Raking the Ashes

by Anne Fine

  She stopped, aghast at herself. ‘I’m sorry. I mean, your stepm—’

  She broke off again, clearly the sort of woman who thinks that calling someone a stepmother is much the same as calling her a witch. ‘Tilly!’ she said at last, her voice strangled with relief. ‘Harry, did you see what Tilly here has managed?’ And you could see from the look on her face as she hobbled away to welcome the next arrivals that, in her own mind, working out what it was polite to call me had been just as inventive and admirable as fixing her tea urn.

  Geoff led me off the other way, over the daisied lawn. Then suddenly he gripped my arm. ‘There they are! There!’ he cried, quite as excitedly as if we’d been looking for elephants. ‘I thought they’d arrive a whole lot later, coming all the way from Torbury Bay – and with a baby.’

  ‘Maybe they came yesterday.’

  ‘They can’t have. Minna thought I’d be spending yesterday evening all alone in that place down the road. If they’d been staying anywhere locally, I’m sure she would have let me know.’

  I didn’t argue. Nobody sits in a car for that length of drive without creasing their clothing. But Geoff was clearly set fair to enjoy the day, floating above brute truth. It’s just that I couldn’t face being part of his idiot enthusiasm. ‘You say hello to them all,’ I whispered, ‘while I slip off to the loo. Back in a minute.’

  I dawdled in the lavatory behind the conservatory, putting on more and more lipstick until I heard a fierce rustling outside. The handle rattled. I unlocked the door. There stood a woman in a hat with flowers dancing on wires. ‘Thank God!’ she said. ‘I’m bursting.’ So off I went to find the others again, hoping that by now everyone would be so sick of introductions that they would let me slide in unannounced.

  Not a chance. ‘So this is the famous Tilly!’ the man I took to be Minna’s new father-in-law trumpeted. Instantly his wife tried to deflect him. ‘Don’t, Caspar! You’ll make poor Tilly think that we’ve been talking about her behind her back.’

  Up till she said it, the notion had never even occurred to me. (And, in my whole life, I don’t believe that anyone has ever had the nerve to call me ‘poor Tilly’.) I raised an eyebrow at Minna, but she just clung to Josh’s arm and nodded briefly as if, far from being someone who’d read her bedtime stories, bathed her cuts and tested her on French vocabulary, I was some neighbour she had once or twice passed on the street.

  Meanwhile, the ghastly Natalie turned back to me. ‘You missed little Pansy’s christening!’ she said, gripping the handle of her granddaughter’s pram and staring at me as if she and her family had travelled across five counties to this wedding simply for some explanation. Since I could scarcely say the prospect of being ignored by Minna and patronized by her new family had failed to appeal enough for me to accept their remarkably offhand invitation, I just remarked on how much Geoffrey had enjoyed the day. (And it was true he’d come home from the visit happy enough. Pansy had favoured him with smile after smile, so he had nice photos; and the sainted Elise had apparently even been kind enough to ask some hapless nephew to show Geoff round Minna and Josh’s ‘barn’ while everyone else was busy with friends who’d strolled in from the village.)

  Minna’s new mother-in-law now smiled forgivingly. ‘Well, at least you get to meet Pansy today.’

  A voice behind me, drawling with graciousness, asked, ‘Who gets to meet Pansy?’ Everyone jumped to attention. ‘Elise!’ cried Natalie, seemingly thrilled to see her mother again after a gap of what can only have been a few minutes. ‘It’s Tilly, Minna’s stepmother, come to say hello at last.’

  Since it was stalking off or turning round, I felt obliged to turn. I let the imperious old trout who’d just crept up on us inspect me up and down, pricing my wardrobe and appraising my vivid hair. I ignored her unpleasant suggestion that I’d preferred to spend my time with ‘all those men in Aberdeen’ rather than come to the christening, and even tried to continue to look pleasant while the ghastly old bag proffered her airily insincere assurance that she and her daughter and son-in-law ‘might perhaps think of inviting you and your …’ The long, long silence was followed by a discreet cough of disapproval but no actual word. ‘… to come to visit us again one day.’

  Then, having had enough of Minna’s frightful new family, I made my escape.

  It isn’t easy to lurk at a wedding as firmly organized as Tara and Harry’s. At some invisible signal, everyone was flushed away from the tea and coffee urns and herded in line along the wide flat freshly mown grass verge towards the village church. Here we were shepherded into pews according to some printed plan. ‘I’m surprised Tara hasn’t stuck colour-coded stickers on all her guests,’ I whispered to Geoffrey. The service started dead on time, as I had known it would. The choir sang for their lives, with fussy descants warbling up and away into the rafters. The only bright spot was the moment I glanced at the words on my printed hymn sheet and noticed that, by a tiny misprint even the assiduous Tara had overlooked, we were about to sing our praises not to God but to Gold.

  Geoff faked a coughing fit to cover my snigger and kept a warning hand on my arm till, in strict sequence, we were ushered out again and back along the road to the marquee. The lady with the hat with the flowers on wires had clearly taken our meeting in the lavatory to be the start of a friendship. ‘See?’ she said proudly, pointing along the tables we happened to be approaching at the same time. ‘A buffet – and no queue! How often have you seen that?’ She tugged each of her high heels in turn out of the turf as the flowers danced over her head. ‘That’s clever Tara for you.’ She sighed expansively. ‘Not that it makes any difference to me. I shan’t be filling a plate. In the summer, I am virtually a fruitbat!’

  Geoffrey came up behind us. ‘May I help you two lovely ladies to your tables?’

  My new companion drifted away as mysteriously as she’d arrived. I laid a hand on Geoffrey’s arm. ‘When can we go?’ He looked so shocked, I added hastily, ‘What I mean is, should I stop drinking now? How long till we’ll be driving home?’

  Geoffrey’s relief was obvious. ‘No, no. Don’t worry about that. Let’s find our places, shall we?’

  ‘Places?’

  But, yes. It seemed that Tara’s drive towards efficiency meant, even at a buffet, a place for everyone and everyone in his place. On account of a rather intriguing spatial anomaly created by putting an oblong table behind a kidney-shaped flower bed next to a semicircular dip dividing the lawn from the orchard, I ended up one seat along from Geoffrey but nowhere near him. Instead, I found myself sitting between Tara’s deaf great-uncle and some pompous old fart who talked only of investments. Across the table, a mother and daughter had surreptitiously swapped place cards around so they could whisper continually through the meal, ignoring the young man they’d displaced. He clearly didn’t care. In any event, so far as I could tell the switch was to his benefit. As long as he could keep up the pretence I wasn’t sitting opposite with no one to talk to, he could – and did – give all his attention to shovelling food into his mouth.

  ‘Are you a friend of Tara’s?’ I leaned across to ask him after he came back with thirds.

  ‘God, no!’ he said. ‘I’m her brother,’ and set about wolfing yet again, as if he were fresh from a cage. In the end I gave up and went back to the lavatory. When I was rattled out a second time, the queue of bursting ladies stretched way down the hall. I took my time strolling back, but when I looked in, waiters were clearing everything except glasses and coffee cups. Clearly, the speeches were about to start. I couldn’t face it. Hoping that Geoffrey hadn’t spotted my brief reappearance between the marquee’s pinned-back flaps, I once again turned round and vanished.

  Geoff found me sitting on the stone ledge of the goldfish pond, teasing the fish. ‘Tilly? I thought we’d lost you. Are you feeling left out?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I was just on my way back when I noticed these and stopped for a moment.’ I gave him a close look. ‘Why? Are you?’

  ‘What?�
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  ‘Feeling left out.’

  ‘No, not at all,’ he said, for all the world as if I hadn’t seen the way Elise and Natalie had shifted his chair to the very end of the table so they could fit the pram between the two of them and keep up a steady conversation over its canopy, ignoring Geoff entirely. But what was the point of saying anything? The man must be back in Noddyland if he couldn’t see his daughter had willingly surrendered herself body and soul to Josh’s family. And who could blame her? After a diet of parental separation, illness and death, they offered a fresh start. The only pity was that their strength was founded on the twin pillars of Elise’s steel will and Natalie’s complacency. Already it was clear that offering hospitality to Minna’s relations was not what they had in mind at all; and only someone as boyishly optimistic as Geoff could fail to see that, so coolly sidelined over a single formal lunch, he’d be wasting his time hoping warmer invitations might drop on his doormat.

  But clearly the question I’d turned back on him had set him thinking. ‘Well, a little left out, perhaps.’ He patted his pocket. ‘I mean, it was a very short speech. And I would so much have liked to welcome Tara into the family.’

  Ashamed that I’d clean forgotten, I tried to be sympathetic. ‘Just a mistake, I expect. It probably slipped Harry’s mind to mention to anyone that you wanted to say a few words.’

  As ever, he was quick off the mark in defence of his offspring. ‘No, no. The problem was Tara.’ He saw my questioning look. ‘It seems she wasn’t sure that it was suitable.’

  ‘Suitable?’

  ‘You know.’ He scraped a polished shoe sideways along the stone ledge. ‘What with the way we are.’

  I was mystified. ‘What way?’

  ‘Not married properly, Til. You know that Tara takes her religious beliefs extremely seriously.’ He dropped his voice. ‘In fact, I rather think that might be one of the reasons Harry was so keen to get the knot safely tied even before he’s finished college.’

  ‘To get a bit of nooky?’

  Geoffrey ignored this. ‘And for much the same reasons – caring so much about these things, I mean – it seems that Tara didn’t think it was quite right to have someone who was living in sin make a speech at her wedding.’

  I snorted with amusement. ‘“Living in sin”? Is that how she put it? Snotty litttle cow!’ I was laughing so hard I nearly fell into the fishpond. Geoff had to put out a hand to steady me. When I got a grip of myself, I asked him, still amused: ‘And Harry put up with all this?’

  ‘Harry’s in love. And it is Tara’s day, of course.’

  But give some people the wedding day and they’ll take the next day and the next, and every single day after that. And there’s no fighting a Christian. If Geoff and I were ‘living in sin’ now, we’d probably be ‘the Devil and all his works’ by the time any children came. After all, anyone who can rid a lunch buffet of queues can get rid of relations they don’t want. Already I could hear the sound of doors being slammed and bolted.

  I slid off the ledge and brushed the stone grit from the back of my skirt. Holding my hand out, I said, ‘Come on, Geoff. Let’s go back and face the enemy.’ He saw me to my seat, then, finding that in his short absence his own had already been folded to make more space for the pram, went off to find another place.

  Aching with boredom, I sat through the last of the speeches, tirelessly folding and refolding discarded paper nests from all the petits fours Tara’s brother was still industriously scoffing. I couldn’t help it. I was sunk in gloom. With son and daughter gone, who did that leave for Geoffrey? Me. The feeling of being trapped swept over me so strongly, I might have been behind steel bars. Certainly I was the only guest at the table to ignore hints to leave. I let the waiters bustle their way towards me, sweeping up silverware and bundling up tablecloths. Filled with resentful thoughts, I hatched a childish plan to take revenge on the day by stealing the sugar spoon in front of me. Shaped like a flat-bottomed ladle, it was the mirror image of one my grandmother always promised to leave me – my favourite thing in her whole house. I must have spent hours at her kitchen table sprinkling caster sugar through its pattern of tiny holes, over and over, as Ed and I waited for our mother to get back from her myriad jaunts and excursions. It vanished in the frenzied grab-fest after my grandmother’s death, and at the time I didn’t think much of it. But as I sat there, watching the waiters clear a score of spoons just like it off the other tables, I suddenly wanted this one badly enough to inch my handbag closer to the legs of my chair, take out a tissue and pretend to sneeze.

  I had the spoon safely under the tissue when a shadow fell at my side, startling me horribly.

  ‘Hi, Tilly!’ Harry gave me an affectionate hug. ‘I’m so glad it all worked out all right.’

  I could have responded sourly, ‘Yes – but thanks only to the worst blow-out in the Company’s history.’ But I couldn’t see the point. If Harry wanted to fall into his father’s habit of thinking everything would come out tickety-boo without his efforts, that was up to him. He was a married man now. Tara’s problem, not mine. It was easier to be pleasant. ‘It’s been a lovely wedding,’ I assured him, taking the opportunity to slide the spoon and tissue off the table onto my lap, and keeping my hands clasped demurely on top of them.

  Harry pulled out a chair and sank down beside me. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I meant with the inspections – first week of June, and all that. I was quite worried.’

  I was so taken up with wondering how to move the spoon into my bag, I barely heard him. ‘Oh, well. As you say, it all worked out.’

  ‘Yes. Dad said he’d talk to you about it, and since it was a wedding, you’d probably be allowed to switch things round this once.’

  I might have been distracted, but this still sank in. ‘Did he?’

  ‘Yes. And he was right!’ Harry grinned. ‘Thank God! Because the whole business of arranging dates was a nightmare, Tilly. Tara was quite fixated on the idea of June because of her dad, of course.’

  ‘Because of her dad?’

  ‘Yes. Saying before he died that, right from the day she was born, he’d had this vision of giving her away at her wedding on a lovely June day. And that he wanted her to promise that, even though he now knew he wouldn’t be there to do it himself—’ He broke off. ‘Well, you heard her Uncle Jim’s speech.’

  I could scarcely admit I hadn’t. So I just smiled and nodded sympathetically as I slid the tissue and spoon off my lap into my handbag. Pressing the bundle down, my fingers caught on a small folded square of paper and for a moment I couldn’t think what it might be, or why I’d tucked it in there.

  But Harry was off again. ‘So!’ He was spreading his hands triumphantly. ‘You were the hero of the hour, Til! Because either we would have had to wait another whole year, or Tara’s mum would have had to wave goodbye to the deposit she’d just put down on her holiday. Dad said he’d talk to you, and look! You’re here as promised.’

  High as a kite with happiness, he gave me another hug. My brain was spinning. What had the boy just said? ‘We would have had to wait another whole year’? What, with the date of the wedding already spread around? And what was all that about Tara’s mother changing her holiday plans? Why should that even have fetched up as an issue, if the fact that I was committed to the inspections hadn’t been part of the discussion right from the start?

  Maybe it was. The longer I thought about it, the more possible it seemed. Take Harry’s blithe ‘Dad said, since it was a wedding, you’d probably be allowed to switch things round.’ I’d taken Harry merely to be repeating some typically emollient Geoffism after the date had been fixed, so he would not have to confront his son with hurt at the bridal couple’s sheer insensitivity. But could it have been said a good deal earlier?

  Before the plans were fully made?

  I stared in the dark mouth of the bag clutched on my knee. My powder compact, lipstick, cheque card, tissues, car keys, comb. And there, tucked in amongst them, the little folded note.


  Could it be possible? Was there truly hope?

  ‘So where is Gloria going on this holiday?’ I asked, to buy more time to work things out.

  ‘One of those frondy islands in the Seychelles, I think.’

  ‘Lovely! Next week?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’ The mention of time brought Harry back to the present. He rose from the table. ‘Married man now, eh? Got to follow orders. Better keep mingling.’

  ‘Yes. That’s the ticket, Harry.’

  As soon as he’d gone, I drew the note out of the handbag, fresh and clear as the day I had forced Geoff to write it. No lies, no leaving information out, no sneaky little deceptions of any sort. That is the deal. And, underneath, the old familiar signature written a little unsteadily from the sheer shock of the demand. Don’t get your hopes up, I told myself. Don’t think too far ahead. Harry’s account of things might have been garbled with champagne and the excitement of the prospect of his first night with his virgin bride. Perhaps he has the story all mixed up.

  My knees were shaking as I left the marquee and worked my way round the garden (carefully avoiding Geoffrey) in search of the one person who might, by a word let drop, send me home singing.

  At last I found her.

  ‘Gloria!’ (Step carefully, Tilly.) ‘A wonderful wedding! Brilliantly organized and everything perfect. I was just thinking you must be absolutely ready for a break after all the upheaval. And now your brand-new son-in-law tells me you’re off to the Seychelles.’

  She launched into the details of her holiday. I didn’t have to prompt. Out it all came – how she decided where to go, what made her choose that travel company, and the fright when she thought she would lose her deposit.

  ‘So frustrating,’ I murmured sympathetically. ‘If you leave cancelling till too late, you can be charged almost the full cost of the holiday.’

  She looked quite shocked. ‘Really? My golly! I was lucky, then. I only stood to lose a couple of hundred pounds.’ Discreetly, she dropped her voice. ‘But after all, this trip’s not going to be at all cheap, so even that would have been irritating.’