Striking a Balance

by Curtis, Norma

  Bill ignored him. ‘Ts, ts, ts...’

  ‘Okay, shall we go to playgroup?’ No need for a verbal reply, son, he thought as Bill went to the hall to fetch his coat.

  *

  The rain which had attracted him to the playgroup seemed to have put others off. Only the stalwarts were there — the stalwarts, that is, and Helen. He thought she’d seen him but her upward-turning lips which always seemed to smile might have been acknowledging or might not. She was wearing her white, open-necked linen grandad shirt and looked like a healthy ghost.

  Larry sat down and checked where Bill was. Then he rested back in the child’s chair and tried to feign comfort.

  Emma came through from the kitchen and gave him a brief glance before returning to her throne. She began laughing with Jean but the movement of his head caught her attention and their eyes met. For a moment she stared at him, unblinking, but her eyes flickered and she looked away. Larry wondered what it was about her that made her hate men.

  Her loss, he thought.

  He sat in Coventry a bit longer and didn’t like it.

  He got up, deciding to join Helen at the table where she was sitting with her dark-haired daughter who was threading shoelaces through card, her pink tongue lodged at the corner of her mouth. He slipped into a small chair opposite her and she looked up for a moment before going back to the threading.

  ‘She’s doing well,’ he said as an opener.

  Helen smiled, as though recognising the attempt for what it was. She curled her platinum hair around one ear.

  ‘You weren’t here yesterday,’ Larry said. ‘Didn’t mean it as an accusation,’ he added. ‘I nearly didn’t come myself.’

  ‘Oh?’

  He was aware of forcing the conversation, and wondered how to carry on. She obviously wasn’t interested — funny how he’d misread her. Ironic, too, if now that he’d accepted his place as an outsider she’d decided she didn’t want to be associated with him. ‘Better see what Bill’s doing,’ he said, getting up.

  ‘Bill’s fine,’ she said, reaching for him. Her hand stopped short of his sleeve and she pulled it back and picked up a yellow shoelace from the table. ‘He’s in the Cozy Coupe. He loves that car, doesn’t he?’

  ‘We should have got him one for his birthday. Only I didn’t know he liked them, then.’ He sat down slowly and her daughter looked up at him before popping her tongue back in her mouth. He smiled at her and she smiled shyly back and picked up her card once more.

  ‘Maybe he wouldn’t want one at home,’ Helen suggested.

  ‘Maybe not. He’s got enough space at home. No brothers and sisters.’ He realised Lily was looking at him again and he gave her another smile. ‘How about you?’ he asked Lily.

  Lily looked at him uncertainly and wound her hair around her finger until it was curled right up to her head. She put her head to one side and looked at him out of the corners of her eyes, a picture of embarrassment.

  Helen came to her daughter’s rescue. ‘No, Lily hasn’t either. Not really.’ She looked at him through dark eyes, uncannily like her daughter’s, and pushed her hair behind her ear again.

  Not really to a yes or no question? ‘What did you do yesterday?’ he asked, the only innocuous question he could come up with.

  ‘I worked in the garden. Weeding, mostly; it’s fairly low-maintenance apart from that. Have you got a garden?’

  ‘Yes, we have. Ours is pretty low-maintenance too. And we add bulbs in the autumn and bedding plants in spring.’

  ‘You’re a “we”, then.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You said ours. “Ours is pretty low-maintenance.”’ She put her head to one side, like her daughter had.

  ‘My wife,’ he said. ‘Bill’s mother. She works but I, er, my firm was taken over.’ He nodded, then shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. He was surprised to find it was true.

  She nodded too and threaded the yellow shoelace through the fingers of her left hand, closing it on the loose ends so that it looked as though she was wearing two rings, one on her third finger, one on her index finger. She held her hand up, the better to see the effect. Then she unwound the lace and dropped it on the table again. ‘I worked once,’ she said and stopped. ‘Oh, Lily, you’ve gone wrong, look, you’ve missed a hole. Shall I put it right for you?’ She took the card and pulled out the thread. She did it with difficulty and Larry noticed for the first time that she had no nails; they were bitten almost to the quick.

  ‘Go on,’ Larry said, intrigued to find out what her job was.

  ‘You really want to know?’ She was laughing at him but somehow he didn’t mind. ‘I worked once,’ she said again. ‘I was a buyer for Needhams. I loved it.’ Her smiled died away, leaving just a trace of it on her upturned lips. ‘I was good at it, too.’ She gave him a direct look, as though he might not believe her, but he nodded; go on, he thought.

  She picked up the shoelace and pressed the hard end into the ball of her thumb. Larry watched as she pressed deeper and deeper. He could see the flesh around it bulge and redden and when it got to the point where he knew it must be hurting her she took it away and looked at the indentation in her flesh, watching it slowly fill again.

  ‘We had it all,’ she said, ‘you know that feeling? When you know you’re living the life you’ve always imagined for yourself? The peak of your success. You look down — and everything that happened before it looks small and insignificant. I liked that feeling. I enjoyed it — Larry...’ Her dark eyes strayed restlessly over his and over his face, searching for something. Larry found himself hoping she would find it although he wasn’t sure what it was.

  She took a deep, shuddering breath and glanced at her daughter, whose head was bowed lower over the card and its coloured threads.

  Somewhere, Larry could see, she had gone badly wrong. She’d lost the pattern, he noticed. The picture, in the shape of a flower, was criss-crossed indiscriminately with threads so that it looked as if it had been slashed. It looked as though the picture had been scribbled out.

  Helen took a tub of babywipes out of her bag and dabbed her throat and neck with one. The atmosphere in the room was claustrophobic. He could see the sheen of perspiration on her face. ‘Want one?’

  Larry shook his head. A flash filled the room and the lights dimmed momentarily. He looked towards the window and saw sulphurous, yellow-grey clouds rolling in overhead. A rumble of thunder vibrated through the sky.

  ‘I knew I was going to have to pay for that feeling of being on the peak,’ she said when the rumble had died away. ‘I knew it. I knew it and I didn’t care.’ She looked into her memory of it and smiled. ‘It was worth it, it was worth anything, then. And it came to me that whatever happened I could look back on that time and know that I’d enjoyed it, that it was bliss. It was bliss,’ she repeated, and looked towards the window. She was quiet for a long time.

  The heat and the thunder seemed to have subdued the children. There was very little noise in the room. Even Emma was quiet as she put out more biscuits and filled the cups with juice.

  So what happened? He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. But like a good psychiatrist he too kept quiet. He looked at Lily who was still working on the card. Some of the holes were so full that there was no room for another lace to be threaded through, but it didn’t stop her from trying. Her tongue had sneaked back into the corner of her mouth, pink and moist and mobile. She appeared not to be listening but Larry guessed she was hearing every word.

  ‘We belonged to a country club,’ Helen said suddenly. She smiled at him. ‘You know how it is? When you work hard you think that pleasure shouldn’t come cheap, either. You want to pay for it. You feel you deserve it. We took up clay-pigeon shooting. We used the gym and swam with the children in the pool. Every weekend, almost, we went there — it had been so expensive to join but it was so lovely. It separated work from pleasure better than staying at home.’

  Her restless hands reached for the yellow shoelace and she wound it
round her index finger and bent it. Larry could see the tip of her finger slowly become pale and bloodless.

  ‘They had a Jacuzzi in the room next to the pool. I got into it and I put her on the side, on a ledge that you sit on. She was chest-deep. She was happy. She liked the Jacuzzi, she’d been in it before, we always went in after a swim. I turned my back on her to read the notice on the wall. It said how you must have a shower before using the Jacuzzi and that under-fourteens were not allowed in unaccompanied and that smoking and drinking were not permitted in the pool. You see, it was nothing to do with me, really, that notice, but I read it in the splashing water from beginning to end and when I turned round she had gone under.’

  Larry stared at her. Under her white linen shirt he saw her ribs heave as though to get rid of a weight on her chest.

  ‘That’s what the splashing had been. While I’d been reading the notice, she was drowning. It was that quick, that gentle, you wouldn’t believe it. I think she’d tried to walk across, not realising she wasn’t on the bottom, not realising it was just a ledge until she stepped off.’

  Larry looked at Lily and then at Helen. ‘Who —’

  ‘Her name was Adele. She would have been six this year.’

  Larry turned to look for Bill. He saw him climbing up the ladder of the plastic slide, his small hands gripping the rail. He turned back to Helen.

  ‘I’d said I was prepared to pay,’ she said, ‘but I was wrong. It meant nothing afterwards, not compared with —’ She turned to look through the window again, almost so that her back was to him. He could see, just beyond the platinum hair, the line of her forehead and her cheek.

  When she turned back he could see the beads of perspiration on her upper lip.

  ‘I don’t think,’ he said suddenly, ‘that’s how it works.’ He knew he’d said the words too loudly. Lily looked up at him, her mouth slightly open, her lips gleaming from being licked. ‘There’s no payback,’ he said to Helen. She nodded but he shook his head. ‘You’re wrong,’ he said, ‘because if you were right then it ought to be reversed and all those who have suffered would find at the end of their lives some glorious crescendo, the big reward, the Camelot.’ He pulled a face. ‘The lottery of life.’ He glanced at her but she didn’t respond one way or the other. ‘But they don’t, do they. Some people suffer all their lives and die suffering. There’s no divine accounts system, debit and credit. Not in this life. Not here.’

  He saw the tears flood her face and through them, like a cliff behind a waterfall, the upturned, slightly smiling mouth. It cursed him, he could see that now; imagining her coming back to the playgroup one child short and that smile to condemn her.

  She wiped her face on her sleeve. Her eyes were puffy, her dark eyelashes divided into spikes.

  ‘I’ll get you a coffee,’ he said. ‘Lily, would you like a juice?’ She twisted for a moment, then nodded. He got up, nearly colliding with Emma who had a broken doll in her hand. ‘Can I get you one, too?’

  Emma looked surprised, but nodded. ‘You might as well do the lot,’ she said, looking at her watch, ‘we’re due for one. They all take milk and if you put the sugar bowl on the tray they can help themselves.’

  Larry climbed over the child-gate into the kitchen and filled the kettle. Through the window behind the sink he could see the darkness leave the sky. Something that had bugged him from the beginning about Helen all of a sudden became clear. He realised that her hair was not bleached.

  It had turned white.

  31

  At the playgroup the following day, Larry made no pretence about where he wanted to sit. He took a seat right next to Helen and Lily and smiled at them in greeting. If she was feeling bad about what she’d told him then the sooner she saw he wasn’t affected by it the sooner she’d feel all right. Behind her, by the door, he saw the main faction take note.

  Helen did seem more reserved than she had the previous day. He also noticed that she was wearing a black cotton dress, and wondered whether the black was subconscious or deliberate.

  Bill came up to him, trailing a pink toy pushchair behind him, a disgruntled look on his face. ‘How do you do this?’ he asked.

  Lily raised her head, and her face came alive as she saw the pushchair. ‘I know how to do it. I’ll show you. You have to find a space, first,’ she said and glanced at the play area. ‘Come with me.’

  Bill followed her, dragging the pushchair behind him. Larry watched them, and blew a puff of air through closed lips. ‘Like father, like son.’

  Helen seemed confused for a moment, and then her face cleared. ‘The woman taking the lead,’ she said, and laughed, rather protectively. ‘Is that so bad?’

  ‘No. That wasn’t what I meant.’

  Helen looked at her knees and smoothed the black cotton flat over them. ‘You were thinking of yourself, trailing behind a woman. It’s all right in theory but in practice you don’t like it.’

  Larry scratched his head, aware of her animosity and where it had come from. She wished, he knew, that she hadn’t told him about Adele. ‘The ideal is for people to do what they’re best at,’ he said mildly. ‘If it’s looking after their children, that’s what they should do. It’s not right for everyone.’

  ‘And is it what you’re best at?’ she asked.

  ‘I liked working. I like looking after Bill.’

  ‘That’s not an answer.’

  ‘I’m hedging my bets.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what you’re good at, sometimes you have to make sacrifices,’ Helen said, turning her face away from him.

  ‘You shouldn’t make ones that hurt the family,’ he said, thinking of Megan and how initially he’d considered the Triton job mainly to please her.

  Helen turned back to him, her eyes angry. She tilted her head to one side. ‘You might as well get it from the horse’s mouth,’ she said, her voice low and urgent. ‘I drove my husband away after Adele died. I supposed they told you that?’ She paused and the pause seemed to stretch until she was lost in the grasping hands of the past. ‘I didn’t deserve him,’ she whispered, ‘and heaven knows, he didn’t deserve me. I carried it around with me —’she held out her arms in front of her and looked at Larry ‘ – like a millstone. I made life so unbearable that in the end he left. I didn’t go back to my job. I devoted myself to Lily. I had to try to make up for things.’ She lifted her head and looked around for her daughter.

  Larry looked, too. He could see Bill sitting in the pink toy pushchair, being pushed around by Lily. They both looked pleased with themselves. He didn’t know what he was meant to think. He knew what he did think, though. He glanced at Helen and saw that she had finished. End of sordid story.

  Larry stretched out his legs. He could see the ridges of his veins on his tanned feet in his Timberland loafers. They reminded him, strangely, of carvings of Jesus’s feet on crucifixes. He bent his knees, tucking his feet out of sight. ‘Do you ever see your husband?’ he asked.

  She looked at him sharply and defensively, as though he had criticised her. ‘Lily does, sometimes.’

  Larry wondered what he looked like. Something like him, he supposed; with dark hair and skin that tanned easily, if Lily’s colouring was anything to go by. He didn’t want to guess what it felt like to have a child die, and to lose, also, a wife and daughter.

  He got to his feet, suddenly tired.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Helen asked him sharply.

  ‘I’m going out for a breath of fresh air,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. Excuse me.’

  The sky was cloudy and blessedly cool. He pushed his hands through his hair and was standing by the swings when Bill came running out to hug his legs and ran back in again.

  Larry turned towards the building and could see Becky inside, talking to Emma by the big table, looking at him. Bill had disappeared out of sight.

  He could still feel the sensation of Bill’s arms around his legs. Thinking about it, Larry realised that since Ruth’s appearance at the christening, Bill h
ad stopped talking about her. It was as if it was her sudden disappearance from his life that had bothered him most, and that now he knew she was still around he had stopped worrying.

  Larry leaned against the fence and his thoughts returned to Helen. He knew the conversation had angered him and he had taken sides, and not Helen’s, but her unknown husband’s. Men and women were a damn sight more alike than either of them cared to admit. This equality between the sexes was not a myth, after all; both sides could be equally cruel, equally self-centred, equally blind.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned round. It was Becky. She looked happy and uncomplicated and young in a baggy white t-shirt and shorts.

  ‘I want to talk to you,’ she said.

  He felt uncharacteristically tired. ‘Shoot.’

  ‘The council wants to close the playgroup and we want to keep it open,’ she said in a rush. ‘Will you help us?’

  Larry turned and leaned his back against the fence. ‘What did you have in mind?’

  ‘Emma’s husband thinks a petition to Downing Street might work,’ she said. ‘We could march there.’

  All twenty of them, he thought. ‘You’d do better marching to the town hall and making a fuss there,’ he said. ‘You won’t be the only ones. Everyone in the borough’s being affected by the council cutbacks.’

  ‘Great!’ Becky smiled happily. ‘I’ll tell Emma, shall I?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you’ll organise a march to the town hall.’

  ‘It was a joke, Becky,’ he said, turning back to the swings.

  She put her hand on his shoulder again. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘Probably not. Too much sun,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah.’ She wound her hair around her hand. ‘What shall I tell Emma?’

  ‘I’ll have a word with her. Do you want a coffee?’

  ‘No, thanks, I’ve got a Diet Coke.’

  As he followed her back inside he knew immediately that Helen had gone. The table was tidy, the toys returned to their basket.