The other people stayed in that big room with the noise that went on all the time. Music, loud voices, more music, braying laughter. Where did it come from – oh yes, that thing on the wall. Not cinema. Like that, but smaller. When had she last been to a cinema?
Janet preferred to come back to this room, where her bed was. A bed, anyway. The girl with the blue overall had wheeled her along the corridor, pushing the door open: ‘Here we are, Janet, sure you want to be on your own?’
She had a label on her overall that said ‘Shona’. ‘Thank you, Shona,’ Janet said. ‘I’m going to read my book.’
Shona had left her in the wheelchair, but the book was on the table on the other side of the pink chair. She’d rather have been in that because it had a nice firm back, upright. She could imagine the soft velvet of the arms beneath her hands, a feeling she liked. She could of course move out of the wheelchair on her own, she wasn’t helpless; she could still do things for herself, still walk.
She was tired. Maybe in a wee while. She felt round her neck for the cord with the oval button at the end of it. She was supposed to press it if she needed anything, but they didn’t really like you to do that. So she would just wait and in a minute, move by herself, and get her book.
Sometimes she wondered what was keeping Harry, why he didn’t come and get her. She missed him, missed the girls, though one of them had been in today, the bonny fair one with the wavy hair, Esther. Good. Esther. She wasn’t daft, she knew her own girls. She had loved them equally, never understood those women with favourites among their children. She and Harry agreed about that. Treat them all equally, he said. Of course they weren’t all hers, though after a while, Margaret was almost as much their daughter as the others. She was a quiet wee thing, sickly, you had to watch her all the time. That old story of Diana’s – Harry had said it might not even be true, she wasn’t a woman you could trust. He loved Margaret too, and she had no one else.
Then there were the twins and she had to care for them as if they were her children too, though they never were. She and Harry had called them ‘the cuckoos’ but only to each other, never of course to anyone else, even her mother, though she wondered if she had thought of them like that sometimes. Only, these cuckoos did not edge anyone else out of the nest, they were the ones who flew off, so they should have had a better name for them. Flew off and never came back. There was a reason, but she couldn’t think of it right now, it eluded her as so much did if she tried too hard to grasp it. Daniel, she thought, oh poor Daniel. Daniel had died, their bonny boy, and Caroline so lost without him.
Her head nodded forward, uncomfortably. You couldn’t rest in this wheelchair, you kept jerking awake. In a while she supposed Shona or the other one – what was she called? – would come and help her get into bed and she could lie there more easily, dreaming.
Soon, the dreams began to appear anyway, would come closer if she kept still and waited, the pictures of the girls on the sideboard, the graduation pictures, the wedding ones, and in the hallway their outdoor shoes flung off when they came in, so that she had to remind them to put them away neatly at the front door. Through the hall and into the big front sitting room that only got warm in summer or at Christmas with a fire on all day, so she came out of that again when she’d looked at the Japanese vases at either end of the mantelshelf, wondering which one had the crack in it, left or right?
Where was everyone? The house was very quiet. Sometimes she went all the way through it without finding any of them, and that was frightening, she didn’t like that. Somehow this time she knew somebody was upstairs, though she avoided going up there yet, not wanting to test this, just in case. If she stayed down here, in the kitchen, she could believe they would all come rattling downstairs soon, ready for their tea.
A sound in the corridor broke into the dream – where was she, what on earth was she doing in this little room? She closed her eyes, tight, too tight for the tears to come, because if she waited long enough, she would be back in her house, her real house, and the girls would be there, and Caroline and Daniel home and then at last, his key in the door, his step in the hall, Harry, calling her, as he always did. Janet? I’m home.
Into the Future
1964
‘Damn,’ Daniel said. ‘I’ve left my gloves in the house.’
They were turning into Queen’s Road, joining traffic heading towards the city centre. He took first one long-fingered hand, then the other, off the steering wheel, opening and closing them.
‘On the hallstand I think.’
‘We’re late,’ Caroline said. ‘We’re late already – Alison will think we’ve forgotten.’
‘It’s ok, the car will warm up in a minute.’
On the steering wheel, his hands were already white with cold.
‘I’ll turn the fan up, will I?’
A blast of icy air chilled their faces, Daniel’s hands.
‘That’s not a lot of help!’ He reached over and turned the fan off. ‘I thought there was something wrong with the heater – it’s been making wheezy noises.’
‘So much for Harry’s friend and his bargain car.’ Caroline stretched out her own hands in their pink striped woollen gloves. ‘Do you want to put mine on? They might stretch enough.’
‘Then you’d have freezing hands.’
‘It doesn’t bother me so much – I don’t get dead fingers the way you do. Anyway, I can fold my arms and tuck my hands under, like this.’ She demonstrated.
‘They’d be too small. It’s fine, don’t worry.’
‘It’s because they’re pink, isn’t it?’
‘Of course not.’ His cheekbones, despite the cold, turned a little pink themselves, and Caroline smiled to herself.
The car was not heating up. ‘It’s like sitting in a bloody freezer,’ Caroline grumbled, rubbing her nose with one gloved hand. She glanced at Daniel. He couldn’t bear cold, and his fingers, that he was flexing again, one hand at a time, were stiff already.
‘I could drive for a bit,’ Caroline said. ‘We keep saying I should get some practice but I never do.’
‘You haven’t got your provisional licence, even, lazy woman,’ Daniel said.
‘Och, who would know? We’re going out to the Bridge of Don, it’s not an area the police are likely to be patrolling, is it? There’s nothing there.’
‘I’m not stopping in freezing cold to try and put L plates on.’
‘Don’t then, just pull over. Let me drive. I’ve got gloves. They wouldn’t be much good to you now, you’ve let your hands get too cold.’
‘When we get out the road a bit, ok?’
He stopped as soon as they were clear of the city centre, drawing in to the wide driveway of a house on the suddenly empty road. Caroline hopped out so that they could change places.
‘Right,’ she said, ‘mirror, signal, manoeuvre.’
Daniel stamped up and down on the pavement outside, his arms folded, hands tucked into armpits, then began running on the spot. Caroline leaned across the passenger seat. ‘Get in!’ she shouted. He got in.
‘Are you sure you’re ok? Do you remember what to do?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said. She wiggled the gear stick. ‘Your teeth are chattering.’
‘Never mind that. Put your foot down.’
‘What?’
‘Clutch.’
‘I know.’
With a couple of jerks, they were off. After a few moments, having managed to change up the gears without trouble, Caroline began to increase speed.
‘This is ok, isn’t it?’
‘Fine. Just take it easy.’ He leaned back. ‘You’ll be a good driver,’ he said. ‘You should start practising properly. Get those lessons sorted out.’
‘I will.’
‘Promise?’
‘You and your promises.’
‘We don’t break them, that’s the point.’
‘You don’t.’
He didn’t. If Daniel said, ‘I promise,’ she believed h
im.
Successfully, she got them through the last traffic lights before the country road began. ‘I’m doing very well, I think.’
‘Terrific. Soon as you pass your test, you can do all the driving.’
‘Good. You wouldn’t mind? I thought men always wanted to be the ones to drive.’ She kept her hands firmly on the steering wheel, trying not to grip it too hard. She was quite good at this really. ‘Look at Harry and Janet. He always drives, though in my opinion, Janet’s actually a better driver.’
‘She has more patience,’ Daniel said, and she sensed he was grinning, but did not want to turn her head, since the car might not keep going straight ahead if she did.
‘It’s ridiculous. Even when she takes him to the station or whatever – he drives there and parks, then she has to move over and drive home. There’s no discussion about it, no decision made.’
They were beyond street lights now and the road stretched unmarked in front of them.
‘Put the full beam on – look.’ He did it for her. ‘If a car comes, you have to dip them.’
‘You do it,’ Caroline said. ‘I can’t do that as well as drive.’
‘Maybe I take it back about you being a good driver . . .’
‘I will eventually. Obviously,’ she conceded. ‘Sorry. Concentrating. You’d better look out for the sign as well.’
‘Where do we turn off for Alison’s?’
‘It’s on the left – something like Cullen, Cullearn. . . . Cullernie, that’s it.’
‘How far now?’
‘I don’t know really, she said to look out for a garage on the left. It’s about two miles after that.’
‘Ok, I’ll keep an eye out.’
They drove in silence for a moment, then Caroline, growing confident (it was easy, you just held the steering wheel and kept going), said, ‘You remember the book the girls always wanted me to read, Alice in Wonderland?’
‘Well, you were the one who read it. I tried them with Treasure Island, but Margaret was frightened of Long John Silver.’
‘She was frightened of everything,’ Caroline scoffed. ‘She didn’t like it when we got to the Queen wanting to cut off everyone’s head in Alice.’
‘What about it, anyway?’
‘It’s where they got the Elties from, the names they used, Elsie, Lacey and Tilly. The Dormouse’s story, though only Tilly really stuck. You know the little girls in the story were supposed to live in a well – a Treacle Well?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘I often think about the Treacle Well. I mean, it’s nonsense, but it’s also quite a good metaphor. You’re stuck in it, you can’t get out, and it seems you never will. It’s such an effort – and it makes me think how everything about living in a family is so . . . sticky.’
Daniel laughed. ‘That’s true enough!’
The more Caroline thought about this, the better the analogy. Now that she and Daniel had left home, had their flat, the car, it was as if they were clear at last of the Treacle Well. Already it was the dream, their new life the real one. It occurred to her that this interlude, driving on the dark road, was also dreamlike. It was hard to keep concentrating.
‘Is that snow?’ Daniel said, peering. A few flakes floated towards the windscreen, landing like wet stars, dissolving slowly.
‘It’s not much,’ Caroline said. ‘We can’t be far from the turning now.’
‘Remind me why we’re going to this party?’
‘I thought you wanted to!’
‘Oh sure. It just seems . . . such a long way to get there. I hope it’s worth it.’
‘It’s all worth it,’ Caroline said. ‘It’s where we’re going.’
‘To a party?’
‘To our future. Our lovely, unknown, brilliant careers, the travelling we’ll do, the places we’ll see, the people we’ll meet.’
‘Our lives to come.’
‘Yes.’
They were passing houses again, set back from the road in a new estate, a knot of people on a corner, the garage they were looking out for, still open and lit up, a pub with people standing outside, then the road dark again. The snow was falling faster, thickening.
‘Put the wipers on.’
‘What – where are they?’ They fumbled, hands together, his cool but no longer icy, and the wipers came on fast, but made no difference, the snow clouding the air in front of them, so that Caroline could see nothing but snow.
‘I can’t see,’ she said. ‘I’d better slow down, eh?’
‘It might be icy – don’t brake for God’s sake. Just ease up a bit with your foot, let the car slow itself.’
‘I wish I could see the road better,’ she said, leaning forward, peering, her foot resting more heavily on the accelerator than she meant it to, than Daniel had told her to, but she couldn’t see, and the car seemed to have a will of its own, she wasn’t really in control after all, so when it happened, when the blow came, she was almost prepared for it, though hardly ready, hardly capable of thought at all.
All through her life, in dreams, she drove that dark road again with Daniel by her side, peering through the windscreen at the secret life to come, and longing for it.
The Treacle Well Page 35