Over

by Margaret Forster

  They try, in their different ways, to draw me in. Molly is especially solicitous, serving me first, hoping I don’t mind her using this dish or that plate, treating me like some sort of revered elderly relative who mustn’t be annoyed. Finn watches me all the time, though if I catch his eye he looks away. Judith is nervous. She talks and laughs too much, then pauses and says, apropos of nothing, ‘Sorry, Lou,’ and there is a sudden silence, as though everyone is waiting for me to accept her apology. I don’t bother saying, ‘Sorry for what?’ – I just nod. And as for Don, he smiles kindly at me. He has this infuriatingly patient air. He is waiting. His expression says he is waiting for me to come round and he is confident that I will.

  I don’t ask questions, but everyone else does. Don asks Molly about Africa and she fills him in on what she’s been doing in Zambia and why she’s in London. I’ve heard it all already, of course, but she tells it slightly differently to her father. It seems to me she is seeking his approval and wanting praise from him which she didn’t want from me. Maybe she didn’t need it from me, knowing that I supported her anyway. She described her training in Serenje, the town which has electricity and is considered luxurious compared to the village she went on to. She told him about the ‘nshima’ they ate, a kind of maize which has a mashed potato consistency but virtually no flavour. Then she emphasised, pointedly I thought, how family-orientated all the villages in Nambo are, with enough huts grouped together to take extended families so that within each village there are smaller villages of grass huts. Don asked how exactly the huts were built and she told him that only the roofs were grass but the walls were of hardened mud or sometimes locally fired brick. She lived with different families for a week each and was surprised how life varied according to the composition of each family. She blushed when Don said, ‘Well done, you amaze me.’ He takes care, too, to ask Finn how he’s getting on without a hint now that he thinks this gardening thing a waste of time – polite questions, factual. Finn is suspicious that he is being patronised and is a little surly in his answers. But as the questions become more detailed he is becoming more convinced that his father really is interested and the surliness is evaporating.

  All this information swilling about, the stuff of our lives while Don has been absent. At first, nobody asked him any questions, perhaps because they were afraid to, in case Don went back to how he had been when they were last with him, but gradually they made the odd enquiry. Don was ready for it. He was obviously glad to have the opportunity to explain where he’d been since his stay in hospital and told us of his movements in some detail. I tried not to listen. I really didn’t want to know. I went into the sitting-room saying I had a call to make and I closed the kitchen door as I went out. Let him enthral them all with his tale of where he’d been and who he’d been with and then his fake eureka moment and the happy ending.

  I rang Ruth. I asked if I could come and stay for the weekend. ‘Perfect,’ she said. She was going to be on her own; it would be lovely. She didn’t ask me why I wanted to visit – I’ve never invited myself in all these years – just stressed how eager she was for me to come. Maybe she stressed it a little too strongly. She’s not stupid, and must know something is wrong.

  *

  It’s good to be staying in a proper house again. It’s not just the sense of space but the privacy, the self-contained atmosphere, as though we’re insulated from the world. Ruth’s new house is detached and surrounded by a garden and, though other houses are near, they can’t be seen from most of her windows. She has a conservatory opening out of her sitting-room and we loll there, on her bamboo sofas, drinking wine and looking out into the garden, at the bird table.

  ‘This is lovely,’ I said. ‘We should have had a conservatory.’

  ‘I could never understand why you let that house go,’ Ruth said. ‘Why did you?’

  I didn’t reply. I hardly understood myself. It was because I wanted, when it was all over, to start again and I couldn’t do it there, in that house. I needed new territory. I had to have it, and to find it I needed money, so the house had to be sold. I told Ruth what I’d told her at the time: Don offered no resistance because he needed money too, for his investigations.

  ‘Maybe, one day, you’ll have a house again,’ Ruth said.

  ‘I doubt it,’ was all I said. It wasn’t just that. I needed ‘new territory’, but it was more than that. The house itself upset me. Nothing awful had happened in it, but it started to oppress me. It seemed to mock me in an odd sort of way. I’d go into rooms and feel overpowered by them, as though they did not belong to me – I’d stop, and stare at the furniture and belongings and wonder how they came to be there, and then I would hurry out into the garden where this peculiar feeling would lift, but not for long. It wasn’t that Miranda haunted the house or anything ridiculous like that. I didn’t connect any of this to Miranda. The problem was the house itself. It wasn’t mine any more. It was another woman’s, somebody I used to know but had lost touch with.

  I tried, once, to explain this to Don, though I could hardly explain it to myself. It took a long time, and several attempts, to get his attention but by then I’d grown used to this. I knew I would have to shock him to make him listen. So I did. I started a fire, a small fire, perfectly controlled, of Miranda’s old school exercise books. I’d looked through them and checked that they contained nothing worth preserving (except for some English exercise books with stories and poems in them, which I kept). I took them into the garden when Don was sitting on the terrace staring into space. He’d been there half an hour. I’d spoken to him several times but, as usual at that time, he hadn’t replied or acknowledged me. So I marched out, arms full of exercise books, and piled them on top of some newspapers I’d brought out earlier and I started a fire. It didn’t catch his attention immediately. The paper was burning well before he seemed to notice and then he got up and called out, ‘What are you doing? Use the incinerator!’ I ignored him and went on throwing books onto the blaze until he came towards me, his face more alive (with irritation) than it had been for months.

  I think I may have laughed, though nothing was very funny. It was the feeling of triumph – that I had done something to make him notice me! He thought I was hysterical, and for a moment he was concerned. ‘Stop, stop, what is this, Lou, what is this?’ he cried. I said it was nothing, I just wanted to talk to him and he had refused to hear me. He said this wasn’t true, what could I be thinking of? I could talk to him any time I wanted. He even embraced me, out there in the garden, the first hug for ages and ages.

  The fire soon burned out. Don wasn’t angry about the exercise books – they didn’t matter to him any more than they mattered to me. Perhaps, surprisingly, he wasn’t sentimental about such things. He said, ‘Let’s go into the house and talk.’ That’s when I told him the house was the trouble: it was what I wanted to talk to him about. So we stayed in the garden and I tried. At first, he listened intently, but as what I said grew more and more incoherent his attention wandered. ‘You’re depressed,’ he said. ‘It’s natural. It’s nothing to do with the house. It’s you.’ But I insisted that I wanted to leave, go somewhere new. He said he hadn’t time to think about moving when he had so much to do. And that was when I said what I had never planned to say. I said I wanted to go somewhere without him. I wanted to be free of him and his grief as well as the house. I almost added that I had come to dread his presence, but I didn’t say it.

  I suppose I am ashamed of that episode, which certainly doesn’t show me in a good light – such cruelty and melodrama sound pitiful now. I didn’t tell Ruth any of this, of course, when she said that about having a house again. I simply told her that Don was staying with me and how hard I was finding this, nearly as hard as living with him in our house had been afterwards.

  I went over how he’d turned up, and what he’d said. Ruth was searching my face while I talked and didn’t say anything crass, or assume I must be delighted that ‘he’s back to normal’. She just said, ‘You
’re upset,’ and gave me a hug, and that was enough to set me off. Ruth was the one person I didn’t mind seeing me like this. She didn’t say anything till I’d stopped snivelling. I couldn’t explain to her why I was so upset because I don’t know myself. Do I really not want the old Don back? Wasn’t that what I had wanted, when he was so demented? Wasn’t it what I yearned for, that this stranger, this horrible madman would stop pretending to be the husband I loved? If Don was now restored to the way he had been before, what was the problem? My reaction didn’t make any kind of sense.

  The first thing that Ruth said, when I’d blurted all this out, startled me. ‘You’re frightened,’ she said. Frightened? How could she think that? What was I frightened of? She shrugged. She said she didn’t know but that was what struck her when she saw me getting out of my car – I simply looked frightened. ‘You looked,’ she said, speaking very slowly, warily, ‘a little like the way you looked the first time I saw you, after you’d heard, you know, the awful news about Miranda, as though you were afraid to believe what you’d been told.’ But how could there be any comparison with the way I felt then, and now? Don returning, his quest over, his rage and resentment apparently gone, could not be, should not be, frightening. ‘Maybe,’ said Ruth, still stepping so very carefully, ‘you don’t love him any more. That would be frightening, wouldn’t it? I mean, you loved the old Don, before what happened seemed to change him, so when he reappears you ought to be thrilled. And you’re not. Is it because in the interval you’ve stopped loving him? That would be frightening.’

  I denied it. I don’t know any more what loving Don means. It’s gone, my capacity to love him, as I used to love. Loving Molly, loving Finn – but loving Don?

  *

  Nearly the end of term. Glorious weather at the moment, hope it continues for the school holidays. The sky is an incredible blue all day long, and the sun clear and strong but not too scorchingly hot. The children look so free in their shorts and sleeveless tops and sandals, and it makes life so much easier when they don’t have to struggle, as some of them do when it’s cold, with buttons and fastenings on jackets and coats. They trot in just as they are. Except for the twins, who remain in long-sleeved garments, their legs still enclosed in trousers. But they don’t seem uncomfortable. Probably to them this weather is not so hot.

  We are considering friendship. I have to step carefully, though. Some of them have no obvious friend, some are everyone’s friend. Friendship makes us happy, I tell them. Friends help each other. Friends play together. If we have no friends we are lonely. We must all try to be friends with each other. A simplistic set of statements, but the children approve, they all want to have friends and for everyone to be nice to each other. Paige says her best friend is her dog. Can dogs be friends? Of course, I say. Lola says her best friend is her cat, and others echo her. ‘Who is your best friend, Miss?’ asks Paige. I told her about Lynne, Pat, and Ruth. I said they were my best friends. But in fact I seem detached from them, not so pleased to hear from them as I used to be. Ruth wanted to make a date for our annual reunion but I made excuses, and she knew I was making them. I didn’t go to last year’s reunion either, though Lynne, at whose home it was held, was so persuasive, assuring me, as ever, that it would do me good, ‘What are friends for?’ she asked, and answered herself, ‘To help get one through the bad times.’ But I’m through them. It’s over. Friends now should be for enjoying myself with. I think about what it would be like, to spend a weekend at Ruth’s with her and Lynne and Pat. What would we do? Eat, drink, exchange news, and most of all reminisce. That is the part which is so important in our reunions, the going over of memories, the ‘Do you remember?’ bit when we all shriek and laugh at the ludicrous scenes of past embarrassments we conjure up. I’ve no enthusiasm for this any more. I don’t feel connected to that past. I’m not going to go. Seeing them separately will have to do.

  Of course, I hadn’t answered Paige quite truthfully. Don was my best friend, always. Friendship led to love. But is he a friend now? If he is, why do I want him to leave me alone? And if he isn’t, then what is he?

  *

  Don left today. I came home an hour ago and the flat was empty. I’d gone straight from Ruth’s to school this morning so I hadn’t seen him since Friday. I thought at first he was just out, maybe at some job interview, maybe just walking, but then I saw the note propped up against the kettle. ‘Gone to Judith’s’ it said. ‘Will stay there till I’ve sorted something out. Thanks for everything. Keep in touch?’ Judith will love having him, but how extraordinary that he has gone there. He used to say, after it all happened, that, much though he loves her, he couldn’t spend another night under his sister’s roof. She irritates him to the point of exasperation. He’s always been ashamed of this, but he can’t control his feelings for long. It’s tiny things that set him off – the way she never stops talking and demanding responses. Judith has to have involvement all the time – it’s ‘Don’t you think?’ and ‘Don’t you agree?’ and Don can’t bring himself to give a simple yes or no. And she hums and sings as she moves about; she’s noisy and he’s quiet. She bangs doors like a teenager and moves around, he claims, like a baby elephant.

  So, he’s at Judith’s. Good. Even if he’s got over his unreasonable resentment of his sister, he will soon find her annoying again. Being there will force him to find a decent place to live as soon as possible. And it must mean he has accepted that I don’t want him back in my life. He can’t be completely out of my life, but I don’t want him at the centre. I don’t have to give reasons to myself. I don’t have to examine my state of mind. It’s enough that I want to go on living on my own. I feel comfortable here, in my flat. In this, my new life.

  *

  Don didn’t tell Molly that he was moving out. She came expecting to find him here this evening and there was some confusion, because as she’s been staying with Judith herself I assumed she would know. But she didn’t. He wasn’t at Judith’s when she left this morning and nothing had been said about his arrival. Never mind, I said, he’s there now, so if you want you can move back here. No, she said, I’ll stay at Judith’s. She’s got plenty of room. No need for me to move back.

  She said this so carelessly, but surely she must know how it hurts me. I want her to come back here. I want her to want to come back. She has such a short time left in London and since Don came I hardly seem to have had any time with her. But I said, ‘Fine, fine, whatever suits you best.’ She stared at me, chewing her bottom lip the way she always does when she’s working up to saying something she isn’t sure she should say.

  ‘Yes?’ I asked.

  ‘Mum,’ she said, ‘what has happened to you?’

  I said that was a big question. What exactly did she mean?

  ‘The way you look at Dad,’ she said, ‘that’s what I mean.’

  ‘And how do I look at him?’

  ‘As if he’s a stranger you don’t much like.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s what he became, remember? Afterwards? You agreed, you felt the same, and so did Finn.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but that’s all over, he’s himself again. You’ve got to forgive him, he couldn’t help how he was, he couldn’t help being obsessed, and he’s sorry.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Yes. Sorry for what he put you through. What he put us all through. You can’t go on holding it against him for ever. It’s cruel. You’re being cruel. Why? It’s not like you …’

  Has Molly forgotten? Is it possible that she has forgotten? I wanted to remind her of what that first year was like, how her father became more and more distant, how we appeared to become of no concern to him, how we ended up almost afraid of him. Had she forgotten the day she broke her arm? How she was running down the stairs outside his study and tripped over her own undone shoelace and went crashing to the bottom? He was in his study, he must have heard the crash and her scream – I was at the bottom of the garden and heard the awful sound from there – but he didn’t move.
He was, he said, in the middle of an important phone call to Holland. Molly lay at the foot of his stairs until I came running in and even then, when I shouted for him to ring for an ambulance he finished the call first. Of course, afterwards, he was remorseful. He apologised. But it was obvious to Molly and to me that his precious investigations took precedence. Had she forgotten all this?

  I will never be able to talk to Molly about how I feel about her father. It is too intimate. It would feel like a betrayal. I can’t tell her that I feel nothing for him any more. It’s no good his telling me he is sorry. Something has been destroyed and I don’t believe it was my doing. Don could argue it wasn’t his either, it was what happened. But that’s not a good enough answer. It’s a question of priorities. Miranda’s death pushed us all to the back of his mind. He didn’t care enough about the living, and that has altered permanently the way I feel. I’m too tired, too emotionally worn out to start all over again. Molly and Finn are young. He can reclaim them, but not me. I’m glad for him that this seems to be possible.