Easy Peasy

by Lesley Glaister

  ‘That smell won’t do you any good,’ I say. ‘Shall I open the window?’

  ‘If you like. I spilt a bit on the bed. I reckon you could get high on this.’ She picks up her sheet and sniffs.

  I force up the sash. The roar of the traffic and a cold blast of its fumes fills the room. I slam it down again.

  ‘Don’t mind the sound of the traffic,’ she says, ‘that make me think of Stan. He’ll be back, tomorrow. Didn’t want to go at all and leave me. But you know. Money and that.’

  I hand her her tea.

  ‘Camomile, thanks. You are good. That’s funny you turning up like this, just when Stan’s away, just when I can do with a bit of company.’

  ‘It’s been much too long.’

  She nods.

  ‘Anything to eat?’ I say. I feel out of my depth with someone so ill, I don’t know what to do.

  She pulls a face. She looks very striking in her headscarf, and, curiously, younger – or ageless rather. ‘Can’t fancy anything now. Talk to me instead.’ She pats the bed beside her.

  I’d arrived mid-afternoon. She’d been watching the television, I could see the screen flickering in a corner of a room, otherwise I might have assumed she was out, she took so long to come to the door. When she did I had to smother my alarm. It was a shock to see Wanda – who lived in my imagination in a cloud of variously coloured fuzzy hair – bald, her face devoid of make-up. I really did not recognise her for too long a moment. But her dressing-gown was velvet, like the one I remembered from twenty years before – though surely not the same one. That was the only Wanda-ish thing about her.

  ‘Vassily said you’d come,’ was what she said as she reached up to kiss me on the cheek. I am not tall but she reached up. I had not realised she was so small. Her body in my arms as I hugged her was soft and insubstantial. She had been very tired. ‘I was just off to bed,’ she said, ‘but you’ll stop, won’t you?’ She had gone upstairs and I’d gone for a walk through the town and down the steep hill to the sea-front. I’d stood on the promenade, watching the grey gulls bob on the darkening sea, attempting to assimilate Wanda as she was with what she has become. I wanted not to be shocked, appear shocked, when I was with her. I wanted to look her in the eye. I wanted to help her and I wanted to know about her. I wanted to ask her about Daddy.

  I bought bread, fruit, eggs and a bottle of wine, in case she was up to a drink. I certainly needed one.

  Now her face against the pillows is bright, vivacious. The crimson of her lipstick reminds me of Foxy and I catch my breath.

  ‘How’s your love life?’ she asks as if reading my mind.

  I say nothing for a moment feeling the leaden weight of it in my chest. She leans forward, the question in her eyes, interest. I feel a corner lift, the possibility of a little lightness. Maybe I can talk to her.

  ‘My lover is bored,’ I say, flinching at the dull, doom-tolling timbre of the word. ‘Yes, bored. Wants other … you know. Don’t know what to do.’

  ‘And do you still want him?’

  ‘Yes, I … at least I think so. And it’s her,’ I add, daring. No idea what her reaction will be.

  ‘Her? Well fancy that.’ She leans back and narrows her eyes. ‘Just fancy.’

  I smile and the corners of my mouth lift the weight and do let in lightness.

  ‘I used to wonder …’ she said. ‘I never had any experience of women, but … well you can’t help wondering, can you?’

  I find myself telling her all about Foxy. I never expected this. She listens very well, nodding, making all the right noises in all the right places. But what can she say? No good seeking an answer from her, from anywhere outside myself. The answer is in me somewhere and that is the only place it is. But the air of confidence is exhilarating and comforting at the same time. I finish talking and there is a long pause.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about Ralph,’ she says, sipping her tea, looking down, examining her bright nails.

  ‘You and Daddy?’ I hold my breath and look at her. A fleeting expression of tenderness on her face is my answer.

  I had tried asking my mother. On Boxing Day – the last time we were together. Huw had bought her an enormous jigsaw, 5,000 pieces, nearly all leaves and sky. Together, we – Hazel, Colin, Huw, Mummy and myself – had started it, arguing as we always did over puzzles because everyone else likes to sort the edges out first and I prefer to start in the middle.

  ‘Trust Grizzle to do it the hard way,’ Hazel said, an edge in her voice, and we glared at each other. But that was the nearest we got to a row. Not bad for a family Christmas. The puzzle was started but the table had got knocked. Everyone else had gone for a walk. I’d stayed behind to help Mummy with the lunch. I was setting the table when I knocked it. ‘Damn.’ I knelt to pick up the pieces, she bent over beside me.

  ‘Mummy?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Daddy and Wanda …’ A drop of temperature suddenly, but I persevered. Since the funeral it had been on my mind. ‘Was there anything?’

  ‘Let’s get this picked up.’

  My mother’s carpet is green and brown, the jigsaw pieces camouflaged. I stretched out and ran my hand over the shadow under the table.

  ‘I mean,’ I insisted, my tongue stiff, ‘I mean were they having an affair?’

  ‘I wish we’d never started this.’ Mummy stood up and examined the puzzle. ‘All forest, millions of leaves. It’ll never get done. Don’t know what Huw was thinking about. Does he think I’ve nothing better to do?’ I stood up and she looked at me. Her pale eyes flooded black with hurt. ‘I know quite well what you mean.’ Her hand went to the corner of her mouth. ‘Does it never occur to you, Griselda, that there are some places where you simply cannot put your big feet?’

  She went through into the kitchen. I opened my fist and let the jigsaw pieces fall on to the table. One I’d picked up happened to fit, an edge piece, gold-leaf fragment, the completion of a blade of grass. I followed Mummy through into the kitchen but she kept her back to me tipping pickles – red-cabbage, onions, beetroot – from jars into glass dishes so that the kitchen reeked of vinegar.

  Now Wanda smiles at the question.

  ‘You were more than … ordinary friends?’

  She considers, picks up the paper tag on the tea-bag string and fiddles with it, folds the flaps back so that it resembles a white moth against the orange of her nails. ‘Yes,’ she says.

  ‘You were …’ Lovers I want to say, but can’t bring myself to use that word in connection with Daddy. She leans over, flicks open the cassette player, turns over a tape, presses play. The sound of water trickling, then the trilling of a bird.

  ‘I like this,’ she says, ‘that’s so restful.’

  We listen together. For some reason the carefully calculated relaxing sounds get on my nerves. Water over stones, wind in leaves, another blasted bird. I long for a shout or gun-shot. ‘Don’t worry,’ I say.

  She opens her eyes and shakes her head. ‘That’s just, I don’t know … I don’t know how much you know.’

  I take a sip of my tea, cooling now. I can’t stand camomile. I should have had a proper cup of tea. ‘Not much,’ I say, ‘it only occurred to me at the funeral that you and Daddy …’

  ‘Really?’ she laughed, something of her old laugh there, a huskiness. ‘But you knew I was on the game?’

  I look into the clear piss-yellow of my tea. I put down the mug. ‘No. No, I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘When you were living near us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I remembered an afternoon in Wanda’s house, Vassily and me creeping around, the bedroom door closed on Wanda when she was supposed to be out. A man calling her a silly name – Hotpants.

  ‘Very high class,’ she says, self-mockingly, ‘very appointments only and regular clients and that. And’, she clinks her nail on the rim of her mug, ‘independent, what I earned, mate, I kept.’

  The window rattles as a particularly heavy lorry pa
sses. The house is on a sloping bend so that lorries grind their gears just as they pass. ‘I don’t know how you stand this,’ I say.

  She shrugs again. There’s an awkward silence between us, leaves rustling, or maybe the beating of wings. I try to get my mind in focus. There is something dreamlike about this conversation. ‘So … so my father was a regular … what would you say … client?’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘A way?’

  ‘Not quite…’

  ‘What?’ I feel like shaking her.

  ‘Well, yes, all right then. He was a regular client.’

  I shiver suddenly. The room is very cold. Wanda, snuggled up in bed with her dressing-gown on is all right. I am dressed in a flowered rayon dress and cardigan. Very 40s’ today, very uptight and shocked.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I fight to keep my voice even. ‘I mean … what about Mummy?’

  She snorts, amused. ‘There usually is a mummy.’

  ‘Did she know?’

  ‘Why do you think you moved so sudden?’

  ‘Daddy’s job.’

  ‘That wasn’t far. He could have driven.’

  ‘They wanted the sea … a change …’ I tail off. It is no good trying to beat away the truth with questions. ‘I’m cold,’ I say instead.

  ‘Look in the drawers in the spare room – some of Vassily’s stuff, sweaters and that.’ I get up, smooth my dress. ‘You upset?’

  ‘No … I don’t know … maybe a bit, you know …’ I wave my hand backwards and forwards. She starts to say something else but I am out of the door.

  I sit on the edge of the bed in the spare room – the room I’m going to sleep in tonight, as if, as if, there was any possible chance of sleep tonight what with Foxy and Wanda and my dad all sexy and knowing and unfaithful chasing each other round and round in my stupid naive head. How have I gone through life so trusting and half blind?

  From the chest-of-drawers I pull out a big Guernsey sweater and slip it over my dress and cardigan. I pause in front of the mirror and look at my pale and childish face. On top of the chest-of-drawers is a jumble of things: a shaving brush, a shoe-horn, a pile of magazines and a chocolate box with a picture of kittens on the lid. I tilt up the lid and peep in. Photographs, the top one of Vassily, older than when I knew him, twelve maybe, leggy and tanned, astride a bike. I let the lid fall and sit down again. The bed-cover is lilac candlewick. The room smells damp. I think of Wanda’s bedroom in the flat, the fleshy scent of it, the crumbs on the rumpled sheets, large breasts under a film of green nylon. Daddy went there. Daddy knew that. Just a garden, a fence, a tree-house away from Mummy and from us.

  I go and put my head round Wanda’s door and look at her. Does she look guilty? ‘Something to eat?’ I say. She shakes her head. ‘Go on. How about some scrambled eggs?’

  She shrugs. ‘If you’re doing some.’

  Why should she be guilty?

  Downstairs, I turn up the thermostat and the pipes gurgle and shudder and the house settles around me. It is a freezing night. This house is not cosy, not like Wanda’s flat was cosy. The same nail and silver string pictures are on the walls, the same ornamental frogs crouch on every available surface, but there is little else I recognise. The angles are all wrong, the furniture too big and bossy for the rooms. I look at the wedding photograph again, study Stan’s face, a good-natured, uncomplicated expression. Was he a client too? Are all men?

  On an impulse I ring my mother. It’s a cruel impulse but one I cannot help. I’m like an electric wire waving free and dangerous with all this information. I need to be earthed. There is no Foxy for me to ring now, not for me. And if I did? What would she say? She would not be shocked at all, nor would she understand my shock. She would think I was being naive and hysterical which I am being, I know. The phone rings many times. I close my eyes and visualise it on the polished telephone table in my mother’s hall, the square coloured note-pad beside it, the pen fastened to it with a silky red ribbon because otherwise she never can keep a pen by the phone. It rings and rings. I am about to put it down, then:

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mum, me.’

  ‘Griselda? What a nice surprise. I was just thinking …’

  ‘I’m at Wanda’s.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wanda’s, you know.’

  ‘How is she?’ Her voice a little cooler, no one’s voice has such a variety of temperatures, edging towards the formal, the more foreign. I will not have that.

  ‘Very ill. Cancer.’

  An exclamation.

  ‘Mummy, did you know she was a prostitute?’ A long rush of silence. ‘And that Daddy … Daddy went to her?’

  I can feel the flinch of pain like a tug down the wire.

  ‘Griselda, why are you doing this to me?’ Her voice quite clear and puzzled. No answer. ‘Why can’t you leave things be? What’s it got to do with you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Indeed, why? I am a wrecker of silences. I don’t know why.

  Mummy breathes in wearily.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I don’t know. I suppose I’m tired. Sorry. Let’s forget it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let’s get this said then, if you want it said. Yes, Ralph and Wanda.’

  ‘And you knew?’

  ‘Not at first. It … dawned on me.’

  ‘Did you try to stop it?’

  The sound of air-brakes outside.

  ‘It wasn’t just … the physical,’ she says.

  ‘What …?’

  ‘I think she really loved him and he …’ Another silence, not silence, a throbbing sound that is the blood pulsing in my ear against the white plastic of the receiver. ‘All right?’ But answers breed questions. Now I want to know more. I can’t ask. ‘And now he’s dead,’ she says. Silence. ‘My best to Wanda.’

  ‘Yes.’

  In the kitchen I break eggs into a glass bowl and beat them with milk. My right ear feels tender from the call I should not have made.

  I must not think of phoning Foxy. She would be no comfort, she would be calm and rational, unphased, and wrong. And probably, anyway, she would be out. My love is not rational and it cannot share. I will not phone Foxy. All I have done by phoning Mummy is upset her again. Why do I do it? Ringing back to apologise would only make it worse.

  I watch the eggs gradually curdling in the pan, scrape the wooden spoon across the bottom and round the sides, pulling the set bits into the centre, scrambling the eggs slowly.

  3

  Christmas Eve. I drove, alone, south and east and into the flat light of Norfolk where the fields glinted wet between hedges, and outside village pubs trees were strung with coloured bulbs. On the radio, for the last hour, the Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College. My lips mouthing the words and tears periodically trembling my vision, I drove towards the first family Christmas without my father. The others’ cars were already parked outside the house. It was four o’clock, the news came on and I switched off the ignition. I wound down the window to smell the mild, salt air and heard the sea sigh and suck like a vast sleeper in a vast dream. I took out my lipstick and did my lips shiny and scarlet like a Christmas bow. I printed a kiss on a tissue from my handbag and got out of the car. I put off the moment, stood staring across grass and past the perilous cliff edge Shangri-La holiday shacks at the North Sea that looked so utterly cold and brown. I gave myself a shake and unloaded my presents from under the bonnet of my Beetle.

  Halfway up the garden path my longing for Foxy to be with me was strong enough to stop me in my tracks, a sudden blast of yearning. I stood with my arms full of presents, the hard edge of a box digging into my chest. She should have been with me but she had gone to Cairo instead with a couple of friends. I could have gone too. I wished, fiercely, that I had. The windows were lit up yellow, the curtains not yet drawn. I could hear my mother’s neighbours’ television and see it blinking through the window: some Christmas children’s nonsense.
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br />   ‘I wish you’d come home with me for Christmas,’ I’d said, but Foxy had shaken her head. ‘No, it’s family … a special family time.’ ‘But you’re my …’ I had objected and stopped. We had been through all that too many times before. Then she told me of her chance to visit Egypt. ‘You could come too … only you can’t really let your mum down …’ Oh Foxy, sailing down the Nile with your red hair flowing around your shoulders. Oh transparent faithless Foxy.

  I pulled myself together and entered the subdued festive spirit in my mother’s house. Mistletoe hung in the hall, as always, and the tree in the alcove in the sitting-room winked its fruity lights. The mince-pies were fresh from the oven, there was a pyramid of tangerines, bowls of nuts in shells with the old useless lion-headed nutcrackers lying beside them, a box of dates like a barge. Just Christmas, the same as ever.

  My parents used to argue about Christmas traditions, Swedish versus British, but years ago, when I was still a tiny child. British won – apart from the straw goat under the tree; apart from the plain lutfisk dinner on Christmas Eve, little relics of my mother’s childhood. I’d wondered if without my father, my mother might have reverted to more Swedish traditions, half hoped for it all to be foreign and different so that my father’s absence would not be so glaring; half feared the betrayal of it.

  Mummy welcomed me with mulled wine. We all kissed under the mistletoe, I even kissed Colin. Everything was warm and bright and fragrant with Christmas. I started to relax. But before dinner I made a mistake. Again, the same mistake. I brought out the envelope and removed the diary pages.

  ‘This is what was in the envelope – you know that you sent me …’ I kept my voice light. I held them out to Mummy but her hands stayed in her lap; she did not look up and meet my eyes. She pursed her lips. ‘I thought it would be something of that sort.’

  ‘What?’ Hazel took them from me.

  ‘Some bits of Daddy’s prisoner-of-war diary.’

  ‘I didn’t know he was a prisoner-of-war.’ Huw’s voice indignant.

  ‘You must have known that!’ I could not believe it, but his eyes were wide, his astonishment genuine.