by Gill Hornby
‘Gosh,’ said Annie in to the rear-view mirror, ‘steady on. I’m sure we don’t need an election as such—’
They ignored her. ‘OK, but should we stop at leader? What about treasurer and secretary and events manager and so on? It’s ridiculous that the same poor dogsbodies have to do everything for everybody—’
‘Oh, I don’t really mind,’ called Annie, presuming herself to be all the dogsbodies in question. She didn’t know who else they could be referring to. There weren’t any others as far as she had noticed.
‘Good idea.’ Bennett whipped pen and envelope out of his pocket and set about drawing up plans on the back of it. ‘And I am quite sure you are the person to do it.’
‘Really? Me?’ asked Annie, flattered. ‘Well…’
But apparently he was addressing Tracey: Tracey who hadn’t been there five minutes and couldn’t keep a civil tongue in her head half the time; Tracey who couldn’t even raise one child without making a total hash of it; Tracey whose son had to be taken under Annie’s wing–and God alone knew how there was any room left under Annie’s wing–before he could amount to anything at all; Tracey who couldn’t even pour milk without missing the wretched cup. That Tracey?
‘I was thinking about it in the second half there, and what with Billy being packed off to the other side of the world,’ Tracey shot what Annie believed her daughters would call ‘evils’ at the driver’s seat, ‘and work being quiet, I’ve decided that yes, all right, I’ll give it a go.’
‘Fantastic. I’ll propose you. And you are the best musician, after all.’
Annie looked back, to check again that they weren’t talking to her. They weren’t.
‘Oh, come on,’ scoffed Tracey. ‘You’re quite the musician yourself.’
Hello? Annie thought. I’m here too. You know, the one with actual perfect pitch? The well-known local tuning-fork? Remember?
‘I’m happy to go for treasurer,’ said Bennett. ‘Get the finances in order straight off. They’re all over the place.’
Apparently, they did not remember. And apparently nothing meant the same as it used to any more.
‘Brilliant.’ Tracey sounded quite fired up. ‘OK, this is me. Thanks, Annie.’
Annie drew in outside Tracey’s garage, feeling extremely put out.
There was an interesting percussional effect whenever Annie knelt down these days. She stood up and went down again, to have a proper listen. C-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r: there it was, like that satisfying first crunch into a fresh Hobnob. She could have done something with that at the Talent Show, if she had noticed sooner. Ow. It did hurt rather. James would have to put the doll’s house back up on a table somewhere at the weekend–she couldn’t be doing this every five minutes, her knees couldn’t take it. Now she was down, she had better stay down.
Last week she had sorted out all the bedrooms; tonight it was the turn of the nursery. She reached in and started to take the furniture out, piece by piece. There was the little baby, flung to the back there. She rummaged around for the pram, put the baby in, covered it with a blanket and popped her into the wooden painted garden for a sleep. A sense of calm came over her. Back in real life, those were some of her happiest moments–getting on in a busy way with domestic tasks while an infant snoozed somewhere. It had a timeless essence of purpose and usefulness to it; a William Morris–style organic beauty. Now then, did these walls just need a wash, or a full repaper?
The phone rang; she leaned back, picked it up off its base and tucked it under her ear.
‘What you up to there?’
‘Just sorting some stuff out, love.’ She lined up the little fireplace against the wall.
‘Great. Can I order a skip? Are we at last having a clear-out of The Museum?’
‘No. I said sorting, not chucking.’ It worried her sometimes, how James always wanted to throw things away, destroy all evidence of the miracle that was their family. While she devoted so much time to preserving, cherishing, cataloguing for the future, he was never happier than when he was lighting a bonfire or filling a bin. Was he trying to wipe the slate clean? Did he want to somehow create the impression that their wonderful history had never happened? ‘How are you?’
‘Busy.’ There was a rustle in the background. ‘And not really sleeping. You know. I must say, it all takes some getting used to. I just wish I could get through to her, but she won’t pick up or reply…’
‘Not to me, either.’
‘It just wasn’t what was expected, I suppose…’ His voice sagged under the weight of his disappointment.
‘Sue says we’re lucky. It’s Miller’s Luck.’
‘And how does she come to that conclusion?’ A fridge door opened with a suck. ‘Sue has the most extraordinary talent to work up jealousy of almost anything if you give her long enough. How would she feel if it was Angostura, hm?’
Annie sighed and put a wooden pink blancmange on the little table. He knew full well what the girl was called, but he flat refused to use it. Personally, Annie thought Araminta was a lovely name and, if she had been married to anyone else on earth, she might have given it to one of her daughters. She would have gone even crazier than that–the wilder the better. Partly because, at that moment of birth, her babies had all seemed so simply extraordinary that an extraordinary moniker was the least they deserved. And partly because she had never quite got over being called Ann. She wasn’t even called Anne, for heaven’s sake. And the ‘ie’ she walked around with now, well–that was pure absurd, extravagant affectation on her part. The fact that her own parents had taken one look at her and said, ‘Ann’ had always rather hurt. Was one simple e too much for her? Did they actually doubt whether she could carry it off? She was never going to be extraordinary after that. She was done for.
‘Bet she’d be pretty bitter’–James had kept the Angostura puns running, very happily, since for ever. It was interesting that he always wanted to clear perfectly useful stuff out of the house as quickly as possible, when he could keep a rather bad joke going for eighteen years–‘if her daughter was mixing with the wrong sort.’ There was at that moment a tap, then a sort of slurp.
James was from the Annie’s parents’ school of baby names: the plainer and more straightforward the better. Even the battles for Lucy, Rosie and Jessica had been pretty intense; each had at least one unnecessary syllable, in James’s opinion. She put a curled-up black cat in front of the nursery fireplace and as she did so her heart gave a private, shy little bounce. It might not be long before we’re all picking names again; there was a thought.
‘Anyway,’ sighed James. Annie thought she heard a thump then a snap, like the breaking of a bone. ‘I suppose I’d better be getting on.’
‘Must you, darling? Really?’ She had flaked out on the Parish Council AGM this week to talk properly to her husband, and as far as she was concerned they had barely begun. ‘Now what’s so urgent?’
‘Sorry, my love.’ Something in the background was at the point of a rolling boil. ‘It’s this case. Won’t last for ever. I’ll call you tomorrow. Have a lovely evening.’ James blew a kiss and hung up.
Annie stared at the phone for a bit, frowning. There was a quiz programme on the television when she was growing up called Ask the Family, which she used to love–mostly because she was pretty brilliant at it. She used to sit at home with her mum, both of them shouting their answers at the screen, bouncing on the sofa with glee. If they had gone on it, they would have won, Annie was sure of that, but it could never happen. Each team was made up of that traditional post-war social construct, the family of four, and for some reason she was just a member of an anachronistic, inadequate, rather woeful family of three. Annie never found out why. All she did know was that her parents produced one, unextraordinary baby, gave it the plainest name they could come up with in the time available, and stopped right there. She had always felt a little hard done by because of it–deprived of a sibling, denied that crucial extra syllable and, most painful of all, precluded f
rom ever going on Ask the Family. She opened up the doll’s house kitchen and repositioned the little Aga.
Annie could answer most questions on that show, but the round she was best at was the Mystery Sounds–when they played the audio of regular, everyday things and you had to identify them. She had an almost perfect record, in fact–aural memory was, apparently, one of the few areas in which she was not completely ordinary–and it was for this reason that she felt, right now, rather perplexed.
For the last thirty years, James had rented, for almost nothing, the little attic of a distant relative’s house in Clapham. The idea was that, when work was intense, he could stay up in town and not wear himself out with the commute; the reality, though, was different. When the girls were at home, he actually came back every night. Annie would take each nightly menu as seriously as a dinner party; the conversation didn’t just flow, it overflowed, and James just couldn’t bear to miss out. So what had happened? Now there were no children at home, he was suddenly staying up all week and had almost no time to talk to her, even.
It was years since Annie had been to that little bedsit, and she couldn’t quite picture James in there now, or imagine what he might be up to. But she knew what she heard and she knew she was right about it. A packet had been opened. Something had been butchered, she was almost certain with a cleaver–a lobster was split or a chicken spatchcocked, she couldn’t quite distinguish between the two. And an egg had been broken.
And therein lay the mystery. Annie had known James for so long, and in such depth, that he was just another part of her. It had been decades since he had surprised her, and she liked it like that. Who wanted a marriage of shocks and surprises? Not Mrs A. Miller, thanks awfully. So she knew, like she knew the bald patch on the back of his head and the varicose vein behind his knee, that he was completely incapable of splitting a lobster, let alone spatchcocking a chicken. She knew that it had been many, many years since he had cracked an egg–in fact, could not at that moment recall him ever having done so. And last time he was even seen opening a packet, indeed, he was a much younger man, with no varicosity in sight. There was a lovely set of miniature copper saucepans somewhere that her godmother had given her for her tenth birthday–now where had they got to? Annie opened the roof of the doll’s house and rooted around to see what was hidden in the attic.
And as she did so, she reflected on the past half-hour–all those clues, all her solutions, and where these things had got her. And it seemed to come down to this: if James wasn’t cracking that egg and spatchcocking that chicken, then who the bloody hell was in there doing it all for him?
The phone rang again and she relaxed immediately. He was calling back, coming clean, had more to say. Really, she could be mad sometimes. As if James, of all people…
‘Hi, love.’
‘Mrs Miller, it’s Ravi.’ There was the sharp clatter of a call centre in the background.
‘Ravi! How lovely to hear from you.’
‘I just wanted to say: thanks to you, I’ve had a bit of good news…’
Bennett reached into the pocket of his apron and took out a few pegs. He stuck them in his mouth then took them out, one by one, to fix the corners of a sheet to the line. The day was cold but the sun bright and the breeze brisk. He stood for a moment with the light on his face and watched the wind catch the linen and toss it up against the blue sky. It brought to mind a Swallows and Amazons sail, and with that little memory his heart gave a skip. Smiling, he bent to pick up the wash-basket and busy off back to the kitchen. Heavens, was that the time? The morning was running away with him. So many jobs left to do…
He tightened his pinny, ran cold water in the sink, tipped out a bag of potatoes and set to with a peeler, humming. Last week marked his fourth month of unemployment and, he worked out, the longest stretch of consecutive time that Bennett had spent at home since his boyhood. He was eight when his parents first sent him to boarding school, he was to turn fifty in a couple of weeks, and for that whole chunk of his life, home had been just another place he visited sometimes. Like every other location in his life–the school dorm, chapel, the holiday cottage they always took in Devon; then university, then the office, and the offices of others, the holiday house they always took in the Dordogne–it was a fixed point in his universe, which he knew very well but to which he did not really belong.
Those first few terms away at school, he would come home so excited, desperate to know everything that had happened without him, wanting to bury himself in its day-to-day business, roll around in domestic facts like a dog trying to change its scent. But he soon gave that up. After they put on the Christmas bazaar without him–he used to love that Christmas bazaar, especially the lucky dip in sawdust; could it really not wait?–and had the cat put to sleep–he didn’t really love the cat, at least not as much as the bazaar, but still the lack of consultation was the final proof that he was no longer considered quite ‘inner circle’–he came to accept that home life went on very pleasantly without him.
As an adult it was the same. In fact–he counted the number of peeled potatoes with the point of a knife–it had been even worse. At least, as a child, he had managed eight years as an important player in home life; but for the past twenty-five, he had only had a walk-on part. He walked out first thing in the morning, walked back in quite late at night, and hovered around getting in the way at weekends. Looking back, he saw himself rather like a human in Tom & Jerry–faceless, anonymous, occasional; a pair of legs saying irrelevant things. Crucial, in that without the provision of a nice house neither Tom or Jerry nor Sue or the kids would have any sort of life at all; but at the same time unnecessary because all the important action went on in his absence.
He dropped the potatoes into the saucepan and lit the gas, then opened the oven for a quick check. A satisfying sizzle and delicious aroma assaulted his senses. Basting the meat, he licked his lips: chicken, lemon and thyme–that was happiness, wasn’t it? He put it back in the oven and went over to the fridge to check on his syllabub. A perfect set. Araminta was going to love that–more happiness. How much happiness did one chap have the right to expect? Time to pod the peas, which he might do sitting down at the new kitchen table. Good to take the weight off–what a busy morning. He slipped his feet out of his shoes and got popping.
What a shame that the 1950s housewife had become quite such a maligned species. Of course, he understood why. It wasn’t that he wasn’t a feminist, oh no. If Araminta came to him and said she wanted to keep house for some chap he would be furious. She was as good as–no, much better than–any boy. She had a great future ahead of her. If she should ever, in this endless series of national testing, actually ever finish taking–and doing brilliantly in–exams she could go out into the world and claim it. He was really thinking more of himself. He, Bennett, would really rather relish the life of a 1950s housewife.
Of course, he might still be in some post-traumatic psychosis. He had, after all, suffered major unhappinesses recently–separation from his family, the humiliation of unemployment. And yet he found in his new life so much minor happiness–the cooking of a meal, trotting about the High Street, watching the sheets dry off in the wind–and moments of an unfamiliar pride that seemed to compensate for so much. He didn’t miss his work at all. Indeed, he found more passion and involvement in the Anti-Superstore campaign and the Bridgeford Community Choir than he had ever felt in any professional projects. There were the elections coming up, and the competition after that–so much to look forward to. Admittedly, he missed Araminta with a permanent biting pain, like a stitch in his side, but what else was he lacking? His relationship with Casper was a happy, less passionate thing, which could be picked up or rested down with ease at any moment, so that was fine. That just left Sue–he put his shoes back on and took the peas over to the side–and the question of how much exactly he was missing her.
He stood for a moment, bit his lip and then suddenly remembered: he had quite forgotten to do the carrots.
/> Sue noticed it as soon as she was through the back door. ‘What. Is. That?’
Bennett was prepared. It might look like a literal kitchen table, but it was in fact a metaphorical diplomatic tightrope, too. For the past two days, he had thought of little else. He had game-played it every which way he could think of and he faced this dénouement with total confidence. This kitchen table was conflict-proof.
‘Where did you get it?’ Sue ran her hand over the surface: good, but not mint condition.
Araminta was beside him with her arms wrapped around his neck. ‘I bought it off someone called Lynn.’ Second-hand–no store of which she could disapprove.
‘Lynn.’ She looked up sharply. ‘Lynn? You mean Shopping Lynn?’
‘Well, Lynn, I don’t know, um, oldish Lynn…’
‘Exactly: Shopping Lynn.’ She rolled her eyes at his ignorance. ‘So what’s she doing now, poor Shopping Lynn? Now you’ve turned up and taken her table?’
‘She’d already bought a new one,’ Bennett shot back, rubbing his daughter’s back. ‘This was in her garage.’
Who could possibly object–a table from a garage? It was wartime thrift, it was make-do-and-mend, it was housewife economics. Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, even Susan St John Parker herself could only approve.
She sniffed. ‘What on earth did you choose a white one for?’
‘Oh.’ Bennett looked down at his table, deflated. ‘It was the only one she had.’
‘So.’ They were all squashed round the table now; Sue was surprised it was so small and had already mentioned this a few times. Bennett needed to change the subject. ‘I met your old swimming teacher.’
‘No way! Which one? Not miserable old Pat?’ Araminta shrieked.
‘Old Patters? Fabulous.’ Casper struck the table. ‘She still on the go?’
‘What is she, like, a woolly mammoth?’ More hooting.