‘Perhaps he could marry Greta?’ I suggested, but without much hope.
‘Greta’s certainly not the marrying kind,’ Mum said.
‘It would seem,’ said Lucas, ‘that no one in this house is the marrying kind.’
‘So. What are you going to say to him?’ I asked.
‘Well, I shall say how honoured I am, and grateful. That sort of thing. And then I shall say I hope we can still remain friends and —’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, cut to the chase, Mum,’ Lucas said.
‘All right. I shall tell him — I shall say I’m, well, I’m —’
‘Not the marrying kind,’ we finished for her.
‘Something like that.’
‘You’d better get on with it, Mum. He’s been waiting nearly twenty-four hours,’ I said. ‘Better get it over with.’
In the event, Call Me Bill took Mum’s decision with the kind of stoicism we had come to associate with him. Lucas and I privately thought he might even have been relieved. It was more than possible that he’d thought he was doing the right (rather than the sensible) thing in offering marriage to Mum; that her vulnerability had finally got to him, virtue had temporarily triumphed over common sense, and by now he could well be regretting his actions. Whatever his motives, Mum needn’t have worried about his future plans. It appeared that Call Me Bill had no intention of moving out of the house, and nothing was going to change. And if Lucas and I noticed a new lightness in Mum’s step, and a lift in her mood, we knew better than to mention it. If she had received a boost from Call Me Bill’s proposal, then that was all to the good.
‘What iss happen?’ Greta wanted to know, sensing that something was being withheld from her. ‘Something iss happen. I know this.’
I hesitated. Should I tell her? It wasn’t really my news to tell, and yet Greta was one of the family. It didn’t seem fair to keep secrets from her.
‘Call Me Bill asked Mum to marry him,’ I told her.
‘Oh.’ Greta’s face fell.
‘Don’t worry,’ I patted her shoulder. ‘She’s said no, and he’s taken it very well.’
For a moment, Greta didn’t seem to know what to say, but I noticed that the tear which had been threatening to fall had disappeared.
‘It’s OK to be pleased,’ I assured her. ‘I’m pleased, too. So’s Lucas. There’s been enough change round here recently. I think we’re all much better off as we are.’
Still Greta hesitated, then she smiled at me.
‘Nice-cup-of-tea?’ She had obviously decided to return to safer and more familiar territory.
‘Nice-cup-of-tea would be lovely, Greta,’ I told her.
Even after all these years, when I think of Greta, I always picture her in her flowered pinny presiding over our ancient blue-and-white teapot. She still never touched tea herself, but it was Greta’s tea which fuelled our family in times of crisis and which gave me my life-long tea habit.
Twenty-three
It is now almost dark, and the unlit room fades to monochrome as I continue my vigil by my mother’s bed. I hear the supper trolley rattle past the door, but it doesn’t stop. There will be no more suppers for Mum, for she can no longer eat. She exists on sips of tea and water, and the occasional teaspoonful of the brandy I have brought for her. I am exhausted and hungry and I could do with a shower and a change of clothes, but I daren’t leave her. Mum saw me into the world; it seems only right that I should see her out of it and do all I can to ease her journey.
Lucas visits, in a hurry. Lucas is always in a hurry. He has an important job and a demanding wife, and he is afraid of death. I don’t really blame him. He brings grapes she can’t eat, and the wrong sort of flowers; garage flowers, wrapped in crackly cellophane. But she seems pleased. Mum has always adored presents, and never seems to mind if they are not what she wants.
A young nurse comes in to check on her.
‘She looks very peaceful,’ she whispers to me.
‘I’m not dead yet,’ retorts Mum, making the nurse start.
‘Oh, dear. I didn’t mean to upset her.’
‘I’m not deaf, either.’
‘That wasn’t very kind,’ I say, when the nurse has gone. ‘She’s doing her best.’
‘I know.’ Pause. Her breathing’s a bit more laboured now, and it’s an effort for her to speak. ‘I’m sorry.’
Mum’s eyes close, but her hands start to move over the bedspread. Her right hand rocks rhythmically back and forth, and I recognize Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
‘Sing it for me, Cass.’
So I hum, and Mum plays, and it all seems perfectly natural. I remember all the other works mum has played over the years on the ironing board, her ancient record player belting out the music.
‘I could have been really good, you know, Cass.’ The Moonlight Sonata comes to an abrupt halt, and she gives a little hopeless gesture with her hands. ‘Really good. If only I’d had the lessons.’
‘I know, Mum. I know.’
Oh God, if there is a God, make it all right for her. Be there to welcome her when she arrives, and fill her heaven with suitable men, dependable Lodgers and a Steinway grand for her to have her piano lessons on. And look after her. Please look after her. Because my mother has never been much good at looking after herself.
In February, Mum quite suddenly returned to her ironing-board recitals. She played sad, pensive pieces — pieces she had played after her mother died — but we all took it as a good sign. Greta, who had been heroically doing all the ironing in the aftermath of Octavia’s death, must have been particularly relieved, for between recitals Mum managed to get quite a lot of it done. For myself, I took it as another indication that we might eventually return to normality, and I was ridiculously cheered. To anyone outside the family, ironing-board recitals must have seemed — and I’m sure on occasion, were — quite absurd, but to us, they were part of life and very much a part of Mum.
A few weeks later, the gay Lodger left to set up house with his partner (at least, that is what we assumed; he had always been very discreet about his private life). While we mourned his going — he had been a wonderful support over the past months, and a good friend to our family — finding a replacement gave Mum something to focus on.
‘We’ve had an application from a woman, Cass,’ she told me. ‘Imagine! A woman Lodger!’
I couldn’t see the problem myself, although our Lodgers had always been men. A woman might make a nice change. But Mum would have none of it, and adjusted her advertisement accordingly.
Unusually, we had several applicants, and Mum settled on a hunky Charlton Heston look-alike with a Ph.D. in bats.
‘Bats!’ Mum cried gaily. ‘Now isn’t that interesting, Cass?’
I had never found bats especially interesting, and suspected that it was the Charlton Heston aspect rather than the bats which had appealed to Mum. But provided he didn’t bring his bats with him, if he was going to help reawaken her interest in the opposite sex, then I certainly wasn’t going to argue.
The bat-loving Lodger appeared to bring Mum a new lease of life. They stayed up late into the night talking, they went for long walks together (ostensibly looking for bats, but even I knew that bats are in short supply at two o’clock in the afternoon), and from the covert padding of feet on floorboards and the opening and closing of bedroom doors in the middle of the night, no doubt engaged in other activities as well.
If Call Me Bill was hurt by Mum’s activities so soon after his proposal, he didn’t show it, and the rest of us were relieved that yet another aspect of Mum’s life appeared to be returning to normal.
‘Do you think we ought to talk to her about — well, about birth control?’ Lucas asked me, when this had been going on for about a fortnight. ‘We don’t want another — another —’
‘Octavia?’ I said.
‘Well, yes. I mean Octavia was lovely, but I just couldn’t bear to risk going through all that again.’ It was almost the first time Lucas had
referred to his own feelings about Octavia’s death, and I was touched.
‘You’re right. I’ll speak to her.’
When I mentioned our conversation to Mum, she didn’t appear to mind at all.
‘Oh, Cass! There are these dear little pills you can take now, which take care of all that. Isn’t it wonderful?’ She rummaged in her bag and brought out a small pink packet. ‘One pill for each day, and bob’s your uncle!’
‘Are you sure?’ This sounded to me a bit too good to be true.
‘Quite sure.’ Mum beamed at me. ‘Dr Mackenzie gave them to me ages ago. Wasn’t that kind?’
‘You won’t forget to take them?’
‘Of course I won’t forget to take them. Now stop fussing, Cass, and run along. I’ve got a lot to do.’
Not for the first time, I thanked God for Dr Mackenzie.
Meanwhile, at school, I continued to plod. I listened in class, did my homework and generally toed the line, but I put no effort into anything I did. In a less able child this would have passed unnoticed, but it continued to frustrate my teachers, who all knew I could do so much better. The only teacher who seemed to understand at all was Mrs Harvey, the kindly woman who taught us English.
‘What’s this all about, Cass?’ she said one day, when I had stayed behind to help her tidy up the classroom. ‘You have outstanding O levels and an excellent brain. You could go such a long way if you wanted to. What are you planning to do with your life?’
‘I don’t know.’ I put down the blackboard rubber and dusted my hands on my skirt. ‘I honestly don’t know. I did know, once, but now life’s so — so muddled, I’m not sure of anything any more.’
‘In what way, muddled?’
‘Mum, Octavia —’
‘Octavia?’
‘My little sister. She — she —’
‘Yes, I know. It must have turned your world upside down.’ She sat down on the edge of her desk. ‘And your mother?’
‘Mum needs me. Us. She needs us all to be together. I couldn’t leave her even if I wanted to.’
‘And do you want to?’
‘No. Well, sometimes I suppose I do, but I feel — safer at home.’
‘And you think that by producing mediocre work — and it is mediocre, Cass — you’re guaranteeing yourself a permanent place at home?’
‘Maybe.’
‘If you work hard and do well, you’ll still have a choice. Just a wider choice than the one you’ll have if you carry on as you’re doing at the moment. You can still choose to stay at home if that’s what you really want, but you can also go to university if you change your mind.’
‘I’m not so sure about that. Does anyone in this place really have a choice? It’s just — assumed that we’ll all go to university if we get good A levels. No one even bothers to ask us if it’s what we want.’ I slammed the lid of my desk shut. ‘Well, not me. I’m not going to be pushed around.’
‘I can see that.’ Mrs Harvey sighed. ‘But don’t cut off your nose to spite your face, Cass. It would be such a waste.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘And it’s not too late, you know. You could easily catch up.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
‘But I do worry about you, Cass. You’re a lovely girl with a really bright future ahead of you, there for the taking. And no,’ she said, seeing that I was about to interrupt, ‘I don’t just mean university. You could do anything you wanted if you wanted it enough. Anything.’
‘Well, at the moment I just want to be left alone,’ I said unkindly.
‘That’s your choice, too. And you have the right to make it,’ she said, ignoring my rudeness. ‘But think about it. And if you ever want a chat — about work or jobs or anything at all — I’d be more than happy to help.’ She stood up and picked up her briefcase. ‘You know where to find me.’
Of course, I should have taken Mrs Harvey up on her offer. After all, I had nothing to lose, and probably a great deal to gain from talking to someone outside the family who was willing to listen; someone who obviously liked me (no one had ever called me a lovely girl before) and cared about my welfare. Looking back now, I think I was probably quite depressed, for while Mum was still supportive, she was obviously beginning to feel a bit better and expected the same to apply to everyone else. That we all dealt with Octavia’s death in our own ways and at our own pace didn’t seem to occur to her; there was light at the end of her tunnel, and she assumed it was the same for the rest of us.
However, she was still often overcome by great waves of grief and crushing fits of weeping, when she would once more take to her bed for a day at a time, berating herself for that moment of inattention which had contributed to Octavia’s death, and mourning the loss of her little daughter. But she would recover from these bouts quite quickly — especially since the arrival of the new Lodger — and often failed to notice that the spirits of the rest of the household didn’t necessarily keep pace with her own. I resented the Lodger; not so much because of Mum’s relationship with him, but because I feared he was taking her attention away from me.
Spring gave way to summer, and the first painful anniversary of Octavia’s death. At Mum’s suggestion, we marked the occasion with a party in her memory, but instead of being the celebration of her life which Mum had envisaged, it turned into a maudlin all-night binge, at which Mum got hopelessly drunk and eventually passed out draped over the ironing-board where she had been giving a tearful rendition of ‘Rock-a-Bye Baby’.
‘It was too soon,’ I panted, as Lucas and I hauled her unconscious body up the stairs to her room. We could have done with Charlton Heston, but he had mysteriously disappeared. Call Me Bill had long since taken himself off to bed, tutting with disapproval. Sundry guests were lying in unhelpful heaps all over the house. ‘We should never have let her do it. I mean, a party, for goodness’ sake! Whatever can she have been thinking of?’
‘No one,’ said Lucas grimly, hitching Mum’s legs over his shoulder, ‘stops Mum when she’s decided to do something. You of all people should know that.’ He too was very drunk, and being drunk always made him disagreeable.
I put Mum to bed in her clothes, too exhausted to be bothered with trying to undress her. I felt lonely and miserable and hopeless. It had been altogether a horrible day; I had just received my exam results, which were every bit as bad as I deserved, and I had a splitting headache from a disgusting vodka mixture of Lucas’s.
Returning to the kitchen, I found the gay ex-Lodger making coffee, and fell weeping into his arms.
‘Everything’s awful, I’ve got no one to talk to and I’m an utter failure,’ I sobbed into his shoulder. ‘Whatever am I going to do with my life?’
Twenty-four
At the beginning of my final school year, the pressure to pull my academic socks up was really on, so in order to get my teachers off my back, I told them I was going to be a nurse.
I should explain that in my particular educational establishment, there only ever appeared to be three career options. If you were in the A stream, you went to university; and if you were in the B stream, you either went to teachers’ training college or you became a nurse. Since both professions were supposed to be vocations, it seemed strange (not to say convenient) to me that those who were under-equipped for the academic life should be automatically assumed to have a calling in one or other of these directions. Since I felt that by this stage I had had enough of teachers and their profession to last me several lifetimes, I opted for nursing.
I don’t think that at the time I had any real intention of carrying this through — apart from anything else, I still wasn’t ready to contemplate leaving home — but the reaction of the teaching staff, who did everything in their power to dissuade me, proved irresistible.
Mum, needless to say, gave me her full backing.
‘A nurse!’ she said dreamily. ‘How worthwhile. You a nurse, and Lucas a policeman! Oh, Cass! I’m so proud of you both!’
Dear Mum. Her reasoning, as ever, was flawless. How could anyone fail, with a nurse and a policeman in the family? Crime and disease would be forever kept at bay, and she need never worry again. Within twenty-four hours, she had us both promoted, and was happily anticipating her role as mother to a Chief Detective Inspector and a Hospital Matron. Never mind that Lucas was at the very bottom of his career ladder (with his lowly qualifications, there were to be no short cuts for Lucas) and I was still at school; in Mum’s eyes, we were both consummate successes. And Lucas had a uniform. Mum had always had great respect for uniforms, and even I had to admit that Lucas looked rather fetching in his.
But if I thought that getting into a nursing school was going to be easy, I was badly mistaken. Many of the better hospitals had waiting lists, with no chance of getting a place for at least two years, and the two interviews I did have went badly.
‘Why do you want to be a nurse, Miss Fitzpatrick?’ asked the tightly upholstered, hatchet-faced matron of the first hospital I went to.
Such an obvious question, you would have thought, but it hadn’t occurred to me to prepare an appropriate answer.
‘Well, I couldn’t really think of anything else,’ I confessed. ‘And —’ remembering Mum — ‘it’s so worthwhile, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’ Her penetrating gaze seemed to pin me to my chair like a helpless insect.
‘Well, yes. I mean, looking after sick people ...’ My voice trailed away uncertainly.
‘Nurses certainly look after sick people,’ my tormentor continued, in the kind of tone one might use to a very small, very stupid child. ‘But I think you’ll find there’s a little more to it than that. You obviously haven’t given the idea a great deal of thought, have you? I expect you imagined that you’d just put on a pretty uniform and float about doing good works?’ She folded her hands together on the desk and waited.
This was almost exactly what I’d thought, and I blushed.
The Frances Garrood Collection Page 14