by Holly Seddon
When I was on my bed rest while pregnant with Izzy, our nanny was a bouncy Antipodean with golden hair and a face-splitting smile. She wore workout clothes all day. She got up early to run on the heath or do yoga in the garden. She was our very own kids’ TV presenter, irritating as shit and brilliant with children. Harry loved having her to stay and I hated her to her core for that.
Paul liked her, as much as Paul likes anyone. I caught him watching her stretching on the grass as I lay round and heavy on the bed. ‘She’s great with Harry and his behaviour has really improved,’ he said one time as I inched carefully into a new position, my back aching from lying, bored and grounded by the memory-foam mattress. ‘And she’s so trustworthy for a twenty-three-year-old, don’t you think?’
I wished he’d just fuck her and get it over with, that’s what I thought. But Paul may well have imagined himself tugging those yoga pants down, but he never would have. Back then, I thought that was because he only had eyes for me. The truth is simpler: it would be the wrong thing to do. And Paul’s whole adult life has been about ‘doing the right thing’, whatever the consequences.
1995
When I was twenty-three, I wanted much more than a nannying job. My one-year graduate placement had flown by and in 1995 I was no longer just a junior at TMC, in part because I craved mentors and asked them lots of questions.
The best advice I got was from John Silver, then an account director who had gone through the grad-scheme himself years before. ‘You want to stay on here after this scheme?’ he’d asked in the bar one Thursday night in 1994.
‘God, yeah.’
‘Make yourself indispensable.’
This isn’t unique advice, I’ve heard this exact line on numerous TV shows and read it in numerous books since, but it was the first time I’d heard it. I took it on board, wholesale. I inserted myself into every cross-department project. I made sure I introduced myself by name to every client I ever answered the phone to, regardless of who managed their account. I got to the office earlier than any other junior, stayed in the bar until the last important person left and always got the drinks. That was the biggest joke: the drinks were free but they seemed to appreciate the effort of me collecting them and bringing them to the table.
That year, I became a junior account executive and then an account executive when two execs were poached in quick succession by Saatchi, just up the road.
Saatchi & Saatchi was the mortal enemy, so much so that the name was banned from our office. They were simply known as ‘them’.
At night, I returned to my magnolia room in a shared house in zone three, set the alarm for 6 a.m. and then crashed out. I loved it.
CHAPTER TWENTY
1986
Mum continued to die throughout Christmas in the intensive-care unit that had a thin piece of tinsel over the door leading to the ward and large cardboard Christmas bells taped to the walls. I spent Christmas eating toast and Mrs Baker’s Christmas cake, watching the Christmas telly and looking away when adverts of smiling, healthy families bubbled onto the screen. My father hovered around the house, never really settling. He gave me £100 of Topshop vouchers, a king’s ransom that had Mrs Baker’s influence written all over them. I gave him a coffee pot for one.
When she actually died for good, Mum was on her own. It was three days after Christmas. My father had visited her the day before and was due to visit that afternoon when the call came. Mrs Baker passed the receiver to my father in the hall. I listened from a hiding space behind an antique chest on the landing.
‘Yes, I see, I understand. Thank you. And do I need to—? Okay, thank you.’
He put the phone on its cradle as though it was made of ultra-thin glass and stood motionless. I hid in my room until Mrs Baker knocked softly. I opened it a crack but didn’t look at her face. ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I know.’ I shut the door with more of a bang than I’d intended and heard the weight shift on the floorboards outside of my door as she walked away. I sat on my bed and thought, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ I willed tears, but they didn’t come, not then.
Mum’s funeral was arranged for the third of January, a Friday. Party day. I asked my father if I could help to plan the funeral. I thought I could look for ideas in whatever fashion magazines Mum had been reading recently for ideas. I thought I could help choose the colour scheme. I just thought I could help. He looked at me like I was a terrorist.
‘It’s not a wedding, Kate. There’s no colour scheme.’ And he walked away, head bowed. More grey than before.
I didn’t know. This was going to be my first funeral, I’d had no warm-up.
On the day of the funeral, I wore a black skirt, black tights and a black top with lace panels that I found in my mum’s wardrobe. It had taken a long time to build up the courage to go in, but once inside her room, I started to sift through the treasure trove. A collection I’d barely peeked in before, let alone touched. Colours and patterns folded and slumped where they had once been a part of my mum, her look. Her leather trousers hung like an animal carcass. Her Russian fur hats peered down from a special shelf that ran above the rails.
For the service, I wore a dark pewter bracelet removed carefully from her jewellery box, and a black feather fascinator – very Siouxie and the Banshees – in my hair. I had tried on some black patent shoes with tiny pinprick heels but my feet slipped around in them too much. Just before Ted arrived to take us to the church, I painted my face carefully using her colours.
My father and I were the only family there. My mother had an older brother – Wilbur – who she’d mentioned, disparagingly, from time to time. I suppose I should say I had an uncle that my mother had disparaged. But he wasn’t invited. I’ll never know the circumstances that led to my mum’s life being so full in one way, and utterly barren in others.
‘No, no other family,’ my father had said to an inquisitive older mourner from the village who may not have been officially invited. ‘Those were Susannah’s wishes,’ my father was forced to insist. ‘The only family members she wanted were Kate and myself.’
My whole life, my father’s communication tended to be via the ruffle of a newspaper, a raising of an eyebrow or a polite cough. When speech was unavoidable, he spoke sparingly. And it was fucking unbearable if you actually needed him to say something that mattered. Speaking to villagers, making small talk, was visibly painful to him.
It had been mild in the run up to Christmas that year, clear blue skies and crisp nothingness that showed no sign of snow. Then Mum died and the temperature dropped overnight. From mild to minus degrees in hours. The Nine O’clock News showed footage of northern towns covered in piles of snow. On the day of the funeral, the wind buffeted the local church and the threat of ice hung from the clouds.
During the service, I sat as still as I could. My eyes were dry, and my chest felt light and giddy. I tried to hold my breath – not to suppress tears but to quell an inexplicable urge to laugh. I could feel it, the bubbles of it, tickling at my chest. The corners of my eyes twitched, heavy with far too much of my mum’s make-up. My mouth wobbled. My father was sitting next to me, his mouth a grim straight line. He saw me looking at him, saw my wobbling lips and reached for my hand with his much larger hand. And then the unwanted laugh popped and turned into a strangled cry. People looked. I would have looked. The twitches in my eyes turned to scratches and I felt my eyelids scrunch into scribbles and soon black-dyed tears were running down my cheeks. And while I cried, I remember thinking how lucky I was. How lucky that I hadn’t laughed and that instead I was crying and that everyone could see me cry. That I was doing the right thing, behaving in the right way.
My father’s hand felt heavy, almost crushing mine into the dark, dusty wood of the pew. I couldn’t remember ever feeling his skin on mine like that. I concentrated on the weight and the softness of his palm, the sharp hair on his fingers.
Throughout the service, the local vicar talked emphatically about a woman no-one in that church would have r
ecognised. Not the few villagers who only glimpsed my mother as she flew past along the country roads, nor my father who had watched her from hallways, or through windows or across large tables the way a cat eyes another cat sitting on the edge of its territory. And the vicar’s description was definitely unrecognisable to the Londoners who had come down by train and looked at the ground with its lack of pavements like they had never seen anything like it. To them, Susannah was Suki. And Suki in the mud didn’t make sense.
Afterwards, I saw Mum’s friends huddled from the wind next to the church porch, all cigarette thin and turned in on themselves.
‘Oh my God, is that Katie?’
One of the men I remembered visiting with a big group years before started to shuffle towards me, a pained look on his face. A woman I didn’t recognise pulled him back by his too-big shirt. The man had a bleached flop of curls that fell from the top of his head to the side, like a breaking wave. He carried his shoulders in a limp, sloping style. His fingers curled around a cigarette and he allowed himself to be pulled back into a hug by his friend. The woman hugging him smiled at me apologetically, her tight dress almost swallowed up by a white fur coat.
Behind them, several other Londoners shuffled and studiously avoided looking at me. The women wore high heels that sank into the mud, which they pretended not to notice or mind, instead taking fresh cigarettes from the packs offered by the men. All of them were thin and dramatic, like my mum. I recognised some of their faces as more hollow versions of the ones that had smiled at me during drunken picnics when I was little. In fact, all the women resembled my mum. Ghoulish versions of her.
My knees knocked together in the biting cold, the thin tights bagging at my ankles as my chunky shoes crunched the frost. I took a step toward the Londoners and my father appeared at my side. ‘No,’ he said. I wasn’t sure if it was aimed at me or the thin people but my father put his hand lightly on my shoulder and swivelled me away.
My father’s attention took my breath away and I started to sob again, but before I could turn in to him for a hug he had strolled away purposefully, shaking an older man’s hand. Mr and Mrs Baker came towards me and led me away from the church and I heard the strangled sounds of the friends crying behind me as the skinny man in the baggy shirt called, ‘I’m so sorry, little Katie!’
After the funeral, mourners filed into the formal lounge at my house. We’d lost half of the congregation by then, including the thin friends who had headed off to The Swan. I wished Viv and Mick had been invited, even though I would have been embarrassed at them seeing the house, the ridiculous scale of it. The way their house could have fitted inside one of the outbuildings like a Russian doll.
After wandering from room to room for a bit, trying to see them as if for the first time, I slipped through the shoulders of the adults and almost laughed as I ran, skidding, down the drive and out through the gate.
The village was deserted. The wind so fierce it picked up fistfuls of gravel and hurled them all around. Sludgy, lazy snow had started to dollop onto the ground, fizzling away to nothing. It was late afternoon and the only light by then was from the pub. I could hear murmurs of laughter inside and clinking of glasses as I passed.
By the time I reached the Loxtons’, my hands were red raw and my damp black skirt as heavy as bricks.
Viv opened the front door in her housecoat with wet dye on her hair, which was piled on her head.
‘Katie?’ At first I thought she was annoyed that I’d turned up without warning. Stomach dropping, I turned to go when she grabbed me and pulled me in to her. I stood shivering and let her hug me until drips of purple-black dye landed on my shoulders.
‘You should have come round the back out of the cold, you never need to knock,’ she said.
We didn’t talk about Mum.
‘Let me rinse my mop off and I’ll make up the Z-bed. Paul and Mick will be back in a minute, they’re out getting chips.’
Paul stepped through first and took off his new Doc Martens, his main Christmas present. He looked up self-consciously as he heard me and Viv talking on the sofa. I realised how dramatic I must have looked. Black clothes, damp hair, bedraggled feather fascinator and drops of his mum’s black hair dye on my skin. I looked like Robert Smith from The Cure.
He looked embarrassed. His nose was red from the cold and his hair was wet. Mick had barrelled through just after him, carrying the newspaper-wrapped fish and chips. Their scent escaped from the thin, stripy carrier bag that swung like a thurible.
‘Glad you two are back, it’s terrible out there,’ said Viv. ‘Say hello to Katie then, Paul!’
‘Hi.’
‘Paul, fetch Katie some PJs would you? She’s too tall to get into mine and no-one in their right mind would want to wear Mick’s.’
‘Hey, they’re antiques, they are,’ Mick called back from the kitchen.
As they divided three portions into four, I realised I hadn’t eaten since the previous day. And that had been toast. Always toast. That’s still my default today. If Paul has to stay away for work, I’ll exist on toast the whole time he’s gone.
We sat in near silence that evening, plates on trays on laps, drinking ginger beer and watching TV. The Christmas programming had given way to January’s slim pickings. We watched some of The Machine Gunners, but it was all about dreary wartime bombing so Viv turned the channel to BBC2 for some show Paul wanted to watch about aliens that invaded earth and froze everyone to death. I didn’t fancy it after watching my mum’s coffin being lowered into the frozen ground earlier that day, so I drained the last of my ginger beer and asked Viv quietly if I could have a bath.
When I came out of the bathroom, peach towel around my head and pyjamas back on, Mick had switched to Match of the Day. Paul and I played cards in his room. He seemed cross, barely making eye contact and grunting when I won. Viv later said he just didn’t know how to act given everything I’d been through and the best thing he could do for me was to treat me normally.
No-one called from home, not that night or the next morning, so I stayed for the whole weekend, playing cards, watching Ghostbusters on the new video player over and over, drinking tea. That film is forever bound up with that time; I haven’t watched it since.
Paul was due to return to school on the Monday, but my school had longer Christmas holidays and wasn’t open for another week. I waved Paul off on the first morning, his shoulders slumping as he hoisted his black duffel bag up onto his shoulder and trudged towards the town. I helped Viv clear the breakfast things away and tidy up. Mick’s work had been cancelled due to the weather, so after some verbal and non-verbal discussion between them, he drove Viv to run some errands.
While they were gone, I drifted from room to room. I lingered in the doorway of Viv and Mick’s bedroom, still wearing Paul’s pyjamas, which skimmed my ankles. I’d seen this room so many times, the door was rarely closed and I’d often go in to take Viv a cup of tea or help her carry laundry to sort on the bed. But Viv and Mick’s bedroom in an empty house felt different.
The bed was made, the tight curls of the crocheted blanket spread as smooth as possible. One pillow each side, a bedside table apiece. Mick’s side had a black John Player Special ashtray on it, polished to a shine. Viv’s had a stack of books. Riders by Jilly Cooper was at the bottom. I sat on the floor, leaning against the divan and opened it carefully so I didn’t crack the spine. The inside cover had a message from one of Viv’s friends, another nurse. A Christmas present.
I started to read, turning the untouched pages silently like they could set off an alarm. As I read further and further, I wondered if Viv yet knew that Jake Lovell, the handsome hero, was a gypsy. Whether Viv’s friend was in the loop on the whole Romany secret. But the more I read, the more I forgot about that until I was nearly a hundred pages deep and heard a car pull up outside. I scrambled to my feet, slipped the book back under the pile, and tried to act normally as I padded back down the stairs and into the kitchen to put the kettle on.
‘I know, darlin’, it’s not right,’ Mick said.
I swished through the bead curtain as if I hadn’t heard and said, ‘Oh hi, you’re back! Would you like a cup of tea?’
Viv had my holdall in her hand and she placed it at her feet.
‘Hello, love,’ Mick said, before he was shooed back out to grit the front step.
‘I thought you might want some bits from home,’ Viv said, walking towards me and putting her hands on my shoulders. ‘And I got you a pad and some pencils for drawing. I know you like to doodle.’
She smelled of Comfort fabric conditioner and Anaïs Anaïs perfume. She’d dressed up carefully to visit my house. I stood before her in her son’s pyjamas, limply holding the drawing pad and pencils.
‘I wanted to speak to your dad and see how he’s doing. We met at the hospital a couple of times and he. . .’ She hesitated and gently pushed my growing-out fringe behind my ears. ‘He seemed like a decent man. I thought I could let him know how you were and arrange for you to stay for a while to give you both a bit of space. People deal with grief differently. . .’ She trailed off.
It was incredibly thoughtful and kind but I remember feeling embarrassment above all else. Embarrassment that Viv had wasted all that time thinking about my father’s feelings and thinking she had to ask his permission to let me stay.
‘What did he say?’
‘Well, he wasn’t there m’love. I spoke to Joan, Mrs Baker, she said he’d had to go off to East Germany of all places.’ Viv took a breath, softened her voice again. ‘She doesn’t know how long he’s going for so Joan and I agreed that you’d stay here for a bit, until your dad was back and you felt like you wanted to go home. If that’s okay?’