‘Where are you living now?’ I asked Wanda.
‘Felixstowe, back to my roots.’ She leant forward and waved her hand between us. ‘Look.’
‘Nice.’
There were two rings on her wedding finger.
‘You’re telling me. Engagement: zircon, my birthstone,’ she waggled the finger so that the stone flashed, ‘and wedding, white gold. Yes. I’m an honest woman – at last.’
Huw glanced down at her hand. ‘Who’s the lucky chap?’
I laughed. Huw has a lucky dip of such stock phrases, always at hand. I was surprised to be laughing on this day, checked myself.
‘Stan,’ Wanda said. ‘Stan the man. Younger than me – but what’s ten years? He make me … he make me happy.’
‘I’m very glad.’ I smiled over my shoulder at her. Happy. I thought, he makes her happy.
But her smile fell away, her face suddenly bleak. ‘I can’t believe he went and topped himself.’
I could sense Huw stiffening. We both looked straight out through the windscreen. We passed a couple of gaudy Lycra-clad cyclists hunched over their handle-bars.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Still, I don’t suppose it make much difference in the long run, how you go,’ she tried, but her voice faltered, unconvinced.
‘It’ll all be the same in a hundred years, eh?’ Huw squirted the windscreen washers and switched the squeaky wipers on to swoosh away the dust.
After a mile or two of awkward quiet Wanda began to talk, about Vassily, about his architectural firm, about his wife and daughter. I was glad my face was turned away. I could hardly believe what she was saying. That that boy, that dog-bellied spook, had become a success, made me tremble with shame at the way I had been. Never cruel before or since. That episode a shadow on my childhood. I did not know if she knew about my cruelty. I never knew if Vassily told on us. ‘He’s a born father,’ she was saying, ‘none of you …?’
‘Not as yet.’ Huw sounded very firm.
I sit at the desk in the room that Daddy called his study. I slide open the top drawer and take out the contents: a tobacco tin full of red, blue and yellow golf tees; a chrome lighter; a pad of blue Basildon Bond; a small electric screwdriver; a packet of wine-gums – and Daddy’s best fountain-pen, a fat gold Parker 51. I put a wine-gum in my mouth, a long green one, CLARET it says on the top in raised letters. Claret? Green? My mouth floods with sticky childish juice. I take the top off the pen and hold it poised in my hand as if I’m going to write. It looks a very important pen, I used to think that, for writing important letters with, business things, things that required his stern cramped signature. Children weren’t allowed to use it, you’ll spoil the nib, he said. I try it. No ink. But there is a bottle of blue-black Quink by the blotter. I suck ink through the snout and inside the cavity, wipe the precious nib on the blotter making a sideways smudge amongst the mysterious blots and squiggles; numbers, names, the trying out of spelling – obssesion, obsession, ocassion, occassion, ocasion, occasion. It makes me smile, they are just the sort of words I can never remember how to spell. Daddy. I make a blot into a man, the profile of a man in a bowler hat.
I will write a letter, a letter to Foxy.
‘That’s obvious why you moved here,’ Wanda said to Mummy when we were home. We were all standing in the sitting-room with cups of tea all gazing out of the bay window at the sea. ‘What a view.’
‘Yes, we bought it for the view.’
‘Not the wisest decision,’ Colin added, ‘in terms of the coastal erosion.’
Hazel gave him a look.
Mummy took a sip of tea and sighed. ‘Well, Ralph was set on it … a good price … and it’s near the golf club.’
‘Him and his golf!’ Wanda gave a throaty laugh.
‘Yes.’ Mummy’s voice tight. I had a sudden start, looking at Wanda, something occurring to me. Not Daddy and Wanda? Surely not. I tried to catch Hazel’s eye but she was busy brushing something off Colin’s shoulder.
I stepped back and sat on the arm of an armchair. Now I was the audience and they were the actors, but their backs were to me. The funeral tea. Widow, family and possible mistress sipping tea from china cups. Widow a head taller than mistress, elegant beside her daring.
No, it was not possible, surely. Daddy and Wanda. And yet, and yet … possibly it made a sort of sense? No. But not impossible…
‘A little semi, not much but it’s our own,’ Wanda was saying, she glanced up at Huw who had put down his cup and was lighting a cigarette for himself. He saw her eyeing it and held out the packet. ‘Thanks. Not what the doctor ordered, but still. How are you doing?’
‘Can’t complain,’ he said. He held his cigarette between his finger and thumb just like Daddy had done. His profile was Daddy’s too.
‘He’s going great guns,’ Mummy said. ‘Lots of auditions.’
‘Ads mainly.’
‘And Coriolanus, not like you to hide your light …’ Hazel smoothed her hair.
‘Well, as I said, can’t complain.’
‘And Vassily?’ Mummy sat down in the armchair beside me. Her face, under its powder, was pale and sweating, not like Mummy, not like Mummy to look defeated.
Wanda began recounting Vassily’s success story and I went out of the house and wandered away to the backs of the cliff-top shacks and caravans. They had a neglected tatty air and most of them had wildly optimistic ‘For Sale’ signs in the windows. A sign: DANGER: LARGE AREAS OF CLIFF CAN GIVE WAY WITHOUT WARNING was stuck to a gate-post. I went cautiously to the edge, the place where the last shack had tumbled, and looked down. A bit of drain-pipe still dangled from the cliff and on the beach there was some debris, part of a brick chimney stack. The sea swirled below me, a dark cloudy brown as it dissolved the cliff. I stepped back, suddenly dizzy.
Daddy and Wanda.
Yes. Like a new beam shone down the corridor of my past, fresh details were illuminated, fresh shadows cast.
Wanda here at the funeral. What else could it mean? Had Mummy invited her? Why would she? I walked past the shacks and down a sloping footpath to the beach. Not dressed for it, not planning for it. I went for a long walk, walked until the light was flat pewter on the sea and the shore darkening, walked with my hands in my pockets, the salt ruining my black suede shoes. As I walked, faster and faster, I let go of all my control. I let furious thoughts well up inside me. I shouted, raged at the sea-gulls and the greedy sea, dashed tears from my eyes, not tears for Daddy now, tears for myself, overwhelmed by the faithlessness of husbands and lovers, wrenched by the pain of betrayal. I walked until distant fireworks began to scratch the sky and the sea smell became tinged with woodsmoke. And when I returned, Wanda had gone.
2
If it had not been for my ants, I might have spent less time in the tree-house. Somehow, as a refuge, it was spoilt now that Dog-belly was always in and out of it.
One Sunday afternoon, from my bedroom window, I saw Daddy holding the ladder while Dog-belly climbed up and then, once the thin legs had disappeared inside, he began to climb up himself. A shout of protest stuck in my throat. I could not believe it. He had never been into the tree-house. Even Mummy did no more than occasionally pop her head through the trap-door to talk to us. It was ours. Hazel’s and mine.
I thought it might collapse with the weight of Daddy, that the branches might break and the whole structure come crashing to the ground with a splintering of wood, smashing Daddy and Dog-belly’s bones among the broken branches. My ants would be all right, they would survive the fall and be set free. I wished the tree-house would collapse then that would be an end of it. But Daddy only put his head through the trap-door and did not climb right in. He stood there on the ladder, wobbling a bit, like a headless man.
I heard Mummy’s voice. She had gone outside and was laughing at something. My thumb went in my mouth, my teeth finding the comforting ridge of my knuckle. I watched as first Daddy, then Dog-belly came down the ladder. I was terrified that Daddy might have seen m
y ants.
‘Daddy would never agree,’ Mummy had warned when I asked if I could bring the formicary home from school. ‘You know how he is about creepy-crawlies. You couldn’t have it in the house.’ I brought the ants home and kept them in the tree-house where he never went. I had been jubilant to have that teeming little world for my own. I admired the industrious creatures, their minute bulbousness and sheen. Although they were all separate they acted like one creature, many bodies with a single intention. Dropping a chicken’s wish-bone in one day had resulted in an extraordinary tumult of activity – but not in chaos. The ants stripped the bones and stowed the meat as if they had been in training for that very event for all of their lives.
Hazel didn’t mind having the ants in the tree-house as long as the tank stayed on my side, on my shelf. ‘As long as you promise never to let them out,’ she said.
‘Course not.’
‘They’re like prisoners,’ she mused, prodding with a lolly-stick and watching the creatures boiling over the surface of their nest.
‘They’re not prisoners,’ I said, ‘not at all. This is their whole world.’
She pulled a face as if I was mad.
At least they were safe in their tank, that’s what I thought, safe from predators or the stamping feet of human beings.
Daddy didn’t mention the ants. From the angle his head would have been at as he stood on the ladder, I realised with a rush of relief, the tank would have been behind him. He could not have seen it.
Dear Foxy,
5.11.90
I’m going to stay a few more days. The funeral was all right. I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad you didn’t come – but thanks for offering. Colin is being his usual obnoxious self but he and Hazel are leaving tomorrow, and Huw too. I’ll stay with Mummy for a few days because she might need me.
Also because I’ve done something I’m ashamed of, something that has upset me – my own fault. I read your diary. I didn’t intend to, I was looking for some tampons, we’d run out in the bathroom, I thought you might have some, I looked in your bag. I saw your diary in there and I should not have looked. No excuse. So I know about Kris. I wish I didn’t, I wish I hadn’t read it. No, that’s not quite true, I’m glad I know but I wish it wasn’t true. Of course I was livid, that’s why I left before you got home, I couldn’t face you. Thinking back I realise you never lied, you just never told me quite the truth but I think that is as bad as lying. Driving down here I realised that if there was Kris there will have been others, because you don’t make it sound that much of a big deal. I realise that if I hadn’t shut the diary quickly, shoved it straight back in your bag and fled, if I’d read right back through the year I’d have found other names: Sally perhaps? You spent a lot of time with Sally, or Dana, or Jez?
To think how stupidly I trusted you. To think I missed you so much whenever you were away, the welcome I gave you on your returns, my mouth full of you when maybe the night before … oh I can’t bear to think about it. I feel so stupid. At the moment I hate you.
I’ve put this to the back of my mind today, tried to think of Mummy first. An old family friend came, Wanda, I think I’ve told you about Wanda. And now I think … oh never mind. When I get back perhaps we could talk.
Yours, (yours? I don’t think so)
Zelda.
Daddy and Dog-belly finished the pond. It was Easter Sunday. I thought that because it was Easter, Daddy might not ask him round, or that maybe Wanda would have taken him away for the weekend. But no, as soon as the table was cleared after lunch, there was his yellow face peering round the door. Hazel had gone out with some friends. I slunk outside and sat up in the tree-house with my Easter egg. I unwrapped the spotty blue-and-silver foil and wedged my thumb-nail in the crack to split the egg into halves. I held the two halves of egg over my mouth and nose to inhale the trapped breath of chocolate before it floated away. Then I broke off a fraction of shell, thicker at the edge, patterned like crazy-paving, and closed my eyes as I put it between my lips. My teeth sank into it. Nothing else has the texture of chocolate, soft and brittle at the same time. My mouth was filled with its sudden melting velvet.
But I was not happy. Daddy and Dog-belly were stretching a great sheet of green plastic over the hole. I watched from the little round window as they weighted it down with bricks around the edges so that it was pulled quite flat. Then Daddy fixed the hose to the tap in the garage and let Dog-belly direct the water into it. The water pooled on the taut sheet. As Dog-belly stood, a stupid grin on his face, holding the streaming hose out stiffly in front of him, Daddy crawled round on his hands and knees easing the bricks so that the plastic, bulging now with water, stretched to fit the contours of the hole. The water made a fatter, a deeper, a tumbling sound the more of it there was. I could smell the freshness of it, like the smell of rain. Mummy, carrying a struggling Huw on her hip, came out of the kitchen door to watch. She said nothing. ‘Me swim,’ Huw shouted, and Mummy glared at the back of Daddy’s head.
When the pond was full it made a kidney shape, clean and glinting in the corner of the lawn. It reflected the clouds that moved across the sky. It reflected the frothy pink cherry blossom from the tree above it. A petal fluttered down and floated on its surface. Nature accepted it, this new pond, easy as that.
I had wanted to hold the hose-pipe. I had wanted the thrill of all that water pouring through my hands. I had wanted to help create the pond. But now it was finished and had nothing to do with me.
I realised that without thinking what I was doing I had eaten all of my chocolate egg. My stomach heaved with the queasy bulk of so much sweetness.
‘Are you going to cover it, or build a barrier?’ Mummy said. ‘Otherwise how am I supposed to keep him out.’ She hitched Huw further up her side.
But there was no reply.
You couldn’t look out of the tree-house now without seeing, in one direction, the big glinting kidney of the pond, or in the other, Dog-belly’s window and sometimes the small cheesy wedge of his face.
I fold my letter to Foxy in half, take out one of Daddy’s pale blue envelopes, and slide it in. I lick the gum with the point of my tongue and stick down the flap. On the front I write her name, our address. Imagine it on the mat, the day after tomorrow; Foxy in her dressing-gown, shuffling to the door in her velvet mules. Imagine her putting the letter on the table while she pours her coffee, finds her reading-glasses, then sitting down, pushing her messy red-grey hair back from her face, slitting open the envelope, unfolding the pages of blue Basildon Bond, and reading. Imagine her reaction. Shit, she might say, maybe she’ll sit with her head in her hands for a bit, then roll herself a skinny fag while she thinks. Maybe she will ring me here, maybe even turn up unexpectedly. Will she be contrite? Will she be angry, somehow deflect the blame all on to me for invading her privacy so that I end up apologising?
The pen has left a dark smudge of ink on my middle finger where it has been pressing. I open the envelope, pretending I’m Foxy and read the letter all unaware, as if, as she might, expecting a love letter. Then I tear it in half, in quarters, tear each quarter into tiny squares too small to read, confetti, too small to piece together and make sense of – as if anyone would bother – and throw it in the bin.
3
The morning after the pond was finished, Easter Monday, Daddy invited Hazel and me to go to the golf-course with him. On the golf-course was a big pond, full of weed and at that time of year, he assured us, frog-spawn and tadpoles.
‘Is Vassily coming too?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘What do you say?’
‘OK. Haze?’
‘S’pose so.’
I felt grudgingly pleased. This was the exciting bit after all, putting life in the pond. Dog-belly might have helped to make the pond but we were doing the best bit, fetching the tadpoles, us, Daddy’s actual children. Mummy smiled at me, as if to say, There, you see … I think she was relieved too that for once we were preferred.
‘We’ll hav
e to do something to stop Huwie,’ Mummy said. ‘I can’t open the back door without him making a bee-line …’
‘All right, all right.’ Daddy was wearing his green cable golfing sweater. He was pink and newly shaved and his hair glistened with some sort of cream or oil. ‘Ten minutes then,’ he said. Hazel and I went to dig out some old fishing-nets and plastic seaside buckets from the garage.
‘We might get fish too,’ I said.
‘You have to buy fish from the pet shop.’ Hazel’s voice infused with scorn.
‘We might catch one.’
‘That would be stealing.’
‘Why isn’t catching tadpoles stealing then?’
‘You’re so thick,’ she said.
I smarted. But I was determined not to fall out with Hazel. ‘At least he’s not coming,’ I said.
Hazel and I got into the back of the car. There was a scratchy tartan blanket folded on the back seat. The inside of the car smelt coldly of petrol and sick because Hazel was usually sick in it on long journeys. ‘Watch out for balls!’ Mummy shouted as we drove off. We had sandwiches and apples in our pockets. We had to wedge the long bamboo handles of our fishing-nets diagonally across the car. It was a long drive to the golf-course on narrow winding roads and I was afraid Hazel would vomit and ruin everything. But she sat with her eyes fixed on the horizon, breathing deeply of the cold air that buffeted through the open window, sucking on barley sugars – and though she went a greenish white and wouldn’t speak, she was not sick.
Daddy parked outside the club-house. We climbed out of the car into a salty whistle of wind.
‘The pond’s over there, see?’ Daddy pointed away into the distance.
‘Isn’t that the sea?’ Hazel said, leaning back against the car.
He laughed. ‘Not that far … down by those bushes.’ He smiled at us as he lifted his golf-bag out of the boot. I noticed that one of his clubs was wearing the embroidered felt cover I had made him for Christmas. I wanted to kiss him. It was good to be out with Daddy.
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