The Things You Do for Love

by Rachel Crowther

  ‘Can I help?’ asks Kitty, and Flora turns to see her watching from the kitchen doorway. Kitty is hardly the delivering angel she needs, but Flora recognises an opportunity of a different kind: cooking with her eight-year-old. Like many other forms of maternal virtue, it’s one she has exercised less often than she might have done.

  ‘Of course,’ she says. Kitty’s wearing the new dress her aunt Jean sent for Christmas: it’s a little small, but very pretty, with smocking and lace – not the kind of thing Flora would think of buying her. She looks sweet in it, something about her bare knees appealingly old-fashioned.

  ‘What do you think?’ Flora asks, tilting the casserole so that Kitty can see the contents.

  ‘Is it meant to be that watery?’ Kitty asks.

  ‘I’m not sure. Probably not.’

  ‘Did you put flour on the meat? Sylvie always put flour on, to thicken it.’

  Sylvie is the French au pair, now departed, whose culinary skills remain legendary in the family.

  ‘Shall we add some flour, then?’ Flora asks.

  Kitty climbs onto a chair to get a packet down from the cupboard.

  ‘It’s brown,’ she says. ‘Is that OK?’

  ‘I’m sure it is. Very healthy.’

  Flora adds a spoonful or two to the pan with a Galloping Gourmet flourish.

  ‘Sylvie always mixed it with the juice if she added more,’ Kitty says doubtfully, as Flora prods at the pearls of flour floating now among the meat and the onions.

  ‘Oh well.’

  ‘I don’t think it matters.’ Kitty, peering at the bourguignon from her vantage point on the teetering chair, puts a reassuring hand on Flora’s shoulder. ‘Lou won’t mind the lumps.’

  ‘Let’s hope not.’

  Why, Flora wonders, didn’t Lou want to go out for her birthday? Does she too have a misguided vision of a cosy family gathering at home? She searches in vain for a whisk in the cutlery drawer, then puts the lid on the casserole and shoves it in the oven.

  *

  Henry is in ebullient mode. Her incompetence in the kitchen has cheered him, Flora thinks, although not in an unkind way. He is sweetly affectionate in the face of her discombobulation, smiling as if he has just recalled a particular charm of hers, then kissing her forehead and apologising for not being back in time to help. His goodwill, though, makes Flora perversely cross.

  ‘Champagne,’ he says, while the girls lay the table and Flora frets over the potatoes. ‘Rodier’s your favourite, isn’t it, my love?’

  ‘I really don’t mind,’ Flora says. ‘It should be Lou’s choice, anyway.’

  ‘I don’t exactly have a favourite champagne yet,’ says Lou. She looks pale, Flora thinks. She’s been working very hard for her mocks, and she’s lost some weight: not much, but enough to be noticeable.

  ‘We had Rodier for your christening,’ Henry says, and Lou gives a half-smile that is meant, Flora surmises, to remind him that she isn’t especially pleased to have been christened without consent. Henry takes it for approval, however, and disappears to the cellar.

  ‘Can I have champagne?’ Kitty asks, and then she glances after her father, as though wondering whether she might have been more likely to get a favourable answer from him.

  ‘Of course,’ says Flora. She smiles, reminding Kitty that she has been her mother’s ally in the kitchen.

  Henry comes back holding a bottle, and tests the temperature against the inside of his wrist, as he always does.

  ‘Cellar chilled,’ he says. ‘Perfect.’

  He tears the foil off with a practised gesture, then thumbs out the cork before any of them are expecting it. It flies across the room, making Kitty jump. She laughs, and Lou grabs a glass from the table to catch the first spurt of champagne.

  ‘Wait,’ says Henry. ‘My party trick. Wait.’

  He leaps onto a chair, brandishing the bottle in one hand and the glass in the other, holds both high above his head and pours. A trickle of champagne spills onto his head, but the rest goes into the glass, and Kitty claps.

  ‘Don’t try this at home,’ says Henry, grinning at her. ‘I make it look easy, but it takes years of practice.’

  ‘I don’t understand why these potatoes aren’t done,’ Flora says. ‘They’ve been on for hours.’ She’s exhausted, she realises. Her operating list started at seven thirty this morning to accommodate a series of tricky cases, including a Roux-en-Y reconstruction that didn’t go entirely smoothly. She turns the gas right up and bangs the lid back on the saucepan, and the girls turn to look at her.

  ‘Never mind,’ Lou says, ‘we’re not in any hurry. Have a glass of champagne, Ma.’

  Flora takes the glass she’s offered and manages a smile. Ma, she thinks. Lou has never really settled on a name for her. It’s a long time since she called her Mummy, and she seems to find Mum uncomfortable too. Flora’s happy to be called Flora, but Ma feels like a special effort. An endearment.

  ‘Happy birthday, my love,’ she says. ‘I can hardly believe you’re eighteen.’

  ‘I can hardly believe you’re spending your birthday with your devoted family,’ says Henry, handing half a glass to Kitty and pouring one for himself, ‘not being whisked off somewhere by a terrifying boyfriend.’

  There’s a short silence – like a tiny black hole, Flora thinks, that they might all fall into. In that instant something occurs to her. Perhaps, she thinks, Lou is never going to be whisked off by a terrifying boyfriend, or even a dull one. She looks at Lou, and an aura of transformation glimmers around her for a moment, like a halo in a medieval painting.

  ‘Well, aren’t we lucky she wants to be with us?’ Flora says.

  ‘Won’t be long, though,’ says Henry, with an air of satisfaction. ‘Beautiful girl like you.’

  He lifts his glass to Lou. The black hole hovers, still, at the centre of the kitchen. Kitty giggles.

  ‘What?’ says Henry. ‘She is beautiful, you scallywag. We’ll have dozens of young men calling for her soon, you wait and see. I shall have to get my protective patriarch speech up to scratch.’

  ‘Don’t, Henry,’ says Flora. ‘Shush, Kitty.’

  Kitty has lost control of herself now, speechless with silent giggles that don’t seem to Flora to have much to do with mirth.

  ‘Oh, come on.’ Henry has finished one glass of champagne already. He pours himself another, and bestows his warmest, crinkliest smile on Lou. ‘I’m not embarrassing her, am I, Lou? Since when has she been a shrinking violet? I’m allowed to toast my lovely daughter on her eighteenth birthday.’

  ‘Dad,’ says Lou, ‘enough.’

  He puts out a hand to touch her shoulder, and she flinches – just the tiniest movement, but none of them miss it.

  ‘Please, Henry,’ says Flora, and at the same time Henry says, ‘Louisa Grace, don’t be like that with your old Dad,’ and Kitty makes a small shrieking noise that turns out to be a reaction to the potatoes boiling over spectacularly on the stove.

  *

  After that, by mutual assent, they lapse into the kind of conversation that has seen them through any number of tight spots, exchanging the familiar jokes and anecdotes that represent their folklore. The good old same old, Henry calls them, this stock of stories that are produced whenever there’s a need for them, and the little traditions they have built up over the years. Perhaps every family has the same staples to fall back on.

  The bourguignon isn’t bad. Using fillet steak, and a whole bottle of red Burgundy, was a good idea. The flour pearls are barely discernible. It strikes Flora that this is a nice thing to do, sitting around the table en famille, and that they don’t do it often enough. She draws breath to say this, then stops. It will seem like a request for reassurance, or even forgiveness, from the girls, and that’s not fair. Certainly not tonight.

  Kitty is telling a complicated joke they have all heard many times before. They listen patiently, even when Kitty loses track of the narrative halfway through, but the punchline, when it comes, doesn�
�t raise enough of a laugh, and she looks disappointed.

  ‘I know a joke,’ says Henry. ‘It’s about a wide-mouthed frog.’

  Another of his party pieces: the girls both smile in anticipation. There is something about Henry’s face that lends itself to the comedy of the wide mouth. He has never minded making himself ridiculous.

  ‘Once upon a time there was a wide-mouthed frog who lived in a deep, dark jungle. . .’ Henry begins.

  Flora listens – half-listens – thinking about Lou and that glimpse she had of her a few minutes ago; that shaft of insight. It would make sense, she thinks, of a quality she has recognised in Lou, something she finds herself identifying as a particular kind of integrity. The lack, at least, of the conformity and the knowing self-consciousness common among her peers. The lack, presumably, of the need or desire to please men.

  She watches Lou now, the lines of her face sleeker and finer than they were, no longer girlish. If her insight is right, Flora wonders, does she mind? Does she, as mothers are supposed to, wish a husband and children for her daughter? Having paid such a high price herself, could she, of all people, really be sorry to see Lou spared the mixed blessings of marriage? Oh, but children, she thinks, with a dart of emotion that takes her quite by surprise. That would be a loss. Could she imagine Lou happy without children?

  Henry has nearly reached the end of the joke.

  ‘. . . and then the wide-mouthed frog meets a tiger, and he says, “Hello, what kind of animal are you?” ’

  Flora remembers the occasion when a much smaller Kitty told this joke and – misunderstanding the point – delivered the last line with the frog’s wide mouth unchanged. That, she thinks, is partly why they all laugh at it still. The memory of that moment of unintentional hilarity makes it funnier for them than it really is. She looks at Kitty now, her face absorbed and intent, then back at Lou. Lou has drunk a couple of glasses of champagne and she looks more relaxed, but Flora notices, again, that slightly detached poise she has acquired.

  Did she intend to make some kind of announcement tonight, Flora wonders? Is that why she wanted them all gathered? It seems unlikely – too melodramatic for Lou, and for the Joneses. And Henry’s reaction couldn’t have been counted on: if Lou was in any doubt about that, she can’t be any longer. Flora sighs, briefly, while the others laugh at the punchline, and Henry roars like a tiger devouring a wide-mouthed frog. All she wants for Lou, she thinks, is happiness.

  ‘Cake,’ she says. ‘Not the world’s best cake, but it’s amazing what you can do with chocolate fudge icing, isn’t it, Kitty?’

  26

  Lou didn’t move for a while after her mother had rung off. It was a long time since they’d spoken to each other, and it felt even longer. Did Flora sound different, she wondered, or was it she who’d changed over the course of the summer?

  The house seemed very quiet now, as though there had been a party in full swing before the phone rang and everyone had vanished now: echoes of conversation seemed to linger, half-finished, in the corners of the room. In fact the house had been quiet all evening – Alice was out, teaching a class – and Lou had been quite content, earlier, with her own company. But now she glanced at the clock, wondering how long it would be until Alice came back.

  She’d been finishing supper when Flora rang, and she got up now to clear the table, making a deliberate clatter as though to demonstrate her equanimity. Flora had sounded pleased about the baby; Lou was glad about that. But it was hard not to analyse her mother’s tone of voice, or to wonder about that out-of-the-blue reference to her difficulty in conceiving – indeed, to dwell on any number of things that had been said or not said. There was often a sense, with Flora, that they were trying to communicate through an invisible barrier which made it hard to be sure precisely what the other person was saying, or hearing. Would it be the same with her child? Would they ever be as close again as in these few months when their circulations mingled across the placenta?

  She turned on the tap to rinse the pan she’d cooked her pasta in and sluiced it too vigorously, splashing hot water over herself.

  ‘Damn,’ she said, out loud – and she felt tears welling up and a tight band of little-girl distress at her throat. What on earth was this for? Her emotions had been under better control lately; it made her feel foolish and fragile to cry without warning.

  She put the saucepan down on the draining board and stood looking out at the garden, green and lush in the late evening light. Alice had transformed the overgrown yard they’d inherited into a pretty little bower: her farming background gave her a feel for soil and roots and light and shade, and her artist’s sensibility for the colours and textures of the end result. The climbing rose she’d trained up the side of her studio was thick, now, with creamy flowers, and the first scattering of petals lay beneath it, pale and unbruised, lining the path to Alice’s door. It struck Lou, as her eyes followed the trail of rose petals, that she had been more conscious recently of Alice’s presence around Veronica Villa: of discarded teacups and jumpers, sketches and scribbled notes. Had there been an increase in this flotsam lately, or had she simply been more aware of it – searching for clues to what Alice was thinking, perhaps, as they battled on with a shared life that still felt unnaturally effortful?

  God, how she wished things were easier. No doubt she was as much to blame as Alice; she knew she was at the mercy of a giddying swirl of hormones that made her reactions, her feelings, mysterious to her. She wondered suddenly what it had been like for her mother, sharing a house which was so full of Henry: surrounded by Henry’s pictures and books and music, when she must often have wished all signs of him away. For her and for Kitty, the effects of growing up in that house were almost impossible to throw off, however hard they worked at creating new habitats for themselves. Would their performance as parents inevitably be shaped by their childhood too?

  Lou turned away from the window, fighting down a surge of resentment. That wasn’t how she thought about life, she told herself. It was hateful, defeatist, to believe you were limited by the circumstances of the past. If there was no way to rise above all that then she might as well . . .

  But then she checked herself. She heard again her mother’s voice on the phone, the hesitancy that could easily be misunderstood. And then a challenging thought: that the past wasn’t just something to be beaten down, any more than it was something to submit to. That you had obligations to it, as well as the right to judge it. For the moment she couldn’t go any further than that, but she had the painful feeling that she had got more things wrong than she had counted before – and that Flora had ridden out the storms of the last thirty years with more wisdom and grace than she had given her credit for.

  *

  Lou was lying in the bath when Alice came home. She listened to her footsteps pausing in the kitchen, then coming up the stairs and along the landing.

  ‘Hello.’ Alice halted, framed in the doorway.

  ‘Hello.’

  Lou lay still. It was the first time for weeks that she hadn’t shut the bathroom door; Alice would realise that. Alice stood perfectly still too. Her face looked opaque, the way it did sometimes when a piece of sculpture resisted her approaches.

  After a few moments Lou lifted herself out of the tub and stood on the bathmat, naked. Alice said nothing, but still she didn’t move away. When Lou reached for a towel and began to dry herself Alice stayed in the doorway. Like a statue, Lou thought. Like one of her own statues – a Madonna without child. She felt something turn in her belly: not the baby, but something harder and fiercer asserting itself or – perhaps – preparing to yield.

  ‘Come to bed,’ Alice said. ‘Come to bed, my love.’

  *

  In the half-dark Lou could see the whole of Alice’s body, from the cramped curl of her toes to the tender space behind her ears, and all the astonishing pale spread of her skin between, the dips and surges and corners of her like symbols in a language no one spoke but them: a syntax
of signs and directions that led her eyes onwards and downwards and inwards, hesitating over the pink line of the scar near her hip bone, a little emphasis of vulnerability. She knew that Alice was thinking what she was: that this was how they were meant to be, their bodies opened wide to each other, expecting nothing and everything. It seemed to her that she could feel her gaze caressing Alice’s body, and that Alice was a different reflection of herself: the softness of Alice’s belly and the tight curve of her own. As her hand traced Alice’s skin she could feel its touch herself; the tingle of fingertips, the brush of tiny hairs, the slight resistance of sweat and flesh. She was filled with impatience and with a desire to hold this moment forever, the tremulous calm of it like the surface of a pond before the pebble drops into it.

  She felt Alice move slightly, bringing her body closer, and she thought, this is the end as well as the beginning. But in the drowsiness of Alice’s embrace she couldn’t think what was ending and what was beginning, whether there was any sense in that, only that she was full of sadness and pleasure. And then she felt, or perhaps imagined, a flicker of feet treading their soft footprints inside her – and she felt tears rising in her throat; tears for herself, and for her child, and for Alice, too. For what must surely be love.

  27

  As they got closer to Orchards, Kitty began to wonder whether it was a mistake to have come, and especially to have brought Daniel. He was driving, and something about the set of his features increased her misgivings: he was anticipating a glimpse of her past, she thought, an insight into the Jones clan. She knew he’d longed to be introduced to Henry before he died, and she couldn’t help being glad she hadn’t indulged him. Everyone wanted a piece of Henry. They always had.