Raking the Ashes

by Anne Fine

  Inside I still knew that was who I am. But with Geoff never openly admitting to seeing my faults, it gradually became easier and easier for me to forget I had any. He loved me through a haze of make-believe and, coming home to steaming casseroles, warmed sheets and theatre tickets on the mantelpiece, I was seduced along with him into living the lie. Instead of having the sense to force him into seeing who I really am, I told myself that this was natural: everyone fools themselves about love and the lover.

  But truth is bedrock. You can’t live for long without the truth. And, slowly, slowly, I began to see the clouds of sparkling, soothing delusions served yet another purpose. Whenever it suited Geoffrey, that gentle, shimmering miasma could be transformed into a fog of lies.

  Take the weekend that Harry slid in the house like a thief, and stood around tensely. I noticed he took nothing from his schoolbag, as if at any moment he might choose to snatch it up and flee. The poor child couldn’t settle all through tea. He seemed consumed with unease.

  I asked him twice if he was feeling all right, then left him to it. He stayed well away from me until a phone call came to say one of the copiers had blown again. Anyone listening would have been able to track the course of the call, so by the time Geoff said, ‘Give me five minutes, Doris,’ Minna was already racing around the house, looking for her little pink rucksack.

  ‘Coming?’ Geoff asked her.

  Minna rushed over. She adored the printing shop and all its wonders. Inside that rucksack she always seemed to have a host of drawings or cut-outs she wanted making smaller or bigger, or copying onto pink paper for her friends.

  Harry hung back. ‘I’m all right. I want to stay here and watch something on telly.’

  ‘What?’ I confronted him as soon as the door had closed behind Geoff and Minna. ‘What do you want to watch on telly?’

  He pawed the carpet.

  ‘Come up to my study,’ I said to him. ‘Come up and tell me all about your interesting week.’

  He scowled. ‘I didn’t have one.’ But he did trail me up the stairs, to lurk in the doorway, banging the drawers of my filing cabinet in and out.

  ‘Don’t do that, please.’

  He knocked it off, but stayed, so I knew he was on the verge of cracking.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘All week, in school, at home, no one did anything interesting?’

  A sullen, ‘No.’

  ‘And no one said anything anyone would bother to remember?’

  The child was writhing. That was it, then.

  ‘Well, come over here,’ I said, ‘because I have something to show you.’

  It was an ancient wiring plan I’d found, inked onto grey-blue canvas so old that all the folds had cracked.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘An early telephone system. One of my grandfathers was a post-office engineer.’

  ‘Post office is letters.’

  ‘It used to be telephones as well.’

  ‘Did it?’ He looked excited, as if he were already thinking of someone at school over whom he might triumph with this information. Then his face tensed again. I said, ‘Why don’t you tell me what you heard that’s worrying you?’

  He was back to pawing the carpet. ‘Because it’s rude.’

  ‘About you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘About me?’

  He traced a finger round the wiring diagram. ‘Go on,’ I told him. ‘Be a brave soldier. Spit it out. You’ll feel much better.’ And out it came in a fierce rush: ‘She called you a canoeing bitch!’

  Good thing he had the prettiest stubby fingers, and smelt of soap, or I might have snapped back, ‘It takes one to know one.’ Instead, I raised an eyebrow and said, ‘Canoeing?’

  The word ‘bitch’ safely out, and – in so far as he could tell – totally ignored, he was a different child. I actually sensed him relax. He reached across to run the end of his finger up and down a temptingly elegant coil design on the wiring plan, and let his soft chubby body lean against mine. ‘It wasn’t canoeing,’ he admitted after a moment. ‘It was more like ivy.’

  ‘Ivy?’

  Relief made him irritable, ‘Yes. Like ivy.’

  I changed the subject. ‘Was it anything in particular, do you think, that so annoyed her?’

  If he had noticed that I hadn’t bothered to ask who we were talking about, he didn’t show it. ‘It was about not swapping over for her birthday weekend.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said. And since that meant nothing to me, I thought I’d better leave things there. ‘Do you know,’ I told him by way of an amiable wrap-up of the conversation, ‘now that I think about it, I don’t believe I’ve been in a canoe since I left school.’

  And that was that. He offered to sharpen my pencils and we worked in a busy and companionable silence till Geoff and Minna got back. That night, in the bath, it suddenly came to me. Canoeing …? Ivy …? Of course! Conniving! And about some birthday weekend I hadn’t even known about. I wasn’t going to bring it up till they were gone. (I knew there would be trouble.) And I left well before the children, on Sunday morning. But early that evening I rang from the hotel in Aberdeen. ‘Have they gone home?’

  Geoff sounded cheerful. ‘Yup. Just back from dropping them off.’

  ‘Geoff, when is Frances’s birthday?’

  There was the tiniest ‘now-what’s-coming?’ pause before he answered idiotically, ‘Not sure I remember.’

  ‘I expect you do.’

  ‘Of course! Silly of me. It was this month, in fact. Yes, now I think about it, it must have been a couple of weeks ago. The seventeenth.’

  Don’t think I didn’t have my diary open and ready in front of me. ‘Exactly two weeks ago, then. The weekend before last.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘When I was home.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Didn’t she want to swap?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Frances.’

  Oh, you could tell that he was toiling. ‘Swap? Swap what?’

  ‘Weekends, Geoff. What with the Saturday being her birthday, you would have thought that she might have preferred to spend that weekend with the children.’

  ‘Well, she had Terence.’

  It was the first I’d heard that Terence was back in town again. But I was not prepared to be derailed. ‘I’m right, then? You did have a little chat, and she did want to swap?’

  Give him his due, he steered well clear of shifty and took quite a high tone. ‘She may have hinted at it. I really can’t remember.’

  I, on the other hand, was not even trying to mask my sarcasm. ‘Well, can you, at the very least, remember what you said to her?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When she hinted at swapping weekends. What did you tell her?’

  ‘Not sure I told her anything.’

  ‘You didn’t mention me?’

  ‘Why should I do that?’

  ‘I don’t know, Geoff. You tell me.’

  I made my voice so icy, perhaps he thought that Frances had been in touch directly to complain of my selfishness. In any event, he faltered. ‘I may have mentioned that it was one of the weekends you’d be home.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘What do you mean, “So”?’

  ‘Well, there are plenty of weekends I’m home. Sometimes the children are with us. Sometimes they’re not. It’s not an issue for me.’

  ‘I never said it was.’

  ‘But, Geoff, you clearly managed to leave Frances with the impression that I was the one who didn’t want a swap.’

  Now he was back to sounding lofty about idiot women. ‘She must have misunderstood something I said.’

  ‘Ah! So you did say something!’

  ‘No. I just …’

  ‘What, Geoff?’

  ‘Nothing. I can’t remember.’

  ‘Was there one single sentence that had my name in it, along with something about not wanting a swap?’

  Trapped, he lashed out. ‘I thought you liked my children.�
��

  I slammed down the phone. I swear that, in that moment, I absolutely hated him. I didn’t sleep for plotting to get him out of my house and out of my life. At the end of my three-day stint, I was still feeling so angry that, back on the mainland, I told Donald to send the message that it had been too stormy for the chopper to pick me up.

  Donald peered over his glasses. ‘Tilly, how can I tell him that? The man only has to glance at a weather map to see we’re as still as a millpond.’

  ‘Then tell him we’re in the middle of a blow-out, and he’s to clear the line for the emergency services.’

  ‘Oh, very funny.’

  But by then, everyone in the dock office was ready to leave. I cadged a lift back to my car, and just kept driving, past home, past Newcastle, and down as far as some godforsaken strip of coastline I’d never seen before but recognized from the name as a bay of such outstanding natural beauty that we had not been permitted to put a single construction on the shoreline to support the rig, out of sight over the horizon.

  It was dark and I was hungry. Following a makeshift sign, I found a tiny hotel. Over my steak pie and wine, I read the headlines in the local paper. MORE CLIFF FALLS ON FOLLY EDGE and SHEEP FOUND SAFE IN NEIGHBOUR’S FIELD. ‘So not much happens round here,’ I said to the barman. He seemed a little put out, and started boasting of a double suicide off Folly Leap only the month before. Not being in the most receptive mood for tales of blighted love, I fetched my jacket and went outside, hoping to walk off the resentment curdling inside me. I felt I’d been enticed by Geoffrey into having emotions I didn’t choose to manage, the same way that I would hate being bullied into wearing clothes I don’t feel suit me. After all, I never wanted children. So why should I have to put up with all the messiness that clings after a parting? I wanted to shriek at Geoffrey and Frances, ‘Look, they’re your bloody kids, not mine. So leave me out of all your petty squabbling. I have a life already. I am busy.’

  Lord knows how long I stomped along in my foul temper. I do remember ignoring a couple of signs, and climbing a couple of fences. But I was still amazed when the dirt track beneath my feet crumbled to practically nothing, and the only thing before me was moonlight and stars.

  And the cliff edge.

  The drop, when I looked, must have been fifty metres or more, and I’d almost walked over. I stepped back, exhilarated. You know the feeling. It’s as if the world is speaking. ‘Look at me!’ it says. ‘I’m huge. I am astonishing. And you will never understand. So why stew in your little human irritations? Stop spoiling everything for yourself and everyone else. Be bigger. Think larger. Just get on and live.’

  So I just sat, knees tucked under my chin, with the seat of my jeans getting colder and damper. Above, stars winked and the huge moon weaved in and out of clouds. Everything seemed to be there to transport me. Even the waves below seemed to have slowed to the rhythm of my breathing.

  I can’t imagine any time or place on earth more likely to settle my feelings and make me feel that things would work out well. I think I might even have driven home to Geoff that night if, back in the room, there hadn’t been, in the bookcase, a thriller all the men on the rig clearly thought brilliant and talked about often. The open fire in the bar downstairs was cosy and tempting. So in the end the weekend passed, not quite the way I’d planned, in taking stock and working out how to part, but certainly in sitting alone, enjoying the solitary pleasures of reading and eating, and from time to time studying the old framed map on the bar wall, to find new walks.

  On Sunday night, I finished my second book – some ancient novel I’d found tucked away on a bookshelf – and studied the slip of paper that had been lying inside and used as a bookmark. It was a guide to the location, opening hours and prices of a local attraction. ‘So where’s this Lartington Tower, then?’ I asked the barman. ‘I’ve walked that way at least twice and never noticed it.’

  He peered at the tattered yellowing sheet I’d pushed towards him. ‘Lartington Tower? Oh, that’s long gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  He made a gesture with his hand. ‘Over the edge.’ From under the dimpled bar he fetched out a small facsimile of the map on the wall, and, with his pen, sliced a line across a part of the coastline. ‘All this has already fallen in.’ He stretched his hand out flat. ‘It’s Britain, see? It’s tilting. Over in Wales you have castles that used to be by the sea and now are stuck way out in fields, and here on our side bits keep dropping off.’

  He glanced at the clock. It was eleven thirty. ‘Speaking of dropping off …’

  I took the hint, gathering up all my stuff because I was leaving so early in the morning. When I got back to Aberdeen, there was a letter waiting. It was in Geoff’s large ragged handwriting and it began, Sweetheart, from the moment you walked out of the door I have been thinking, and I have come to see that what I did was unforgivable. It went on for three pages.

  I said to Donald, ‘How did he know to send it here?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Tilly. Can’t you forgive the poor bastard?’

  But I already had. The next four days seemed like a punishment posting, and, when I got home again, it was candles and fine wine and a hot-water bottle in the bed. ‘Promise,’ I said, ‘that you will never, ever again dump even the tiniest smidgeon of the crap between you and Frances onto my head.’

  He didn’t simply promise. He dropped on his knees and took my hands in his and kissed them, and swore he’d never, ever play that trick again.

  No. It was always a new one. When I was young, there were girls like that in the playground. They’d torture you with subtle variations. ‘You can play nurses with us tomorrow,’ they’d tell you. Next morning, thrilled and hopeful, you’d be at the school gates half an hour early. They’d show up arm in arm, wreathed in their mean little smiles. ‘We said we’d let you play nurses. But we’re playing explorers this morning.’ On and on.

  And I was never sure if Geoffrey even realized what he was doing. ‘Please,’ I would beg him. ‘Don’t tell the children you’re not eating supper with them because I’m getting home late. I can eat on the plane.’ ‘Please, Geoff, don’t pin the fact that you’ve not taken them to the fair on my daft schedule. You can go without me.’ ‘I hope you’ve not left Frances with the impression you can’t fix the children’s dates till you know mine.’

  ‘It’s a pathology,’ I complained to my brother. ‘I live with a man who simply refuses to take responsibility for any decision, however trivial. It always has to sound as if it’s for the benefit of someone else.’

  ‘He just doesn’t want it to be his fault if things go wrong.’

  ‘But it’s so babyish.’ I did a childish wail. ‘“It’s not for meeeee!” Do you know, last time he came home with his hair cut too short, he even claimed he’d only let the barber go at it like that in the first place because he’d seen me looking at the tendrils hanging over his ears.’

  ‘Smart thinking. If he comes out looking like a prison convict, then you’re to blame.’

  But that was what was so strange. Geoff wasn’t into blame. I am. I go round tossing accusations out left, right and centre. ‘You left the milk out all night.’ ‘You forgot to pick up the tickets.’ ‘You left Minna’s bike where you might have known I’d trip over it.’ But Geoff was far more generous-spirited. I could forget to lock the door behind me when I came up late at night, and he’d say nothing. I’d promise to bring home some vital ingredient for a special supper, and show up without it. One night, I even forgot that Frances had left a message about her own father being rushed to hospital with a coronary. You can imagine the stick Geoff got for not phoning back about that. And still he didn’t bollock me.

  ‘Mr Perfect’, Ed and I used to call him, and took to playing a sort of game. I’d ring Ed any time I had a new one. ‘Do you know what he said last night? “Tilly, I was brought up never to touch a banister.”’

  ‘Three points!’

  We’d fall about. But in a way it wasn’t funny, b
ecause it gradually became obvious that I, too, had been swept up in this extraordinary compulsion of Geoff’s never to make waves. The first time I realized it was happening was when I offered to drive by the school to pick up Minna after a swimming lesson. She was easy enough to spot, one of a row of little girls doing handstands along the wall beside their bright school bags. A second bus drew up just as I took the last parking space, and since I was trapped till it pulled away again I stayed in the car, watching the kids spill off.

  Thump, thump! Thump, thump! A gang of boys were swinging bags around their heads like lariats, then bashing anyone in reach. Thump! Thump! Most of the children appeared to be keeping their blows within the bounds of a game, but quite a few were being downright vicious.

  I got out of the car and spoke to the bus driver. ‘Aren’t you going to stop it?’

  He stared at me as if I’d fallen from the moon. ‘They’re always like this. Both ends of the ride. It’s what they do to pass the time, waiting.’

  ‘Oh, is it?’

  I called the worst of the offenders to heel, put Minna in the car, then, without even thinking about it, went into the school and told the woman on reception I wanted to speak to the head teacher.

  Nervously, she glanced at a woman walking past. I swung around. ‘Are you the head?’

  I told Mrs Dee exactly what I thought. I said if any child of mine were being thumped like that, I’d take the matter further. I said I hoped she’d get the matter sorted out, with proper supervision at both ends of the journey. (I may even have hinted I’d make a point of stopping by to check.) Then I went back to the car and we drove home. Harry was jumping about, wild with excitement at having won some special part in his class play. We all went out for supper, and the whole business slid from mind.

  The call from Frances came during the week. I heard Geoff’s voice rising defensively in the next room, but I had no idea the quarrel was to do with me till the next day, when a discussion about whether or not Frances would want a clump of my thinned-out lavender ended with Geoff muttering something along the lines of ‘Perhaps in the circumstances it’s not really the moment.’