Before and After

by Lockington, Laura

  I turned the light off and listened to the house settle into the darkness. Marmaduke was breathing heavily just outside my door on the landing and it was a comforting sound, perhaps taking me back to primeval times when we all, so we are told, huddled together in caves for warmth and relied on hearing other breathing patterns for safety and comfort. I say so we are told, because, frankly, after having visited some of these so called Neolithic sites it strikes me as highly unlikely that any ancestors of mine would have willingly settled for such a bleak existence. All those sites are depressingly barren and windy, miles away from water or shelter. We may all have been Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal but we weren’t all stupid.

  The house creaked and groaned with the end of the day’s warmth and activities and all that could be heard was the light sound of Flora Tate sleeping the sleep of the just, perhaps unjustly.

  Along the corridor Archie Amble was muttering curses under his breath and debating whether to invade Sylvia’s bedroom where a perfectly decent three-quarter bed was his for the taking. Wasn’t it? He eyed his single billet with distaste. It was bloody uncomfortable. No wonder Aunt Edith didn’t like staying there. He thought of Flora lying in his bed, and groaned softly to himself. Bloody woman. He could surely go to his wife and sleep with her? Indeed, he got as far as the door, when he stopped. Sylvia hadn’t exactly been inviting. Maybe she was enjoying a room of her own? Wasn’t that the title of some damn silly book by that Bloomsbury woman who looked like a horse? He sighed again and gloomily wrapped himself in a duvet. He thought wildly of taking a room in a hotel for the night, but dismissed it as frivolous and extravagant and with the money that was being thrown around with the re-decoration, not to mention Flora’s more than generous fee… How old was Flora, anyway? He couldn’t tell. Sometimes she looked like a damn fine filly, other times a touch of mutton dressed as lamb. It was all very confusing. And what the hell was his daughter doing rubbing her feet? Archie suddenly thought of a picture he’d once seen in an art gallery somewhere long ago in the days when, to keep Sylvia happy, he’d traipsed around the major cultural buildings in Europe. Where was it? Florence? Paris? Amsterdam? He couldn’t remember. But the picture came, clear and unbidden into his head. The washing of Mary Magdalene’s feet. A jumble of Lapis Lazuli blues and golds flooded his memory, but the face, oh the face was Flora’s, with an almost ecstatic sacred rapture on her face as he remembered it. He also remembered thinking that there was something damn fishy, not to mention very queer, about a woman who could practically have an orgasm by having her feet cleaned. But that’s artists for you. Daft buggers.

  Sylvia Amble was sitting at a dressing table, gazing in the mirror whilst brushing her hair. Her face was a picture of puzzlement. The confusion came with the knowledge that she could brush and brush her mousy jaw-length hair and it would never reach the cascading glory that was Flora’s. Although with a moment of unclouded vision Sylvia knew that Flora must dye her hair. Nothing was that colour naturally. Nothing. Sylvia reached for a pot of cold cream and began rubbing it gently into her face, but nothing that she knew of, up to and including a date with the top plastic surgeon in Europe, would give her the glowing healthy skin of Flora Tate. On impulse Sylvia shifted her lips into a snarl to expose her teeth in the reflection. Up till now she had been proud of her teeth, even, regular and small with very wet-palmed, white- knuckled visits to the dentist, but now they were simply dull and ordinary compared to the pearly viciousness of Flora’s. Perhaps hers were caps or implants, Sylvia thought hopefully, then sighed. Even Flora’s feet were perfect. She didn’t yet trust herself to think of any other part of Flora’s anatomy. Sylvia was mildly astonished at her lack of despair at these comparisons. There was a certain resignation that Flora was of course younger (wasn’t she?) healthier, childless - or in moments by herself Sylvia termed it child free - at least she assumed she was, and children were very age making, and she was, well, she was, oh god, vibrant, sexy, confident… Sylvia felt an undeniable prick of pride that Flora was staying in her house, sleeping in her bed. It was nothing like the pride she had felt when Hal won the sprint at sports day, or when Bella had made her first successful sponge cake – in fact nothing like it at all – it was more a feeling of a white hunter who’d bagged his first tiger and was swigging gin round the camp fire with a few fellow big game seekers. Sylvia tilted her head to one side and stared at her eyes in the looking glass. There was none of the tigerish quality in her, but she recognised it in Flora. There was an animal serenity in Flora that reminded Sylvia of a large cat. No-one she had ever met before was so comfortable, so lithe, or so feminine in her own skin. Sylvia continued brushing until her arm ached and static flew between the hairbrush and her hair. The stray thought occurred to her that, like a large cat, perhaps Flora was not quite to be trusted. And after all, who wants to live with a tiger? Surely a domesticated tabby was the better companion? Sylvia sighed again.

  Further away, in the stripped and echoing house, Bella was in a deep sleep, dreaming of the feet of an angel descending from heaven wearing a full white net tutu. Whilst, in his room, Hal was reading up on the internet all he could discover about the fur trade. It seemed like a truly terrible career move to him. He was wondering if he should boast of his afternoon’s near seduction via e-mail to his friends, or would they consider it gross? Flora wasn’t eighteen…or even the unthinkably ancient age of twenty-five, at least he didn’t think so. It was impossible to tell.

  Maria Kandinsky was kneeling at the foot of her bed, which was in a room tucked off behind the kitchen, praying. The Amble family that had seemed like saviours to her three short years ago and had provided the sanctuary that she craved, was changing. Maria didn’t know how or why, but with the finely tuned instincts of all her peasant blood that lay close to the earth and to the animals, with the knowledge of the moon and the stars and the turn of the seasons, she knew it. Something was wrong in this house. Anything that felt like change to Maria was shocking. She craved the stability that she had never had, and it was, she suspected beginning to ebb away from her, just when she thought she’d found it. She felt the rosary slip with practiced ease through her fingers and began to pray. ‘Oh Lord deliver us from evil, Jesus Christ have mercy upon us…’ Maria’s whispered sibilants barely made it past the kitchen and were certainly not heard by anyone else.

  Rule Number Seven

  “Change for change’s sake is the best kind of change—contrary to popular belief. Deftly altering the fabric of daily life can produce momentous changes. A tweak here, a tweak there. Few changes are as a significant as a change of location. Or scenery, in the patois.”

  Saturday mornings were usually a progression of snatched breakfasts and weekly chores for the Ambles. Sylvia would preside over the large blue and white teapot, ruefully waiting for her family to gather round her. Perhaps Hal might have a sports fixture on that required her chauffeuring skills (a new car was in the offing for Hal but neither she nor Archie were keen to pay the whacking insurance that Hal’s age and their post code demanded), Archie might have paperwork to look over, Bella would certainly need help with some school project or other. Then there were the smaller, more pleasurable tasks. Re-stocking the wine cellar, maybe a trip to a gallery, tickets for a play, taking Marmaduke to the park, all of those dull domestic duties that made up the week fell to Sylvia to vaguely organise.

  I knew this without having read any of the now scattered notes.

  I knew that Sylvia dreaded weekends, when she felt obscurely denied. Her children didn’t need her. Her husband didn’t need her. Maria looked askance at her if she ventured into the kitchen or picked up a duster. Sometimes Sylvia wondered what it was that other women did at weekends, women in her position. Which was, she was only too well aware, horribly privileged. What did they do in the lonely hours of the long days when all around them was the ticking of time and space? Sylvia had tried many things to occupy the time, but nothing had taken root in her heart. Things were either too trivial (tapestry, p
ilates, growing African violets) or too hard (oil painting, yoga, learning Spanish) for any success rate.

  Sylvia was a woman on the edge. On the edge of what, she didn’t quite know, but she felt the ground crumbling beneath her feet and was staring into an abyss that she didn’t know was there. Of course, she’d seen other women fall. There was the unfortunate case of a neighbour whom she’d seen furtively unloading crates and crates, or so it had seemed, of vodka from the back of her Range rover. The woman had caught her eye and had laughingly explained that she was expecting some Russian visitors, but Sylva had felt her tension and humiliation. The encounter had chilled her to the marrow. It had also set her thinking. What was it like to crave a drink mid morning? She couldn’t imagine it. Sylvia had never drunk to excess, the mere thought of it made her panic, she’d never smoked, never been wild enough to try any sort of recreational drug (not that there was much on offer in her youth and her social circle, but there had been daring mention of something called a purple heart or a black bomber when she’d been much younger). She was not what you would call, the possessor of an addictive personality. She certainly didn’t have the ‘let’s-get-blasted’ gene in her anatomical make up. But she did wonder now and again.

  She’d seen a programme once on BBC4 about Shamanism, where the men of the tribe hunted animals in a forest with blow darts and believed that by taking a drug made from the sap of some unpronounceable tree gave them an insight to the hunted animal. The men had become wild eyed and fierce, looking to Sylvia as if they had tasted a pinch of feral paradise. Staring at the dark brutal men, dressed in scraps of fur and vibrant feathers sticking from their matted hair, Sylvia marvelled that they were even from the same species as her. It seemed impossible. The trembling dark limbs of the hunters didn’t compare the slightest to her feeble extremities. What was it like to feel as alive as that? Sylvia doubted that she’d ever know.

  Archie had watched the same programme, sitting next to Sylvia on an extremely comfortable sofa. All he had thought, if he had thought much at all, was a fleeting thank you to a god he didn’t believe in that he hadn’t been born in a third world country and have to scrabble about in a forest for food.

  The children had been otherwise occupied, but perhaps if Hal had watched he might have understood his mother’s rapt attention to the screen.

  Oh, how the Sylvia’s of this country are ripe for the plucking.

  I do what I can of course, but I am only a single individual, and can in no way take on the world (although given unlimited funds and a willing army of hand picked protégés…) Still, I have often wondered if some sort of universal league of the disenfranchised wealthy females would wreak the havoc that I suspect they could on an unsuspecting world. It’s a favourite fantasy that I re-play in my mind on the rare nights that sleep is elusive.

  This weekend would have to be different. It helped that the house was practically uninhabitable, though it would become much, much worse once some of the internal walls were knocked down. It gave me the excuse I needed to remove the Ambles from their lair. I needed them out of this house. But where to?

  I gave the matter my serious consideration as I lay in the bath. I rarely have showers, by the way, I find them far too hasty and they leave me feeling unwashed somehow. No, a good long soak in a tub, followed by a brisk rubdown with a towel that is only this short of being abrasive, is what I like. As I lay there, in the steaming heat, I pondered about the little properties that Archie was hiding. I had been correct (of course) that there was more to them than meets the eye. One call had put me right on that. It wasn’t the properties themselves that were valuable, although god knows bricks and mortar in a portfolio never go amiss, it was the location. The cottages were perched on an un-mined seam of Fullers Earth. Strange stuff, Fullers Earth. There are only three places in Europe that it’s found. And, like caviar, the rarer the commodity the higher the price. What’s it used for? Oh it goes into practically everything from paper to toothpaste. Of course, the bone of contention is that to get the stuff out of the ground, a very nasty scar on the landscape has to occur. Still, money finds a way doesn’t it? The Ramblers Association, Friends of the Earth and other no doubt worthy protestors had held up the mining of this product for some years now, but the case was grumbling along quite nicely.

  I lathered some very special soap (I have used the same product for years and order it direct from Paris where it was originally formulated for a sad, but flawlessly complexioned Empress) onto a sponge and carefully soaped between my toes.

  Archie had bought the properties long before the fact that the ground beneath the houses were holding onto to treasures became general knowledge. Sensible man. Insider trading is vastly under used in this country.

  As I was dressing there was a scuffling at the door, and I opened it to admit Marmaduke.

  “Well then, have you been showing off to the poodle next door?” I asked conversationally to the large yellow dog, as I softly stroked the place behind his ears that all canine friends enjoy.

  Marmaduke fixed me with a bashful stare. It seems that he had.

  He then lay at me feet, rolling onto his back.

  How often, when dogs assume this position do we hear the cry of – ‘Ooh, look, he wants his tummy tickled!’

  Pure nonsense. It’s merely a display of submission. It’s merely that the dog in question is allowing the most vulnerable part of his body to be chomped by jaws that he perceives to be greater than his own. I was the alpha female round here after all, wasn’t I?

  I finished dressing and slipped out of the door, I motioned Marmaduke to follow me, and together we crept slowly and silently down the stairs.

  Conversation from the kitchen was easy enough to hear if you pressed yourself flat against the wall just outside the door. Marmaduke, the lamb, lay quietly at my feet.

  “And I can’t even sit down and watch the golf. The bloody TV’s packed into a cardboard box somewhere,” Archie grumbled.

  “But it’s going to look lovely,” Bella said loyally.

  “I don’t want to even think about the final bill,” Archie continued his morning moan.

  I sensed that Sylvia was searching for the right words to soothe, but was unable to come up with anything.

  “Where is she, anyway?” Hal’s voice was low, but I could hear him clearly.

  “Oh, Flora says that she always has a late morning in bed at the weekend. It helps her to face the rigours of an English Saturday,” Bella said informatively, if a little indistinctly through a mouthful of toast.

  I smiled. Such loyalty would have to be rewarded.

  I heard Sylvia clear her throat in preparation to making an unpleasant comment. I heard a rustle of paper.

  “Bella, I’m going to show this letter from school to your father. It’s really very worrying. We’re not at all happy with you, are we Archie? Archie? “

  There was an ominous pause as Sylvia willed her husband to respond to her.

  I smiled again. I could imagine Archie’s face and guessed of his thoughts. He was finding this modern parenting lark a bit of a struggle. Frankly, he didn’t give a damn if his daughter didn’t do too well at school. What was the point of worrying about a few failed exams? If it had been Hal – well – that was different. Boys became men, and they had to succeed in his world, but women? As long as they could look pretty, play the piano and know how to interest the opposite sex, the status quo would be preserved.

  He’d seen so-called career women. There were a few of them where he worked. Struggling to remain feminine whilst breaking balls. Then juggling with child-care and the boardroom. Ridiculous.

  I thought I’d wait a few more moments before entering the kitchen, and my patience was rewarded.

  Sylvia had obviously got the bit between her teeth and wasn’t about to give up on what she thought was her husband’s indifference to the fate of their daughter.

  “Well, Bella, daddy and I have been thinking about things and we think that unless you buck your
ideas up a bit and study harder we’ll have to do something about it.” Sylvia said defiantly.

  “What? What are you going to do about it? Stop my allowance? Keep me in? I hardly get any money anyway and I never go out so that’s pointless,” Bella said boldly and truculently.

  Hal snorted with laughter.

  “Don’t be rude to your mother,” Archie said in a manner of man who had said the same words many times before with no hope of being obeyed.

  Family bickering is quaintly endearing, to my ears anyway. It was almost restful with its undercurrents of affection and familiarity. But then again, it was something I simply wasn’t used to, so it was hard to judge. I lay my hand on the kitchen door and pushed it open. The family turned, as a sunflower does in a field to follow the sun and looked at me. I fancied that I could almost see them basking in my rays. Perhaps this was what Louis, the Sun King felt like as he entered a room of supplicants.

  “Well, what a dismal morning it is,” I said, gesturing outside to the cold skies, and to the crowded table that they all had to sit around as their normal table was out of use.

  Bella jumped up to make room for me, and Sylvia asked if I would like a cup of tea. I nodded and went to sit down, watching Hal’s face flush as I smiled at him.

  “I do hope you all slept well?” I enquired, noting with amusement that the remains of a prairie oyster sat in front of Sylvia. Archie harrumphed and shook his newspaper, but the others all clamoured to assure me that they had indeed slept like babies.