Next morning she made the last batch of sponge while she contemplated the small ordeal of ringing Ursula Rodd and the large one of sacking Mrs Barlow. Mrs Barlow must certainly go; her cleaning services had been a luxury since the elder children left home, and Ella knew she could no longer justify the expense of sentiment. She rehearsed the phone call, not having the heart for the interview:
‘Rather better, thank you. Just one of those twenty-four-hour things. I’m making the cakes but I don’t think I’ll be up to coming to the fete. Could you get someone to pick them up on Saturday morning? Bernard (watch your voice) isn’t here at the moment …’
‘Yoohoo,’ said Mrs Barlow at the back door. ‘Sorry I’m late, dear.’ She came in, stepped out of her shoes and groped in her large bag for her slippers, saying, ‘The old lady’s very bad with her arthritis, couldn’t raise herself out of bed, I had to do the lot for her. Still the comedian, mind you. “Ivy,” she said to me, “old age is a bigger bummer than love, and that’s saying something.”’ Inserting a bunioned foot into a black felt slipper which had taken the shape of the bunion, she confided to it, ‘She’d be a whole lot better if she kept right off the grog, but it’d be a shame to deny her a bit of pleasure.’ Slippers adjusted, she stood up and faced Ella. ‘For God’s sake, Mrs Ferguson, what’s the matter?’
‘Mrs Barlow, I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to have you here again.’
Mrs Barlow’s lively face was still, first from shock, then from offended dignity.
‘I hope you’ve been satisfied with my work?’
She had dropped what David called her comedy act. (‘Mrs Barlow talks like that because she thinks that’s how charladies are supposed to talk.’)
‘Of course I have. You’ve been wonderful, always. It’s nothing like that – it’s a change, a change of circumstances. I won’t be able to afford help in the house in future.’
After a pause Mrs Barlow said with conviction, ‘Him.’
She nodded to herself in agreement.
‘I’ll just sit down for a minute if you don’t mind, dear.’ She sat and sagged. ‘In fact, no offence, but I don’t think I can stay. It’s a shock.’ She rallied. ‘No, that’s no good. There you are up to your eyes in cooking and you need the help. I’ll get to it. Anything special you want done?’
Ella shook her head.
‘The usual, then. I’ll start upstairs.’
*
Two hours of silence from Mrs Barlow made a solemn and eerie experience. Waiting, while she made the chocolate icing, for the face and a burst of chatter at the inner door, Ella told herself that the phone call would be easy after this. She was relieved when Mrs Barlow made her farewell appearance in the kitchen.
‘Not much I can do here. You’ve spread yourself properly.’
‘No, I’ll clean up when I’ve finished.’
‘Lamingtons for a cake stall, is it?’
‘That’s right. The Sunshine Home for Retarded Children. It’s one of our charities.’
‘Always someone worse off than yourself.’
Ella fetched the housekeeping purse from a drawer and counted out thirty dollars, feeling paltry.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said miserably.
‘Understood, dear.’
‘Will you have a drink with me?’
Mrs Barlow looked more cheerful.
‘I wouldn’t say no to a glass of port. We go back a long way, you and I.’
Alcohol to the rescue again. Ella fetched the bottle of port from the living room and poured two glasses.
As Mrs Barlow accepted her glass, she said, ‘Gone off, has he?’
Ella was startled. She hadn’t meant the glass of port as an invitation to intimacy, but, as it had cost Mrs Barlow her job, no doubt she was entitled to hear the truth of the matter.
‘Yes.’
‘Found somebody younger.’ Mrs Barlow nodded, looking grim.
That face again. Gone. It goes, it dies and goes.
‘Mind you, though it isn’t my place to say, as soon as I set eyes on that one, I said to myself, “You’re too handsome for your own good, you are.” The old lady told me early. “Never trust a handsome man,” she said to me.’ She added reflectively, ‘Not that I got much good of the plain ones. But then, I never met one who didn’t think he was handsome. The others just get away with more. Well, here’s to better days.’
Ella drank to that in silence, without conviction.
‘I’ll tell you one who won’t see better days. He’ll live to rue it. There’s never been a better wife and mother than you and he won’t find your like again. And there you are after all you’ve done, like they say, traded in, traded in on a later model.’
The anger in her voice took the offence from her words. Harsh and commonplace as they were, they were set to Nina’s grieving music, comforting in one way, in another frightening.
Mrs Barlow emptied her glass and left it available. Ella refilled it and from courtesy topped up her own.
‘Will you be looking for another place? If I hear of anything …’
‘I’ve a waiting list. A friend of Mrs Ramsden wants the first vacancy. I never thought it would be you.’ She girded herself to humour. ‘You’re never short of a job if you vacuum under the bed and clean down the S-bend in the toilet. Mind you, what some of those people get away with is a disgrace. They should have more pride. Oh, well, I’ll be off then. If you’re ever in a spot where you need a friend with a mop and a broom, dear, you let me know. In the way of kindness, I owe you plenty.’
‘Thank you.’
Port and true charity were bringing Ella to tears. Mrs Barlow saw this and added to her charity by hurrying away.
A searing smell and a gush of black smoke came from the stove, where a neglected pan of chocolate icing had reached burning point. She seized it and thrust it into the sink, wrenched the cold tap violently open to drown the contents, then sat down to a bout of serious weeping.
On Sunday afternoon the two elder children came, twenty-six-year-old David with his wife Martha, twenty-seven-year-old Caroline with her husband Max and three-year-old daughter Becky, to hold a family conference.
When the young Fergusons were assembled, they gave the daunting impression that extreme physical beauty was a family estate. ‘What a pair of heartbreakers,’ people had said to Ella of the elder two. ‘You must have had a time of it when they were teenagers.’ However, they had broken no hearts. David had settled early with Martha, who had some charm but little beauty – her overlarge bespectacled black eyes, set in the small delicate face, gave her the look of an appealing insect. Caroline, in spite of her blonde beauty (which was perhaps too ethereal, a little too saintly to rouse carnal desire) had never formed a serious relationship before she met Max, who was a little too old, a little too fat and slightly foreign, a physics lecturer with a brilliant brain and indeed a splendid family man. Ella hoped Becky would not inherit that broad, flat nose.
As they sat, David and Martha side by side in the rosewood chairs, Caroline and Max together on the sofa, they appeared mismatched, yet David and Caroline were winners. In the words of the proverb, they were the ones who extended the cheek while the others kissed. From her new status as loser, Ella knew this and resented it, even in her children. She remembered Pam’s words about accepting other people’s happiness. She was right there. That was one thing learnt and, no doubt, a lot more to go.
She looked to Becky for comfort. Becky and Sophie were sitting on the rose rug, Sophie sorting out from the old toybox the animals which belonged to the Noah’s ark standing in the centre of the rug. As Sophie handed her the animals, Becky arranged them along the central wreath of roses.
‘The two horses have to go together, Becky.’
‘Why?’
‘They are like Mr and Mrs Noah. Mr and Mrs Horse, Mr and Mrs Cow.’
The Noah’s ark had belonged to David, who was watching with amusement.
‘Mr and Mrs Bull, I think.’
Sophie said earnestly to Becky, ‘Uncle David is a rotten old sexist. Don’t pay any attention to him.’
David looked startled, recovered and grinned at her.
‘My apologies. Ms Cow and Mr Bull.’
‘Don’t confuse Becky, please,’ said Ella.
She feared that her pain could be heard in her voice. Such a gust had come to her from the past, from Sophie’s babyhood when so many things had been different, the house brightened by David’s delight in her, and a more discreet tenderness in another face, so like his. Against this anguish there was no shield.
‘She’ll have to sort it out sometime, Mum.’
‘Early days yet,’ said Martha.
Becky had heard enough nonsense from her elders.
‘Where’s Mrs Sheep, then?’
Max beamed at this indication of intelligence, while Sophie returned to her task.
Max got up to take a third slice of strawberry cream sponge. With the air of one bringing the meeting tactfully to order, he said, ‘He’s certainly going to miss Mother’s cooking.’
Ella hid rage. Eyes, nose, cheeks, hair, chin, throat, piano wire, violence, release. She was calm again.
‘He’s searching for youth, of course,’ said Martha.
‘Well, he seems to have found it.’
‘No, Ella. It doesn’t work like that. It’s the illusion of his own youth he’s seeking, not the reality of someone else’s. That’s just the thing to make the situation worse and that’s why these relationships can’t last.’
No fool like an old fool, as one used to put it. Max with his ‘Mother’ made her feel ancient, while Martha seemed to think Ella had come down in the last shower. Both good people, who made her children happy.
‘Whether it lasts or not is their affair,’ she said.
This comment had some impact on the listeners. Caroline said, ‘I hope you wouldn’t be unforgiving, Mother.’
‘Nobody’s asked me yet,’ she answered, and regretted the sharpness of her tone as Caroline flinched.
The movement had been brief, almost subliminal, but Max had observed it, too, and closed his hand on hers for a moment.
In spite of appearances, that had been the best of marriages for Caroline, who needed just such a warm, constant, uncritical love as Max provided.
David asked soberly, ‘What are we going to do now? What’s the next step? Somebody tell me what I’m supposed to do and I’ll do it. There are some things – money, I suppose.’ Having pronounced the ugly word, he added defensively, ‘Mum has to know how she stands about money. And what is Dad doing? Where is he?’
‘He is lecturing as usual,’ said Max. ‘I saw him in the common room on Friday. I nodded but I didn’t speak. Not my place, I thought.’
Max was inclined to speak with pride of his rare excursions into tactful behaviour.
David nodded.
‘I’ll ring him at the Medical School and arrange a meeting, get a few things sorted out …’
The prospect of handing over responsibility to the men of the party, which lifted Ella’s spirits, made Martha twitch with annoyance.
‘What about yourself, Ella? Do you have any plans? Any idea what you want to do with your life?’
She put some emphasis on the words ‘you’ and ‘your’.
Ella, who wanted to go on doing what she was doing now, said perversely, ‘I could be a cook, I suppose.’
‘Oh, something more ego-positive than cooking! What about your teaching? You’re so good at it, and you like it.’
So even Martha didn’t think it was her life.
‘Teaching 2B English? That’s ego-positive? Ego-negative, I’d call that,’ said David.
‘I go on trying. They are improving slowly. I try to build up an atmosphere of trust and acceptance.’
‘This is all about nothing,’ said David. ‘Mum will get support. Dad wouldn’t want her to work.’
‘What Mother needs,’ said Max, ‘is a really good divorce lawyer, someone to watch her interests from the start.’
Sophie had looked up sharply from the Noah’s ark play and sat staring, unmoving. The other Ferguson children wore the same startled look.
Mum and Dad, that house made of flesh – the thought of its being demolished and carved up by lawyers shocked them all. Now they know, thought Ella, with some revengeful feelings. Until that moment they had not taken in what was happening.
‘Can’t we leave the lawyers out of it?’ asked Martha.
‘How can you leave the lawyers out of it? Divorce is a matter for the law, is it not? And the law is a matter for lawyers, I think. If you want to watch Mother’s interests, you will go to a lawyer who specialises in divorce.’
To be Max’s mother, Ella would have to have given birth at the age of thirteen. It was the European background, of course. It made him a wonderful family man, but sometimes strange in his manners. It was a pity Caroline had picked up the habit. From her it was a little chilling, though she was only copying Max and meant no harm.
‘You hear such terrible stories of all the money going in lawyers’ fees. It’s much better if you can avoid confrontation and handle things yourself.’
The debate was between Max and Martha. The Ferguson children were still tasting and trying to swallow the word ‘divorce’.
‘Where money and property are concerned, there is always confrontation. Your father is not the only one involved, remember.’
He never called the other one Father. Christian names in the common room, no doubt.
As if she had seen a bad vision, Caroline cried out, ‘This house will have to go.’
What a ridiculous idea. How could Ella be put out of her house? Anyone would think that she was the guilty one.
She had to make allowances for Caroline, who was obviously distressed, but the idea was unthinkable in this room, where everything spoke of permanence, where the wreath of roses in the hooked rug shaded from the crimson of David’s school blazer through the rosepink of Caroline’s winter dressing-gown to the paler pink of Sophie’s skirt, and pictures, vases and ornaments seemed to be rooted like plants in their accustomed places.
She waited for someone to protest at the absurdity. Since nobody spoke, she was sorry she hadn’t protested herself.
‘Wait till I’ve talked to Dad. We don’t have to assume that there’s going to be confrontation, as you call it. We can wait and see.’
Max shrugged.
‘As you like.’
His body language announced that this neglect of his advice would be regretted.
It was clear that Sophie had received a blow. When it was time for the others to leave, she packed away toys in silence and allowed David to take possession of Becky and carry her out to the car.
David kissed Ella on the cheek and said, ‘I’ll be in touch, Mum,’ while Becky climbed out of his embrace to put her arms round Ella’s neck.
Hugging Becky to her, Ella thought how much she loved her and how different this love was from her feeling for her children – a joyful extravagance, an accidental, unexpected source of happiness.
If only David and Martha …
Sophie was in the kitchen washing the used china.
When Ella picked up the teatowel she spoke.
‘We wouldn’t have to leave here, would we, Mum?’
‘No, of course not. Caroline didn’t mean it. She was upset.’
Sophie nodded, relieved.
‘I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.’
Ella felt guilty, since she had expected Sophie to leave, though the other two had stayed at home in an oldfashioned manner till they married. Sophie had seemed different, a lover of groups, happy, one would suppose, sharing a flat with other young people. Ella had even spoken to Bernard about the need to settle Sophie in a new home before they left for England in September. His response, now she came to think of it, had been vague.
After all, Sophie was not ready to leave home. She made bold excursions into adulthood, from which she needed sometimes to retreat.
There was another problem now. Ella thought of the mother-and-daughter pairs one read about so often in novels, the querulous, possessive mother and the trapped, resentful daughter. Could she ever turn into such a person? There was no telling what one might not become.
‘You’ll be wanting to leave home some day, Sophie.’
‘Oh! Some day!’
She took the plug out of its hole and watched the water run away, but it was only Ella who saw time running as it disappeared.