She hadn’t said anything. She’d never said anything. She’d always bitten her tongue, telling herself that it wasn’t worth getting upset about. In fact, she always seemed to find herself apologising to Lesley and Madeleine, usually for something her eldest son had done. The last time it had been Christine’s wedding, the marriage of Lesley and Madeleine’s oldest daughter to a bushy-faced teacher in Bournemouth. Janus had turned up drunk at the reception, having travelled down separately. He’d played the grand piano that had sat unused in a corner of the hall, but had produced nothing but trills and glissandos. He’d danced drunkenly with bridesmaids, lurching around so clumsily they would end up on the floor. He’d shaken up the bottles of champagne and had sent fizzy cascades into the shocked, walrus-moustached faces of the groom’s older relatives. Colette and Aldous had made their escape quickly and had travelled back to London alone, leaving Janus to run amok in Bournemouth. A stupid thing for them to have done, but it had been Aldous’s suggestion. ‘If we go now Janus will probably be stuck down there for the weekend and we’ll get some peace at home.’
They did get some peace. Janus was held in a Bournemouth police station for Saturday night and most of Sunday. Lesley had had to bail him out. The letters that came from High Wycombe shortly afterwards were carefully measured in their mixture of indignation and sympathy. How dare you leave us to deal with Janus, but now we see what you have to put up with, were their gist.
Colette was vaguely aware, as Madeleine walked over to her, holding an empty sherry glass in one hand and a jar of homemade blackberry jam in the other, that she hadn’t yet apologized for that incident, to either Lesley or Madeleine. They hadn’t met since, and Colette still had the letter of apology she composed and never posted, in her old needlework box, along with all the other unfinished, never-to-be-posted letters she had written over the years, most of which began ‘Dear Madeleine, I won’t beat about the bush, I think you are a cow . . .’
‘I’m so sorry, Madeleine, about Christine’s wedding,’ she said.
Madeleine affected great surprise.
‘Sorry? Whatever for. It was a tremendous success.’
‘Sorry about Janus and his antics that day.’
Madeleine closed her eyes and gently shook her head.
‘Colette, if there is one thing that gives me a constant supply of energy and happiness as I grow older, it is the knowledge that my daughter that day married one of the finest men in Bournemouth. The memory of your son’s self-debasement and humiliation has completely faded and died in the shadow of Christine’s happiness, except of course, to give me concern for yourself and Aldous’s poor plight in having to cope with him. Is he still as terrible as ever?’
‘Aldous is fine,’ said Colette.
‘I meant Janus,’ Madeleine laughed embarrassedly.
‘Well, he still enjoys his drink, like we all do,’ she looked down at Lesley, still sitting silently on the couch. He gave a polite, non-comprehending smile in return.
After an awkward pause Madeleine became aware of what she was holding. She held it out for Colette.
‘Anyway, Colette, this is for you. The blackberries grow all along the alley at the end of the garden, so last summer I finally found the time to make some jam. I’ve got far more than we could ever use.’
Colette took the preserve.
‘How nice,’ she said.
The jam was one of those barbs that Madeleine was always firing at her, compliments, kindnesses, gifts, but each with an inward pointing hook that stuck and hung in the flesh until it festered. She had become very skilful at it. A neutral observer would never have known what blackberry jam meant to these two women – how Colette’s garden was so overrun with blackberries they could have outdone Robertson’s in the production of blackberry jam. How in the days when Lesley and Madeleine had been regular visitors to Fernlight Avenue Colette and Madeleine were always talking about the blackberries, Colette saying how she was going to make lots of jam that summer, Madeleine how she was looking forward to having some. But Colette never made their blackberries into jam. The children ate what they could off the bush, but there were too many even for them. The rest rotted on their stems. But now Madeleine was making the jam, and giving it to her. Madeleine may as well have stabbed Colette and written across her forehead incapable wife and mother, in blackberry jam.
But Colette took the jam thankfully, smilingly, knowing it would sit in the larder uneaten for months, even years, forgotten about among the relics of that cupboard, to be rediscovered one day, opened, and found do be an inch deep in fungus. Colette’s family had never much taken to jam, or marmalade. She bought it occasionally, on a whim, thinking it to be a treat, and perhaps a quarter of the jar would get used, then it would go runny, and greasy with the butter that had carelessly got in, and then it would be forgotten about.
‘Although I say it is unnecessary for you to apologize to me about Christine’s wedding,’ Madeleine went on, ‘you might like to have a few words with Christine herself, I’m sure she’d appreciate it.’
‘Christine’s here?’ said Colette, surprised.
‘Over there,’ said Madeleine, pointing across the room, where Colette could just glimpse between the crowds, a figure of a woman in deep purple, sitting on a coffee table, who looked nothing like the Christine she remembered from that summer in the late sixties when she had been a regular visitor to Fernlight Avenue, the summer during which her friendship with Janus had blossomed. Then she had been a girl – happy, pretty, willing to please. It felt as though that was the last time she had seen her, because at the wedding she was all veiled and tucked away in her silk. Now, having passed through the chrysalis stage of her wedding, it seemed, she had emerged as a mature woman, still pretty, in a soft, dreamy, dark sort of way, but serious, confident and rather sad.
Madeleine having retreated into the crowd, Colette made her way across the room in an awkward and slow zigzag towards Christine, preparing the long apologetic speech she had wanted to deliver for a long time, not just for the wedding, but for the awful way Janus had treated her before that, when their friendship had come to an end – hounding her with phone calls, writing her a long series of childish, haranguing letters, once abandoning her in the middle of London without any money. But as she nears she feels a nervousness creep up on her. It was to do with Christine’s beauty and confidence, two female qualities which always unsettled Colette, since she had always felt a distinct lack of both. She passed close by where Christine was sitting, noticing the man she was talking to, who had cropped hair and round wire glasses, in the Auschwitz-survivor style John Lennon had recently adopted. She then realized that this man was the same hirsute hippy Christine had married herself to in Bournemouth, only then he was mimicking John Lennon’s long-hair phase. Feeling a sudden rush of panic as she neared the coffee table on which Christine was sitting, she felt unable to break into their conversation, and passed quickly by, as if having something important to attend to in the kitchen.
She would catch Christine later, she thought. She had always liked Christine, but had always feared she would grow into a woman like her mother. Having married that deranged-looking teacher had given Colette some hope, since she detected some disapproval in Madeleine, despite her long eulogy to her daughter’s happiness.
The kitchen, too, was crowded with strangers. She made for the cool air of the garden, which was empty.
When the kids had been younger they’d loved visiting Janus Brian for his garden. He would always begin by giving them a formal tour, where they would stand patiently and a little nervously while their uncle named all the plants, usually in Latin, telling them when they’d been planted, when they were expected to flower, or fruit. Then, the tour over, the adults would retire indoors while the kids ran riot in the flower-beds and vegetable patches, destroying most of the plants whose names they’d already forgotten.
It was always with a loud sigh of relief that Janus Brian saw them off the premises in the evening.
The garden now was as perfect as she remembered it from those days, already colourful with spring flowers – daffodils and hyacinths sprouting on the rockeries, crocuses peeping through the little lawns. Colette climbed the crooked stone path that took her through the different levels of the garden, past the dainty oval lawn backed by ornamental firs and its rustic bench, through the wattle-made laburnum arch to another tiny lawn, then past a dwarf willow and the herb garden to the level area where there was a long lawn on one side, the vegetable patch on the other – canes and trellises, ranks of winter and spring vegetables, frames, a greenhouse, netting, a little shed. More food grew here than could possibly be consumed by wan, wispy Janus Brian. Odd that a man who grew such an abundance of wholesome food in his garden should always look so undernourished.
Beyond the lawn and the vegetable patch, where the garden ended, was the garden’s real treasure. Through the tall trees could be seen a railway cutting, and in it, the rails that carried the little silver trains of the Piccadilly Line above ground. They passed so frequently the kids had never had to wait long to watch them rattling past. Colette watched them now, through the trees, and tried to remember the childish thrill of trains. These trains weren’t up to much, however, not to a woman who’d travelled on the Silver Streak and the Flying Scotsman, leaning dangerously out of the carriage windows to watch those magnificent locomotives as they’d taken the bends on their way to the north. They could hardly be called trains at all, and they always looked so weak and vulnerable above ground, these tube trains, like snails out of their shells.
‘I thought I’d find you here.’
Colette jumped, then turned to see Janus Brian standing close behind her.
‘Janus don’t,’ she said, a hand to her chest, ‘you nearly gave me a . . .’
‘Sorry. I just had to get out of that house. Mary’s friends are driving me nuts. They keep saying how brave I am. If I was really brave I’d tell them all to shove off and leave me in peace.’
Colette laughed.
‘I’m just remembering the times we used to come here when the children were young. With Nana, do you remember? The children loved it. Nana too. She was always very complimentary about your garden.’
Janus Brian, without altering the expression on his face, simply said, ‘Nana was a dream, dear.’
‘How can you say that, Janus Brian, about your own mother?’
It had upset her greatly when Janus Brian had first started denying the existence of the past in this way. Whenever she had related some anecdote from their childhood, a fond memory she wanted to share – the time their floppy Airedale Barry fell into the river Lea or the time a drunk from The Flowerpot tried to turn the water in the pond on Clapton Common into wine, Janus Brian would wait politely for Colette to finish, and then say, always with that same dry tone of pity, ‘Barry was a dream, dear. The water into wine was a dream. It was all a dream.’
Aldous knew how it upset her. She was often in tears as he drove her home along the winding suburban back roads.
‘What did he mean – Nana was a dream?’
‘I don’t know. It’s just his way of . . .’
‘Way of what?’
‘He doesn’t like talking about the past.’
‘Why doesn’t he?’
‘I don’t know. Don’t take any notice of him.’
‘I don’t like being told my whole life is a dream,’ Colette held pink lavatory paper to her eyes, crimping it with tears, ‘Nana wasn’t a dream, she was real.’
‘I know.’
‘He’ll say I’m a dream next. Is that what he thinks? Everything is a dream?’
‘I don’t know.’
Now, in her brother’s garden, where she can almost see the ghost of her mother reaching up to sniff the lilacs, the delightful phantoms of her children tumbling in the flower beds, she feels a strong urge to question her brother.
‘You don’t really mean it, do you, when you say that? You don’t really think Nana was a dream?’
‘Do you remember those lines from that poem in Alice in Wonderland, how does it go –
Ever drifting down the stream,
Lingering in the golden gleam,
Life, what is it but a dream?’
‘I never liked Carroll’s serious poems. He could be very sentimental.’
‘But true all the same. What is the past? Dreams and dust. And not even much dust. Would you like some tomato sherry?’
For the first time Colette’s attention is drawn to the objects in Janus Brian’s hands. A wine bottle and a glass. He holds up the bottle for her inspection, it has a plain label bearing Janus Brian’s cramped handwriting. Tomato Sherry – 1972.
‘The coffee morning dragons have got through all the off-licence stuff, so I’m reduced to raiding my wine cellar. It’s not proving too popular for some reason.’
He poured some into the empty sherry glass Colette had with her. She remembered now. Those little gifts she used to get at Christmas, or on departure from a visit – Cucumber Wine, Cauliflower Champagne, Brussel Sprout Whisky. That was where all the fruit and vegetables from this extensive kitchen garden went – into the fermentation bins of Janus Brian’s home brewing kits. She took a sip of the tomato sherry and felt as though something had jumped out of the glass and punched her in the nose. Janus Brian’s home-brew was always like that. Unbelievably potent, and sweet to the point of burning, though her tongue, these days seasoned by regular drinking of barley wines, was more able to cope with it, and she downed it quickly for a refill.
‘You know, dear, all my life I have been scared of death, but since Mary died I have come to the conclusion that it is life that’s the really frightening thing.’
They sat on a bench that looked as though it had been made by seven dwarves, and shared the bottle of sherry together. Janus went on, ‘Religion is supposed to make us cope with death, but we need something to make life bearable . . .’ He suddenly looked at the full glass in his hand, then drank thoughtfully. ‘That’s what I was thinking all the way through the service. Did you understand a word that priest was saying? He had a very strange accent . . .’
‘He was German.’
‘And I was thinking all the time that we should be praying for ourselves, not Mary. Mary’s gone. It’s the people left behind that are suffering . . .’
‘She isn’t gone, not really, stop saying that,’ said Colette. She didn’t like this line of thinking that her brother was so insistent on pushing, partly because she felt it was true. She was not there to mourn Mary, but to talk to Janus Brian, and as far as she could tell, Mary had been all but forgotten about already amongst the nattering mourners. Mary was the past, and she was rapidly being overwritten by the present.
‘Oh I know you still believe in heaven and all that ghostly stuff. But I never have. Not even as a little boy. I could always see, even from infancy, that it didn’t make sense. The same with Father Christmas, the tooth fairy. I always knew it was just a trick.’
Colette remembered the Christmas Eve when Janus Brian had rigged a little web of cotton across the fireplace, a mesh of barely visible black thread taped to the surround. He’d called it his Father Christmas trap. On Christmas morning, he took the fact that it hadn’t been broken as conclusive proof that Father Christmas didn’t exist.
‘What is that you’ve got in your hand?’
Janus Brian uttered the last remark as though it was a question he’d been burning to ask.
‘Oh, just some of Madeleine’s jam. A little reminder of what a terrible mother I am,’ she said.
In the house the absence of the pair went almost unnoticed. The coffee morning women in their dark frocks chatted mostly with each other. Aldous found himself trapped with someone from the local branch of the Labour Party where Mary had been a voluntary helper for many years, and had to endure a long panegyric to Mr Wilson ‘. . . he’s no fool you know. He’s a fellow of the Royal Society . . .’ and after escaping several such encounters, f
ound himself in a circle that included Lesley and Reg Moore, Janus Brian’s oldest friend and Mary’s brother.
‘Bloody good stuff,’ said Reg, hiccuping stupidly, ‘Janus certainly knows how to make a good wine.’
As a regular visitor to the house, Reg knew where the wine was kept, and felt obliged to help himself for the sake of the guests whose glasses were beginning to run dry.
‘It’s not bad at all,’ said Lesley, who disguised his avid consumption of the liquor as a connoisseur’s interest in taste, continually twirling his glass, sniffing the bouquet, then downing it in one for another sample, ‘fruity. Very fruity.’
‘Got quite a kick as well, hasn’t it?’ said Reg.
Lesley shrugged and wagged his head, as if to say the ‘kick’ was not important.
‘What do you think, Aldous? But Methodists don’t drink alcohol, do they? Is that why you’re on the orange juice?’
‘You’re not a Methodist are you, Rex?’ said Lesley, downing another glass and looking at his old friend blearily.
‘Of course I’m not a Methodist,’ Aldous replied, charmed to hear the middle name no one but Lesley and Madeleine ever used.
‘No, of course you’re not,’ said Lesley, relieved to have got it straight in his mind, ‘you converted to marry my sister.’
‘Ah, that was your first mistake,’ said Reg, swaying. His lips were shiny, his speech beginning to slur, ‘changing your religion for the sake of a woman . . . A man with any sense would have insisted the woman change to his religion, not the other way round. You should have told Colette she had to become a Methodist.’
‘I don’t think the Methodists are that fussy about who they marry. It’s just the Catholics that make a fuss,’ said Lesley, ‘isn’t that right, Rex?’
I’ll Go To Bed At Noon Page 3