‘I didn’t much care for being a child.’
‘I just wondered if –’
‘When you don’t much care for something you prefer not to dwell upon it, Helena.’
The conversation ended, as abruptly as other attempts to elicit information always had. ‘Of course I shall endeavour,’ her mother said. ‘I intend to continue to make an effort. He would consider it pusillanimous if I did not.’
Helena tried to imagine her as a child and then as an older girl but in neither of these efforts was she successful. The only photograph in the house was of her mother and her father on their wedding-day, standing against an undefined background. Her father was smiling because, Helena had always guessed, the photographer had asked him to. But her mother had not heeded this request.
‘I’ve cooked us moussaka,’ Helena said the next day, wanting to make up for her outburst. ‘A kind of shepherd’s pie.’
‘Good heavens, child, how very ambitious of you!’
Her mother left most of it on her plate and went away to find herself a slice of bread. Some time later they spoke again of cooking. Helena said:
‘There’s a course you can take.’
‘A course, Helena?’
She explained, her mother carefully listened. Her mother said:
‘But surely you can take a more interesting course? What would be at the end of this, for instance?’
‘You would cook in some kitchen, is that it? Other people’s food? Food for mouths in a hotel – or a hospital or a school? Is that it?’
‘Well, perhaps.’
‘I can only call it pathetic, Helena, to cook food for people in an institution.’
‘Cooking is something I like.’
‘I do not understand that.’
Genuinely, Helena knew, her mother didn’t. The meals they ate – which as a child she had assumed to be as all meals were – had never been prepared with interest. Meat and vegetables arrived from the food department of the Kensington store and had, with as scant attention as possible, found their way on to the mahogany surface of the dining-table.
‘The course doesn’t cost a lot.’
‘Child, it doesn’t matter what it costs. Your father would be disappointed is what matters.’
There was resentment in her mother’s voice. There was astonished disbelief, as if Helena had confessed to a crime. ‘I’m glad he’s dead,’ her mother said, ‘so that he need not suffer to see his only child becoming a cook.’
‘I’m sorry it’s such a tragedy.’
‘It makes no sense, child.’
Her mother turned away, leaving the sitting-room, where the brief conversation had taken place. Helena might have told the truth: that any course, in cooking, in typing and shorthand, in nursery management, in accountancy or gardening, would have fulfilled her need, which was to close the door of the house behind her and never to return.
She worked in the kitchens of Veitch and Company, paper manufacturers, helping to cook canteen food for two hundred employees. Braised steak, silverside, gammon, beef, roast potatoes or mashed, peas, carrots, Brussels sprouts, broad beans in season, trifle or Black Forest gateau, stewed plums or custard tart: they were dishes and tastes which represented a world as distant as it could possibly be from her mother’s and father’s. ‘Helena!’ a voice shouted in the kitchens one day and there was Mrs Archingford on the telephone, talking about the police and how the name of Veitch and Company had been discovered on a postcard in the dark study, where Helena’s mother had been found also. It was Mrs Archingford who had noticed the curtains not drawn back in the sitting-room of her mother’s house, who had worried and had finally spoken to a policeman on the beat. Starvation was given as the cause of death on the death certificate: still struggling with the work in the study, Helena’s mother had not bothered to eat. Not having visited her for more than three years, Helena had tried not to think about her while that time passed.
‘You’ll forgive me, dear, if I fail to attend the funeral,’ Mrs Archingford requested. ‘She didn’t care for the look of me and no bones about it. Would be a trifle hypocritical, should we say?’
Helena was the only person who did attend the funeral. While a clergyman who had never known her mother spoke his conventional farewell she kept thinking of the busy kitchens of Veitch and Company–all that mound of food, while her mother had absentmindedly starved.
She cleared the house, taking a week off from the kitchens. She gathered together her mother’s clothes – and her father’s, which still remained – and placed them ready in the hall, to be collected by a charitable organization. She telephoned a firm which a girl in the kitchens had told her about, which purchased the contents of uninhabited houses. She telephoned a house agents’ and put the house on the market.
She found nothing, in her mother’s bedroom or the study, that belonged to the past, before the time of the marriage. There were no personal letters of any kind, no photographs privately kept, no diaries. There was dust everywhere, some of her mother’s clothes were unwashed; the gas cooker in the kitchen, the refrigerator and the kitchen cupboards, were all filthy. But the order which was absent elsewhere dominated the study. The papers and notebooks dealing with lexicographic matters were arranged tidily on the long rectangular table beneath the window, and on the desk itself were two stacks of lined foolscap, one covered with the tiny handwriting of Helena’s father, the other with her mother’s, larger and firmer. The pages were numbered: there were seven hundred and forty-six of them.
