Narcissism for Beginners

by Martine McDonagh

  Ha. How much use can memory really be if it’s so fungible?

  I sense a prejudgment forming so I go into a spiel about how I chose that particular hotel for its proximity to her house without realising it would be quite so luxurious and that anyway it was actually really cheap from one of those last-minute booking sites, and I redeem myself enough for her to pay me a compliment. Or what I think she intends to be a compliment. ‘You really are the spit of him,’ she says. ‘It’s quite uncanny.’

  What’s uncanny is that even her voice is different today, like she never so much as looked at a pack of cigarettes.

  I ask if she’s okay with me recording on my phone whatever she’s going to tell me. She says, ‘Of course, dear, if you think it will help,’ and sits down in the armchair next to the window, saying, ‘I had a good think about it all last night. Whatever will help you to find him.’

  Now seems like the right time to break the news about him being dead. Dishonesty makes me uncomfortable.

  I wouldn’t say she shrugs it off exactly. I know how it is with old people: the death of old friends, relatives, whatever, whoever, becomes a part of your daily routine, like reading the newspaper or watching Judge Judy or taking a pill to make the poop move through your pipes.

  ‘Tell me what you need to know,’ she says.

  ‘I don’t know anything at all, so just whatever you remember.’

  ‘Well, just stop me if I wander off track, then,’ she says, and pats her knees for Binky to come be petted by her as she talks. I guess the stroking sets her into the rhythm of her story.

  ‘I first met your grandparents, Mr and Mrs Agelaste-Bim, in September 1970 when they took me on as their daily help. Old Peggy Jackson was retiring and suggested me as her replacement. I happened to be pregnant with my Sharon at the time, but it was early days and I wasn’t showing yet, so I decided not to mention it in case they changed their minds about giving me the job. We needed the extra money, you see, with a baby on the way.

  ‘I’d only been working there a few weeks when I heard that Mrs Agelaste-Bim was expecting too. I didn’t hear it from her, of course; some old busybody in the village told me. Idle gossip was nothing short of an Olympic sport in Applesham. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t get dragged into gossip about the goings on at the house, but it was impossible to avoid it. Menopause mishap, they called it. I wasn’t exactly young myself at thirty-seven, old enough in those days to have given up on ever being a mother really. Mrs A-B must have been a good ten years older than me and I felt sorry to hear her being talked about so disrespectfully. I’m sorry to tell you, dear, your grandparents weren’t well liked in Applesham, but that didn’t stop people being interested in their business; if anything it made them nosier. Human nature, I suppose. Don’t let your tea go cold, dear. Is it sweet enough?’

  I take a sip and nod enthusiastically. I want her to stay on track. And I don’t want to be hearing my own voice when I listen to the recordings. They say never eat or drink anything with sugar in the top three ingredients. Now I understand why her teeth are so bad.

  ‘The problem with your grandparents was that they hadn’t always lived in the village, not that they cared about that, but people didn’t like outsiders in those days. A double-barrelled name and being filthy rich didn’t help much either. I was still a teenager when they arrived – it must have been a couple of years after the war ended. To me it was as if they’d descended from a planet made of gold. Everything about them was shiny: their cars, their clothes, their skin, their hair. They bought the Grange, which was the second-biggest house in the village after the Rectory, and made it into the first-biggest by building a huge modern extension on the back and side. All wood and glass, it was. You’d have thought people would be pleased the house was coming back to life seeing as how it had been sitting empty all those years, but no, you’d hear them rattling on in the post office about how much better it was before, even though they’d been just as nasty about the previous owners when they were around. Those poor devils were killed during the war when a bomb flattened their London house. People said they must have been too drunk to hear the air-raid sirens and slept through them. That’s how nasty they could be.

  ‘Anyway, the Agelaste-Bims moved in and spent an absolute fortune doing the house up. It was a devil to clean, but I loved it, all that light and space. It seems ridiculous now, but it felt like a privilege to look after it. People don’t have the same pride in their work these days. I think what really upset everyone most about them was that they never made any effort to get to know anyone outside their circle, never invited anyone from the village to their house unless it was to do them a paid service of some kind, never even so much as set foot inside the pub or the local shops. I suppose the common feeling was that if they weren’t going to spend their money in the village, they were of no use to anyone. A bit like the French must feel about Monaco, my Frank used to say. Frank’s my husband. Was. He’s dead now. That’s him over there.’

  Mrs C points to a framed photograph of a man holding a fish. He’s wearing a huge fisherman’s hat that covers his eyes and his face is hidden in its shadow.

  ‘They were never short of visitors, whizzing back and forth in this or that sports car. Theatrical types, writers – the poor posh, Frank called them. Lots of parties. Some of their guests were famous by all accounts, but I didn’t recognise them; the Swinging Sixties hadn’t really made it down to Applesham. We didn’t watch much television in those days and the nearest theatre was miles away in Bristol. Do you know –’ she quits stroking Binky a second and leans towards me ‘– even the debris left behind after one of their parties was other-worldly: a golden feather here, a fallen star of a broken earring there. I swept up quite a little collection of fancy litter in the aftermath of those dos. Nothing valuable of course; I wouldn’t want you to think me a thief. I never took anything that wouldn’t have otherwise been headed straight for the bin. I brought it home in the pocket of my apron and put it by in a jar for my little Sharon to play with when she was old enough. Not that she’d been born yet. I was like a jackdaw, collecting shiny things for my nest.’

  She stops for a sip of tea and then stares at me as if she’s really looking at me for the first time, as if the tea has somehow opened her eyes. ‘The absolute spit,’ she says.

  ‘Well, when word got round that Mrs A-B – I took to calling her that privately after I’d been there a couple of months – was expecting, Frank and I reckoned the most upsetting part of it for the old fuddy-duddies was that a middle-aged couple could still be having sexual relations, but nobody ever came right out and said that; it was all folded arms and sucked-in breath, you know how people are. Instead they said things like “How on earth will they cope?” As if they were concerned for their wellbeing, when what they really meant was, “Well, that’ll put the mockers on their footloose and fancy-free lives.” It was almost as if they wanted it all to go wrong for them. No, I’m afraid nobody liked them, dear. Jealousy can be very ugly.

  ‘Having said that, the Agelaste-Bims weren’t the most domestic of people. Having seen them at relatively close quarters, I have to say I secretly agreed it was hard to imagine them doing anything so practical as raising a child. Not that they were unpleasant or bad people; they were always charming to me and never criticised my work. As long as they had food to eat and wine to drink and clean clothes to wear and a radiogram to listen to and dance around to and books and newspapers to read and talk about, and friends to entertain them, I don’t think they noticed much else. I suppose he worked, but I never did find out what at. In the end I think the real reason people didn’t like them was the same old chestnut you still read about day in, day out in the newspapers now, dear: they were different.’

  Mrs C stops for a sip of tea. ‘Is this the kind of thing you had in mind? You must stop me if I’m rambling.’

  I nod and give her the double thumbs-up.

  ‘All right, well, going back to your father. To her credit, Mrs A-
B took pregnancy in her stride. There were none of the histrionics that you might expect from a woman of her class. She never troubled the midwife outside of her routine visits. She carried on as usual right up to the day young Robin arrived. I’d go so far as to say that she behaved as if she was the one person in the village who hadn’t been told she was pregnant!’

  She slaps the arm of her chair, wakes Binky up.

  ‘The upside of that from my point of view was that they seemed to not even notice my own pregnancy, even though my belly grew as round and bulbous as hers was sophisticated and discreet. That suited me fine – it meant I could relax and stop worrying about losing my job and concentrate instead on dreaming about all the lovely family holidays down in Cornwall my wages would pay for in the future.

  ‘Looking back, I must have been naïve but it honestly never once occurred to me that a pregnancy that failed to register in the mother’s consciousness would likely produce an unwanted baby. I must have been the only person in Applesham not to work that one out. To me a baby was such a precious gift; it just didn’t make sense to reject him. It wasn’t that he didn’t look like them: he was the most beautiful little cherub with his smooth olive skin and large, dark, unblinking eyes. Anyone could see he would grow into the handsome child, and then man, that he did. But it wasn’t his fault. It was about them not wanting anything to inconvenience their social life, and for them that was a perfectly acceptable reason to hand over the responsibility for their child to an employee they scarcely knew. In the end the villagers were right. It’s what people of their class did. When you have money, no problem is insurmountable, and an unwanted child is a problem, no more, no less.’

  Her eyes move around the room as she talks, like she’s talking to each of the pictures and china doggies in turn, like they’re her audience and she talks to them all the time. Maybe she does. Occasionally, like now, her eyes turn to me in the front row and seem surprised to find me sitting there.

  ‘Have you been to Applesham, dear? It’s only about twenty miles from here. You might find it interesting to see the house and the school. The last I heard, the school had been converted into one of those health farms. I haven’t been to see what they’ve done to it, I couldn’t bear it if they’ve destroyed Frank’s garden. I’m sorry, dear, I keep going off on a tangent. Just tell me if I’m doing it wrong.’

  I wave at her to keep going. It’s hard not to speak. I’ll need to explain so she doesn’t think I’m rude. I’m no psychologist, but I guess I’ve already discovered the reason my dad was such a fuck-up. Quite the cliché, right?

  ‘Anyway, your father was born in one of the guest rooms at the Grange because it didn’t occur to anyone to prepare a nursery until after he’d been born. Well, it did occur to me, but it wasn’t my place to say. Your grandmother gave birth with very little fuss and named the baby after the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes later that day, a robin on the windowsill, then got up and got on with her life.

  ‘My own pregnancy ended a couple of days later with the stillbirth of my little Sharon. Black as coal she was when she came out, and cold as the sea. These days, people take pictures of their dead babies and give them proper funerals. Nothing like that happened then. Little Sharon was whisked away to I don’t know where without me getting a proper look at her, let alone a kiss goodbye.’

  Another sip of tea. I wonder if all the pictures on the wall are to compensate for that one missing photo.

  ‘So there I was, childless and distraught and with enormous bosoms overflowing with milk sufficient to nurse a whole field of calves, never mind the baby Robin Agelaste-Bim. My sorry state of affairs couldn’t have suited the A-Bs better if they’d planned it. Do you understand what I mean by “nursing”, dear? They call it breastfeeding now. They offered me a lot of money and I was shell-shocked enough to take it. I would have gladly fed him for nothing, but I accepted the payment because a relationship with the likes of me only made sense to them if there was a financial transaction involved. So they paid a high price for the milk that should have nursed my Sharon. I’m not ashamed to say that the first eighteen months of your father’s life provided for the complete redecoration of Applesham Lodge. That was the gatehouse at Applesham Manor School, where Frank and I lived. I had it in mind to dress the place up in a style similar to the Grange, which made Frank cross, and looking back I suppose the result was a real poor man’s version. Frank was the groundsman at the school and the Lodge wasn’t ours, it came with the job, but I didn’t mind spending the money on it because it was ours until Frank retired and we weren’t planning on moving anywhere else. People thought differently in those days: where you lived was your home, no matter who owned it. These days it seems like everyone’s a landlord, and no one can afford the rent.’

  I want to tell her about our landlord in RB, to offer another perspective and sweeten the bitterness of her words, but she’s talking to the pictures again.

  ‘Naturally when my breastmilk dried up I expected my wages to return to normal, but they never did. I tried to bring it up and Mrs A-B just shooed me away. I was convinced she would realise her mistake one day and ask for the money back, so I never told Frank and never spent a penny of it. I hid the extra away just in case. Mrs A-B was conscientious all right, but she was more like an overseer than a mother and I can’t have been quite right in the head because I came to think of the boy as my own. She’d pop into the nursery once or twice a day in the first months, to check we had everything we needed. Once the weather was warm enough and Robin was big enough for us to go out and about she more or less left us to our own devices.

  ‘It made me proud to see him growing into such a strong, healthy little chap and I would wheel him into the village in his big pram to show him off – like a Rolls-Royce it was – or the mile or so up the lane to the school to coincide with Frank taking his lunch break. I was daft enough to try to encourage a bond between Frank and young Robin to match the one we had –’ she’s talking to the picture of Frank and the fish and I imagine she’s seeing a baby in place of the fish ‘– but, whenever I offered him the baby to hold, he would stand up shaking his head and say, “It’ll never be a two-way street with that one.” I never understood what he meant by that and the only sense I could make of it was the obvious fact that Frank could never love a child that wasn’t his own, but I never gave up hope even when I knew people were talking about me behind my back.’

  Back to me. ‘All this yakking’s making me thirsty; let’s have another cuppa. I bought some posh biscuits on the way home from church – would you mind going to fetch them in? I’m always leaving my shopping out on the bike, I hope the gulls haven’t got to them.’

  Which is how I discover that she rides that heavy old bike down the hill to town and back up again every day.

  Before we start again, I explain why I’m not speaking on the recording. She seems okay with it, says, ‘As long as you’re okay with me rambling on, dear.

  ‘We’d only just celebrated Robin’s first birthday when Mrs A-B told me about their plans for his future. From the age of five the poor little mite would be sent to board at Applesham Manor, the school where Frank and I lived and Frank worked. Not that there was anything wrong with the school, it just seemed so young to send him away from home, even if it was to a school in the same village and I lived on the grounds. I suppose they thought he would be close enough to me that I could keep an eye on him, and to them that he wouldn’t forget who his real parents were. Well, it turned out I’d misunderstood their intention entirely. When the time came he took the upheaval in his stride and I tried to too, but as soon as he’d gone his parents disappeared from the Grange as mysteriously as they’d arrived. I turned up at work one morning to find it all locked up. Even though the house wasn’t sold for years, they never came back. I believe they moved to the Middle East. Jordan, or one of those places. Do you know where they went, dear?’

  I shake my head. I never even knew they existed until now, besides the o
bvious fact that my dad must have come from somewhere other than outer space.

  ‘We arranged with the school for Robin to come to our house every Sunday morning after chapel and stay until after teatime, just so he wasn’t completely abandoned. It broke my heart to see him all trussed up like a choirboy in that uniform. When I say we, I mean me really. Frank never quite cottoned on to my plan for him to be a surrogate father to the boy. Even out of pity. On the contrary, he took to getting up earlier on Sundays than he did on a work day, to go fishing. He’d pack himself a flask of tea and a pile of sandwiches and be gone before I left to pick the boy up.

  ‘During the school holidays Robin was allowed to stay the whole day, and no matter how many times I asked Frank to take the boy fishing with him the answer was always, “Maybe next time,” but it never happened. Not that I had anything better to do with my Sundays, I was no churchgoer in my younger days; I only started going when I moved here, as a way of meeting people. And before you say anything I’m not the only one, they’re a right godless bunch round here. I’m not even sure the vicar believes.’

  We both laugh at that and I forget about not speaking and tell Mrs C about the church in RB that writes a new pun on its signboard every week – SOULER ENERGY USED HERE – that kind of thing.

  ‘Ooh, I like that,’ she says. ‘I must suggest it to our vicar. So, where was I? Oh, yes. Occasionally in the holidays Frank would get home before Robin left of a Sunday evening, if the weather was bad, or maybe just to please me. He never said anything but would hand over his catch, usually a large trout or a perch wrapped in soggy newspaper, and wait in the hall while I got Robin into his outdoor things. Then he’d take him by the hand and walk him up the driveway to the school. They’d both let go of hands as soon as they thought I was too far away to see. He did that just often enough to stop me nagging. The fish would always be gutted, filleted and in the pan by the time he came back. Nothing tastes like trout fresh from the river.