by Anne Doughty
‘I like your stroky dress, Aunty Jenny. When I grow up, can I have a stroky dress just like yours?’
‘Of course you can. But you might like a different colour because your hair is blonde and mine is dark.’
‘I’ll have blue, or red, or yellow, or green,’ she began, counting on her fingers the colours she knew. ‘Or perhaps crushed raspberry,’ she added triumphantly.
‘Come along, children, lunchtime.’
The saccharine tone reached us from the kitchen door where my mother stood with Mavis. Resplendent in a new wool dress with very high heels, she wore a minute frilly apron, the product of some long-forgotten bring-and-buy sale, as a gesture towards the cares of office. I walked Susie to the door and delivered her up for handwashing. I expected no greeting from her, nor was there one, and Mavis would not speak if my mother remained silent.
I turned back into the garden and walked the whole way round it, looking at my father’s autumn planting and the new piece of crazy paving he’d laid in the summer. The air was mild for so late in the month and where the sun spilled onto the path through the trees and shrubs on the south side of the garden I could feel it warm on my shoulders.
I stood looking around me, the garden still bright with summer bloom, the flowers whose names Susie had finally mastered through her sheer persistence. With some things persistence really did pay off. I remembered the first cuttings I had made after I’d watched Daddy making trays full of them in the greenhouse. It looked so easy. Indeed, he assured me, it was easy. You just pulled off a new shoot with a little heel of old wood, trimmed it, and stuck it in some compost, or some soil. I’d tried it, produced a boxful that looked just like his and they’d all died. I’d firmed them in so energetically, I’d knocked all the air and moisture out of the soil. The next lot did better, but it was a while before I developed that knack of picking the right piece of new growth, at the right time, and sticking it in the right mixture of what would best encourage it to put roots down.
But sometimes persistence was not such a good idea. Like the way I had persisted in trying to make something of my marriage. I had certainly tried, I had gone on trying, as if, with practice, I could get the knack of it. But making relationships work was not at all the same thing as getting cuttings to grow. There were times when one just had to walk away. Admit defeat. Start over again.
I looked up at the bright sky, the sun glancing off the slate roofs across the Drive, the small clouds beginning to form on the crest of the hills to the north. I wondered what Alan was doing at this moment. Clearing up the mess after the party, or having lunch with Val and Bob. Or perhaps he’d gone down to the cottage.
I imagined him there, taking the key from behind the drainpipe, unloading stuff from his car. And as I thought of him, I knew I would have to be very strong, and very steady, because at this moment all I really wanted was to be with him, in his cottage, in his arms and in his bed. After all this time it just seemed so simple and so obvious.
I walked round the whole garden once again, gently putting Alan out of my thoughts. As I came back up the path, a wisp of grey cloud from the west blotted out the sun. The warmth was cut off for a few moments only, before the sun beamed out again, but I found myself shivering. A thought had shaped in my mind and repeated itself, over and over again. Never again in this garden. Never again in this garden.
Chapter 14
Apart from my father’s comforting presence and the little stories he managed to slip in, whenever my mother paused for breath, the only enjoyable thing about Sunday lunch was the food itself. My mother is a good cook, when she chooses. Today, she had chosen. There was a formidable array of vegetables with the lamb, and on the sideboard she had lined up a trifle, a lemon meringue, and a thickly iced chocolate cake. Beside the dessert plates, a well-polished silver ladle lay ready for use with her largest Waterford bowl full of whipped cream. I thought back to Friday night’s meal, the rock-hard, boiled potatoes and the tinned peas she’d not even managed to heat through properly.
Although she behaved as if I didn’t exist, I knew from her tone that Harvey hadn’t reported yet. If he had, then although she was being charm itself to Mavis and Harvey, the climate would have been distinctly chillier. I looked across the table at Harvey, absorbed in choosing the most delectable of the crisp, golden roast potatoes and wondered if he’d held back because Mavis was in the kitchen when he got there.
I don’t pretend to understand my sister-in-law. I’ve never figured out whether she really is as bland as she appears to be, or whether there is some deep passion hidden far down below the calm, unruffled surface she presents to the world. Not for Harvey, of course. I can’t imagine Harvey inspiring passion in anyone. But rather some esoteric interest, like early eighteenth-century antimacassars, or self-fertilising fuchsias. I’ve always had a fantasy that one day I would mention some subject or other to Mavis and find her suddenly transformed. But it’s never happened. The nearest I’ve got on the rare occasions we’ve been together is a sense that she was on the verge of saying something to me, making some declaration about herself, or telling me some significant story about her past. I sometimes feel sad that she never has.
‘No, Mavis, don’t you trouble with that,’ said my mother graciously, her tone well mellowed by Harvey’s attentions and her share of a rather good bottle of Burgundy.
I watched her extract the dessert plates from Mavis’s hands and pass them to Harvey.
‘If anyone deserves a rest today it’s you, Mavis,’ she said, fulsomely. ‘And I’m sure Jennifer has had a busy weekend too, covering up for not being there all week. You go and put your feet up and Harvey will give me a hand,’ she ended firmly as she took up the untouched bowl of trifle and the remains of the lemon meringue.
Noting the change in tone as I was given my exit line, I rose obediently from the table. ‘Covering up’ was her usual way of referring to the hours of hard work put in during evenings and weekends by those who wilfully refused to do things properly and make housekeeping a fulltime job. It was on the same scale of unpleasantness as her referring to Bob Dawson as Val’s boyfriend, or even ‘fancy man’, long after they were married.
I smiled to myself. No point whatever getting upset by the familiar barbs when a full-frontal assault was likely in the not very distant future.
‘George, see you don’t let that fire go out in the sitting room. It’s not one bit warm today when the sun’s not out,’ she called over her shoulder as she left the room with Harvey in close attendance.
I followed Mavis across the hall and heard the kitchen door shut with a firm click. The sitting room was full of sunlight and beyond the French doors, halfway down the garden path, Susie was deep in conversation with some real or imaginary creature who lived under a late-flowering spiraea, bright with blossoms in both pink and white. I stood watching her for a few moments, turned round and found my father bending over the fire. Two bright spots of colour burned in his cheeks like badly applied rouge. As he placed small logs in the hot embers, he began to wheeze. Hastily, I turned away, pretended I hadn’t noticed and stood waiting till I heard the squeak his chair always made as he leaned back into it when he had finished.
I looked out at the garden where the October sunshine was already casting long shadows across the lawn although it was still only three o’clock. This time yesterday I had been in my own garden, mowing the lawn, weeding, trimming edges. A mere twenty-four hours, but it seemed like a lifetime ago, so much had happened in the intervening time. And it seemed the pace was not going to slacken. Right now, Harvey would be making his report and I saw little likelihood of me leaving Rathmore Drive without a confrontation with my mother.
Confrontation was the only word I could find to describe what I felt sure lay ahead of me. ‘Argument’ and ‘disagreement’ both had connotations of discussion or interaction of some kind and that was something I could rule out. What was really troubling me was that I might not be able to find any way of dealing with her random
brand of assertion, complaint and insult. Trying to use any kind of logic in reply to her was always doomed to failure.
I was thinking what the possibilities were for coping, for defending myself without making matters worse, when I heard my father wheeze again. And that was when I made up my mind. Whatever she said or did, however awful, untrue, or hurtful her comments, I would not let her see I was angry. I would not lose control. The one thing that would really upset my father was to see me in tears. I’d managed to survive her tirade on Friday night, well I would jolly well have to do it again.
As my father settled back gratefully in his wing chair, I turned away from the window and saw Mavis settle herself on the long settee opposite the fireplace. In one practised movement she smoothed the pleats of her skirt, touched her gold bracelet, straightened her sleeves and fingered her mother’s cameo. She folded her hands easily in her lap, pressed her ankles neatly together and sat there looking as if every item she was wearing was either freshly laundered or straight from its wrapping paper. She entirely fitted my mother’s No.1 category of approval: ‘Just immaculate’.
Indeed, Mavis appeared to fit all my mother’s categories, but it suddenly came to me, as I looked across at her, that she certainly didn’t pay any attention whatever to the continuous flow of comment and advice my mother offered, particularly on the subject of Peter, her grandson, on whom she considered herself something of an authority.
I listened to what Mavis was saying to my father. There was nothing like a nice log fire now the weather was colder, and no, she wasn’t at all cold, the room was quite warm, even if the fire had burnt down a little. She inquired about the quality of the logs this year, and whether the young man who delivered them had charged extra for stacking them along the side of the garage. When she moved on from logs to roses, I collected myself, came and sat down in the armchair opposite my father and prepared to do my bit.
‘No, Grandad, no matter what I do, they still don’t do well,’ said Mavis earnestly in reply to my father’s polite inquiries.
For the first year of her marriage, Mavis had managed to avoid calling my parents by any name at all. Then Janet was born and from that day on Mavis addressed my father as Grandad and my mother as Nana and me as Aunty Jenny. My father made no objection to his title and my mother embraced hers with delight. I still found being addressed as Aunty Jenny by a woman thirteen years older than myself rather curious, but I’d got used to it. It seemed all one with the way Mavis had chosen to play the game and if that was the way she wanted it, I was happy enough to do what was required of me.
‘I’m sure it’s that peaty soil of yours, Mavis. You’d have no trouble at all if you had a heavy clay like Loughview.’
‘I didn’t think you’d have time for gardening, Aunty Jenny. However do you manage to garden and do your housework?’
I smiled patiently for the question was a real one, it had none of the edge of criticism it would have carried had it been my mother, or even Karen Baird.
‘Oh, I do what I can with weekends and holidays,’ I said lightly. ‘It’s a question of priorities. You’ve got to be absolutely certain what’s top of the agenda. I had a couple of hours yesterday for the garden, so it had to be cut the lawn and lift the geraniums. I didn’t dare risk leaving either job for another weekend. Thank goodness too, I managed them before that frost. I hope that’ll be the last cut of the season.’
‘Should be, dear,’ my father nodded. ‘A few more frosts like last night will soon stop growth. Did you have a frost last night, Mavis? You’re more exposed up in Antrim than we are here.’
Mavis seemed happy to do the bulk of the talking. She moved on from last night’s frost to the size of the heating bills for the large house overlooking Lough Neagh, referred to the difficulty of getting a fulltime gardener and the extra cleaning lady that Harvey’s new suite of rooms made necessary, and mentioned the problem of finding a garage reliable enough to be trusted to come and fetch her car and return it in time to collect the children from school in the afternoon. I kept an ear open for my cue, but in between my mind wandered.
Diagonally across the room from me, in the angle between the French windows and the long wall behind the settee where Mavis now sat, there’s a china cabinet with a curved front. It’s full of Waterford glass bowls, wine glasses and a collection of plated silver cups won by Harvey for cricket and athletics. But it was the two matching silver photograph frames on the top of the cabinet that caught my eye. Each designed to hold two full-plate prints, the one on the right has Mavis and Harvey on their wedding day, ‘a lovely young couple’, paired with the happy parents and Janet, Peter and a small bundle that is Susie, ‘such a lovely family’.
I had to smile to myself as I heard the epithets repeat themselves. They were as obligatory as ‘hero of Troy’ or ‘greatest of the warriors’ in a classic story. The newer of the two frames held a similar wedding picture of Colin and me, another ‘lovely young couple’, but all there was to make a pair was a faded print of Granny and Granda Hughes outside the door of their cottage behind the forge.
Something about those two expensive silver frames said it all. That’s the trouble, Jennifer, I said to myself. That’s what all this is really about. You are refusing to earn your epithet and relegate your poor dear grandparents to the shoe box in the corner of the wardrobe. You won’t play the game, and quite literally you won’t fit the frame.
I remembered the conference going on in the kitchen and felt my stomach turn over. I burped discreetly, looked across at Mavis and wondered if anything this side of Domesday could upset her equilibrium. But then, I reminded myself, three years as a theatre sister no doubt taught you how to keep cool, whatever the stress.
Harvey had met Mavis at a hospital dance. He was twenty-six then and she was several years older. Three months after they met, they were engaged, and they married a year later. Mavis’s father turned out to be a consultant gynaecologist, and it was no surprise to me when Harvey suddenly discovered his great ambition in life was to specialise in gynaecology.
Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, I remembered the posy and headdress of fresh flowers Mavis had sent me on her wedding day. I could almost smell the delicate perfume as I thought of how I’d lifted them out of the florist’s box and handed them to Val who had come to help me get dressed. I had planned to spray them with water when I got home from the reception and keep them moist, so Val could paint them for me. But that didn’t happen. After my mother’s performance, the only thing I watered was my pillow. I found the flowers next morning, limp and dying, beyond retrieval.
‘Here we are then, Mavis, a nice cup of coffee,’ said my mother brightly as she came in and put the tray down on the long table in front of the settee. ‘How would you like it?’
‘White please, Nana. No sugar,’ replied Mavis, leaving what she’d been saying suspended in mid-air.
‘Jennifer?’
One word was enough. Like the cell under the microscope to the practised eye, the tiny fragment said it all. The case was definitely terminal.
‘Black, please.’
‘It looks as if we’re going to have another teacher in the family, Mavis,’ said my mother charmingly as she looked towards the garden where the two dolls and the teddy bear were again under instruction.
‘Goodness, yes. She practically takes that blackboard to bed with her,’ said Mavis with a little laugh.
‘Well, I do hope Janet will know when to stop, Mavis. A career’s all very well, as you yourself know, but I do hope she’ll grow up to know better than to put her own interests before those of her husband and family.’
I took a sip of my coffee. It was only instant, and it was both tepid and weak.
‘I think I will have some hot milk, please, Mummy,’ I said, ignoring as best I could the unmistakable thrust of her comment.
‘Oh, changed your mind, have you? Oh, well, they say it’s a lady’s privilege, don’t they, Harvey? Perhaps it’s a good sign,’ she said with a small
, hard laugh.
She turned to Mavis who was sipping her coffee carefully. ‘Jennifer is a great one for making up her own mind, Mavis, without consideration for anyone else.’
My father put down his coffee cup and looked across at her sharply. ‘Edna, Jennifer’s a grown woman. Surely her decisions are a matter for herself?’
Mavis picked up her handbag, checked out sleeves, bracelet and cameo, and rose to her feet all in one easy movement, glanced at my mother, smiled vaguely and said, ‘I think, Nana, I’ll just go and have a little tidy up and see how the children are getting along.’ She moved slowly across the room leaving a trace of Chanel on the air, and my mother promptly took her place on the settee at the other end from Harvey.
Stand by for boarders, Jenny, I said to myself. I saw Harvey shift uncomfortably at one end of the long sofa and my mother fiddle irritably with her coffee at the other.
‘Cigarette, Harvey?’
Harvey jumped so visibly when my father’s cigarette case appeared under his nose that I nearly laughed.
‘Oh – er – no thanks, Father, I. . . I’ve given them up.’
‘What, no bad habits at all now, Harvey?’ Daddy sat down again and pulled out his lighter. I saw him glance from one to the other out of the corner of his eye. He busied himself lighting his cigarette and brushing flecks of ash from his trousers, but I knew he, too, was waiting. It comforted me to have him there. I sat looking down the garden, displaying a kind of calm I certainly did not feel.
Harvey cleared his throat.
A stream of clichés ran through my mind. This is it. The crunch. The big scene. I could almost hear the low drumbeat of the music from the climax of Gunfight at the OK Corral as I looked across the large Bokhara rug which lay between the fireside armchairs where my father and I sat, and the long settee where Harvey and my mother had taken up their positions.