A Place to Lie

by Rebecca Griffiths

  Timothy stepped into the sunlight and tugged at his dog collar as he slid a furtive gaze to her window. Hating him to think she was spying on him, Cecilia retreated sharply on her wheels. Not that there was any real need, the gesture was probably automatic; Timothy Mortmain had stopped looking at her years ago. She understood his disillusionment, the debilitating symptoms of her condition impacted on his life too, and although it wasn’t her fault, neither was it his. Within seconds, Lillian Hooper appeared, clutching a wad of music manuscript. Beautifully turned-out as always. Cecilia thought she was as classy as that Stefanie Powers in Hart to Hart , with her easy attractiveness. A demon of an organist, Timothy couldn’t praise her enough, and so kind; Tilly Petley said the woman never had a bad word to say about anyone.

  Downstairs the front door slammed. Amy ? Cecilia twisted from the window. The front door slammed again. This time it was accompanied by raised voices, followed by the thudding of someone charging up three flights of stairs.

  Amy burst in. ‘You okay, Mum?’ Flushed and panting, she adjusted Cecilia’s blanket. ‘Bit stuffy, shall I open the window?’

  ‘What were you two arguing about?’ Cecilia asked.

  ‘Dean.’ Amy shrugged. ‘Dad knows.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, sweetheart – you’re hardly discreet, the pair of you.’ Cecilia smiled.

  Amy returned it, her prettiness lifting Cecilia’s afternoon. ‘I don’t care. Dad can shout all he likes – I love Dean. I really do.’

  Cecilia spread wide her arms and Amy, kneeling, her thighs pressed against the footrests of the wheelchair, lay her head in her lap.

  ‘Best not rub his nose in it, though, eh?’ Cecilia stroked her daughter’s glossy hair that, fanned over her knees, smelled like the joints she’d smoked at college. ‘You know it riles him,’ she said, wondering if Dean had given Amy any more of the cannabis she needed to help ease her pain.

  ‘But why can’t he just be happy for me?’

  ‘He worries you won’t achieve everything you should … that you’ll throw your future away on him.’

  ‘What d’you think?’ Amy lifted her dark irises then dropped her head again.

  ‘I’m thrilled you’re having a good time … trying new things.’ A wry smile as she inhaled the smell that threw her back to a relatively carefree time in her own history.

  ‘Trying new things . I’m not trying , Mum – this is for real.’ Amy fidgeted on Cecilia’s thin thighs.

  ‘I know you think that now, sweetheart, but you’ll be off to university before you know it, and—’

  Their conversation was severed by the arrival of Timothy Mortmain: slightly out of puff, although this had more to do with his temper than the arduous ascent to his wife’s bedroom. Imperious in his crow-black vicar’s garb, he made the cats scatter; they didn’t like the reverend, these intuitive creatures who lived on the tips of their nerves.

  ‘How dare you run off when I’m speaking to you!’ he shouted at his daughter from the threshold. Amy sprang upright. ‘You’re not too old to be put over my knee, my girl.’ The vicar wagged a pious finger.

  Striding into Cecilia’s room to administer a disinterested squeeze of her shoulder through the cable-knit shawl she needed to keep warm, Timothy dipped his head to bump a tacky cheek against his wife’s. This was what passed as a greeting between them nowadays, the kisses – along with any intimacy – sadly fizzled out after her diagnosis. Perhaps, or so she wanted to believe, from an irrational fear he had of worsening her pain.

  ‘Oh, Timothy, you’re sweating. Why don’t you use the stair lift we paid all that money to have put in? You’re always complaining it doesn’t get enough use.’ She teased him, trying to lift his mood; but he refused to give the merest glimmer of amusement. ‘And you’ve been in the woods again, look at the state of your shoes.’

  ‘Don’t fuss, Cecilia,’ he said, the huge silver cross around his neck winking insolently in the sharp sunlight. ‘Nothing a good polish won’t fix.’

  ‘What did you say to those little girls?’ Cecilia stared into the recess of her husband’s philtrum, to a thatch of bristles that always eluded the razor.

  ‘Little girls ? What girls?’ The words thick with menace.

  ‘Ellie Fry and Dora’s nieces?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He stepped back too briskly for her to see his expression.

  ‘You must’ve said something , they looked terrified, poor things – came running out of the church.’

  ‘You’ve been reading too many thrillers,’ he accused. ‘You think everyone’s up to no good. Not enough to do, that’s your trouble.’

  ‘Take me somewhere, then. I only get wheeled out for funerals.’ Cecilia knew this wasn’t true, it was her illness, not Timothy, that dictated whether she left the house. It was why they had the top floor of the rectory converted – because even if she wasn’t up to socialising, at least she could look out on the village and still feel part of things. But it made Amy giggle, and lightened the atmosphere.

  Although only momentarily. His daughter’s laugh reminded the vicar she was there. ‘And as for you ,’ he started up again, ‘we don’t pay for you to go to one of the finest schools in England to throw your life away on that waster .’ The deep rumble he usually saved for Sunday sermons crackled against the Eau de Nil-painted walls. ‘Smoking dope … riding around on the back of his motorbike … it’s disgusting. What must people think?’

  ‘Timothy, please ,’ Cecilia intervened. ‘She is eighteen. And Dean’s not a waster.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Don’t you remember what we were like when we first got together? The things we used to get up to.’

  A grunt from her husband. ‘Why don’t you come downstairs this evening? Share a meal with me for a change. We could open a bottle of something.’

  ‘Not tonight, Timothy. I’m sorry, but I’m really not up to it.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, sounding defeated. Cecilia read the disappointment in his tone and wished they could have their old life back; that she could be the wife she once was. The man was lonely. Not that he admitted this to her face – he saved it for his poetry, which he then gave her to read. ‘Give me a shout if you change your mind.’ And with long strides, he left them to it.

  The room, churned by his presence, spun and settled into the languid heat of the afternoon.

  ‘Don’t cry, love.’ Cecilia cupped Amy’s face between her hands, drew her close and breathed her in like a rose. ‘You two used to be such friends.’ Her own eyes glistening with emotion. ‘He used to teach you the names of flowers and trees – do you remember? He was besotted with you, wanting to give you a head start so you shone at school; which of course you did.’ She wiped a tear from her daughter’s cheek with the pad of her thumb. ‘D’you remember going with him to the old farm labourers’ cottages?’

  ‘Yeah.’ A tentative nod. ‘The squalor, Mum – you wouldn’t believe it.’

  ‘As a young vicar, your dad tried so hard to empathise with his parishioners. Did everything in his power to help them,’ Cecilia explained. ‘You won’t know it, but he wore himself out campaigning for better living conditions for those rural workers.’

  ‘But they never really liked him much, did they?’ Amy said.

  ‘Things were better when he had a thriving congregation. Nowadays, those who’ve remained loyal only do so out of habit, or a belief the sky would cave in. You can see what he’s up against – how hard it’s been for him to stick it out here? Especially since I got ill.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Say it to him, Amy. Because it’s not really his fault he’s so grumpy these days, is it?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ Her daughter shook her head, then changed her mind. ‘But he doesn’t have to take it out on me.’

  ‘I know, love, but he gets frustrated. You’ve heard him, the things he says to me sometimes, but I know he doesn’t mean it. He’s got a lot on his plate.’ Cecilia, counting herself as yet another of her husband’s burdens, smiled a
smile that didn’t reach her eyes. ‘I suppose his inability to identify with his parishioners is why he writes poems. He’s trying to make sense of it all … of what’s happened to me.’

  ‘Is that why he takes himself off for those long rambles, smoking his pipe?’

  ‘Yes, he said that because God had failed to show Himself inside the church, he owed it to Him to search elsewhere.’

  Cecilia gave her daughter the reasons Timothy had given her for disappearing for hours on end. And what choice did she have, other than to believe him? Confined to a wheelchair, she could hardly follow him about to see what he was really up to; because she was certain he was up to something, and whatever it was, there was nothing godly about it.

  Present Day

  Woken by the violent squeal of tyres in the street below, Joanna tries to go back to sleep. She thought she had slept for hours, but her head had barely hit the pillow. Too full of the unresolved questions about Caroline she had hoped she was free of when she climbed into bed. Unblinking, she watches moonlight nudge between the folds in the bedroom curtains. It curdles with the glow of city streets and moulds itself to the withers of Dora’s old furniture.

  Accepting she isn’t going to be able to drift off now, she rolls over. Groping the graveyard of earrings her sister occasionally wore, the framed black and white photographs – of their father, another of Joanna and Mike on their wedding day – standing proudly amid empty bottles of temazepam and zolpidem. She switches on the bedside lamp, swaps the sickly pre-dawn light for the artificial and swings her legs off the bed. Pulling on one of Caroline’s cardigans, she slots her feet into her sister’s old slippers. Finding the hollows Caroline’s toes had made brings a memory of her father’s shoes, and not of Caroline at all. Shoes Joanna would push her hands inside to feel where his toes had been, before her mother bagged them up for Oxfam to take away.

  Padding to the bathroom, she tugs on the light and is greeted by more of her sister’s medication lined up in the cabinet above the basin. The sight of it pushes her back to that damp, cramp Camden flat of her childhood: the stuffiness, the mustiness, the rows of brown pill bottles, their necks plugged with pink cotton wool – pills that if her mother didn’t take spelt trouble. Shaking them and finding each of them empty, she drops them into the bin. She snaps shut the mirror-fronted cabinet and catches a glimpse of Dora over her shoulder. The draught of ghostly breath on the nape of her neck. She jumps, ice cold beneath her night-clothes. Joanna experienced something similar to this when Dora first died, but nothing since. Why is she seeing her again after all these years – is her aunt trying to communicate something? An unsettling thought as the real world recedes then shifts forward into the startling sound of the telephone.

  ‘Who the hell rings people at this hour?’ she grumbles, listening to it summon her. ‘It could be urgent,’ she says to no one, in no hurry to answer it.

  Joanna sweeps Caroline’s thick woollen cardigan around her, finds a hole worn away on the sleeve. Coddling herself, she aims for the hall, letting the swell of a rare gibbous moon lead the way. Slithering free from a fold of cloud, its supine stare is enough to override the stain of streetlamps and allows her to circumvent the sharp-edged furniture, picture frames and vases. Checking what can be seen of the clock above her head to confirm the absurdity of the time, she picks the telephone up on the sixth ring.

  ‘Hello?’ she interrogates the handset, pinching sleepy dust from her eyes.

  Nothing.

  ‘Who’s there, please ?’ Her voice shaking. ‘Mike , is that you, love?’

  When no one answers, her mind spins to what the neighbour said about Caroline being beleaguered by silent calls. Could this nuisance be the same person who’d been pestering her sister? Could it be connected to why Caroline was too frightened to leave the flat, so she missed her appointments at the hospital, didn’t collect her prescriptions? And – worse – why she armed herself with Dora’s knife that night?

  ‘Who’s there, please?’ she asks the caller, a shiver of fear running the length of her. ‘Answer me. Who are you, what do you want?’

  Again nothing. But there’s definitely someone, she hears them breathing. The sound fights for room alongside her in the dark.

  Summer 1990

  Asked by Ian Fry to do another stint at the pub, Caroline – eager to see Dean and hoping today would be the day he got around to asking her out – was up before Joanna for a change. Elbow-deep in a basin of tepid water, humming the tune about a yellow bird that Ellie played them on her mother’s guitar yesterday, Caroline felt the happiest she’d been for a long time as she slapped a flannel under her arms, across her back and neck. ‘Could grow potatoes there,’ an expression of her father’s between fresh applications of soap, made her scrub harder. The padded linoleum of Dora’s bathroom was sodden, despite the cork bath mat she stood on. She wiped away condensation with the back of her arm and scrutinised her face in the mirror. Found she rather liked the fine spray of freckles that had blossomed on her cheeks. She wasn’t too bad, she decided; better yet if she kept her mouth closed. At least her nose was straight and her eyebrows neat, certainly not like the vicar’s – those were like the tails of the foxes Mrs Hooper fed scraps to. But it didn’t matter what she believed about herself any more. A bright thought skidded into her head: nothing mattered now she knew Dean loved her, and soon they were going to be together. Forever.

  Running the cold tap, she splashed her face and wondered if she should cut her fringe as Dean suggested. Reaching this crossroads in her life – no longer the cute little kid her sister still was, but not a fully-fledged woman either – Caroline knew, despite Dean wanting her to be his girlfriend, she wasn’t nearly pretty or interesting enough to join the realm of grown-ups proper. Cutting her fringe might help make her look older, she decided, repositioning the red Alice band Dean said complemented her hair – hair that up to then had only ever been referred to as ordinary brown . She would do it tonight, when Joanna and Dora were asleep: she would do it to please Dean.

  Sounds of Dora moving around downstairs. Dropping things on purpose, as if to communicate how busy she was, how much hard work looking after them both for the summer was. Hunting for the nice lavender talc Dora said she could use, Caroline scraped what passed for a fingernail over the grey tide of scum inside the bath she and Joanna were reluctant to sit in. It fell away in flakes like dry skin, and she rewashed her hands, sniffing to check they didn’t smell. Perhaps the talcum powder was on the windowsill, she thought, as she dried herself on a towel. She tugged the chintzy Austrian blind up an inch, careful not to touch the dust-thick pleats, but the state of the windowsill – a graveyard of candied bluebottles – made her drop it again. God, this place was disgusting. The fancy soaps and luxury toilet paper pulled under the crocheted skirts of a round-faced dolly didn’t fool her; Caroline reckoned she’d used cleaner public conveniences.

  The hum of the vacuum cleaner propelled her into action, but before she could put on her T-shirt, she must first fasten her bra. Hanging nonchalantly over the wicker laundry bin, she eyed it warily. These two weren’t friends. Uncomfortable with it in the same way she was with those thick pads her mother bought her once a month to put in her knickers, she picked up the bra and rubbed the cornflower-blue polyester that chafed the tender skin under her arms. She must wear it, must get used to it, even if she still didn’t have quite enough to fill the little fist-sized cups; all the girls at school had them, and she needed to show Dean she was all grown up.

  Fully dressed and out on the landing, Caroline still wanted the talc. She wondered if it could be in Dora’s room and peeked around her aunt’s partially open door. Stepping inside, she was hit by the vinegary smell of unwashed feet and a vague tang of sweat that, mixed through with Dora’s signature perfume, made her wrinkle her nose on impact. It was as slovenly as the bathroom. The room was exactly as she expected it to be: half-empty mugs of cold tea, one with a bloated custard cream floating in it; dregs of red wine in
smeary glasses; unwashed plates daubed with dried-on unmentionables. Clothes that had obviously been stepped out of, heaped on the floor. A pair of jumbo-sized knickers draped over a chair. It was like the bedrooms of school friends, the few she’d been invited into.

  A curtain twitched at the window that wasn’t quite closed. The faded material did little to sheath the room from the greenish light pushing in from outside. Tiptoeing over, Caroline looked out on a garden cobwebbed in early mist and dew then, withdrawing into the room again, saw that the jam jar of pretty wild flowers she picked from the woods and thoughtfully arranged for Dora only yesterday had been relegated from the dusty-topped dressing table to the waste paper basket. The indifference of it hurt and, interpreting it as yet another rejection, she rifled through Dora’s ornate jewellery box for something to compensate her. A fleeting thought about the small yet beautiful things already pinched from the pub, from Mrs Hooper’s, from her aunt’s holiday home – a place crammed with so much, she’d convinced herself they’d never be missed. What’s this? She sifted a substantial pendant attached to a heavy gold chain that, once in her palm, she saw had been fashioned into a ladybird. Nice. She smiled, dropping it into her pocket, the weight distorting the shape of her cardigan as she considered the state of the bed. An opulent affair, heaped with pillows, its silk counterpane kicked into a mound at the bottom. Turning away, quietly disgusted, she noticed the convex doors of the huge lacquered wardrobe wouldn’t close over the bulge of dresses and coats. Dora’s clothes had the luxuriant feel of money, with their deep hems and silk linings, the shoes of hand-stitched leather. Not that anything was appreciated, Caroline thought judgementally, stroking a particularly vivid green blouse.