THE DAY BEFORE the cremation I drive my mother down to Earby, to see a man about funeral baked meats, and then on to the hairdresser. ‘I’ll be done in about an hour,’ she says, and I push on towards Kelbrook, parking by a row of terraces. It was cobbled here once; the houses have bathrooms now, and satellite dishes, and pebble-dash. Sandra’s is the last door on the right, navy blue. She appears in an apron, and with a duster in her hand. ‘I thought you might come,’ she says. ‘I’m dusting.’
Sandra was Pat’s predecessor, the maid before. She’d come from a broken home in Scotland in 1963. I was thirteen. She was nineteen. My sister had just gone away to boarding-school. We were alone a lot, sharing the same teenage stuff—Titbits, Top of the Pops . She was young for her age after the traumas back home, and my father had felt protective, treated her as a daughter as much as an employee, and was upset when she left. But she had a boyfriend by then, and found a cheap flat to rent, and had got a better-paid job on the till at a petrol station in Barnoldswick. She’d married the boyfriend but the marriage hadn’t lasted—only the son had, grown up now. Sandra stayed close to my parents, always remembered birthdays and often called in. She felt grateful to them, for one thing: my father had lent her money to buy her house—this house where she’s now pouring the tea out, and asking me how it was at the end, and saying: ‘You won’t mind if I dust round you, will you? My mam’s coming down for Christmas, and if I don’t do it now I never will.’
From a wooden stool she shakes a feather duster at the pot rail, the sideboard, the glass display case with her collection of thimbles and miniature dolls. She’s wearing blue jeans and a red sweatshirt which rides up from the waist as she stretches—she’s not lost her slimness, and her face is still attractive under the reddish hair, permed and frizzy now, not Twiggy-straight. My father’s death, the flood of grief and nostalgia, my acute physical awareness of her have removed any barriers. Without meaning to, I’ve slipped into the old flirtatious banter we used when we were teenagers:
‘Funny us being alone in a house again.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what it used to mean.’
‘Oh, I’ve given all that up: life seems less complicated without.’
‘Don’t you get lonely?’
‘Not really.’
‘But it’s such a waste. How old are you now?’
‘Forty-eight next month.’
‘A terrible waste.’
‘Nah.’
My parents had always had maids. Rosa, who was Austrian, had come in 1946 and stayed until 1958, when we moved the mile from Earby to Thornton: I could remember only a sweet-natured, hard-to-hear-properly granny figure who’d be ironing or making cakes while I lay with the labradors under the kitchen table, and who one day rushed in flour-faced from the garden with a swarm of bees in her white hair. Then came Lennie, in her late twenties, a beanpole with a long runny nose, prone to moods and silences. She must have seen me through from childhood to puberty—I can remember walking into her bedroom in my underpants, a twelve-year-old swooning in self-regard at an erection (she saw me off by not noticing). When she married a carpenter called Jeff, and they emigrated to Australia, there followed a dismal brief succession of housekeepers: the one who cooked us mixed grills, spent all evening crying in her room and left after three weeks; another who left after twenty-four hours; a third who might have lasted longer but who walked into the bathroom one morning when my father was (his phrase) ‘on the throne’ and blithely continued cleaning around him—even he found that a bit too informal. Sandra was a desperate last shot, immature but sweet-natured. She had stayed two years; and even when she’d left, and Pat had taken over, she’d never really gone away.
A pretty nineteen-year-old in a big house in a strange place far from home might have felt bored and unattended, especially since the job was so undemanding: I was at school all day, my sister at home only in the holidays, my parents unfussy about cleaning but needing someone to cook occasionally and answer the phone while they were out on their visits. But if Sandra was lonely she never showed it. Soon tradesmen and farm-hands and older schoolfriends of mine and any male with the remotest excuse to call were paying court, and she happily flirting back. The kitchen with its Aga was the centre for this and most other activities in our house. I’d perch there on my stool under the window, pretending to do homework in thrilling proximity to the world of would-be adult sex, when only a year before, at twelve, the mechanics of intercourse (as relayed to me by a friend at grammar school) had seemed so incredible and disgusting that I’d refused to believe them. My parents, being doctors, might have been expected to fill me in about sex, but by the time my father finally broached the facts of life with me as I lay in bed one morning, both of us deeply embarrassed, I had already lost my virginity.
It was a boyfriend of Sandra’s called Steve who brought the world of sex even closer. Steve was in his last year at grammar school and so a year younger than her. But he was swanky and handsome and tough—once, at the local swimming-pool, I suspect egged on by me, he had started trying to beat up two ‘posh little boarding-school cunts’ and got us ejected and banned. Sandra, impressed, lighted on him among her other suitors, and they began going out together, though going out seemed to mean staying in and drinking coffee by the Aga. His banter grew in confidence until it reached a sort of Mellors-like bluntness (I was just discovering Mellors, too: my mother must have bought her copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover shortly after the trial: she kept it in her bedside cupboard, and I furtively took it off to bed whenever she was out). I wondered whether much of Steve’s banter wasn’t for my sake—a piece of machismo more to impress the jealous schoolboy with his homework than to seduce the maiden.
‘Tha’s got a nice pair.’
‘Shut up’ (flicking a duster at him).
‘Gi’ us a feel.’ He’d lunge, she’d push him off. ‘Go on, Blake wants one too, dunt tha?’
I did, and—emboldened by Steve’s bluntness—in his absence sometimes tried for one, my mother once walking in on us as we wrestled near the dining-room cupboard and disguised our sexual tussle as a fight to get out the carving knife for supper. Then, one night when my parents were out and Steve not there either, after a long session of innuendo, Sandra emerged from her room wearing a new bikini: ‘How do I look?’ I’m not sure what she expected, but for me, seeing her vulnerable but also pleased with herself, this was the chance at last to touch her breasts. I came at her. She fought me off. We fell to the floor. I tried to undo the bikini top, failed, got my hand inside it, slid on, down towards the elastic of her bikini pants. She fought harder now, squirming and panicking—it had got out of hand, wasn’t supposed to go this far, but now I felt the brush of pubic hair and suddenly, cornily, miraculously, like some bad old film cliché, we stopped fighting and began kissing. On the bed, she told me to be careful . There was no need. In a few seconds, the moment she touched me, I came.
I didn’t know what to expect—anger and remorse, probably. But next morning, my parents out again, I went to her while she was hoovering, and we walked wordlessly upstairs. Neither of us quite understood what was happening: it was innocent, clitoral, barely-penetrative sex, though that morning I ruptured the little thread at the back of my foreskin: there was blood all over the place, but it was me whose hymen had been broken, not her. She told me later that she had lost her virginity to a friend of her father’s when she was fifteen—her only time. She never did sleep with Steve.
We went on having sex for six months, a year, till she found a proper boyfriend and left. It was usually on Friday evenings during term-time, when no one else was in the house, though we took our chances when we could. We’d be up in her bedroom, under the open window, listening for the sound of my parents’ car coming up the drive, the door slamming in the yard or the key in the front door. And this meant it was a detached, alert, silent kind of lovemaking, one ear open above the swoosh of the flesh. We were both terrified of my father walking in on us.
‘It’s all a long time ago,’ she says, moving her stool under another stretch of pot rail.
‘Yes, we were more or less kids.’
‘The last time was after that friend of yours was killed.’
‘Nick Proctor, you mean.’
He had died in a car crash one Christmas, some time after Sandra had gone. Four of them had been on their way to a party I’d told them about in Barnoldswick—Brian Smith and his cousin Bernie in the front, Bob Skelton and Nick in the back. The Rover they hit on a bend at Broughton sent the back of their Mini into a low wall with trees behind it. My father, drinking in the local pub, The Bull, was early on the scene. Brian led him to where the bodies lay among elm and drystone and metal, Bob already dead, Nick clearly dying. At Airedale Brian met me histrionically: ‘Look at these hands—that’s Nick’s blood.’
‘I remember,’ I say. ‘I stopped off on my way back from the hospital.’
‘Bit of a risk. I’d broken up with Mick by then, but he sometimes came round when he was drunk. And there was the baby.’
‘I was upset. I realized you weren’t keen. It was a bit like this—a death.’
‘Wanting comfort, yes, I understand that. But I’ve given up, I told you.’
‘If you change your mind …’
My father had found out of course, after a bit, I’m not sure how. He met me off the school bus, and was oddly understanding: we were young, we’d been alone in the house, it was innocent and natural, he wasn’t going to tell Mummy. But what we had done was also very wrong: we must never never do it again or he would have to kick me out. If I’d been more mature I would have seen he couldn’t have meant the last bit: the obvious solution to this teenage sex problem would have been to dismiss Sandra, not expel me. But he didn’t do that either: she, too, was given a (rather heavier) lecture and allowed to stay. Later, looking back, I thought it to his credit that he hadn’t done the expected middle-class thing and sacked her (it was me who had done the expected middle-class thing and fucked her). Perhaps, too, I wasn’t so scared by him as I thought I was: within weeks, we resumed.
But sex after that always seemed a thing to be done furtively and silently: terrible retribution might be walking up the stairs. In my callow, febrile way I wondered if my father and Sandra might be doing it too: that would explain why he hadn’t given her the push—so as to carry on, or not risk her exposing him. But she denied this, and in the end, when I understood their relationship better, I believed her: she was more surrogate daughter than surrogate wife. Less easily suppressed was the suspicion that he took a vicarious thrill in trying to catch us out. One night, in bed with Sandra, I heard the tiniest click of the key in the front door and fled naked to my room. He crept up the stairs and walked straight into her bedroom, where he found her sitting, just a towel round her waist, at the dressing-table. She covered herself and was indignant: what did he mean walking in without knocking? He came into my room, where I feigned sleep. There was nothing he could prove.
I never talked to him, later, about what had happened, but I can imagine his pragmatic way of shrugging it off: ‘Leave two men together in a room for long enough and they’ll kill each other. Leave a man and woman alone together in a room for long enough and they’ll screw each other. No way round it—law of nature. There are worse things in life than what you two did.’
‘You forget,’ I say to Sandra, leaning against the doorframe while she dusts on, ‘You were my first love. You predate everyone.’
‘Hum. I suppose.’
‘It never felt wrong.’
‘Not for you maybe.’
‘It still doesn’t.’
‘You don’t give up, do you—you think you’re different but you’re just like all the other fellas. Tell you what: how about making us another cuppa?’
I leave the room, and put the kettle on, half-ashamed of my flirtatiousness, needing the escape and obliteration of sex, but hating the hard little bit of myself I’ve just been hearing, so manipulative and opportunistic. Is it unnatural to want her now? Or would it be unnatural not to?
‘Here you are,’ I say, putting a mug of tea down by her feet on the stool, ‘I’ll have to go. My mother will be waiting.’ And she is, with her funeral hairdo.
That night I dream Sandra comes to my bed. She drives up to Thornton, lets herself in with her old Union, and silently climbs the stairs. ‘Here’s that tea,’ she says, and when she puts it down I see the glass half-pint tankard my father took his last sip from. It’s five in the morning and I’m wodgy with sleep, but not so much that I can’t work out why she is here. She is wearing a baby-doll nightdress from the mid sixties and I try to pull her into bed. She resists at first, changing her mind or preserving her dignity, but soon she lies beside me on the blankets, then under them. I touch her breasts, her neck, her navel—a nineteen-year-old’s. Even the noiselessness is the same, the stroking-more-than-kissing, the ear open for trouble—for what if my mother should wake? Sandra is worried, too, I can tell. I come at once, the premature ejaculator of fourteen.
‘Better go,’ she whispers into my head.
‘Sorry, I wanted it to be longer, I wanted to do it properly.’
The dream seems to be over then, because I’m downstairs in the kitchen and can feel the teapot cooling on the Aga. But the tankard in my hand is full of blood, not tea, and I swill it away, rinsing the glass to transparency. I must find my father, I think, but my mother is in bed alone, deeply asleep, a Dick Francis novel face down on the floor, her arm hanging out as if to retrieve it. Upstairs again, I check the door to my room (closed), then to Pat’s room (locked), and come to the spare room, which is open.
‘You’re still here,’ I say.
‘I was always here. It was you who left,’ says Sandra.
I close the door behind me, and get into her bed and into her. It is the same long dream of memory, but better this time, wetter, less awkward, no guilt. We hang on to each other, rocking the cradle of childhood together, calling back the old days, wanting to hear his car on the tarmac, his key in the front door, his footstep on the stairs. We’re noisy now, to wake him, we push and rock and come, but my father does not come, will never hear us now, though we hold each other in his memory, in the daze of his loss, hoping beyond hope that now, finally, he will walk in on us.