The Seven Rules of Elvira Carr

by Frances Maynard

  “I’ve only come…” I stopped myself. Mother would probably have said, Ridiculous idea! I could only assume that though, because of there being no flash from her jar when I’d asked it what I should do about Charlie.

  “She might not have been too keen, but she’s not here now, is she, pet? It’s wonderful you’re moving on.” Sylvia was smiling. “So, what’s he like?”

  “He likes animals, and he doesn’t mind pauses in conversations.”

  “Well, that sounds good, pet. Have you spoken to him about…” She stopped while she negotiated a mini roundabout. “About your dad?”

  “A bit.” I folded my arms. “But I don’t want to find out any more.” I thought of Father’s photo. “It’ll make me rude and challenging.”

  “Ah, pet.” Sylvia clicked her tongue. “You’ve had a lot to contend with. One surprise after another. Hard for you to see a different side to your dad.” There was a moment’s silence. “This Charlie,” Sylvia went on, “your half brother…half brother, pet, fancy! If he’s nice, that might be a lovely thing, pet. It could open up a whole new life for you.” She swallowed. “You’re in it together now, aren’t you? He knew you existed, yes, but I expect there’s a lot he didn’t know about your dad.” A truck labored up the hill, its engine giving a high-pitched squeal of protest, and in the distance, there was the faint, insistent sound of an ambulance. “You’ll be able to support each other now, won’t you?”

  • • •

  Charlie’s car was older than Sylvia’s. It had a Save the Badger! sticker in the rear window and a familiar, comforting smell of dog. On the backseat was a mud-stained tartan rug and a crumpled copy of the Guardian.

  “This is really weird, isn’t it?” Charlie said, shaking his head and laughing.

  “Mmm.” I nodded, holding tight to the hem of my purple sweater. Sitting next to a relation I’d never met before was overwhelming. I wished I could sit in the backseat or, even better, lie down there to get used to the situation, but I was too afraid to ask. I didn’t find anything funny in our meeting, but Sylvia had said people sometimes laughed in new or strained social situations to show they wanted to get on with each other. I hadn’t thought about Charlie finding the situation difficult.

  He wore jeans and a red-and-white sweater with a complicated pattern of deer on it. His mother had knit it, he said. I shifted in the car seat. I didn’t want to hear about his mother, Ms. Katharine Hargreaves, who’d made Mother share Father, especially now I knew she saw me as a sore point.

  • • •

  It was easier at the Shire Horse Center because we talked about the horses. I didn’t have to use any of the conversational topics I’d written down. We watched a girl demonstrate grooming a Percheron, and then walked around looking at horses gamboling or grazing in the fields. My arms swung stiffly, and I glanced up at Charlie to see what I should be doing. He was tall, like Father, I thought with an uncomfortable jolt.

  He walked bent slightly forward, in long strides, his striped scarf flying out behind him. He had light-brown curly hair, and he smiled a lot—like Father, I thought again, but then not completely like Father, because Charlie only smiled at me, not at the lady who took our money, or at the girl groom whose jodhpurs were so tight.

  We stood gazing at a group of three retired Shire Horses standing close together.

  “They could be chatting,” said Charlie, “talking about the old days.” He wound his scarf around his neck. “Having a heart-to-heart. It’s hard for us to talk about our backgrounds, isn’t it?” He put his hands in his jeans pockets. “It’s such a weird situation.”

  I put my hands in my jeans pockets too and kicked at a clump of grass.

  Charlie turned, looking at me. “You must be really angry about Dad, Ellie. It’s worse for you because it was a complete shock.”

  I looked up into the branches of the tree next to us, trying to put my feelings into words, but then I got sidetracked and wondered if there was an owl asleep there or even a Great Bustard. In the end I just gave up and kicked the grass again, muttering, “I keep cleaning the house, I’m so angry.”

  “At least there’s a payoff then.” Charlie smiled.

  “No.” I shook my head. “I don’t get any pay.” My hands clenched. “Father told me a lot of lies.”

  “Yes.” Charlie rocked backward and forward on his heels. “It’s really disappointing when someone you look up to lets you down.”

  I nodded, my eyes prickling. “He already had a family. He had Mother and me. Why did he want another one?”

  Charlie sighed. He didn’t know either. “He got into the habit of lying, I suppose. And he could charm the birds from the trees, Mum always said.”

  I looked up at the tree again, imagining a line of owls, Great Bustards, even cranes, shuffling their clawed feet along a branch, eager to fly down at the mention of Father’s name.

  Charlie bent to pick up a piece of dry wood. “I suppose if Dad hadn’t been like that, hadn’t won Mum over, I wouldn’t be here.” He broke the wood in half with a snap that made me jump. “Mum’s never talked about him much. Her lips go sort of tight when I mention him. I think she always felt second best, not good enough. She used to watch loads of documentaries on BBC4 to try to keep up with Dad.”

  I glanced at him, surprised. I tried to decipher what he said. I had trouble keeping up, Mother said. I hadn’t thought NeuroTypicals did too. But, if Ms. Katharine Hargreaves had found keeping up with Father a struggle, she should have found her own husband, a less clever one, not shared someone else’s. Besides, Father had only watched documentaries when Mother was around. With me he watched Classic Horror Films and Variety Shows.

  Ms. Katharine Hargreaves feeling second best had caused friction, Charlie said, fights. Good, I thought. There had been a row the night before Father died. A bitter feeling came to the back of my throat because of it being with them.

  “Wasted the best years of my life on you,” Charlie’s mum had shouted. The next day Dad had treated her to a new sofa from IKEA, and dragging it in from the car had given him a heart attack.

  Father had had a heart attack because of a sofa. We didn’t shift furniture about at home, and we used Tofu to stave off heart attacks. There was a pause so long it was a silence. “What color was the sofa?” I asked.

  “Pale green. A two-seater. Why?”

  “Father—” I stopped. We were talking about the same man, but it was difficult to see Father as this…other dad. “Our father. He and Mother bought our sofa from John Lewis. It’s big, dark red, with mahogany legs. It sounds completely different from your sofa.” It sounded much better, but I didn’t say this (Rule Six: Diplomacy).

  • • •

  I thought about how I’d found out Father had died. I’d come back from the Library, with a book for Mother about the Treasures of the British Museum. Mother had just said, “Your father’s dead.” A policeman and policewoman had come to tell her, apparently. I’d dropped the Library book, I remembered, and Mother had thrown up her hands. Then she’d made me sit down, and she’d made me a cup of tea, with sugar, in spite of my BMI. We’d just sat there in the kitchen for ages, and we both forgot our eleven o’clock cookie choice. And then Mother’s face had crumpled and she’d gone upstairs.

  “Neither of us could believe he’d died,” I said to Charlie now. “He’d gone Away so often, for months sometimes, that it just seemed like he was Abroad on a business trip.”

  I bit my lip, feeling stupid. Father being Away had meant Father spending time with—no, not just spending time, living with—Charlie and the brazen, not-good-enough Ms. Katharine Hargreaves. There were no foreign business trips. It was hard to get used to this.

  “Yeah, he was always away, wasn’t he? Those business trips took ages.”

  I darted him a glance. The business trips Father told Charlie he went on were when he was living with us. I didn�
��t point this out, feeling a faint twinge of nausea. Not pointing things out was Diplomacy. At least it would be a tick for the checklist.

  • • •

  Charlie had found out Dad was really Father when they couldn’t go to the funeral. It was only then his mum had told him that Father had a wife already, one that he would never leave because of there being a disabled child involved.

  Charlie stopped, clapping his hand to his forehead. “Sorry! Sorry! I don’t see you as disabled. That’s why I said it.”

  Other people had said I was disabled. Mother’s friend Jane, for one. I crunched my feet through some drifts of leaves, my chin rising. “It’s more that I’m different.”

  Charlie smacked his forehead again. “I can’t believe I just said that!” He looked at me. “Yeah, you are different. In a good way. Unique.”

  I blinked and my toes gave a little bounce, then my jaw set again as Charlie continued, telling me how he’d felt sorry for his mum because of Father not wanting to marry her.

  “But later, I thought, well, some of my friends’ dads walked out on them when they were kids, and others had dads who did stay around but were really, like, controlling. I always got on well with Dad, when I saw him. The Gregster.” Charlie laughed. “That’s what I called him. He was a lot of fun, wasn’t he? OK, older than some dads but with more…style. Except for being, like I said, a flirt. With waitresses and people. That was embarrassing.”

  That must be what a ladies’ man meant. Someone who liked ladies and paid them a lot of attention. Someone who ended up telling them lies.

  • • •

  After my meeting with Charlie, I thought about Father every time I passed a Greggs bakery. Greg. Greggie, the Gregster, Dad. Not just Father. I went into one for the first time, the branch in the bus station, and bought two wholemeal rolls. Greggs was on the paper bag. After I’d eaten the rolls, I smoothed it out. I hesitated between the two boxes under my bed, then put the bag, not into Cookie Packaging, but with the other things to do with Father, the ammonite from Lyme Regis and The Observer’s Book of Dogs.

  37.

  A ladies’ man leads to trouble.

  —Mrs. Sylvia Grylls, neighbor

  “He’s left her,” Sylvia announced, flopping down with a long sighing breath. “He’s come back home. I knew their marriage was in trouble. That blasted salon. It’s all Shelbie thinks about. My poor boy…” She scrabbled in her bag for her cell phone and a tissue. I darted into the kitchen to put the kettle on.

  “Tell me more about…where Josh left her,” I asked from the doorway.

  “In the blood…blasted salon! In his salon! The one he provided the money for! Now he’s had to leave, and she gets to keep it all! All his hard work…” Sylvia put the tissue to her eyes.

  I arranged the tea things on a tray, listening while she spoke to Katie on her cell phone. “He’s down at the club with Trev now. Having his mind took off Madam.” I bent down to get out the cookie tin. Sylvia wasn’t supposed to eat cookies, but in this situation—her son leaving his wife—she might really need one, or possibly several. I might need at least one too, because of Josh moving back next door. I tore open a new packet of Hobnobs and put the whole lot on a plate. They’d been invented by McVitie’s, in Scotland in 1985.

  “Tah-rah, Katie, chuck.” Sylvia snapped shut her phone and turned to me. “It’s this makeover business. Shelbie’s obsessed with it,” she said, smoothing back her longer, blonder hair. “That Lewis who takes the before-and-after shots…”

  “A ladies’ man, you said,” I remembered, adding, “like Father.”

  Sylvia reached out to pat my knee. “Yes, pet, I did, and charming though they are, they lead to trouble.”

  They lead to Crawley, I thought, to Katharine Hargreaves. To Mother having to share, to her being angry, to Father going Away, to shocks and suddenness. To Charlie.

  “Yes, all around the women Lewis is, adjusting their hair, leaning in for close-ups. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.”

  “You couldn’t throw him at all, probably,” I pointed out. When I saw her shoulders shake, I offered to make her more tea, but she carried on talking about Josh and Shelbie. The last straw had been Shelbie taking out a loan, without asking Josh, to open a whole chain of hair salons throughout the New Forest. Sylvia talked for a lot longer than two minutes, but it was a type of special occasion.

  • • •

  Charlie had emailed me two days after our Shire Horse Center outing. He said it would be nice to meet up again before Christmas and suggested going to Animal Arcadia! I’d been so excited—I’d be able to show him how the animals knew me and tell him lots of Facts he might not have known before—that I’d had to get up from the computer and run around the study, my arms wide, before I could reply.

  Now we were on our way there and I could feel my heart beating because I was excited again and also not very used to Charlie.

  “Did Dad…Father talk to you about Japan much?” Charlie took his eyes from the road for a moment. “He used to go there regularly for engineering work, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.” I looked out the car window and took a deep breath. “Yes, he talked about Japan a lot. But…” I let the breath out slowly. “There weren’t any Japanese stamps in his passport.” I stole a quick look at Charlie’s face. “Japan meant Crawley. Or Sandhaven.”

  Charlie burst out laughing. “No! What a nerve! He never went there at all?”

  I shook my head. I listed all the “Japanese” things Father had brought me back, supposedly from his “business trips.”

  “Do you know, thinking about it,” Charlie said slowly, “it was a bit weird, ’cause when I was younger, I was really into manga, but Dad had never heard of it. And it’s massive in Japan. And when we went to Wagamamas in Crawley, Dad just toyed with the food. He didn’t seem to know what any of it was. Couldn’t handle chopsticks. Just kept laughing when he dropped his food. Said it was because he’d stayed in posh hotels over there where all the food was European.” Charlie shook his head, grinning. “And all the time Japan was a cover-up for you! You almost have to admire him, don’t you?”

  Did I? I looked out of the window again, noticing a dog trotting past, wearing a black coat with a reflective strip that made it look official. I used to admire Father: his important job, his foreign travel, his height and good looks, his lovely smell of English Leather, his classical education. He’d gone to a Private Boarding School, which was a school for especially clever children, he’d said. He’d learned Latin and Greek there, which is why he’d found Japanese easy. I put my head in my hands. Father had probably never learned Japanese, since he’d never been to Japan! A wave of heat rose in me. That was why I didn’t admire Father anymore: because he was a liar!

  “You all right there?” Charlie bent toward me without taking his eyes off the road. “Like I said, it’s worse for you.”

  “Mmm,” I mumbled. I tried to slow my breathing. I sat up straight, staring at Charlie’s navy sleeve. He was wearing another sweater his mother had made; knitting was her hobby, apparently. Charlie told me she worked as a secretary for a construction company that put up ticky-tacky new homes everywhere.

  “That’s why I’m studying ecology. Doing my bit to redress the balance of nature.”

  I didn’t know if that was a joke or just information. It was always hard to spot the difference. I looked out of the window at the empty fields, so far unspoiled by ticky-tacky houses. Mother had hated new houses. She’d thought our 1930s house was too modern. She would have preferred something with a moat and drawbridge, Father said.

  I asked Charlie if Ms. Katharine Hargreaves knew he was meeting me. I couldn’t bring myself to say the word Mum. Your mother, I said. He rubbed his chin. “Yes,” he said, “and she wasn’t happy. She was always miffed about Dad not marrying her, and your mum’s bequest got her so riled up, she tore up
the letter from the lawyer.”

  I whipped around to stare at him, then sat stiff and silent for a moment. Sharing another woman’s husband was bound to lead to trouble. But instead, my mother had left her a present, and one to her son, in her will. I mentioned this.

  “They weren’t nice things to leave, though, were they?”

  “Weren’t they?” I glanced at Charlie, surprised. “Yours was to do with animals, well, birds.”

  “They were a bit mean. Think about the wording, Ellie.”

  I thought about the wording. I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Great bustard sounds like bastard, someone whose parents weren’t married, and John Major, who used to be prime minister, was famous for calling his colleagues bastards.”

  I clapped a hand to my mouth.

  “Not your fault, Ellie. Your mum had every right to be angry with us…well, with Mum. But you can see why Mum wasn’t keen on me getting in touch. I asked her if she wasn’t even a little bit curious, but she said she was too busy earning a crust. She said no relative of your mum’s would ever welcome me, and that I should let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “You said she looks after him,” I remembered. I knew it was a Figure of Speech. It just reminded me of Charlie’s dog.

  “Yeah. Akira. My buddy. Part Jack Russell, that’s his short legs, part Labrador, and part Airedale—that’s the teddy bear fur.” Charlie turned down the narrow country road that led to Animal Arcadia. “You had an Airedale, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” I looked out of the window at the familiar countryside flashing by. “Tosca. Mother named her. I miss her.”

  “Yes.” Charlie inhaled deeply. “That’s the penalty for loving anything, isn’t it?”

  • • •

  I told Charlie Facts about every single animal at Animal Arcadia, all two hundred and sixty-three of them. He was really taken with Vikram, the ex-circus tiger, and we spent ages watching him batting a rubber ball about with his enormous paws.