Raking the Ashes

by Anne Fine

  About the Book

  Lovers, colleagues, family – Tilly has always been brilliant at pushing people in and out of her life exactly as it suits her. Then along comes Geoffrey, gentle, compassionate, generous to a fault, with his miserable little children and his manipulative ex-wife.

  Tilly’s own expertise in the arts of deception and avoidance should be enough to make sure she’s always one step ahead of Geoffrey’s crumbling family. Time and again she finds herself staying with him, although she knows the relationship to be doomed. How can Tilly plan her permanent escape?

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Reading Group Material

  About the Author

  Also by Anne Fine

  Copyright

  RAKING THE ASHES

  Anne Fine

  For R.C.W.

  1

  GEOFF DROVE FROM the wedding in much the same mood he would have left a funeral. It was obvious something had died. In the end, I decided it must be his sense of closeness to his son, that firm belief of his that, however rarely the two of them might see each other, however long the intervals between one or the other of them picking up the phone, there had been between them some unsnappable – even unshrivelling – bond. He’d been gung-ho enough on arrival. ‘So there you are, Harry! Sneaking one last cigarette before the execution? And where’s your bonny bride?’ But from the way he’d taken to hovering in the background throughout the reception, I couldn’t help suspecting his confidence was draining away. And, by the time the grotesquely balloon-clad limousine finally cruised off down the drive, Geoff was standing shyly on the edge of the gravel looking rather as if he felt he meant no more to his son than any of the overdressed, overexcited guests who milled after the car, waving.

  I, on the other hand, was in the merriest of moods. Even after we got stuck in a traffic jam at Reading, I was pursing my lips every few minutes to imitate the lady in the hat with the flowers dancing on wires. ‘In the summer, I am virtually a fruitbat!’

  After another fifty miles or so, this clearly became tiresome. Geoff said accusingly, ‘You had a good time!’

  ‘I did.’ I couldn’t help snorting. ‘And I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a misprint more.’

  Even forlorn Geoff had to chuckle. Most of the congregation had been singing with singularly little commitment. (Such a wet little hymn. I certainly never expected to have to warble it again after leaving my primary school.) And then we’d reached the small, unmissable, printed mistake:

  He gave us lips to tell

  How great is –

  ‘Gold Almighty!’ I crowed, and fell about laughing. I’d had a really good day. Something had vanished for me too; but what was gone was that humiliating sense of always being on the edge of things with Geoff and his children – as good as invisible sometimes: the stepmother who could be taken into account or ignored as inclination chose.

  For we were both sidelined now. Geoff had his first salutary inkling of how I’d so often felt when word came – through Minna, not Harry – that the wedding would be in the first week of June.

  I’d stopped on my way from the kitchen. ‘What, before the eighth?’

  Geoff gave me a look, but said nothing.

  ‘It’s the week of the inspections,’ I said, not because I thought for a moment he might have forgotten, but to galvanize him back into speech. ‘You know they’re always at the start of June.’

  ‘I’ll ring Harry tomorrow.’

  ‘You can’t do that. We haven’t even been invited yet.’ To stop him trying to pre-empt me (‘Oh, Tilly! Of course we’re invited!’), I’d pressed on in a rush: ‘You can’t go telling them to change the dates for something you still only know about by accident.’

  The father in him reared up, offended. ‘Scarcely by accident!’

  ‘I don’t see what else you’d call it. It’s not as if Harry’s had the courtesy to ring up and ask, after all. “Oh, by the way, Dad, Tara and I are thinking of getting married. Would this date be all right for you and Tilly?”’

  Now Geoff was turning sullen. ‘So are you saying I should just let them carry on with the arrangements as they are now?’

  ‘I think that’s best. After all, you can still go. And it won’t be the first time I’ll have missed a family occasion.’

  He couldn’t fail to notice the veiled attack. ‘Well, I am going to ring them.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Now you’re just being silly.’

  And that was the cat out of the bag. ‘Don’t call my feelings “being silly”, please. Your son’s wedding matters to you, but my pride matters to me and I don’t want you phoning on my account. If it’s their choice not to check dates with me, it’s equally my choice not to have you ring them.’

  Geoff sounded so uneasy. ‘Look, I expect they just didn’t think about it.’

  ‘How would they not think about it? Harry knows my job. He knows that once a year I go off on inspections and that the schedule is set in stone. If he was bothered, he’d have phoned to check.’

  ‘Surely I could just mention it …’

  On any other matter, I might have been more conciliatory. (‘You must do as you like, Geoff. He’s your son, not mine.’) After all, the sheer bloody rudeness of the oversight had come as no real surprise. Right from the start, every last one of the Andersons had treated me as if I were some pleat in their family economy – there to be taken in and then let out again just as it suited them. But weddings are different. A wedding is a public event, and if you’re not there it shows. (‘I thought the young man had a stepmother. Has she not come?’) The clear indifference behind their carelessness drove me to snapping. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Geoff! Haven’t you learned yet that, in a family like this, there’s no such thing as “simply mentioning” something?’ And it was true. I could have pointed to a million instances over the years, from way back when grave little Harry, swinging his legs tensely under the kitchen table, just happened to mention, ‘Mum doesn’t really like it when Tilly does our washing,’ right through to Minna’s recent greeting on the phone. ‘Oh! Hi, Til. I thought you’d still be up in Aberdeen.’

  In the end, of course, what with the blow-out off Troendseim, all the inspections were delayed. (No one to fly us out.) Head Office agreed we could vanish. The blokes went off climbing. I thought of joining them, but in the end decided that would be too close to staying in a sulk. Instead, I made the effort to cadge a flight back. I picked up a rather smart dress in Newcastle on the way home, and, by the time Geoffrey and I set off for Sussex the next morning, I was as free as anyone to celebrate the beginning of Tara and Harry’s life together.

  And start looking forward to the end of our own.

  2

  I WAS STILL married to bill when I met Geoffrey. Things had been sticky from the start, and I had lovers – one after another – cheerful, juicy lovers who swept me out to concerts and films and restaurants. I can’t remember ever having to step behind a pillar or bury my face in a menu till someone who knew me had passed. I think it must be that great long conveyor belt that runs from antenatal classes and nursery groups right through to school and teenage-party car pools that sucks most people into the community.

  Women like me can dance all over that. And Bill wasn’t ‘social’. In fact, he was a grump. When he was home, I often found myself counting the hours t
ill he went back on the rig; and I’m quite sure that he was happier watching films with the lads in those great floating cages than sitting morosely back home with me. Later, when I was working in oil too, I’d often meet people who worked with him. ‘Great chap, Bill,’ they’d tell me. ‘Bundle of laughs. Marvellous sense of humour.’ For quite a while, I took it all as tongue in cheek. But gradually I came to see that, just as I can be sweet and soft and uncritical in someone else’s bed, in someone else’s life, so Bill could be a warm and cheerful bloke away from me, and I felt better, rather than worse, for ratting on our marriage regularly.

  By the end, we had the timings that worked best for us. He’d do his three weeks on the rig and, when he came home, I would as often as not be tossing my clothes into the bag for my next trip, or yet another course. And (what with the lovers) I managed to keep going. I don’t have friends. Even way back in school, I’m supposed to have had a grudging attitude towards company my own age. Once, in a flu epidemic, I came home beaming. ‘Good day?’ my mother asked me. ‘Brilliant!’ I admitted. ‘Almost everyone was off.’ One of my many ‘stepfathers’ once asked me, rather pointedly, ‘Is there a single one of your so-called “friends” you actually like?’ And now I think about it, looking back, I do see what he meant. I chose my companions always because they interested me, never for any more soft-hearted reason. So some were sullen. Some were volatile. And some were downright mad. (Beth put her fingers in a switched-on blender and was off school for weeks.) Some were from families that made my mother’s hair curl. None of them lasted as friends, and when I went to university I took up mostly with boys. For one thing, back then women were so rare in engineering that any girl could be a queen. And for another, I’d lost my nerve with my own sex. My last attempt at friendship with a girl broke down in our first year. Sarah knocked on my door, and then, instead of sitting on the rug in front of the gas fire as usual, made a short speech. ‘I’ve just come from my therapist. And I was telling her that every time I come away from you I somehow feel worse, as if you’d secretly amused yourself by seeing how many little things you can slip into the conversation to make me feel bad.’

  ‘What on earth—?’

  ‘No! Don’t interrupt. You know exactly what I’m talking about. All your mean, sneaky ways of coming back to the fact that I can’t do the work as well as you, and you have more boyfriends. Why, you’ve even managed to make me embarrassed about the way my jaw clicks when I’m eating apples. And isn’t it odd how the fact that my brother has been in jail keeps coming up whenever we’re—’

  ‘That’s bec—’

  ‘No!’ Sarah lifted an imperious hand. ‘Me and my therapist have—’

  It was an open invitation to scorn. ‘You and your therapist!’

  ‘See! There you go again, trying to make me feel crap!’ She kept right on, though by now I was pushing her towards the door. ‘My therapist thinks that’s all you want your friends for – to make yourself feel bigger by putting them down, and amuse yourself sticking in your little pins of spite.’

  I slammed the door shut in her face. But clearly, having mastered her valedictory address, she was determined to finish. ‘So that’s it, Tilly!’ she shouted through the woodwork. ‘I don’t want to be friends with you any more because it’s not working for me.’

  Nor for anyone else, after that. It wasn’t clear to me how much the girls on my corridor had overheard, or how much Sarah had told them. But certainly everyone started to treat me with that unfailing courtesy that doubles as distance. I just got on with my work. It meant I got a better degree than most people round me, and solid praise from my tutors. So you could argue Sarah did me a giant favour, dumping me like that. And certainly I’ve never felt any gaping hole in my life where women friends ought to be. I married stupidly young – at twenty, if you can believe it; I myself scarcely can – and, what with Bill and my work and my lovers, I was busy enough.

  Then I met Geoffrey. He was sitting on the beach with two miserable children. The wind was bitter. The toddler was howling, and the bigger one was whining hard. I walked past twice, and then my curiosity got the better of me and I walked past again. ‘Why don’t you take them up to one of the cafés?’

  ‘I’m waiting for someone,’ he told me.

  ‘Their mother?’

  He nodded.

  ‘She’ll have the sense to go and search up there, surely?’

  He gave me one of those ‘Well, you-don’t-know-her, do-you?’ looks, and I realized he must be a Sunday father. I felt great pity for him. ‘Look, I’ll stay here,’ I offered. ‘I’m dressed for it.’ (You don’t visit North Sea rigs, even in summer, without picking up warm togs.) ‘You tell me what she looks like, and if she comes I’ll tell her where you are.’

  And that’s what I did – sat on the beach and let the wind spit spray into my face while he took his caterwauling kids up for hot chocolate. I probably saved all their lives. When he came back, I gave him my number. ‘In case you ever need some help again.’

  That night I told my lover, who was a fat and easy Jewish businessman who loved his wife, ‘I rather think I might have met your replacement today.’

  ‘Where? At the dock office?’

  ‘On the beach.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’ he asked, rather as if I’d said I’d met the man down some sewer. (In my experience, Jews aren’t outside-y people.)

  ‘I was taking a walk.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Nowhere.’ I tried to explain again. ‘It was a walk.’

  And that was that. Sol didn’t even ask, ‘What was he like?’ or ‘Who was he?’ So, what with not getting to say the name Geoffrey aloud, I quickly forgot it, and for the next couple of years simply thought of him from time to time as ‘the man with the frozen children’.

  Then I bumped into him again at some old flame’s party. He was in the corner, alone and almost hidden by two tall leafy plants standing sentry on either side of him. ‘How are the kids?’ I asked.

  ‘Fine,’ he said, cheerfully enough. And then, because he didn’t press on with something as general as, ‘The older one’s in nursery now,’ or, ‘The baby’s finally grown some hair,’ I realized he didn’t have a clue where he had met me. Perhaps the last time I’d seen his kids was at the younger one’s christening. On the other hand, maybe I’d stuck a needle in one of them at the Health Centre that morning.

  ‘We met on the beach,’ I reminded him. ‘About three years ago. I gave you my phone number and you never rang.’

  I waited, but nothing was forthcoming. So, as a bit of a flirt, I asked, ‘Why didn’t you ring? Didn’t you fancy me?’

  I knew he remembered me now. He was staring. ‘You look completely different.’

  ‘I’m wearing a whole lot fewer clothes, and my hair isn’t sticking out sideways in the wind.’

  And after that we danced, and I went home with him. (It wasn’t one of his nights with the children.) We had a good time. In the morning I gave him my number again, and this time he rang it.

  It turned out the party-going wasn’t typical. He was a real home-bird. It wasn’t long before he got in a stew about me still sleeping with Jerry (or Stefan or whoever – Sol was long gone by then) and started nagging me to take up properly with him.

  I didn’t mind. We got on really well. The weeks flew by. I met the children again. (Harry wasn’t nearly so whiny, and Minna was sweet.) I thought I went down rather well with them, and so did Geoffrey. All the green lights were flashing. I think the end of it was quite inevitable. I can’t remember ever being more content. One night, when maybe both of us had drunk a little too much, he asked me to move in. I made the effort of rolling over in the bed to look at him, so nice and rumpled and warm and friendly.

  And I was mad enough to think, Why not?

  * * *

  In the end it was Geoffrey who moved in with me, because Bill had moved out and my place was much nicer. Ending my marriage turned out to be a hundred times more easy th
an I’d feared. I stalled for a month or two, then made a point of altering my schedule so Bill and I had three days in the house at the same time. I fed him home-made lasagne to weigh him down, then raised the subject of my ‘recent straying’. (I was trying to be tactful.) But it turned out, to my astonishment, that Bill had had a mistress for seven years.

  Seven years! In Kettering, of all places. (And us in Northumberland.) ‘When did you even see each other?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ Bill said rather sheepishly. ‘We managed every now and again. She did a lot of the travelling.’

  I was amazed. But, I must say, it made things so much easier. I took the house. Bill took the savings – rigs pay well – and he swanned off. He sent back the finished paperwork for both the house and the divorce in double-quick time (his Janet was a solicitor) and within weeks he was effectively out of my life. We had a phone call one or two months later. I had the strongest feeling Janet was listening. She’d called to him, waited till he’d picked up, then made such a clatter of putting down her extension that it was clear she’d lifted it again and was sitting, scarcely breathing, checking up on the level of emotion between us.

  It must have been a very reassuring call. ‘Bill,’ I said, torturing him only a little for starters, ‘I’m in real trouble and I need your help.’

  Could a man sound more wary? ‘What’s the matter, Tilly?’

  Off I went with my problem: a real one, all about fits and starts in the pressure chain, and problems with the new QXII valve, and knock-on disasters. Bill did a pretty poor job of hiding his relief, but he was helpful, remembering exactly what Tom (who’d retired and vanished) had always said would prove the trouble with the QXII, and suggesting a good way of getting round the problem.

  Then he said, ‘Hang on, Tilly. Just a minute,’ and he was silent, breathing heavily. (I don’t know what she thought.) After that, he was off again. ‘No, Tilly. I’m completely wrong. Try tackling it from the gatehouse. Take down the pressure on the lower hose and …’