Half Broken Things

by Morag Joss

  One morning early in the month the telephone rang while they were having breakfast. A man, who introduced himself as Stan, told Jean wearily that he could send one of the boys round later in the week to mow the lawns. As long as that was convenient to herself, he added, as per the arrangement.

  ‘Oh! Oh my goodness, arrangement? What arrangement? This week?…’ Jean turned to see Michael and Steph sitting upright and alarmed, and realised that her voice had sounded frightened.

  ‘Ma’am? The arrangement for the grass. I was told you’d know all about it. Shan’t inconvenience you at all, ma’am,’ Stan said, implying that the inconvenience would be his.

  ‘The grass? Well, I… I couldn’t say. How- I mean I’m not sure…’

  ‘The arrangement, ma’am, didn’t they tell you? They said there’d be somebody here that knew the score.’ When Jean said nothing he went on, even more wearily, ‘Ma’am, I farm the next land. Mr Standish-Cave lets me have his hay from the fields either side of his driveway, and for that I get one of my boys to cut his grass when he’s away. Suits us both, except I’m short of hands. So I’m not saying we’ll be round every week but I can spare Darren Thursday, most probably.’

  There was a silence. There had been something on the owners’ list about the grass but Jean could not remember what. Until this moment she had not given the grass a thought beyond thinking it was getting rather long; it was silly of her, for of course it would need mowing. But not by an outsider. She said, ‘Well, actually, if you’re short of hands, there’s no need. I’m sure we can manage. It’s only a bit of grass cutting.’

  ‘There’s a lot of lawns, ma’am. You’re not planning driving the mower yourself, are you?’

  ‘Well, no, I don’t suppose so. But we, I…’ She looked at Michael. ‘I have someone here. I’m sure he’s perfectly willing. Then there would be no need to bother you, would there?’

  Stan brightened. ‘That’s made my day, that has. I don’t mind doing it, mind, but it’s hard to fit in, come summer. If your visitor’s up to it, good on him, and you thank him from me. Only,’ he said, ‘I wonder, ma’am, if you’d mind not saying… you know, to Mr Standish-Cave. Thing is, you see, I’d still owe him then, wouldn’t I? You with me, ma’am? I mean I would do it, only if you’re telling me there’s no need… and it’s only a bit of hay at the end of the day, isn’t it?’ He laughed.

  ‘Quite right,’ Jean said. ‘You’re quite right, I shan’t bother to mention it. Goodbye.’

  After she had put down the telephone they remained tense for a few moments. Then Steph said, trustingly, ‘No problem, is there?’

  ‘No. Oh no, it’s just-’ It was just what, Jean wondered. That matters such as grass-cutting, and a hundred others, were not for her to decide because the house was not hers and she had somehow not been able to bring herself to spell that out? That Michael and Steph had no right to be here because she herself was only temporary, transient, and belonged, in the end, nowhere? It was all too unsavoury. Jean looked slowly from one to the other and decided that they understood it all anyway, and more than that, they understood the need not to go into any of it.

  ‘It’s just- oh, arrangements,’ she said. ‘You know. If it’s not the grass it’s another thing. But I don’t think we want to be disturbed, do we? I should think we can manage by ourselves.’

  ‘Definitely,’ Michael said.

  Steph shifted Miranda to the other breast and nodded. We don’t need nobody else.’

  Jean reached for the coffee pot and refilled Steph’s cup. ‘You keep your fluids up now. Michael, I think the mower keys are in the jar on the window sill.’

  Michael cut the grass that day, chugging pleasurably on the tractor mower, learning how to corner just at the right moment for the blade to snatch the edges of the grass without munching into the plants in the borders. The smell of the cut grass brought Jean and Steph outside, and Michael made a note that later he would scrub down the wooden table and chairs by the kitchen door so that they could sit there when it was warm enough.

  Over the next couple of weeks he made it his business to discover the extent and nature of the grounds, the condition of window fastenings, door latches, furniture. He even inspected the roof, tutted over blocked guttering, and spent two days clearing out wet and wormy leaves, wearing huge industrial gloves. He cleaned and oiled garden tools. It was a house with more behind-the-scenes arrangements for comfort than he had ever seen; it felt like a theatre. He found out what appliances, machinery and systems made it all work and came to understand the boiler, the septic tank, the water softener, the plumbing, the Aga. Mentally he stored up projects for himself for the next day, the week after, next month. He bled the radiators, sawed up some felled logs on the edge of the woods. Thinking of Steph and Miranda, he planned that soon he would master the swimming pool.

  Yet in all these things he was a little less than proprietorial, behaving more like a respectful and discreet householder-elect. It was with a sense of his filial duty, a grown-up obligation to help his capable but ageing mother with such a large house, that he took some of the weight on his younger shoulders. Jean observed him with increasing pride that she should inspire such quiet and solid devotion, and that he should express it in ways that she thought so apt and so manly.

  But perversely, as the good days became more frequent, the bad days when they came grew worse. There were days on which Jean woke with her heart pounding so hard that she felt she had been thrown out of a dream about an impending collision, just a second before the moment of impact. Saying nothing, she began to dread her trips to the freezers, whose pickings were growing thin. She felt guilty about her early lavishness with the beef, salmon and game of which the supply had once seemed endless. Her generosity and the sense of celebration she attached to feeding everybody had been, she now saw, simple profligacy and poor husbandry. One morning she came back from the freezers with a packet of sausages to find Steph in the kitchen.

  ‘Oh hiya,’ Steph said, backing out of the fridge with a packet of bacon in one hand and a butter dish in the other. ‘I’m starving. Got to have a bacon sarnie.’ She set the things on the table and pulled a baking tray (the wrong one, Jean observed, not the one to use for bacon) from the pan drawer. Jean watched her as she peeled five slices from the bacon packet and laid them out on the tray.

  ‘But you’ve already had bacon for breakfast. About two hours ago,’ Jean said, in a rather ringing voice. ‘That’s all that’s left now.’

  ‘I know,’ Steph said, turning flat eyes to Jean’s. ‘Isn’t it awful. I’m that hungry. I’ll get huge. Must be the feeding, I’m just really hungry the whole time.’ She smiled lazily. Jean watched in silence as Steph slid the tray of bacon that was meant to be tomorrow’s breakfast into the top of the Aga. She tried to expel, in a long sigh, the resentment she felt at the commandeering of her oven. Her oven, her kitchen, her baking tray (the wrong one for bacon).

  Steph was nosing in the bread bin now. ‘Bread’s finished as well, once I’ve had this,’ she said, taking out the end of a loaf. She sniffed it. ‘Needs using anyway.’

  ‘Steph-.’ There were no more than two or three loaves of bread left in the freezer now. Jean hesitated. She was in danger of saying something tight and mother-in-lawish. There was flour in the kitchen cupboards, after all, and dried yeast. They would be all right for a while.

  ‘Know what I was thinking?’ Steph was saying, as she went about sawing the bread into slabs. ‘I was thinking Miranda’s room could do with-’ She glanced at Jean apologetically. ‘I mean it’s lovely and everything- but it’s, like, kind of serious? A bit old-fashioned? What with the panelling, it’s kind of dark, you know?’ When Jean did not answer she went on, ‘I mean it’s lovely, as panelling. But I’ve always wanted to do a baby’s mural, you know, paint things on the wall. A cartoon character, maybe. Life size, and like in a kind of setting that you paint them in, maybe a castle or a forest or on a mountain or whatever.’ She waved her hands in the air. She d
id not seem to notice that Jean was not filling the silence with an enthusiastic response. ‘Saw an Aladdin one in a magazine once. I’d only need a bit of paint in maybe eight, ten colours, and the brushes. I could do a really nice job. I mean I’m not professional but I’m not rubbish, I could do it really nice. Is there any paint, sort of, around anywhere?’

  She wandered along the row of wall cupboards, opening them until she found tomato ketchup, which Jean considered a ruination of good bacon. The plastic bottle wheezed two long red worms of the stuff onto the slices of bread. Then Steph set the bottle down so hard that a bead of ketchup still hanging from the top flew off and spattered on the worktop, which Jean had lately wiped clean.

  ‘Though it doesn’t matter if there isn’t because it doesn’t cost much, paint. I mean if I could get it myself I would, only I’m not exactly earning anything at the moment, am I? I mean soon as I was I’d pay you back and everything.’

  Dear God. Paint in eight colours, brushes, nursery murals featuring cartoon characters? Jean opened her mouth but could not trust herself to speak. Was Steph blind? Could she not see that she, Jean, was standing in front of her holding six frozen sausages that were making her fingers numb, wondering if she could spin them out with rice or something and call it supper? Jean put the sausages in the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table. What could she say to Steph, round-eyed and trusting, no more aware than a child, who was calmly eating anything that wasn’t nailed down and asking her to find the money for paint? She would have to face up to a few things.

  But what Jean actually heard herself saying was, ‘Oh yes, how lovely. I can just picture it. I wonder what Miranda would think- she’d be thrilled, wouldn’t she?’ She knew no way to point out that buying paint was out of the question, to tell her that there was hardly any money even to buy more food; to suggest that actually, they might all have to learn to manage with less to eat. Nor could she mention that even if they had the money, it would have to be Steph or Michael who would have to get up the courage to go shopping, because Jean herself could not.

  But she could not point any of this out because to do so would amount to saying that life could not be lived in this way. And how could she suggest that when life together here was now, for them all, a simple necessity? Jean was protecting them all by saying nothing. Things would sort themselves out. In the meantime it was still true (in a way) that whether or not they could buy the paint Steph’s mural sounded lovely. And since it would never happen, Jean would not have to say anything heavy-handed about not touching the seventeenth century oak panelling. It could not matter, then, that she said again, ‘She’d be thrilled, wouldn’t she?’

  Steph was now laying out flabby bacon slices over the bread, murmuring that she thought they’d be a bit crisper than that after this long in the top oven but she was too hungry to wait. Jean rested her elbows on the table and tried to think seriously about what else she might give them with the sausages that evening, knowing that by luxuriating in this immediate but comparatively small problem she was displacing temporarily the huge, intractable one. They could not live forever on the contents of the freezers, but in the meantime, until she absolutely had to decide what to do about it, there were a couple of onions and a tin of tomatoes. Jean brightened. And she would see if Michael could find anything more in the garden. He had already found some potatoes in the large walled garden that Jean had never explored properly. She would ask him to dig it over again, there were always a few more. Everything would be all right.

  Steph was finishing her sandwich and Jean was sifting through a collection of jars of dried herbs when Michael came in, bringing a blast of outdoor air with him. He strode over to the Aga, crouched over the temperature gauge and groaned. ‘Thought as much,’ he said, straightening up and turning to them. ‘I’ve just been out and checked the tank and it’s practically empty. We’re out of oil.’

  Just then there was a wail from over their heads. ‘That sounds like a hungry cry,’ Steph said informatively. Her desperation over her daughter’s feeding had vanished, and in its place was a kind of contented weariness which was easier on them all. But she was wrong, Jean was thinking, about the cry. Miranda cried very little and was never hungry. It was not a hungry cry, but a cry of bewilderment and despair, and it grew louder. It was then that Jean burst into tears, sank her head into her hands and sobbed almost hard enough to drown Miranda’s yells.

  ***

  I had almost put my desire for a tree to one side, knowing that there simply was no money for such things, but when Steph announced that she was after paint for a mural, I found myself thinking that I did want my tree, and why shouldn’t I have it? I wanted a magnolia to plant in the spot where I’d buried the afterbirth, but I had contented myself with just the wanting of it and had not hankered much after the getting. Old habit. But why shouldn’t I get, too? I really wanted that tree. Still I didn’t say so, because on that very same day we had the business of the oil to deal with. It put other things out of my mind. Things rather came to a head, and I had to face the fact that even here, life can only go on with a certain amount of involvement from the outside. The oil was a shock to me, I admit.

  Michael was wonderful. He sent Steph up to feed Miranda and then sat quietly with me until I was able to speak. He got it out of me at last that I wasn’t quite the owner of the house, a thing I had never really spelled out. I don’t think he was altogether surprised. But we both felt such distaste for this fact that, without having to say so, I think we both resolved to get the practical difficulties of the oil and the money situation dealt with without delay, and ever afterwards to refer to such things only when absolutely necessary. I told him what the owners’ notes had said, which was that the tank was full and wouldn’t need refilling. But Michael pointed out at once, being good at these things, that there would have been enough if I had been here alone because then I wouldn’t have been heating the whole house day in day out since January. It was obvious, of course, and not the sort of thing that I would ordinarily miss.

  Of course I didn’t know how to get hold of more oil. Then he asked if there might be any papers kept anywhere, to do with the house, that would tell us. For example, what happened about the post? I explained that I had been picking the post up first thing before he or Steph could see it, and that I put it in the library desk, as instructed. But then I remembered the study upstairs, and I told Michael that there were lots of papers there, and filing cabinets. He took it out of my hands, told me not to worry about another thing, he would deal with all of it. He and Steph together, he added, and I could tell that he felt he needed her help. So I gave him the key to the study, and knew I trusted him to do as he said. And he did, of course. Steph too- she’s a clever girl, easy to underestimate a girl like that. They took care of all the money matters. In fact, until I started coming up here to use the typewriter to write all this down, I had no call to come in here at all. They have saved me from having to worry about that kind of detail.

  I suppose I never have been very skilled with money; I mean look at me and Father’s clock for a start. I found myself wishing that somebody like Michael had been around all those years ago to help me with the business of Father’s clock. Not Michael, of course, how could it have been? I was only sixteen myself. I mean somebody older than me at the time, who would have known what to do. Mother was useless, not that I would have consulted her in any case; we had by then set out our positions about me and university and I knew she would have done nothing whatsoever to help me get there. She did not single out that one thing to be useless over, she was useless in everything from that point on, because when Father died Mother simply declined to be of any further use. She declined even to get up much any more. I think at first it was mainly to make sure that I didn’t go off to college or indeed anywhere else. Whether or not she was actually ill at that point I cannot say, but she kept to her bed. Not their bed, note. She couldn’t abide to be in the bed she had shared with him (I did think to myself, well, she
probably couldn’t abide it while he was alive) so she took the room at the back of the house, beyond the kitchen, that the previous owners had built on for a lodger. There was some money from somewhere that Father left to her, and that went on putting in a bathroom alongside. No, I was on my own over the clock.

  I went to Hapgood’s in the High Street. It sold jewellery and clocks and also mended them, so I thought they would know about my clock, even though mine was an antique and they sold mostly new things. Mr Hapgood was about thirty, I suppose. He had a wide face, not like a grown-up’s at all, but even so I thought of him as old. He had sandy hair and sharp little teeth, and very careful hands, and he was kind. He asked me how a young lady like me came to have an antique longcase clock in the first place. It was only two weeks since the funeral and the question made me cry, and Mr Hapgood took me behind the counter and into the back of the shop. It was quite dark except for the space over the two long benches that were lit by angled lamps, and very warm, with the smell of an oil stove. He sat me down on a torn leather sofa, surrounded by boxes of bits of metal and cogs and sharp-looking tools, and made me a cup of tea. And he said he would come and see the clock if I gave him my address. I was grateful.

  Steph and Michael shut themselves in the study, leaving Miranda, newly fed, with Jean in the kitchen. Now alone, they assumed the authority of the young taking responsibility for the supposedly incapable old. Michael could hardly admit to enjoying the slight sense of crisis that Jean’s collapse had brought, but there was something uniting in the idea that he and Steph were now being relied upon.

  In the filing cabinet under Suppliers Michael found receipts and details of the oil supplier’s quarterly debit scheme.