There is another big nod, and a long pause which unnerves Ellie but seems to be quite all right for everyone else.
‘I’d like to start by sharing something I wrote only last night,’ says one of the latecomers, who is elderly and might be mistaken, in any other circumstances, for a bag lady with deep and slightly clouded eyes. Nobody moves or reacts, nobody even looks eager.
In fact they all wear looks of martyred acceptance. Ellie opens her handbag with a loud click. She gives a silly little smile and stays absolutely still, as if that was an accident.
‘Thoughts of the inevitability of every minute
Enter my head
In this strange house
Which I will leave in a few moments
Never to return.’
Alan Bennett had not read out anything like that, nor had he used that strange lilting tone. He had been very matter-of-fact with the poems he had recited.
People are nodding softly and thinking deeply.
Eventually Dawn says, ‘Would you like to tell us anything more about that, Rosy?’
Rosy the bag lady reaches up and pins some escaping hair to the top of her head. She starts to explain… but Ellie loses track, grasps this opportunity to take out a cigarette, draws on it deeply and waits for the next person’s turn.
But the next person, the girl lying on the floor, doesn’t need to read from a paper and speaks her poem from her position on the floor. It is a very long poem, and Ellie only hears the first line:
‘While it lasted it was tremendous, of course, isn’t that always the way…?’
To Ellie it doesn’t sound like a poem at all. It sounds as if she’s just talking in a rather strange kind of way… like a caterpillar humping and creeping along a pavement.
Time goes by slowly. She has found a silver cup-cake case on the floor and is using it as an ashtray. It has started to rain and raindrops hit the skylight and trickle down it. The glass starts to steam up. Ellie thinks of the steak and kidney pudding she has left boiling on top of the cooker and her tummy rumbles unpleasantly. She decides to stop at the greengrocer’s and buy a swede on the way home. Malc likes a bit of swede mashed into his potatoes.
Some of the members of the group are scribbling away while they listen. Ellie is nearly drifting off; she is very relaxed in this yellowy light with the room fugged up and the rain and the spluttering of the little electric fire. Ellie has brought a notepad with her but so far she has written nothing. And then, before she knows it, it is her turn, and Dawn is turning her moon-like face towards her, not asking for anything directly, but clearly expecting some response.
‘Oh,’ says Ellie, jerked into the rather dim limelight and unprepared, expecting to have longer. ‘I didn’t know, actually, that I had to bring anything to read, and I haven’t managed to write anything.’
‘Fine. Fine,’ says Dawn. ‘And is there anything you’d like to add about the poetry you have heard so far this afternoon?’ Dawn’s smile is a sweet one, but vacant, not directed at anyone in particular.
‘Oh, I don’t know all that much about poetry. I’m kind of new at all this. I’ve never really done much of it before…’
‘Fine. Fine,’ Dawn’s smile has fluttered away and she is staring at her with a curiously sad expression. She understands… oh yes, she understands… but what? Ellie feels the first prickles of anger.
But the rest of the group moves on.
They have a break for tea. It is herbal, with strange, nutty-tasting biscuits arranged very carefully on a tray. They each drop their ten pence into a white, chipped sugar basin. There is quiet conversation, and quite a lot of stretching and yawning and Ellie senses the peaceful cosiness of a winter’s night, but she is excluded, knocking outside, trying to get in.
At the end of the session Dawn picks up a book from the pile she has on the floor before her and says, ‘I’m finishing by reading a poem of Stevie Smith’s,’ and then she smiles at the girl they call Joey who has sat upright all afternoon, ‘by special request.’
‘Oh no, not again,’ say two of the others, but smiling placidly as if this is something they often have to endure. ‘Can we all join in?’
Dawn smiles broadly as she begins. She is still smiling when she reads the last line, ‘And not waving but drowning.’
Something is coming up… something so despairing and so deep Ellie cannot reach it, let alone control it. She needs to speak to someone about the poem she’s heard but Dawn won’t do and she doesn’t want to hear these people say anything about it anyway. She doesn’t want to ‘share it’. She drags herself up, her face distorted with pain, not even slightly concerned that she disturbs the peaceful person beside her. Gripping her handbag like a weapon and holding it before her, she storms from the room, creating a draught in her haste to be gone, to be out and away from this…
Past the wretched posters she goes and down the stairs with her clothes flying around her. She is almost blinded by tears and where can she go and what can she do to dislodge this wedge of misery? She makes a dash for the Metro. She fumbles frantically for her keys, gets in and drives away, not knowing where she is going.
And no longer caring.
18
‘HE IS LEAVING ME behind. I thought I’d be able to keep up with him, Di, but I can’t. I haven’t got any self-confidence and wherever I go or whatever I try to do seems to be making it worse. It’s not as if I haven’t tried, for Christ’s sake. Even Mandy, when she came to stay, seemed far more capable than me all of a sudden, and although I was glad to see her so mature and able… you know, Di… it did feel as if my own inadequacies were highlighted.’ And Ellie doesn’t burst into tears. She’d done that when she’d first come in. Her face is all red and blotched from it.
‘Inadequacies, Elle?’
She’d had to come and see Di. She’d been driven to it. Malc wasn’t coming home until late and Ellie could not have endured one more evening in that bungalow on her own. She had rung her up on the wave of one desperate surge of misery and Di hadn’t even sounded surprised. She’d just told her, ‘Get in the car and come straight away.’
And Dave is sitting in the kitchen with a cold cup of tea, banned from the front room and trying not to listen.
‘Yes. Inadequacies. I want to be good at something.’
‘And you don’t think you are?’
‘Well, what am I good at then, Di? I’ll just sit here quietly and listen while you tell me.’ And Ellie stubs her cigarette into the sensible ashtray on a leather strap which lives on the arm of Dave’s chair. There is an ironing board in the corner of Di’s little lounge and Ellie wishes Di would get up and do the ironing. It would be easier to talk to her sensibly if she wasn’t sitting down, deliberately trying to be sympathetic like this. Di has gone blonde and a full inch of dark roots is showing through.
‘You are seeing yourself now, you are giving me a picture of someone I have just never seen before and it’s taking time to sink in.’ Di is dressed in a bright pink tracksuit for aerobics. She was going to the class tonight but cancelled it immediately when she heard that Ellie was coming. Perhaps Ellie should have put her name down for aerobics…
‘Don’t play for time, Di. You were going to tell me what you thought I was good at.’
‘You were a brilliant mother, Elle. I always used to envy the natural way you had with your children and the way they just automatically liked you…’
‘>WERE! We are talking about now!’
‘Well, you are a good listener. You are patient, considerate, kind, and there are times when you can be extremely funny…’
The cuckoo clock on the wall hoots nine. Across Di’s wallpaper go shepherds with crooks and milkmaids sit beside their pails. Something has always made Ellie think they are probably gods and goddesses, not ordinary working people at all. She thinks it is possibly the blue in the dye that gives her this idea, for it is a rather mystical eggshell blue. In her despair Ellie picks at her cardigan sleeve and sits silently watching
the fire. ‘Am I ugly, Di?’
Di laughs. ‘Don’t be so silly! Of course you’re not ugly!’
‘Do I look old?’
‘How can I tell you that? Do I look old? Does Margot look old? You can’t tell when you’re with people. They just look exactly the same as they always did.’
‘You’re saying that when you know someone well, you cease to notice?’
‘I suppose I am saying that, yes.’ Di speaks slowly. She is being careful, glancing anxiously at Ellie.
‘Well, what about Malc then, Di? Does he look exactly the same?’
Di says, ‘No, no, he doesn’t.’
‘What does Malc look like?’
‘Well, Malc has changed an awful lot just lately…’ She leans back in her armchair and calls through the door, ‘Stick that kettle on, Dave. And have we got any cheese?’ And then they can hear Dave’s chair scraping back as he gets up to obey instructions. ‘Malc has had to change, I suppose, because of all the new circumstances, because of his job. And I suppose… in a way…’
‘Yes?’ Ellie sits forward, her inner wretchedness showing in her hunched-up shoulders.
‘… I suppose you could say that Malc does look younger. But it’s not just a matter of looks, is it? It’s the clothes he has taken to wearing, and the weight he has lost, and the way he’s always hurrying around now as if he’s got more on his mind than just passing the time, beating time until Friday night when he can go out and enjoy himself.’
‘But that hasn’t happened to me, has it, Di?’
‘No, Ellie, I don’t think it’s happened to you, but then why would it?’
‘Well, my life’s changed.’
‘Yes, but not in the same sort of way.’
‘So how can I get my life to change like that?’
‘We’ve got some Eccles cakes,’ says Dave from the kitchen, ‘but I don’t know how fresh they are.’
‘They’re stale,’ says Di. ‘I meant to throw them away but I forgot. Look in the fridge for the cheese, Dave. No, what you need, love, is a new lease of life, an all-consuming interest, I suppose,’ she goes on, settling back thoughtfully, but is it the cheese she is thinking about, and the whereabouts of the crackers? ‘After all, that’s what seems to have happened to Malc, isn’t it? But he seems to be being very nice about it. He doesn’t exclude you, Ellie, does he?’ And then Di leans forward and whispers, ‘Sod it, Elle, I wish something like that’d happen to yours truly.’
‘Malc and the kids have always been my all-consuming interest,’ whispers Ellie back. ‘I have to admit that. I have never, really, had anything else.’
‘Well, who has?’ Di hisses. ‘Perhaps you should not have given up work.’
Ellie snorts. ‘That was hardly an all-consuming interest.’
Di shakes her head. ‘There must be something you could find to get yourself absorbed in now that Malc’s on the up and up.’
So Ellie tells Di about the secretarial course and Dave comes in with a tray. You can tell he is prepared to stay, hoping the confidences are all over, but Di frowns at him hard and he backs out again, taking the third cup with him and a handful of crackers.
Di is not impressed by the idea.
‘But I might get a job with Canonwaits.’
‘Would Malc want you there in that sort of capacity?’ asks Di sagely. ‘After all, he is company director now and maybe he wouldn’t want his wife working so closely with him. No, Elle,’ she says convincingly, ‘if you find something it must not be connected with Malc in any way—it has to be something for yourself.’
‘I’ll just have to sign up for more courses then,’ says Ellie, feeling tears prick the backs of her eyes again, ‘because I can’t think of anything else.’
‘How about painting?’ asks Di, and Ellie winces. She hasn’t told Di about the poetry, only about the cordon bleu and Di laughed loudly and horribly about that.
‘Well, what about taking some exams and going to university?’
‘Who, me?’
‘Why ever not? There’s a woman at the hospital, thick as a plank, not a brain in her head, couldn’t be trusted to empty a bed-pan but she…’
‘Thanks a lot, Di.’
Di is serious when she says, ‘Have you talked to Malc about this, about these feelings of being excluded and left behind?’
‘Of course I have talked to him.’
‘And what does he say?’
‘Mostly he tells me I am being silly, and I don’t like to moan on too much because he is so pleased with himself. I don’t want to always be spoiling it, being miserable when he’s at home, forever going on about myself. At last he has something for himself… something that’s changed him and made him happy. I did want that to happen, you know, Di. I wanted that very badly.’
‘Well, I know you did, Elle. We would all like that.’
Ellie nibbles at a cream cracker she does not want and cannot taste. She licks her lips before she confides, ‘You know, Di, I used to think I was disappointed in Malc, and that he was pulling me down. Now I know different. Now I realise that I was not disappointed in him as much as I was disappointed with myself.’
‘Well, you never had any need to feel that way, Elle, and you still don’t. Really. And I just wish I could find something to say to convince you. Could it be the place that disagrees with you? Could it be that moving back to the city is the answer? I know that sounds too simple but from what you’ve told me…’
By now both women are desperate for an answer.
‘I think you’re right!’
Di looks pleased.
‘Yep. Yes. I think that you’ve hit the nail on the head. I was never keen to move out there.’
‘Well then,’ says Di, stretching with relief. ‘There you are.’
‘I am going to have to go home and tell Malc that.’
‘He has got to be told,’ Di agrees with her, ‘whether he likes it or not. There is no point in him getting more and more successful if you’re going to be unhappy.’
‘He doesn’t really mind where we live, anyway, although he has worked hard on that garden.’
‘Well, buy somewhere with another garden,’ shrugs Di.
‘And we’ll be able to transfer the mortgage, I suppose.’
‘That’s easily done,’ nods Di.
Ellie muses as she sips her tea. She forces herself into believing that Di has hit the nail directly on the head. It might take time to sell the bungalow—sod it, if only she could use her own money—but the knowledge of the move will help her.
There is a bunch of flowers on Di’s table. Ellie has stopped putting flowers in her house.
‘Some houses have bad effects on people, you know.’ Di is rambling on, keen to hammer her triumphant point home and Dave, sensing safety, comes wandering in from the back room where it’s cold. Ellie notices the same shuffle in his step that Malc used to have, although Di and Dave have not done badly with their own house like this and their caravanette… but that old picture of the goats must be depressing… always looking back on that same old snapshot, never able to avoid staring at it. Dave is different at home, much quieter and gentler than he is when he comes to the club.
When Ellie’s got her Georgian fireplace she won’t have a picture over the top, she’ll have one of those enormous mirrors. And by then she’ll be happy to stand before it, looking straight at herself, because by then all will be well again, she’ll feel different. She probably won’t even be able to remember this awful time—she and Di will sit back and laugh as they laugh over so many painful things.
Ellie watches Di and Dave together and realises the extent of the change that has taken place in herself. The warm expression in the eyes of her friends which ought to be making her glad is filling her with the stinging anxiety of guilt and a sense of irreparable loss. She is here on false pretences, on the take—she asking for their help and them so readily giving it, but all the time she is deceiving them. She isn’t like them any more. She knows very well how
they worry, how they struggled to get that caravanette and how heavily the mortgage weighs on their shoulders.
Ellie has been freed from this daily grind and all its debilitating difficulties. She only has to pick up a pen and write a signature in order to buy whatever luxury she can think of and somehow this old familiar friendship, so necessary, so precious, is no longer appropriate, fair or excusable.
She has taken from Di for the last time. And now she can only drink up the rest of her tea, share a few reminiscences for old time’s sake, the odd laugh, and go home.
19
A WEEK GOES BY and Ellie does not mention the move, but keeps herself busy with a dustpan holding unseen germs at bay.
She has also started to make a patchwork quilt.
Tap tap tap—that can be nothing else but the sound of Maria Williams’ high-heeled boots tripping across the patio. Ellie lies low, ducking automatically; she’s not dressed yet and the dishes are piled all higgledy piggledy on the draining board… pans, vegetable dishes, wooden spoons, colanders and the chopping board. Last night’s dishes as well as this morning’s.
Yes Ellie lies low, balancing in a half-crouch, hanging on to the edge of the sink. Her neck aches from holding her head up so stiffly to listen.
‘Hell-oooo.’ And there go the boots, clip-clopping round the side of the house with their owner peering in at every window, no doubt noticing last night’s unemptied ashtrays in what Malc has started to call the drawing room, the ashy fireplace and the squashed, forlorn morning cushions.
Ellie holds her breath. She feels that her head is about to roll from her shoulders, feels like she used to whenever she played hide and seek as a child—frightened, desperate to reveal herself, and dying to pee. She crosses her legs and blows her tension into the air out of ballooning cheeks, through tight lips.
‘Oh God go away woman.’
‘Ell… ieeeee. Ell… ieee. I’ve got something to show you!’
Don’t people’s words sound sinister when you are hiding from them? Ellie imagines herself as a child, probably hiding behind a tree, not playing hide and seek now but being pursued by some creepy abuser. The longer she hides herself the more alarmed she feels, as if time itself is her enemy.
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