by Kate Fulford
“Well, I, that is, I . . .” I muttered. Thankfully I was saved from going any further as, just at that moment, Marjorie let out a blood curdling shriek.
“Get down!” she ordered. It took me a moment to realise that she was talking to me. I had presumed that an animal of some sort had come into the room. I realised what she meant, however, when she threw herself under the kitchen table at which we had been sitting before grabbing my arm from below to make sure that I did the same.
“Did you see her?” Marjorie gasped as we huddled on the floor beneath the table. This was not at all what I had been expecting when she had invited me back for a coffee.
“See who?” I asked.
“Meryl bloody Streep.” As the only view from the kitchen was of Marjorie’s garden I was rather bemused.
“Meryl Streep is in your garden?” I asked.
“In next door’s garden,” Marjorie hissed through gritted teeth. “She’s looking over the fence. Can you see her?”
I poked my head above the level of the table just far enough so that I could see, but hopefully not be seen by, whoever was looking over Marjorie’s fence (while she had said it was Meryl Streep I thought this was unlikely). I could just make out a figure peering through the hedge on the left hand side of the garden.
“Yes,” I hissed back, “she’s still there.”
“I’ll tell you a funny story about her.” Thank goodness there was a funny story associated with this as otherwise it would seem very odd to be cowering under a table with one’s partner’s mother in an effort to avoid Meryl ‘bloody’ Streep. Marjorie launched into her story while the pair of us crouched on the floor.
“She came here for coffee once, along with some of the other girls, you know.” I didn’t know who the girls where, but I nodded as if I did. “She sat here, at this very table,” Marjorie pointed to the table above our heads, as if I needed clarification. “She was sitting exactly where you were just sitting, and chatting away to me as if butter wouldn’t melt.” Where, I wondered, was this going? “Then, no more than a year later, she moved in next door and do you know what she said to me?” Of course I didn’t. “ ‘Hello’, she said, ‘I don’t think we’ve met.’ Don’t think we’ve met, I ask you! And to think, she had been a guest in my home. My home! Can you believe the rudeness of the woman? She should have got an Oscar for that performance.” The Meryl Streep reference finally made sense. “Such an affected woman,” Marjorie continued. “No class at all. Not an ounce. All brass and no class, that’s what she is. Has she gone?” I peered over the edge of the table once again and was able to confirm that Meryl had now, indeed, gone.
“Oh, that’s better,” said Marjorie as we resumed our seats. “Now,” she said, smiling at me broadly as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, “where were we?”
After quite lot of general chit chat about me and my background (I focused heavily on having been orphaned and rather less on my adult life, and got the expected response) and with Marjorie slightly moist eyed at the trauma I had been through as a young girl, I announced that I really had to go. While I was glad to have had the chance to spend some time with Gideon’s mother, and while I felt that it had gone reasonably well, I couldn’t imagine wanting to spend a great deal more time with her, especially not alone. The truth was that she wasn’t a very engaging conversationalist even when she was trying to be pleasant. She asked endless questions to the point where I felt as if I was being interrogated and she had nothing particularly interesting to say herself. But she didn’t have to be interesting, she simply had to not actively dislike me. As we seemed to have got on well enough it was, I thought, mission accomplished.
“I really must get back Marjorie,” I said, smiling broadly at her, “but this has been lovely, really lovely, we must do it again sometime.”
“Oh, must you go so soon?” Marjorie looked as if she was about to grasp my wrist again but I managed to move it out of the way this time without appearing to be avoiding physical contact. Had she really, I thought, not had enough of me? I had been there over an hour, and I had certainly had enough of her.
“I’ve been asked to help with a friend’s daughter’s birthday party,” I said, “so I really must get back. Lots to do!” Nice touch that, I thought. I didn’t add that I had excused myself from helping at the party itself, or that it wasn’t for another three days anyway. All I had to do was make a cake that I would deliver before the arrival of any children, which suited me fine. I don’t dislike my friend’s daughter, but she is a handful on her own so the idea of being trapped in a room with her and ten others of the same age (three) was not very appealing.
“One last thing,” Marjorie said over her shoulder as she carried our empty coffee cups to the sink. “I know what you’ve been up to. You might fool Gideon, but you don’t fool me, you naughty girl.” Having placed the cups in the sink she turned to look at me, her right index finger wagging from side to side and a knowing smile playing around her lips. I was unsure whether the smile was sinister or conspiratorial. I opened my eyes wide to indicate a complete lack of guile and waited to see which way this was going to go. “You buy cake mixes don’t you, you naughty girl.” Oh thank goodness.
“You won’t tell him will you?” I opened my eyes even wider, a look of apprehension on my face and took the opportunity to grab her wrist, squeezing it possibly a little harder than necessary. “It’s just that I’ve never really mastered baking.”
Marjorie must have observed me putting a box of cake mix into my basket when we were at the supermarket. How long, I wondered, had she been watching me before she began cooing from across the store?
“Don’t worry Eve,” Marjorie said, patting the hand with which I was still holding her wrist. “Your secret is safe with me. But you can give these to Ian.” I released her as she turned to pick up plastic box that had been sitting on the worktop behind her. “Tell him I made them for him specially. Or tell him you did, if you’d prefer, I won’t tell.” She tapped the side of her nose before adding “We women will have our little secrets, won’t we? They’re flapjacks,” she continued. “Ian adores flapjacks. Try one. They are delicious.” She opened the box and pushed its contents towards me.
“No thanks. No really,” I said as she positioned the box directly under my nose as if it were a nosebag and I a horse.
“Go on,” she insisted, “it’ll give you energy for the ride home.”
“No, I really can’t.” I averred. She had pushed the box so close by now I was practically inhaling its contents. “I can’t eat oats,” I explained, “I can’t digest them.” It’s true. For many years I ate porridge for breakfast, day in, day out, all year round. Turns out it’s not as good for one’s insides as people would have you believe, or at least not for mine. The merest hint of an oat these days and I get the most horrendous indigestion.
“Really? You can’t eat oats? How odd,” said Marjorie looking dumbfounded. “Well, take them for Ian anyway.”
I gingerly took the proffered box and cycled off homeward. Claire, I realised, was quite right. It was possible that Marjorie hadn’t engineered the ruination of my birthday and she may not have seen me in Peter Jones. We could, I was sure, develop a perfectly acceptable working relationship. I had, I was now almost sure, been fretting over nothing.
CHAPTER 5
Having made some headway in my relationship with Gideon’s mother (Malcolm didn’t really count as it was clear where the power lay in that marriage) I felt that I was ready to delve a little further into his family. I was not that perturbed, therefore, when Gideon suggested we pay a visit to his sister and her family.
I knew very little about Helen other than that she was two years, to the day, younger than Gideon, that she was married, and that she had a lot of children. Unlike her brother and parents she was not London based but lived near East Grinstead which is not, as I had assumed, a grimy northern mining town, but a pretty half-timbered sort of a place in West Sussex.
“Is t
his really the way?” I asked Gideon as we bumped along a farm track that appeared to stretch to infinity. I have been to the countryside before but I had no idea that people really lived down farm tracks, so far from anything that might come under the heading of civilisation.
“Bizarre though it may sound I do know where my own sister lives. I have been here before you know.” Gideon replied, somewhat tersely. Tersely is not generally a nice way to be spoken to, but I could forgive him as I had asked a lot of questions on the journey down. While I hadn’t been perturbed when Gideon suggested the visit I had become increasingly perturbed the closer we got to his sister’s home. As a consequence I had been trying to establish as much as I could about where we were going and what reception I might expect to receive when we got there. It was through this questioning that I had established the bare facts detailed above. The response to most of my questions had been either “why don’t you wait and see when we get there?” or, as Gideon’s patience ran out “how the hell am I supposed to know that?” I think that my question regarding whether Gideon was really sure we were going the right way was the final straw, questionwise, and as we were nearly there I realised that I might as well, as he had advised, put a sock in it.
Despite his terseness in the face of my barrage of questions, or perhaps because of it, the more I got to know Gideon the more I liked him. Long term exposure to another person usually only serves to highlight that person’s faults but, so far, Gideon had only gone up in my estimation, and he seemed pretty keen on me too. We just sort of clicked. I had never felt as comfortable with anyone as I did with him and, while I still fully expected everything to go horribly wrong (this being the statistically probable outcome) so far we seemed to be defying the odds.
“Seriously?” I yelped. “Are you sure you haven’t brought me here to murder me?” My yelp was due to the fact that Gideon had just told me that I had to get out of the car and open the farm gate that was blocking our path. After travelling for simply ages along the farm track we had finally come to an actual farm yard but this was not, it seemed, our ultimate destination and we were to continue yet further into the wilderness. I simply couldn’t keep quiet in the face of such madness.
“If you think that’s a real possibility then I suggest you make a run for it now. If not,” Gideon continued, “you need to shut this gate behind me and then open the one on the other side of the yard.”
“She lives the other side of a farmyard?” I was flabbergasted.
“Yup, as do the rest of her family.”
“How very odd, when there are so many towns they could live in.” I observed.
After all the farm track, farm gate and farm yard business I was fully expecting to see a farm house awaiting us – it seemed the only logical conclusion to the journey. I was a little disappointed, therefore, to be faced with a rather unprepossessing house built, I guessed, in the late sixties or early seventies. It looked like a council office that had been mistakenly plonked down in the middle of a field instead of by a roundabout on a ring road. If the house was a surprise, then the woman that came to the door was a revelation.
I had no real idea what Helen might look like (Gideon having been monumentally vague in response to my questions) but I suppose I had thought she might be a younger version of her mother. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The first thing that struck me was Helen’s hair. It was stupendous. It was very thick, very wavy, and ran in a golden river down her back. Marjorie had thin, completely white hair that she wore in a rather masculine crop and Malcolm had what looked like an old scouring pad on his head. Even Gideon doesn’t have amazing hair. He has perfectly acceptable hair, but it wouldn’t trend on twitter. Helen had clearly got the entire store of good hair genes originally assigned for the whole family. What her home lacked in fairy-tale wonderfulness her hair certainly made up for.
The rest of Helen didn’t, if one was being entirely truthful, quite live up to the hair. She had a perfectly pleasant face, but if she had got the hair Gideon had certainly got the looks, and while he is tall and athletic looking Helen is a little on the plump side, rather like a cottage loaf to his baguette if you will. In addition to her hair being nothing like her mother’s, her personal style was also the very antithesis of Marjorie’s, who favoured neat, vaguely military cardigans worn over sweaters if it was cool and plain blouses in pink, pale blue, or white in more clement weather. She also perennially wore what I believe are called slacks (I am unclear on the distinction between slacks and trousers, but you know it when you see it), in taupe or navy. I don’t think I saw her in a skirt more than once or twice in our whole acquaintance.
Helen, on the other hand was a far less buttoned up dresser. On this occasion she had on a floaty, peasant style skirt and a thick, possibly hand knitted, jumper. She didn’t appear to be wearing any make up, except for possibly a little Vaseline on her lips. She was that sort of a girl. She did however, once one got past the hair and clothing, bear quite a strong facial resemblance to Marjorie which I had never perceived in Gideon. It was slightly unnerving.
“You made it!” she exclaimed, folding her brother into a hug before doing the same to me. She made me feel like a giantess as, like her mother, she is quite a lot shorter than I, and I’m not particularly tall. It was a lovely hug nonetheless. “Come in, come in, Joe’ll be home soon and then we can have supper, you must be starving.”
Once inside the house I could see immediately that it was the complete opposite of its exterior, and of Marjorie’s home. Where the outside was comprised of unyielding straight lines, unattractive dirty grey bricks, and metal window frames, inside it was warm (figuratively and actually) and inviting. It also positively vibrated with life, as well it might as Helen and Joe had, I now learned, four children.
“This is Martha, and this is Ruby,” said Helen as two tousle haired blonde girls appeared by her side. They must have been around ten or eleven and I realised, on closer inspection, that they were identical. While their hair and clothes were completely different, one had short hair and the other long, one wore trousers while the other was in a skirt very like her mother’s, their faces were exactly the same. “Yes,” said Helen in response to my unspoken question, “they’re twins, as are Hector and Jake.” Two boys of about thirteen had appeared from upstairs. “And this,” said Helen, as a young woman came from the direction of the kitchen, “is Celeste.”
Celeste was attired very differently from the rest of the family, who were all dressed in very much the same hippyish style as Helen. She had cropped, peroxided hair, and looked extremely chic in skinny black jeans and a black roll neck jumper. I initially assumed she was yet another of Helen’s children but when she spoke she had a distinct French accent. Unless she was one of these people who start speaking with a foreign accent following a bump on the head, which seemed unlikely, I had clearly assumed wrong.
“ ’Allo, ’ow lurvly to meet wis ewe boat.” Celeste extended a slender, elegant hand with which she gave first me and then Gideon a very firm handshake.
“Celeste is the . . . she’s the daughter of a . . . of a family I spent a year with . . . in France . . . when I was a teenager. She’s here to . . . um . . . help the children and me, I suppose, with our . . . with our . . . . French.” Helen stuttered and stumbled her way through this explanation. She was clearly lying, although what she was lying about was less clear.
“I thought young French people came here to improve their English.” I observed.
“Yes,” Helen concurred, “that would make more sense, but I suppose she can do that too.”
“De ewe speck Frenshh?” Celeste looked at me with a steady gaze. She was clearly a very self-possessed young woman.
“Oh, I was a complete dunce at languages at school.” I replied, unwilling to meet her eye. She struck me as one of those people who take life very seriously, and who believe that truthfulness is of paramount importance at all times. I find this type of individual disconcerting, and for a moment I felt extremely
uncomfortable. People who never tell lies have that effect on me.
“So that’s everyone apart from Joe, and he’ll be back soon.” Helen said, snapping me back into the moment. “Let’s have a cup of tea and you lot,” she made shooing gestures with her hands towards the children, “find something to do while the grownups talk. You can watch Only Fools and Horses!” Helen was obviously trying to whip up some enthusiasm for Only Fools and Horses, but the children weren’t buying it. After a short impassioned protest from the boys they did, however, trudge off, along with Celeste, into what I assumed to be the sitting room, while Gideon and I followed Helen into the kitchen.
“We can’t get anything here, no television, no broadband, no mobile phones, it’s because we’re in a valley.” Helen explained as Gideon and I sat down at the big farm house style table (at last, something farm like!) that dominated the room. “But we do have a DVD player and Joe picked up a box set of Only Fools and Horses at a car boot last weekend, so that’ll keep them occupied.” The countryside was, it would seem, even worse than I had feared.
“So how are you all?” Gideon asked once we were ensconced at the huge table, a mug of tea in front of each of us.
“We are all fantastic, as you would know if you phoned me occasionally.” Helen replied, giving me a theatrical wink.
“You just said you don’t have any phones.” Gideon pointed out.
“We have a landline.” Helen countered.
“You can call me then, can’t you?” Gideon responded with a smile.
“I shall do just that then, you see if I don’t.” Helen replied laughing. She really was nothing like her mother, which was, in truth, an immense relief. “And how are Mum and Dad?”
“They’re well,” said Gideon. “You should get up to town and see them more often.”