by Isla Dewar
‘You never really understood how hard it was for him.’
Alistair sighed. ‘He needed to get away.’ He wanted to tell May that Johnny actually needed to get away from her, but he held his tongue. ‘He needed some sunshine, so I gave him the money for the fare. He’s my best boy, too.’
‘I suppose you know about all the trouble we’re in.’
‘I know,’ said Alistair.
‘Somebody told the income tax people about me.’
Alistair nodded.
‘It wasn’t you, was it? You knew.’
Alistair shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t do that. You’re my ma and pa. I love you. Actually, I even like you which is harder. The love comes naturally.’
‘Fair enough,’ Harry said, slapping his knee. He wanted this conversation to end. He hated this kind of chat; keep things jolly was his motto.
‘I had to ask. I needed to be settled in my mind,’ May said. She got up, crossed the room and touched Alistair’s cheek. ‘You’re a good boy. We’re proud of you.’ She heaved on her coat. ‘Although sometimes I wonder where you came from – you’re so upright and honest.’ She busied herself putting on her gloves. ‘We better be going. Got a lot to do.’ She turned to Carol. ‘Take care of my granddaughter. And your stew’s burning. The smell’s turned dark. It’ll be sticking to the bottom of the pan. Probably you put it on too high a heat.’
Carol swore and ran to the kitchen. May grinned.
Alistair watched them walk arm-in-arm down the street. They’re up to something, he thought. They always were. They planned, schemed and came up with new ways of making a buck. They put their money in the kitchen cupboard and were often seen standing side by side, looking at it with joy.
He remembered his mother running into the flat the family lived in when he was young carrying a pack of sausages. She had slammed the front door, leaned on it panting and had chucked the sausages to him. ‘Quick, cook them and eat them. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. Eat the evidence.’ Sometimes he thought she was magnificent.
‘What was that about?’ asked Carol. ‘The stew’s burnt, by the way.’
‘Just add a spot of wine and swish it about,’ said Alistair. ‘That’s what she does. And I’ve no idea what that was about. Perhaps they were saying goodbye.’
‘You didn’t tell your mother about us.’
‘No need. She knew.’
‘How?’
‘She’s a nosy, interfering, bossy mother. It’s her job.’
‘And she doesn’t mind?’
‘Oh, she minds. She just knows when not to mention it. She’s awfully fond of Nell. Well, Nell is a gift for bossy, nosy, interfering mothers, isn’t she?’ He put his arm round her, and kissed the top of her head.
‘You told her you loved her,’ Carol said. ‘Do you?’
‘Of course I do. She’s my mother. I just don’t approve of her.’
Chapter Twenty-six
Time to Move On
There was quite a crowd at Nancy’s funeral. Nell was taken aback; she hadn’t realised her mother had known so many people. After the ceremony, as mourners, friends, neighbours and work colleagues lined up to shake Nell’s hand and sympathise with her loss, she thought miserably that she only knew about ten people who might come to see her off, should she die soon. Carol was included in the total and Nell wondered if she’d come along. She certainly wasn’t here today, though Alistair was. He smiled sympathetically at her and repeated that if there was anything she needed, she should give him a call. Nell said she’d have to go to the flat and pick up the things she left behind.
‘Anytime,’ Alistair said.
He didn’t come to the gathering at a small hotel afterwards, saying he had to get back to work. Nell had wanted to throw a more glamorous celebration of her mother’s life than the drab affair that her father insisted upon. She’d suggested they serve canapés and wine.
‘Canapés,’ he father sneered. ‘I’ve never eaten such a thing in my life and neither has your mother. Plain food is what we’ll have – ham sandwiches and fruit cake. We’re ordinary folk and proud of it. Plain is what we like.’
People milled around, sipped the sherry provided, nibbled on the sandwiches, and then left. When the last guest had gone, Nell’s father went to the manager, took out his chequebook and paid. ‘Don’t worry about funeral bills,’ he’d told her earlier. ‘Nancy and me have all that covered. When my time comes, you’ll find the details in the cabinet beside the bed upstairs.’
By two in the afternoon, she and her father were home. He sat on the sofa, sighed and said, ‘That’s that, then. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Always thought I’d go first.’
Nell didn’t know what to say. She longed to get back to work to help distract her. She’d phoned several times but got no reply. This was bothering her but she consoled herself by thinking they must be too busy to pick up the phone. Perhaps there was too much to do with her being off so they let it ring.
Two days after the funeral, Nell told her father she thought it time she went back to the restaurant. ‘I can’t just leave people to cover for me. I have important work to do, and as I’ll be managing my own place soon enough, I have to show May how responsible I am.’
Her father told her she didn’t have to show May anything and that he needed her at home, so Nell stayed. She shopped, she cooked, she lit the fire, she massaged her father’s aching back with a foul-smelling embrocation, but none of it was good enough for her father.
‘You don’t have Nancy’s touch,’ he told her. ‘You don’t ease the sore bits the way she did.’ And she didn’t light the fire properly, or buy the right things. ‘That’s not the right kind of cold meat. I only like ham.’ Her cooking didn’t come up to scratch, either. ‘These chips aren’t crispy like your mum’s. And the egg’s too hard. I like it runny.’
In the evenings, he sat staring blankly at the television. He rarely spoke to Nell. He despaired.
He lasted three weeks. He died in his sleep. Nell had made breakfast and had called that it was ready from the foot of the stairs. When her father didn’t appear, she called again before going up to his bedroom. She knocked and then stuck her head round the door. She’d known even as she went to the bed that something was wrong. His stillness was disquieting. On tiptoe, holding her breath, she crept up to him, touched him and jumped back. She stared at him for a long time before calling the doctor.
The doctor told her it was quite common: one partner dies and the other follows soon after. ‘These old hearts don’t cope with grief.’ He smiled to her. ‘Still, your mum and dad – it was quite a love match, wasn’t it?’
‘Was it?’ Nell was surprised.
‘Oh, yes. I couldn’t help but notice how close they were. In fact, your dad had your mother’s photo under his pillow. He must have missed her terribly.’ He told her to look after herself, and left.
Nell made a second announcement in the deaths column of the local paper and organised a second funeral. This time, in an act of defiance, she booked a room at the best hotel she could think of – the Caledonian – and ordered canapés and wine. Her father proved to be a lot less popular than her mother. There were six mourners and nobody touched the food. Mrs Lowrie, a neighbour Nell had rarely spoken to, had clutched her hand as she made her way out. ‘We’re plain folk, lass,’ she said. ‘Ham sandwiches and fruit cake would have been fine.’
Alone at home, Nell sat in front of the fire. Not knowing what to do, she got up and walked into the kitchen, looked round, realised she wasn’t hungry and went back to sitting by the fire. How suddenly silent this place was. Even the clock in the hall had stopped ticking. It must know he’s gone, Nell thought.
She went upstairs, looked in her father’s bedside cabinet. In it she found a bottle of embrocation, a pair of false teeth, his spectacles, a couple of handkerchiefs and his insurance policy. She’d send that off tomorrow along with the death certificate to claim the money that would cover the undertaker’s bill an
d the hotel catering. There wouldn’t be much left after that.
In her mother’s cabinet, she found a pair of stockings, knickers and the romance novel she’d been reading. Nell looked over her shoulder, afraid that somebody might catch her prying.
She started searching; what for, she didn’t know. In the cabinet in the living room were Christmas cards going back fifteen years, a photograph album with snaps of the only holiday the family had ever taken. There was Nell aged seven building a sandcastle on a beach in the Highlands. In the kitchen were the same old pots and pans and utensils Nell had been familiar with all her life.
Is this is? Nell thought. Ancient things, false teeth, Christmas cards from people long forgotten – is this what love brings? Two lifetimes reduced to this. She rummaged some more, then at the foot of her mother’s wardrobe she found an old shoebox, lined with blue tissue paper. Carefully preserved were Valentine cards, years and years of them, all dated and all written in her father’s careful hand. To my lovely Nancy. To my sweetheart. You’re still the beautiful woman I married all those years ago and you make the best cup of tea in the world. Pressed between two sheets of pink paper was a violet. I saw this and thought of you. It’s sweet and tender and it was flowering in the snow. Nell hadn’t known her father was such a romantic. She felt she’d never known romance. Alistair had never sent her a Valentine card. ‘It’s crass commercialism,’ he’d said. No doubt he’d send Carol one. She’d make his life hell if he didn’t.
It hadn’t occurred to her how much her parents had loved one another. To her they’d just been her mum and dad. Just there, that’s all. Maybe love was something more than passion. Maybe it was warm and comfortable and the two people involved reached a moment when each knew what the other was thinking – like when to make a cup of tea.
She wished she had someone to talk to. Usually, she’d discuss dramatic moments in her life with Carol, but now the idea of seeing Carol was too painful. She thought of Alistair, who’d said if there was anything he could do, she should ask, but she was pretty sure that by that he’d meant money, not listening to her misery.
She went back to the sofa and considered her life. A tear for her dead parents slid down her cheek, but beneath the shock and grief was a glimmer of relief. At last she was free to go back to work. It was time to leave this small house with its faded wallpaper and tired furniture and find a place of her own, time to start being the sophisticated, independent, working twenty-one-year-old woman she’d decided to be.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Walk Away
Nell didn’t start her new life the next day, nor the day after that. She was numb. She lay in bed till midday, got up, moved from room to room and went back to bed again. Pictures of her mother and father filled her mind. Moments she had forgotten reappeared – her father pulling her along the street on the sledge he’d built for her. She remembered how cold it had been and looking back at the tracks they’d left in the snow and his serious face looking down at her telling her to hold on. She remembered sitting on her mother’s knee listening together to a story on the radio; standing on a chair helping her mother bake a chocolate cake and licking the bowl afterwards; Christmases when they decorated the living room with paper chains – all that, and oh-so-many other things. She cursed that she’d dismissed them as boring. She chastised herself for being rude to them as she grew up. Sometimes the memories pained her so much, she doubled up as the emotional became physical.
She struggled through three days of this grief. On the fourth morning she told herself that many people had suffered misfortune and had not only survived but had gone on to great things. Charlie Chaplin, she thought. Marilyn Monroe. What about Buddy Holly’s widow? How she must have grieved. I can get over this. I can carry on with my life. I am a woman who has opportunities. I must stop my daydreaming. I’m addicted to it. It makes me happy to float away into a fantasy world. It’s time to face reality. If I don’t I’ll never be a sophisticated, independent woman of the world like May.
She bathed, drank a couple of cups of tea, dressed and set out for work.
The restaurant was deserted and the doors were locked. Nell knocked but nobody answered. She went round to the kitchen door at the back. It, too, was locked. She peered in the window. Nobody. She looked at her watch – quarter to eleven. Really, someone should be here preparing lunches. She waited, pacing the car park. Something was wrong.
Every so often, she would step out into the road, stare one way, turn and stare the other way, hoping someone would come, but nobody did. After a couple of hours she set off towards the village nearby where Annie lived. It was a cold April day. She pulled her coat collar up and moved carefully. There was no pavement; the road was rough and her shoes delicate. She tripped and stumbled, cursed and fretted. Occasionally she would turn and walk backwards, staring down the road, watching the car park in case somebody turned up.
Once she reached the village, Nell went into the post office and asked for Annie. ‘Annie who?’ said the woman behind the counter.
‘Annie who works at Rutherford’s. She’s my friend,’ Nell said.
The woman came out from behind her counter, led Nell out into the street and pointed to a cottage on the opposite side of the road. ‘That’s our Annie.’
It was chocolate-box perfect. The garden was a tumble of late-spring blooms. There was a log pile at the side. Nell was charmed. As she walked up the brick path, she imagined herself living here. She’d live the simple rustic life. She’d be ‘Our Nell’ to the folks in the village. She could wear a yellow frock but jeans would be best when she was chopping logs. She’d bake her own bread and the local squire would court her. She thought she’d be like Doris Day in Calamity Jane, except without the horse.
She stopped herself, clenched her fists and thought, ‘Quit the daydreaming, Nell.’
She knocked on the door, and after a minute Annie answered, stared at her and asked what she was doing here.
‘I wanted to find out what’s going on. I’ve been off for a few weeks, come back and Rutherford’s is locked up. What’s happening?’
‘Nothing as far as I can tell,’ said Annie. ‘Nobody’s been near the place for ages.’
Nell asked why.
‘As far as I know, May’s broke. Can’t pay any of her bills. She certainly hasn’t paid me. I stopped going in to work a while ago. I figured the big bonus wasn’t going to happen.’
‘So Rutherford’s is shut down?’
Annie nodded. She stepped back, invited Nell inside and asked if she wanted a cup of tea.
‘Please.’
Annie waved Nell into her living room and told her to make herself comfortable while she put the kettle on. The room was small; the furniture was old, comfortably worn. The far wall was covered with bookshelves. A log fire burned in the hearth. Tucked behind the sofa was a pile of toys.
After a few minutes Annie appeared with a tray bearing two mugs of tea and handed one to Nell. In this light, Annie looked different: slimmer and younger. Up till now, Nell had only seen her in her cooking whites. Today she wore jeans and a long jumper. Her face was lightly made up. Nell had always thought Annie was old, but now could see she was probably only in her early forties.
‘You have children?’ Nell asked, pointing at the toys.
‘Standard two, both girls,’ said Annie. ‘They’re at school at the moment.’
‘I didn’t know,’ Nell admitted. ‘What does your husband do?’
‘He’s a musician. Plays the piano.’
‘Oh, like the piano man at Rutherford’s.’
‘That’s him.’
‘Really, I didn’t know you and he were married. Gosh. Do you know, every time I looked at him, I thought I knew him from somewhere? Only I can’t place him.’
‘Oh, he remembers you. Did you used to go to the Locarno?’
Nell flushed. ‘In my stupid youth, I did. God, that place was wild—’ she stopped. Emerging through the mists of her memory was the moment sh
e’d seen André, the piano man. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It was the last time I ever went there. A goodbye-to-all-that-silliness outing. He was fighting with another man in the passage outside the lavatories.’
‘My husband has never got into fights. He’s the sweetest man alive. He was helping his friend who was epileptic. He’d had a fit and passed out. André ran for help and to phone for a taxi to get his friend home. The taxi came, and you and your friend took it. He was furious.’
Embarrassed, Nell put her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. Oh God, I took his taxi. I thought—’ She didn’t finish the sentence. She cringed and wished the ground would open up and swallow her.
Blushing furiously, she changed the subject. ‘I—I—I like your house.’
‘I was born here,’ said Annie. ‘I inherited it after my parents died. I like it. So May hasn’t been in touch?’
Nell shook her head. ‘My mother died, and then my father. She probably thought I had enough on my mind.’
‘I’m so sorry for your loss, Nell. That must have been tough, losing them so close together.’ She paused. ‘As for May, I should think she’s got a lot on her mind, too. That woman’s in a lot of trouble. The taxman’s after her for unpaid taxes.’
Nell said she knew May was against paying tax, ‘But how did the Inland Revenue find out?’
‘Somebody informed on her.’
‘Who would do such a thing?’ said Nell.
‘Me,’ said Annie.
Nell couldn’t believe it. ‘You’re joking.’
Annie shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Why would you do such a thing to someone like May?
‘That woman is a pain. I got sick of her. Singing to the customers, who all looked startled. Feeding all her friends and Harry’s clients for free at the special table, laughing, drinking and me in the kitchen cooking her bacon and eggs and scrubbing up.’
‘She’s a wonderful cook,’ said Nell.