Boredom was registered in every line of Poppy’s body. ‘I have no idea. Possibly’ She turned her head and looked out of the window. ‘Everyone insists on talking to me about the future – well, anyone who’s over twenty-five, which seems to be the age when brain degeneration seriously sets in. It’s like a disease. They can’t wait to get me sorted into a category they can understand. “It’s so exciting,” they say. If only they knew what they sounded like.’
I looked round the kitchen, alive with murmurs from the past. ‘Remember the red shoes?’
Poppy chased an apple pip around the plate. ‘That old story.’
For her seventh birthday, Nathan, Ianthe, Sam and I had taken Poppy to purchase the exact pair of red shoes that the advertisements promised would turn her into a princess. The royal status failing to materialize (also the ballgown), Poppy’s cries had cleared the shop. ‘But they promised, and it’s not true,’ she sobbed. ‘They promised.’
‘It was one of the rare times Dad said, “Here, you take her.” He was usually the one who could calm you down.’
Poppy’s face crumpled. ‘Oh, Mum,’ she choked, ‘it’s so awful. Everything’s changed. I thought the one thing that would never change is you and Dad. And it’s so awful that I’m not taking it better.’
Poppy stayed for three days, pretending to work and refusing to see Nathan. She would not even to talk to him. That must have hurt him.
‘My dad,’ Poppy was overheard confiding to a friend at her ninth birthday party, ‘doesn’t get cross with me.’ But he got cross with Sam, of whom he expected different, sterner things. Other than the garden, it was one of the few things about which Nathan and I rowed. Sam’s gravity settled over him when he tumbled to the idea that life was intrinsically unfair. In successfully claiming a monopoly on Nathan’s heart, with witchery, a pair of large eyes and sulky red lips, Poppy had early taught her brother a brutal, useful lesson.
Laden with food and vitamin pills, she took the coach back to Nottingham. I offered to pay her train fare but she was not having it. ‘I
Chapter Ten
Since half of me was my mother, it was natural that I shared some of her habits.
When it became intolerable, my thoughts too black and too weary to bear, I found myself pacing from room to room, as Ianthe had after my father died. Up to my study, an aimless rattle through the papers on the desk, along to the spare room, back down the stairs into the kitchen.
It was a reflex I must have learnt from her – a way of making sure that the body still functioned, of dealing with great loss.
The days dragged into night, night into day.
A man from Gleeson’s rang me. ‘Is that Mrs Lloyd? I have the new vacuum cleaner you ordered. Will someone be in the house on Wednesday?’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied.
‘Mrs Lloyd?’
‘Yes, yes, they will be.’
I was frightened by my responses. Overnight I had lost the ability to decide the simplest matter. I spent hours working out what I would say to Nathan – a whole architecture of new beginnings and promises, and as many hours deciding not to see him at all, ever.
If I closed my eyes, I was confronted by pictures of myself hurling violent abuse at Minty. If I dismissed them, equally vivid ones of
I went through all the dreary how-could-you-do-this-to-me-Nathan routines. I pointed out that I had been a Good Wife, I had loved him, produced his children, contributed financially. I had been faithful. Was this not a rotten return on that emotional investment?
And what about my lost job? How could
Thus I yo-yoed. From job to marriage. Marriage to job. One was greater than the other, yet they were bound together.
I could not eat and, by the end of the week, I was shaky from lack of food.
I tried to read, but books failed me.
Music was worse.
When it grew dark, I lay on the bed with hot, burning eyes and begged for sleep.
From time to time, I was lucky, fell into a doze and dreamt, always, of a sun-washed garden: of the felty leaves of the olive tree, of smelling spring, fresh, light and sweet, of driving my fingers into the soil and letting it sift through them. In those dreams, a voice sounded across those gentle canvases: the garden anchors you, it suggested. Its complications and subtleties are never treacherous. Yet when I wrestled impatiently with the catch of the french windows and went out, I could not see it. The fug of traffic smothered its sharp, spicy fragrance, the soil was clogged and sour, the plants sullen. The garden was dead to me, and I to it. More often than not, I returned inside.
So I drank Nathan’s whisky and, as my mother had before me, I paced through the house.
‘He was so upset by the Suez affair,’ Ianthe told me, when I was old enough to understand what Suez was. ‘That was the killer.’
I think she was right. Suez cut to the quick of my father’s old-fashioned honour, rattled what we knew too late was his damaged heart muscle.
‘He was so angry,’ she said. ‘And humiliated by the botch-up. He said we were supposed to lead the world but we had turned out to be Hitlers. He was never the same afterwards.’
It froze hard and deep that January, the week of my eleventh birthday. The cold killed, cemeteries were overflowing and the council issued a notice forbidding people to die within the parish boundaries of Yelland. If there was the least likelihood of anyone doing so, they were to be conveyed to the next parish. My father had a good belly laugh over that one. ‘There’s nowt like a council that thinks it’s God.’
I’m glad he found something to laugh about, and even gladder that he could not possibly have seen the irony.
The cold flayed fingertips and cracked lips. On the morning of my father’s death, I pushed open my bedroom window and peered out. More snow had fallen during the night and cleared the sky. The moor was white and sparkling, and the wind had traced patterns on the beautiful snow plains. My breath vapourized into fog and my cheeks burned. I leant on the casement and imagined that outside was a giant birthday cake, just for me.
Downstairs, in his chair by the stove, my father toasted bread on a fork, drank his tea, and went through the daily pantomime of finding his glasses. Then he buttoned his tweed coat, and put on his flat cap. ‘I’ll fetch the shovel,’ he said to my mother, ‘and clear the path.’
He never returned.
It was Ianthe who found him, still holding the shovel in his rapidly cooling hands. A heart-attack. The manner of his death was so commonplace that it was unremarkable as, indeed, was his omitting to have made a will, which resulted in even more muddle and anguish. It is possible that my father believed doctors could heal themselves. More likely, though, he ignored his condition. If he had suspected his heart was so fragile, I am sure he would have tried to pay off his debts, incurred from having run his country practice on the basis that need came before profit.
I remember being so frightened by my mother’s face: it was tight, contained, dead-looking.
Only at night when she paced through the cottage did she give way. Lying freezing and anguished in my bed, I knew exactly which stair would creak, which door was heavy with damp, and which floorboard shifted outside my bedroom when she halted outside to check my breathing.
All the remaining winter and into a cruel spring, the wind rattled and snow crept into the oddest corners. It was
