No one discovered the presents she’d hoarded, but she’d nearly been found out with the food. When Mrs Guerney spied the Christmas provisions she’d vibrated with surprise. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘there’s a turn-up for the books. What has got into your mother all of a sudden?’
Vanessa did not tell a lie. She simply said nothing, staring at Mrs Guerney blankly, praying that the woman would not give the game away. They’d flown really close to disaster one morning a week before Christmas, when Mrs Guerney, chatting away with her usual terrifying loss of control as she bustled about with her duster somewhere between osteopaths and orgasms, said, ‘I see you’re going over the top this year then, Mz Townsend, splashing out on your festive fare.’ Vanessa’s hands gripped her book tightly as she sat by the fire pretending to read but she itched with concern all over. Mother was in a hurry as usual. With controlled impatience she said, ‘Mrs Guerney, there are some items I’ve left on my bed for dry-cleaning and I’m not going to find the time. Perhaps you would be an absolute dear and drop them in for me?’
Mother rarely listened to anything that Mrs Guerney said and Mrs Guerney knew it: ‘That’s why I leave a note when there’s something important to say.’
Before they leave, Daddy must go upstairs to the drawing room and admire the tree and the decorations. ‘It is quite like old times,’ he says with a smile of nostalgia for something so long ago Vanessa cannot remember. Can he? ‘Perhaps things are going to start getting better from now on. Maybe we’ve all been through the worst.’
The children smile and cling to him, especially the twins, relishing his happiness and his company.
Five minutes later the twins slide towards the car, glorying in the brand new snow and squealing. They look like little dancing gnomes in their bobbing bobble hats, creatures up from an underworld.
As she closes the front door and crunches across the pavement Vanessa listens hard for screaming curses from the basement or a crashing of fists on the sauna door. The dread is mixed with a strange excitement, almost euphoria. The silence is sinister: perhaps the walls are so thick that no sound can penetrate. Why does she imagine that Mother is smiling? She glances at Dominic so flushed and excited, cradling his Nintendo, looking as if he hasn’t a care in the world. At least he’s made sure Mother will be quite warm enough, they need not worry about that. She thinks about the turkey in the oven, sweating out all that bloody water.
She scans the house once again, afraid that somehow it might be giving away its secret. But no, no one would ever guess.
Inside Daddy’s car feels like the safest place in the world. She is once again the beloved daughter taking her place on the front seat, driving away from her strange and dangerous house with the rottenness in the cellar. The opulent interior smells of leather, the engine purrs with pure pleasure for the times they have spent together.
Camilla wears her coat over her tutu, she carries her ballet shoes and her face has lost its earlier strain: she looks radiant. The snow adds to the feeling of safety. It cocoons them in love as they creep along the deserted streets in case they skid, their fears and doubts put to one side as they concentrate on the wheel-tracks and judge other people’s Christmas trees.
‘Have you got a tree, Daddy?’
‘Yes. But it’s silver.’
‘Oh.’
‘Suzie chose it.’
‘Ah.’
No one else notices, but, with a surge of pity, Vanessa sees how his black-gloved hands tighten on the steering wheel.
Ten
OH DEAR, SUZIE. WHY is everything going wrong and why is life so terribly unfair? How come you were not persuasive enough to prevent Robin from going to fetch his children? All Suzie wants to do is edit her books, nurture her orchids and bear Robin’s baby, probably in that order, I’m afraid. But while her orchids are snuggled down in the greenhouse at a constant, carefully controlled 60 degrees Fahrenheit, what is happening to the struggling seed in the moist, dark depths of her womb? How is that coming along, or did it slip out in the bath last night and wiggle off down the plughole?
Life is so unfair, because Suzie would make a far better mother than Caroline, who manages to breed like a rabbit.
Dominic, that beautiful, precocious son of Robin’s, told Suzie exactly what Caroline said when she first heard about his mews flat. ‘Isn’t it sweet?’ Dominic stared levelly at Suzie as he relayed Caroline’s comments on a note of cocky triumph. ‘And how typical that your father should end up sharing a stable.’
Suzie drew herself tightly up. ‘Well, Dominic,’ she calmly replied. ‘Do you think it looks like a stable? Does it feel like a stable?’
‘No, it looks more like a pub.’
Robin laughed uneasily. He gathered his new wife consolingly into his arms. ‘He is talking about the low ceilings and your antiques. All the rooms at Camberley Road are large and square.’ Suzie has never been to Camberley Road so she wouldn’t know about that. Yes, Suzie supposes, all the rooms in the flat are quaint, apart from the one on the top floor where Robin has raised the ceiling, installed roof windows and strengthened the floor, the room which lies empty now, waiting for his apparatus.
There is something unnerving about the sly way Dominic looks at Suzie… she catches his glances when she turns round quickly, long black lashes over those dark, haunting eyes, the slanting smile, so knowing. And yet he is an innocent child, only eight years old. Suzie supposes she has a problem when it comes to Caroline’s children and she works hard to conquer it, without much success.
Now she watches from the diamond-paned window as Robin’s car moves silently up the narrow road over the snow-humped cobbles and in through the whirring garage door. She is suddenly horrified, aware of what she must look like to anyone watching from below… chewing her lip… twisting her fingers. The branches of the wisteria that clads the front of the flat, wispy and bare only yesterday, are padded now and swollen with snow and she thinks of her butcher’s fingers. She stares down at the roof as the car moves inside, a carload of kids on top of everything else, for God’s sake!
Not only was Suzie forced to hide from Caroline when she and Robin started living together, but she endured the humiliation of having to hide from the children, too, because they were invited round to Ammerton Mews on the occasional Sunday or Saturday afternoon. ‘But surely the bedroom is safe? Can’t we lock the bedroom door?’ Suzie would ask, exasperated, with her private belongings gathered in her arms, a celery stalk between her teeth, on her way down the narrow staircase to her Peugeot GTI which waited with its boot propped open. Again. ‘Christ, I feel homeless, like a refugee. This does nothing for my morale you know, Robin.’
‘I’d rather be on the safe side, Suzie. When I tell them about us I want to make sure it’s done properly. They have suffered enough already and I don’t want it coming as a shock.’
The black dustbin bags full of her clothes were already worn and tattered by then. She had shoved as much as she could out of sight under the bed. ‘But couldn’t we tell them now? We could tell them to keep your secret, to keep quiet in front of Caroline. They know her better than anyone else, they would understand.’
‘That would be grossly unfair. They are far too young to cope with those sort of confidences, and Caroline is so manipulative she could squeeze water out of a stone if she thought there was something going on—particularly where I am concerned.’
‘They probably know anyway,’ said Suzie, whose own childhood has been so happy she remembers very little of it except long, warm summer days and dens she built in her garden. Dens to nest in; she filled them with dolls, practising for her future home… no one would ever have dreamed of turning Suzie out of one of her dens. And all those things she had promised, as a child, never to do: give up her name, for a start, and end up with nothing more than an S on an envelope; be penetrated by a man—she resolved that if she must have a baby she would conceive by test-tube and thereby achieve perfection—share a television set or a bedside light.
&n
bsp; So, in the face of all that, it is quite understandable that Suzie still harbours some resentment. It is natural, surely, after such a nerve-racking start.
‘Have they arrived? Did I just hear a car?’
Suzie adjusts her face and turns round smoothly. A bleak white light fills the room, unbroken save for the orange flicker of the fire and the prick of the candle wall-lights. ‘Yes, Isobel, they’ve arrived. I’ll go down to the kitchen and welcome them.’
‘Are they going to eat with us? What time did you say that dinner would be ready, Suzie? I am afraid that I have forgotten.’
Suzie flexes her shoulders. Oh, but Isobel has not forgotten. She is making her point again. Suzie and Caroline, so unalike, would agree on this description of Isobel—Robin’s mother is suffering from a terrible reverse kind of senile dementia where, instead of letting herself go all messy and higgledy-piggledy as she moves up through her seventies, she has become abrasively fastidious, laundered and trim, and instead of embracing a relaxed absentmindedness, she is acutely alert with a predatory kind of vigilance. Absolutely terrified of losing control, she conducts her life by way of lists and orderly bowel movements.
Robin’s mother does not approve of meals being served in the middle of the afternoon, even Christmas lunch. She would prefer it—she expects it—to be dished up at one o’clock on the dot. Suzie, so organised, so controlled, is a far more suitable wife for Robin than Caroline could ever have been, so why does the woman persist in her resistance to the change? All right, she does not approve of divorce, especially when there are children concerned, but she certainly never accepted the sluttish, disorganised Caroline and she knows very well what Robin has gone through during his fourteen years of married hell.
Isobel sits stiffly beside the blue flames of the coal-gas fire; massive dried floral arrangements of Suzie’s stand either side of the great burnished canopy. Her soft jersey-wool suit is what you might call an eggshell green, but Suzie thinks of stained birdshit. Joe, her large and comfortable husband, crammed into a smart suit, is playing solitaire, the tiny white pegs really too small for his fingers, at the other end of the room beside the silver Christmas tree. Joe always manages to find the backs of rooms. A shy man, familiarity alarms him. Two cotton-wool puffs of snaggly hair grow above his ears, like headphones. He listens but does not join in the conversation that Isobel is having with Suzie’s mother, Eileen, who is happily draped in the soft armchair with her stockinged feet on the antique fender.
Both women had encouraged Robin to fetch the children in spite of Suzie’s desperate signals to her mother. She put forward every argument she could think of: ‘What if you can’t get them back? What if they can’t get the road-sweepers out? What if the streets get impossible and they have to stay the night?’
And then, ‘It would be awful if the twins got upset again when it was time to leave, like they did last time. It would be cruel to make them unhappy on Christmas Day.’
She whispered, ‘You will have to cope with the added strain of making sure they behave properly in an enclosed space, with Isobel.’
‘Do you want me to postpone lunch?’ she asked him eventually, close to despair, thinking that this device might change Isobel’s mind.
‘No,’ said Robin. ‘Good heavens, of course you needn’t postpone it. We can eat at the same time, according to plan. The children will be quite happy playing while we eat. It’s not that important, Suzie. The essential thing is that I see them on Christmas Day, and I would like them to stay for tea, as planned. Is that so strange?’
‘But you won’t be gone long, dear, will you?’ asked Isobel, alarmed by the prospect of time alone, abandoned by her son and left to Suzie’s ministrations and Eileen’s slovenly conversation. ‘It would be better if you brought them here rather than stay over there.’
Joe merely watched and listened and said nothing. Eileen did not care either way although ‘it would be a shame to waste that lovely tea’. She was thoroughly enjoying herself, ‘being looked after, treated like a Queen.’ Dear Mummy, she puts Suzie under no pressure, an easygoing, cheerful person, happy with her fatness, in her orange trousers and navy top, although she is finding conversation with the stiff-necked Isobel hard going. She thinks she might have to sell her cottage. She feels she can no longer cope with the garden. She discusses all this with Isobel and you can see her thinking—with a mother like this, no wonder poor Robin is so serious, such a responsible person.
So that’s how it happened. Nothing has worked. As far as his children are concerned Robin rushes here and there and gets nowhere, driven onwards by guilt.
Up until the moment she’d seen the steamy windows of the car, Suzie had clung to the very great hope that Caroline, so unpredictable, so determined to thwart Robin at every turn, would refuse to let her children go on this special day. Not so. Engrossed in her latest affair, muses Suzie, Caroline has apparently seized the opportunity of a day in her house, alone, with her man.
A couple of hours with the children would be bad enough, but all day! Damn the snow! In a minute the midday peace, all Suzie’s careful organisation will be shattered.
Foiled. And full of foreboding, Suzie leaves her guests and heads downstairs. The flat, comprising three small cottages knocked together by the previous owner, is really nothing like a flat but that was how it was described on the brochure when they bought it. To one side of the garage remains the original great arched entrance with the studded, oaken door still intact, but now, instead of leading into the old cobbled courtyard it opens on to Suzie’s well-tended garden, and her greenhouse leans against a sunny, south-facing, ancient wall. The whole effect is picturesque and pleasing. Even Caroline, when she finally traced the place and arrived to cause trouble, even she had to admit that it was a dream house, although, she insisted, ‘Still very much a stable. A conversion is always a conversion. You never get it to feel like a house inside, no matter how old it is.’
Bitch.
The kitchen that Suzie loves is a mass of creeping greenery, pine shutters that actually work, and a stone-clad plinth houses her hob, standing squarely and dramatically in the centre of the room. What a very good thing she is a good cook, an inadequate cook would be intimidated by this kitchen. She opens the stable-door to the garden; her face cracks into a smile as she lets everyone in.
‘Happy Christmas!’ calls Suzie, five times and fading, using a happy knack of plunging into a nightmare without even changing expression. But having no children of her own—not yet not yet—not being an aunt, or a godmother, or anything to do with other people’s children, she finds it difficult not to talk down to them. Of this she is very aware.
But with a child of her own she will be quite different.
They are polite, as usual. They are introduced to Eileen for the first time. They present themselves one by one to Isobel, gravely thanking her for their gifts. ‘I am glad to see you liked the nurses’ outfits,’ she tells the twins. ‘Although I would have thought them hardly suitable in this sort of weather, Robin, and wouldn’t it have been nice to dress them in something smart on Christmas Day?’
Robin, having got his way, can afford to smile benignly. ‘Let me top up your sherry, Isobel.’
‘I have had quite enough already. Aren’t we eating yet?’ Isobel bites an olive in half and the bitter pimento catches between her two front teeth and hangs redly there, unnoticed.
‘How is your mother?’ Isobel asks Vanessa. The serious child sits as neatly as her grandmother, tall, pale and green tucked into one end of the sofa stroking her crucifix. She seems to like it, thank God, thinks Suzie. It was difficult to know which one to choose. Of all Robin’s children, this is the one Suzie would most like to know. Veiled and impassive, what lies behind that protective veneer? If Suzie found favour with Vanessa, she would be well on her way to acceptance by the others but Suzie has tried and tried and every time that quiet, pale child politely rebuffs her. Suzie is hurt every time. It is just not fair.
‘She is ver
y well.’
Isobel frowns and her eyes turn an eerie light green. ‘Everyone always tells me that when I ask and it is, quite blatantly, untrue.’ She crosses her thin hands on her lap, unconsciously mimicking the child herself when she goes on, ‘People persist in telling me that Caroline is fine, I don’t know why. But then I have never understood that particular situation. Even when your parents were married I could never quite grasp what was going on under the surface. But there,’ she smiles confidentially at Eileen who returns a sherry-sweet leer. ‘Different generations, I suppose. I really ought to have kept in touch, I know. Time and time again I have written, “Ring Caroline” on my daily list, but your mother can be so difficult. Perhaps when Christmas is over.’
The silence is an empty rushing of air. From the far end of the room Joe gives an abrupt wheezy chortle. Everyone turns but he is engrossed in his solitaire.
Eileen is moved to ask, ‘Are you quite sure there is nothing I can do to help, lovey?’
‘No Mummy, really, I did most of it earlier. You just relax.’
‘I think that Mother has plans,’ Vanessa says suddenly, rather loud.
You can actually see Robin turn pale, as a soldier might turn and gape at the battle he thought he had won, only to find that behind his back his opponents have started to scuffle again.
‘Plans?’ He is concentrating on the Nintendo, down on the floor amongst the aerials and wires with Dominic, the boy whistling through his teeth in a most infuriating fashion. Everyone else stares at Vanessa, waiting for her to explain.
‘I don’t think Mother will be at home after Christmas. You see, she was talking about going to Broadlands again. I think she has booked herself in for a fortnight.’
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