‘Yes.’ Maria’s eyes slide towards the fence. ‘Yes, he has a generous mouth.’
It does not feel as though it’s Malc Ellie is discussing with Maria. It doesn’t feel as though it’s anyone she knows. Making love to a stranger… is that why she’s started feeling so different of late? Why she’s started to take more care when she goes to bed, leaving off the Oil of Ulay, leaving out the rollers—disguised as beauty aids but surely the first line of defence—putting away the old winceyette along with the swimming costume, deep down in that bottom drawer?
Nothing is said. Well, Ellie and Malc never discuss sex… not since those balmy days up on Caldy Hill. The walls were paper-thin in Nelson Street and they often heard Arthur swearing and grunting as he pumped himself into his comatose ghost of a wife. There gradually ceased to be much to say about sex. Sex died with the music. For Ellie and Malc it was on, off and over.
Not any more.
She wants him now. She wants some of that raw energy, some of that driving determination of his to rub off on her. She wants to be touched, to be made alive by it all.
It is Ellie who turns her light off first, it is Malc who stays reading—minutes of meetings, complicated order forms and manufacturers’ specifications.
And last night, after he’d put down his notes, he insisted on keeping the light on. ‘You’re lovely, Elle, d’you know that? You’re very lovely.’ Ecstasy was the only word for her happiness then. She’d never imagined it could last so long or that he could transport her to such a delightful place.
‘It is so important to mix with the right type of person, we always think.’
‘Yes. Yes, I suppose it is, really.’
‘It is so easy to be dragged down. You see it everywhere you look.’
Ellie, stuck down Nelson Street for so many years, has never had the time or the inclination to look until now, but she’s glad she left her fags behind in her own garden. Ellie is quite confused. She’d imagined that Caroline Plunket-Kirby was a snob, and women like Mrs Gogh, but they were snobs in a covered-up way, not overt about it like Maria Williams: they’d never talk quite like this. Bewildered, Ellie doesn’t know where she stands.
‘People don’t choose to be poor, or down on their luck,’ she says bluntly.
Maria’s eyes flash. ‘Oh, we all know that, but some people just never try, do they?’
‘Some people don’t get the chance to try.’
‘Some people know no better. And yet they are artful enough to make sure they put themselves out of house and home and get nannied by the state while it’s left to men like Wilfred and Malcolm to take destiny into their own hands, to create their own chances.’
Who are these ‘some people’ they are sitting here talking about? Ellie’s not sure. This… girl… Maria, she looks so fresh and young to be talking like this. What on earth has made her so angry, Ellie wonders. And what is she so frightened of? Losing her money—well, the little she has? Losing Wilfred’s love?
Ellie’s sham smile is wearing her out. She used to like people, used to talk to them easily, but just lately, everyone she meets is making her sad. She is amazed at the depths of her disappointment. She suddenly shivers, feeling confused and lonely, horrified by her strange inertia. Malc said Maria was easy, he said she’d like her and get on with her. Well, it’s bloody well not happening like that, Malc, she wants to shout over the fence.
She sighs with relief when she’s back in her own kitchen again; it suddenly feels like a refuge. She peers out through the curtains and down the garden. She would like to talk to Malc but he is busy. He is bronzed and tall and energetic and shorts suit him. He puts the puny Wilfred to shame. Even back in his very worst times that twinkle had never quite left his eyes.
‘I am not on an island.’ She speaks out loud and forcefully, telling herself off. ‘It might feel as if I am, but I’m not. There’s the phone. I can always ring someone up.’
‘Who?’ the voice seems to answer back.
‘Well, Di’s on the phone, and I could ring Mandy.’ And what about Robert Beasely? Would she dare ring him up on a Sunday, his day off? No, she’s not desperate enough to risk that.
‘Go on, then.’
‘The trouble is that I am not quite sure what is wrong. Everything is coming up roses and I wouldn’t know what I was complaining about.’
‘Why don’t you make yourself feel better next week by going and spending some of your money? Maybe that’s what’s wrong. Maybe you’re feeling bitter because you’ve got it there and can’t use it. You’re all uptight, perhaps that’d loosen you up a bit.’
The voice of temptation—it comes slyly on a high wind from the wilderness places intent on casting her into the abyss. What could she spend her money on, even if she succumbed? She couldn’t bring anything home, could she… not without the danger of Malc finding it. And anyway, is that the honest answer to her problems?
She remembers that first thrill—she shivers as she feels it again—one million, five hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds. Not Malc’s, not anything to do with Malc but MINE MINE MINE. But where is it? What is it?
‘It is this place,’ she tells the niggling voice. ‘It’s this bungalow, this awful, suburban halfway house. I’ll never fit in here. We should have gone all the way… Georgian or nothing at all.’
The sweet smell of lamb makes her feel sick. She doesn’t fancy lamb either. Perhaps she’ll take it out and let it go cold, make a salad as Malc suggested. ‘What do you think about that idea?’ she asks the voice.
‘I thought I heard you talking to someone,’ says Malc, coming in and dropping a kiss on the top of her head so that all her distress flies out of the window with the steam. She catches his soily hand briefly as he passes by.
‘I didn’t like Maria,’ she confesses immediately.
‘Well that’s okay, why should you? She’s a bit grasping and superficial, but I’m sure she means well.’
In the past Malc would have called Maria a cow. It would have been Ellie who added the ‘means well’.
‘I’m not doing any potatoes.’
‘Fine. Fine.’ He goes to the sink and rinses his hands. Ellie can smell the soap.
‘I thought we’d have a salad as you suggested.’
‘That would be nice.’
‘And then this evening when it’s cooler, we could go for a walk on the shore.’
‘If you like, Elle.’
‘Malc…"’
There is a silence while he puts on his shirt, reaches for the comb and positions himself before the mirror to tidy his hair.
‘Malc,’ she tries again. ‘I don’t know that I’m going to like living out here.’ Is it really this warm in the kitchen? The heat that is coming off Ellie is fire.
Malc turns round abruptly, his comb halfway through his hair. ‘What?’
She shifts uneasily in her chair. ‘It’s just that…’
‘What are you going to tell me now? That all this has been a waste of time, that you’d rather be back in Nelson Street?’
‘No.’ She is quick to contradict, she can’t bear the pain she sees in his eyes. ‘No, Malc, not at all. Nothing like that.’
‘We’ve hardly been here a month, Elle, you’ve got to give it time. It’s bound to be difficult at first, especially for you.’
Especially for me?
‘I don’t think I’m going to find any friends. I seem to have lost the knack.’
‘Don’t be silly, Elle. Just because you don’t get on with Maria. You’ll have to have Di and Margot over more often, that’s all. And when you can drive you can choose where you go.’
‘I was thinking, Malc. When I give up at Funorama next week, what about me taking a secretarial course… then I might get a job with Canonwaits, and I could help you.’
Malc comes over and takes Ellie’s face in his hands. ‘Hey, steady on. I want you to be a lady of leisure, I want to think you don’t have to go out any more to earn your crust. I think you’re panicking
far too soon. Why don’t you just wait a couple of months, see what happens and then, if you find yourself on your own too much, if you’re bored, then certainly take a course. But why not do something a little more frivolous, like floristry or brass rubbing.’
‘Piss off, Malcolm.’
He kisses her hard on the mouth and she tries to hit him and twist away. ‘That’s better, Elle. That’s my girl!’
See, she silently tells the voice. Leave me alone when I’m being silly! We are going to be all right.
16
‘IT’S A BIT TWEE, Mum, isn’t it?’
Ellie does something she’s never done before in her life. She reaches across and slaps her daughter’s face.
Mandy bites her lip and goes white.
Ellie wants to apologise. She wants to fling her arms round her daughter and hold her tight but she’s hit her and she can’t. So she wraps her arms round herself instead and stares out of the window, turning her back on the misery.
‘Mum, what’s the matter?’
Ellie sniffs as her face contorts, as her mouth does strange dances across her face and her nose starts to run. She stretches out for a piece of kitchen roll.
‘Mum, I didn’t mean it. When I said it I thought you would laugh.’ Mandy’s voice is quiet and steady, and Ellie knows hers, when she speaks, will not sound like that.
‘I’ve been a bit… I’ve been a bit… lately I’ve been…’ And she scrubs at herself with the kitchen roll which has scrolls on the border. There seems to be no end to what’s trying to come out.
‘I didn’t mean to insult the house. I didn’t mean to sound patronising. If this is what you and Dad want… I just never imagined you’d choose somewhere like this. I ought to have done, I am stupid and thoughtless.’
‘Your Dad thought it would be more practical, and you know how we’ve always longed to get out in the country.’ Her words feel like Band-Aids, as though she is covering a wound with one of those airtex plasters.
The silence seems very long, and they both keep to protective positions, not moving, not drawing closer, and both of them stay very still as if the shifting of an arm or the angle of a neck might say something dangerous or unmeant.
Mandy breaks it, because it cannot go on and someone has to grasp the nettle. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’
So Ellie can let herself go loose and actually move to the table.
Over her shoulder Mandy says, ‘I expect you are finding it strange, Mum, not going to work every day any more.’
‘Don’t make excuses for me, Mandy. I feel bad enough without you doing that.’
‘I don’t know what else to say, and I have been wondering about you, at home all day.’
‘But you didn’t ring me.’
‘I wasn’t sure that you wanted me to. I know how you feel about telephones.’
‘That’s just a silly aversion.’
‘It might well be, but it’s real.’
‘It’s just that, with a telephone, you can’t prepare yourself, can you? You never know who is going to be on the other end, or whether you want to talk to them or not.’
Mandy tries to lighten things up. She is unused to wading through her mother’s darkness and naturally she is nervous of it. For Mandy, this is new. ‘I bet Mrs Gogh was at her most wounded best when you told her.’
Ellie understands what Mandy is doing and she’s grateful. She is also quite proud at the maturity of her daughter, a maturity which has taken place in some distant zone, patterned by distant events unknown to Ellie. And look at her now! Quite the young lady in that smart dress and those beads. Even Maria Williams couldn’t sniff her snobby disapproval at that sophisticated choice.
‘Mrs Gogh was a cinch!’ Ellie manages to smile. ‘Now it’s that terrible woman next door, I have to hide to get away from her. She keeps coming round with things, God knows why she thinks that I want them. And they have these peculiar parties on a Saturday night.’ Ellie sniffs again, stares at her hands. ‘You’d think she’d have more to do with her time than come meddling over here, peering at everything and criticising.’
Mandy sets a cup of tea on the table before her and Ellie is grateful for the teaspoon with which she can play. She and Mandy seem to have swapped positions, Mandy taking on Ellie’s role as the sensible one, the comforter.
Mandy smiles gently when she says, ‘I’ve never known you to have trouble dealing with meddlers before. This is something new!’
‘Well, I’m new here. I don’t want to appear unfriendly. I don’t want to upset anyone.’
‘And would you upset this Maria if you told her you wanted to be left alone?’
Ellie feels a flicker of annoyance. ‘Of course I would, Mandy. Nobody wants to be told to get lost when they are trying to be nice!’
‘It doesn’t sound as if this Maria is trying to be particularly nice. Nor does it sound as if she’s the kind of person you’d want to know anyway.’
‘You soon get a reputation, living out here, for being offish. Christ, I used to think gossip flew down Nelson Street but that wasn’t a patch on what goes on here. In the butcher’s. In the newsagent’s. In the cleaner’s.’
‘That sort of thing never seemed to bother you back home.’
‘They all knew me back home, Mandy. This is different. Here I am a stranger. Everyone’s a stranger. No one’s been here long enough, really, to call themselves natives, although people like the Williams do.’
Mandy sips her tea but she keeps her brown eyes fixed on her mother when she says, ‘So what does Dad think about all this?’
‘Well, I suppose he agrees with me, really, but he’s never at home. He doesn’t have to put up with it in the same sort of way. You know Malc, he says I shouldn’t get myself in a state over it. He’s beginning to say it’s my age.’
Mandy groans. She is a feminist. Ellie likes the way she’s got her hair cropped short like that. Short but curly, it’s not an aggressive style, in fact it makes her pleasantly angled face look softer. A bit like Mia Farrow, but more substantial, not so fluttery.
Ellie had driven to the station this morning to pick up Mandy with mixed feelings. Oh, she wanted to see her daughter it’s true, but the way she’d been feeling just lately, she wondered whether she’d be able to cope with somebody else in the house all the time. A fortnight suddenly seemed an age and she found herself making plans to pass the time as if it was a total stranger she was expecting, someone who would want every minute of their visit to be full and entertaining. She had to force herself to say, ‘This is Mandy! This is Mandy! Mandy won’t expect anything from you other than that you be yourself!’
And the voice answered back, ‘But you don’t know Mandy!’
‘Of course I do,’ Ellie told it sharply. ‘I will always know Mandy and Kev.’
‘Is it yourself you don’t know any more, then?’ asked the voice, unkindly.
The journey home had been easy, the conversation full of the sort of things people want to tell each other when they’ve been too long apart. And Mandy expressed amazed admiration for her mother’s driving, even though Ellie touched several kerbs because she was trying too hard, and took the wrong turning at one stage.
She heard herself giggling in a silly way. It was all the excitement, she supposed, and she was still quite a nervous driver.
‘Calm down, Mum! Calm down,’ Mandy laughed, ‘or you’ll be done for dangerous driving in a minute and you’ll lose that brand new licence.’
God forbid. God forbid that she be stuck in the bungalow with no way out.
No, everything had gone smoothly until they reached the house. Ellie had manoeuvred the coffee and cream Metro up the steep little drive, kangarooing it slightly, and Mandy just said, ‘Is this it?’
What had Ellie expected? What had she wanted this daughter of hers, this honest daughter of hers, to say? This daughter to whom she had always maintained it was stupid and cowardly to lie or to back down in the face of adversity.
‘This is i
t!’
Then Mandy had stood and stared for a moment, giving no reaction, before she opened the boot to get out the cases. Ellie had hurried forward to open the front door, one anxious eye on the bungalow next door in case Maria came out and wanted to know what was going on.
Mandy had dumped her bags in the hall and waited until they reached the kitchen before she made her hurtful comment. Ellie hasn’t even shown her the rest of the house yet, and now she doesn’t want to, even though she’s taken such trouble over Mandy’s room, getting it just right.
‘And I think that Maria next door is a snob.’
At this Mandy Freeman roared with laughter. ‘Well, of course she’s a snob! Nobody but a snob could have a pretentious front door like the one she’s got, or ornate wrought-iron gates, or two concrete whippets on top of the wall. Of course she’s a snob, Mum.’ And it is obvious that Mandy doesn’t think this fact, so worrying to Ellie, should bother her.
‘She’s clearly just as much of a snob as that grotesque Mrs Gogh.’
‘Poor Mrs Gogh,’ says Ellie.
‘Yes, poor Mrs Gogh, exactly! So now why can’t you feel the same way about Maria? She shouldn’t be a threat to someone like you, Mum. You shouldn’t be intimidated by a person like that. Good God, just treat her like you treated Mrs Gogh, with calm superiority.’
‘But I wasn’t trying to be anyone special when I was dealing with Mrs Gogh.’ Then Ellie removes her eyes from her daughter, as she can’t answer that puzzled frown.
Mrs Gogh had said, ‘So you want to leave me, Ellie. After all these years you want to leave me.’
Amazed, Ellie realised that Mrs Gogh and Funorama were one in her own head… that she was going to take this personally.
‘Is it more money you’re asking for?’ Mrs Gogh’s face was stiff under the make-up. She wore her most dignified expression. Above her was a poster of a half-naked man, before her a pile of little sacks with laughs inside, called ‘a bag o’ laughs’.
‘If it was money I was wanting I would have said so,’ said Ellie lightly. ‘No, it’s nothing like that. It’s just that now Malc has this new job… he’s a director of Canonwaits here in the city… and we’ve moved out to Heswall, it isn’t necessary for me to work any more.’
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