‘Do come in.’ Mrs Bottrell was gracious. ‘Samuel is in the conservatory.’
Walking through to the garden room, Harriet saw that it was not merely the front door that had been radically altered but the familiar interior landscape of her father’s house. The piles of old shoes, the shabby books and dusty prints were clean gone. The denuded walls were brilliant with paint and on a shelf, which had for ever held the Encyclopaedia Britannica, she observed a dimpling china shepherdess and her swain.
Her father’s appearance had undergone a corresponding change. His formerly unkempt hair had been cut short, as, she detected, had his nails, which were unwontedly clean. Instead of the moth-eaten maroon pullover in which, for the past ten years, he had received her, he was sporting a crisp blue-and-white striped shirt beneath a navy blazer. His ancient slippers, she saw, looking down at his feet, had been replaced by a pair of smart brown brogues.
‘He’s looking better, isn’t he.’ It was an affirmation rather than a question. ‘We’ve had a bit of a tidy since you’ve been gone.’
Harriet glanced at her father, expecting outrage. But with a shock, she saw his being was wholly focused on Mrs Bottrell, at whom he was gazing with adoring eyes. ‘She’s a marvel,’ he exclaimed, turning finally to his daughter. ‘Brenda is a marvel.’
‘Get away, you old silly.’ With a terrible mirthful jauntiness, Mrs Bottrell whacked Harriet’s father in the region of what Harriet instinctively knew the Chair of the Garden Society would refer to as his ‘backside’.
Harriet stared and Mrs Bottrell afforded her a majestic smile. ‘He just needed a bit of pruning, didn’t you, dear?’ at which Harriet’s father (as Harriet later told Mike) positively simpered. ‘And there’s no need to worry about “carers” any longer.’ Mrs Bottrell waved a large manicured hand. ‘Samuel and I got engaged. On Easter Sunday, actually,’ she announced and, quite dreadfully, giggled. ‘We are getting spliced as soon as we can. We were only waiting for you to come home, weren’t we, Samuel?’
NIGHTMARE
When Kitty Giles quarrelled with her mother she would say, ‘I am going round to Nan’s house.’
‘Nan’ was born Anna but she had been known in the street as ‘Nan’ ever since her two grandchildren had come for a summer with her, years ago it was now. She lived two doors down from the Gileses in Cumberland Gardens where Kitty’s parents had moved when their daughter was three.
Kitty’s father Geoff was an artist, which meant he made next to no money, so when Kitty was four Susannah, her mother, who was a town planner, went back to work full time. Susannah was grateful when her elderly neighbour offered to look after her daughter. And Kitty seemed really to like going round to the house with the grass-green front door, now somewhat blistered but still clearly and cleverly painted over with spiders and beetles and ladybirds – for Nan was quite an artist herself in her way. The shy little girl didn’t cry one bit when her mother left her with their neighbour at number seven. Perhaps not enough, even, for Susannah’s sense of her own importance to her daughter, though it went without saying that she was grateful for Nan’s kindness.
When it was time for Kitty to start school, it made sense for Nan to collect her at the end of the day and give her her tea and keep the child round at hers until Susannah came home from work. And it made sense, too, that Kitty went to Nan’s over half-term and in the school holidays. Kitty seemed not to miss her home or her parents during these periods and quite often spent the night in the brass bed, not quite a double but certainly wider than the usual single, which had once belonged to Nan’s daughter, Bella, and then had been the province of Bella’s twin girls. The twins were grown up now and had gone to New Zealand where one had married an oncologist and the other an ear, nose and throat specialist, keeping, as Nan liked to remark, on twin lines. On the head of the bed, Nan had painted a field mouse’s nest with tiny curled field mice babies and beneath it, watching, a weasel with a predatory look in his black beads of eyes. These animals, the mouse family and the weasel, were among the cast of creatures woven into the stories which Nan told Kitty as she fell asleep on the nights her parents were out or it just seemed so much simpler for Kitty not to go home.
From time to time, Susannah worried about Kitty’s attachment to Nan but Geoff would reassure her. ‘She doesn’t love us any the less for loving Nan,’ he would say. ‘Anyway, it’s good for kids to have an extended family. Your parents are no use. Nor are mine, if it comes to that.’
Geoff’s parents had been killed in an air crash before Kitty was born. Susannah had been born to her parents late in life and had been brought up on stern lines. She loved her daughter deeply, but the habits laid down in our childhood will noiselessly inform our adult behaviour and more of Susannah’s parents’ philosophy had rubbed off on her than she would have recognised or wanted to own.
One half-term holiday Kitty was staying over at Nan’s and she had a nightmare. She got out of bed and ran to Nan’s room where, hardly seeming to surface from unconsciousness, Nan had said soothingly, ‘Hop in with me, pet, and snuggle down here.’
When she woke in the big bed which smelled of Nan’s Coty talc, Kitty said, ‘Mummy doesn’t let me get into bed with them if I have nightmares.’
Nan said, ‘Oh, there, Kitten. I’m sure she will if you ask her.’
Two days later Susannah called round to see Nan. After some awkward conversation about local events she said, ‘Nan, Geoff and I want Kitty to learn to sleep alone. We’d prefer that when she stays here you don’t allow her into your bed.’
Nan for a moment spoke her mind. ‘That’s cruel if the child is scared.’
Susannah’s face took on the expressionless look of which Geoff, had he thought about it, had grown afraid. ‘I don’t want this to become an issue, Nan.’
The next time Kitty had a nightmare while staying at Nan’s, Nan said, ‘Go back to bed, darling,’ and when Kitty began to wail piteously, ‘Don’t cry, my pet. I’ll come and sit with you.’
Kitty, through tears, sobbed, ‘But you let me last time …’
‘I know, lovie.’
Nan sat by Kitty’s bed till she fell asleep, her face still damp with tears. By then it was hardly worth going back to bed herself. She went downstairs and made a cup of tea and watched the dawn come up with a pain in her side.
After that, every time Kitty had a bad dream while staying at Nan’s the child would beg to come into Nan’s bed – and Nan, hating herself, refused. But one half-term, when Nan had not been feeling too good, and was too tired to keep up a protest she had in any case no belief in, she said, ‘All right then, pet, hop in, but don’t tell your mum or we’ll both be in trouble.’
In the morning she said, ‘Look, Kit. As far as I’m concerned you can sleep where ever under God’s heaven you like, but I have to do what your mum says.’
‘Why?’
‘I just have to, love.’
‘I think she’s silly.’
‘No, she’s your mum. We – that’s you and I – have to do as she says.’
‘I don’t like her when she says things like that,’ Kitty said.
By the time Kitty was eight years old, her open shyness had fallen away and her stand-offs with her mother were more frequent and sometimes nasty. One evening she shouted, ‘I don’t want to live with you any more, I want to live with Nan.’
‘Well, you can’t, you have to do as I say, young lady.’ Susannah, who loved her daughter dearly, was wounded and retorted more sharply than she intended.
‘I can, so.’
‘No, you can’t. While you’re a child you have to do as I say.’
‘It’s not fair. I hate you,’ Kitty yelled, rushing to her room and slamming the door. ‘I only love Nan.’
Susannah was crying when Geoff came in from his studio. She told him what Kitty had said.
‘Oh, Suzie, that’s just kid’s talk. Kit adores you.’
‘No more than she adores Nan.’
‘Nan’s been kind to
her. We’ve been glad enough when it suited us. Don’t pick a fight, please.’
But next half-term Susannah arranged for her daughter to spend it with a friend.
Kitty went down the road to tell Nan. ‘Mummy says I’m going for a sleepover with Flora.’
‘That’s nice,’ Nan said. She had made a hazelnut cake, Kitty’s favourite.
‘She says I’m not coming here.’
‘Never mind,’ Nan said, comfortingly. ‘There’ll be other times.’ When she understood that she was not going to see Kitty at all that half-term, she gave the tickets for the new Walt Disney film to the Garrod children over the road.
And somehow there were no ‘other’ times. With some difficulty, Susannah managed to organise different houses that her daughter could visit after school or over half-term, where she also spent nights when it was convenient. When Nan and Kitty met in the street they still hugged but no further occasion arose for Kitty to pass a night in the field-mouse bed.
One day, Kitty’s teacher, Mrs Allen, asked if she could ‘have a word’.
‘Kitty’s been a little off colour lately. Is everything all right at home?’
‘I think so,’ said Susannah, trying to pretend to herself that she had not been wondering about this too. ‘What’s the matter with her?’ She had noticed that Kitty seemed strained and tired.
‘She’s not eating her school meals. And she’s getting into a few fights. Maybe it’s just a bad patch. Children go through them, same as we do. I dare say it will pass.’
But a few weeks later Mrs Allen said, ‘Mrs Giles, if you don’t mind my asking, who is Nan?’
‘A neighbour,’ Susannah said. She didn’t quite like to hear Nan’s name.
‘Kitty mentions her a lot. And she has written some stories. I just wondered quite what the relationship …’
‘She used to fetch Kitty from school,’ Susannah said.
‘Did Kitty ever spend the night with her?’
‘She used to,’ Susannah said. She perhaps could not have explained why her tone had become defensive. ‘But we’ve rather gone off the arrangement.’
‘You know, I think that might be wise.’
Mrs Allen raised her pencilled eyebrows questioningly and Susannah, who had been feeling guilty about Nan, said in an effort to be fair, ‘I don’t think she was ever unkind to Kitty.’
Mrs Allen’s frosted pink lipstick folded into a line. ‘No. I’m sure. But that wasn’t … I don’t want to … but I wonder if there wasn’t some sort of …’
‘What?’ Susannah asked, feeling rather frightened.
‘I wouldn’t say “abuse”, because I don’t say that it was anything overt, but Kitty writes a lot about their cuddles. It seems she sometimes slept with, er, Nan.’
That night Geoff said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. My brother and I used to get into my parents’ bed all the time. We often slept with them if we were ill – or had nightmares.’
‘Geoff, we talked about that and we agreed. It was you as much as me.’ Susannah was the more indignant for surmising that with another woman her easygoing husband would have been likely to accede to other terms for his child’s sleeping arrangements.
‘All I’m saying is that there is nothing sinister about Kitty’s sleeping in Nan’s bed. Until the Victorian period, everyone slept together: men, women and children. It was quite normal.’
He might have added that it is only humankind among the mammals who think it natural, and preferable, to sleep apart from their young.
Kitty looked anxious and then defiant when her mother explained that there was something she needed to ask.
‘It’s nothing horrible, darling, I promise. It’s just about Nan.’
Kitty had grown wary of that word ‘just’. It always seemed to bode so much more than implied. ‘What about Nan?’
‘When you slept in her bed –’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Kitty, it is OK. We know you did. I only want to know what happened …’
‘Nothing did.’
‘Did Nan touch you?’
‘’Course she did. She cuddled me. We snuggled down together.’
‘What did “snuggling” mean?’
Kitty looked at her mother in surprised scorn. ‘Don’t you know what “snuggling down” is?’
Two days later Nan received a note:
Dear Mrs Lethbridge,
We are grateful for all you have done for Kitty but for various reasons we feel the time has come to end the relationship. Kitty will not be coming to stay with you again. We should be grateful if you would not go out of your way to try to see her.
Your sincerely,
Susannah and Geoff Giles
At the end of the year, the Gileses moved house. Kitty needed a larger room, Susannah explained to Mrs Garrod over the road, when she met her in Tesco’s. For some time, when Kitty had a nightmare she would comfort herself by imagining that she was safe and warm in Nan’s large, soft, talc-scented bed. She knew better than to mention this to her mother. And after a longer while, because to do so was easier, Kitty forgot all about Nan.
THE GREEN BUS FROM ST IVES
William had not planned to go to St Ives over the May bank holiday. But four nights earlier, out of the blue, his wife, Helena, had announced that she was going to Paris with her friend, Dotty Blaine, adding casually that it would be ‘all right about the dog and the cats’ as William would be there ‘to see to them’.
I’ll be damned if I will, William had said to himself. As those who feel wronged will tend to, he searched about in his mind for something that would demonstrate his difference from his wife. He had never yet visited the Tate Gallery in St Ives and had been promising himself that pleasure for years. Helena didn’t share his enthusiasm for modern art.
‘I’m afraid I shall not be here,’ he said, more belligerently than he felt, for the truth was he felt rather scared. ‘I’m going to St Ives.’
If Helena, who was used to her husband’s mute acquiescence in her suddenly announced but often long-brooded plans, was surprised to hear of this proposal she didn’t allow it to show. She was a woman who had worked to make efficiency her hallmark and she was not to be put out because her husband had taken it into his head to be mulish and awkward. She organised a neighbour to see to the cats and for Wanda, their cleaner, to walk Daisy the dachshund.
‘I’ve given Wanda the number of the burglar alarm in case it goes off while we are away,’ was all Helena said as she swept a carmine streak across William’s cheek on her way out of the door to the taxi which was waiting to take her to Heathrow. She smelled, as always, delightful and William felt a flash of regret. But as his small act of rebellion seemed really not to trouble Helena he did not allow compunction to lessen his excitement.
So now he was on the train to Penzance, inwardly mouthing the Robert Louis Stevenson rhyme for children, Faster than fairies, faster than witches as they rushed through a countryside all green and white and yellow and alive with fields hopping with sturdy-looking lambs.
William had booked a room at a hotel he had found via the Internet. Privately he abhorred the Internet, perhaps because Helena had become such a mistress of it. Their aged copy of The Good Hotel Guide had disappeared (no doubt considered by Helena redundant it had been passed on to a charity shop) and he was reluctant to give his wife rope by asking for her help. She would be sure to ‘know’ somewhere he ‘must’ stay. This trip, he had determined, was to be strictly his enterprise.
Arriving at Penzance, an almost violent smell of sea assaulted his nostrils. Above him a chaos of seagulls wheeled, white as angels, noisy and obstreperous as alley-cats. The hotel, painted a maritime blue, was easy to spot on the nearby rise. William was breathing hard by the time he had hauled himself and his suitcase up the cobbled incline. Not that he was a heavy man; on the contrary, he was slenderly built and fighting fit, he liked to think, for his years.
He was reassured by the hotel’s peaceful interior: no sign of bra
ss-work or Cornish piskies, a pleasing smell of wood smoke, elderly, well-polished furniture and white china jugs of pretty wild flowers. The young hotel manager showed him to his room.
‘You’re lucky, we had a cancellation so I put you in our best room. There’s a view front and back, and you can see the weather from your bed.’ The manager drew back the curtain to a chorus of screeching gulls. ‘It looks set fair for the whole weekend.’
William hoped this was an omen and unpacked his clothes. Unsure what to do next, he went out to explore Penzance.
It was the inconvenient time of day when – unless one is an alcoholic – it is too early for a drink and too late for tea. William bought a vanilla ice cream, licking it rather dubiously as he walked by the old harbour. It was one of those enjoyments, he decided, which are better in recollection. He had forgotten how ice cream will always drip down the cone and on to the wrist and sleeve, and was relieved when he finally polished the thing off.
What to do now? Had Helena been with him there would have been no problem filling the time. Already, she would have formulated plans for the day ahead and his part would have been merely to agree with or, less likely, dispute them. Over the long years of their marriage, the initiative had passed lock, stock and barrel to Helena. Suddenly a free man, he felt, as old recidivists are said to feel, nostalgic for familiar constraints.
He walked past a café which displayed in its window a timetable of the local bus service. Here was the chance to make some sort of plan. The bus to St Ives, he calculated, ran every forty minutes and took as long to get there. Well, that was good. He could set out tomorrow after breakfast and be in St Ives by ten.
There was a couple already in the hotel lounge when, after several consultations of his watch, William felt it was decently possible to go down for a drink. The couple, expensively dressed, were sitting knit together on the more comfortable and capacious of the sofas. The girl had with her a vast patent leather handbag which she had placed on the coffee table so that it obscured William’s view. Helena would have asked her to move it. Instead, William wished the couple good evening and asked if they had had a pleasant day.
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