by Maggie Joel
Jennifer frowned, remembering the beige carpet in the lounge and dining room at her parents’ home that sometime during the eighties had been replaced by an awkward red, black and white geometric design. What were the carpets like now? She found she couldn’t remember.
‘No, I don’t think they are,’ she replied. Slippers? Vomiting? Carpets? What am I doing here? she wondered. She thought of the long drive home and closed her eyes.
It was warm by the window due to the radiator that ran the length of the sill and was turned to full blast, judging by the waves of heat that wafted above it. By contrast, the window was cold and Jennifer pressed both palms against the windowpane and felt the ice seep into her skin.
‘I remember that summer,’ said Aunt Caroline.
Outside a milk float rattled past and a robin landed on a branch of a yew tree and busily inspected its plumage.
‘Ted and I had only been here a few months. We planted the roses in the front garden and we had two weeks in the Greek islands that year. Crete. Something big happened that summer...’
‘The Royal Wedding,’ Jennifer supplied with a sigh.
‘No, the riots. I was thinking of the Brixton riots.’
And that was typical of Aunt Caroline. Just when you thought she’d become the sort of old lady who cooed over things like royal weddings, she brought up the Brixton riots. Jennifer looked across at the corner table beside Aunt Caroline’s chair and saw that day’s Guardian nestling beneath Sporting Life. I should visit more often, she realised. Well, here she was and it wasn’t too late.
The robin shook its wings and darted off. An elderly neighbour, a man with thinning white hair and thick glasses, walked past in the street and waved through the window. Aunt Caroline watched him go into the house next door.
‘Mum died a few months after that,’ she continued. ‘We drove down for the funeral. You were doing your mock A-levels. And Charlotte was at that college. She’d just resat one of her O-levels. She was a bit peaky. Deirdre said something about it at the time.’
A bit peaky.
Grandma Lake’s funeral had been in December, four months later. Yes, Charlotte, she recalled, had indeed been peaky. They had both been. She couldn’t remember Mum saying anything about it.
‘I so wanted Charlotte to come down today,’ said Aunt Caroline, shifting the teacup in her lap. ‘But she was busy.’
She’d invited Charlotte? And Charlotte hadn’t come?
I was busy too! Jennifer thought indignantly, and now she felt annoyed with her younger sister who had saved herself this journey in this weather. There was something wrong here, she realised curiously—it should have been she who was unable to come up because she was too busy, and Charlotte playing the good niece, sitting patiently on Aunt Caroline’s settee, sipping Aunt Caroline’s Earl Grey.
Why had she invited Charlotte?
Because of the television program.
‘We had a good few years together, Ted and me,’ said Aunt Caroline as though they had been discussing Uncle Ted. Jennifer moved away from the window and came and sat down again, wondering if this was leading anywhere. She couldn’t imagine where.
‘Fifteen lovely years. There was no fuss, no bother. Just a contented, shared life. We liked the same things, and that’s important.’
Jennifer nodded, thinking of all the things she and Nick had both liked: Middle Eastern food, experimental home-made cocktails, guilty cigarettes after they’d both quit, sex in unlikely places (especially in other people’s houses when the other people were downstairs), affairs with other people. That last one they hadn’t realised they both liked until just before the marriage broke up. She didn’t equate any of these things with Aunt Caroline’s marriage to Uncle Ted.
‘And I was quite happy to move to Skipton,’ Aunt Caroline remarked, ‘even at my time of life.’
Aunt Caroline had been in her mid-fifties when she’d married Ted Kettley. Mum, who had never even heard of Ted until a month before the wedding announcement, had been tight-lipped at the news. ‘I’m not saying a word,’ she had declared vehemently to anyone who would listen. ‘I’m not saying anything about this man, whom none of us know. I’m not saying anyone’s too old or too set in their ways for such a life-changing decision—a decision that, after all, affects us all. I’m not saying anything at all.’
But Mum had been wrong, and until Ted’s death four years ago, he and Aunt Caroline had lived quite happily in Ted’s bungalow and Aunt Caroline appeared to have made the transition from London spinster to Yorkshire wife with commendable ease. At least, Jennifer supposed so. She’d never really given it much thought. She glanced ever so discreetly at her watch.
Aunt Caroline pulled the rug a little closer about her knees and Jennifer stared at her aunt’s hands, which were the hands of an elderly lady. She looked away. It had been over a year, nearer eighteen months, since her last visit.
‘And even when you have a loving husband and wonderful friends,’ Aunt Caroline was saying. Then she paused, as though she had suddenly realised Jennifer no longer had a loving husband, and who knew what sort of friends she might have? ‘...the one thing that’s always there is your family.’
Jennifer stifled a groan.
‘We don’t choose them, and Lord knows, if we could, we probably wouldn’t choose the ones we’ve got.’
Amen to that.
‘Your mother and I didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of things. Most things, really.’
And now Jennifer saw where this was going—it was a not-so-subtle reference to what Aunt Caroline no doubt saw as a rift that had developed between herself and Charlotte. That stupid TV program. She should have been prepared for this, she realised, as Aunt Caroline went on talking.
‘You can grow up with someone, live in the same house, but your experiences, your outlooks, can be totally different.’
Jennifer had no idea at all what Aunt Caroline’s outlook might be, or Mum’s for that matter. They had always been fairly cordial with each other, hadn’t they? Indeed, they hardly referred to each other at all, and that was about as much as she cared to know.
A memory came into her head of Aunt Caroline, years ago, standing on the doorstep outside the kitchen at Mum and Dad’s house, smoking a cigarette and making no effort at all to keep the smoke out of the house. It must have been spring or summer because the kitchen door was open and it wasn’t cold. And it must have been before Aunt Caroline had met Ted, while she was still living in Perivale. What Aunt Caroline had been doing outside their kitchen smoking a cigarette, Jennifer couldn’t imagine. She’d been a rare enough visitor, even before Grandma Lake had moved in. It was the middle of the day and Mum was going on and on about what a business it was, running a house for five people. So many meals and so much washing and always cleaning and the shopping that never ended and Lord knows, she didn’t expect Caroline to understand.
It was the first time Jennifer had heard her mother say anything like this, complaining about the house, about them. About her life. She must have been about twelve, she realised, eleven or twelve. Not yet angry with her parents, though this might have heralded the start. And Aunt Caroline, standing in the doorway, had taken a drag of her cigarette and said, not turning around, speaking to the garden it had seemed, ‘You chose it, Deirdre. You chose your life.’
Jennifer remembered the shock these words had been to her. The harshness of it. Then she’d looked at her mother and thought, Yes, you did choose it. You chose your life.
‘Of course, there was a good few years between Deirdre and me,’ Aunt Caroline was saying now. ‘In some ways it was as though we were different generations.’
Jennifer rubbed her temples. Aren’t we talking about me and Charlotte? she thought impatiently. If this was meant to be a parallel it wasn’t a very good one. She and Charlotte were not years apart, they were eleven months apart. Although, we could be from different generations, she mused, Charlotte seemingly having been born with a middle-aged sense of seriousness and
disapproval.
‘We tend to let things fester, don’t we?’ said Aunt Caroline.
Do we? Jennifer wondered, remembering Nick’s affair with Milli and her own fury. Now Nick and Milli were living together in Nick’s flat in Rotherhithe and Jennifer often went over there for cocktails or Sunday brunch. Who was festering?
‘Spite. Petty jealousies. Envy. They’re a normal part of growing up together. But sometimes they can get out of hand. People’s lives can be affected. Changed.’ Aunt Caroline tapped her silver teaspoon against the side of her teacup then looked up brightly. ‘But still, you learn to get on. To get by. And as you get older those differences seem to count for less.’
She frowned suddenly, and pressed a hand to the side of her head. Jennifer waited. Was there more? But the tapping of the teaspoon seemed to have signalled the end. It was time to go. And if she wasn’t careful she’d be snowed in and that would mean either spending a night on Aunt’s Caroline’s sofa bed or asking some taciturn Yorkshire farmer to dig her out. Neither prospect appealed. She pushed herself up off the settee with a ‘Well!’ that was intended to convey a sense of finality to the visit. She reached for her gloves and coat and bag.
‘Are you leaving, dear?’ said Aunt Caroline.
‘I ought to, so I get back before dark.’ Fat chance, it being past two o’clock already and with contraflows on the M1 either side of Newport Pagnell.
Aunt Caroline got up and as she did so she swayed and put out a hand to steady herself against the wall, a slight frown creasing her brow.
‘Well, it was lovely of you to come and visit,’ she said, her hand still pressed against the wall. ‘I’m only sorry I haven’t made any cake or nice little biscuits for you to take back with you. But I don’t bake, you know. Well, why would you when there’s a Sainsbury’s in town?’
Why indeed? Jennifer kissed her aunt’s cheek and tried not to notice that it had a greyish tinge and was the same consistency as crepe paper. The same consistency, too, as Grandma Lake’s cheek all those years ago. She had a sudden vision of Grandma Lake seated at the dining-room table at Sunday lunch twenty-five years earlier, chasing a pea around her plate with a spoon, her mouth open and a shining bubble of spittle balancing on her lower lip. She shuddered. She hated all things old, people most of all, and those two years when Grandma Lake had lived with them was no doubt the root cause of this phobia. And now Aunt Caroline was old. But not as old as Grandma Lake had been at the end. Besides, she was Aunt Caroline who had married Uncle Ted, and who went to the races at Doncaster and had her own life up here in Skipton. There was no comparison.
As she turned to leave, Jennifer saw a row of postcards along the mantelpiece, one of which she recognised as a card she had sent from Mykonos last year showing a laden mule struggling up a winding cobbled street, and she remembered she hadn’t seen any mules, laden or otherwise, during her week on the island. She’d seen the inside of a lot of clubs and tavernas, but no mules. Next to her own postcard was a card showing a vast and darkly oppressive building topped with bulging domed roofs and spikes with a distinctly Eastern European appearance. She remembered that Charlotte had gone to Moscow a while back. Moscow was a typical Charlotte tourist destination: cold, bleak and austere. No danger of having any fun there.
Beside the two postcards three photographs were lined up: one in a modern, transparent plastic frame of a smiling Uncle Ted in a tweed jacket and corduroy trousers standing in a muddy field, taken perhaps eight or nine years ago; one in a more conventional wooden frame of a serious-looking boy with Brylcreemed hair and an RAF uniform who definitely wasn’t Uncle Ted; the third, in a plain silver frame, was a grainy black and white photograph of a young woman with a 1920s bob standing in what looked like a bus depot waving jauntily at the camera. Jennifer picked up the photo and studied the young woman for a moment, wondering if she ought to find something more to say, if she were being rude leaving this early. Then she put it down and, with a cheery wave, let herself out.
As soon as the front door closed behind Jennifer, Aunt Caroline eased herself away from the wall and walked stiffly over to the window, watching as her niece swept a dusting of snow from the bonnet and front and rear windows of her Peugeot, climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine, sweeping the windscreen wipers back and forth a couple of times. Then she revved the engine and held up a hand in farewell as the back wheels spun on a patch of ice and went nowhere.
In no time at all Mr Milthorpe from next door burst from his own bungalow, spade at the ready, and was soon busily shovelling away snow and putting down stones beneath the tyres and calling out things like: ‘Easy! Easy now! Tek it steady, lass. Back her oop now. Aye, that’s right.’
Eventually the car was freed and with a final wave and a loud rev of acceleration, the Peugeot leapt away from the kerb and roared off down the street.
Aunt Caroline stood at the window for a while longer, noting the grey clouds overhead and estimating that it would be dark by three thirty.
The sudden wave of dizziness had surprised her but it had gone as quickly as it had struck.
She drifted over to the mantelpiece where a moment before her niece had stood and she too picked up the silver photo frame. She didn’t look at the photograph because she didn’t need to. Instead, she tapped the frame with her forefinger and for a full minute she considered telephoning her sister, Deirdre, in London.
CHAPTER NINE
SEPTEMBER 1981
‘W,’ JENNIFER SIGHED IN a tone that was meant to convey her total indifference to the letter ‘W’ and her utter boredom with the game as a whole.
Hangman! And on a Saturday night.
Graham said nothing, just raised his eyebrows in that ironic, rather smug way he had and drew the long downward stick of the hanged man’s left leg. Jennifer stared in silent contempt at the top of his neatly brushed, precisely parted, mousy-brown head. She had one remaining chance and seven letters on the piece of paper that didn’t look as if they belonged together in the same word.
‘Ae_rotat! Anyway, there’s no such word. You just made it up.’
Sadly, denying the existence of Graham’s word, though satisfying, was a futile gambit: Graham had no need to make up words. Despite being a whole two years younger than Jennifer, he appeared to have memorised Dad’s Complete Oxford Dictionary and was a self-professed authority on words of which no one else had ever heard. That made it impossible to win against him at hangman or Scrabble or anything else.
It was Saturday night. The first week of a new school term was still fresh in everyone’s minds—everyone who’d bothered to actually go to school that was—and Jennifer was sitting at home playing hangman with Graham.
Ae_rotat, for God’s sake.
Mum and Dad had gone out for the evening and Charlotte was alone upstairs. On the television, Wonder Woman had been replaced by The Generation Game. Mother-and-son team, Irene and Greg from Cirencester, were attempting to ice a giant wedding cake.
Jennifer picked up the pencil and her fist clenched tightly around it so that her nails cut into the palm of her hand. Something, a throbbing rush of blood behind her eyes, a flash of painful white light, blurred her vision, and she saw herself reach out and draw a vicious line right across Graham’s notepaper, tearing the paper, her hand sweeping it from the coffee table, flinging the pencil against the wall so that it made a mark on the wallpaper then bounced harmlessly onto the carpet.
But she did none of those things. She sat calmly on the sofa holding the pencil and staring at the word. That damned word.
Ae_rotat.
On one side of the paper was the neat list of discarded letters: i, u, b, c, m, n, s, p, l, v, d and now w. That left f, g, h, j, k, q, x, y, z, none of which looked remotely possible. Aezrotat? Aekrotat? Aefrotat? They sounded like a Central American tribe, a Soviet news agency and an African hairstyle. The throbbing started again.
On the television, Greg from Cirencester dropped a stack of plates and the audience shrieked wit
h laughter.
‘Anyway, who cares?’ she declared, throwing down the pencil and snatching up last week’s Smash Hits. She proceeded to flip irritably through its pages. Graham leapt forward triumphantly and with a flourish drew the man’s second foot to complete the hangman.
‘Hangman!’ he exclaimed, just in case she wasn’t already aware. ‘It’s a g. Aegrotat,’ he said writing in the missing letter.
‘Aegrotat! Crap,’ Jennifer snorted, refusing to acknowledge the existence of such an absurd word.
‘It means a certificate of illness to excuse a student from an exam,’ explained Graham, as though someone had asked for a definition.
‘Yeah? Well, it’s not hangman because I never guessed the final letter so I never got it wrong,’ Jennifer pointed out.
‘Hangman! Hangman,’ sang Graham just as Charlotte drifted into the lounge.
Jennifer looked up and felt the blood drain from her face. The room fell silent. So silent she could hear her heart beating, the blood rushing in her ears, pulses throbbing at her temples and at the back of her neck. She could hear the hum of background noise from the television set, the settling of floorboards on the stairs, the rustling of leaves on the sycamore tree in the garden, the buzz from the streetlight outside the house, the footsteps of a neighbour in next-door’s driveway, the slam of a car door at the end of the street.
‘Wanna play hangman?’ said Graham.
And Jennifer thought, Why aren’t we playing noughts-and-crosses? Monopoly? Snap?
Charlotte ignored the question. She slunk across the room and flopped herself down onto the sofa, staring blankly at the television, her arms folded across her chest as if no one else was in the room.
Smash Hits had a double-page feature on The Teardrop Explodes. The band members posed in black leather trousers and bulky leather flying jackets in a derelict inner-city landscape. Jennifer began to read the first paragraph of the accompanying interview, but she couldn’t make out the words. They seemed to make no sense.