It was only a couple of weeks ago that he finally conceded and gave me his hall-door key so I could have a copy cut for myself. And Lynette still has to ring the door bell – unless I’m going to be out, in which case I’m told to leave the key under the concrete block where, as Brendie Caudwell quite rightly pointed out, anyone could find it and walk straight in. I doubt Mrs Larkin – ten years working here – even has her own key.
And now, here is this complete stranger walking along our roof, the whole bunch of them snug in the pocket of his overalls. Why? Because he’s a man? Because he likes racing? Because he’s not a nurse and he’s not a cleaner? Or because he’s not me?
I fume for a bit, tone it down to a sulk then dry my hands and come back to the table where, leaning on the edge of it, I slowly begin to empty my head.
Releasing the onions from their web, I pluck one out of the rolling pile and weigh it on the palm of my hand. It’s been a while since I’ve paid attention to the weight of an onion, felt the stiff skin of it on my palm, the scent of it under my nose. I play ball with it for a moment, sideways hand to hand, then straight up catch. My hands are steady. And now, I’m ready to begin my second tour of the kitchen.
This time I bring to the table: flour, olive oil, sugar. From the fridge, a good lump of butter and a silver nugget of foil holding a chunk of cheese – lightly coated with a whiteish mould but nothing that can’t be cured by a swift, dry shave. Next I unscrew a head of garlic from the rope and sniff it. I know there’s a bottle of cognac in the drinks’ cabinet in my mother’s sitting room and some decent enough stock cubes in one of the kitchen drawers. I turn on the oven and unsheathe the frozen baguette from its plastic.
Down on my knees now, I begin pulling things out of an overcrowded cupboard: Mason Cash mixing bowls and biscuit cutters; flan-cases and jelly moulds, cake tins, wooden spoons, wire beaters, an old-fashioned electric mixer. There’s a box packed with cookery books and, sitting on top of them, a plastic bag of recipes in pamphlets or in cut-outs from old magazines. My hand, no longer quite so steady, begins to sift through them.
My mother was not much of a cook really, despite her love of eating. She always favoured convenience foods – quick gratification and a minimum of mess – and took a child-like pleasure in the small miracle that could be brought about by the simple addition of boiling water to desiccated bits in a bowl: those off-white granules that swelled into mashed potatoes; the dried buck shot that transmuted into what she called ‘real-live peas’. I’m sure she embraced the microwave cooker like the friend she’d been waiting for all her life. What she did excel at though, what she truly loved, was baking: for this she had a light hand and a patient, caring eye. Birthday cakes, Sunday cakes, scones, tarts, buns, bread, pastries – she never minded messing the kitchen for the sake of such things.
The scent of a cake shop always hung over our house, and I seem to remember her, here in the kitchen, baking most days when I was a child. I have to wonder now if that could possibly be true? And if so what did she do with all those cakes and buns – we certainly couldn’t have eaten them all, despite her best efforts. Maybe she gave half of it away – but I don’t see her walking up a neighbour’s driveway, somehow, with a covered plate in her hands, and doubt she would ever do such a thing. Unless she had eaten most of it herself? I know I caught her once in the middle of the night, sitting on the step in the garage, stuffing her face like a maniac, chocolate wrappers all over her lap. Maybe she baked every day just for the pleasure of it and then threw the surplus out?
I sit back on my heels and look over the batterie of baking utensils spread all over the floor; these bits and pieces that would have kept my mother company every day of her married life. And I am struck by a sense of her loneliness. Whatever else I may think of her – no matter what may have been killed off or cancelled out by our mutual disappointment – I know this much about her and pity her for it: my mother was the loneliest woman I have ever known.
‘Your mom must be, like, the fattest person in the neighbourhood,’ Patty announced one evening in Serena’s car when she was probably stoned. All the times she had listened in silence while myself, Rachel and Agatha carried on a conversation about how much we hated our mothers – something we three had in common – and yet, when she said that, I remember my eyes stinging with unexpected tears.
I reach into the cupboard again and, from the very back, drag out the large cast-iron pot that once belonged to a grandmother I never knew. Then, one by one, I return all the obsolete baking aids back to where I found them.
The weight of the cast-iron pot when I lift it over to the sink, the motif of dust that it leaves on the front of my sweater.
I lower it into the sink, lather it with detergent and turn on the tap. I’m ready to lather up the inside too, but as I lift the lid I see there’s something inside there and so pull the pot away from the reach of the water. I dry off my hands then take out an envelope.
It’s a small white envelope, greying with age; when I turn it over the words Mr and Mrs Nichols greet me.
I can see this envelope didn’t come through the mail – there’s no stamp or address on it. It may have been handed to my mother but I feel it was more likely to have been slipped through the letter box in the middle of the night, or on a day when she was certain to be out. The envelope isn’t sealed. There’s something stiff inside it – a card obviously.
I spent an entire afternoon searching for this card a couple of weeks ago, after I’d come across that shoebox in the bottom of my mother’s wardrobe. The shoebox was filled with memorial cards – maybe twenty-five of them: a lifetime of deaths, anyhow, that either she wanted to remember or that the relatives and friends of the deceased hoped she’d want to remember. The envelopes in the shoebox had all been opened – some more than others: tiny rips at the edges, flaps that had been unevenly resettled. I opened them again and laid the cards across her bed like some macabre game of solitaire. My maternal grandparents were there, and my father’s brother who drowned when he was a boy. There was an old woman I didn’t recognise but whose name seemed vaguely familiar. My father’s friend, who died in India, and his second cousin, a priest, I remembered from a wedding photograph simply because he had a hare lip which made him stand out. There were neighbours too: Mr Preston who died only four years after I left – the photograph taken when he was a young man with two solid arms stretched over the back of a sofa. Mr Slater who lived to be ninety-four and who, without his hat, looked like a vagrant – a photograph I can’t help but suspect his wife chose out of spite. And Mr Caudwell with his fat, red face, even fatter and redder than I recall, dunted down between the braided beak of his police commissioner’s hat and the epaulettes of his uniform.
That day, I had been searching for one particular card because I knew it had to have existed. I also knew it would have been given to my mother by whatever means, even if it was only to make a point. And so, she had kept it after all. Maybe out of superstition, or maybe out of compassion – even if she couldn’t quite bring herself to put it into the shoebox with the rest of the respectable dead.
I’m not saddened by the card in my hand and this surprises me a little. In fact, I feel warmed by it, almost glad. I think about opening the envelope, inching it out and what I would see. First the black border, then the words In Memory of, beneath that, the photograph.
I wonder which photograph they chose in the end.
I put the envelope into the back pocket of my jeans. This is not the moment; this is not even the day.
Now I turn on the radio, edge the knob over the wavelengths, past the news and all the opinions of the news, until I arrive at a sound that pleases me. I know this one actually – this is ‘Winterzeit’.
I heard it at the first recital I was ever at in New York (or anywhere else for that matter) where I was taken on my very first date by a skinny law student with the gentlest of kisses. Simon Fischer – I was even in love with his name. Then, as we sat holding hands in the c
heapest seats of a dimmed auditorium, I heard only hope and love in Schumann’s music. Now when I listen, I hear madness and darkness in an isolated landscape; I hear the beginning of the journey to death.
Outside in the garden, there is the rattling of the ladder being folded and carried back to the shed. But I don’t care now about the ladder, about the keys or even the beautiful black angel.
I’m about to go somewhere else.
I know what I’m doing now, and I know the season. I know where I am. I’m in my mother’s kitchen, in my father’s house, peeling onions for French onion soup.
8
Summer Past
July
MR RYAN, THUMP THUMP-THUMPING cartons of stationery into the boot of his car, calls up now and then to his son Thomas.
‘Byebye Tomtom. Tomtom byebye.’
Thomas, she imagines, dressed in his turtle pyjamas, splayed on the box-room window.
‘Byebyedada. Dadda byebye.’
Downstairs in the front room, Jilly brays like a donkey. Elaine knows by the way she is dragging her wordless voice around the room that she’s trying to communicate with her father.
Byebye Tomtom. Tomtom byebye.
‘Answer her, you bastard,’ Elaine mumbles, ‘could you not just, for once, answer her?’
*
Around this time every morning, Elaine starts to feel bad about Jilly and Mrs Ryan. Shortly after she’d come out of hospital, she’d fallen into a routine of having breakfast with Mrs Ryan, waiting for all the men to leave for the day and taking her cue from Mr Slater’s departure. She would then sneak down the back path in her dressing-gown and slippers and squeeze behind the broken fence that divided both back gardens. Her mother, lost in the noise of the hoover, or – as had more recently become the case – still in bed with one of her ‘headaches’. Tommy, up since dawn charging around, would be worn out by then and enjoying his post-breakfast snooze. Mrs Ryan in the kitchen or, in this warm weather, out on the patio, getting Jilly ready for another day in a life she didn’t appear to know she was living.
But then one day, not long after the arrival of Serena and Patty, Elaine had been about to pull the fence back when she heard a sound coming from the Ryans’ patio. She could see Jilly up there, as usual, lying on her day-bed, the basin of water her mother had been using to wash her on the ground with the yellow sponge bobbing on top of it. And poor Jilly, dead-eyed and face all twisted, right arm extended with her hand angled on the end of it, as if someone had been trying to screw it off her wrist. Mrs Ryan sitting at the patio table, crying. One hand over her mouth, trying to shove the short, angry sobs back down her throat. The other hand, pressed down on the table, held a sheet of blue writing paper. Mrs Ryan crying! Elaine hadn’t known which way to turn – should she go in and try to console her? Should she allow Mrs Ryan absorb whatever bad news she’d just read in that letter and come back later on?
And that’s what she had always intended doing, if not later that day, then certainly the next one.
But when she had stepped back into her own kitchen, there had been her mother, an identical page of blue paper in her hand. ‘Will you just look at that?’ she’d said, holding the page towards Elaine but then snatching it back and reading it aloud herself, in a mealy-mouthed New York accent.
‘Serena Greene and her daughter Patty would be so pleased if you could join them tomorrow for a… wait for this: a mother-and-daughter afternoon – did you ever hear anything so ridiculous in all your life!’
Since then, there have been four mother-and-daughter afternoons.
The second one took place in the Shillmans’ house on a beautiful day in the garden and went on late into the night, way after all the daughters had gone home anyway, along with Mrs Hanley who ‘unfortunately had so much to do and could only stay for an hour’.
As soon as they had walked into the house, Mrs Shillman, hand on hip, had said, ‘Now look here, there’s lemonade for the kids, and there’s tea and there’s coffee – if that’s what you want. But in this heat, I say: let the grown-ups have a proper grown-up summer drink – anyone care to try a Bellini?’
Some time after midnight, Elaine opened the bathroom window to hear three voices still floating around in the dark: her mother’s, Mrs Caudwell’s and Mrs Shillman’s, and had to wonder what it was about drunken people that made them think everyone else was deaf.
*
Jilly and Mrs Ryan had not appeared at any of these parties and, as far as Elaine knows, they were only ever invited to that first one, and that was probably only because Serena Greene hadn’t yet realised that the daughter in the Ryan house was a big broken doll.
‘You’re my big doll,’ Elaine used to whisper to her, when she was seven or eight years of age, and Jilly – so small for her age – was a few months older. She loved brushing Jilly’s cotton-wool hair with a baby brush, tying a bib around her neck and feeding her, then pushing her along the Ryans’ back garden path in her special pram with the little engine attached to the wheels. Or even pushing her out front as far as the cul-de-sac corner. Until Jilly grew too big and too ugly to believe in as a doll, and Elaine grew too old to bear the jeering of the bigger boys, like Gerry and Peter Caudwell.
She listens now to the morning chorus of car engines: the smug purr of the professionals; the rat-tat of all the in-betweeners; the chug of those cars that work hard for a living – Mr Jackson’s station wagon, Mr Tansey’s showroom specimen. Mr Ryan’s car with the cartons of stationery stacked neatly inside. And Jilly erm-ermming them all on their way.
Soon Mrs Ryan will be wheeling Jilly out to the patio. Not long after that, she will be settling herself down at the patio table, her teapot and toast, her last night’s newspaper.
She wonders if Mrs Ryan, as she turns over a page, ever glances down at the broken fence at the bottom of the garden and waits for it to tilt.
Elaine takes the usual few seconds then to imagine herself getting up, throwing on her dressing-gown and going down her own garden path and then coming up the Ryans’ garden with an excuse already tumbling out of her mouth. Except there is no excuse. Mrs Ryan knows well where she’s been all this time: she’s been going to mother-and-daughter afternoons, she’s been wearing make-up at the Hanleys’ garden party that Agatha’s mother couldn’t be bothered to come to in the end. She’s been sunbathing in back gardens, practising her smoking skills and going out places; she’s been talking and talking and talking – to friends, to boys, to complete strangers. She’s been learning how to fit in.
She decides to stop thinking about Jilly and Mrs Ryan. Pulling her journal out from under the bed, propping herself up with her pillows, she considers the cars of the neighbourhood.
Out of all the houses around, only two of the men don’t own cars. Mr Owens who ‘only’ works in a shop in town – as she’s often heard it said. And Mr Preston who has a withered arm and can hardly be expected to hold onto a steering wheel. The third non-car man is Mr Slater but, as he is retired, he is excused.
Preston and Owens live facing each other on the right-hand curve of the cul-de-sac. They take the same bus to work every morning, yet never walk to the stop together – one always leaving a little behind the other, as if by prior arrangement. She knows this has something to do with cars, or maybe the shame in the lack of a car. Cars are significant in this estate – she has always known that. Cars are manly possessions.
And out of all the houses around, only three of the women own their own cars: the newlywed nurse who lives near the village; Mrs Tansey whose husband is a car dealer; and Mary Hanley from across the way. Dinky, sweet-smelling things that zip around corners and make her think of powder-puff boxes on wheels. It is generally accepted that Mrs Shillman could have her own car if she so wanted, but as her husband is usually picked up in an embassy car or else he’s away, she gets to use his car almost as much as he does.
Other women can, and sometimes do, drive, but only if a husband is not using his car and only at his convenience. In Mrs
Donegan’s case to go to the supermarket on Saturday mornings or to run her children to music classes. And in Mrs Caudwell’s case to clean her mother-in-law’s house every Sunday, bring her weekly groceries and a fresh change of sheets.
Maggie Arlow also has her own car: a long, low affair from Sweden, dented all over and muck-caked at the bottom which the men regard as something of a disgrace. But Maggie is not of the estate as such and so lives by different rules.
And now there is Serena.
Serena refers to her car as a nervy little pony although it’s not all that small – just smaller than the sort of car she is used to – and it’s only really nervy when she jerks on the gear stick – something else she needs to get used to. Serena’s car, like herself, smells of jasmine with an occasional slash of turpentine.
The house gives off a similar scent – jasmine and turps in varying degrees. Upstairs is more jasmine; downstairs more turps. In the dining room where she paints her pictures, the air is clogged with it.
‘I’m not calling it my studio just yet,’ she said to Elaine, at the first of the mother-and-daughter afternoons. ‘I’ll call it my studio when I’ve managed to finish one Goddamn picture that’s worth the price of the paint.’
Agatha, Elaine, Rachel and Patty: Serena calls them her four little heartbreakers. Although so far none of them – apart from Patty – appears to have caused so much as a hairline crack on any heart in the neighbourhood.
Patty is different. And that, as Rachel Shillman points out, is the crux of the matter. She is a novelty. ‘I’m not saying that Patty isn’t attractive.’ Rachel then adds, ‘And no, I am not jealous. Although obviously I’d prefer to be walking around with her figure than this… whatever this is that I have to cart around with me.’
The Lives of Women Page 11