Weep a While Longer

by Penny Freedman

  Dominic and I have had our run-ins but we have now reached a state of armed truce. He has felt the need to slap me down ever since the first rehearsal, when he gave us his spiel about the play with heavy emphasis on smutty stuff about the meaning of ‘Nothing’ in the title. (No thing is a reference to the female sexual organs; we have no thing. Get it? Clever stuff from the boys, isn’t it?) He is right, actually; Shakespeare uses it like that in the sonnets. However, there was no need for Dominic to use quite so many little-boy-showing-off four-letter words in his explanation and it is generally unwise to lecture a group of academics on their home ground. Mervyn Lewis, the professor of Renaissance literature, and I started up a counter-commentary on the lines of nothing being also noting. The play is full of people noting things – often incorrectly. In the first half of the play, people spy, overhear, misinterpret and misreport, heading for the climax, the super-misinterpretation in which Claudio, deceived by the villainous Don John, wrongly believes that he sees his fiancée invite another man into her bedchamber the night before their wedding. It’s a much more interesting line than the no thing one and it also, as I unwisely pointed out, makes nonsense of performing the play in the open air. The play actually requires curtains and nooks and shadows and spy-holes.

  Dominic has a sidekick, Terry, who is the technical director, and the two of them have very loud, jargon-ridden conversations designed to intimidate us and keep us in our amateur places. At the last rehearsal, however, we had sound effects for the first time and they were less than perfectly timed. When, finally, a flourish of sprightly dance music interrupted Leonato’s distraught lamentations over his daughter’s dishonour so that the actor stopped dead, I spoke into the silence more loudly than I had intended. ‘And that,’ I said, ‘is what we in the profession call a balls-up.’ Dominic, I think, would like to sack me but he needs my costumes.

  I retrieve my bike from the bike blocks outside Sainsbury’s and cycle round to The Burnt Cake, the health food shop just outside the back gates of the abbey. There I buy a wrap with hummus and red peppers in it for my lunch, and a selection of pots of salad for my supper tonight. If my sitting room is going to be full of overdressed and overexcited celebrities and my lover is blanking me out, then I shall go to bed. I shall read Bring up the Bodies and I shall eat my supper in bed. I shall feel hard done by and I shall get guacamole on the duvet cover. How’s that for a risibly middle-class mishap?

  I go into the abbey close and find myself a bench under a tree. I get my script out to go over my lines but I can’t concentrate. I’m thoroughly pissed off with David, of course. I do understand that he has to get a grip on the murder inquiry and I want him to find the killer as much as anyone but I resent not even being acknowledged, being shut out and having bloody Paula waved in front of my face. And I want to know what happened. All I know is that I saw them, the three of them, a young mother, a little girl and a dog, just out on an ordinary summer afternoon, and they went home and they died. And I keep imagining what happened, and all the time, buzzing away underneath the teaching and the cooking and the shopping and the talking and the wondering where exactly David and I are, my mind goes round and round it, imagining. Who died first? The dog, I suppose, because he would have tried to protect them. And then? Did Karen have to watch her daughter die? Or Lara watch her mother? Was it quick? Now I know about the dog, I know there was a knife. Were all their throats cut? The terror is what I come back to, over and over again. And David could give me the answers to some of these questions but he doesn’t trust me; he chooses to leave me in the dark with my wondering and I don’t think I can forgive him for that.

  I get out my wrap and munch away at it. It was a stupid choice, really, because the hummus squidges out of the sides and I drop bits of red pepper on my skirt. Halfway through I give up and donate the rest to the pigeons who have gathered round me, knowing in their scary, avian way, that I am the kind of person who will drop my food. Then I ring my mother. I haven’t rung her since the murders and Annie’s invasion of my house. I’m never sure how important my phone calls are to her. She is eighty-nine, lives on her own and is in some pain from arthritis, I suspect, though she won’t admit it. She was a GP and seems to think that illness is only for other people. She has friends and someone who does her shopping for her; she reads a lot, potters in her tiny garden, listens to the radio, watches documentaries on television, and goes out to concerts sometimes. When I ring, she always suggests that she is perfectly content and has no need of anything from me, but I continue to call twice a week and give news, in which she takes a moderate interest. Would she notice if I stopped ringing? I think she would but I’m not sure.

  This afternoon, though, there is something odd about her. She asks after the girls and Freda and Nico, but I’m not sure that she’s listening to the answers. When I ask what she has been doing she is vague – ‘Not a lot, a quiet week’ – and when I press for details she tells me snappily to stop interrogating her. In the end, although I know it will make her cross, I ask if she’s all right. ‘Of course,’ she says, and rings off.

  The rehearsal begins badly. I’m not in the mood for it and I have a major run-in with Dominic about costumes before we even get started. He sees a class war element in the play: the aristocrats – the Prince of Aragon, and Count Claudio – versus the middle-class family of Leonato, whose daughter is to marry Count Claudio. To this end, he wants Hero and Beatrice, daughter and niece of Leonato, to appear in aprons at every opportunity, suggesting that they personally are doing the catering for the crowd of army officers who have descended on the house.

  ‘Dominic!’ I protest. ‘The very reason why all these aristocratic army officers are staying with Leonato is that he’s the biggest man in Messina. He’s the Governor of Messina, for heaven’s sake. His womenfolk aren’t kitchen maids. They’re Lady Beatrice and Lady Hero. Even their maids aren’t kitchen maids, I would hazard. We’re waiting gentlewomen, though if you want me to wrap myself in an apron I’m happy to do so. It’s a costume I’m well used to.’

  ‘So it’s really a kitchen-sink drama we’re in, I see,’ Mervyn Lewis mutters sotto voce and I quip back, ‘On an apron stage!’ before the image of the dog can fell me again.

  Dominic has gathered himself for what he clearly regards as his clinching argument. ‘I suggest a little more attention to the text, my dear,’ he drawls. ‘When Beatrice comes to fetch Benedick into dinner, she says, ‘Against my will I am sent to bid you come in to dinner.’ She has been sent on an errand, against her will. Doesn’t that tell you something about her status in the household?’

  ‘God, Dominic! Do you understand this play at all? She says she’s been sent against her will because the scene isn’t funny unless she’s unequivocally unfriendly to him. He’s been told that she’s in love with him and then she comes in and is rude to him and he tells himself that there’s a double meaning in that, when there can’t possibly be. That’s why it’s funny!’

  Silence has fallen. I know I’m being more vehement than the situation requires but I can’t back down. ‘Benedick, as men so often do, has let her down in the past. He won her heart from her with false dice – she tells us so. So she’s armed against him. She’s not going to give him a chance to let her down again. She—’ I stop. Where am I going with this? I am being ridiculous; Dominic is smirking at me. ‘Well, if you want sodding aprons you can have them,’ I shout. ‘I’ll just go and order a hundred yards of calico, shall I?’

  He opens his mouth but I’m done. I stomp off into the abbey cloisters and demand a cigarette from the young chap who is playing Claudio and is having a quick pre-rehearsal smoke. I have given up smoking, really I have, but there are times when a cigarette seems to be the only answer.

  We limp through the rehearsal and we are none of us at our best. It is a sunless afternoon and a brisk little wind is blowing our voices all over the place. A few tourists watch us desultorily for a while but soon depart; Dominic is clearly bored and disappointed with us
and at one point wanders off, leaving us to our own devices. Things fall apart quite quickly when we realise that he’s not there; nothing exposes the oddness of performance as sharply as having no-one to perform to. Soon after this, he calls an early halt and we disperse with relief to the disparate pleasures of our Saturday evenings.

  Pleasure features little in my evening. David does not ring to suggest dinner as I secretly hoped he would, the bump and grind of Strictly penetrates into my room enough to distract me from my book and my supper is disappointing, largely because it is an inappropriate meal to eat in bed. And, yes, I do get guacamole on the duvet cover.

  9

  Sunday 22nd July

  No Confidence

  I am, once again, a refugee from my home. When I go downstairs in the morning, I am assailed by the high garlicky reek of leftover pepperoni pizza, mingled with the gritty undertones of unemptied ashtrays. I have a choice of fight or flight: I can go and thunder on bedroom doors and demand that they get their idle overprivileged arses out of bed and downstairs to clear everything up or I can spend the day going to see my mother in London and clear the whole lot up myself if they haven’t done it by the time I return. Choose the former, and the friends will gaze at me in wounded disbelief at my unkindness and Annie never speak to me again; choose the latter and my mother will be annoyed and ungrateful but I shall bask in my own virtue and self-restraint. The former would be more fun but life can’t be all fun and I am determined on martyrdom.

  Avoiding an encounter with the kitchen and its dubious sink, I cycle off to the station without breakfast, allowing myself the indulgence of a coffee and a Danish off the station stall. I also find, at the tiny bookstall, among the John Grishams, Jilly Coopers and Stephen Kings, a gardening book which my mother might just like. I can’t be sure, but it’s better than a bunch of station flowers, which she would certainly despise.

  By the time the train has chugged its way to London with special Sunday slowness, stopping at every available station and a number of arbitrary spots in between, it’s midday and I think I had better go into M&S Food at St Pancras and buy a couple of salads in case my mother has nothing in for lunch. I am beginning to tire of deli food; I need to get my kitchen back.

  The tube journey to New Cross is pretty unsavoury and some of my fellow passengers look as though they haven’t been to bed – and certainly haven’t washed – since they were partying last night, so it’s a relief to be out in the street, even though the air is hardly fresh and the sky is sullenly overcast. It is a twenty-minute walk to my mother’s flat so I opt for a taxi and the driver is mercifully taciturn.

  I ring my mother’s doorbell and get no reply, so I find my key and let myself in. I can hear the radio in the sitting room but my mother is slumped in her chair with her eyes closed. For a moment I think she might be dead, but as I put down my bags she opens an eye.

  ‘What?’ she asks. ‘Why?’

  ‘A surprise visit,’ I say, feeling foolish. Why didn’t I ring to warn her? Because she would have told me not to come, and she probably would have meant it.

  ‘What for?’ she asks, rousing herself.

  I would like to say, ‘Because I was worried about you’, but she won’t like that, so I say, ‘Because Annie and her friends have invaded my house and I needed an outing.’

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I don’t know that there’s any food.’

  ‘I brought some salads. There’s plenty. Would you like some?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not hungry. I was going to make myself some toast.’

  ‘I’ll do it.’ I hand her the gardening book. ‘I thought you might like this. Amuse yourself while I get some lunch.’

  The kitchen is immaculately tidy and aroma-free in a way that suggests that little cooking has been going on here. I find a fairly fresh loaf, though, and I put together a tray of toast and tea. As I’m looking for milk in the fridge, I notice a tub of anchovy paste. I put my head into the sitting room. ‘Anchovy paste on your toast, I ask?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. She is holding the book in her lap and looking at its front cover but I’m not sure that she has opened it.

  I put the tray in front of her on the coffee table and settle myself opposite her with my salads. She eats her way dutifully through a slice of toast; I munch unenthusiastically at borlotti beans and coleslaw. I attempt conversation but she is no more forthcoming about what she has been doing than she was on the phone, so I end up prattling about my life: Annie and the Edinburgh play, Ellie, Freda and Nico, Much Ado About Nothing, the murders of Karen and Lara Brody.

  This last stirs her slightly.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ she says, ‘that you’ve got yourself involved in that.’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ I say. ‘David has made it crystal clear that there is no place for me in his investigation.’

  ‘Well, that must be a great relief to you,’ she says, and just for a moment I see the glimmer of a smile, a hint of her usual self.

  ‘He has a very able assistant in DS Paula Powell,’ I say, packing up my plastic salad tubs with every appearance, I believe, of nonchalance. ‘They seem to get on very well.’

  I go out to the kitchen to throw them away and she calls after me, ‘Don’t underestimate him. He strikes me as a man of hidden depths.’

  ‘Well, he’s certainly keeping them hidden from me,’ I call back. I return to take her tray. ‘Of course, hidden shallows are more dangerous, aren’t they? They’re what you run aground on. I suspect Paula Powell of hidden shallows.’

  She picks up her book and starts leafing through it; I go and wash up. After that, I do a few jobs: a curtain has come off its runner so I get up on a chair to fix it. ‘While you’re up there,’ she says, ‘that bulb needs changing.’ So I do that too, and I notice that the handle on the sitting room door is loose so I go rummaging in a kitchen drawer where I’m fairly sure she has a screwdriver and I find a pile of unopened mail. The dates I’m able to read are all within the last two weeks, so this squirrelling has, at least, not been going on for long. I take the letters into the sitting room and brandish them.

  ‘What are all these?’ I ask. ‘Why haven’t you opened them?’

  A look crosses her face, and it’s a look I remember from childhood, a look so close to dislike that I tried very hard not to provoke it.

  ‘Nothing to do with you,’ she says shortly. ‘Put them back where you found them.’

  I was intending to ask her outright if she’s not well but after this contretemps I can see that I shan’t get anywhere. There seems to be little point now in hanging around, although I shall have a long wait at St Pancras for one of the infrequent trains home. I leave her with exhortations to eat and promises to return soon. As I‘m closing the front door behind me, the door of the flat opposite opens and her neighbour, Margaret, comes out.

  ‘Gina,’ she says, ‘I thought I heard you arrive. Have you got a moment?’ I follow her into her flat, which is stuffed, as retirement flats inevitably are, with too much furniture. It is also very pink and floral, in contrast to the austerity of my mother’s décor. Margaret is quite pink too, a large, comfortable woman, a former dental nurse, with a powerful Welsh accent, undimmed by forty years of living in Greenwich. She and her husband have lived in this flat for about ten years and she has been a godsend in keeping an eye on my mother.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ she asks, and I decline on the grounds that I’ve just had one with my mother.

  ‘Well, at least she’s drinking her tea,’ she says darkly. ‘That’s something.’

  ‘Is she not eating, Margaret?’ I ask, sinking into the rosy depths of an armchair. ‘It didn’t look as though she was.’

  ‘She hasn’t said then?’

  ‘Said what?’

  ‘I wanted to ring you but she said not to. She’d tell you herself, she said. Of course, I should have known she wouldn’t, knowing her like I do.’

  ‘Tell me what, Margaret?’

  She gets up and goes to the telephone. ‘
I wrote it down here,’ she says, picking up the phone message pad. She squints at it. ‘TIAs,’ she says, ‘transient ischaemic attacks. At least three of them she’s had in the last three weeks. The first time I called the doctor, but she wouldn’t let me after that. Said it was nothing to worry about, just her brain being short of blood for a bit. But they leave her confused, and she’s lost all her go, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I do. Exactly. So when was the first one? Can you remember?’

  ‘Yes, I can. Because it was our little grandson’s birthday – our Sammy – and I called in after to see your mum and take her a piece of birthday cake. Well she didn’t answer the door when I rang, so I used my key and I found her sitting there and she looked at me as if she didn’t know me. I spoke to her but she didn’t say anything, so I called Harold to come and have a look and he said, “Call the doctor, Margaret,” so I did and then I waited with her till the doctor came. She’d come to a bit by the time he got here and told him it was all a fuss about nothing but he had a look at her and “You’ve had a TIA,” he said to her. “I’d like to get you admitted for some tests,” but she was having none of it. And she wouldn’t have you told either.’

  ‘And then there have been two more?’

  ‘As far as I know. Once I knew what it was, I wasn’t so alarmed, you know, but we looked up TIA on NHS Direct, you know, and I saw it’s a kind of stroke.’