Alys, Always

by Harriet Lane

  I go out to the sandwich bar and buy a roll with some Parma ham, and I’m eating it at my desk, out of a shiny packet of greaseproof paper, flicking through the Guardian, when Mary stops by my desk again. She puts down a proof copy. It’s the new Sunil Ranjan. ‘Does this interest you?’ she asks.

  I say I’ve read one or two of his other novels.

  ‘Oh, good, good,’ she says. ‘Six hundred words, a week on Thursday? I was going to get Oliver to do it, but – well, you know.’

  I make a discreet, understanding noise, and she pats my shoulder and moves off.

  Interesting, I think, picking up my sandwich again. Very interesting.

  ‘So!’ says my mother brightly. She’s sitting bolt upright on the tightly upholstered button-back chair, holding a teacup and a petticoat tail, doing her best to look entirely at ease. I’ve been in the house for only ten minutes, and we have already exhausted the drive, the dreadful traffic around Ipswich and the weather. ‘How is London? Busy, is it?’

  Like so many of my mother’s questions, this one anticipates one particular answer, in which she will take only the most limited interest. Conversation with my mother rarely goes anywhere unexpected. She has a horror of the unexpected and her entire life is structured to keep it at bay.

  ‘Pretty busy, yes,’ I say, taking a sip of tea. We look together at the shrubs thrashing around beyond the patio doors. My mother considers herself green-fingered, which simply means she subscribes to a lot of gardening magazines and pays a man to mow the lawn in the summer. She calls him ‘the gardener’. My dad does all the legwork – digging in the compost, pruning, planting bulbs – under her instruction.

  It’s a very tasteful sort of garden. There’s very little colour or scent in it – my mother thinks most flowers are vulgar, and she has a deep-seated fear of vulgarity, as if it might suddenly overpower her in a dark alley – but plenty of texture and shapes. At this time of year, as the dusk consolidates, it looks drearier than usual.

  ‘Your father should be back any minute,’ my mother says, taking another tiny bite of biscuit and dusting an invisible shower of crumbs off her skirt. At the far end of the house, the dog barks manically.

  ‘How is the dog?’ I say. The dog is called Margot, after the ballerina. She’s a Jack Russell, enormously fat and badly behaved. My parents have always had dogs, but by the time they got Margot they’d run out of energy and never found the time to train her properly, so she has to be shut up in the sunroom, like the first Mrs Rochester, whenever anyone visits.

  ‘Getting on,’ says my mother, adjusting the knife-pleat in her skirt. ‘Poor old thing.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll take her for a walk later,’ I suggest, as I always do, for my own amusement. ‘She could do with it, I expect. Take her over the common, down to the reservoir?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not sure that’s a good idea,’ says my mother, as I knew she would, as if I have suggested something terrifically reckless. ‘Poor old Margot, she gets ever so out of breath nowadays.’

  I know the reason why Margot never goes for walks, and it isn’t because of her old age, or her inability to behave herself on the lead, or anything like that. My mother has always been most comfortable on her own territory. Nowadays even minor local expeditions (trips to the seafront with Hester’s children, or the Pearsons’ Boxing Day drinks) make her jittery. She’d never admit it, of course. So there’s always a reason why she can’t come or must leave early, and usually it’s something to do with mass catering. ‘I’ve got to put the potatoes in,’ she’ll say with a tiny smile of martyrdom. ‘See you back at the house!’

  I finish my tea and as soon as I’ve put the cup back on its saucer my mother has risen from her chair, whipping them (and the plate of biscuits and the little stack of napkins) off the coffee table, and bustling back to the kitchen, where I hear her carefully rinsing and then arranging the china in the dishwasher, in what is always a very particular formation.

  ‘Why don’t you go and put your things in your room, Frances?’ she calls gaily, over the roar of tap water.

  I take my bag and climb the stairs. My parents live on the edge of a pretty village, in a comfortable three-bedder built in the seventies: white-painted boards and Cambridge brick, pine panelling in the dining room, bubbled glass in the bathroom door. At the front, the view is of the village green, with its bus shelter and pink-washed pub and occasional uninspired games of cricket. At the back, you look out over the garden and fields of rape and cabbages, and the strange dwindling architecture of pylons processing off into the next county. It’s a very flat, uneventful landscape.

  My mother has gussied up the room for me, as she always does, as if the gussying up will somehow distract me from the shot springs in the bed, which I’ve had since primary school. It’s like a little stage set, every painstaking detail suggesting gracious living.

  The pair of scatter cushions arranged against the pillow. The guest soap, still in its wrapper, laid upon the flannel. Three padded satin coat hangers fanned out on top of the duvet. The stack of Good Housekeepings and House & Gardens on the bedside table, next to the tray of tea things – mini-kettle, sugar sachets, UHT thimbles – as if I’m being accommodated in the East Wing, as if the kitchen is half a mile away.

  I drop my bag and sit down on the bed, and then I reach over and pick up a magazine and flick through it. It’s full of candle-making, beetroot recipes, charmingly mismatched blue-and-white crockery. There’s a special offer on glass cloches and brooms made in Sweden by the partially sighted. I don’t believe any of it. I put the magazine back with the others, taking care to line up the spines. I don’t want my mother to think I actually looked at them.

  All my personality has long since gone from this room. The rosettes and posters and framed class photographs, the joke books and sets of C. S. Lewis and Laura Ingalls Wilder, the cushion cover I cross-stitched when I was nine: so many dust traps, all got rid of. The bottom drawer in the little chest contains my A-level and degree certificates, my stamp collection and a shoebox of old snapshots, and that’s really all that is left of me in the house.

  Here in my bedroom, the curtains in the little dormer windows were once yellow with a scarlet and orange rick-rack trim; now they’re toile de Jouy shepherds and ladies on swings, toes pointed and hat ribbons flying. When did one replace the other? I can’t remember. Was my permission, or even my inclination, sought? I am sure it was not.

  There is a rattle from downstairs as my father opens the glazed front door and closes it behind him.

  I spread my hands on the duvet cover, feeling the heat trapped in my palms by the polycotton, the light, uneven give of the springs. Then I stand up and unzip my bag and take out my toothpaste and toothbrush, my hairbrush and the Sunil Ranjan proof copy. Seeing it lying there on the bedside table makes me feel like a slightly different person; someone, possibly, whose opinions might just matter a little.

  When I go downstairs, my mother is busy in the kitchen, and my father is circulating with a jug of water, charging the tumblers set out on the dining table. He puts down the jug to greet me and we kiss hello. I am filling him in on the highs and lows of my journey (‘Did you see the new B&Q they’ve built outside Tewford?’) when my mother – mouthing a tiny O of anxiety as she bears a Pyrex dish of mince and potatoes before her – enters, obliging us to separate. We both step back to the edges of the room so she can get to the table.

  ‘I hope you’ve worked up an appetite!’ she says, settling the dish on the trivet, which is laid upon a cork mat, which is laid on top of a tablecloth, which is laid on top of an oilcloth, as if the table itself, somewhere deep beneath these protective strata, happened to be Georgian mahogany rather than an ugly Formica.

  The meals at my parents’ house always come thick and fast, and in between there’s a constant opportunity to supplement. The food rolls out in marshalled surges, like Bomber Command. There is no let-up. Someone is forever passing around foil-wrapped chocolates, cheese straws, yellow slices of Ma
deira, salted luxury nuts, little fruited scones anointed with scarlet jam, cubes of mild Cheddar speared with cocktail sticks, decorative tins containing layers of scalloped Viennese biscuits. It’s a relentless battery of snacks. The food and the constant preparation and clearing away of it quite often get in the way of other things we might profitably be doing, things normal families seem to do when they convene: going for walks, playing Scrabble, talking about subjects other than roadworks or the weather we’ve been having lately.

  From time to time, the real world makes itself known to my mother: strikes, petrol shortages, heavy snow, a rise in the price of wheat. Such events prompt panicked phone calls, sometimes two a day, suggesting I stock up on basic provisions as the local supermarkets have had a run on bread and milk. The chest freezer out in the garage accommodates several weeks’ worth of apocalyptic menus – chicken à la king, beef olives, Gypsy tart – stashed in neatly labelled containers that once held soft-scoop ice cream.

  Occasionally, when it’s entirely unavoidable, my parents come to London, and though they usually stay with Hester (who has a proper spare room in the house in Maida Vale), once in a blue moon they have to stay on my sofa bed. Of course, these visits are always an ordeal for my mother, who applies herself strenuously to the task of appearing easy and relaxed in what is essentially enemy territory. ‘This looks smart,’ she’ll murmur faintly, as I put a risotto on the table or scoop some avocado into a salad. ‘Just half for me.’ After one such meal, when I came unexpectedly into the room, she turned her back on me, unable to speak, her mouth full of biscuit.

  The chocolate wrappers and apple cores I find in the bin when they’ve left are always exquisite little reproofs.

  We sit and eat. It’s constantly disconcerting, my mother’s cooking. She models herself on the ideal hostess, but she cooks like a prison caterer, as if the activity is a punishment which she is obliged to pass on to others. This cottage pie is no exception.

  ‘Frances was saying London is very busy,’ my mother informs my father.

  My father picks up his fork and says Stewart Pearson was down in London last week, visiting Clare and the grandchildren.

  ‘Clare lives not far from you, doesn’t she?’ says my mother. ‘Do you ever see her?’

  Clare lives, I believe, in Acton. I barely even know where Acton is. I had nothing in common with Clare when we were at primary school together, and now she’s a marketing manager at Unilever with a husband and two children we have even less to talk about when our paths cross at the Pearsons’ Boxing Day drinks. ‘I thought I saw her going into Selfridges last week,’ I invent. ‘But she was quite far away, I couldn’t be sure.’ I rake my fork through the pale uncrisped mash so the gravy seeps down the channels, just as I used to as a child, before I knew that not all food tasted like this.

  ‘Have you seen Hester and Charlie recently?’ my father asks.

  I say I babysat for them a few weeks ago, and we talk a little about Toby and Rufus. I quite enjoy my nephews, as long as I don’t see them too often or for too long. Overexposure is never satisfactory, not least because I’m frequently rather dubious about some of Hester’s parenting techniques. But I know from experience that my parents don’t want to hear about that. My parents are always more enthusiastic about the idealised notion of the grandchildren than they are the noisy, messy reality. That much is clear when we all congregate here or at Hester’s house at Christmas.

  I sometimes suspect that, as far as my mother is concerned, the real purpose of family is to ensure she always has something to talk about if she bumps into Mrs Tucker at Tesco.

  As is customary, she only half-listens to what I am saying about Toby and Rufus. My mother has never been a very engaged listener. Other people’s speech is useful mainly as a prompt. So when I mention Toby’s passion for Playmobil, she launches on an anecdote about a den Hester and I once built together using the clothes horse and all the clean towels in the airing cupboard – a story I’ve heard countless times before (although I now have no memory of the actual incident). I wonder how much of a connection my mother makes between the child I once was and the adult I now am. Usually she talks of my childhood as if it’s something that really happened only to her, as if I were only distantly involved.

  We have crème caramel in stemmed glass dishes for dessert, and then I help to clear away. The evening stretches ahead of us: acres of it, as flat and featureless as the fields around the house. None of us can decently go to bed for hours.

  We fill the time with coffee and mint chocolate thins in little slippery envelopes, and my mother lays the table for breakfast, and then we watch several finalists competing for a part in a London stage musical, and after that there’s a film, an action movie set in ancient Rome. My mother fidgets uneasily during the fight sequences and the sex scenes. In the second commercial break, she collects the cups and chocolate wrappers and says, ‘Well, Frances, I hope you have everything you need. Sleep well, dear.’ Then it’s just my father and me, sitting side by side in the darkened room, eyes fixed on the screen like astronauts preparing for countdown.

  From time to time, I can hear the dog barking. It’s a less angry sound now, as if she has started to adjust to her new status, as if she is now merely disconsolate.

  We don’t watch the end of the movie, but switch over for the ten o’clock news.

  Later, as I move around my room, picking the plastic film off the soap (as tiny and pearly-pink as prawn dim sum), brushing my teeth at the rinky-dink basin and running the flannel over my face, I hear my father escorting Margot through the house and ushering her, with a strange sort of chivalry, out of the front door (‘Come on, old girl, time for some fresh air’). I poke back the curtain an inch with a finger and watch the pair of them beginning a circuit of the village green, moving slowly between the benison of the lamp-posts, a stout elderly man and a stouter elderly dog, out in the wind and the dark.

  Fifteen minutes later there’s the slight reverberation as the front door clicks. Lying in bed with the novel propped open on my chest and a notebook and pen ready on the bedside table, I hear Margot’s nails skittering down the corridor and my father’s muttered good night as he shuts her in the sunroom and then comes upstairs, wheezing faintly on every step.

  The buzz of the bathroom extractor fan, the toilet flush, the fan switching off. Finally there’s silence.

  This is the house where I grew up, and it means nothing to me, just as I mean nothing to it. There’s no sense when I’m here of being safe or understood. If anything, this is the place where I feel most alone, most unlike everyone else.

  I learned to talk and walk here; I sat at the dining-room table painstakingly crayoning letters on sugar paper; I sowed mustard and cress upon thick wet layers of kitchen roll; I came down on Christmas mornings and received dolls and roller skates and bikes and, as time went on, book tokens and jeans that I’d picked out myself; and I lay on my stomach on the lawn underneath the elder tree, reading and reading; and then I moved away, and it was as if I’d never lived here at all.

  The radiator gurgles as the central heating shuts off for the night. I shift position in the narrow bed, looking at the shadow the pendant lampshade casts across the ceiling, trying to remember what it felt like, growing up in my parents’ house. I don’t remember being especially happy or unhappy here. Childhood just happened to me, as I suppose it happens to most people. At the time, I suppose it seemed an endless succession of fears and dreams and secrets, but from this distance it looks as dull as the life I’ve gone on to lead. Did I tell my mother when things went wrong or well at school? I’m fairly sure I did not. She was never at leisure to be interested in me. She had other things to worry about.

  Hester was always kicking off, throwing down challenges, sneaking out to meet boys. I remember the general relief when she went off to university. But I wasn’t like that. I was the good girl: biddable, compliant. I did what I was told, I kept my nose clean, I was no trouble to anyone. But the farther I travell
ed from the house where I’d grown up, the less I seemed to belong; the less it looked like home.

  The Pearsons are coming for a quick drink before Sunday lunch. And Terry and Val Croft might look in, if they have time, although there’s an antiques fair at Fulbury Norton that they’re hoping to visit. Before retirement, Terry and my father were partners. Thorpe & Croft Solicitors. The office was on Beck Street, between the precinct and the leisure centre.

  While I was at school, if I missed the bus home, I used to head up there and wait for my father to give me a lift back. There were two wing-backed chairs in reception and I’d sit on one of them and do my French homework on the coffee table, clearing a space between the elderly Sunday supplements with the recipes ripped out of them. If she happened to be in a good mood, Penny, the secretary, used to make me a cup of tea and slip me a pink wafer from the tin she kept in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. I wonder what happened to Penny. There was always something funny about her, and then one day I realised that she wore a hair-piece.

  My mother is almost beside herself with anxiety.

  ‘You’ll have to find your own way around, I’m afraid, dear,’ she says, with an air of extravagant restraint, as I appear for breakfast. ‘You know where everything is. I’m a little tied up, as you can see … Weetabix in the cupboard, muesli, cornflakes, so on and so forth. No, not that milk, dear, there’s one open on the lower shelf. Bread in the breadbin. Jam’s in the cupboard, or perhaps you’d like Bovril?’