by Barbara Vine
I took my wine and went into what used to be the dining room. The man on the steps with the hammer in his hand seemed nothing to do with me, a workman who was building something, doing overtime long into the night. Thick white mist had come down and you couldn't see the end of the garden. A heap of old timber loomed through it, the french door frames and what had once been the shed and a length of fence. My watch said ten-fifteen.
‘Are you going to be much longer?’ I said.
He didn't stop hammering. He'd got half a dozen nails clamped between his teeth. ‘Give me another half-hour. You go to bed.’
‘Can we talk, Mike?’
The nails dropped into the palm of his hand. ‘I know you're upset about your dad. That's only natural, time will heal that.’
‘Not as upset as I should be,’ I said. ‘It's not that. Can we talk?’
‘Isn't that what we're doing?’
‘I mean, have a talk. I want to talk seriously.’
The hammering stopped and he turned to me with an expression of acute irritation, his face reddening.
‘You know something, Jenny. I've been working all day and when I get home I have to get started on this, I don't even have a break. I get tired. Can't you realize that?’
We'd never had a serious talk in the whole of our married life, but I'd never noticed before.
I went upstairs. We sleep in the front but the bathroom's at the back and I was cleaning my teeth when the frosted window was suddenly lit up with a yellow dazzle. I went into the back bedroom and looked out of the window. Mike had set light to the pile of timber. Because it was damp he had poured paraffin on to the wood and it was burning fiercely, sparks flying up into the damp dark air like rocket tails on Guy Fawkes Night.
It's sensible to think of the thatched roofs in the village when you light a fire, but there'd been too much rain to worry about that. The flames were leaping high and the fire already had a red heart where the hardwoods burned slowly.
I opened the window to feel the heat. On my face the blaze was like summer sun. The roaring was an intense, frightening sound that soon fetched Sandra Peachey out from next door with her husband Joe in his dressing-gown and the murderous cat in his arms. When they started shouting at Mike I closed the window and went to bed, into our double bed, on the left-hand side, right on the edge so that I wouldn't touch him when he got in.
13
No one will disturb me, thought Stella. They think I am too tired for anything. And so I am, too tired for anything but this. I no longer have the strength to carry that chair across the room and wedge it under the door. But no one will come in. After all, in a residential home they're glad if you're resting, if you're quiet, if you give no trouble…
I am going to say something I thought of telling Genevieve but I can‘t. I can't risk her telling him. No, not telling him. Unwittingly revealing it to him. If I were going to tell him myself I should have done so years ago. Perhaps I shall give him this tape but perhaps I shall not. After all, he can never find out. There is no evidence he can ever find that would point to his – well, his parentage.
I'll begin now.
When he was five, said Stella, Richard had to have a blood test. He was a very small, thin child and some sort of anaemia was suspected. As it turned out he didn't have it and he soon began to grow and fill out, there was nothing wrong with him, but this test was done.
I had never known whose child he was. I supposed, and at one time hoped, he was Rex's. After all, Rex was my husband, he supported me, he kept the children, fed and clothed and educated them. That was how I looked at it at the time. That was the way married women who were not breadwinners did look at it. Still do, some of them, I expect. How strange this is, Genevieve knows this, that it's easier for me to talk about sex than money!
Richard was conceived at the time of one of Rex's returns to me. In the crucial month I must have had sexual relations five or six times with Rex and just once with Alan. That sounds very disgusting, uttered like that. I shall stop the tape and play it back.
It was even more disgusting to hear than to say. No one should behave like that, but some women do, some women don't have much choice. I told myself that the baby must be Rex's, I persuaded myself of that. The other possibility frightened me but I kept thinking of those figures, the five or six times and the one time. It haunted me. Instead of thinking with happiness about the coming baby I thought always of whose child it was. Every morning when I woke up it was my first thought. But the strange thing was that when Richard was born I stopped worrying, I almost ceased to think about it.
Babies are interesting the way they look and the way they change. Priscilla's Hugo looked a lot like my father-in-law when he was first born, at three months he was the image of his mother and when he was twelve he looked like a photograph of Jeremy taken when he was a child. Richard looked like me for the first five or six years of his life. His hair was fairer and his eyes were lighter than mine but they had the same features. At that time I hadn't realized that Alan and I were ourselves rather alike to look at, not twin-alike but as a brother and sister might be. If my child looked like me he must also look like Alan.
Then came the blood test. Richard's blood group was B, not rare but not all that common, about 6 per cent of the population. Rex and I had both at one time been blood donors and I knew we shared group A. It might not be DNA fingerprinting but it was sound enough. Richard couldn't be Rex's son.
Twenty years later, at least twenty years, I was reading an article in a newspaper about why women miscarry and came upon a theory, or perhaps something more than a theory. It suggested that families of children all of the same sex might not be that way as a matter of chance. Suppose the man carries some faulty gene that only affects boys and is so damaging that it kills the male foetus when it's, say, three months old. Then the mother would conceive girls and boys but carry only girls to term. I thought about that. All the babies I miscarried that were old enough for their sex to be known had been boys. Suppose that was a fault in Rex and not in me, in Rex's genes. He who had so much wanted a son could never have had one, no matter whom he had married. My boy, the boy to whom I had given birth, was Alan's son, not his.
I wish I'd read it when Richard was small. It would have made me feel less guilty. I had over a year of guilt and fear before Rex died, guilt that he had a cuckoo in his nest, fear that he would find out, that he would see. For Richard was beginning to look like Alan. He was changing and starting to look like Alan, or I thought he was. It may have been my knowledge of who his father really was that made me think like that, but I believed I could see a physical change and that everyone must soon see it too.
If I had been aware of the gene theory then I might not have felt so bad. After all, I had given Rex the son he could never have produced. He loved Richard and was proud of him. It might even be that he stayed with me instead of going off to Charmian because of Richard. At the time, though, that only made me the more afraid of what the effect on him would be if one day he looked at his son and saw Alan.
Rex died. The day I found Charmian's body in the barn and Alan took me back to the house and lay there holding me in his arms, on that day I told him. I had to get back, I couldn't leave Richard with Priscilla for the evening. I had to go back and fetch him and take him home. The conversation we had, I remember it word for word. I got off the bed and sat with my back to Alan and said,
‘He's yours, Richard is your son.’
‘Yes, I know,’ he said.
I can't describe how casually he said it, how lightly. I might have told him it was ten past five or the sun had come out. ‘You know?’
‘Sure, I've known since he was a few months old. Same turned-up snout, or retroussé nose, as they say. He's got your eyes, I've always been glad about that.’
‘Why didn't you tell me?’
‘Why didn't you tell me, my dear? It was your secret.’
‘Oh, Alan, are you glad?’
He got up and came roun
d the bed. He put his arms round me and held me tight. ‘It's the best thing in my life,’ he said, ‘after you.’
‘Yet you were content never to mention it, have him accepted as Rex's? Would you ever have asked?’
‘I've been waiting for you to tell me for nine months.’ It was nine months since Rex's death. ‘Come to think of it, we could have had another one in that time.’
You're terrible, I said. You're awful. It was what I always said when he made his bad-taste jokes. ‘Shall we ever tell him?’
He thought about that one. My head was on his shoulder and he held it there lightly, his thumb moving against my cheek.
‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘but not yet. Not until we're all three living together or until Gilda sees, whichever is the sooner.’
It made me want to be with him more and I think it made him want to be with me more, now that we had said to each other what we both secretly knew, that Richard was our son. An illicit affair seemed – oh, I don't know, inappropriate. I needed some dignity in our relationship, and more than that, openness, propriety I suppose, a love and a bond that all the world could see. The three of us together, Richard and his parents.
I am feeling rather better today. A remission. Talking into this machine comes most easily first thing in the morning, when I am freshest. This the last tape I shall make and destroy. I regard it and its predecessors as practice, as rehearsals for the real thing. The next one will be the real thing.
It is true that driving a car has unpleasant associations for me. So does fire, though only in the sense of cremation. I have left instructions that I am to be buried. But it is the plough that troubles me most, or troubles me on some deep, barely conscious level. My lips, now, as I speak of it, grow stiff. Forming the word and uttering it is for me as it is for some people to speak the name of the creature they are phobic about: snake, spider, rat. Once or twice it has been the answer or part of the answer to a crossword puzzle clue and as I have written it in something has contracted inside me and a shiver has run up through my body.
When I have a bad dream that is what my dream is about. The strange thing is that it is never the modern machine that I see, the actual machine that gave rise to all this, but the hand-held or horse-drawn implement. I don't know why this should be. I can only recall once seeing such an object, and that was in a museum of bygones. I have seen pictures, of course.
Alan sometimes called me his star. ‘My star’ – because Stella means a star. Once he quoted someone and, telling me to look at the stars, said he wished he were the heavens so that he might look at me with many eyes. Last night, before I went to bed, I looked at the stars out of this window as I often do. I saw Charles's Wain up there, that some call the Big Dipper, and Ursa Major and – the Plough. The shape of it, the configuration of stars, is the shape of the thing in the museum. The effect on me was to dream of a man ploughing, an old man in medieval dress, pushing the plough through a stony field, only the earth he turned over was ashes and the flints that came to the surface were bones. And when he came close to me I saw that his face was Alan's face, grown old.
I have dreamed that a good many times before I sat at the window and looked at the stars. Dozens of times in the years that have passed. Twice since I have been in here. The ploughman usually has Alan's face but not always. It was another man that I saw trudging through a field of bones last time I dreamed it, a different face, one I've seen only once before but have never forgotten. That was the only time it printed itself on whatever screen of memory figures in our dreams.
I believe it performed this operation because I had been sitting with Genevieve talking for longer than usual that day.
The sooner I strip that from the tape the better.
14
Maud was to Lena what Stella is to me. I realized that when Maud was dead and I saw Lena's face swollen with crying. She'd sat up all night with her, being the daughter Maud never had, holding her hand to keep the life in till death got too strong and prised them apart. Even if you're running what Ned calls a granny farm, even if you're money hungry, you can still have your affections. I thought what a contradiction a person's character can be and for some reason it frightened me.
‘You'd hardly credit it,’ Sharon said, ‘but she's got a waiting list of wrinklies queueing up to come here. Hope we get another old boy, the women piss me off.’
The undertakers' car was outside when Marianne arrived. She came on her own, driving a Volvo Estate. As she walked up to the front entrance the undertakers' men came down the steps with Maud's body on a stretcher covered up in black.
I was on the steps too and I thought she was going to drop. I went quickly up to her and took her arm.
‘It's not…?’
‘It's old Mrs Vernon,’ I said. ‘She died in the night. Are you all right?’
‘Oh, Jenny, I'm fine. You are kind.’
Marianne may be a bit neglectful and a bit scatterbrained but you can't help liking her. It's nice when people remember your name. It's nice when they talk to you as if you're old friends and don't have any side or give themselves airs.
‘I haven't seen Mummy for a month,’ she said. It was nearly two but I didn't say so. ‘I've felt so guilty. I was doing this TV commercial in Ipswich and I said to myself, Marianne, you'll be an utter bitch if you don't take this chance to go and see Mummy, it's only a matter of whizzing up the A14. And then when I got here I thought I was too late. Of course it was my guilt distorting things, darling. I'm such a fool!’
Looking at her then I had some idea of what Stella had meant by saying she was like Rex. Of course I'd never seen even a photograph of Rex Newland but Marianne's large dark eyes and quite heavy dark eyebrows didn't come from Stella. They make an interesting contrast with her hair that isn't actually dyed even if it isn't naturally quite that red-gold. And her nose is a bit hooky, aquiline I think they call it, while Stella's is a neat little straight nose even now. She was wearing jeans and a white shirt and big silver earrings. It reminded me of what Stella had said about the way actresses look, their way of doing their make-up and their clean hair.
I walked her along to Stella's room but I didn't go in with her. The long package she was taking out of her bag I guessed was two hundred cigarettes. Marianne was the secret supplier Stella said she'd be tortured about before she'd confess.
Lena had asked me to sort out the few pitiful things Maud had left behind her for the relatives if we could find any. She couldn't bring herself to do it, she said, and for once I didn't dislike her. I suppose I'd discovered she was human like everyone else. When I'd done that and taken Lois for a walk from one end of the house to the other and back – she's supposed to have a bit of daily exercise – I took Arthur his tea and carried a tray along for Stella.
The room smelt of smoke though they'd opened a fanlight. Seeing Stella almost every day, I suppose I haven't noticed the deterioration in her the way an occasional visitor would. Marianne caught my eye behind Stella's back and made a face of exaggerated distress. I asked her if she'd like a cup of tea but she shook her head and mouthed that she'd have it in a minute, she'd have it outside. She put her arms round Stella and started saying goodbye, she'd come back in a week's time, so I left them and walked slowly back down the passage.
Marianne came running after me.
‘Oh, Jenny, isn't it dire! The change in Mummy! It was such a shock, I can't tell you.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘But she's not in pain. Her brain's very clear. And she's not muddled in her talk, she can talk as well as ever.’
‘Can I speak to you for a moment?’
We went into the lounge. Carolyn was in there with tea on a trolley and no one to give it to but Gracie, who had fallen asleep in her armchair with one of Lena's cats in her lap. Marianne sat down by the french windows. I don't think she knew she'd picked Stella's favourite chair, the one where she always sat to watch the butterflies. I fetched her a cup of tea and one for myself.
‘You said her brain's
very clear,’ Marianne began, ‘but do you think there's anything preying on her mind?’
All the things she tells me, I thought, and for some reason doesn't want you to know.
‘What sort of thing?’
‘I don't know how much you know about her, darling.’ Marianne looked searchingly into my face. Her big dark eyes fix themselves on you and seem to see into your soul. ‘Does she ever talk to you about my father?’
‘She mentions him. Sometimes.’
‘Does she talk about the way he died? I mean, where he'd been before he died?’
I don't know why I denied it, why I shook my head.
‘She's never got over my father's death. Oh, yes, don't look like that, darling, I'm sure of it. She's never got over it. Let me tell you about it. It can't matter now, it's all so long ago, but you needn't tell her I told you. He had this long-standing relationship with another woman, you see. I was only fifteen but somehow I knew, I'd known for quite a little while. Terribly precocious of me, wasn't it? I was like Amanda in Private Lives, my heart was always jagged with sophistication.’
Perhaps you have the faintest idea what she meant. I haven't.
‘I'm sure Mummy never knew about it. She's so trusting, Jenny, she's so innocent. He went on the train to see this woman – he'd given up driving by then – and coming back he had a heart attack. If he hadn't been alone in the carriage – well, it's no good talking about what might have been, is it? They found him when someone got into the carriage at Bury and they took him to hospital but he was dead when they got there.