Every Day Is Mother's Day

“Yes. I’m all right.” She moved away from him. “Will you be taking any evening classes this year, Colin?”

“Yes. I’m taking Do-It-Yourself. We want to move, you see, we need more room, and our only chance is to get something going cheap that needs a bit of work. I was thinking, actually, Mrs. Axon’s house will have to go up for sale, won’t it? I mean, Muriel won’t be coming back to live by herself, I shouldn’t think, so they’ll have to put the money in trust for her, or whatever they do.”

Isabel stared at him. “You must be mad.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not really thinking of buying that house?”

“Why not?”

“Didn’t you feel the atmosphere?”

“Atmosphere?” He laughed. “There’s no atmosphere. Give it a good clean-up, slap a bit of white paint around, it’ll be completely different.”

“You’ll never clean it up. The smell—”

“It smelled of mould.”

“It smelled of misery.”

“We’ll get rid of that.”

“Oh, you’re planning to be happy, are you?”

He looked away. “That’s perhaps too much to ask.”

“I cannot understand how people can give up on life as you have. You used to talk as if you were looking for the Holy Grail.”

“It was a phase.”

“You got a quick poke in the back of a parked car and you said it had changed your life.”

“I thought it had.”

“Tried and failed, is that it? A lifetime’s excuse for not trying any more. Ultimately, Colin, they’ll find your body and bury you.” She turned away, pulling up her collar and knotting her scarf against the wind. “Anyway—the house. I wouldn’t call myself over-endowed with imagination, and I wouldn’t buy it.”

He followed her. “Do you know something about the Axons that you aren’t telling me?”

“I don’t know anything.”

“The Axons—you see, if only we had known what their lives were like…”

“Well, there are a lot of things we don’t know, and choose and prefer not to know.” She hesitated. “Goodbye, Colin.” Slouching, his face set, he watched her walk away between the line of parked cars. When she had driven off he turned and went back to Florence; he found her on the steps where he had left her, a glassy tolerance in her eyes, and her handbag on her wrist, like the Queen reviewing a parade.

CHAPTER 10

Many months had passed. It was September again. Colin stood by his new double-glazed french window, the part product of his second mortgage; and stared out over his crepuscular garden, open and breathing like a ploughed field. The scent of autumn earth carried into the house.

He had never known what the police had been looking for, when they turned over the garden, and he was not sure whether they had known themselves. Still, a few timely words from his solicitor had reduced the purchase price still further, and Sylvia had not been sorry, she said, to see the back of some of those evergreens. Sylvia had been extremely sensible about it all, putting her back into weeks of cleaning without a word of complaint. Even Florence, who had not been keen initially, had to admit they’d changed the place out of all recognition; two rooms knocked into one downstairs, the fireplaces pulled out, and all the ceilings painted eau-de-nil.

Sylvia sat behind him, placidly knitting, the picture of domestic contentment.

“Draw the curtains, love,” she said.

From upstairs, Alistair gave an earsplitting yell. The baby began to cry, and Sylvia thrust her needles into her ball of wool and heaved herself to her feet.

“Just as I’d settled him,” she said. “I don’t know what’s the matter with Alistair. He wants a good slap. I think the devil’s got into that child since we moved house.”

She bustled out, yelling at the child as she clumped up the stairs. Perhaps he’s unhappy at the new school, Colin thought. He heard Sylvia administer the slap, heard Alistair’s wail, the louder shrieking of the baby, and Sylvia’s voice rising over all. The noise, the sheer noise level defeats me, he thought, the classroom all day with the five minutes’ anarchy between every lesson, the traffic rattling the staffroom windows, the pneumatic drills on the bypass, the screaming baby all night. How that child screams, worse than all the others put together, I’ve never heard anything like it.

Just now, when it was going dark, he had been touched by the depression that crept up every day at this time. It was a new kind of gloom, more akin to fright than misery; a tightness round the heart, a tension at the back of the neck. It was not circumstantial, not related to the delinquent children or the size of the mortgage. He had consulted the doctor; free-floating anxiety, the man had called it. Offered him Valium; Valium, he felt, was for women. He took it for a week and found himself bursting into episodes of florid rage; he threw it away. He had little fear of the future now, for he knew what the future held; an infinite series of evenings like this one, the same vague dread touching his heart. It would seem infinite, of course, because he would never be able to look back and say, “That was the last one.” Suicides never realise it, but no one experiences his own death; we only experience in retrospect. Those were the kind of speculations that ran through his mind a lot these days; he was thinking over a lot of things that had never bothered him before. He had begun to wonder whether his blood-pressure was up, and