She may have to cancel the Mothercraft class, but possibly it was going to be a bit too much anyway, with the Basic Cookery course on Tuesday afternoons and the Advanced on Thursdays. When she started out, Alison had imagined that she would be catering for young brides, for Basic at least, and had looked forward to starry-eyed biddable girls, but in the event most of the punters, for both classes, are older women, quite a lot of them her own age, and they are neither starry-eyed nor biddable. She had installed a new cooker, even larger than the one that had done duty for so many family meals, but even so there were—and are—undisguised reactions to the Allersmead kitchen, ranging from merriment to downright scorn. She had not realized it was so unusual; it was other people’s kitchens that had always seemed odd to her—so shiny and small. When people are being kindly they say, “How lovely and old-fashioned—my mother had a dresser like that.” Other remarks are not quite so restrained. She has caught mutterings about the potential of a place like this, in the right hands, and once overheard one woman, putting her coat on in the hall, announce: “God, that kitchen . . . but, face it, she’s a fantastic cook.”
There lay her authority. Those who were initially unimpressed by Alison’s lack of chic (“Where does she get those sack things she wears?”) and the individuality of the Allersmead ambience soon changed their tune after exposure to Alison’s skills. A casual interest would soon become keen ambition: they too could turn out those elegant dishes, impress their friends, confound their menfolk. Those who had come along just for the fun of it were soon the most ardent acolytes, progressing from Basic to Advanced, from essential salad ideas to Italian, Middle Eastern, and Thai cuisine. Alison’s cookery persona is a surprise, they discover; her house may be crying out for a makeover, she may be dressed by Butterick 1975, but when it comes to cooking she is on the cutting edge. She has availed herself of all the pundits, and added her own twists and amendments—she has outspiced Claudia Roden, trumped Nigella, improved on Jamie Oliver, revived and reinvented Elizabeth David. The members of her classes, women who thought they knew a thing or two themselves, are silenced in the presence of achievement of another order. They watch Alison chop, whisk, stir. They marvel at what comes out of her ovens. They submit meekly, deferentially, to instruction—chopping and stirring alongside in the Allersmead kitchen, vying for her attention: “Alison, is this thick enough?”; “Alison, why can’t I get my pastry like yours?” Alison has taken wing, floating masterly in her own element, untouchable. The women know that they will never achieve her finesse, they recognize that she has some sort of culinary sixth sense not available to them, but they see that something will rub off, they can raise their game, cookery is all the rage nowadays, it is well worth an afternoon and a few quid.
For Alison, the cookery classes have been affirmation, and a small personal income. They have given her a new status, now that the children are no longer there, and some money to spend as she wishes. She has never particularly felt the need of money; Charles has always left management of the household finances to her, and has never asked to see the accounts. There has always been just about enough, so long as one was careful, though what comes into the bank from his dividends does seem to have been getting less and less lately, for some reason. There has never been extravagance at Allersmead, but even so the little bit of spending money from the classes has been a source of satisfaction. Over the years Alison has treated herself—has treated Allersmead—to the latest in blenders and microwaves, she has had a Dyson vacuum cleaner, and a proper washbasin for the downstairs loo instead of that ancient sink. Remarks had been made about the sink, by cookery class women.
Charles remains in his study, on cookery class days. Most of the women have never set eyes on him; sometimes there is vague murmured speculation, Alison being so obviously and productively married (the family photos everywhere, those named mugs). Ingrid is supportive, if enigmatic; she comes in and out of the kitchen, sometimes does a bit of brisk clearing up, and is referred to by Alison as “my PA.” Alison is not clear what the term means; Ingrid suggested it, and they both rather like the sound. The women are a bit puzzled by Ingrid, who is unforthcoming when discreetly probed (“You must be Scandinavian . . . let me guess—Swedish?”) and makes it clear that her role is strictly professional: “I am working with Alison for some time now.”
Ingrid has moved down from her bedroom on the attic floor to Gina’s old room. The attic room has developed a tiresome ceiling leak that means a bucket when it rains. A builder came to look at the roof; there was much shaking of his head when he descended, and a subsequent estimate that was patently ridiculous, all those zeros. Alison assumed there was some mistake, but apparently not. Charles simply stared at it and shrugged, and of course he hasn’t been up to the attic floor for ten years or so. Buckets are now arranged up there as fixtures, and that seems to do the trick.
Allersmead appears somehow isolated these days, clinging on in a neighborhood that has subtly changed. There is a different kind of neighborhood now; huge sleek cars are parked in driveways, one Allersmead-size house on the street has become a nursing home, another is divided into flats. The people next door sold their garden to a developer, and a bungalow sprang up, much to Alison’s indignation. The neighbors are younger and more distracted—they whisk off in the sleek cars at the crack of dawn, and reappear late at night, wives and husbands both; their children are shepherded around by young nannies. Ingrid claims that there are children who do not recognize their parents.
Letters from house agents drop through the front door, saying that the house agents have clients who are anxious to acquire a property in the area, similar to Allersmead, or, indeed, by implication, Allersmead itself. Alison bins these. She is aware from the comments of the cookery class women that Allersmead is perceived as a curious marriage of archaic and highly desirable (“I mean, what one could do with it . . .”). The women themselves tend to come from the leafy roads of detached four-bedroom new and newish houses on the outskirts of town, from the villages round about, or from the old warehouses down by the canal that have been converted into lofts. They exclaim at the Allersmead stained glass, and the black-and-white marble of the hall floor; Alison is irritated by this, she does not like to have Allersmead seen as some kind of anachronism, a survival. “This has always been a home,” she says. “A real family home.”
It is so long since Alison lived anywhere other than Allersmead that she can no longer remember what other houses are like. She left her parents’ home to marry when quite young. Her own childhood memories are of that north London Edwardian semi—roomy but not expansive, and anyway there were only the two children. When she thinks about the place, it is inevitably set beside Allersmead and does now seem, well, a bit poky.
She recognized Allersmead, when first they saw it. She stared at it—the steps up to the big front door, the many windows indicating many rooms, the solidity of it, its assurance—set there amongst big trees with the quarter acre of garden spreading away behind (so said the agent’s particulars). She stared—and before her eyes the place became populated. Little faces peered from the windows; a small figure rode a bike around the graveled circle of the driveway. She hurried forward, with Charles a few steps behind.
He said, it’s rather big, isn’t it? She was busy allocating space and hardly heard. He said, what would one want all that garden for? She had marked out the croquet lawn and hung some swings. He said, that’s an industrial-size kitchen. She had tracked down a great scrubbed table and the removal men were edging it through the hall. He said, there’s another floor, up those stairs, it really is very big. She was installing Ingrid, or someone like her. He said, it’s rather beyond the budget, in fact. She said, that big room off the hall, the one opposite the sitting room, the one with the paneling and that funny old tiled fireplace, that could be your study. He took another look; he began to measure up for bookshelves.
Allersmead—ownership of Allersmead—rests on Vim and Dettol and Brasso and Harpic and R
obin starch. There had to be an erosion of Charles’s inheritance from his godfather, that blessed sustaining lump of money derived from the prinking and polishing of a million homes. The chunk taken to buy Allersmead meant that there would be some diminishment of income in the future, but Alison reckoned that they could manage perfectly well. In fact, Allersmead, though not cheap, was nothing like as desirable then as it apparently is today. People didn’t want such large, cumbersome old houses. How would you heat it? How would you keep it clean?
Charles did not ask these questions. He did wonder, aloud, from time to time, how on earth they were going to use all this space. Alison merely beamed. Smiled and smiled. Oh, you’ll see, she cried, you’ll see, it’ll be fine. As for the heating and the cleaning—simple. Good thick sweaters in the winter, and one just won’t be too fussy about a bit of dust. And, in the event, that was how it worked out. Allersmead children were amongst the last to experience that fine aesthetic thrill of frost patterns on the inside of the windows; a monthly blitz of the place by Alison, and, in due course, Ingrid saw to the worst of the dirt.
Allersmead children. Of course, that was the object of the exercise, and if Charles had not realized this, well, he was at the start of his writing career, he had other things to think about, one book out, another simmering. Alison had happened to him, and things had rather rushed ahead, and one has to live somewhere and perhaps preferably no longer in a rented flat, eating at the café around the corner.
Or had Charles happened to Alison?
I wanted to get married, of course. I mean, girls did then—I know it’s different now, most of those Mothercraft people weren’t, but you took it for granted back then. You got married, and had children of course, unless you were someone like Corinna, and really one does wonder what her life can be like, but she always seems pretty satisfied with it, makes that clear enough. I knew I wanted lots. Growing up in a family of two always seemed not quite right, somehow. Two is not a family. Not that it wasn’t a happy childhood, blissful, I’ve no complaints, goodness no, it was a golden time, just what childhood should be, but I always wanted little brothers and sisters—doll mad of course when I was small. So I assumed children, right from early on—children were obvious, sooner rather than later. And I suppose I was thinking about marriage too. Well, you had to, back then, didn’t you?
I wasn’t looking for someone to marry, goodness no, I was very young, there was no hurry, just, I suppose it was in the back of one’s mind. When I met Charles at that Highgate library I never for one moment thought of marrying him. Mummy had sent me to get some books, and he was there and he helped me to find a book she wanted, and then we had a coffee and I rather liked him so I asked him to a drinks party my parents were having, and things just sort of went on from there.
I didn’t know anything about birth control, one didn’t in those days, and of course later after we were married I didn’t bother with it, and then eventually there was no need. And anyway I never liked the idea—it’s killing babies, isn’t it, in a way, one does sort of sympathize with the Catholics. So I just didn’t worry and I suppose it’s not surprising that—well, that Paul was started a bit early as it were.
We’d have got married anyway. Oh yes.
I knew Allersmead would be perfect, as soon as I saw it. A lovely, lovely family home, just waiting. Yes, of course it was a bit expensive but not that much, and it wasn’t as though we were going to live expensively, not like they do nowadays, those cars you see parked outside, and Ingrid says they all go to the West Indies or the Seychelles for their holidays, no question of Devon or Cornwall. Ingrid talks to the nannies sometimes—they get paid the earth apparently.
And Allersmead has been perfect. Plenty of room for everyone and the garden to play in—and so good later for Ingrid and her vegetables—Charles had his study and the kitchen was ideal for so many children, and then for years it’s been just right for the cookery classes. We rattle about a bit today, I suppose, but one of them visits every now and then, and of course the whole place is full of memories. They’re still here, as far as I’m concerned.
Paul actually is here, of course, as he often has been. Things so often haven’t worked out for him and then he comes home, well, to sort of take a break and look around. The Garden Centre work is just to tide him over for the moment while he thinks about what he really wants to do. Eventually Paul’s going to hit on what he’s really good at—he’s had such a lot of bad luck, fetching up with the wrong work and, frankly, the wrong people sometimes, from way back when he was very young and got led astray into that drug business—left to himself he’d never have got involved. He’s always been a bit of a worry, Paul, and of course he’s the eldest, and I suppose one’s had a special feeling . . . yes, he was rather my favorite.
But you love them all, and if there are six you don’t spread it more thinly, somehow there’s just more of it. When they’re small they love you back, but of course later even if they still do it doesn’t much show, and you just have to reckon with that, you can’t expect demonstrations of affection from sixteen-year-old boys, not that Roger wasn’t always a perfectly nice boy. And girls go their own way, nothing you say is going to make a blind bit of difference, Gina rushing off to that college place, Sandra so sure of herself, clothes mad when she was eight, and Clare just dance, dance, dance.
One did one’s best, and at least one was always there for them, they had a mother, and a home, and that’s what matters. I mean, so many children don’t—one wonders actually about the people around here now, with the cars and the nannies. Allersmead was a real home, I was always here, I’d be waiting for them after school, and there’d be a cake for tea. Children need security, don’t they?
Those Mothercraft girls went on about their partners and shared duties. I never expected Charles to do much if anything, and of course that’s how he saw it too, just a bit of help with homework sometimes when they were older—and arguing with Gina, I suppose that would be called parenting now. Though I won’t say there weren’t times when . . . well, when I wanted to break down the study door. But of course one laughed it off, obviously everything’s not going to be plain sailing with a household like ours, there are going to be points when things get on top of you.
It was just a wretched accident, the Limoges plates. Paul didn’t mean to, he just wasn’t quite himself that evening.
Charles had his work, the books, and one respected that. I know I’m not much of a reader myself but Charles knew I don’t read a lot—though always bedtime stories with the children, always—and you don’t marry someone because of what they’ve read or not, do you? Well, I daresay you do if you’re people like Corinna and Martin, not that they are married, and no doubt they do talk about Shakespeare at breakfast, and rather them than me, frankly.
Charles wouldn’t have wanted to talk about the books. His books.
In a family like this everyone was talking, all the time, children’s chatter to begin with, and of course there’s so much practical stuff, someone needing this or that, but later it gets more grown-up, a bit too much so sometimes I found, Gina and her opinions, and Charles would have his say then, not always in a way that people liked—Dad being sarky, they used to call it.
But the thing about Allersmead was that people could escape from one another if they wanted to. Charles with his study, and Ingrid had her room up at the top, and the times when no one was to bother her. And the children had the garden and sometimes they all used to go down into the cellar, if you please—the big ones were reading to the younger ones, apparently. Isn’t that rather sweet?
Other people’s houses felt so small. And other families seemed—thin. Just a couple of children or three at the most. I used to feel so lucky, by comparison. Oh, there were comments—“Your delightful Victorian family, Alison,” and Corinna saying, “My sister-in-law is doing her valiant best to prop up the declining birthrate”—saying that to Martin, I remember, when she first brought him here, she didn’t know I’d heard.
I never had any problems, getting pregnant. It would just happen. I even used to feel maybe you didn’t need to—make love. That perhaps I just got pregnant anyway. It’s called having sex now, isn’t it—not making love. That sounds so—basic. I was a bit horrified, the first time, but it’s surprising how quickly you get used to it, and eventually it’s just routine.
If cross-examined on the matter—something that has not happened, and just as well—Alison would probably admit that she never much cared for sex. She agreed to it willingly enough for procreative reasons—virgin conception was a romantic idea but Alison knew well enough that its only record is biblical. The Allersmead four-poster bed thus saw a standard amount of marital sex during the early years; the bed itself, an untypically flamboyant gesture, had belonged to an aunt of Alison’s who was going to send it to a sale—Alison pounced and it was reprieved. Paul, Gina, and Sandra were born in it: Katie and Roger had to make do with the local hospital because by then home deliveries were not so popular with doctors and Charles had made it clear that he shared their reservations, though probably not for the same reasons.
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