Never Mind Miss Fox

by Olivia Glazebrook

  The memory made her cringe in the sheets where she lay.

  Incidents and accidents collided in Martha’s head. She wanted to thread them into order like pearls onto a string, but they would only clash together and apart like marbles. There was no making sense of them.

  There’s been an accident.

  Martha had said those words many times on that dreadful night.

  After the ambulance, from the hospital, she tried to reach Clive again at his hotel. The same receptionist took her call but this time Martha gasped, “There’s been an accident. Please find him—you have to.”

  Still there was no answer from Clive’s room. “His key is here,” the girl said, slick and efficient.

  “There’s a colleague—”

  “Yes. Shall I try her room for you?”

  “Yes—yes—”

  “One moment.” There was no more “please” or “ma’am.”

  Then an English accent: “Belinda Easton speaking. Who is this?”

  “It’s Martha—” Martha wondered how her voice was stringing these words together when she did not seem to be giving it any instruction. “—Clive’s wife. There’s been an accident. A fall—stairs—head—hospital—”

  It was not what Belinda said—

  “All right. Martha? It’s all right: I’ll find him, I’ll tell him and I’ll get him on a plane.”

  —but the tone of her voice, a mother’s voice, that reassured Martha.

  When Clive rang back she gabbled, “I woke up and she was crying—Oh God oh God—They won’t tell me anything—It was only for a second—”

  Clive asked, “What have they said?” and then, “How did it happen?”

  Martha did not answer and later she wondered, Why did he even ask? She knew he would have imagined it, exactly as it had occurred. He would have seen it all, vivid with his mind’s eye: the crying child, the broken sleep and the open gate on the stairs.

  I woke up and she was crying—

  Martha was asked to describe what had happened—how it had happened—so many times that it became a story, and one that always began the same way. She learned where to breathe, just as if she were making a speech.

  First she told the men from the ambulance, crouched at the bottom of the stairs. Then, at the hospital, she was asked to start again: I woke up and she was crying. Val pushed through the swinging doors with a crumbling, quake-struck face, and Martha told her too. Uniforms, stethoscopes, clipboards and lapel badges all stepped up to be told. When she finished—each time—they went away again. Doctors, nurses, specialists and then—What?—a social worker. A psycho-someone, and then another. Martha began to lose track.

  She noticed that although she had arrived in the noisiest part of the hospital—It’s an emergency—she was soon, somehow, in a quiet place. Nothing here seemed about to happen fast. There was no confusing wall of noise. Aside from the flick-flap of a door and the squeak of a rubber shoe there were only two sounds to speak of: the mip-mip-mip of one machine, and the regular click-shush of another.

  All these people asked to hear it over and over again: What? How? And then what? When Martha reached the end there would be someone else, someone new, who needed to know from the start.

  She was almost mad with fear, but afraid of sounding mad. She tried to make herself sensible, or at least to sound sensible, but it was hard—it was so hard that she began to wonder if perhaps she had gone mad. She could not seem to get a grip on herself. Was this what insanity was?

  It was hours—the night was over and it was day—before she realized what they suspected: not that she was mad, but that she had hurt Eliza.

  She said nothing at all after that.

  When at last she spoke again it was to Clive: “Don’t you want me to be punished?”

  In bed, they were lying on their backs and looking up. They could not seem to move closer together or further apart but only to lie with this fixed distance between them, like two railway sleepers.

  “You’re punishing yourself,” Clive said. “It was an accident.”

  It was not an answer to her question but he had told Martha what she wished to know. When she shut her eyes she saw a row of black-capped judges who shook their heads and pronounced her guilty. It was easy to recognize Clive, sitting in the midst of them.

  Martha was too feeble to contain herself, here in the cottage alone, and what was the point in self-government? She made a little comma of her body in the bed, and rubbed her cheek with the pillow. As if she had given herself a signal, tears spilled from her eyes. All those marbles in her palm—accident, incident, blunder or crime—tumbled from her grasp and rolled away.

  After lying awake all night—flat on his back like a felled tree—Clive got up, dressed, and surrendered.

  “We’ll leave after breakfast,” he said to Eliza.

  “For the cottage?”

  “Yes. Isn’t that what you want?”

  Eliza did not answer but asked a question of her own. “Will Tom be there?”

  “No. He’s gone. It’s just your mother and me.” Clive felt the weariness of defeat.

  “You and Mum? Huh.” It was a new voice: a weapon as blunt as a hammer.

  Clive looked at his daughter. “That wasn’t very nice.”

  “Good.”

  He could think of no reply to that and Val, wiping a dishrag over the counter, seemed not to have heard.

  The sound of a car on the track wrung Martha from her bed. Upright—or near enough—she staggered to the window. She stubbed her toe but even that sharp pain did not dislodge the headache from her temples. She must have drunk some wine the night before.

  A stranger’s car—small, clean and white—was creeping up the track. Bother! How awkward.

  Martha looked down at herself and found she was still dressed in yesterday’s clothes. Pieces of the day fell into her mind: Eliza safe—Tom gone—red wine. The recollection made her swallow.

  Downstairs she opened the kitchen door and found a neat man with an apologizing face. “I’ve come to have a look in your roof,” he said. “For the bats?” He showed Martha a laminated identity card.

  “Oh!” said Martha. “I didn’t know…”

  “I had an appointment? With someone called Eliza Barkes?”

  Tears threatened; Martha gulped. “She’s not here.” Because she ran away. “But come in.”

  They climbed the stairs to the attic door and Martha clicked the latch. “It’s a bit of a mess,” she apologized.

  The man got out a torch. “Everyone’s is,” he said with a sigh.

  Martha scrambled in after him and they crouched beside each other on the rafters, staring into the gloom.

  Under the sorrowful beam of the torch a misshapen and half-remembered landscape of junk-filled boxes stretched away. Everything in here was degenerating into a clogged heap the color and texture of pipe tobacco. Martha’s heart sank to look at it.

  Into the attic had been posted everything that she and Clive had no use for, but could not throw away. Her father’s clothes and the manuscripts which she had never read. Broken Christmas tree lights. Boxes of records, cassettes, CDs and videotapes. Equipment that marked the beginning and end of self-improvement: diet books, juicers, dumbbells and weighing scales. Eliza’s old school uniforms, her outgrown shoes and even that detested helmet, issued by the hospital, which made her scream until her parents took it off.

  These things were meaningless now, but to look at them filled Martha with despair. Nothing could ever be got rid of. Even if something were carted away for trash it would still exist somewhere, buried in a hole or shredded into bits.

  “Are they still here?” she asked her companion. “Will they come back?”

  “They’re going to keep coming back,” he said, “but does it matter?” He pointed the beam of the torch into the crevices above their heads. “They were here all along, after all—you just didn’t know about them.”

  Martha sat back on her heels and considered. She could
find nothing to argue with. “It doesn’t matter, does it?” she said. “It’s perfectly fine.” A sudden exhaustion—weakness—resignation—made her want to laugh. It was so quiet and warm up here. She smiled, yawned, felt hungry and thought of Eliza, traveling home. “My daughter will be very pleased,” she said.

  When the man had gone Martha found her telephone and got back into bed to use it. She propped herself up on the pillows and her heart thumped with nerves.

  “Eliot?”

  She would begin like this, but had not thought how to go on.

  Afterwards she sat in the silence and stared out of the window. This day seemed to have many beginnings. She rested, pillowed by a new feeling of calm, before getting to her feet and starting again: undressing, washing, dressing, drinking coffee and finally taking the lamp from Eliza’s bedside and moving it into the attic. She attached it to an extension cord and plugged it in on the landing, and then she climbed back into the roof and switched it on. Everything seemed to wince—to shrink back into its shell—but Martha would not be put off. She stared at it all with folded arms and a fierce look, and then she got to work.

  Later—her eyes and nose clogged with dust and a rummaging pain in her back—she went down to the kitchen and made herself a fried-egg sandwich. She ate it sitting on her father’s bench, in the garden.

  Tom liked to sit here and smoke as her father had done. Martha wondered whether Tom was with Eliot—perhaps they had woken up together in that empty, echoing Hampstead house.

  The morning’s activities had brought a welcome peace, and now Martha could think of both Tom and Eliot—of everyone—with equanimity. She stretched out her legs and looked down at the field. It was warm, here in this corner where the sun kissed the bench all day, and it felt a long way from London, Paris, or anywhere else she might be.

  What will happen? This had been Eliza’s question and now Martha asked it musingly of herself. Getting no answer she turned up her face to quiz the air, the tree and the skating swallows. What will happen?

  She still sat in that spot, face tilted to the sun, when Clive’s car drew in at the gate. At the sight her heart expanded with welcome.

  Today, Martha guessed, Eliza would jump out of the car and run up the field to the house. Yes, here she came now: zigzagging with her arms outstretched and her palms brushing the tall, feathery tips of the grass.

  Martha got to her feet, raised an arm and called out, “Eliza!” The shout was instinctive: Mine! In a moment her daughter was wrapped in her arms and Martha said, “Don’t run away, never again, please. I was so frightened.”

  Eliza did not answer but said, “Ow, Mum, you’re hurting.” She hinged herself out of the embrace. “Has anything happened?” she asked. “Has anyone been?”

  “The bat man,” said Martha. “He came especially to see you.” She heard the note of supplication in her voice and was surprised. I am trying to appease, she thought. With a sudden feeling of fright she knew that her authority had gone. Eliza had taken it with her, yesterday on the train, and had not delivered it back.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said they’ll keep coming back and we ought to get used to it. He said they’ve been here, all these years, and we just didn’t know.”

  “That’s what I said to Dad! See, Dad?” She turned to Clive. “It’s their home too.”

  Martha turned to Clive and when she saw his face, in her mellow forgiving mood, her heart flared a little in pity—Oh! You!—as if she had brushed together the sweepings of love and put a match to them.

  But Clive was not listening. “Why are you covered in dust?” he asked Martha.

  Martha patted her head. “Oh,” she said. “Because of the attic. I’ve been sorting out some of the rubbish up there.”

  Eliza examined her. “It looks cool,” she said. “Like a witch or a ghost.”

  Martha heard approval in that voice and felt the touch of loving tendrils reach around her heart. She was almost dizzy with relief, smiling and dazed, but then felt suddenly awkward—exposed—in front of Clive. “You could help,” she suggested to him, for something to say. “You could bring down some boxes.”

  Clive did not want to commit. “I’ll come and take a look,” he said.

  Following him up the stairs, Martha wondered if they would always speak to one another—perhaps for the rest of their lives—as if they were two strangers on a train who agreed that the weather was wet and the carriage unusually crowded. But how should she proceed? Should she shake a fist in Clive’s face, stamp her foot and say, Listen to me: I kissed a boy! Eliza ran away! Be mindful of us! Was it safe to go on as if nothing had occurred, with independent thoughts and plans growing like weeds in the cracks between them? She felt as alert and trembling as one of those tall grasses in the field. We are separate after all, she thought. She felt a premonition throb in her heart and quake the length of her body. We were a family, but today we are three.

  When Clive saw that a light had been lit in the attic he said, “That doesn’t look very safe.” He switched it off at the wall. “What’s wrong with using a torch?”

  Martha felt very tired. “There’s nothing wrong with it,” she said, “I just didn’t.” She passed Clive a torch. “Here—you have this. I’ll fetch another.”

  When she came back Clive was bent over one of the boxes marked “Dump.” He had unsealed and opened it.

  “What are you doing?” Martha asked him.

  “Checking. In case there’s something I want.”

  “Oh, Clive, please don’t.”

  “Look,” he said in triumph, “what’s wrong with this?” He pulled out a kite and its tangled knot of string.

  Standing on the grass, Eliza stretched out her arms as far as they would reach and began to rotate. This was the way to make her head spin: she felt her thoughts mix and stir into a muddle.

  She tipped back her head and watched a swallow dip and swerve its open-hearted path across the blue. Like the bats, the swallows would not stay. They had somewhere else to be.

  That fragile feeling began to creep into her limbs again. She thought of the delicate life of Hector Fox. Heads were easily hurt: she pictured an egg in boiling water, and the banner of white that would bloom from a tiny crack.

  Yesterday, on the way to find Eliot, Eliza had asked her grandmother, “What will happen, after today? Will it go back to normal?”

  Val thought of a better question than an answer: “What do you want to happen?”

  No one had asked her this. Eliza realized, to her surprise, that she did not know the answer. She frowned, thinking it over.

  A newspaper blew past them along the pavement and was scattered into pages by the wind. Eliza felt sorry to look at it, and suddenly she knew: “I want all of us together,” she said. “And I want Eliot too. She’s my friend.” It was simple.

  Val reached for Eliza’s hand. “Well,” she said. “There’s nothing too hard about that.”

  It was a long, tall hill up to Eliot’s house, and they held hands all the way, pulling each other along.

  Back at the cottage, Eliza felt bigger.

  Aren’t you grown-up.

  Yes I am.

  The adventure of yesterday—all that she’d learned—had expanded her.

  She was beginning to feel sick but it did not stop her turning. Stopping would be worse—the world would spin by itself. She shut her eyes and drew slow, gliding circles on the grass. Alternate patches of light and shade dabbed at her closed eyelids. In the sun her vision turned to orange; under the blot of the tree there was nothing but black. Perhaps she would lose track of her position and twirl out of the garden and into the field or the sky; perhaps she would open her eyes and find herself high above the grass, the house and the tree—

  She heard a car door slam and stopped her revolutions to stand still. The inside of her head churned and so did her stomach. She staggered, blinked, gulped and tried to pin her wandering gaze on something fixed.

  There was Eliot: s
tanding in the yard beside her little car. She was looking straight at Eliza, with that rare smile on her face.

  “Eliot!” Eliza ran to greet her.

  From inside the house, Clive and Martha heard Eliza’s exclamation: “Eliot!”

  Clive straightened his back and stood alerted, listening. He went quite still, as if he had heard a frightening noise in the dark. Then he said to Martha, “How did she find us?”

  Martha had straightened up too. She was watching Clive. “I told her we were here,” she said.

  Clive looked at her, disbelieving. “What?”

  “I talked to her.” She waited a moment and then answered a question he had not asked. “It was the right thing to do.” Sounding peaceable, calm and collected she went on, “Eliza, me, your mother, Tom—we all trust her, Clive.” She spoke with decision: we have settled this matter without you. “It’s what Eliza wants. She never did anything wrong.”

  Was this Eliza or Eliot, who had never done anything wrong? Clive wanted to stop Martha—Stop!—and to contradict her—No!—and then to beg for a pause from time itself—Wait!—

  But Eliza’s bold voice called up the stairs from the hall: “Hey, Mum? Guess what: Eliot’s here.”

  Clive could picture his daughter swinging from the latch, just as she had since the day that she could reach it. Here was the pause he had wanted: for a moment he allowed the luxury of that image, now outgrown, to dab at his mind with its soft, remembered colors.

  “I’m coming down,” Martha called. She turned to Clive. “Well?” It was almost a challenge. “What about you?”