Raking the Ashes

by Anne Fine

  There was a three-week gap while Frances stayed with some old friend from school. (Her house was still rented out up here, and Torquay is enchanting in September.) And by the time the children came to us again, they might have been strangers. Harry prowled round with that disquietingly watchful look you see in adverts for the NSPCC, and Minna was even more shy than before. She thawed (at least with Geoff ) within a visit or two, but it must have been a month before Geoff managed to win Harry round again. The breakthrough came when he taught Harry how to do the bloodied-finger-in-the-matchbox trick. (I played my part, putting aside my unfailingly calm instincts in the face of gore to offer up a satisfactorily convincing screech.)

  That night, with the three of them finally curled up together on the sofa, young Harry summoned the courage to come out with it.

  ‘Why didn’t you visit us in America, Dad?’

  Geoff spun him over on the cushions and gnashed his teeth, making great alligator jaws with his arms. ‘Because I was frightened of crocodiles!’ They ended up laughing. But that night, as I was dropping my nightie over my head, I dared to say it. ‘You realize he really wanted to know.’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘Why you never went out to see them. Harry wanted an answer.’

  ‘He was just asking, that’s all.’

  ‘No. If he’d just been asking, he would have said, “Why didn’t you come?” But he said, “Why didn’t you come?”’

  ‘Not sure what you’re trying to say, Til.’

  That weasel way of trying to block discussion has always irritated me. ‘Perfectly clear, I’d have thought. The first way of saying it implies it’s a casual question. The second makes it pretty clear it’s been an issue.’

  Geoff gave me one of those ‘You-are-unhinged, Tilly’ headshakes.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ I said. ‘I’m telling you something important. This business has clearly been on his mind.’

  Now here’s the difference. Bill would have said, ‘What are you thinking, Tilly? That he thinks I don’t care enough to bother? Or that his mother’s been poisoning his mind against me, or something?’ And we’d have discussed it like grown-ups. I might have persuaded him that Harry’s way of asking the question was significant. He might have persuaded me it wasn’t. We might even have come to some agreement in the middle, whereby we made a deal to fish about a bit for further evidence before deciding which of us, if either, was closer to the truth of the matter.

  And what did I get?

  ‘Tilly, I think I probably know my own child a little better than you do.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ I snapped. (I have a very low tolerance for being patronized.) ‘It’s just I think, if he were my son, I’d do him the honour of telling him the truth, not fobbing him off with some joke about crocodiles.’

  ‘The truth is,’ Geoffrey as good as snapped back, ‘that I was too busy earning money to pay the bills, and helping you look after your mother.’

  You can imagine how that quarrel ended. I spent the night on the sofa. And perhaps it was sharing the cushions with Dilly the Dinosaur and Barney the Beaver that put me so firmly on the children’s side, and made me vow I wouldn’t ever josh them out of things when they’d had the guts to ask a real question.

  And I would begin by setting Harry straight on this matter of the visit.

  I wasn’t quite sure how you start a conversation with a child. But early that morning, while Geoff was in the bathroom singing some silly song to Minna to try to distract her as he washed her hair, I picked up the fiendish puzzle and said to Harry, ‘If you had left this here when you went off to America, I might have learned how to do it by now.’

  He didn’t muck about. ‘You could have come and fetched it.’

  We sat on the bed and I told him, ‘Your father and I worked out three separate times to come and visit you. If you look at the calendar, you can still see the yellow felt pen lines we squiggled across to keep the weeks free. But the technical college sent your dad a huge load of copying, and since a shop like his only keeps going because of big orders, he felt he had to stay. He didn’t want not to be able to give your mother his share of the money she needs for you.’

  He sat there quietly, twisting the puzzle round and round.

  ‘Then when it came to the next squiggled-out bit, my mother was ill. I said I’d have to stay. He should have gone to see you alone. He probably knows that now. But he was being wet. He didn’t want to have to hang around near you and your mother all by himself.’

  ‘They’re divorced, you see,’ Harry explained to me.

  ‘That would be it, then,’ I assured him gravely. ‘And, as for the third and last time, just as we were about to buy the flights your mum rang up and told us she was coming home.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  That easy. That easy! Harry flung his arms round me and hugged me tight. Then he ran off. I stayed in the bedroom, pretending to carry on picking up toys before following him through to the kitchen to twist the calendar straight on its hook again. Harry, by then, had rushed off to join the other two, and all of them ended up playing some astonishingly noisy game that left so much water on the bathroom floor, you’d have thought we kept seals in there. Later, when Frances drew up outside as usual and did her irritating hoot, I watched poor Harry prance from one foot to the other in an agony of indecision. For the first time since they’d come back from Georgia, he couldn’t work out if he wanted to pick up his rucksack and run to the car, or stay and give yet another hug to his father.

  I might have helped poor Harry rid himself of lingering doubts, but it was clear that that wasn’t going to change my status in the family. The following Wednesday he was back to treating me with that standoffish sort of sideways courtesy I’d watched him use on most of his schoolfriends’ mothers. Clearly the hug had been nothing personal, only a thank you. So, out of devilry, next time I had a bit of time to waste during a pump test, I wrote Harry a letter – well, sent him a picture, really. THIS IS ME, I wrote in tiny neat block capitals above a matchstick-thin figure with copper-coloured hair that fanned out like mine. All around, I drew signs.

  EXIT. LEVEL FIVE EAST. FIRE HOSE BENEATH THIS. ESCAPE HATCH. THINK SAFE, ACT SAFE & BE SAFE. NO SMOKING, NO DRINKING, NO EATING. FIRST-AID BOX. OFFRIG SUPPLY. LASHING POINT – 3 TONNES MAX.

  Nobody, not even Geoff, said anything about the picture when I came home. Intrigued, I let a couple of weeks go by, then sent another. This time I persuaded Donald in the company office to use his drafting skills to draw the rig itself, top heavy on its spindly legs like a wasps’ nest spilling out all over. ‘Put in a storm,’ I told him when I came back from speaking to the motor men, and he drew life-rafts tossing on some giant waves, with desperate men in survival suits waving, and me with my flaming hair clearly the last to dare leap from the derrick.

  Still nothing. Fascinating. I hadn’t realized quite how hard it was to woo a seven-year-old.

  The third time, all I did was copy one of our huge electrical wall diagrams onto a thick sheet of paper. Each time I went to another deck, one of the others seemed to pick up the pen and fill in a bit of the detail, rather like hotel guests stopping to add a piece or two to a communal jigsaw.

  ‘Why didn’t you just photocopy it from the manual?’ everyone kept asking.

  I pointed out that something photocopied wouldn’t work.

  ‘And this will?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Wait and see.’

  And I was right. It was the weekend after the diagram arrived that Harry cracked. Geoff put him to bed and set the shower running. I knew that Harry must have known which of the two of us was in the bathroom. (I get enough of showers on the rig.) In any case, he lingered in the doorway long enough to check it was me on the sofa before sidling in.

  ‘That map …’ he offered.

  ‘Diagram.’

  ‘Diagram. Did you invent it?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But if I had to, and you gave me long enou
gh, I probably could.’

  There was a pause, so I took up again. ‘I mean, first time around I might not get it looking quite so tidy as that one I sent you. It’s not just where the cables go, you see. Part of the art is how you set it out. Like in the Tube map.’

  ‘Tube map?’

  Just at that moment, we heard the shower splutter to a stop. ‘Well,’ Harry said hastily, ‘thank you.’ And he slid out of the room before I could offer to find a map of the Underground and explain what I meant. I didn’t mind. I felt that, bit by bit, at least with Harry I was making progress. To his small sister I was still a ghost. And it was hard to work out even where to start with Minna. ‘She is so in their wake,’ I complained to my brother whenever he asked after her. ‘She never moans or complains or wants to “do something else”. She just tips her head prettily to one side, and stares with big eyes, and begs her dad to put her hair in bunches. He treats her like a pet.’

  ‘He treats you like a pet as well, and you enjoy it.’

  ‘But I’m a grown-up. I know what I’m getting. And I spend four days out of every seven staring at drainage systems and kicking men’s butts. This is her image of herself this man is building.’

  ‘Talk to him. Explain the tenets of junior feminism and step back to watch the scales drop from his eyes.’

  ‘It doesn’t work. Either he doesn’t grasp it, and starts getting ratty …’

  ‘Or?’

  I didn’t want to say it, but I did. ‘Or I suspect he gets a whiff of what I mean, and gets rattier even faster.’

  Ed must have said it a dozen times: ‘How can you live with a man if you can’t talk to him?’ But Ed was wrong. I never couldn’t talk to Geoff. Geoff couldn’t talk to me. Oh, he could listen. I could bang on for hours about the rigs and their problems, or what Ed and I thought we would end up having to do with Mother as her brain thing developed. I could talk about old boyfriends, things I was reading, plays I’d seen fifteen years ago. If I had started giving him the details of ancient holidays, he probably would have listened. Talking was not the problem. No, I was allowed to talk about anything – talk until dawn if I wanted – so long as the subject I chose was on my patch.

  The problem came if I stepped – ever – out of line. My life was ours, it turned out. But his was his.

  At first, I’d try to come at issues in his family sideways. As when, for the third week running, Minna stared at the tubs of ice-cream ranked in front of her and said, ‘I don’t mind. You choose.’

  I shuffled them round in front of her. ‘Come on, Min. Vanilla, chocolate chip or coffee? Or a bit of all three?’

  ‘You decide.’

  ‘No, you. You’re going to eat it, so you choose.’

  Already I could sense the tension rising. ‘Give her vanilla, Tilly,’ Geoff told me in a firmly jovial tone. ‘She likes vanilla best.’

  ‘Then she can say so.’ I turned back to Minna. ‘Look, sweetpea, all the tubs are full, so you can have what you want. There won’t be a problem for anyone.’

  Her eyes were huge and desperate, and as painful to watch as those of poor bullocks twisting their heads to stare out from between the slats of cattle wagons.

  ‘Just say one, Minna. Take a deep breath and choose a flavour. Or two. Or all three.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Tilly! Can’t you let her be?’

  ‘Please, Minna.’

  And the tears would spill. Later, in bed, he’d hump his back away from me, furious, and I’d say pointedly into the dark, ‘It isn’t right, you know. A child of her age should be able to state a preference.’

  ‘Jesus, Tilly! What is your problem? Minna and I don’t get all that much time together. Why do you have to think of ways to try to spoil it?’

  ‘I’m not trying to spoil anything, Geoffrey. I’m simply pointing out that it’s not natural for a six-year-old to be incapable of even choosing a flavour of ice-cream.’

  He’d flounce away further in the bed. ‘You’re mad. You know that, Tilly? You’re crazy.’ We would have one of those nights. I’d lie awake, planning his funeral or my escape, and in the morning he would bring me my tea and beg my pardon. ‘I’m so sorry, Tilly. I didn’t mean what I said. I’m sure you’re right. Next time …’

  Next time. Always next time. But in between came all the loving and the listening and tender concern. He wove a spell around me, taking the sort of interest I didn’t know one person could take in another. I became his hobby. He didn’t just learn useful things, like what I like to eat and how to give me pleasure. He took an interest in everything. Soon he knew the names of every man I’d ever slept with and why I liked them (or didn’t any more). He picked up all the details of my family – not just about Ed and Mum, but down to the entire series of honorary ‘uncles’ who came after our father. And when I told him I would rather be boiled in oil than accept the invitation to my college reunion, the look on his face was of pure disappointment.

  Then there was all the spoiling. That’s hard to resist. I realized after a while that, each time I clocked up the irritation of not being able to sort out some petty problem that arose between the two of us, I’d be at a disadvantage because he’d invariably just finished doing something really kind and thoughtful for me. He took such care, and kept me so pampered. I woke to tea trays and came home to ironing in neat piles, a freezer filled to bursting, and even the comforting assurance that he had found a few minutes in his busy day to ring up the nursing home and check on my mother.

  ‘Dump him,’ my brother kept warning. ‘The man’s not natural. He’s probably a serial killer, burrowing his way into your life.’

  But when Ed finally flew back to Britain, the magic worked on him as well. He came to stay while I was in the middle of the inspections. By the time I got home, Ed was full of Geoff’s kindness. ‘Til, he was an absolute brick. I told him you’d warned me all about Mum’s dribbling and shouting and so forth. But he insisted he had to drive in that direction anyhow, to pick up some gubbins for one of his copiers. I’m sure that was just because he knew how shocked I’d be. And he was right. I couldn’t have driven home. My hands were shaking. Literally shaking. He had some whisky in the car. Can you imagine? Even thought of that. The man’s a marvel, Til. You make sure you hang on to him. He’s bloody perfect!’

  That night, just as we started canoodling, I asked Geoff, ‘Don’t you ever get fed up with caring for other people?’

  He opened his eyes again and looked at me as if I were mad. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know. All this nurturing.’

  ‘Maybe it comes from being sent away to school,’ he said. ‘Roomfuls of bony boys for years and years. Now I just have to see a warm pink body in my bed, and all I want to do is …’

  His voice trailed off, his hands trailed up, and that was the end of that conversation.

  4

  IF YOU HAD asked me, what I would have said is that I always knew it couldn’t last. It was as if this man had come along and tempted me to close a door on how things truly are, and yet inside – pretty well just at the back of my mind, not even deep down – there was always the knowledge that one day I’d have to break back through to real life waiting on the other side.

  From time to time, the door would open of its own accord. Once, for example, I came back to find Geoff idly stirring onions in a pan, absorbed in a play on the radio.

  ‘Where are the kids?’

  ‘Oh, mooching about.’

  Apart from the radio, the house seemed remarkably quiet. ‘Where? Upstairs?’

  ‘No. Outside somewhere.’

  ‘On the street? I didn’t see them.’

  ‘They’re up and down. They’re playing “Tell Aunt Betsy”.’

  ‘I didn’t see them,’ I told Geoff again.

  ‘I expect they’re round the corner.’

  I knew he was trying to hang on to the thread of what he was listening to, but I was anxious. ‘What, on the estate?’

  He laid the spoon against the edg
e of the pan and said, as if I were some four-year-old pestering, ‘Tilly, what is your problem?’

  ‘This is my problem,’ I told him: ‘your kids are out there in the dark around the end block of a none-too-savoury housing estate, and you’re not bothered.’

  ‘Kids need a bit of freedom. We played outside in the evenings all the time.’

  ‘Thirty-five years ago! Things were a whole lot different.’

  ‘This isn’t Moss Side,’ he defended himself; but nonetheless I saw the quite unconscious move his hand made towards the volume knob on the radio. It was quite clear he’d guessed what would be coming next: a dressing down about his parenting skills; perhaps a reminder of the most recent child to disappear off a street and be found in a ditch five days later; maybe even a slighting, ‘I don’t know what Frances would think.’

  But what I also saw was that small furtive look of tiredness that crossed his face – that fleeting ‘here we go; it’s starting’ expression.

  I’ll only have my moods predicted when I choose. Inside, I told myself, ‘Not my kids. Not my problem,’ and outwardly I shrugged. ‘Might not be Moss Side, but it’s not Toytown, either.’

  On the way up the stairs, I found myself muttering, ‘And you’re not bloody Noddy!’ which was ungrateful since this sort of idiot optimism was at the root of Geoffrey’s charm. Never seeing the bad, never fearing the worst, he was the most soothing companion. Put on ten pounds, and he’d just mutter, ‘More for me to cuddle,’ and hold you closer. Wear some fright of a frock and, to him, you were still the loveliest woman in the room. Living with Geoffrey was like living in Happy Valley. And, over time, the showers of stardust around him infected my eyes too. I stopped wanting to tell him, ‘Listen, I’m not like you. Even since you moved in, I’ve slept with four separate men in Aberdeen. Last week I saw the perfect shirt for your birthday in a shop window, and couldn’t be arsed to hang around for even four minutes until the place opened. And sometimes, when you ring, I shake my head at the person holding out the phone, to make them tell you they can’t find me. That is the person I am. You cannot love me.’