by Rosie Harris
The minute Reginald had decided to take retirement and had given Charles a free hand, he had wasted no time in instigating a whole new way of running things.
At first it had been new carpets, modern desks and massive pots of green plants in the office. Then he’d installed a fax machine and introduced mobile phones. Next he had updated their computer system to deal with accounts records, enabling him to use advanced techniques as well as word processing for mailing shots.
At the time, Alison had even gone as far as to say that it was the shock of so much modernization that had brought on her father’s heart attack. That was complete nonsense of course, as Mark, Alison’s husband who was a doctor, had pointed out.
‘Your dad’s been planning his retirement for almost ten years. If he was going to have a heart attack over the changes Charles had made then it would have occurred a long time ago.’
‘It could be delayed shock. He’s been brooding about it and …’
Charles had silenced Alison with one of his withering glances. He considered most of his sister’s remarks to be muzzy and badly expressed and in the same mould as his mother’s.
Steven, who was always ready for an argument, especially with his eldest brother, had taken up the cudgels on Alison’s behalf.
‘Alison could have a point. The old man has always been a bit of a traditionalist. He’s always hated change of any kind. Remember how it took years to persuade him to install central heating at home. It wasn’t until Mum wasn’t feeling too well and she asked him to clean out the grates after they’d had a coal fire that he realized how much work was entailed.’
Margaret hadn’t listened to the rest of the argument. She’d gone out into the kitchen to brew some tea. Sandra, Steven’s wife, had followed her, hesitantly trying to apologize for her husband’s insensitivity.
‘There’s no need to worry about it,’ Margaret assured her. ‘Those two never did see eye to eye. Steven likes to get his own back whenever he can for the way Charles used to bully him when they were little.’
‘Thank heaven we have a boy and girl, not two boys,’ sighed Sandra.
‘Are you saying that Matthew never tries to bully Hannah?’
‘I don’t think he does!’ Sandra looked startled and her grey eyes widened. ‘He always tries to protect her … in fact, she’s more likely to boss him about than the other way round.’
‘That’s the great advantage of only having one,’ said Alison who’d followed them into the kitchen and was busying herself laying out cups and saucers on a tray.
‘Don’t you find that Christopher is awfully lonely at times?’
‘Heaven’s no! He has plenty of friends and leads a very busy social life, I can tell you.’
‘But he has no one to share experiences with—’
‘Nonsense! He is always having friends to stay or he is invited to sleepovers at their homes. When they are at our place then if they start bickering or quarrelling with each other then they go home. It’s a perfect arrangement, I can assure you.’
‘You would have liked to have had a daughter, surely.’
‘No way!’ Margaret heard the hard note creep into Alison’s voice. ‘Another like me! Perish the thought.’
Margaret had smiled non-committally. Why did Sandra have to open up old wounds? Of course Alison wasn’t going to admit to wanting a daughter, or even another son. Not now. Sandra knew all about Mark and Alison losing their second baby, so why raise such a sensitive issue?
Alison was right though, in some ways. It was more convenient having only one child. There was a lot of nonsense talked about children needing brothers and sisters, of them being company for each other, of them benefiting from being part of a family unit.
Experience had shown Margaret that it wasn’t true.
From a very early age all three of hers had been self-orientated. She was sure that in a family environment they were probably more selfish and more possessive than an only child would be. Leave a toy or any other precious possession lying around and it became general property.
Even more to the point, an only child didn’t have to suffer the indignity of wearing hand-me-downs. Everything was new and bought specifically for them. And once they’d developed a sense of dress and learned how to manipulate their parents, then usually it was exactly what they wanted.
Sandwiched between Charles and Steven, Alison’s great advantage had been that, because she was a girl, most of Charles’s hand-me-downs had been kept for Steven.
Possibly that was why Charles had gone through life with such a superiority complex, mused Margaret as she studied the back of his head. Nothing fazed him. He was always in control of his feelings and of every situation. Being so laid back and so confident was probably why he was so competent when it came to business matters.
Since Charles was always so relaxed about everything, calm when everyone else was panicking, decisive when all the others were uncertain what to do next, she found herself wondering why it was that Helen was so often agitated and snappy.
She studied her daughter-in-law’s profile. An angular face with high cheekbones that she attempted to soften by wearing her copper-coloured hair swept forward on to her cheeks. There were stress lines around her green eyes and at the corners of her mouth.
She’d been as slim as a ruler and sweetly pretty when Charles had first brought her home. Petra took after her. She was thin and had her mother’s reddish brown hair. Even at sixteen she was already dreaming of the day when she would be old enough to be a model with the single-mindedness that had made her father so successful in his business career.
Amanda was the exact opposite. Although she was only fourteen, she was already highly-strung, dramatically reacting to every situation around her. Ever since she’d been a tiny tot she had mastered the art of crying almost to order. Her crocodile tears vanished the moment she managed to get her own way.
Margaret sighed. She was a devious, scheming little girl who seemed to be quite capable of manipulating the world to do her bidding.
As they drew up outside Willow House, Margaret switched her thoughts back to the trauma ahead of her. She wondered how many of those who had been at the crematorium intended to come back to Willow House. There must have been about twenty close friends, and as many, or possibly more, business acquaintances. In addition, there were numerous relatives that they only saw at funerals, weddings and christenings.
The thought of the noise and turmoil that sixty or more people would cause sent a shudder through her. How long were they all going to stay, she wondered. Two hours, three hours? Surely they’d leave once all the food and drink had gone. It wasn’t a party, damn it!
She longed to be completely alone. She needed solitude. She wanted to sit down in her favourite armchair with a cup of tea and analyse her thoughts. Her mind was so confused that she couldn’t think straight.
Although she hadn’t shed a tear, nor had any feelings of grief, she was experiencing a sense of loneliness. It was as if she was poised on the edge of a great void.
Two
Looking round the crowded room, she listened to the buzz of unfamiliar voices. Margaret wondered what Reginald would have thought if he’d known that his send-off would have resulted in such a gregarious gathering.
Everyone seemed to be having a splendid time, she mused as laughter boomed out on the other side of the room. It was more like a party than a funeral wake.
The food was good, much better than she and the family could have put on and she was glad she’d listened to Charles and hired outside caterers. It left her free to circulate without worrying about whether glasses needed to be topped up or plates of food handed round.
She’d dreaded the thought of all these people coming back to Willow House, invading her home, but now they were here she was actually enjoying it. So many faces that she hadn’t seen for years.
The never-ending sea of faces of those who had come to show their last respects to Reginald became a kaleidoscope of ju
mbled memories as they slowly came over to greet her. People who seemed to be as pleased to see her as she was to meet up with them again, murmuring their kind wishes and condolences for her loss. Yet they all seemed so old.
Reginald’s younger brother, Silas, and his wife, Monica, were both grey-haired and very portly. Their son, Edward was already balding although not yet in his forties. His slightly younger brother, Peter, was a tubby, heavily jowled man who looked like a farmer, but was in fact a skilled computer analyst.
As Reginald’s sister, Hilda, a thin, shrewish woman and her equally scrawny husband Jack kissed her goodbye, Margaret wondered if they were on a perpetual diet. If so, it wasn’t one shared by their daughter Gillian, who was the size of a house and wobbly with it.
Her own sister Vivienne seemed to be glad to get away. Older than her by ten years, she was almost in her seventies and crippled with arthritis that distorted her body into an ungainly shape. Her lined face bore the ravages of the pain she endured.
Their mother had suffered with the same disease. In old age, her hands had been so gnarled she could barely hold a teacup. She would sit with them wrapped in a scarf, or hidden inside the sleeves of her cardigan, as if ashamed of their disfigurement.
Joseph Chapman, their brother, took after their father. Stocky and immensely strong, he’d always led an outdoor life. Even as a young boy he had taken an interest in gardening and had spent his weekends and school holidays mowing lawns and weeding gardens for their neighbours.
He’d worked on the greens at a nearby golf course after he’d left school, becoming head groundsman when he was twenty.
After he married, he and his wife, Hetty, had decided to start their own market garden. They’d acquired a stony field on the outskirts of Cookham. The soil was poor, so they’d erected a glasshouse and concentrated on raising bedding plants. It was successful, so they’d expanded and begun to specialize in indoor flowering plants until greenhouses and glasshouses covered the entire field.
Margaret had fond memories of her frequent visits, before Reginald retired, to the long misty glasshouses filled with heady smells and packed with colourful, exotic blooms. Occasionally, unable to resist the temptation, she would bring home one of their eye-catching plants and smuggle it into the small front bedroom which was designated as her sewing room.
It was the one place in the house Reginald rarely went in, yet he had an unerring instinct to do so if she had a flowering plant in there. The bout of hay fever that followed made her feel so guilty that if the plant wasn’t hardy enough to put out into the garden, she would return it to Joseph’s nursery.
Hetty always made it quite plain that she thought it was a ridiculous state of affairs. ‘Tell him to keep out of the room. He doesn’t have to go in there, now does he?’
‘He can’t help getting hay fever.’
‘Nor can you help getting a cough from those stinking cigars he’s always smoking,’ Hetty would state firmly.
It was an irrefutable argument, but Hetty didn’t have to live with Reginald, she did.
Hetty wasn’t alone in her belief that Margaret should stand up for her rights. Her friends Thelma Winter, Brenda Williams and Jan Porter were all of the same opinion.
If one half of the things Thelma told the three of them, in the days when they’d met regularly for coffee, were true, Thelma led her husband a dog’s life. She did exactly what she wanted to do; everything revolved around the schedule she imposed.
At the time, Margaret had thought it amusing. Later, after Reginald’s heart attack and the cosy routine she had established was completely disrupted, she’d felt envious. By then, he’d taken over her life and was running it in much the same way as he had his office. Economies were the order of the day.
The first thing to go had been her car.
‘There’s no longer any need to run two cars,’ he’d stated. ‘If we go out it will be together, so we may as well dispose of your Ford.’
Her one-careful-lady-driver-only Escort had been snapped up, sold to the first person that had come to look at it. True she had only used it as a run-around; popping into town to the shops, collecting groceries from the supermarket or going to visit her friends, but she missed it greatly. She felt trapped.
It mightn’t have been so bad if they had taken it in turns to drive his car when they went out. Reginald never even asked if she wanted to but automatically took the driver’s seat as though he had a god-given right to do so. Furthermore, whether they were going shopping or somewhere for a walk, he was always the one who decided on the destination and the route they would take.
Even if she suggested somewhere in particular, it made no difference. It was almost as if the car was programmed in advance to do what he wanted. After a time she’d given up caring. She’d consoled herself with the thought that one shopping centre was much the same as another. If she didn’t like the location he’d chosen for their walk then she could always imagine herself somewhere else.
Sometimes she felt it was like living in limbo, or watching the antics of the world from the other side of a plate glass window.
Occasionally there were paralysing moments of insight when she feared she had lost the ability to enjoy life. She teetered on a tiptoe of anxiety. She was too apprehensive to risk doing or saying anything that might disturb the uneasy peace that existed between them.
Thelma, Brenda and Jan lost patience with her when with monotonous regularity she declined their invitations to play bowls, go swimming or on a shopping spree, join them for away-day’s or even to meet them for coffee.
‘I’m afraid I can’t leave Reginald on his own, not now he’s retired.’
‘He’s left you on your own all day, even at weekends, for years and years.’
‘That was quite different. Reginald was always at work then.’
‘You need a life of your own,’ they protested. ‘It isn’t even as if you both share a hobby or even have the same interests.’
They were right, of course. Until he’d retired and had a mild heart attack, Reginald had had a very active social life. He’d always had a great many business meetings and some of these had necessitated him having to be away from home overnight. He had played golf on Saturdays and Sundays, as well as most evenings during the summer, and afterwards he would participate in a drinking session in the clubhouse.
Although his heart attack had been a fairly mild one, he was told that golf was too strenuous and drink strictly limited. Out of sheer boredom he had stuck to her side like a limpet and insisted on accompanying her everywhere she went.
When he’d first retired he’d volunteered to help around the house. The novelty of pushing the vacuum cleaner around or dusting the furniture quickly waned, but not before he’d made so many changes that he’d altered the entire atmosphere of their home.
He had found having to move ornaments and framed photographs in order to dust was far too time-consuming, so these had all been banished to the attic. Next all the rugs disappeared together with all the unnecessary bric-a-brac; trivia that she’d collected over the years and put on display because it brought back memories.
The clean sweep left easy-to-clean, uncluttered surfaces but, in her eyes, it had expunged all the personal touches that turned a mere house into a home.
She knew that she should have insisted on putting them back but when she had propped up a snapshot of Steven’s little girl, Hannah, on the mantelpiece and half an hour later found it had been taken down and put in a drawer, she’d simply given in. Reginald was right of course, bare surfaces were so much easier to dust.
Having made his point over what he termed irritating clutter, Reginald had then turned his attention to cooking. At first he had simply hovered over her in the kitchen. When he began telling her better ways to chop onions, mix up custard powder and add seasoning, she’d lost her cool.
‘You do it, if you know so much better than me,’ she’d exploded, biting back her tears of frustration.
‘There’s
no need to be like that,’ he told her huffily. ‘That’s the trouble with doing everything your own way all these years; you’re stuck in a rut.’
‘That’s probably because in the past I’ve been left to get on with things,’ she’d retorted with an unexpected show of spirit.
‘Well, I’m trying to rectify that and to bring efficiency into the kitchen at the same time,’ he’d snapped grimly.
‘Don’t bother. I like doing things my way.’
‘I’ve noticed that,’ he flared. ‘You can’t stand the slightest criticism, can you?’
They hadn’t spoken to each other for the rest of the morning. She took refuge in gardening, venting her anger by plunging the trowel savagely into the soil as she cleared the weeds from a border.
When she went back indoors to prepare lunch he had already started cooking it. She resigned herself to the new pattern that had been established. He used double the pots and pans necessary and always left the washing up and clearing away for her to do, but peace reigned.
It was inevitable that he became involved in the shopping. Since she no longer had her own car, she relied on him to take her to the supermarket. The first time this had happened she had felt as though she was caught up in some TV farce and had half expected that at any moment Jeremy Beadle would pop up from behind one of the gondolas followed by an entire camera crew.
Reginald had scoured the shelves like a starving marauder, picking up anything that caught his fancy and tossing it haphazardly into the trolley. Some of the more unsuitable items she’d managed to sneak back on to the shelves again, albeit in the wrong places, while he was foraging for new delights.
Even so, when they reached the checkout the bill was three times what she normally spent. All the way home he had ranted on about the need to pull their horns in now that he was retired.
On their next visit he’d gone armed with a calculator to make sure they didn’t overspend. He insisted on selecting the cheapest brands, refusing to listen when she said he wouldn’t like them or that they weren’t good value.