by Judy Astley
Heather felt dismissed. The phone rang minutes later and Heather wandered into her bedroom fully expecting it to be Annabelle, on the talk-of-the-devil basis.
‘Hello Heather-Feather, you certainly know how to give a man a surprise,’ Iain’s voice purred down the phone. She could almost picture his lazy smile, could see his mocking eyes narrowed, cat-like. She imagined him sprawled across Margot’s chintz sofa, his bony fingers playing with a cigarette as he spoke.
‘Why are you calling?’ she asked him abruptly, infuriated by his use of the old pet-name.
‘Hey, sorry!’ he laughed as if she was being childishly aggressive. ‘Couldn’t I just be calling to ask after your daughter? Has she recovered from her soaking?’ Heather said nothing. ‘You do remember I rescued her?’ he went on, slightly less fun in his voice.
‘Of course I do. She’s fine. She swims breast stroke for her school team and had a county gymnastics trial, so her balance is spot-on. She jumped in on purpose and didn’t need pulling out. But thanks anyway.’
‘Uh-oh, sarcasm I sense. It’s sooo long since I’ve had girls throwing themselves into deep water for me,’ he continued.
Heather suppressed a shriek of fury. ‘Good grief, you don’t imagine it was your attention she was after do you?’ she said with a burst of laughter, wishing immediately she’d been a little less emphatic, that she was capable of simple cool disinterest.
‘Actually Heather,’ Iain became more business-like, abandoning the drawling banter, ‘actually, I thought that as fate seems to have thrown us together for a few weeks, perhaps it would be nice to have lunch and do a spot of catching up.’
Heather gasped. ‘You want to do twenty-five years of catching up over lunch?’ she asked, incredulous. ‘Why on earth do you think I’d want to see you?’ She could hear Tom down in the hallway. Any minute he’d be up making enquiring faces from the doorway and trying to find out who she was talking to. She pulled her dressing-gown tightly around her and wished she was fully, defensively dressed.
‘Curiosity?’ Iain suggested.
‘About what?’ she snorted back.
‘Oh come on Heather, it would be such fun, just for old time’s sake. Perhaps I could meet the rest of your family; they must be curious about your old ex from the past, even if you’re not.’ Such arrogance, Heather thought, as if she’d rushed home like an over-excited child from the party and talked about nothing else. She hesitated; it would perhaps be useful to talk to him, to see if he had developed a better nature she could appeal to, in the little matter of her family knowing nothing about him. ‘OK lunch tomorrow then,’ she stated. ‘The Beetle and Wedge at Moulsford, 12.30. Don’t, whatever you do, mention it to Margot – or anyone.’ This necessary request made her feel vulnerable, which she detested.
Iain laughed, misunderstanding. ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be our secret. Just like the old days, huh?’
‘No Iain. It isn’t at all like the old days,’ she replied, then hung up.
Chapter Eight
Maddening man. Heather was still fuming about Iain when she drove Delia (with Jasper) to the clinic. He’d got the better of her, just as he always had when she was a silly and impressionable teenager. He’d made her feel so daring then, persuading her to lie and defy her mother’s curfews, and dally the hours away in bed with him. He hadn’t been the one who’d had to invent whoppers about staying the night with a friend who needed homework help (‘a whole Wordsworth project, honestly it’ll take hours’). He hadn’t been the one who’d then had to get up while it was still dark to rush back to school on unreliable trains, dashing in after assembly, signing the late book and pretending excuses about alarm clocks. In his Chelsea flat, she recalled vividly, he’d had the first duvet she’d ever seen. It had been called a Puffin Downlet, an exotic piece of bed-furnishing at a time when no-one knew how to pronounce ‘duvet’, or had yet decreed that the term ‘continental quilt’ was destined to become obsolete. This was an era when people used their wedding present bedlinen till it wore out, and replaced it with pastel sheets only if they were really artistic and daringly experimental with colour co-ordination. The only function of beds was to accommodate sleepers in inhospitably chilly rooms, so Heather knew instinctively that only the dangerously louche and decadent made their beds into such tempting nests as Iain had. The room had been the warmest in the flat, and there had been covers for the duvet in stylish maroon and chocolate colours; his cleaning lady had hated changing them, struggling to match corners with corners and complaining that the the zip-openings had been too small. There’d been one cover in dizzying op-art black-and-white squares on which Heather was terribly sick when she’d drunk too much vodka and orange juice. At the time he’d asked her, with perverse amusement, ‘Did you feel it was lacking colour?’
‘I’m surprised you wanted to come out. I’d have thought you’d want to spend Tom’s last day with him,’ Delia’s voice trilled across from the back seat.
‘Tom’s always having “last days”, Mother. We don’t make a big song and dance about it, it’s just his job. And anyway I’ve got mine to do; if I don’t get these plants delivered to Julia Merriman, it’ll be all round the village that I’m just a dabbling amateur.’
‘Men like someone to fuss,’ Delia warned. ‘If they can’t get it at home, they’ll look for it somewhere else.’
It would have been decidedly cruel of Heather to ask what Delia could possibly know about it. Perhaps she was a bit casual about Tom, but surely better that than a tearful goodbye and frantic welcome every time he went to work and returned safely. As a family they weren’t fractured and helpless without his daily presence – it wouldn’t exactly make him happy to imagine they were. While he was up in the sky making the tricky descent into Hong Kong, he shouldn’t have to worry about whether his wife was capable of ordering the right heating oil, or unblocking the sink. And wouldn’t a massive last-supper goodbye rather imply that his job was unacceptably dangerous and that it was a constant miracle that he returned at all? Sometimes he was only gone three days – how could anyone keep up the necessary level of emotion over the years that her mother thought appropriate?
‘At least he was there for your friend’s party,’ Delia said with a sigh, as if the event would give Tom fond thoughts of home to comfort him during lonely foreign nights. ‘It was quite fun really, wasn’t it? I do like to see a good mixture,’ she added, making Heather, who was trying to overtake a lurching minibus, think immediately of a rich fruit cake.
‘I saw you having a chat with Nigel’s mother,’ Heather commented, praying to get the party covered without mention of Kate’s rescuer.
‘Oh yes, I liked Clarissa. Now she is a lady,’ Delia said with a satisfied sigh. ‘You could tell by the hat. Do you know, she’s invited me to Slingsby Court to have a look at the roses.’
Heather smiled at her through the mirror. ‘Well that will be lovely, the roses there are wonderful. Some are centuries old . . .’ but Delia had a faraway look and her hand was up, gently patting at her old straw boater.
‘Perhaps I should pop into Oxford and get a new hat . . .’ she was murmuring.
Just as Heather assumed with relief that they were safely past the subject of Margot’s party, Delia’s attention flashed back over it like a radar beam. ‘By the way, dear, is it wise to let Kate have alcohol? Is that why she needed pulling out of the pool? And who was that man?’
The barrage of questions rained over Heather from the back seat, and she almost felt she should cower for safety, like the child of jokey parents who shout ‘duck!’ when driving under a low bridge. ‘Hey, one thing at a time!’ she said, forcing a laugh. ‘Kate wasn’t that drunk, she could easily have climbed out by herself. And . . .’ she chose her words carefully, ‘I couldn’t tell you who he was. Just someone Russell and Margot know, I suppose. Something to do with the film.’ Of course she couldn’t tell her mother who he was, not unless she wanted to see a demonstration of instant apoplexy.
‘Look
ed vaguely familiar, I thought. One of those tricky sorts of men. I don’t know where I’ve seen him before, but it’ll come to me, you mark my words,’ she warned.
Heather managed another brittle laugh. ‘Honestly Mother, if everyone had “marked your words”, as you put it, over the years, we’d all have seen the complete failure of decimal currency, Concorde wouldn’t have got off the ground and Margaret Thatcher would never have got off the back benches.’
Through the mirror, as Heather sped down the last straight stretch of road, she could see Delia frowning, deep in thought. ‘Hmm, we’ll see,’ she was saying, nodding ominously.
They were approaching the clinic. Heather turned the Renault off the road and onto the winding, laurel-lined drive. It reminded her very much of the entrance to a crematorium: discreet and leafy, one’s final destination not revealed till the last possible moment, just a soothing pathway decorated with clumps of inoffensively subdued bedding plants, as if to distract gently from the awful reality and keep it well hidden from those whose turn it wasn’t quite yet. The view could hardly make any difference to those whose turn it was. She wondered if this ever crossed the wandering minds of new residents to the clinic as they arrived – that their next journey could be the one for which this was so like a dress-rehearsal, even to the extent that old and sick people were always put in the back of the car, as if they were already half-corpses on whom a front-seat view would be wasted.
‘You’ll just pop in, won’t you dear, just to say hello,’ Delia said to Heather as she climbed out of the car. ‘Stay there, Jasper.’ The dog growled crossly. Delia looked nervous, as if half dreading that she was about to be met by a sorrowful nurse waiting to tell her that Edward, sadly, had just that moment passed away, but there was no reason why she couldn’t just come and see him, looking so peaceful as he was . . .
Heather looked at her watch. ‘I’m supposed to be at Julia’s . . .’ she started saying. Also, could she trust the dog not to get fractious and start chewing at the camellias which were crammed into the space behind the back seat?
‘He’ll be so pleased, you know. At that age, there aren’t many left to visit.’ Guilt won her over easily and she locked the car, sighing. Delia adjusted her snug pink hat and smiled contentedly at Heather as if she might, after all these difficult years, seem to have the makings of quite a dutiful daughter. I’m nowhere near assertive enough, Heather thought as she walked in through the clinic’s main entrance hall. But then, there wasn’t a lot to be assertive about. How stingy could she be with a mere ten more minutes, after all?
Uncle Edward was in bed this time, with a nurse checking his pulse. She wore a more starchily traditional uniform than was nowadays seen in National Health hospitals, rather as if acknowledging that private patients were paying for a return to old standards. She did not have a name-tag with ‘Sandra’ etched on to it, such as Delia had been so furious about when finally making her painful way up the waiting list and achieving a few hours in the Day Surgery unit in Putney, to have her veins done the previous year.
‘Mr Phelps is feeling a little tired today,’ she explained quietly with what her mother’s smile told Heather was the right amount of deference. She heard a slight sharp exhalation from Delia and recognized that she had been holding her breath, waiting to see if the nurse committed the terrible chummy sin of addressing her patient by his first name. Worse even could have been ‘Eddie’, Heather thought, glad the nurse had passed the test.
She looked at Edward, shrunken and skinny in the ice-white bed. The curtains were only half open, and the pale sparkle of his eyes looked dulled. How much worse can he get? she wondered with pity. What a long drawn-out process a diseased end of life was. What sort of state must his insides be in, if his outer appearance was so ravaged and frail? Had his bones powdered away their strength, shedding scales of worn-out calcium like flakes of dandruff? Were his organs crinkled and drained, like his skin? Heather tried not to shudder at the terror of fading vitality.
Startling her, Edward’s eyes turned suddenly towards her, and his hand shot out quickly and grabbed her, strong as an owl’s claw, just as she remembered it from her childhood. He grinned, showing toothless, pale gums. ‘Bring the little girl again for me?’ he asked, child-like, almost a whine. ‘Little Heather,’ he said, before drifting back into half-life.
‘Won’t be long now, I dare say,’ Delia said to Heather outside Edward’s room. She sounded very matter-of-fact, less as if she was talking about imminent death than as if she was waiting for a train and had just seen the level crossing gates opening at the end of the platform.
‘Ssh, he’ll hear you,’ Heather said, moving them both away towards the reception area.
‘Will you bring Kate again for him? He’d love that, you know. And Suzy too, he should see her,’ Delia asked.
‘I don’t know. It’s so depressing for them. And he doesn’t really know them. He thinks Kate is me.’
‘Well let him. He was happy back in those days. Why not let him pretend a bit?’
‘I’ll ask her,’ Heather conceded. ‘And now I really must go. I’ll collect you later. What about the dog?’
‘Oh I can’t have him here dear, you take him with you – he’ll enjoy a run in your friend’s garden. And don’t worry about me, I’ll arrange for a taxi home. I shall like that.’ She patted Heather’s arm, then gave her a small but forceful push before turning back to Edward.
Heather felt as if she’d been sent out to play. Oh good grief, she thought, how did I get stuck with the awful Jasper? He sat panting eagerly on the back seat waiting to be praised for having caused no plant-damage. In spite of having left all the windows open, she opened the car door to a newly resident smell, non-specific but definitely of dog – a mixture of Jasper’s foul breath and flatulence. More of the qualities of ageing, Heather thought with depression. She felt superstitiously that her daughters should be kept safely away from the dying old man, as if decay was catching. It wasn’t as if Edward had something that could be usefully warned against, as if he’d been a sixty-a-day smoker brought to premature decay by his own foolishness. Then she could have said to them after a dispiriting visit, ‘There, now you know what happens if you smoke’, and let it stand as a warning. In his case, all she could say would be, ‘There, that’s what happens if you’re lucky enough to have a long life.’ Better to let them believe in immortal youth.
Suzy knew who had been in the garden the night before. She knew even before she found his Zippo lighter on the grass by the dock. When Jasper started barking in the middle of the night, her light had been the first to go on, almost as if she had been waiting for Simon. She’d caught just the briefest sighting of him in his delicious leather jacket, sprinting down the lawn, past the paddock until he’d disappeared by the willows. For just one fleeting, thrilled, half-awake moment, she had imagined that he’d come for her. Now, in the midday heat she led her hot and dusty pony into the shade of the paddock oak tree and started to give him a thorough brushing. She worked hard, trying to eliminate by sheer mind-numbing physical effort the hopeless stupidity she’d felt after that blissful millisecond, when she realized exactly who Simon had come looking for. When, oh when, she pleaded to the guardian angels of adolescent girls, would she get a body like Kate’s? Surely Kate, at very nearly fourteen, hadn’t looked so like a juvenile stick-insect? Suzy leaned her head against the pony’s chunky withers and wished she could weep dramatically. However hard she squeezed her eyelids and thought of the Ginger’s death scene from Black Beauty, she couldn’t manage to cry unless something physically hurt. She still easily howled for a grazed knee or banged elbow, but really creative crying, the sort where sad tears trickled down a perfectly still and beautiful face, this was beyond her. Perhaps if she could produce these instant magic tears, then Simon would just happen to come looking for his lighter, and find her, and comfort her . . .
‘What on earth are you doing?’ Tamsin’s strident voice startled the pony, and his head bounced up
, knocking Suzy off-balance.
‘Bluebell! You stupid animal!’ she yelled at him as she stumbled against the tree, grazing her arm. Tears did threaten then, just when she didn’t want them.
‘Thump him. They have to learn,’ Tamsin advised from a safe distance, leaning against the paddock fence.
‘No, he didn’t mean it. You frightened him,’ Suzy said, recovering quickly and stroking the pony calm again. His eyes were wary of Tamsin, who wore discomfiting fuchsia pink. ‘He’s probably worried someone might want him to go out for a ride. He thinks it’s too hot, and he doesn’t want to run about or carry anyone.’
‘He’s a bit small for carrying anyone over six,’ Tamsin said scornfully. ‘How do you know what he’s thinking anyway? Do they think?’
‘Bluebell does,’ Suzy told her defiantly, continuing gently with her brushing. She felt as if Tamsin was insulting a favourite teddy bear, laughing at love for an outgrown toy. He was so comfortingly soft to lean on when she felt miserable, the least she could do was defend him.
Tamsin idly adjusted her bra strap, a habit that Suzy had more than once bravely told her was really annoying. The black elastic pinged against her chubby pink shoulder and she said, ‘Ouch that hurt. This thing is getting really tight.’ Suzy went on brushing, too miserable to rise to the showing off. ‘You should have stayed over with me last night,’ Tamsin started saying, getting on with the point of her visit, ‘Shane got really friendly.’ She perched on top of the fence to get a good view of Suzy’s reactions.
‘Oh yeah? So what happened?’ Suzy asked.
‘Well, Dopey Darren was going off home with Loopy Lisa, and said to Shane “Are you coming?” and I looked at Shane and he looked at me and said “No not yet.”’
‘And? What then?’