But thank God Caroline is promiscuous. Thank God for all those other men. Dreadful though her behaviour undoubtedly is, and no kind of example to her children, while Caroline is otherwise occupied Caroline is calmer. With a bit of luck one of them might take her on, relieving Robin of his burden for ever. But then again—Suzie receives a sharp image of Caroline’s face in torment, suffering so, she sighs—maybe not.
Suzie Townsend fiddles anxiously with the piece of holly she has arranged on the breakfast tray. The whole effect is crisp, clean and healthy. The blood-red berry of the holly detracts from the freshness of the greens and whites and yellows she has made. ‘Oh the holly bears a berry,’ she hums smugly to herself as she removes the distasteful sprig between finger and thumb. ‘Happy Christmas, you old sleepyhead,’ she calls as she pads eagerly up the stairs and towards the bedroom. She smiles her sexiest smile. There are ways and means of persuading Robin to miss Mass this morning and, a powerful woman in spite of her size, a firm Unbeliever, she fully intends to use them.
Six
THE ATMOSPHERE IS QUITE different over in Potters Bar.
In the kitchen of a heavily mortgaged terraced house painted a wild canary yellow, Ruby Dance steps over paper, unopened parcels, children, nappies and feeding bottles in an effort to reach her bird and stuff it.
Ruby has been up since six-thirty, dealing with over-excited toddlers, trying to keep them quiet, bundling up the piles of paper so there is somewhere to walk in safety. Earlier, passing through the hall, she heard the distinctive ping of the bedroom extension but she walked on, determined, yet again, to ignore it. There is far too much to do in her life than allow her imagination to play the kind of tricks that her present mental state will not tolerate.
She is catering for Bart and her four small children. Her sister Elspeth and her boyfriend makes eight, and Bart’s parents and strange brother, Lot, out from his hostel for the celebration, makes eleven. An odd number, difficult to accommodate at the oblong dining-room table. Where has she put the Christmas cloth? Is it out of the ironing basket yet, or still lying there crisply, abandoned at the bottom since last year?
‘Count your blessings,’ she yells savagely at herself, into the mayhem, ‘and you’ll bash your skull in, Naomi, if you try to balance like that.’
She will put Damian’s high chair at the end of the table so she can roam more freely to the kitchen and back and, at the same time, deal with her thirteen-month-old baby. She, like one of the foolish virgins, has not done her preparations previously; she has ignored Delia Smith’s countdown and now look… chaos! Phew! She blows up her scattered fringe of hair—it is like a panful of burnt scrambled eggs which have spilt all over her head—she sits down in the mess with her first cup of coffee of the morning and lights up her fifth cigarette.
She digs the traces of sage and onion from under her fingernails with a cocktail stick. Bart had flopped into bed beside her last night. Ruby had only just settled Damian and she was slipping, relieved, into her own dreams when the cold of the flapping duvet disturbed her, and the click of the bedside light.
‘You’re surely not going to read,’ she groaned. ‘Not at this hour. It’s terribly late.’
‘You know I can’t get to sleep unless I read first.’
‘That’s crap. You should come to bed earlier, then.’ Already she was worrying about the ham.
‘I couldn’t get away. There was a party at the Club.’
‘A party at a health club? Huh! You’ll get yourself talked about. What did they give you to drink? Kiss me properly, Bart.’
But his kiss was so hard and dry his teeth scraped against hers. The bed creaked, putting her in mind of a frozen lake. ‘Wine,’ he said. ‘There is nothing wrong with the odd glass of wine. And I did phone you.’ His hand slithered down her thighs but she pushed him off, exhausted.
Yes, he phoned her, and she had sat down on the floor and wept, feebly and forlornly, because he had promised to be home to help her. She finished the last of the parcels with tears dripping off the end of her nose which she had to lick off with her tongue because both hands were busy holding down uneven edges and manipulating the Sellotape. But it was understandable, she told herself. He worked so hard he needed his leisure time with his friends, and the Club was a useful place to meet clients and that is important, it really is. Being home, these days, is hardly relaxing. Everywhere you look there are demands—to clean, to console, to mend, to wipe, to pick up, to cuddle. Everything is slightly easier now that Naomi goes to school, but Ruby still has three at home, and she has to struggle over three main roads with prams and reins each afternoon to fetch her.
‘It can’t get worse,’ Bart often assures her. ‘Chin up, old thing. At least we stand a good chance now, of getting through the eye of a needle. When things get better we’ll move, maybe to the country. You can lie on the grass and sunbathe all day. What do women think about when they sunbathe?’
‘What do men think about when they are driving? But for now get your hand out from under my skirt.’ But Ruby can’t see how a change of scenery would help her. It is time she needs, and a serenity which seems to have abandoned her.
Good Heavens, she can’t complain. If they had been invited out, if there’d been a party, then Bart would have taken her, they would have found a babysitter. Somehow Ruby would have made an effort to make herself presentable, dug out her old black dress. If only they had not bought that expensive car… She knows that image is all important, but things were looking up at the time they had made the commitment. Now, only months later, poor Bart is gripping on to his agency with white knuckles and broken fingernails. He’s already been forced to make two of his best designers redundant.
They are going home to Esher for the New Year. Ruby has made up her mind to ask her father for help. She knows he will give it because she is his favourite daughter. Mummy will say, ‘I told you so!’ but there, the Dances are in no position to pander to pride. A child screams—not seriously. Ruby jerks, a puppet in a cherry-red dressing gown, she sees the mess on the floor and automatically reaches for the cloth.
When the phone rings, Ruby curses. What now? It is impolitely early. She moves a tricycle in an effort to reach the hall, with a mutinous child still clinging to the handlebars.
‘Hello?’ The chair beckons invitingly because it has nothing on it. She crosses her legs and the dressing-gown flap falls back, revealing them, shockingly unshaven.
‘Is that Mrs Dance?’
‘Yes it is.’ Once again she puffs at her overgrown fringe, surveying her violent surroundings.
There is a short silence, during which Ruby’s eyes take on their darting anxiety again. Where is Damian? Oh no, not upstairs. She wants to call Bart to get him to keep an eye, she has forgotten to put the damn gate up.
‘Yes,’ she says again with impatience. Hurry up, she wants to add.
‘I have something very important to tell you.’
What a very strange way of speaking. Canvassers could not possibly be working on Christmas Day, could they? Ruby frowns, covering her legs again. She ought to have shaved for Christmas. She waits. She does not know the owner of this voice.
‘Mrs Dance, I am afraid that your husband is having an affair with a divorced actress in Highgate. It has been going on since October. I thought that you ought to know.’
Ruby tenses. Her body thunders with fear. ‘Who the hell is that?’
‘I am a friend. But who I am does not really matter.’
‘But it’s Christmas Day!’ cries Ruby, shrinking.
She clutches the receiver long after the caller hangs up. By the time she realises what she is doing she is cradling it like a baby.
She knows, of course she does. She has chosen to pretend—but now that option is closed to her. She knows that this was not just an abusive telephone call, she knows that the stranger spoke the truth. She looks around, bewildered, at the turmoil that is her house, startled into extreme sensation. Before she became a mother she ha
d imagined none of this… Christmas Day should be happy… she wanted to enjoy the children at these most precious times.
‘Bastard. Bastard,’ she mutters under her breath.
‘Mummy! Mummeeee…’
‘Wait a minute. I’ll be there in a minute.’
‘But James has climbed on your chair and now he is crawling across the kitchen table!’
‘All right, Naomi, I’ll be there in a minute. It’s okay. It’s okay. I just have to go upstairs for a moment.’
To the sound of a bloody battle from her kitchen, Ruby climbs her balloon-strewn stairs, tucking her pale hair behind her ears, determined to be able to see her way quite clearly. She pushes open the door to her bedroom. Bart is sitting up in bed, wide awake, watching some mindless cartoon on his miniature TV. She stands in the doorway and stares at him hard… handsome, even at this worst hour of the day, but debauched, slightly paunchy round the jowls, eyes sinking greedily into his head as the pursuit of money possesses him. A pig. Betraying her, even while he grunts on top of her, imagining the other woman, the actress in Highgate, my God!
‘Get out of bed,’ says Ruby, terribly calmly.
‘Sorry?’ Bart’s guilty eyes widen and he seems to crouch deeper into the covers.
‘Look, I’m not at all sure that I can bear this so I’m not going to stand here repeating myself.’ She clenches her fists, and finds she is holding a tinfoil star. Lost and sickened, Christmas is only a wilderness of trash. Once, she had picked up a snowball and found it to be a frozen blackbird. ‘I am unreal, Bart. I am unreal and this house is unreal and you are unreal. Get yourself out of that bed and go and find Damian. Then there’s the spuds to be peeled and the table to lay. When you’ve done that you can get on the floor and start playing with your blasted children! Do you hear me, Bart? Have you understood?’ Ruby’s tired voice rises to a scream.
‘Whatever’s the matter?’ But he leaps out of bed. He must know!
‘I have just dealt with the most extraordinary phone call. The woman on the other end told me… that’s what has happened, that’s all. I know everything, Bart. The only thing I don’t have is her name and I think I can live without knowing that.’
‘I don’t know…’ he tries to protest, stupidly fiddling with the tie of his scarlet silk pyjamas. She cannot watch. She cannot bear to take her eyes to anywhere below his waist. His face is painful enough. Ridiculous.
She cuts him off crisply. ‘If you speak one word in your own defence then I’m going, and you can go to her. I am taking the children, the car, and I’m going home. It is up to you, Bart. From now on it is entirely up to you.’ Without Ruby’s father’s help Bart’s firm will collapse and he knows it. Ruby shrugs. ‘You see, I am much too tired to play any more of your games. If you want to telephone the cow and explain then carry on. But I give you ten minutes, that’s all, and if you’re not downstairs, dressed and ready by then, I am leaving this house. You won’t sell it. Not now. You’ll be bankrupt in two months.’
She leaves him alone; she listens hard but he does not pick up the extension.
She pushes the crushed tinfoil star down the waste disposal. Ruby stands at her sink and stares blindly at every sprout she handles. The cuts she makes are deep and precise. She handles the knife with relish. She is weeping softly from pain and frustration and one of her nails has broken. Wronged, wronged, horribly wronged in so many ways. She keeps her back to Bart when he comes down and sidles sadly to the drainer beside her.
‘It was over anyway,’ he tells her sincerely. ‘I don’t even know why it happened. I can’t explain.’
Suspicious of gifts, any gifts, slowly, Ruby turns round, not looking at him. Expressionless as she surveys the mess about her she says, ‘I know why. I know very well why. But I didn’t… and I could have. Many many times I could have. Bloody hell, only last week I could have screwed the Bendix man. Well, don’t just stand there. For God’s sake open the sherry.’ And then she says quietly, ‘You bastard, you know it is going to take years. Was it so wonderful? Was it worth it?’
‘No,’ says Bart. ‘She was a bitch.’
At 14, Camberley Road Vanessa and Camilla are still laughing. ‘You did it so well! I wish we had someone else to phone, I want to hear you do it again.’
‘Well, that’s sorted Bart out. He won’t be phoning again this morning—or ever!’
‘But what did she sound like when you told her? Did she shout? I wish I could have heard.’
Vanessa thinks hard. Her telephone hand is still sweating. ‘She sounded just like anyone else. She was quite calm. Not hysterical. She sounded as if she already knew,’ says Vanessa. ‘It was quite disappointing in a way.’
‘She can’t have cared, then.’ Camilla is surprised. She fingers Mother’s address book.
‘Oh no,’ says Vanessa. ‘We are all right. I am sure that she cared very much.’
Seven
‘OF COURSE YOU REALISE that we will have to go down soon.’
‘Why do we have to?’
‘If we want to keep Mother alive we will have to go down. She will need feeding.’
This—all this—everything they are doing… they are merely beating time. Hardly aware of what is happening, as if some vast net has been thrown over them and dragged them along, they have stepped over some boundary and Mother might be snarling down there in the basement by now. Vanessa is frightened and fascinated by the very idea.
Last night Vanessa listened to the soft sift of snow against her window and tried to remember only loveliness. She tried not to hear the wind which bore the howls of the wolves in the park, like a living thing, breathing unceasingly, with a breath as cold and frightening as death.
Throughout all the giddy excitement of the morning—Camilla helped Vanessa to distribute the pillowcases, Dom and the twins went to sleep extraordinarily quickly after the gruelling events of the early hours—there wasn’t a moment when Vanessa was not conscious of the time they would have to open that basement door and descend to the gym. It was the thought of speaking to Mother which slayed her: not so much what Mother would say, but what she would say to Mother.
Vanessa and Camilla did not get to bed until after three. The younger children dragged their pillowcases into Vanessa’s room at seven-thirty on the dot, ‘Although we’ve been awake for hours.’ She imagined Mother’s livid face, rammed against the round porthole window, flattened by the pressure, puce with anger—the window which is not made of glass which would steam up in the damp heat when the sauna is in use, but designed out of a cloudy kind of reinforced plastic. The window is at the top of the door, just the right height for Mother’s face.
This morning Vanessa’s hair is pinned into a simple knot on the top of her head, pulled back starkly from her face. She refuses to use Mother’s toggles and ribbons. She wears a bottle-green velvet dress from Laura Ashley, the one with the nun-like collar, and the starched white sleeves grip her wrists. Mother says it is too long; she says that it throws her head and legs out of all proportion. ‘You’re all body in that,’ says Mother. ‘Especially with those black tights underneath it. You look like a praying mantis.’
Is Mother awake yet?
How important it is, now, that they should love one another.
Bart’s unexpected, early-morning phone call frightened them.
They meet Ilse in the kitchen. She is squeezing fresh oranges into her glass; already with her coat on she is planning an early start. ‘Did Mrs Townsend approve of your beautiful work? I did not hear her come home. She must have been very late.’
‘Mother loved it.’ Vanessa frowns a warning at the twins. At the lie Sacha squirms against her, trying to bury her head in her dress but Amber doesn’t seem to notice. There’s been no opportunity to prime them yet. She tries not to sound anxious when she asks, ‘Will you be able to reach your friends’ house with all the snow?’
‘They are picking me up on the corner. I will probably have to wait hours because of the snow. I will just have t
o hope they can run me back safely by tomorrow night.’
‘I am sure Mother won’t mind if you don’t make it.’
Dominic is being far too reckless but Ilse doesn’t appear to notice. ‘I can only do my best,’ she says. ‘I suppose Mrs Townsend is still asleep.’
‘Why, did you want her?’
‘Just to let her know I vas leaving, that’s all.’
Amber bongs about the kitchen on her new pogo stick. Over-excited, it is difficult to tell if she even remembers the capture of Mother. ‘You’ve got a present, Ilse,’ she jabbers, face flushed, hair tangled. Already she looks like a motherless child. ‘And it’s waiting for you under the tree!’ There are chocolate stains dribbled all the way down the front of Amber’s sleepsuit.
Oh no! Oh no! Ilse was on the point of leaving but now she hesitates, and they’ve forgotten to straighten the Christmas tree. Pieces of tinsel are still hanging off it.
‘Camilla, why don’t you go upstairs and fetch Ilse’s present down for her?’
Ilse likes the flashing earrings. She even takes time to put them on. ‘I want them,’ Sacha says, climbing on a chair in order to finger them rudely. Ilse gave the children their presents last week because they were partly Christmas cards… Boots tokens… yuk. ‘Tell Mrs Townsend that I am most grateful and vill thank her ven I return.’ Mother would never have chosen such a gift. She would have called the earrings common, pandering to the lowest taste.
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