Nell buys some eggs and half a cucumber, a morsel of frozen smoked haddock and two small bananas, and then, as a gesture towards Rodney, she chooses a box of iced fancies: yellow, pink and chocolate diamonds, spangled with jellied fruit. By the time she’s finished in the supermarket, the rain has started to fall. Nell is well prepared, always one step ahead of any eventuality. She wears her mac over an extra cardigan, and now she unfolds a transparent plastic rain-hat, arranges it over her curls and ties it neatly under her chin.
Nell toils up the hill. She takes it easy. Twenty-five steps and then a pause. Jim used to joke about the hill, say it kept her trim. Oh, but he was a gentleman. He would carry her bags up the hill for her, without a second thought, and even push little Rodney in his pram – very unusual for a man in those days. You see them all over now, men pushing babies in those flimsy little buggers or whatever they call them, something newfangled and American. Buggies.
Half-way up the hill, as she pauses on a twenty-fifth step, Nell notices something unexpected in the gutter, under a parked car. She rests her shopping basket and her plastic carrier-bag on the ground for a moment as she looks. It is a hat. It is not just any old hat, it is familiar. It is a black straw hat, quite a nice hat really except for some silly wax cherries on the side, common, like sucked sweets. It looks just like Olive’s hat, the hat she’s had for donkey’s years, the hat that she was wearing this morning – ridiculous old tart that she is. Nell experiences a little swoop of excitement. What a dilemma! She’d like to pick the hat up and take it home. Before she gives it back, of course. For it must be returned to Olive. But it would be humiliating to be caught crouching down and putting her hand in the gutter, under a filthy car, which is what she will have to do in order to reach it. She looks up and down the hill. Nobody about. She looks at the rows of windows. Nobody, apparently, looking out. Quickly she stoops down and pulls out the hat from beneath the car. The blood rushes to her head as she leans over and she can hear her pulse. She jams the hat into her carrier-bag without even pausing to examine it and continues up the hill, her cheeks pink, and in her excitement manages the rest of the hill without counting her steps.
On the stairs, Olive weeps for her hat. Arthur gave her the hat in 1945 to celebrate the end of the war. Miraculously, for it was certainly not a cheap hat and he had no money, and he might even, Olive suspects, have stolen it, but that doesn’t matter. It is a beautiful hat, a celebration hat, and it might have been made for her, he had said, made for a beauty with cherry lips and ebony eyes, made for his Olive. She weeps for the hat, and she weeps for her sore hands and knees, and she weeps because she has done something shameful. She has peed on the stairs. She couldn’t help it. It just wouldn’t stop, she just couldn’t stop it, not sitting crouched forward at the bottom of the stairs. She weeps for Arthur, for what he will think of her, and on her lap, curled into a bony ball, slumbers Mao.
Wolfe throws scraps of bread to the ducks. Poor ducks. It is raining and it is cold. The green pond-water is spotted with the holes and the circles the raindrops make. Poor ducks who have to sit in the cold water all day, all night, all winter.
‘Come on,’ says Petra. ‘We’ll get soaked to the skin.’
‘Just a minute,’ Wolfe says. He is trying to toss his last scrap of bread to one of the brown ducks that hasn’t had any yet, but a greedy green one snaps it up first. ‘Horrible duck!’ Wolfe shouts.
‘I’m going,’ Petra says, and she turns her back and walks away. Wolfe trails along behind, dragging his shoes through the wet leaves. It is a good park. There’s the river running through, the allotments up one side, some swings and a seesaw, and lots of grey squirrels amongst the trees.
‘There’s plenty of sticks,’ Wolfe calls. ‘We need some sticks for the bonfire.’
‘Not now though,’ Petra turns and holds out her hand. ‘They’re too wet. Come on, let’s get back and have lunch. Bob and Buff will be wondering where we’ve got to.’
‘Could we get an allotment?’ Wolfe asks, taking her hand. ‘Then we could grow all sorts of things.’
Petra pauses and squints through the rain, up at the drenched plots. ‘That’s a thought,’ she says. ‘It depends.’
‘On Tom?’
‘No!’
‘What then?’
‘I keep trying to explain … I just don’t know.’
Wolfe tries to stop it, but a hot tear squeezes out and joins the raindrops running down his face. ‘I don’t like it, Mum,’ he says. ‘I don’t like not being sure.’
‘Nor do I,’ Petra says. They have reached the park gates. ‘Come on, let’s hurry home. Look, I promise I’ll get it sorted soon.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. But the baby will be here soon, and Tom and I will have to make some decisions, and then we’ll know whether we’re coming or going. Now we’ve got to climb this ruddy hill so shut up and save your breath.’
They climb the hill in silence. The rainwater flows in the gutter like a river and the drops splat so hard on the pavement that they send up little round splashes. Petra’s hair trails down like wet string. Wolfe’s socks are soggy. He stops crying and wipes his nose on the sleeve of his anorak.
‘Ducks can’t smile, can they?’ he says suddenly.
Petra pauses. ‘No, I don’t suppose they can!’ she laughs and squeezes his hand. He turns and looks down the hill. He sees Arthur.
‘Look, there’s that man from next door,’ he says.
Petra turns, and they wait. ‘Hello,’ Petra says as he catches them up, ‘you look nearly as wet as us!’
Arthur grimaces. ‘Thought to get moving on allotment, but rain put paid to that.’
‘I’d like an allotment,’ Wolfe says, ‘but we’re in a state of flux. I might plant a tree though, mightn’t I, Mum? In the garden.’
‘Good for you, lad,’ Arthur chuckles. ‘What sort of tree?’
‘Don’t know yet. I’m still considering.’
Arthur smiles at Petra in the way that adults smile at each other over children’s heads, but Wolfe doesn’t mind. He likes the way Arthur’s wrinkles crinkle round his eyes, and likes his shaggy eyebrows and the way the raindrops hang on the brim of his cap.
‘You can always come up allotment with me if you like,’ Arthur says. ‘I could do with a hand. If it’s all right with your mum.’
‘Can I?’ Wolfe begs. ‘Please Mum. I could take my trowel. I’ve got a trowel. I used to have my own bit of garden at the Longhouse,’ he explains. ‘I used to grow the very best radishes in the world.’
‘Of course he can, if you’re sure he won’t be a nuisance …’ Petra says.
‘Tomorrow?’ asks Wolfe.
‘I’ll let you know, lad. It might be a day or two.’
‘Great,’ says Wolfe. ‘That’s just great.’ Arthur is lovely. He is like a grandpa. He will be someone to talk to. Timidly, Wolfe takes his hand and Arthur looks down oddly at him, almost sadly.
‘Oh, we bought some chocolate for your …’ Petra takes it out of her bag.
Arthur smiles. ‘She’s a devil for it,’ he says, ‘always has been always will be.’
They have reached the top of the hill. Petra stops and rests for a moment. ‘I won’t be able to do that for much longer,’ she says, her hand on her belly.
‘When’s it due?’ Arthur asks.
‘End of the month.’
‘Not so long then. What do you want?’ Arthur asks Wolfe, ‘a brother or a sister?’
‘Don’t really mind,’ says Wolfe.
‘There’s a lad,’ says Arthur, squeezing his hand.
As soon as he gets through the back gate, Arthur can tell that something is wrong. Kropotkin is out in the rain, sodden and bedraggled, for the outhouse door is shut. His lead still trails from his neck.
‘Poor old boy,’ Arthur says. He takes off the lead and opens the door so that the dog can get into his basket. He is almost afraid to go into the house, and as soon as he does, he can hear Olive crying.<
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‘There, there, me duck,’ he says, finding her bundled in her coat at the bottom of the stairs. ‘It’s all right, me old love. What’s up? Tell me what’s up.’
‘Oh Artie,’ wails Olive. ‘Oh Artie … oh it’s awful out there. My hat, oh my cherry hat.’
‘Come on,’ says Arthur. ‘Let’s get you up and get your coat off.’
‘But you don’t understand … my hat, Artie, I’ve lost my hat.’
‘Come on, it’s not end of world …’ Arthur tries to pull her up but Olive resists. She will not meet his eyes.
‘And I’ve peed myself,’ she whispers. ‘I’m sorry, Artie. I’m so sorry. I just couldn’t move. I couldn’t help it.’
‘That’s all right, Ollie,’ Arthur says. ‘Come on, love.’ He struggles her into an upright position. His heart beats wildly with the strain and the anxiety. ‘Oh my poor love. What about a bath, eh? A nice warm bath.’
‘If you think that would be best, Artie.’
‘Let’s dry your eyes first,’ he says, and with his old handkerchief, warm and crumpled from his pocket, he wipes away her tears and the smudge of her lipstick. ‘Now, can you sit there a minute?’ he manoeuvres her onto a kitchen chair. She sits down painfully, obediently. ‘It’s just for a moment. I’ll pour you a drop of brandy, then I’ll run bath.’
Olive submits. She sits on the stiff chair, her spine aching and the back of her dress cold and wet against her legs. She sips the brandy and listens to the comforting sound of the water flowing into the bath upstairs. Mao tries to creep back onto her lap but she pushes him off. He is too sharp, too cold. She isn’t in the mood for Mao, now. The brandy leaves a trail of gold from her tongue, down her throat and into her belly, a hot trail that spreads and seeps through her until the spasms of her weeping subside.
Nell sits in her armchair. On the coffee table beside her are a cucumber sandwich, a banana and a cup of tea – her lunch. She has switched the television news on for a bit of company, but her eyes are not on the flickering screen, her eyes are on the hat. It sits on the other chair, Jim’s chair, a splash of brightness in the beige of the room.
As she chews her sandwich – thirty chews per mouthful, Jim’s recipe for a good digestion and though he had his troubles his stomach was never among them – Nell considers Olive’s hat, and considers Olive. They used to sit together at school all that time ago, both clever girls, the top of the class. Only, of course, they couldn’t both be top. Olive was always slightly sharper with arithmetic while Nell’s spelling was flawless. They were best friends, ‘soul mates’ her father called it, approving of Olive. He encouraged the supposed friendship, urged Nell to invite Olive on family outings where she would outshine everyone, sparkle indecently, until, Nell suspected, her father preferred Olive to herself. Olive used to lark about with Edwin too, and Father didn’t mind that and it simply wasn’t fair because Nell had to sit and be quiet and still, seen but not heard, while Olive could make as much of a commotion as she liked, joke and laugh and torment Edwin till he blushed. ‘She’s a proper card!’ Father used to laugh. ‘And those eyes! My God. Gypsy eyes they are. You mark my word, bees round a honeypot when she’s a few years older. You see if I’m not right.’ And he started to call her Gypsy Rose, Gypsy for short, and Olive loved it, used to play up to him, all pert and flirting and flashing her eyes in a way she never bothered with at school, while Nell glowered. He never had a pet name for her. He called her Eleanor and she had to be neat and prim, still and quiet as a pink and white china doll with painted-on eyes and a sweet stiff face. He would have been furious if his Eleanor had behaved like Olive, like his little Gypsy. He was tickled by Nell’s cleverness at school, but didn’t think it a serious matter. He didn’t pay attention to her reports in the same way he did Edwin’s. Edwin’s brains mattered more even though Nell was brighter. In her autograph book, he wrote once, the day after she’d come top in a mental arithmetic test–beating Olive by a clear three points – ‘Be good sweet maid, and let who will be clever.’
Despite Nell’s spelling and her occasional ability to beat Olive at arithmetic, it was Olive who came out top of the class in their final year at school. Nell still remembers that failure, not a failure everyone said, someone had to win, but that is how it felt. On the day they had to write their composition, Nell had been indisposed. She had had her period and she had had crampy pains and felt dizzy and sick but she hadn’t said, she’d just soldicred on. One didn’t make a song and dance of it in those days, not like today, she thinks, when it’s emblazoned everywhere, advertisments for stick-ons and stick-ups all over the place. Filthy it is, and you can’t get away from it: switch on the television, open a magazine and there it is. There’s no proper sense of shame any more. People use it as an excuse now, you can do anything – murder – and get away with it these days, but then you just kept quiet and battled on and back luck if it happened to be an important day.
She remembers writing. She even remembers the title of the composition: Poets are the Trumpets that Sing to Battle. Discuss. She remembers the clock ticking, the scraping of many pens, the way Olive’s pen flew. And she remembers the dark sinister leaking between her legs. And Olive had come out top of the class. She had won the prize. It was a little cup, a nice little cup like a silver vase, engraved with her name and the date, and one other word: EXCELLENCE. And Olive went up on the stage, her sash all awry, ink on her blouse, to receive the cup. It made Nell want to spit. And now Olive is a fat old spinster, childless, senile. Oh excellent! At least Nell has a son, at least Nell hasn’t gone to seed. She finishes her tea and peels her banana and gloats over Olive’s hat.
Four
The bathroom is dim and steamy. Drips of condensation run down the walls and outside the rain beats against the frosted window-glass. Olive is squeezed into the bath, and Arthur sits on the toilet lid watching her. Her eyes are closed and she looks dead and yellow. Her breasts have slipped down her sides. Her big purplish hands rest on her belly above the sparse white tufts of hair. It used to be such a curling bush, so black, so rosy pink beneath. Her thighs are massive, and on each of her knees is an ugly graze.
‘We’ll have to patch up those knees, Ollie,’ he says. ‘Lucky you broke nothing. You must have gone down a smack.’
‘I did, Artie.’ She opens her eyes a slit, and he is relieved. She looks more like his Olive, with her eyes open.
‘Let’s get you washed,’ he says. He kneels down beside the bath and takes the bar of lavender soap and rubs it between his hard palms. He rubs the sparkling froth of bubbles into Olive’s front from her neck to her belly. He closes his eyes, enjoying the slip of his hands against her flesh. ‘Remember how we used to…’
‘Remember how! And how I soaped your back. We’d never fit in together. Not now.’ Olive looks down at her fatness.
‘Slippery fingers.’ Arthur slips his hands round and soaps her lolling breasts. ‘My old love,’ he murmurs. He soaps her legs, between her toes, her thighs, and around underneath in the tender soapy crevices. And oh she was passionate and she would never lie still, not like the others, never let him take control.
‘I saw Nell this morning,’ Olive says suddenly, her eyes open wide. He feels her stiffen. ‘Looked at me as if I was shit. As if I care. Buggering slag.’
‘Ollie. Be calm. And anyone less of a slag …’
‘That’s right, defend her! And where were you, Artie, while I was out there alone?’
‘Think, Ollie. Come on now, remember.’ Arthur is frightened by the way her memory is failing, anxious and also impatient. He cannot believe that she can really be so forgetful. Surely she does it on purpose, sometimes, to be awkward, for she has always been awkward, Olive has, never an easy person to live with.
Olive shrugs. She clutches his hand. ‘I want my hat.’
‘Come on lass, lean forward and I’ll do your back … I’ll go out and look in a bit. It’ll be there somewhere. I’ll wait while rain stops. I met young woman from next door again on my w
ay up hill. Nice little lad, little fat lad.’
‘Some odd name. Not the fashion. An animal name.’
‘But a grand lad.’
Arthur helps her out of the bath and dries her. There is something wholesome and lovely about her, clean and fat. He pats lavender talc under her arms and under her breasts and between her thighs where they rub together. Her sallow skin glows pink from the warmth of the water, from the rubbing of his soapy hands. He chooses clean clothes for her. It is comforting to comfort her. He rubs Germolene into the grazes on her knees and hands, and patches them with neat squares of gauze.
‘There, there,’ he soothes, then together they go downstairs, for it is past dinner-time, and they eat ham sandwiches and dip Garibaldis in their tea.
‘Dead-fly biscuits,’ Olive remembers, as she always does. ‘I’d not touch them as a lass.’
Arthur looks lovingly at her. She is all right now. Her cheeks are rosy again from the fire, her clean hair is a fluffy halo. ‘Good as new,’ he says.
Petra empties two tins of tomato soup into a saucepan. ‘Call the others,’ she says to Wolfe. Wolfe goes to the bottom of the stairs.
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