In-Laws and Outlaws

by Kate Fulford

  “I suppose not,” I said, but that didn’t make the vertiginous ascent look any less potentially fatal. We duly joined the queue next to a sign that had “One Hour” written on it. “Is that how long the ride lasts?” I asked, horrified at the thought.

  “No,” said Martha, who was the more talkative of the two, “that’s how long we have to queue.”

  “You are kidding me?” I exclaimed. “Seriously? We have to wait an hour before we even get on the da . . . the thing?”

  “Yup,” said Ruby, not one to waste words. As it happens the hour passed quite quickly. We wended our way through the endless switchback queue watching the other families, some of whom put on quite a show. It was as I was doing a rough calculation of the calories one woman had given her already podgy child (every time we passed them the child was stuffing something different into its mouth with its fat little paws) that I noticed the other queue. While we were shuffling along like tourists on Westminster Bridge, this queue was belting along at a cracking pace. No sooner had someone joined it than they were being hustled into the next available roller coaster carriage and swooshed out of sight.

  “That’s not fair!” I huffed. “Why the hell do they get to jump the queue?”

  “Because they paid more,” said Martha, seemingly unmoved by the awful inequity of such a system. “They’re being fast tracked.”

  “That is outrageous,” I said, ready to launch into an attack on theme park owners who thought it was morally acceptable to have a two tier queuing system based purely on the ability to pay. I was planning to expand my argument to include fee paying schools and private health care, but I never got that far as we had, finally, reached the head of the slow track queue and were about to be loaded into the next available carriage. It was then that Ruby found her voice.

  “I don’t want to do this,” she said.

  “Oh come on,” I coaxed, “it’ll be fine. It’s perfectly safe.” I didn’t believe for a moment that it was perfectly safe, but felt I ought to at least pay lip service to this notion.

  “You thought that children had died on it,” Martha pointed out unhelpfully “Four children,” she added.

  “Yes,” I said, “but I was wrong, wasn’t I? I doubt more than one or two have actually failed to come out alive.” My joke was, unfortunately, spectacularly misjudged and in no time flat both girls were in floods of tears and we were all being led away by an attendant through a door with a sign on it saying Emergency Exit. It should have said “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, free at last” but it didn’t.

  The three of us spent the rest of the morning twirling around and around sedately in a huge teacup, which was much more to my taste and for which there was, miraculously, no queue.

  “Thank you so much for agreeing to come,” said Helen as we stood in the queue (naturally) to buy the high calorie, low nutrition lunch that was the only food available. Having chosen the least disgusting thing on display (I don’t know what it was but at least there wasn’t much of it) Helen and I settled ourselves at a table a few feet from the children and left them to it. The boys were showing off about the death defying rides they had been on and the girls were trying to make the teacup ride sound far more exciting than anything based on tea could ever be, so they were better off without adult supervision.

  “I just wanted to say,” Helen began, “that I’m so happy for you and Gideon. You’re great together. I think you’ll have a great marriage. You make him happy.”

  “Well that’s very kind of you to say,” I replied. “He makes me happy too.”

  “The thing is . . . Celeste . . . she isn’t . . .” Helen seemed to be having trouble getting her words out. “She isn’t ill.” Helen finally managed to say. “I’m sorry that I lied, but I thought we should, you know, get to know each other better. And this seemed like the perfect opportunity.”

  After the morning I had had, the suggestion that there was anything perfect about this experience amused me. But it was an opportunity to speak more with Helen, even if we did have to speak very loudly to hear each other over the cacophony.

  “It’s nice for me too,” I said. “I hope that we’ll get to see more of each other, become friends.” Helen was very different from me, but I liked her. She was honest, and kind, and also quite funny when she wanted to be.

  “But you mustn’t let Mum . . . you know, interfere.” Helen said, looking about nervously as if her mother might overhear from her ship in the Antarctic.

  “Why should she interfere with us being friends?” I asked.

  “Not with us, with you and Gideon.”

  “Oh,” I replied.

  “She does, I’m afraid, have rather a lot of influence over Gideon, and I . . .” Helen came to an abrupt stop. “Oh do shut up Helen,” she said, after a pause, “You’re being ridiculous.” She let out an unconvincing little laugh.

  “Helen,” I said resolutely, “you have to tell me what this is all about. You hinted at something when I came to your house and it’s not fair, not really. Either say what you want to say or . . .” I was going to say shut up, but I thought she might take me at my word. “I would really like to know what I am dealing with. I really care for Gideon and . . .”

  “And I love Gideon too,” she said decisively, even though I hadn’t used the word love, “he’s a great brother, mostly, but he gets on so well with Mum . . . he doesn’t understand that it’s not as easy for . . . other people. To get on with Mum that is. I don’t understand it, really I don’t.” Neither do I, my dear, neither do I.

  “You just need to be very careful about coming between them,” Helen continued. “The thing is,” she dropped her voice even though the sound levels in the cafeteria were so off the scale someone only inches away from us couldn’t have overheard a thing. “The thing is,” she stopped to look around the room as if fearful of being observed, “there’s more to their relationship than meets the eye. There’s always more to my mother than meets the eye.” Helen looked at me knowingly. “He doesn’t . . . he can’t see what . . . he always takes her side, or rather he always gives her the benefit of the doubt however badly she behaves.”

  “And you really don’t know why Gideon is so close to your mother?” I asked, very much hoping for a straight answer.

  “No idea, I’m afraid.” Helen replied. “But,” she went on, “they’ve been thick as thieves ever since he was a teenager. Just when most people start to question everything about their parents, Gideon seemed to decide that Mum could do no wrong. If I can give you one bit of advice Eve,” she leant across the table and grabbed my hands in hers, pulling me quite sharply towards her, “it’s to be very careful what you say around my mother, very careful indeed.” She practically hissed these last words.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Oh nothing really.” She released my hands and leant back. “Ignore me, I’m just being silly. That’s what Mum would say. But,” she leant in and grabbed my hands again, “if my mother were to learn anything about you that you didn’t want Gideon to know, then . . . well let’s just say it would be best if she didn’t know anything about you at all. Poor Sasha,” she suddenly said. Thankfully she equally suddenly let go of my hands. The table was quite wide and she had pulled me quite far over it, jamming my ribs up against its edge in the process, which was pretty uncomfortable.

  “Why poor Sasha?” I asked. “What’s she got to do with this?”

  “You know that she and Gideon were engaged and she broke it off?”

  “Yes,” I replied, “you told me about it before. You said she got cold feet.”

  “Yes, I did, didn’t I?” Helen looked uncomfortable. She clearly hated lying. “That wasn’t entirely true,” she continued. “Just before Gideon and Sasha split up she, Sasha that is, came to see me. She was furious. You know I told you that she and Mum were close?”

  “Yes.” Gideon had had a lucky escape from Sasha as far as I could see. Any woman that could be close to his mother should,
I felt, be treated with some caution.

  “Sasha,” Helen resumed, “she said, well . . . she said that Mum . . . well that Mum was making things very difficult for her, Sasha that is, and Gideon. I got the impression that Mum had found out something, I have no idea what, but something Sasha didn’t want Gideon to know. Oh,” Helen sighed deeply, “but it was a long time ago and Sasha was very angry.”

  “And you have no idea what it was that had made her so angry, just that it was something to do with your mother?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, she didn’t say, but what she did say was that she wasn’t prepared to put up with Mum, not even for Gideon’s sake.” Helen replied.

  “Put up with her?” I prompted.

  “Mum likes to . . . well she knows her own mind, and so did Sasha. She was some really high up government type,” Helen continued, “she was involved in all sorts of important stuff, all very top secret and, to use her exact words she ‘wasn’t prepared to be held to ransom by a bourgeois little housewife.’ ”

  “What on earth do you think that meant?” I asked. “How could your mother possibly hold a woman like that to ransom?”

  “I have no idea, no idea at all. They had got on famously at first, but then, not long before she dumped Gideon something changed and she and Mum could hardly bear to be in the same room.”

  “Do you think your mother made Sasha leave Gideon?” I asked.

  “Not in so many words, but there was more to it than either of them let on, I’m sure of that.” Helen explained.

  “That’s awful!” I exclaimed.

  “I know, but whatever the reason she dumped Gideon rather than have Mum on her back. He was a bit of wreck for a while after, but he got over it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Gideon what Sasha told you?” I asked.

  “Because first of all she didn’t really tell me anything and second of all Gideon would have thought I was just trying to get at Mum.”

  “Has your mother interfered in any of Gideon’s other relationships?” I knew from what Joe had told me that she had, but it didn’t hurt to get a bit of corroboration.

  “She’s always had an opinion, but I really don’t know. My guess however would be yes. But as long as you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to worry about have you?” She gave a little laugh, but her heart clearly wasn’t in it. “Aleksandra Arnesen.” Helen suddenly said.

  “Sorry?” I looked at her blankly.

  “Sasha. She was called Aleksandra Arnesen. I was quite intimidated by her at first. She was always very nice, but also . . . I don’t know, powerful I suppose.” Helen went all dreamy at the memory of Aleksandra Arnesen. “She had quite exotic ancestry, Russian and Finnish I think.” Helen explained. “She was very tall, very blonde, very . . .”

  “Have you any idea what happened to her?” I interrupted, not really wanting to hear any more about how very whatever Aleksandra Arnesen had been.

  “She moved to Cheltenham when she and Gideon split up. Although I haven’t heard from her in years so she may not be there any longer.” Helen replied. I suddenly had the strangest feeling. It was as if I could see something out of the corner of my eye but when I turned to look there was nothing there. But however hard I tried, I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that there was something that if I could only look quickly enough I would be able to see.

  “Mum, Mum, Mum!” Martha came bounding over. “Can we go on the log flume? Please, please, please!”

  I have tried my hardest to blank the rest of that afternoon from my memory. I can, from this distance, only recall a few hazy details so successful have I been. What I do know for certain is that when I got home several hours later I was soaked to the skin (bloody log flume), and feeling as if I had truly been to the heart of darkness. When Gideon came home from work he found me lying prone on the sofa muttering “the horror, the horror,” over and over again and swearing that I would never go on another family fun day as long as I lived.

  CHAPTER 13

  Looking up at the gold Buddha in Battersea Park I couldn’t help but reflect on the huge figure. Not that I was planning on becoming a Buddhist. Dominic had been a Buddhist for a short while and it had made him quite furious. Buddhism, at least according to Dominic, virtually guaranteed that if people did bad things (to Dominic) they would suffer for it, but as far as he could see the world was full of people getting away with all sorts of awful things while he got no reward at all for being what he referred to as ‘the good guy’. He also gave up eating beef but it turned out that that was a different religion altogether, so what with one thing and another he gave up on the whole malarkey after a couple of months. My reflections on the Buddha were, I’m afraid, much more prosaic. All that the statue made me think was how uncomfortable his crossed leg position looked and how if I were to pursue enlightenment I would choose a more comfortable position to pursue it from. But I wasn’t there for the purposes of enlightenment, at least not the sort offered by the Buddha. The reason for my being in Battersea Park was that Meg had finally called me and demanded that we meet.

  “I can’t come today,” I had said, “I’m on my way to work.”

  “How odd, acting in the morning.” Meg had replied. I had forgotten that I had told her I was an actress so was quite glad of the reminder.

  “I’m not acting at the moment,” I explained. “I have to temp to make ends meet. You know what the theatrical world’s like.”

  “Oh, I thought you might be going to a rehearsal.” Meg replied. “I’ve always been fascinated by the theatre. I go whenever I can. Have you ever done a Pinter?” I had no idea what doing a ‘Pinter’ might entail, so I thought it best to say I hadn’t.

  “I can meet you tomorrow,” I added, “if that’s any good.”

  “I suppose I could do that,” Meg said, “and it will give me time to think of lots more questions for you. Have you ever performed in the round?” In the what?

  “I’m not really that kind of actress.” I said, hoping this would suffice as an answer.

  I wasn’t at all sure that meeting Meg was a good idea as my reflections, both while standing by the Buddha and over the previous few weeks, had made me realise that I was very probably making a massive mountain of a teeny molehill where Marjorie was concerned. Claire was almost certainly right (she was right about most things) when she said that the issues I had with Marjorie were more about me and my unrealistic expectations of mothers than about the woman herself.

  What Joe had told me about Helen’s relationship with her mother was troubling it’s true, but mother and daughter still saw each other, so how bad could it really be? Helen herself had told me nothing substantive about Marjorie. It was all rumour and innuendo and, as Claire told me, all families had their issues. As for Gideon, why shouldn’t he think his mother was amazing, and why shouldn’t I accept his assessment? Marjorie loved her son and no woman would ever be good enough for him, but she was hardly alone in feeling like this. I would just have to deal with it. And Marjorie had, as it happens, been rather pleasant in the weeks since she and Malcolm had returned from their cruise. She had even thrown herself with gusto into the preparations for our upcoming wedding.

  Our secret wedding having been such a wash out, Gideon had had second thoughts about excluding his parents, or more specifically his mother. We had therefore gone back to Plan A, which comprised a very small Register Office wedding followed by a meal at a local restaurant for about twenty people. As all my favourite weddings (including one of my own) had been small affairs, this was fine by me, not that I shared this observation with Gideon.

  Marjorie had also, in her own way, been charm itself since her holiday in the Antarctic. Maybe it was the sea air, but a few days after her return she had invited us to dinner and been quite jolly (although the food was as horrid as ever, so not everything had changed for the better). After an extensive penguin based slide show (no polar bears I noticed, and no mention of them either) she had announced that it was time for w
hat she called ‘pressies’. For Gideon there was a strangely shaped parcel which contained quite the most horrid cowboy hat I had ever seen. Made from very stiff tan coloured leather it had what I assume were indigenous South American designs tooled into the surface (they had incorporated a tour of South America on the way back from visiting the penguins). Had my one and only been a llama farmer (which as I mentioned earlier was never likely to happen) it would have been the ideal choice, but for a psychology professor from Chiswick, not so much.

  “And for darling Eve.” Marjorie said, handing me an equally large package. “I saw this and I thought of you!” She almost squealed with delight as I took the present from her. Quite why Marjorie had thought of me on seeing an enormous, brightly coloured, stripy poncho I don’t know, but I murmured my thanks nonetheless and swore to wear it on the next chilly day, or, to be more precise, when hell froze over.

  I therefore wasn’t at all sure that there was any purpose in meeting Meg, but she had been quite insistent. So here I was, waiting next to a great gold Buddha and hoping that he was wrong about reincarnation, as I wasn’t too sure how well I would come out of it next time around.

  “Now,” said Meg, when she finally joined me some fifteen minutes later than agreed. “I’m going to tell you the same thing that I told the other one.”

  “The other one?” I asked.

  “The other one that came to see me!” Meg sounded rather annoyed as if I should have known what she was talking about.

  “But who was this other one?” I replied, still none the wiser.

  “Gideon’s girlfriend of course!” Meg exclaimed as if I was being terrifically thick. “Tall, blonde, beautiful,” she added, unnecessarily I thought. “She seemed to have some idea that she and I might join forces to take her on.” Meg continued.

  “Take who on?” I queried.

  “Marjorie of course.” Meg exclaimed. “But when it came to it she didn’t have the stomach for it.”

  “Marjorie didn’t have the stomach for it?” I tried to clarify. Talking to Meg was like wading through glue.