Not Quite Nice

by Celia Imrie

  ‘No.’ Theresa winced. Why did she feel so bad about claiming her own life? ‘I can’t do Wednesday, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Do you notice, Mother,’ Imogen flung the cloth into the sink, ‘how selfish you’re becoming?’

  Theresa felt herself stammering her reply. ‘I’m meeting up with some friends.’

  ‘Friends?’ Imogen scoffed. ‘Can’t you meet them another night? You know Wednesday is my Pilates class.’

  Theresa braced herself and said ‘I can’t really change it. It’s a one-off. Schoolfriends, you know.’

  Imogen wore a cold smile. ‘Schoolfriends? You’re fifty-nine years old. Why? How?’

  Theresa felt her heart thudding, just like when she herself had been brought before the headmistress for disobedience. She said quietly: ‘They found me on Facebook.’

  ‘Facebook?’ Imogen threw her head back and laughed. ‘Facebook! Listen to yourself, Mummy. You’re going on sixty, not sixteen.’ She went back to rinsing the already sparkling sink. ‘You don’t think I have time to play about on computers and the Internet, do you?’

  ‘I’m on the Internet all day at work, other things come through now and then,’ said Theresa, wondering how it had come to this, what had happened that she felt it necessary to explain herself to her daughter.

  ‘Oh really!’ Imogen turned off the tap and pushed up her sleeves. Theresa could see that she was really spoiling for a fight. ‘Perhaps I should phone Mr Josephs and tell him what you get up to on his time?’

  ‘Jacobs,’ Theresa corrected, under her breath. ‘Please, Imogen, I’m not in the mood.’ Theresa pulled away and went to the sofa to pick up her coat and bag. She noticed that the three girls were now sprawled out on the floor, happily playing with paper and crayons. How come it was never like this during her sessions with them?

  ‘Anyway, Imogen,’ she said, putting on her coat, ‘for your information, Mr Jacobs has let me go.’

  ‘He sacked you?’ Imogen tutted. ‘I’m not at all surprised.’ She paused her kitchen cleaning, then perked up. ‘You mean you don’t have a job any more? You won’t be going to work? Oh God, Mummy, how marvellous. If you’re not working, you’ll be able to come here more often and do days now as well.’

  Theresa knew that she was cornered.

  But why did she have to think of coming here as something bad? This was family, after all. The people who really had first claim on her time. She felt awful for resenting them. Was it she herself who was the problem? She steeled herself and resolved to work harder at being the perfect grandmother.

  ‘Of course I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘But you know, Imogen, I can’t bear the thought of that endless tube journey up and down from Highgate all the time. Perhaps I’ll sell up the house. It’s way too big for me on my own anyhow. I could buy a flat somewhere round here.’

  Imogen’s smile froze on her prim, perfect face. ‘Why? Why here?’ She took a deep breath and looked Theresa in the eye. ‘Look, Mummy, I hope you don’t think that if you move to Wimbledon we’re all going to look after you in your old age.’

  The shock Theresa felt stunned her to silence. She had only suggested the move to save time, to make things easier, so that perhaps sometimes she could have the children to her home.

  A small commotion took place as Michael, Imogen’s husband, came in, and, with a cursory nod at Theresa, went straight upstairs.

  ‘Better to keep a bit of distance, eh, Mummy?’ Imogen laughed, steering her mother towards the front door. ‘After all we don’t want you spying on us.’

  Spying?

  Theresa had to turn away so that her daughter would not see the flush of embarrassment on her face, nor see the tears gathering in her eyes.

  The front door clunked shut.

  CHOCOLATE FUDGE TIFFIN

  Ingredients

  1 tablespoon golden syrup

  1 tablespoon soft light brown sugar

  1 tablespoon butter

  1 tablespoon cocoa powder

  A few drops vanilla essence

  Pinch of salt

  Crushed biscuits/cornflakes/muesli/rice crispies etc.

  Raisins

  Method

  Put equal amounts (e.g., one tablespoon) of golden syrup, sugar, butter and cocoa powder into a heavy saucepan.

  Add a few drops of vanilla essence and pinch of salt.

  Stir over heat till it melts and bubbles.

  Remove from heat and fold in a cereal of your choice: cornflakes, rice crispies, muesli or crushed biscuits and raisins.

  Put into a buttered tin or dish and place in fridge to chill.

  When cool cut into squares.

  Eat.

  2

  The Wednesday after that fateful night of babysitting, Theresa had met up, as arranged, in a hotel bar in Covent Garden with five of her old schoolfriends. She hadn’t seen any of them in about forty years. They all exchanged memories and news of their old classmates and the nuns, laughed and drank a lot of wine.

  ‘Another bottle?’ asked Theresa, as she wiped away tears of laughter after another of Ann’s tales of marital life. Ann had always been the class clown, the girl who, when reprimanded by a nun, always talked back.

  She had just described the expression on her ex-husband’s face the day she caught him in flagrante with one of his patients. ‘If I’d wanted to I could have reported him to the General Dental Council and had him struck off, but my plans for revenge included a decent settlement and if he lost his job that would have been zip. So I simply dangled the threat.’ She waved for a waiter. ‘After the divorce came through I knew continuing my life in that town was unthinkable. My husband had slept with half the population, and the other half was baying for his blood. I didn’t want to live the rest of my life getting sympathetic looks from the greengrocer, the butcher and even the paperboy. So I took the lump sum that the court offered and buggered off to the sun.’

  Theresa sat back and watched the girls – though they were all sixty she found it impossible to think of them as anything but girls. Three of them, Catherine, Louise and Margaret, seemed so cowed and the lines on their faces spoke of struggle and disappointment, while the other two, Ann and Sarah, still had a youthful light about them.

  ‘Are we all divorced then?’ asked Theresa. ‘Traded in for a younger model?’

  Theresa, along with three others, raised her hand.

  ‘And you two are still married?’ Theresa said to Sarah and Catherine.

  ‘I’m widowed,’ Sarah said brightly.

  ‘I’m still married,’ said Catherine, who seemed so brittle and burdened, her inner light dimmed – old.

  Perhaps it was losing her job, but Theresa feared she was on the edge of spiralling down into that same huge air of disappointment.

  She wanted to be like Ann and Sarah, who appeared hardly to have changed since the days of hockey sticks and homework. Despite life’s vagaries, both women seemed so radiant and full of energy. What was their secret?

  ‘Mmm,’ said Sarah, sipping the red wine. ‘A lovely Tuscan red. But not nearly as good as the stuff I get from the next-door farm.’

  ‘You get wine from a farm in Wiltshire?’

  ‘Oh God, Theresa, keep up! I left Wiltshire ages ago, about a year after Ron died. Too depressing staying. Too many memories, you know, so I sold up and moved to a run-down old shack without water or electricity a few miles south of Montalcino. Our local wine is Brunello, the taste of heaven.’

  ‘You live without water and electricity, Sarah?’ shrieked Ann. ‘Gah! I have to have my comforts.’

  ‘No, silly. The house has been my project. Fifteen years’ work and it’s almost like a real home. Every mod con you could wish for in Islington, but I’m smack in the middle of an olive grove with lovely views of the Tuscan hills. I even have my own private swimming pool.’

  Theresa felt a stirring of envy. ‘So are you in Italy too, Ann?’ she asked, dreaming of olive groves, lemon trees and bowls of huge red tomatoes.

  ‘Anda
lucía,’ Ann replied. ‘Cadiz, in fact. It’s like a very hot, sunny, Spanish version of Liverpool.’

  ‘Don’t you get homesick?’ said Catherine. ‘I still live in the house where we brought up the kids. I enjoy the familiarity.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Margaret.

  Sarah shuddered. ‘Nothing on earth would get me back to the UK. I don’t know how you all put up with it.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Ann.

  ‘I live just round the corner from my son,’ said Louise. ‘Though, to be truthful, I don’t really see that much of him. Dan and his wife seem to spend half the year jetting off to exotic places. But they really need me there, you see, to take care of the grandchildren for them whenever they’re away.’

  ‘It’s the grandchildren for me too,’ said Catherine. ‘My daughter wouldn’t be able to manage without me. Or him indoors. I don’t think Jonathan would want to leave Blighty. He’d miss the cricket. And anyhow all that foreign food disagrees with him.’

  ‘He has a point. I couldn’t live without my English tea,’ added Margaret.

  ‘Ah, Margaret,’ said Ann with a wink. ‘I don’t miss England a bit. But I have to confess I occasionally pop over to Gibraltar to stock up on tea and Marmite.’

  ‘I don’t understand how you two can bear to live in some strange foreign land,’ said Catherine, ‘with nothing familiar around you and no family nearby.’

  Sarah interrupted. ‘Well, I don’t understand how you three can bear not to break the ties and start anew.’

  Louise sighed. ‘How can you leave your children and grandchildren?’

  ‘We have phones and Skype in Italy, you know,’ said Sarah. ‘Just cos there’s wall-to-wall sunshine doesn’t mean we’re in a time warp.’

  ‘And my lot come and visit.’ Ann shrugged. ‘Which feels like a lot more fun all round.’

  ‘Change is the important thing,’ added Sarah. ‘Perspective. Not letting the familiar ties trap you like a fly in a cobweb.’

  When the evening came to an end Theresa rushed along Long Acre towards the tube station, wishing she’d had the foresight to bring an umbrella. The vertical sheets of rain burned her face and froze her hands. So much for the English summer. She was glad to get home.

  But the next morning Theresa called in estate agents and put her house on the market. She liked the thought of change, blowing the dust away but, for the sake of the family, decided to stay put in London.

  When she wasn’t working, she spent her breaks looking at websites displaying flats in Highgate. After work she went round to see some of the places for sale.

  She was not impressed. In comparison to her well-worn but lovely, quirky old house, everywhere seemed characterless and anodyne. Everyone with a place to sell seemed to have cleared out their space, chucked out the carpets, sanded the floors and painted the walls off-white. The pristine sleek kitchens had not been designed by cooks, that was certain, and the bathrooms looked like operating theatres. Nothing had any personality.

  Theresa wanted somewhere in a lively area with a bit of heart, but all the flats she saw were more like dentists’ waiting rooms than somewhere you’d like to curl up with a book on a rainy evening.

  When Theresa got home from the viewings she was greeted by another accusatory phone call from Imogen.

  ‘As you couldn’t be bothered to come and babysit last night, might you be able to make it tomorrow instead?’

  ‘I’ve put the house on the market.’

  There was a small silence down the line.

  ‘How could you, Mummy? All of our precious memories . . .’

  It was at least eight years since Imogen had visited her here. That was how much she cared about her precious memories.

  Theresa decided not to respond.

  Another ominous pause.

  ‘I do hope you haven’t forgotten what I said about moving to Wimbledon, Mummy. It would be much . . . easier for you . . . if you didn’t. We’d all prefer it, I mean, it would be better all round if you kept a decent bit of distance.’

  Theresa braced herself, astonished to discover that it hurt just as much to be told this a second time.

  ‘You’re right, Imogen, of course.’

  Theresa had no idea when in the thirty-five years since she had given birth to Imogen her daughter had become so high-handed. Was it Michael, she wondered, who had turned her into such a prig? She also couldn’t think why Imogen was always so tense. She had no job, other than being a housewife and mother. She lived in a comfortable house with nothing more pressing to attend to than the calendar at the local gym. Perhaps it was because Theresa was always there, on hand. Perhaps she was to blame for being too ever-present.

  Next morning Theresa asked Mr Jacobs for advice on buying abroad and he printed out a bundle of papers for her, which she pored over on the bus home.

  She spent the weekend browsing the Internet looking at towns in France. She hoped that somewhere across the Channel should be a ‘decent’ enough distance. She browsed through articles about the Dordogne, the Ardennes, Provence and the Île-de-France. She came to the conclusion that the Côte d’Azur was the dream place for her: warm sun in winter to ease her aching bones, good food, the sea and lots of historical, artistic and literary connections. What could be better?

  As much as anything because of the English meaning of the name, she plumped on Nice.

  ‘I am going to Nice,’ she said to herself. ‘I am leaving Horrible and going to Nice.’

  Theresa went to Nice for a fortnight. Just to look at the place, she decided. A little autumn holiday by the Mediterranean. Then, if the place made her heart sing, she’d come back in spring and look around for property.

  Theresa was surprised at how easy it was to get from the airport into the city centre. A boy sitting next to her on the plane told her not to waste her money on a taxi, just take the bus, and she tried it, expecting the worst.

  But the bus ride was cheap and rather wonderful. The route ran alongside the beach for the length of her journey, then she had a very short walk along the Promenade des Anglais to her hotel.

  Her room had an old-fashioned window with a Juliet balcony that looked out over the huge blue arc of the bay. She had to drag herself away from the view to go out and explore the city.

  The market was packing up as she swung into the Old Town. She bought herself a few pots of olives and tapenade to give to Imogen when she got back.

  She was surprised that after crossing the avenue behind the Old Town that she was right in the middle of a proper city, with department stores and a modern tramline sweeping round and up into the hills. Although it was autumn the day was bright and warm, and the mountains, which rose protectively behind the town, were coated with a mantle of snow.

  Theresa almost laughed aloud. Sun, sea, snow, mountains, city shops, historical ancient streets, a port, art galleries, even an opera house! Where else could you find everything in such close proximity?

  She had a truly delicious dinner in a little restaurant at the port before turning in and spent the next few days doing the usual tourist things: taking a walk down the Promenade, visiting some of the many museums and art galleries, buying more souvenirs, mainly of the edible variety.

  On the final day, on the advice of the girl on the hotel desk, Theresa took a bus along the coast to Monte Carlo.

  It was unlike any bus journey she’d ever taken. The road was high, cut into the hillside, with dizzying views out to sea. If you looked down you could see magnificent villas with turquoise swimming pools and lush green gardens; look up and there were more pilastered houses, perched on rugged brown crags.

  A little fishing village caught her eye, with its multicoloured awnings and pretty rows of cottages lining the harbour. But all too soon the bus swung round a bend and there was another gorgeous vista to admire.

  But Monte Carlo was not quite so much her taste. The anodyne clean streets, with rows of absurdly upmarket shops and all the parking spaces filled by Porsches, Ferraris
, Bentleys and Lamborghinis, left her feeling quite uncomfortable.

  But as she had got there Theresa briskly did the sights. She viewed the Palace, which she thought a bit of a joke, very Disneyesque. The Opera House, designed by Garnier, who’d also done the Paris Opera, looked wonderful in the milky midday sunlight. Thinking of one of her favourite films, The Red Shoes, she knew she had to pop inside and take a look. But the theatre was closed for rehearsal and the only other option was a ticket to the casino.

  Inside the ornate salle de jeux she couldn’t resist having a go, and took a seat at one of the roulette tables. Theresa bought the minimum permitted number of chips, which still came to over a hundred and fifty pounds, with the firm plan of having only couple of spins then cashing in the remaining chips. She wasn’t worried about losing twenty pounds or so for the thrill of imagining herself in some scene from a James Bond movie for a moment or two.

  But half an hour later Theresa was still there. She had one chip left. Feeling hot and cold, and deciding she would not be telling anyone about this little escap­ade, she lay it down on a 6-line, all the numbers from 16 to 21.

  ‘Vingt,’ said the croupier as the ball fell into place, and he swept five pink chips towards her.

  As the other players leaned over the table, placing piles of chips on multiple numbers, laying down thousands of pounds on a single throw, Theresa decided to cash in those last five chips and leave with at least a little dignity.

  ‘Rien ne va plus,’ called the croupier as she picked up her bag and climbed down from her stool. ‘No more bets.’

  The ball whizzed round the wheel and clattered into place.

  Theresa strolled away from the table heading for the cashier’s window, taking a good last look at the sumptuous decor of the legendary salon.

  Behind her the croupier called out ‘Dix-huit.’

  Theresa laughed to herself. If she’d left the chip in the same place she’d have won another five.

  ‘Madame!’ called the croupier, urgently. ‘Madame!’