Spencer’s List

Chimneys like gun turrets pointing skywards, birds wheeling about them, elusive as the smoke that drifts from their dark mouths.

Duncan had reached northern Germany. The letter was a particularly thick one, and Fran hadn’t opened it until the fish pie was in the oven and there was a glass of wine in her hand.

Here there are no green fields to camp in; here my tent is pitched on wasteground and in the morning no birds sing. I walk alone, I sleep alone, I wake alone.

She had first met Duncan when he came hedging with her university conservation group. He had not been there to help but to take photos for his visual arts postgraduate degree show, and in due course she went to see the exhibition of brooding monochromes into which he had transmuted their cheerful day in the country. Fran was featured in several of the photos, sweating in a sleeveless T-shirt, an axe in one hand, a branch in the other; he had taken her shots from a very low angle so that she looked like a Valkyrie silhouetted against the horizon (his words) rather than a stocky five foot two. He had been twenty-six to her twenty, dishevelled and unshaven in a fairly romantic way and he had wooed her by chalking poems on the wall of the garage opposite her flat, so that every time she’d opened the front door she could see how much he wanted her (his words again). She had succumbed fairly rapidly and when they had sex in a candlelit bath sprinkled with lavender oil it had been the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her; certainly well worth all the mopping up afterwards and the subsequent row with the landlord about the downstairs ceiling.

I wake alone, Fran; and this is your choice too, to wake alone without my arms wrapped around you, my hands cupping your breasts, my mouth whispering into the breath-light strands of the hair at the nape of your neck.

After they had left university, Duncan had stayed dishevelled and fairly romantic and had travelled a lot and carried on taking brooding photographs, whereas Fran had got a job, moved to London, and rented a bedsit. He wrote her long, flattering, poetic letters, and had turned up every few weeks with his camera and a bag of dirty washing, and carried her off to bed. He had never stayed longer than a few days, and they had never – as a consequence – had to have arguments about cleaning rotas or whose turn it was to pay the milkman. It had all been very easy. As time passed, however, she had started to resent certain aspects of their relationship; for instance, the fact that he always arrived penniless but departed with a loan of anything up to £50. Sometimes she’d see it again, sometimes not.

Walking through a landscape built from money, I wonder whether it is the same city in which I lost you, in which you ran ahead between the glinting buildings until I could see you no longer.

Often he’d be in bed when she left in the morning and still there when she returned at night, having managed to stagger no further than the corner shop for some Rizlas. If she became annoyed, if she pointed out that he might at least have shoved a couple of potatoes in the oven and done the washing-up, he would urge her to relax, to take time off, to let her life breathe, as if she were selling futures on the floor of the stock exchange instead of forking manure just off the North Circular.

Perhaps if I had held you still, pulled you close, we could have listened together to the soft murmur of the turning world.

He’d started using her already tiny flat as a storage facility for his photographs, so that her bedroom gradually filled with cardboard boxes. She’d opened one, once, out of curiosity and found it full of enormous sepia enlargements of her own left nipple.

You’ve been the lodestone to my lens, the strong heart and tender hands that guided my star, and now I’m wandering, my compass is broken, my map is burnt.

It wasn’t, she had come to realize, so much a relationship as a bi-monthly excuse for sex, operating on a barter system. When she and Peter had decided to buy the house, she’d known it would be a turning point; Duncan and her brother had no mutual history and found each other incomprehensible. ‘I don’t want to sound like a fascist, Fran,’ Peter had said, going upstairs with a j-cloth and a bottle of Ajax, ‘but he’s a complete sponger. And he’s left water all over the bathroom floor.’

‘Jesus, Fran,’ Duncan had complained, lying in bed at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday with a joint in one hand and one of her buttocks in the other, ‘he’s such a tightarse.’

Spencer had always been agog for details. ‘It’s like Withnail sharing a house with Prince Charles.’

She had been working her way round to ending it, and wondering whether she’d miss him at all, when Duncan got a job. Not a real one, of course, but a modest commission for a book of photographs of Northern European rural skylines, commissioned by the EU for their agrarian archive. ‘Sign me up for ten copies!’ Mark had shouted, hooting with laughter.

You could have been that compass, Fran, we could have walked these white roads together.

He’d wanted her to come with him, and she’d been relieved to find that she wasn’t even tempted.

‘I don’t want to, it’s a brilliant job, it’s exactly what I want to do. And I’ve just bought a house.’

She had told him that it was a good place, and a good time, to end their relationship (a speech rehearsed over the course of an afternoon with Spencer) and he’d taken it incredibly badly, weeping white-faced throughout the night and leaving at dawn. She’d watched him walking down the street in the milky light, unlaced boots flopping and a water bottle swinging like a pendulum beneath his rucksack. He’d phoned her from Victoria Coach Station and begged her to write and Fran, amazed to find herself enmeshed in the plot of a romantic film, had promised to do so. Since when she had dispatched factual two-siders on a regular basis to postes restantes in Finland, Norway and Denmark and, in return, had received these huge and passionate letters, heaving with poetry. They were ridiculous, she knew that; Duncan saw himself as the hero of a tragic drama which in no way fitted with the prosaic facts. But they also provided an enjoyable frisson, a flattering and mildly erotic counterpoint to a life which at present seemed to revolve around shovelling mud and paying an ever-greater proportion of her wages into the mortgage.

I dream of you, Fran, crouched like a wild creature amidst the green leaves and jewelled petals of the gardens you love so much. Did I lose you to nature – does only nature have your heart?

Like a wild creature who lacks an oven timer, she lifted her head suddenly and then leapt from the chair, alerted by the faintest, slightest aroma of burning. Grabbing the casserole from the oven, she was relieved to see that the smell arose from a tiny piece of potato, separated from the rest of the herd and now fused to the side of the dish. The pie was starting to brown on top and bubble underneath, and was looking quite impressive. She’d used potatoes from the garden, and the last of the broccoli was waiting in a colander for Sylvie to arrive. Apart from the fact that she liked fish, Fran had gleaned no more details about Peter’s new girlfriend.

‘I don’t think he’s got a type,’ she’d said. At school he’d gone out with a big, square girl who played hockey, and at university he’d lived for three years with a short, flexible girl who’d been a gymnast. In his mid-twenties he’d become engaged to a middle-sized, completely unsporty woman who had eventually broken his heart by deciding she was a lesbian and going to live in Wales.

Fran laid the table, and put on the water for the broccoli; then, on impulse, she took a torch and a pair of scissors into the garden. The only flowers still blooming were the yellow plates of fennel, swaying high above the vegetables. She snipped off the last seven heads, and had just finished arranging them in a vase when the key turned in the lock.

‘It’s just up the stairs on the right,’ she heard Peter say, and then he came into the kitchen, unwinding a long scarf from around his neck.

‘I’m not sure. She’s been a bit upset.’ He poured himself a glass of wine and stood beside the table, leafing through the morning’s post.

‘Why’s she been a bit upset?’ Sometimes Fran wondered if it wouldn’t be quicker to issue him with a questionnaire, and come back later when he’d filled it in.

‘Oh. Problems with her landlord.’ He took an olive from a bowl, looked at it carefully and then popped it in his mouth.

Upstairs the toilet flushed. Fran turned down the oven and put the plates in to warm. Peter ate another olive and looked at a cycling magazine. Sylvie didn’t appear. Fran wiped the kitchen surfaces with the special kitchen-surface cloth and poured herself a second glass of wine. The lid of the saucepan rattled insistently as the water boiled away.

Peter looked up and frowned. ‘Perhaps I’d better check.’ He disappeared upstairs and it was nearly five minutes before he returned, this time accompanied by Sylvie. Fran was draining the broccoli and said hello over one shoulder as she bashed the colander vigorously against the bottom of the sink.

‘Sylvie’s got a bit of a headache,’ said Peter in a lowered voice, looming beside her.

‘Oh.’ Fran gave the figure sitting at the table an apologetic look. ‘Sorry.’

Sylvie, one hand to her head, smiled slightly. ‘That’s all right. It’s very nice to meet you.’

‘Oh, well, I hope you enjoy it,’ said Fran, rather awkwardly. ‘Pleased to meet you too.’

It was a very quiet meal; it felt almost as if someone had turned down the volume in the house, and Fran was aware of every clunk of cutlery against china. Sylvie sat at the head of the table, with Fran and Peter on either side. She ate extremely slowly and carefully, holding the knife and fork like delicate surgical instruments and conveying one tiny morsel to her mouth at a time. She had a round, pale face, rounded grey eyes, and long straight hair of an improbable silver-gilt colour. She spoke little, but listened carefully, fixing her eyes with unwavering attention on the face of whoever was talking. At one point she coughed slightly, and Peter reacted as if to a starting-pistol, flying to the sink for a glass of water and placing it tenderly beside her plate.

Sylvie swallowed what was in her mouth, put her fork down and then very gently tucked a strand of hair behind one ear. Fran looked at her, waiting for a reply, and then noticed with a shock that the grey eyes were brimming with tears.

‘No, no, it doesn’t matter.’ Sylvie searched within the overlong sleeves of the vast green jumper she was wearing – Peter’s jumper, Fran suddenly realized – and found a tissue with which she blotted her eyes. Peter watched, his face heavy with concern.

‘One of the other tenants has complained. Her son’s got asthma and she thinks he might be allergic to cats and, to be honest, I hadn’t properly read the terms of the lease and it actually says no pets.’ Her eyes filled again. ‘I know he’s only a cat. I know it sounds silly…’

‘It does, I know it does.’ She gave Fran a rueful, rather watery smile. ‘I’m not usually stupid about animals, truly.’

‘It’s just that he was a stray, so I feel he’s been abandoned once already…’

‘So if he goes I’11 have to go too. And things have been difficult at work, one of my colleagues is ill and we’re having to cover for him, so it felt like one more problem to have to cope with. But anyway –’ she shrugged gamely and blew her nose ‘ – I’m fine really. And it’s lovely to come round here this evening.’ She loaded a minute flake of fish onto her fork, lifted it halfway to her mouth, looked at it, and then lowered the fork back onto the plate. ‘That was really delicious, Fran, but I don’t think I can eat any more.’

Fran scraped the remains of the pie into the bin and dumped the plates into the washing-up bowl. Immediately after finishing her meal, Sylvie had excused herself and Peter had followed her upstairs a few minutes afterwards. Fran had no idea whether they were going to reappear or not and in the meantime a panful of plums from the farm was stewing gummily on the stove and the custard had developed a lovely thick skin. She went out into the hall and cocked an ear up the stairs; she could just hear the low rumble of Peter’s voice, but not what he was saying. She went halfway up the stairs, and a faint sobbing became audible in the gaps between the rumble. ‘Anyone want pudding?’ she called. There was no break in the pattern of the noise.

Iris was cleaning out the cupboard under the sink. It was the kind of esoteric out-of-sight-out-of-mind housework with which she didn’t normally bother, but the u-bend had developed a slow leak and a sludge of semi-liquid washing powder now covered the interior. She had mended the leak with gaffer tape and was scraping up blue gunge with a spoon when the phone rang.

‘Hang on.’ She started to rinse off her hands. ‘Bring the phone through to me,’ she called. There was no response. Blue bubbles sluiced into the plughole.

She shook her hands to dry them and hurried along the narrow corridor to the living room. Robin lay on the sofa, feet hanging over one end, the phone flopping in his outstretched hand.

‘Are you hungry?’ asked Fran abruptly, as soon as she took the phone. ‘Only I’ve got a lot of pudding on my hands. Not literally, of course.’

Walking up to Fran’s front door, Iris trod on something that made a crunching noise, and she lifted her foot to see the fragments of a roof slate strewn across the path. She held out a chunk of it to Fran as she opened the door.

‘Oh fuck, not another one. And it’s not even windy.’ Fran cast a vicious look at the roof as though suspecting it of sabotage and then ushered her in.

Iris was always struck by the amount of space in Fran’s house. Part of the reason was the obvious one – Fran and Peter had a whole two floors rather than the botched downstairs conversion that she occupied with the boys. Admittedly her flat had a large extension out the back, containing the bathroom and a third bedroom, but it had been built prior to the days of planning regulations and therefore lacked both aesthetic pretension and the usual number of sockets, cupboards and windows.

The other part of the reason was the lack of clutter: no plastic bags in the hall, no jackets over the chairs, no copies of Viz on the floor, no ironing on the table, no school bags apparently loaded with pig iron sitting immovably in the centre of the living room. Fran’s rooms were freeways; her own were permanently covered in roadworks.

‘Sorry about the mess,’ said Fran, as they went into the kitchen. The room smelled wonderfully of hot cinnamon, and Fran filled two bowls with stewed plums.

‘I’m two glasses ahead of you so I’ll fill you up. Aren’t you normally at your dad’s on a Tuesday?’ she asked incuriously as she poured.

Fran looked at her sharply and handed over the glass. ‘What’s up? Is he all right?’

Iris took a large drink of wine and considered her answer. ‘He’s having an affair,’ she said, and the words sounded as unlikely to herself as they did to Fran.

‘I turned up at the house yesterday when he wasn’t expecting me, and I think he was in bed with someone.’

Fran laughed so hard that she spilled some of her wine. ‘Well, good for him,’ she said, raising her glass in a toast. Iris didn’t reciprocate. ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Fran.

She could hardly explain even to herself. She had spoken to no one about what had happened at the house yesterday; had been walking around in a daze, one brain-filling emotion replacing another like a Roman Candle puffing out green, then pink, then yellow smoke. And yet underneath the successive waves of amazement and bewilderment and baffled apprehension she could sense something much more complex taking shape in her mind, not yet fully constructed, but ominous in form.

‘Once. The time he came round to prune your ivy. We didn’t exactly chat.’ Fran remembered a thin, tall, relentlessly unsmiling man, who had ripped every last rubbery stem from the garden wall and left it as naked as a bleacher.

‘Well you saw that he’s not someone who finds a great deal of joy in life. He’s a very serious man, he always has been, and he’s never had much time for… for fun.’

‘Mrs McHugh? She’s… frivolous.’ Fran laughed incredulously. ‘She is. She almost skips around –’

‘Early seventies. Her first name’s Tammy –’ Fran snorted ‘– and she wears little hair slides and sings songs at the church social.’ An enduring image in Iris’s mind was the sight of Mrs McHugh clad in a nightie encouraging the audience to clap along as she sang ‘It’s nice to get up in the morning but it’s nicer to stay in bed’ while brandishing an oversized alarm clock. ‘She’s the sort of person that people say “oh she’s a one” about.’

Iris closed her eyes for a moment, trying to orientate herself in this new world, and Fran refilled her glass. ‘Your mum wasn’t anything like that then?’

‘Oh no, nothing like that at all. My mother was very shy. Very, very shy. She hardly ever opened her mouth in public. I think she was worried about her lack of education – she thought she might let Dad down if she said anything.’ Or let both of them down, in fact, her autodidact husband and his swotty daughter. She had always waved aside her own genetic input, insisting that Iris ‘got all her brains from her father’. In the event, of course, it had been Iris who had let everybody down, throwing away her career and closing the book on Unwin social progress for yet another generation.

‘So what’s the problem – is it that you mind him taking up with someone else?’

‘No, it’s not that. At least I don’t think it’s that. It’s…’ Iris tried to pin down her thoughts. ‘I think it’s the first time,’ she said, slowly, ‘that he’s ever done anything that I couldn’t completely predict. It’s the first time that I can ever remember him stepping outside his –’ she groped for a phrase ‘– moral framework.’

She didn’t though, thought Iris. She liked Fran, liked her enormously, but talking to her was sometimes like talking to someone from another continent. Everything from Iris’s own life had to be explained, translated. ‘It’s that he’s broken his own rules and he’s never done that before. He’s always been so inflexible; he’s never believed in second chances, you have to do everything exactly right the first time. He’s always –’

The phone rang and she jumped. Fran answered it and handed it over. ‘Robin. Or Tom.’

‘No, but I think there might be a piece of glass still in it.’ He sounded (as he always did when injured, or ill) about six years old.

‘Well hold it under the tap for a minute, and I’ll look at it when I get home.’

Fran went to the fridge and took out another bottle. ‘You know, don’t mention it to the boys, but I still can’t tell them apart. I wish they’d get their hair cut differently.’ She uncorked the wine. ‘Where were we?’

‘No no, don’t apologize.’ Fran sloshed some more wine into her glass and sat forward keenly. ‘You were talking about his morals.’

‘Oh.’ The moment broken, she found herself suddenly reluctant to continue. Fran’s eager expression made her uncomfortable; it was as though she were listening to the plot of a soap opera. Iris herself had been the focus of enough gossip in the past – ‘fancy that happening to Iris of all people’ – to want to avoid doing the same to her father.

Fran saw her hesitation. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to tell me. I’m being nosy, I know I am.’

‘It’s not that,’ said Iris. She felt mean, and smiled to soften the severity of the moment. ‘I think perhaps I need to mull it over for a while.’

In her mind’s eye, Iris tried to construct a scene in which she and her father had a discussion about the presence of Mrs McHugh in his bedroom. ‘So, Dad, are you going to see her again or was that just a one-off?’ she’d ask casually, as she dried the dishes. Or ‘So, Dad, sex outside marriage – have you revised your position?’ as she emptied the contents of the pedal bin into the black plastic bag he was holding. Or on the phone: ‘Sorry I can’t come over on Thursday, it’s parents’ evening at the sixth form college. Incidentally, who made the first move, Dad? Did she pinch your bottom or did you ping her suspenders when she was helping you empty the boxroom?’

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