Sylvia couldn’t forgive Shelbie for taking Josh’s princess away to get her fair skin burned to a crisp in Spain. Now he could only Skype Roxanna on the computer. “No wonder he smokes and goes to the pub. Trev’s heard he leaves early, mind. Now, him getting a lady friend would wipe the smile off Shelbie’s face.”
Father had smoked cigars. He’d kept them in an initialed case, a gift from Mother when they got engaged, and tapped the ash into a silver ashtray shaped like a woman’s hand. He was only allowed to smoke in the study. I’d find him there, not studying but sitting in his battered leather armchair, staring out the window, wreathed in smoke like the picture of the genie coming out of the bottle in The Thousand and One Nights. Even now, when I looked up a word in his dictionary or dusted one of his thrillers, I could still smell his tobacco.
• • •
Sylvia invited me over for a Sunday roast dinner. I didn’t really want to go because of not being able to make conversation. Mother was good at it. She could talk for a long time on many different subjects—politics, Opera, Vitamins, and all the countries she’d visited or lived in, such as Kenya—so I’d always left it to her.
I took a bottle of champagne with me to the roast dinner, the same Daily Telegraph Best Buy as at Christmas. I no longer had the Telegraph to advise me because I’d stopped buying it. Mother hadn’t been able to hold it because of her right side not working, and when I’d folded it up small so she could do the crossword, she’d dropped it on the floor, her eyes bulging behind her glasses. Sylvia had said, “Thanks, pet,” but it wasn’t worth buying a posh paper just for her to line her bin with.
Now she said, “Oh, you shouldn’t have, love,” but Trevor gave me a thumbs-up sign and Josh flicked the hair out of his eyes to read the bottle’s label. Katie, Sylvia’s daughter, said, “You’ve got to watch the pennies.” Katie’s marriage was not in trouble, but Sylvia often phoned her, even though they lived in the same town and saw each other more than twice a week.
I wanted to explain about my Trust Fund so Katie would know I was well provided for, but Sylvia had told me people didn’t discuss finances in conversation. I didn’t know why—I’d find it interesting—but it was another of those unwritten Rules I didn’t understand, but that made people angry or upset when I broke them. I didn’t know why I shouldn’t have brought Sylvia a present either.
I stared at my plate, not looking at anyone. Everybody talked about different things, and nobody took turns. They kept changing the subject so I couldn’t keep track of what was being said. They asked me questions, but by the time I’d thought of the answer, they’d started talking to someone else. It was how I imagined being Abroad would be like. I thought about the silence of my own kitchen and eating Sunday’s dinner (Stuffed Baked Potatoes with Leeks) on my own.
Trevor asked me, twice, how much longer Mother would have to wait for a place at Bay View Lodge. This played on my mind too. My heart thudded each time someone with a clipboard walked by Mother’s hospital bed in case they’d come to turn her out of it. She’d be angry with me if that happened. She might come home.
Sylvia stood up to pass the gravy. “Leave the girl alone.”
“I’d like to see a bit more of you, pet, that’s all,” Trevor told her. “You’re always dashing about, hospital this, nursing home that, lawyer whatever.”
“Not good for your blood pressure, Mum.” Katie speared half a roast potato.
“Yeah, ride pillion, Ma. Take a backseat. Let other people sort out their own crap.” Josh stuck his hands in his jeans pockets and tipped back in his chair. He was probably tired of Sylvia talking about his marriage breakup too.
Katie was flicking through her cell phone. “You ever thought about getting a computer, Ellie? Broadening your horizons? Finding out things?” Katie was the same shape as Sylvia but younger, and her eyebrows weren’t perfect half-moons.
I stared at the flowered pattern in Sylvia’s dining room carpet, trying to answer accurately. “Mother said computers kept people imprisoned in their bedrooms, not communicating with the outside world.” They stared at me from around the table, although what I’d said was true. Mother had said that. “And she thought I’d find learning to use one a struggle,” I added. My face was hot.
There had been another reason too, one neither Father nor Mother had explained. I could be targeted by predators, they’d said. In David Attenborough’s Documentaries, these were large animals such as tigers, animals at the top of the food chain. Carnivorous animals. I’d failed to understand what Mother and Father meant and they wouldn’t explain, which had led to me going to my room and slamming the door.
Katie tapped on her phone. She was always on Facebook. Communicating with the outside world. She didn’t know how I survived without a computer or a phone. Mother hadn’t approved of cell phones either because they went off in Operas and disturbed the singers. I didn’t like loud noises or speaking to people, but Sylvia said I could text. “You’ve got to keep up with the modern world, pet.”
Oh, do keep up, Elvira was something Mother often said when I asked her what was happening in a Foreign Film, or what someone had meant, exactly, by puzzling phrases like We must meet up soon (why must we?) or A change is as good as a rest (but it’s completely different) or It’s as plain as the nose on your face (why is my nose plain?).
5.
It’s better to have a system.
—Mrs. Sylvia Grylls, neighbor
The phone rang. My heart raced. It was always difficult to answer, whether it was an insurance company, a prerecorded message, or someone from a charity. Part of it was the not knowing who it would be. I fumbled with the receiver. It was Mrs. Hulme, from Bay View Lodge. I could hear her wheezing. “A vacancy has come up, Miss Carr. Would your neighbor…?” I ran next door. Sylvia answered, chewing. When I told her, she did a little dance on the tiled floor of her porch and Trevor shouted out, “Thank God for that!”
We rushed back for Sylvia to answer the phone. Mother could move in the day after tomorrow. All her things to move there! A new place for me to get used to! I sat down and rocked. For goodness’ sake, Elvira! We are not in an asylum! I heard Mother say. Sylvia put her hands on my shoulders and said she’d felt awful when Trev’s mum had gone in, but she’d settled in soon enough and it would be the same for Mother.
• • •
That afternoon, Sylvia came around in a red gingham apron. She took off her high heels. “We’ll have a system, pet. Sort out what your mum needs.”
System was reassuring. We ticked things off in Sylvia’s British Legion notebook. We took the throw from the study armchair for Mother’s bed. Sylvia said Katie could make copies of Mother’s photos. She picked up Mother and Father’s wedding picture and said how tall and handsome Father had been, like a film star, and then put it down.
“Your mum must have been dazzled,” she said, and then, under her breath, I thought I heard her say, “but she saw the light eventually.” I suppose she meant that photographers had to use a special flash in those days.
We took two pictures for Mother’s walls. Her favorites were by Turner, of sunsets, with sometimes an old-fashioned ship being tossed around by a giant wave. Her last vacation had been a cruise to the Canary Islands. It had been free in return for giving talks on Operas. She hadn’t enjoyed it, though, because the sea had been rough and people kept having to leave her talks.
I’d never been Abroad. Mother used to say taking me would be a waste of money and no break for her. She and Father had gone one at a time because I couldn’t be left on my own. Mother had stopped going altogether when her knees got stiff, except for an occasional Opera cruise, but Father had still gone Away. She’d shrugged her shoulders.
She was past caring, she said, adding: Your father had free rein to do what he liked. When I’d asked if that meant him going on horseback riding vacations on his own, she’d snapped, No, it does not! Perhaps he t
oured countries that needed improving through engineering, countries that Mother had no interest in. When he’d come back, it had all been too dull to talk about.
After I’d explained all this to Sylvia, she looked at me for a long time but not quite long enough to be a stare, another thing they’d warned us about at school. “Well, you’re on your own now, pet, and look how well you’re doing.”
We chose a little carved chair from the study to take for me to sit on when I visited Mother, and a couple of cushions from the sofa in the front room. It was a red brocade sofa with tassels and dark, wooden feet. Trevor said it looked like it came from a harem, and I’d had to look up the word. Trevor was wrong, though, because Mother had bought the sofa at John Lewis.
Decorations. We needed decorations for Mother’s room. The animals’ horns on the walls of the utility room, personally shot by Mother’s grandfather, weren’t suitable, Sylvia said, nor were the African warriors from the mantelpiece. I fetched the Japanese netsukes, even though they were really my things.
Sylvia picked one up. It was a boar with tusks and bristles. “Look at the detail, pet.” She turned it over. I noticed part of a price label underneath. I took it. Ashmole…something. It didn’t sound Japanese. Another word looked like shop. I turned over the others. One, a grasshopper, had a tiny scrap of paper with the word Museum. Sylvia took it quickly. “Perhaps your dad bought them somewhere else.”
I gazed at the group of animals. They could have been part of Father’s cover if he’d worked on a Secret Mission for the Government. He might have been sent to a different country entirely, one we were at war with, with a fake identity. Japan might have been a front for something far more important. Making things up, lying, was wrong, but if you were protecting your country, then it was the Right Thing to do. I took the Japanese notebook out from my apron pocket and made a note about this.
Sylvia made a mark in her own notebook. “Clothes next, and then we’ll have a cuppa.” She headed for the stairs.
We opened the carved door of Mother’s wardrobe with its ornate mirror. There was a nose-prickling smell of mothballs and, underneath, a faint trace of Mother’s Je Reviens perfume.
Smelling Je Reviens on the dark-blue velvet dress Mother wore when she went out with Father gave me the collapsing feeling again.
A picture surfaced of Mother in a pearl necklace and matching earrings, handed down through generations, and her best glasses, blue ones with jewels, which went up at the outside corners of her eyes. She hadn’t looked like Mother then, but like a queen in a fairy tale.
When Mother and Father went out, I’d had a babysitter, Mrs. Carver, a cleaner at St. Anne’s Church. She’d sit in front of the TV all evening without going upstairs to check I’d brushed my teeth. She always brought a box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray with her, because babysitting was an evening out, and gave me the Orange Creams because she didn’t like them.
Mrs. Carver came in the daytime too occasionally, when Father was Away and Mother had to research the cultural background of Operas at the Ashmolean Museum. She’d take Father’s leather briefcase with her to carry her notebooks and her Sheaffer pen and some pencils. Once, I’d sharpened two of my own for her, but when I’d put them in, there weren’t any notebooks in the briefcase. Or pencils. Instead, there’d been a brand-new book, A History of the Kenyan Mau-mau Uprising by Colonel W. R. Leys, two bars of Asda Extra Special After-Dark chocolate with 70 percent cocoa solids, a bottle of English Leather aftershave, and a box of the same cigars that Father smoked.
I’d run into the kitchen to tell Mother she’d forgotten her writing things, but her lips were a thin line and she’d snapped at me for being nosy. She didn’t say thank you, which is what you should say when somebody does something kind for you. Taking my pencils out might have been being nosy again, so I’d left them in the briefcase. I never saw them again.
Now, we put Mother’s clothes in a suitcase and packed a box with everything else. Seeing her possessions lined up in the hall as if she were going on vacation gave me the collapsing feeling. Sylvia fetched the cookie tin and asked Trevor to come and pick up Mother's things.
As I went to put the kettle on, I heard him say, “Let’s hope this is an end to it! We’ve been through it with your mum, with my mum, never mind the bloody neighbor’s mum. Anything else, and I’m ringing Social Services. I mean it, Sylv!”
“Shh,” Sylvia whispered and then said louder, “Take it all up to Agnes’s room at Bay View, could you, Trev? There’s a pet.”
• • •
As soon as she left, I got into bed. My heart was pounding. I’m phoning Social Services was something Mother used to say when things got to be Too Much, and she’d had a phone conversation with Jane in Dunstable. Dear Jane suggested Sheltered Housing might be the best thing for you, Elvira. She’d talk about no time off for good behavior and a life sentence and kept taking off her glasses and polishing them. Shelters were for animals no one wanted, and Sheltered Housing was living in a different place on my own, under supervision.
I’d cried every time she’d threatened it. Now that Mother couldn’t speak, could Trevor send me to Sheltered Housing? Sometimes, when I saw him staring at me over the top of his glasses, not saying anything or smiling, it reminded me of Mother. I’d hoped I could stay here, safe, at home, without anything changing except for Mother not being there. I didn’t want to be sent Away.
I sat up and looked around my bedroom. It was tidy, and I’d dusted it only yesterday. I ran downstairs. There was no decaying food in the fridge to constitute a Health Hazard and lead to me being thought incapable. I scanned the kitchen. A Social Worker would be impressed by my meals and housework schedule, with its ticked-off checklist, and my shopping list, and the Japanese notebook where I was trying to find the answers to things.
Sylvia could give evidence that I put my bins out on the right days. Since Mother had been gone, there’d been no loud music in the house, and since Father, no alcohol or tobacco. I did not take drugs, not even digoxin. I racked my brain. There were all sorts of other possibilities. I went back upstairs, my brain whirring with them.
Had I forgotten to pay a bus fare? Stayed five minutes beyond visiting time at the hospital? Might Social Services think sending an elderly person to a home against her will was abuse? Because Mother was going to hate Bay View Lodge. She was going to hate everything about it, even its view, because she wanted to be at home, in charge.
I threw back the duvet, all the things I might be doing wrong buffeting my brain. My armpits and the soles of my feet prickled. Once, when I’d asked Mother what she was doing—she was sorting a stack of papers to take to Mr. Watson, slapping them down into piles—she’d shouted, “For goodness’ sake, stop asking questions! Can’t you see I’m out of my depth here?” She’d probably used a Figure of Speech, I thought, one I could identify with now.
I had been out of my depth once—literally, I mean; not a Figure of Speech—at Lyme Regis, when I was eight. We used to go there for vacation. Mother would take me to stroke the donkeys on the beach and give them an apple. She’d shown me how to feed Grace the pony in the paddock behind our house so I knew to hold my hand out flat. I remembered her sitting down on the sand to watch a Punch and Judy show with me, and telling me afterward about the history of it, about it coming from Italy and being hundreds of years old.
On the out-of-my-depth occasion, I’d gone paddling by myself. A group of children on a yellow float wouldn’t let me play with them. I kept walking out to sea, my red bathing suit getting darker and darker. Suddenly, my feet thrashed. I couldn’t feel the bottom! My mouth was filling with water. My heart was bursting. Something grabbed and lifted me out of the water. I thought a seal or dolphin had come to save me, but it was Father, wearing his trousers and his shirt and his tie in the sea. He carried me back to the beach in his arms. My heart had hurt, and my throat had been sore from salt water and crying; Mother would be
angry with me for making Father’s clothes wet.
Mother had sighed a lot. She’d held up a big towel so Father could take off his wet clothes and put on his swimming trunks, and after that bought him a mug of tea, with sugar, from a stand on the sands. A lady bought me an ice cream. Later, when Father was dry, he’d made a sand tower—Bigger and better than a sand castle, Elvira!—with a moat and a drawbridge made from a piece of driftwood. It was studded with seashells and was nicer than any sand castle I’d ever seen.
Father had stood by it, laughing. He’d beckoned to the lady who’d bought me the ice cream. “Come and see my masterpiece,” he said, and leaned close to her and chatted. I hadn’t wanted to go back to the hotel and leave the sand tower on the beach to be washed away, but in the end, Mother said it was just a pile of sand, not the Sistine Chapel—and hadn’t I caused enough trouble for one day?—and pulled me away.
6.
Guinea pigs get a bad press.
—Brenda Cunningham, pet therapist
Mother arrived at Bay View Lodge in a hospital taxi, sedated for the journey, her glasses slipping down her nose. I clenched my toes inside my shoes. Mrs. Hulme grasped the handles of the wheelchair and pushed her up the ramp.
I’d positioned Mother’s photos in the same order as at home. I moved the photo of Tosca a fraction now, avoiding Mother’s gaze when she raised her sagging head. The netsukes were in a row on the windowsill, the same size gap between them, looking out to sea. The symmetry of their arrangement gave me a physical thrill.
Mother’s head drooped. “Not that way,” she said quietly, her eyelids closing.
“Bless her, she’s out for the count,” said Mrs. Hulme. “I’ll get Maria to put her to bed. Later, she might fancy some toast and Ovaltine. All right, ladies?” She turned to us, a smile puffing her fat cheeks into pouches like the giant desert rat’s in The Life of Mammals. “Plain sailing so far. No storms yet!” She pointed to one of Mother’s ship pictures, and she and Sylvia laughed and then shushed themselves.
The Seven Rules of Elvira Carr Page 5