‘Ruth, you should have left that,’ I said. ‘I’d have done it.’ But my voice trailed away as I undid the buttons on my mac while she tied on her apron.
‘You can do the potatoes, dear, if you really want to help. Let Graham and his dad watch the news in peace.’
Oddly, as if she resented me, Ruth seemed deliberately to do her chores in an order which made it impossible for me to help. I simply was not there to do my duty, so her irritation was self-induced.
The dishes could never be left to drain. ‘We don’t want smeary china,’ she told me. She eyed me through a stiffening distaste. ‘In this household, Jennie, we have always dried up.’ And then she watched me carefully. ‘One plate at a time, dear, please. I’ve kept these plates for twenty-five years and I don’t want chips in them now.’
Clean sheets would be folded and pointedly left on the end of the bed every week, as if she guessed ours would be stained. Every Friday, top sheet to bottom and a fresh one on top. I said, ‘Please don’t bother to iron our sheets, Ruth. They really don’t need ironing.’
And Ruth smiled staunchly.
I don’t think Ruth disliked me, but maybe she was trying to tell me something I had failed to grasp about marriage. Graham and I were married now and so the romance was over. As a wife, self-sacrifice came next on the list and this was a mild initiation.
I would look at Graham reproachfully but all he could do was shrug his shoulders.
When we drank wine it was secretly and in the morning Graham smuggled the bottles out of the house in his briefcase, rolled up in serious newspapers.
Another couple would have made a fuss but not me and Graham, oh no. We hated to argue, we dreaded scenes and we felt so grateful to have found each other. Neither of us had imagined we were special enough to be chosen, neither of us had had a best friend; we were so similar in that kind of way. Middle of the road, fifteenth in a class of thirty, sixth in a team of twelve, friends with everyone but special to no-one.
Fair to middling. Could do better.
One of the best things about being married was sharing somebody else’s name. There was strength to be had in this pooling together; a name was a stout wooden fence and meant we could peer at the world through the knots. And Gordon, a good strong name, was near the front of the alphabet whereas my maiden name, Young, had kept me last in life, near the back.
Every day during that first summer we went to look at our sprouting house, pacing round it and imagining what our new furniture would look like inside. I would walk up and down the stairs, running my hand along the smooth wooden banister. Graham planned out the garden. Unsure of the house to begin with, I came to start loving it then. It signified such a great escape and I whispered to it, ‘Oh hurry, house, hurry up, please hurry.’
Heaven. We could breathe again. Truly together for the first time ever and he carried me over the threshold. We were proprietorial, understandably I suppose, and kept an eye on the couples who came to see over the show lodge, the last house to be sold in the frying-pan-shaped close.
We weren’t in longer than a month before the red SOLD sign went up on numbers two, three and four, even though the men were still working inside. We saw this as a good sign: we’d be able to sell quite quickly when we came to move on, we believed. I was already pregnant. Poppy was due the following spring and I had already resigned from the bank, having no real interest in the job.
‘I know him,’ said Graham, shamelessly spying on the couple coming up next door’s path with the keys to number two in their hands.
‘Oh?’ I stared as rudely as he, fascinated by the blowzy woman with the wild mane of hair, more pregnant than anyone I’d ever seen and wrapped in an emerald curtain. She was big. No shame. She flapped along penguin style in large ethnic sandals, her hands kneading her back as if she was about to give birth. Her coarse guffaws of laughter were unreasonably disturbing; after all, she was the stranger, I already lived here – me, Graham and a few sick saplings.
‘Sam Frazer, he runs his own advertising company and goes to the Painted Lady for lunch. I’ve seen him in there with his mates.’
‘What’s he like?’ I felt uneasy but didn’t know why.
‘Seems like a decent kind of guy.’
‘Perhaps we should make them a cup of tea… and go round… be friendly, you know.’
Sensing my tension, Graham held my hand. We stood together warily in our house of brand-new wood, breathing sawdust and turpentine, paint and putty. ‘Jennie, no more “shoulds” for us, this is our house, we don’t do anything we don’t want to and we can be as unsociable here as we damn well like.’
Martha would have been the first to echo this sentiment. She might even have raised a smeary glass in a toast, had she heard it.
Dear God, how I wish that I’d never met her.
TWO
Martha
DEAR GOD, HOW I wish that I’d never met her.
So there we were, in our superior executive lodge. I must say I never expected to end up on a half-finished estate in bloody Essex.
But then I had never expected to get married or have my own baby. Nor did I think I would ever reach twenty, or grow breasts, menstruate, throw away my black leather skirt, die, or stop watching Neighbours.
Unlike the co-ordinated house next door ours was a jumbled mixture: tumbledown sofa strewn with throws, assorted chairs with various cushions, lamps and pieces of twisted oak, because we’d been meaning to buy an old cottage over the border in Hertfordshire.
Piglets Patch was my dream house. Honeysuckle, thatch and roses.
It fell through when I was eight months pregnant. We had sold our flats and we needed a home, we had buggered about long enough. So we bought the house and its dandelion lawn in a state of panic. We hadn’t intended to stay for long, but life is full of little surprises.
I didn’t expect to settle down here round a fading mulberry bush but, dear God Almighty, far more extraordinary than that was being knifed in the back by the woman I came to call my friend.
It was a wet and blustery March when Jennie and I entered the dark world of breeding.
All night long the women in our ward were kept awake by pitiful cries from the adjoining delivery suite.
Sam rushed me to St Margaret’s when the pains came every five minutes and within an hour Scarlett was born.
Nature’s disgusting.
Nature hurts.
That animal smell, blood and Johnson’s and the visitors’ freesias.
Sam stayed and watched and afterwards we stuffed down chicken sandwiches, holding Scarlett in our arms and getting used to the words ‘our daughter’. Oh, the glory! Kissing her black, bloody hair. I had to use half a box of tissues to wipe Sam’s proud tears away.
Perversely I had the natural birth while Jennie endured the forceps.
I recognized her in the morning when they wheeled her into the ward with the teas, drooping like a dunked digestive. I had caught sight of her only once, yesterday, when we moved in. I had made the sandwiches to tide us over until the cooker could be wired up. We never imagined we’d have no time to eat them.
‘I know you, don’t I? You live next door to me.’
Jennie’s matching slippers sat waiting on the floor by her bed. White with rosebuds, signifying innocence, same as the nightdress she changed into. All that whiteness made her waif-like. She lifted her head from the pillow and eyed me, unaware of where she was or what she was supposed to be doing.
Nosing into the pink blanket in the perspex cot beside her I said, ‘Great, a girl. They’ll be neighbours, they’ll be best mates.’
Jennie’s moan of distress was tragic.
‘Leave Mrs Gordon alone,’ said the nurse. ‘She’s had an exhausting time.’
Well, naturally I was indignant. I’d been spoken to like a child, but I managed to rise above it because my main concern was getting to the loo for that first morning cigarette.
As I passed Jennie’s bed, fags deep in Sam’s dressing-gown
pocket, she whispered to me with her eyes tightly closed, ‘That’s it. Never again.’
One of the first subjects Jennie brought up was the way she was bullied at school. I think she had a thing about this and it influenced all her behaviour.
We were in her house at the time, in her bedroom. I sat on Graham’s side of the bed while she, with her wet hair wrapped in a towel, sat beside me bottle-feeding Poppy after a careful sterilization routine. With her hairline reduced by the towel Jennie looked almost childlike, quite impish. And with her small bones and snub nose she put me in mind of a freckled pixie. ‘Why did they pick on me?’ she asked, still bewildered all these years later. ‘I didn’t stand out in any way. I wasn’t fat or spotty or smelly, I didn’t have a squint or a harelip. They were girls I’d had to my party, and they made fun of my mother.’
‘What was wrong with your mother?’ I teased, my sticky nipple in greedy Scarlett’s mouth. I was always finished way before Jennie because it was essential that Poppy drained the lot, was winded at least six times during her feed and by the time the torment ended Jennie’s lips were as sore as my tits; she bit them continuously. She kept Lipsalve in the pocket of her special feeding apron. She changed the brand of milk weekly, even venturing into goat’s when Poppy went through a long phase of colic.
‘Nothing was wrong with my mother,’ she snapped. ‘That was what made it hurt more. My mother was really trying, she’d made such an effort to get everything right. My God, how I hated kids’ birthday parties, but you had to have them and you had to go to other people’s if you were invited. Does any kid honestly like them?’
‘I did.’
‘Honestly?’
‘I was a pig. I went for the food and the presents.’
Jennie propped Poppy against her hand and the baby burped and puked. Jennie looked worried. ‘Damn damn damn.’ Her agitation was catching. ‘I’m going to get no sleep again tonight.’
‘Leave her downstairs where you can’t hear her. It won’t hurt her – not as much as you being so tired.’
Of course she didn’t listen to me, why would she? Letter by letter, word by word, Jennie was following the latest book. Following rules, like believing in God, like measuring recipes, like testing her hair before colouring, was an essential part of her nature.
‘My mother had veins on the back of her legs.’
I looked at my own. ‘Join the club.’
‘No, Martha, not veins like that. Horrible wormy veins. She was always in having them done. She had to wear special stockings. It was the veins they started whispering about – Barbara Middleton and Judith Mort.’
She even remembered their names. ‘Kids are so foul.’
‘They scrawled on the blackboard, thin wispy scrawls with red and blue chalk. Nobody knew what they were but me. And they wrote underneath in mauve, “legs eleven”. But they didn’t stop there, they went on and on.’
‘Only because you let them.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You should have fought back. Thrown their books down the loo.’
‘And then some other kids joined them. People I thought were my friends.’
‘Picking on somebody else is a way to make sure they don’t pick on you.’
‘I know, I know.’ At last Poppy drained that dratted bottle. Jennie tried to smile, a tired one, purified by pain. She started to tidy her layette, a basket in pink waterproof gingham in which she kept her oils and creams, half-opened packs of this and that, sacred ceremonial ointments. ‘It sounds obvious now, but it wasn’t then. I used to break my heart at night thinking how hurt Mum would be if she knew. She kept asking me what was the matter. She asked so gently, so tenderly, how could I explain?’
That first spring at Mulberry Close was so wet the earth gave out seaside smells and the rain went on interminably. To venture out meant getting covered in mud. The heart-shaped leaves of the mulberry tree which stood on the green in the centre were splashed with tar and cement. Sam could do nothing with the new garden. The clay was too heavy to move, so the patio slabs, the sand and cement stayed stacked at the back of the garage, and when the roses arrived in their little brown sacks we dumped them in the shed and forgot them.
I grew fatter and slacker and more depressed, while next door Jennie smiled radiantly and oozed with an eerie confidence, her whole house organized to create an aura of peace and goodwill.
On the few dry days her washing was out on the line by eight thirty. Although it never properly dried outside, she disapproved of stringing it, dripping, round the kitchen as I did.
I was the only one allowed to peep behind this maternal serenity and this was because, with my Safeway bag full of Pampers nappies, my dribbled-on bibs and sticky dummies, I was no competition.
For Jennie everything had to be right.
When Poppy caught chickenpox, every individual spot was dabbed at with the calamine while I watched in mad exasperation.
The towels in her bathroom matched her flannels.
Her kitchen sink stayed clear of dishes and her windows sparkled.
She needed to be reassured that she was a marvellous mother and she was, at some cost to herself as, like a superhuman, she liquidized all Poppy’s food, had her weighed weekly, boiled her snow-white terry nappies, disinfected rattles and crept round the house while her baby slept, with her voice in mellow mode. But she was draining her own vitality.
Everything was done to rote, nothing was ever spontaneous.
‘Isn’t this lovely?’ she seemed to be asking. ‘Look – I am a safe and natural mother.’
But she wasn’t safe. Not safe at all.
I thought of her mother’s terrible veins and wondered how she got them because Jennie, programmed like this, was following some destructive pattern.
If I encouraged her to try to relax she would twist and protest with all the strain showing. ‘Let Graham help more,’ I suggested. ‘He’s a genuine new man. You should make more of him. Now if you had Sam as a partner, I could understand the state of your nerves.’
‘What state of nerves?’ she’d ask sharply, biting a trembling lip.
In the end, seeing she was close to collapse, I ordered her to sit down.
‘I’d better not drink,’ she sniffed when I offered her wine, head down like a sulking bird.
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘Get this down you and stick your feet up on this chair.’
‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ she groaned. ‘Mothering comes so naturally to you. It ought to be such a simple thing. But Scarlett’s such an easy baby, she’s never woken more than twice a night.’
‘I find her almost impossible to cope with,’ I told Jennie truthfully.
With a voice contorted with fresh distress she confided her terrible secret. ‘What would you say if I told you I sometimes hate Poppy so much, I’m frightened I’m going to kill her?’
‘I’d say you were normal,’ I answered, amazed that she thought otherwise.
‘If I said that to Graham he’d never understand. He would think I was a freak.’
‘If only you’d stop pretending,’ I said.
And I wondered in how many other ways Jennie and Graham pretended. And why.
I made her go out, to fetch stamps from the post office. She hadn’t left her house since coming home from the hospital after the birth. ‘Walk, take your time, don’t use the car.’ Such a little step. I made her leave Poppy with me.
She came back happier but fearing corruption.
And the next step after that was enrolling for aerobics.
Sam said, ‘Why is that damn woman always here when I come home? And she looks so sheepish, as if she’s doing something wrong. I don’t know how to react to her, she seems shy and uncomfortable with me.’
‘That’s because you’re so gruff,’ I said. ‘Not everyone appreciates your sick sense of humour. Be gentler with her. And perhaps we should have them over for supper.’
‘Oh no…’
‘Don’t start. We
could ask the Fords, too. I think Jennie is lonely, out of her depth. I mean, she cries if her cakes don’t rise and she has no-one but me to talk to.’
‘We don’t want to live in the neighbours’ pockets,’ Sam said predictably, ‘nor do we want to get involved.’
‘It would be the first time that poor woman has left her house at night since Poppy arrived,’ I informed him. ‘I’m going to suggest a babysitter.’
‘Martha, I just can’t face it. She’d bring the wretched child with her.’
So that was how it first started, ten years ago.
Life with Jennie was never easy, but the fatal cracks appeared much later.
When Mrs Forest rang me up I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
I was stunned. ‘But Jennie Gordon’s a friend of mine, she only lives next door. If this bullying has been going on for so long, why the hell didn’t she tell me?’
‘She says she did bring the subject up, but that you took it very lightly,’ said the teacher. ‘All I can say is, apparently Poppy has been frightened to come to school from the beginning of this term. Yesterday afternoon she went missing.’
‘Because of Scarlett?’ Ridiculous!
The telephone hummed with tension. There must be some misunderstanding. Scarlett and Poppy, inseparable since infancy, had their desks moved last term to stop their endless gossiping. They chose to open their Christmas presents in each other’s bedrooms. They insisted on the same hairstyles. Snow White and Rose Red they might be, but somehow they managed to look alike.
‘I think you and I need to talk this over,’ said Mrs Forest sympathetically. ‘Come into school and collect Scarlett early.’
Stranger and stranger. As I backed out my car I thought I saw a movement of curtains at number one. Jennie was nervous. More persecution, more victimization, and I began to wonder if victims were made by a parent’s genes or some unidentified chemical.
And I think she never learned how to love.
THREE
Copycat Page 2