truth is, I wouldn’t have wanted to do anything that might damage you or your career. I can’t imagine that your bosses would approve if they found out you had a ranting, angry, feminist wife inciting an uprising amongst downtrodden women around the world.’

  ‘And that’s what you were doing. That’s your writing.’

  ‘Yes. But semi-fictionally. That is, I wondered what Libby would say and then I removed any filters, any capacity for intellectual reason and then spouted it out into cyberspace. I tagged a bunch of feminist blogsites and made sure I tagged a few outspoken right-wing nutters and some pretty vitriolic Christians too. And then I’d stand back and let them fight it out in the comments. It wasn’t anything particularly clever or original that I wrote, it was the readers that gave my blog traction. All I had to do was pose a leading question, disguise it as an opinion, and then I’d let them get at me and each other. It was amazingly powerful.’

  ‘What sort of questions?’

  ‘Well, now you know what I’ve been up to, you can go back and read them all if you must. But I suppose I wrote about anything that upset me. It started soon after I went back to work. All those women who I thought were my friends, they turned out to be so incredibly judgemental. I didn’t fit into their friendship group once I’d had my op and they just dropped me. That’s what started it off. But after that, anything could trigger it. I’d hear a really obnoxious comment on the tube or at work or somebody would patronise me and I’d just focus all my spleen on them. It was weirdly therapeutic.’

  ‘It was?’ Danny looked genuinely interested in an idea that losing control, any control, might have a benefit when he’d worked so hard all his life to do just the opposite – to use control to keep a lid on the stuff that might yet come out. He and his wife were opposites, he now realised. ‘Did you hate me? Did you write any posts about me?’

  ‘You didn’t exist, Danny. Sorry. I don’t think Libby would have had any credibility at all if she’d had a loving husband at work supporting her while she stoked her revolution. I am afraid I just wrote you out of the picture.’

  ‘Cheers,’ said Danny, hiding his hurt with some flippancy he didn’t really feel. ‘So, Libby was single.’

  ‘God yes! She’d voluntarily removed her ovaries to free herself up from the confines of maternal responsibility.’

  ‘Wow. That’s harsh. Can you actually do that? I mean, it’s not really like having your tonsils out, is it?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I really sincerely doubt it. But I don’t think I ever actually said that in the blog. I just gave that to her in my own backstory. I had to create a character that I absolutely believed in and who absolutely believed in her own doctrine and then it was easy to let her say what she felt she had to say. She always had something to say – it was astonishing really.’

  ‘You’re talking about her in the past tense,’ observed Danny.

  Sam looked up at Danny accusingly. ‘Well, I can’t exactly carry on with her, can I? She existed in my mind and now she’s here, sitting between us at the table, she can’t exist. She’s not real enough anymore, she lacks conviction. And she can hardly be fervid while she’s married to you,’ Sam snarled a bit, as if it were all Danny’s fault. ‘She can’t plausibly have an opinion now, can she?’

  Danny dropped his voice to something just above a whisper. ‘I actually hate opinions, Sam.’

  Sam was silenced for a moment. This was new information. There was nothing much Danny hated, other than eggs, satsumas and mess. ‘All opinions?’ she asked, puzzled.

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded seriously. ‘I mean, apart from yours. I va
lue your opinions. I don’t always understand them, but I do try to listen to them and to try to interpret what you mean by them. But people at work with opinions, they just about kill me.’

  ‘Oh my love,’ said Sam, remembering that none of this was really Danny’s fault. ‘Nothing could kill you. You’re such a coper. You just get on with everything so brilliantly. Look at how you’re dealing with me now. I’m a complete mess, I’m a tangle of cheap coat hangers, so simple in their design, but so complicatedly entwined once you try to get in there and pull the individual components apart.’

  ‘And I hate metal coat hangers too,’ added Danny, for clarity.

  ‘I know you do!’ said Sam, adding this to the list of things she knew Danny hated: mess, eggs, satsumas, opinions and coat hangers. ‘Why do you think we don’t have any in the house? I get your dry-cleaning home and I transfer your suits on to wooden coat hangers. I am exceedingly good to you at times. I try to shield you from all the stuff that you shouldn’t have to cope with.’

  ‘You’re amazing,’ Danny agreed.

  Sam was embarrassed now by the paltry deed. ‘I don’t think that’s amazing. That’s just a tiny act of love and respect for what you can and can’t cope with.’

  Danny sighed, as if he couldn’t cope with very much at all. ‘So, what else haven’t you been telling me, other than your intense relationship with thousands of fans that read your blog that I didn’t know existed.’

  Sam looked at him. His shoulders were hunched with hurt. It was now though, that she had to share everything she could with him. If she could bundle everything into one tidy knapsack of misinformation, she wouldn’t have to drip-feed it and he wouldn’t have to confront her dishonesty again. She paused.

  ‘I don’t actually have any friends here.’

  ‘You don’t? Hattie and Anne? They don’t exist?’

  ‘They exist, but they’re not friends. Hattie is the sort of woman that drives me to write my blog. She couldn’t be friends with somebody like me, I’m not her type. And Anne, she’s just a bitter old cow really. She’s where I’m going to end up if I’m not careful.’

  ‘And what about the other one, you had a third friend, didn’t you?’

  ‘Diana? She’s real. And I hope she’s a friend. We may even be very alike. If she is who she says she is.’

  ‘But you’re not always who you say you are.’

  Sam looked at her husband sadly. ‘That’s true, I’m not. I’m sometimes me and I’m sometimes Libby and I’m always a bit of a confusion. I’m dishonest with myself but then, I think so is Diana. She says she’s not a witch. But I think she might be. If she is a witch, she’s not a bad witch. She lives in the woods. She’s been healing me.’

  Danny recoiled melodramatically. ‘Now I actually think you are crazy. That other thing? That thing where you adopted the persona of an old friend and wrote caustic articles about women without telling me? That’s fine. I’m good with that. But a witch in the woods?’

  ‘Really. Diana might actually be a witch. She lives in a grubby old caravan in the middle of the wood, under a bit of mouldy old tarp and the caravan looks like it is half fungus, but inside it actually feels more like a luxury bijou apartment. I met her when I thought she was offering to kill my enemies.’

  ‘Don’t talk to mad old witches in the woods, Sam, you can’t do that!’

  Sam laughed at the passion in his voice. ‘You don’t believe in witches! That’s me. You’re the one whose job it is to tell me there’s no such thing as witches and to pull myself together.’

  Danny took Sam’s hands into his own. ‘I am frightened of witches. Genuinely.’

  Sam snorted. ‘You’re the one being silly now. You’ve never given witches a moment’s thought until now.’

  Sam’s blog, the sheer weight of those unspoken words, had given Danny some courage. She had all these feelings that she’d not dared to express. And so did he. He bounced Sam’s hands on the table to emphasise just how much thought he had given witches. ‘But I have! I always thought my grandmother was a witch. I had to go and stay with her every time my mother was ill, which increasingly became the dominant part of my childhood. My grandmother absolutely terrified me. She was always stirring a big pot of something at the stove, and yet it never seemed to materialise into anything good to eat. I tried to look inside the pot sometimes, but she’d send me flying across the kitchen if I went close.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes really, she’d push me away. But she didn’t need to physically push me, it felt like the sheer force of her displeasure was more than enough to repel me. She’d put her hand up to stop me coming close and I’d feel like she’d pitched me across the kitchen with just her mind.’

  ‘My love. You’ve never told me any of this. That does sound awful.’

  Danny nodded. ‘It was awful. My mother was so soft. She smelt of talc and starched linen and she wore silk with these delicate lace edges and I’d climb into bed with her if she was well enough and I’d bury my face into her neck to smell her skin. It was so smooth, even when she was really thin. Her arms were the softest thing I knew, and I can still feel the touch of her lips on my forehead. She gave the lightest, driest, kindest kisses.’

  Sam felt her eyes filling up. She found it hard to be soft and kind. She was often far too brittle and harsh. ‘I’m so sorry you lost her, Danny.’

  Danny nodded at the memory of his mother and then quickly shook his head. ‘But her mum? Jesus. There was nothing soft about her. I swear she had hairs growing out of warts on her chin.’

  Sam laughed. ‘You’re making that up.’

  ‘Oh, almost certainly. I had some terrifying picture books in my bedroom in her house. Grimms’ Fairy Tales, I think. Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Red Riding Hood. God! Red Riding Hood. What was she thinking? I think the images from those books and the reality of my grandmother merged into one ghastly memory. And I expect I probably blamed my grandmother for keeping me from my mother. My grandmother was never kind. She never took me on her knee or told me it would be OK. She never told me my mum would get better.’

  Sam tried to imagine Danny’s childhood. ‘She was probably hurting too. No mother likes to see their own child get ill.’ She thought of her own mother standing out of reach by her bed when Sam had been in hospital but shook away the image, banishing it for another time.

  Danny shrugged. ‘That’s true, I suppose. But it wasn’t really my job to empathise with my grandmother. I was six or seven, for God’s sake. And she always made it very clear that she hated my father.’

  ‘That’s tough too. Do you know why?’

  ‘Because my mum turned to him when she got poorly. She only wanted to be with him. And with me of course, when she could. But Mum didn’t like me to go in to see her at hospital. I only saw her each time she came home and that became less and less frequent.’

  ‘I wish I’d known all of this, Danny. You were so great to me when I was ill, but I never stopped to think what memories it might be bringing back. You should have told me this right at the beginning, it would have helped me understand you.’

  ‘But then you wouldn’t have married me. I wanted you to marry a strong supportive man who could look after you, not a jangling mess of nerves. You were way out of my league as it was.’

  ‘You are a strong, supportive man but you’ve got your foibles too. You don’t let them show too often but you should, it’s attractive, I promise you.’ She squeezed his hand across the table.

  ‘But don’t get ensnared by a witch, Sam. Promise me?’

  ‘I can’t promise you that, and she’s really not a witch, Danny. I used that facetiously. She is just a lonely old woman in the woods.’

  Chapter 44

  Danny and Sam had been lying in the dark silently musing on their own separate worries when the storm began. It started without warning, a sudden, vertical deluge of rain that hit the roof of the cottage with astonishing force before the wind picked up and began to pummel the house rele
ntlessly from every direction. Danny ran through a mental register of threat and jeopardy, picturing the guttering, the fencing and the roof and reassuring himself that all risks had been mitigated where possible.

  ‘Five hundred pounds,’ he said, into the darkness, over the sound of the wind.

  ‘What’s five hundred pounds?’ Sam asked, who had been listening intently to the trees, straining to hear any sounds the screaming gale might be swallowing.

  ‘The excess on our buildings insurance. Isn’t that what you asked me?’

  ‘I didn’t say anything!’ she said.

  ‘Oh, it must have been the wind.’

  ‘Typical you, Danny. The wind is choosing to talk to you about insurance.’ She laughed, but half-heartedly. She too was hearing things in the wind and was resenting the noise of her own voice which was stopping her concentrating. She was sure she had heard a howl.

  ‘It’s getting louder.’

  ‘Shhh. I’m listening,’ Sam said, feeling an unanchored anxiety building in her stomach.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Danny but as he spoke a large crack pierced his words and the room lit up for a second. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘That was close.’

  Outside something snapped, a sickening wrench, the splitting of something solid.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Sam, leaping out of bed. She fumbled in the dark and threw some tracksuit bottoms and a jumper on before saying, ‘I’ve got to go out there.’

  Danny followed, putting a jumper on over his pyjama bottoms and hurrying after his wife.

  ‘Where are we going? What are we doing?’ He could now think of a number of loose items that could do with being secured. The bins for instance. And the garden furniture. He was sure it was securely stowed but he wouldn’t mind checking. His mind raced, imagining heavy forms coming loose and hurtling towards the windows of Broome Cottage.

  ‘Stay here. I’ll be right back,’ Sam said, grabbing an anorak.

  Danny ignored her and when he called out, a little hesitantly, ‘Wait for me,’ she ignored him. He grabbed an umbrella but as soon as he followed Sam outside he realised how futile it was and he threw it back into the porch, where, possessed by the wind, it jumped and twisted and hurled itself into the garden, stopping and starting and disappearing into the darkness.