Supper time was festive, with a glass of sherry to celebrate her homecoming, and ham cut from the bone. George Patterson had been in hospital with heart trouble. Aimée Hughes had had a breast removed. Mrs Munro’s sister’s child had produced a baby without arms. Mrs Glendenning had gone peacefully in her sleep – the only way to go. Mrs Munro herself was being treated for hypertension.
‘Why?’ asked Ann, shocked.
‘Nerves. She runs the whist-drives. She does all her own gardening.’
‘The baby—’ said Ann, but Mrs Walton grimaced in the direction of her husband, as if the subject was too delicate.
She had tickets for the church pantomime. The Floral Hall was cold, and Captain Walton kept on his muffler and his overcoat with the band of velvet at the collar. Everyone chatted to Mrs Walton – the vicar’s wife, Aimée Hughes, wearing an apron criss-crossed upon her mutilated chest, Mrs Munro. She was so popular, so well known. She ran gaily between the rows of chairs to the trestle table set with cups and sandwiches. She laid her hand on the vicar’s arm as he passed. She admonished the choirboys slithering excitedly over the worn planking of the wooden floor.
‘You’ve met my daughter, haven’t you?’ she cried, above the noise of the cups placed on saucers, the chairs dragged into place. ‘Works in London, you know. For the BBC.’
Ann smiled and bobbed and shook hands. Her mother’s laugh, high-pitched and near hysteria, leapt and trembled about the hall. Captain Walton, ignored, tapped his feet for warmth; his eyelids flickered, his lips turned blue. The curtains opened and the local ballet school, in green and white, danced with precision. The leading lady, dressed as Robinson Crusoe, cast herself beneath a papier-maché tree and sang ‘One Day My Ship Will Come’. The church organist, Arnold Mason, played ‘Man Friday’. He rolled his eyes comically and bounded like a dog about the stage. Whenever he opened his mouth to speak, Mrs Walton gasped in anticipation and dug Ann in the ribs. She led the laughter and the applause.
In the interval everyone agreed that Arnold Mason was a scream. Ann would have liked to be friendly, to have joined in. When her parents had settled in Brighton she had been away at school – she had no roots, no continuity; she knew none of the young couples arm in arm in the back rows, united by church-going and tennis tournaments. She smiled till her jaws ached. Now she was here, with her mother the life and soul of the party, she wondered why she had come – why she had left William in London to spend Christmas alone. Perhaps it was her father she had made the journey for. She put her arm through his in the darkness. He shifted on his chair. After a few moments he had a fit of coughing and removed his arm to get at his handkerchief. When he had recovered he crossed his arms on his chest.
Later, Mrs Walton sat Ann in the kitchen and said, ‘Now, tell me about him – this person you were so full of.’
It was an apt phrase. Bent over her stomach, Ann tried not to feel hostile. Her mother had the knack of stemming communication at source. Like frost, she nipped the bud before it had time to open.
‘He’s just a writer.’
‘Have you met the father yet?’
‘Not yet. But next month he’s taking me to meet him.’
Her mother didn’t mention Mr McClusky’s rank. Maybe she feared he wasn’t a General after all, and it was best to live under an illusion. She was no fool. ‘How rich is he?’
‘Quite rich. He bought that coat … and the boots. He’s got you a lovely present for Christmas.’
‘Me? Me?’ Amazed, Mrs Walton pushed her hand against her breast. She clutched her sapphire brooch.
‘And something for Father. He’s very generous.’
‘Show me the present. Let me see it.’ The little spiky lashes, blobbed with mascara, blinked rapidly above greedy eyes.
‘You’ll have to wait,’ said Ann.
‘I want to see it now.’
‘You can’t, Mummy.’
The electric fires were switched off, the lights on the Christmas tree extinguished; the warmth faded from the terrace house. The mist rolled in from the sea front, penetrating the doors and the windows.
‘I’m cold,’ Ann complained, climbing the stairs.
‘Rubbish,’ said her mother. ‘It’s very mild.’
She flung open the window of the bedroom, adjusted the rug beside the divan, turned back the sheet.
‘Can’t I close the window?’ Ann said.
‘No, leave it open. It’s stuffy in here.’
Captain Walton coughed in the back bedroom.
‘Sssh,’ said her mother. ‘Don’t disturb your father. Get into bed quick and turn the light off. Don’t leave your clothes all over the floor.’
Ann looked at her room, at the neat net curtains, the picture on the wall, taken from a calendar, of two kittens on a cushion. On the dressing table was a sewing basket she had used at school. That was all, apart from the bed and a chair. No books, no dolls, no hockey stick or tennis racket. All her childhood tidied away.
She could hear her mother opening the door of the walnut wardrobe, the metallic noise as she replaced her brooch among the other jewellery, the rustle of polythene as she hung her dress safely against moths, the click of the switch as she turned off her electric blanket, a faint vulgar noise of wind escaping.
Mrs Walton opened William’s present before anyone else’s. She fingered the fur, looked for a label. Ann watched her face.
‘It’s very nice,’ she said finally, and laid it to one side. She wasn’t going to return it, but obviously it was not as expensive as Ann had imagined.
At the bottom of her suitcase Ann had discovered a small box with her name written on the lid. Inside was a string of amber beads and a square of white card – ‘To my own darling from your loving William’. Ann left the beads and the note where her mother might see them. When she looked an hour later, the necklace had been placed on the mantelpiece. Beside it lay the remains of the card, torn into pieces.
Aunt Bea and Uncle Walter came for Christmas lunch. They sat in the front room with crackers beside each plate and the meat on the sideboard. There was very little space.
The flex for the electric carving knife stretched like a trip wire across the hearth. The chairs backed on to the electric fire; Mrs Walton was for ever leaning sideways, fondling the polished legs, to see if the wood was scorched. Captain Walton carved standing up and stopped frequently to cough. Whenever he did, Mrs Walton jumped up and rubbed the misted surface of the sideboard with her napkin. Ann wore rouge on her cheeks. She had woken at dawn in a room filled with fog and retched into her handkerchief. Her lips tasted of salt.
‘Pamela’s in London, then?’ said Mrs Walton, not too sharply.
‘Working,’ said Aunt Bea, defensively. ‘She’s a dental receptionist now. In Regents Park.’
‘Surely not on Christmas Day?’
‘She has a lot of friends,’ said Aunt Bea. She looked sideways at Ann, as if to imply it was different for her.
‘No stuffing,’ said Uncle Walter. ‘If that’s no trouble.’
‘And how’s your young man?’ asked Aunt Bea. ‘The professor.’
‘He’s well,’ Ann said. ‘He’s made friends with some people who have a cabin in the mountains. They shoot bears.’
‘It’s illegal,’ remarked Walter. ‘It’s not on.’
‘They do shoot,’ said Ann. ‘I may have got the animal wrong.’
‘Have you ever met Richard Murdoch?’ he said. ‘In the course of your work.’
‘No,’ said Ann. He asked the same question every Christmas: he had been in the RAF during the war, and had once seen Richard Murdoch across the room at a tea-dance.
Mrs Walton swept up crumbs from the carpet and emptied the ashtrays, even while they were eating. She crawled on hands and knees under the table with her pan and brush.
Aunt Bea admired the clay bowl on the window sill that Ann had given her mother.
‘There’s a lady in the downstairs flat from Ann,’ explained Mrs Walton, ‘who’s a p
otter. She’s very artistic.’
‘It’s strange how so many of them are,’ said Aunt Bea. ‘In London. Pamela’s been living until recently with a lady in Hampstead who does modern dance.’
‘In Hampstead?’ said Ann.
‘What the hell is modern dance?’ asked Walter, coarse with drink.
‘She’s a frightfully nice woman. Very well spoken. I’ve talked to her on the phone once or twice.’
‘I didn’t know,’ Ann said. ‘I thought Pamela was in Regents Park.’
Walter jumped up and sang a chorus from Much Binding in the Marsh. He tripped over the wrought-iron magazine stand and sent it backwards into the alcove. Aunt Bea pushed him into an armchair and he fell asleep with his mouth open. His hands trembled on his lap.
Mrs Walton lit a cigarette and squinted upwards through the smoke. Ash fell on to her breast. She looked down at the opening of her dress and stroked her skin lovingly with the tips of her scarlet fingernails.
If only I was adopted, thought Ann. If only they could tell me now, this moment, like an extra gift, that I was not flesh of their flesh, but different. How peaceful that would be. She was so like them. She possessed in equal quantities, the reticence of her father, the vampire instincts of her mother. Already her face, shaped like her father’s, was stamped with the character of her mother. She had only to lift an eyebrow, shrug her shoulders. I’m having a baby, she thought, choking on a silver sixpence sticky in a wedge of Christmas pudding. A bastard.
They listened to the Queen’s speech. Her father didn’t stand to attention; he sat up stiffly in his chair, eyes front, gazing stoically at the net curtains and the grey sky beyond.
Later they drove along the coast to a beauty resort – in summer: now the wind tore across the flattened grass and rocked the car where it stood. They walked to the headland. Aunt Bea and Mrs Walton turned back almost at once. They struggled, the ends of their headscarves whipping their outraged faces, back to the car and Walter, snoring, with his head against the window. Above the beach was a fragile structure of wood, cut into steps, leading down to the shore. It creaked, shifted, whined under the thunderous onslaught of the wind. The sea smashed against the cliffs, leapt into the air, fell away, leaving a strip of umber sand, laced with foam. Captain Walton began to descend the steps. He clung to the driftwood rail with both hands, his muffler streaming behind him. ‘Don’t,’ shouted Ann. He screamed something in reply – she couldn’t hear: it was typical of him to become articulate when atmospheric conditions rendered her deaf. She followed him. Maybe, she thought, her father would like William: they both knew so much about Napoleon, the desert, the vulnerability of men under fire. He had unwrapped the book on military campaigns, fondled the leather, looked up with baffled eyes. He had never asked who had given it to him, never read the inscription on the inside page.
She cowered under the spray that rose into the air, gasping for breath. They stumbled down the last wooden flight, jumped onto the beach and turned their backs on the incoming sea. Their clothes were saturated. She got earache almost at once. She stamped upon the sand and clutched her head. The cliff rose in tiers and shelved the sea to the north. When the tide was out and the day was calm, people lay in bathing costumes under the sun. Children ran like cats upon damp ground, skipping fastidiously on frail and tender feet over the baked ridges of the beach. ‘Stand fast,’ cried Captain Walton, and they leaned against the white cliff and the sea rolled up and hit them in the back. He held his arms up over his head in a gesture of surrender. She nearly fell, sucked backwards by the water. She ballooned outwards, the baby growing inside her, the heart pumping blood. The sea dropped away. They were still alive, wet through and trembling. He led her to the steps, tip-toeing through the receding waves, his hand urgent on her elbow. They dragged themselves upwards. How dangerous it had been. She wondered what had possessed him to go down onto the shore. They could have been drowned.
Mrs Walton was almost speechless with irritation. They made so much mess inside the car; they dripped on to the upholstery. Ann’s fur was ruined. Ruined. ‘You careless girl,’ she cried, touching over and over the matted shoulders, the doused collar. A chemical smell, like bleach, filled the travelling car. Such trouble they had caused – the expense of the water heater for baths, the drying of clothes.
In the dismal garden she pegged Captain Walton’s overcoat on to the line; it swung, stiff with salt, to and fro above the waterlogged grass.
On Boxing Day, after lunch, Mrs Walton became aggressive. It was a strain having a grown child in the house.
‘Have you written to that person in America?’ she asked. ‘About this new male … this writer.’ She sounded as if she would be angry at a negative reply.
‘Yes,’ said Ann. ‘I’ve told him I can’t go.’
‘You foolish girl,’ scolded her mother. ‘You could have waited till you had seen which way the land lay.’
‘I couldn’t,’ Ann said. ‘William wouldn’t let me. He told me to write.’
‘My husband,’ began Mrs Walton, ‘during the war—’
‘My father,’ said Ann.
‘—tried to make me write to my friend the rear-gunner. I wouldn’t.’
‘But in the end—’ said Ann.
‘It was utterly different. It was the war. I told my father about it—’
‘My grandfather,’ Ann said. It was not so much that she was trying to define relationships as that she wanted her mother to be less possessive. She needed to be included.
‘—he said it was none of his business.’
Was it always like that, Ann wondered. Did people endlessly choose the same kind of people to love? Her grandfather, it seemed, had, like her own father, avoided involvement. Once the big Victorian family had been swept away – the wide scope of aunts and uncles and cousins – did the choice narrow? Did you trudge around in an inner circle waiting for the one person who reminded you of your father? Did William think, deep inside, that she was none of his business?
‘Have you given yourself to him?’ asked Mrs Walton.
‘Only once,’ said Ann. It sounded better, limiting the number of times.
‘You disgust me,’ said her mother. She turned off the electric fire.
‘Don’t,’ protested Ann. ‘I’m cold.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘I am. You never stop to think about anyone else. You’re so selfish.’ She was shouting.
‘Behave yourself,’ said her mother firmly. ‘Just because you’re living a very undisciplined life and being made unhappy in consequence, you have no cause to turn on me. I’ve told you before. You’re your own worst enemy.’ The corkscrew curls sprang backwards from the complacent face. The plump hands, circled with diamond ring and platinum watch, beat a tattoo on her crossed knee.
‘I’m freezing,’ whimpered Ann. They struggled with the switch on the fire, clicked it on and off, childishly. Her mother won.
‘Why did you tear up my card?’ Ann cried. ‘You had no right.’
‘What card?’
‘My card.’ Tears ran down her cheeks.
‘My dear girl,’ said her mother. ‘You need something for your nerves. You’re imagining things. There’s something radically wrong with you.’ And she peered with genuine concern at the miserable face, blotched with weeping.
‘William,’ said Ann, ‘says you’ve tried to devour me.’
There was a pause. Her mother stared at the floor. ‘If he knows you so well,’ she said, ‘why hasn’t he mentioned wedding bells?’
‘He’s married,’ said Ann.
In the front room, napping in the chair, Captain Walton coughed.
‘Why does he cough so much?’ she asked.
‘To gain attention,’ said Mrs Walton. ‘To gain attention.’ She stretched her legs across the rug. The fire had mottled them, patterned the shins with purple.
‘William loves me,’ said Ann. ‘He really does.’
‘You need more than love, my girl. When you were born,
I lost all my teeth.’
‘I know,’ Ann said, remorseful. ‘But William loves me.’
‘Love,’ said Mrs Walton scornfully.
‘He’s going to ask his wife for a divorce.’
‘When?’
‘Soon.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘I don’t understand you,’ said Ann. ‘Don’t you want me to be happy?’
‘Go to hell,’ said Mrs Walton.
She couldn’t ring William to say she was returning a day earlier, because she didn’t want to be overheard and detained. When her mother had gone four doors away to visit Aimée Hughes, Ann told her father she was leaving.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Something cropped up?’
‘Sort of,’ she said.
She ran to the station and waited three hours for a train. She watched the end of the platform for her father to appear, sent by her mother. He never came. By the time she was seated in the train she remembered only the warmth of the house when she had arrived, the little gifts in her stocking at the end of the bed, the orange in tissue paper, the chocolate mouse.
She took a taxi to Nethersole Road. The house was in darkness save for a light in the hall. Mrs Kershaw’s bicycle lay against the wardrobe; there was mud on the wheels, a new lamp on the handlebars. She fitted her key into the lock, stepped from the green carpeting of the landing on to the black and white tiles. The bedroom door was open; there was a body, two bodies, lying on the bed. She stopped, the suitcase still in her hand. She walked into the far corner of the sitting room to turn on the light. There was a faint click in the hall as if someone had gone out, a rustle from the bedroom. The geranium on the window ledge was dying: the stems hung down; through the pale and wrinkled leaves stared Dennis Law. The doorbell rang. It was William.
‘You,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you let me know?’ He put his arms round her; he pressed her head against his shoulder.
‘There’s someone in the bedroom,’ she whispered. ‘A man and a woman. I thought it was you.’
He looked startled. He sat her on the sofa and went into the bedroom. She heard him say – ‘Oh it’s you, Mrs Kershaw. Is there anything wrong?’ And Mrs Kershaw replied, ‘There’s a leak. In the roof. Roddy asked me to see what damage there was.’
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