Half Broken Things

to see Michael and Steph sitting upright and alarmed, and realised that her voice had sounded frightened.

‘Ma’am? The arrangement for the grass. I was told you’d know all about it. Shan’t inconvenience you at all, ma’am,’ Stan said, implying that the inconvenience would be his.

‘The grass? Well, I… I couldn’t say. How- I mean I’m not sure…’

‘The arrangement, ma’am, didn’t they tell you? They said there’d be somebody here that knew the score.’ When Jean said nothing he went on, even more wearily, ‘Ma’am, I farm the next land. Mr Standish-Cave lets me have his hay from the fields either side of his driveway, and for that I get one of my boys to cut his grass when he’s away. Suits us both, except I’m short of hands. So I’m not saying we’ll be round every week but I can spare Darren Thursday, most probably.’

There was a silence. There had been something on the owners’ list about the grass but Jean could not remember what. Until this moment she had not given the grass a thought beyond thinking it was getting rather long; it was silly of her, for of course it would need mowing. But not by an outsider. She said, ‘Well, actually, if you’re short of hands, there’s no need. I’m sure we can manage. It’s only a bit of grass cutting.’

‘There’s a lot of lawns, ma’am. You’re not planning driving the mower yourself, are you?’

‘Well, no, I don’t suppose so. But we, I…’ She looked at Michael. ‘I have someone here. I’m sure he’s perfectly willing. Then there would be no need to bother you, would there?’

Stan brightened. ‘That’s made my day, that has. I don’t mind doing it, mind, but it’s hard to fit in, come summer. If your visitor’s up to it, good on him, and you thank him from me. Only,’ he said, ‘I wonder, ma’am, if you’d mind not saying… you know, to Mr Standish-Cave. Thing is, you see, I’d still owe him then, wouldn’t I? You with me, ma’am? I mean I would do it, only if you’re telling me there’s no need… and it’s only a bit of hay at the end of the day, isn’t it?’ He laughed.

‘Quite right,’ Jean said. ‘You’re quite right, I shan’t bother to mention it. Goodbye.’

After she had put down the telephone they remained tense for a few moments. Then Steph said, trustingly, ‘No problem, is there?’

‘No. Oh no, it’s just-’ It was just what, Jean wondered. That matters such as grass- cutting, and a hundred others, were not for her to decide because the house was not hers and she had somehow not been able to bring herself to spell that out? That Michael and Steph had no right to be here because she herself was only temporary, transient, and belonged, in the end, nowhere? It was all too unsavoury. Jean looked slowly from one to the other and decided that they understood it all anyway, and more than that, they understood the need not to go into any of it.

‘It’s just- oh, arrangements,’ she said. ‘You know. If it’s not the grass it’s another thing. But I don’t think we want to be disturbed, do we? I should think we can manage by ourselves.’

‘Definitely,’ Michael said.

Steph shifted Miranda to the other breast and nodded. We don’t need nobody else.’

Jean reached for the coffee pot and refilled Steph’s cup. ‘You keep your fluids up now. Michael, I think the mower keys are in the jar on the window sill.’

Michael cut the grass that day, chugging pleasurably on the tractor mower, learning how to corner just at the right moment for the blade to snatch the edges of the grass without munching into the plants in the borders. The smell of the cut grass brought Jean and Steph outside, and Michael made a note that later he would scrub down the wooden table and chairs by the kitchen door so that they could sit there when it was warm enough.

Over the next couple of weeks he made it his business to discover the extent and nature of the grounds, the condition of window fastenings, door latches, furniture. He even inspected the roof, tutted over blocked guttering, and spent two days clearing out wet and wormy leaves, wearing huge industrial gloves. He cleaned and oiled garden tools. It was a house with more behind-the-scenes arrangements for comfort than he had ever seen; it felt like a theatre. He found out what appliances, machinery and systems made it all work and came to understand the boiler, the septic tank, the water softener, the plumbing, the Aga. Mentally he stored up projects for himself for the next day, the week after, next month. He bled the radiators, sawed up some felled logs on the edge of the woods. Thinking of Steph and Miranda, he planned that soon he would master the swimming pool.

Yet in all these things he was a little less than proprietorial, behaving more like a respectful and discreet householder-elect. It was with a sense of his filial duty, a grown-up obligation to help his capable but ageing mother with such a large house, that he took some of the weight on his younger shoulders. Jean observed him with increasing pride that she should inspire such quiet and solid devotion, and that he should express it in ways that she thought so apt and so manly.

But perversely, as the good days became more frequent, the bad days when they came grew worse. There were days on which Jean woke with her heart pounding so hard that she felt she had been thrown out of a dream about an impending collision, just a second before the moment of impact. Saying nothing, she began to dread her trips to the freezers, whose pickings were growing thin. She felt guilty about her early lavishness with the beef, salmon and game of which the supply had once seemed endless. Her generosity and the sense of celebration she attached to feeding everybody had been, she now saw, simple profligacy and poor husbandry. One morning she came back from the freezers with a packet of sausages to find Steph in the kitchen.

‘Oh hiya,’ Steph said, backing out of the fridge with a packet of bacon in one hand and a butter dish in the other. ‘I’m starving. Got to have a bacon sarnie.’ She set the things on the table and pulled a baking tray (the wrong one, Jean observed, not the one to use for bacon) from the pan drawer. Jean watched her as she peeled five slices from the bacon packet and laid them out on the tray.

‘But you’ve already had bacon for breakfast. About two hours ago,’ Jean said, in a rather ringing voice. ‘That’s all that’s left now.’

‘I know,’ Steph said, turning flat eyes to Jean’s. ‘Isn’t it awful. I’m that hungry. I’ll get huge. Must be the feeding, I’m just really hungry the whole time.’ She smiled lazily. Jean watched in silence as Steph slid the tray of bacon that was meant to be tomorrow’s breakfast into the top of the Aga. She tried to expel, in a long sigh, the resentment she felt at the commandeering of her oven. Her oven, her kitchen, her baking tray (the wrong one for bacon).

Steph was nosing in the bread bin now. ‘Bread’s finished as well, once I’ve had this,’ she said, taking out the end of a loaf. She sniffed it. ‘Needs using anyway.’

‘Steph-.’ There were no more than two or three loaves of bread left in the freezer now. Jean hesitated. She was in danger of saying something tight and mother-in-lawish. There was flour in the kitchen cupboards, after all, and dried yeast. They would be all right for a while.

‘Know what I was thinking?’ Steph was saying, as she went about sawing the bread into slabs. ‘I was thinking Miranda’s room could do with-’ She glanced at Jean apologetically. ‘I mean it’s lovely and everything- but it’s, like, kind of serious? A bit old-fashioned? What with the panelling, it’s kind of dark, you know?’ When Jean did not answer she went on, ‘I mean it’s lovely, as panelling. But I’ve always wanted to do a baby’s mural, you know, paint things on the wall. A cartoon character, maybe. Life size, and like in a kind of setting that you paint them in, maybe a castle or a forest or on a mountain or whatever.’ She waved her hands in the air. She did not seem to notice that Jean was not filling the silence with an enthusiastic response. ‘Saw an Aladdin one in a magazine once. I’d only need a bit of paint in maybe eight, ten colours, and the brushes. I could do a really nice job. I mean I’m not professional but I’m not rubbish, I could do it really nice. Is there any paint, sort of, around anywhere?’

She wandered along the row of wall cupboards, opening them until she found tomato ketchup, which Jean considered a ruination of good bacon. The plastic bottle wheezed two long red worms of the stuff onto the slices of bread. Then Steph set the bottle down so hard that a bead of ketchup still hanging from the top flew off and spattered on the worktop, which Jean had lately wiped clean.

‘Though it doesn’t matter if there isn’t because it doesn’t cost much, paint. I mean if I could get it myself I would, only I’m not exactly earning anything at the moment, am I? I mean soon as I was I’d pay you back and everything.’

Dear God. Paint in eight colours, brushes, nursery murals featuring cartoon characters? Jean opened her mouth but could not trust herself to speak. Was Steph blind? Could she not see that she, Jean, was standing in front of her holding six frozen sausages that were making her fingers numb, wondering if she could spin them out with rice or something and call it supper? Jean put the sausages in the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table. What could she say to Steph, round-eyed and trusting, no more aware than a child, who was calmly eating anything that wasn’t nailed down and asking her to find the money for paint? She would