They were inching their way down Mordred Hill, some sort of delay having been caused by a juggernaut trying to back into an eighteenth-century alley centimetres too narrow for it. Zoe sighed with disbelief, then practised her deep breathing. Nothing you could do about it, no point in road rage, the country was stuffed to the gills with cars and that was all there was to it. She had taken the Civil Service exams after college and one of the questions had been, ‘How would you arrange the transport system of this country?’ At the time, being utterly wrapped up in clio-metrics and dendrochronology, she had been quite unable to answer; but now, a couple of decades down the line, she felt fully qualified to write several thousand impassioned words, if not a thesis, on the subject.
But then if you believe in wives and steadfastness and heroic monogamy (thought Zoe, as the lorry cleared the space and the traffic began to flow again), how can you admit change? Her sister Valerie had described how she was making her husband read aloud each night in bed from How to Rescue a Relationship. When he protested, she pointed out that it was instead of going to a marriage guidance counsellor. Whoever wants to live must forget, Valerie had told her drily; that was the gist of it. She, Zoe, wasn’t sure that she would be able to take marriage guidance counselling seriously either, as she suspected it was probably done mainly by women who were no longer needed on the school run. It all seemed to be about women needed and wanted, then not needed and not wanted. She moved off in second gear.
No wonder there were gaggles of mothers sitting over milky lattes all over the place from 8.40 a.m. They were recovering from driving exclusively in the first two gears for the last hour; they had met the school deadline and now wanted some pleasure on the return run. Zoe preferred her own company at this time of the morning, and also did not relish the conversation of such groups, which tended to be fault-finding sessions on how Miss Scantlebury taught long division or post-mortems on reported classroom injustices, bubblings-up of indignation and the urge to interfere, still to be the main moving force in their child’s day. She needed a coffee though – a double macchiato, to be precise – and she liked the café sensation of being alone but in company, surrounded by tables of huddled intimacies each hived off from the other, scraps of conversation drifting in the air. Yesterday, she remembered, there had been those two women in baggy velour tracksuits at the table nearest to her, very solemn.
‘I feel rather protective towards him. The girls are very provocative the way they dress now. He’s thirteen.’
‘Especially when you’re surrounded by all these images. Everywhere you go.’
‘It’s not a very nice culture.’
‘No, it’s not.’
And all around there had been that steady self-justificatory hum of women telling each other the latest version of themselves, their lives, punctuated with the occasional righteous cry as yet another patch of moral high ground was claimed. That’s a real weakness (she thought, shaking her head), and an enemy of, of – whatever it is we’re after. Amity, would you call it?
‘Last year when we were in Cornwall we went out in a boat and we saw sharks,’ said Harry.
‘Sharks!’ scoffed George. ‘Ho yes. In Cornwall.’
‘No, really,’ insisted Harry.
‘It’s eels as well,’ said Freda. ‘I don’t like them either.’
‘Ooh no,’ Harry agreed, shuddering.
‘What about sea-snakes,’ said George. ‘They can swim into any hole in your body.’
The car fell silent as they absorbed this information.
‘Where did you hear this?’ asked Zoe suspiciously; she had her own reservations about Mr Starling.
‘Mr Starling told us,’ smirked George. ‘If it goes in at your ear, you’re dead because it sneaks into your brain. But if it goes up your . . .’
‘What happens if it gets in up there?’ asked Harry.
‘If it gets in there, up inside you,’ said George, ‘you don’t die but they have to take you to hospital and cut you open and pull it out.’
The talk progressed naturally from here to tapeworms.
‘They hang on to you by hooks all the way down,’ said Harry. ‘You have to poison them, by giving the person enough to kill the worm but not them. Then the worm dies and the hooks get loose and the worm comes out. Either of your bottom or somehow they pull it through your mouth.’
‘That’s enough of that,’ said Zoe at last. ‘It’s too early in the morning.’
They reached the road where the school was with five minutes to spare, and Zoe drew in to the kerb some way off while they decanted their bags and shoes and morning selves. Would George kiss her? She only got a kiss when they arrived if none of the boys in his class was around. He knew she wanted a kiss, and gave her a warning look. No, there was Sean McIlroy – no chance today.
They were gone. The car was suddenly empty, she sat unkissed, redundant, cast off like an old boot. ‘Boohoo,’ she murmured, her eyes blurring for a moment, and carefully adjusted her wing mirror for something to do.
Then George reappeared, tapping at the window, looking stern and furtive.
‘I said I’d forgotten my maths book,’ he muttered when she opened the car door, and, leaning across as though to pick up something from the seat beside her, smudged her cheek with a hurried – but (thought Zoe) unsurpassable – kiss.
The Tree
‘I’m very worried,’ she said. ‘Can you come over right away, Derek?’
‘Listen, Mum,’ I said through gritted teeth, ‘I’m on my mobile. I’m sitting in a traffic jam in Chudleigh Road. Is it urgent?’
‘It’s that dead tree in the back garden,’ she said. ‘I’m really worried about it. It’s a danger to life and limb.’
‘Do you know where Chudleigh Road is, Mum?’ I said. ‘It’s in between Catford Greyhound Stadium and Ladywell Cemetery. And you’re over in Balham.’
‘Never mind that,’ she said. Then, ‘Ladywell used to be a lovely area. Very what-what.’
‘Well it isn’t any more,’ I snapped, glaring out of the car window into the November drizzle.
‘I’m really worried, Derek,’ she said. ‘That tree out the back, it’s dead and now the wall beside it is shaky and it might fall on someone.’
‘That wall is only shaky because you went and got rid of the ivy,’ I told her, crawling along in first, trying not to sound irritated.
‘Ivy is a weed,’ she said with surprising force.
I hate ivy too. It makes me shudder. To me it’s the shade-loving plant you find in graveyards feeding off the dead.
‘You should have left it alone,’ I said. ‘It was helping hold that wall up. Parasitical symbiosis.’
When I was over in Balham two days ago she took me to look at the tree, which was definitely dead and was at that point covered in strangulating ivy. There were flies and wasps crawling all over the ivy berries when you looked, and also snails lurking under the dark green leaves which smothered the wall.
‘I did a good job getting rid of it,’ she said down the phone. ‘I ripped it all out, it took me the full morning.’
Her memory may not be what it was but physically she’s still quite strong. I could just imagine the state of the old brickwork after she’d torn away the ivy; the dust and crumbling mortar. No wonder the wall was shaky after that.
‘You should have left it to me,’ I said tetchily. ‘I’d have cut the stems and left it a few weeks. That way all those little aerial roots would have shrivelled up a bit and lost their grip on the brickwork. It would have come away easily if you’d only left it a bit.’
There was a pause, then I heard her start up again.
‘I’m really worried, Derek. It’s that dead tree in the back garden. Can you come over?’
‘Listen, Mum,’ I said, and my voice was a bit louder than I meant. ‘You keep saying the same thing. I heard you the first time, you know. You’re repeating yourself, over and over again, did you know that?’
‘Oh dear,’ came her voice aft
er another pause. ‘I suppose it’s true. You’ve said so before and you wouldn’t make it up.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, immediately remorseful. ‘It’s not the end of the world. Me, I’m forgetting names all the time now that I’ve reached fifty.’
‘Are you fifty?’ she said, and she sounded quite shocked.
I wasn’t making it up about the memory. I go hunting for a word, searching up and down my brain, and just as I think I’ve got it, it’s gone – like a bird flying out of the window.
‘It’s important to forget things,’ I said down the phone. ‘We’ve got too much to remember these days.’
‘It’s a bit worrying though, isn’t it,’ she said.
‘Well you can just stop worrying,’ I said, seeing the traffic start to move at last. ‘Stop worrying about that tree. I can’t come now, I’ve got too much work on my plate, but I’ll be over on Saturday. OK?’
I had so much work on that it wasn’t funny. I was on my way back to the office in New Cross where there was a pile of stuff to be dealt with, then I had to be over at the house in Bassano Street by three, which would be cutting it fine but I’d have a sandwich in the van on the way. I was going to go round it with Paul the surveyor before starting in on the structural stuff, just for a second opinion. We put business each other’s way on a regular basis, so it works quite well.
Now a surveyor really does have to worry. That’s what he’s there for, to worry. He worries for a living. It’s up to him to spy the hairline crack in the wall which will lead to underpinning in five years’ time. See that damp patch? That’s hiding wet rot, which in turn leads to dry rot, and dry rot will spread through a house like cancer. You have to cut the brickwork out if it gets bad enough.
Seeing a house for the first time, you can tell everything about it that you need to know if your eyes are open. It’s the same between men and women, the first meeting. You know everything on the first meeting alone, if you’re properly awake. And as things go on, it’ll be the first cold look, the first small cruelty which lays bare the structural flaws.
Martine would never even consider having my mother to live with us. ‘I am not marrying you so that I can be a tower of strength and a refuge to your relatives,’ she said. I drop by when I’m passing through Balham, generally once or twice a week, and I tend not to mention it to Martine when I do so. ‘I have the right to decline responsibility for other people’s problems,’ says Martine, and I agree with her. She is the first woman in my life who doesn’t lean or cling, and this is a luxury I had not thought possible. She’s independent yet she chooses to be with me. I can hardly believe it. Anyway, I left Vicky and the boys for her. I can’t talk about selfishness.
Later I had to ring Paul to say I was running late for Bassano Street. I had to track him down on his mobile in the end because he was already there. He started telling me about the dodgy flaunching on the chimney stacks, but far more interesting than that was the news on the Choumert Road house I’d sent him to check out that morning.
‘I went down into the cellar and I couldn’t believe my eyes,’ he said, sounding quite excited for him. ‘Asbestos everywhere. I’ve never needed my mask before in all my years in this job, and of course I couldn’t find it when I needed it so I had to make do with a piece of kitchen paper . . .’
‘You’re going a bit over the top, aren’t you?’ I said, because I’d liked the look of that house. ‘Can’t you just case it in and seal it off ?’
‘Normally I’d say yes,’ came his voice. ‘But this stuff was crumbling, it was in a dreadful condition. White dust everywhere.’
‘Even so,’ I said, not wanting to give up on the house, which had looked a nice safe bet to me when I’d seen it the week before.
‘More people die of asbestosis every year than die in road accidents,’ he said. ‘Did you know that? You don’t get to hear about it because it’s mainly building workers that get it. Like my father.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Message received.’
Funny how the picture of a safe solid-looking house can cave in on itself to reveal a rotting death trap, all in a few seconds.
The next day my mother rang me again, and this time I was at the office battling with the VAT returns. She was in a real state, very upset, sounding guilty and at the same time humiliated. It was that tree again, of course.
Gradually I got the story out of her, how she couldn’t wait, she’d been so worried about the tree that she couldn’t think about anything else so right after my last call she’d dug out a copy of the Yellow Pages and got some tree specialists along.
‘You think I’m incapable,’ she said at this point in the story. ‘You think I can’t do anything on my own any more.’
When the men arrived, she told them, ‘I only have £825 in my savings account. Will that be enough?’
‘That should do it,’ they assured her, and I can just imagine them struggling to keep their ugly faces straight.
So she left the three men in her house, alone, while she went down to the Abbey National to draw out her entire savings. When she got back she watched them cut the tree down, which took about five minutes. They cleared some of the rubbish, pocketed her money and said they’d be back to deal with the roots. She hadn’t seen them since.
‘They promised they’d be back right away with some poison for the roots,’ she said, and she was almost in tears. ‘They haven’t finished the job. The roots are the most important bit, aren’t they, Derek.’
Of course, I knew it could have been a lot worse. Stories centring round the vulnerability of old ladies, they’re what keep the South London Press in business, as you’d know if you read that paper. New mothers are notorious for going to pieces over sad news items involving children, and in just the same way I am overcome by tales of helpless elderly women like my mother being robbed blind or beaten up or worse.
I realise Martine might seem hard to some people, but she’s just frightened of getting old. Before bed she always rubs handcream into her elbows and her upper arms as well as into her hands. She knows how to look after herself. My mother is not like that. Her hands are mine, so is the way she holds herself and the line of her worried brow. She has trouble with her hips, her shoulders, and so do I. She is losing her memory. So will I. There’s a phrase I have to describe her to myself. I saw it in one of those poems they stick up now on the underground along with the adverts. When I read the words, I thought, that’s her: Ancient Person of my Heart.
‘Am I talking sense, Derek?’ she said last time I visited. I said of course she was. She went round the houses sometimes, I said; but that was allowed once you were no spring chicken.
One day she’ll look at me and she won’t remember me. She won’t know anything about me, who I am or what I’m called or the baby I once was in her arms. It happened to her own mother after all, and I daresay it will happen to me. My grandmother’s last ten years were spent in a bad dream of not knowing who or where she was, until she fell off the edge at last into the final darkness.
‘What’s the number, Mum,’ I said down the phone, and I kept on at her until I had it. She was sure she’d lost it but then I told her to go and fetch the Yellow Pages and when she came back to the phone with it there sure enough she had circled their name and number in biro.
‘Right,’ I said, taking down the number. ‘Leave this to me, Mum. And you stop worrying, do you hear me?’
I dialled and waited then demanded to speak to the manager. I was reasonably under control at this point, I’m sure I was, but there must have been something in my voice because the man whistled and said, ‘Who are you.’ Very calm and controlled, I told him how my elderly mother had had his men in to deal with a dead tree in her garden; how I was concerned about the extortionate fee they’d charged her; how they’d not been back as promised to remove the rubbish; and how they hadn’t even finished the job. ‘What’s the point of cutting down the tree and leaving the roots?’ I demanded, my voice rising. ‘The roots need
to be poisoned and then, later, dug up. Call yourself tree surgeons?’
He listened to my story in silence. He heard me out. Then he flatly denied his men had ever been there.
Of course, I thought. Bastard. I banged the phone down and I was shaking. I sat there and I began to boil with rage. I started to think through what I would like to do to them, that bunch of Del-Boy crooks. Smash their windows. Their legs. Then I had an idea. I leafed through my address book and punched in the number of a debt-collector friend of mine. I gave him the story, gave him their address and number. I told him to get the money back whatever way he liked, and he could have half.
When I am old and have the illness my mother is now entering, I will remember this while the rest is slipping away. And Martine no doubt will have come to a just estimate of the situation and of her own needs, and will have arranged suitable care for me. As I will have to, eventually, for my mother. For I cannot look after her indefinitely, I cannot wander away there with her, hand in hand.
I rang the tree crooks back and went completely ballistic. I threatened them with the strong arm of the law and with all sorts of illegal strong-arm stuff too. I moralised at them and told them what scum they were, what vermin, taking advantage of a defenceless widow; how they deserved to rot in hell. I poured a molten screaming lava of vileness into the mouthpiece and then I slammed the phone down.
The noise I’d been making, I must have brought the rest of the office to a standstill. I was completely shaken up, shuddering with indignation. I was exhausted. Plus I had three appointments lined up that afternoon for which I was now running late.
Someone slid a mug of coffee onto my desk, with a message to ring my mother. I took a few slow deep breaths. I took a sip of the coffee. Then I rang her back.
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