Annie is in a foul mood this morning. She comes down early, before any of the others are stirring, and sits and glowers at me while I’m drinking my morning coffee. I know better than to ask outright what the matter is; she will simply yell at me for not having the sensitivity to intuit the nature of her pain. Instead, I pretend obliviousness and try to involve her in the crossword. The glower darkens; torrents threaten. I give in.
‘Is there anything particular the matter?’ I venture.
She slams her mobile across the table at me. ‘Only being woken at seven thirty in the morning by a crap text message,’ she growls.
‘Oh, crap text messages,’ I say. ‘I know all about them.’ But she is not interested in my problems.
‘Well, look at it,’ she storms.
I pick up the phone, afraid that this will be her charming, sweet-natured and altogether desirable medical student boyfriend, Jon, finally deciding that she is too much like hard work and declaring his intention to move on, but the message is from Andrew. He is sorry that he can’t get to the play. Family stuff. He is sure she will understand. I immediately feel guilty. This has been prompted by my reminder to Andrew. He had obviously forgotten all about the play. If I’d said nothing, he would have said nothing and Annie might not even have noticed that he hadn’t been to the play. Yes, she would. Of course she would. That he takes an interest in her matters to her and I could kill him for that. The girls got used to Andrew’s lack of interest in them even before I divorced him. We were a contented little trio during their teenage years. We screamed at each other quite a bit, but that didn’t matter; we knew we could rely on each other, and Andrew hardly impinged at all. He had rights, of course; he was supposed to see them every other weekend, but he’s an international lawyer and he was often away, and the girls increasingly had weekend activities – dance and drama classes, hockey matches and birthday sleepovers. The weekend visits dwindled from sporadic to blue moon frequency and no-one, it seemed to me, minded. Then Annie involved Andrew in her plan to study law, he encouraged her to try for his old college at Oxford, she got in and there was a very irritating love-in between the two of them for a few months, until baby Arthur stopped mewling and puking, hauled himself to his feet and became a delightful toddler, followed briskly by baby Hubert, who will, no doubt, be equally delightful soon. Andrew has sons; they are the pride of his heart and Annie has been dumped.
I push the phone back to Annie. She takes it and rereads the message. Is this to fuel her rage or in the hope of a crumb of comfort? I need to deflect her. I know from experience how this will go otherwise. She will start offloading, beginning with Andrew but then allowing the whirlpool of her discontent to suck in all the other annoyances and injustices of her life while I attempt helpful comments and suggestions, only to find that at the dark, swirling core of this whirlpool one person is to blame for everything, and that, it turns out, is me. I have been there before and I am anxious not to go there again.
‘I’m reading Bring up the Bodies,’ I say. ‘I’ll lend it to you when I’ve finished. It explains a lot about fathers and sons.’
She says, ‘Pa isn’t the King of England. The fate of the country doesn’t depend on his having a son and heir.’
‘I know. I’m just saying there’s a thing about men and sons. I don’t think I realised it. I couldn’t see any reason why Andrew shouldn’t be delighted to have you and Ellie, but he wasn’t. I thought he just didn’t like children, but now I think if you and Ellie had been boys we might still be married.’
‘Well, I’m sorry if we screwed up your life for you.’
‘Not at all. You revealed him in his true colours and I have never regretted divorcing him.’ I drain my nearly cold coffee. ‘If Lavender had produced another couple of girls, I don’t think she’d have lasted long,’ I say.
‘He’d have had her beheaded, would he?’ she asks, with the morning’s first glimmer of a smile.
‘More or less.’
‘And this aperçu of yours is supposed to help me how?’
‘It’s supposed to tell you that it’s not personal. It’s not a judgement on you. Pa just likes the boys because they’re boys. If anything, I’m the one who should feel it personally. Lavender is so much the opposite of me in every way, I can’t help feeling that definitively-not-Gina was what Andrew was looking for second time around.’
‘Well she is fragrant, of course, dear Lavender.’ She fetches a mug and pours herself some coffee.
‘She is sweet and soft and fragrant and pliable. And rich, of course.’
‘You make her sound like a cake.’
‘So she is. She is like a particularly delicious little cake with pink icing on the top and little sugar flowers. One that you have to handle with care or it will crumble to pieces in your hand.’
‘And what are you?’ She is watching me over the rim of her mug and I think she’s smiling.
‘Oh, I’m one of those thick, solid slabs of flapjack – terribly worthy, full of fibre and likely to break your teeth if you’re not careful.’
She lets out a hoot of laughter. ‘You actually are quite a funny woman, you know, Ma.’ She swirls her coffee round. ‘Men, you know – well boys, really – they make jokes all the time. It’s the way they come on to you. Trouble is, they’re mostly not as funny as you.’
With this, she gets up and leaves, saying as she goes, ‘You know Jon’s arriving this evening, don’t you? I shall be at the theatre. Can you give him some supper?’
‘Well, no,’ I call after her. ‘I’ve got the tech for Much Ado. I shan’t be here.’
‘Oh well, just leave him something, then. He’s not fussy.’
Her voice floats down airily from the stairs.
‘How’s he going to get in, Annie?’ I ask, going to the foot of the stairs.
‘I’ll tell him about the key in the shed,’ she says over her shoulder, and disappears into her room.
The key in the shed. We have always kept a key in the shed, under an old bird bath which turned rusty but never made it to the tip. We have had it there for years and I have never worried about the insecurity of the arrangement until now, when I’ve been told to be aware. That seemed to be a perfectly useless injunction and I couldn’t see what practical action I could take, but now I see that not having a key to my house available to anyone who takes the trouble to go through the side gate (bolt broken) and look in a few childishly obvious places in my shed might be the sort of thing David had in mind.
It seems suddenly urgent that I retrieve the key and I run out to the shed – pyjamas, bare feet and all – and lift up the bird bath to find nothing there. I stare stupidly at the empty space, then get down on my knees, regardless of the filthy floor, and grope around helplessly for the key which I feel must be here. I run back indoors and bang on Annie’s bedroom door. She opens it and peers out at me, looking irritated. I can hear music from inside. The other girls are sleeping in her room too, on an old studio couch with broken springs.
‘Someone’s taken the key,’ I say. ‘I just went to check.’
‘Well, it wasn’t me. I haven’t used it for years. I don’t live here, remember?’
You could have fooled me.
‘And it wasn’t me. That’s the point. I always have my key with me. It’s on the same ring as my office key and the one to my bike padlock. That’s what I mean. Someone’s stolen it.’
She looks at me in puzzlement. ‘So Ellie’s got it,’ she says.
‘Ellie hasn’t lived here for eighteen months. Why would she have it?’
‘So the last person who used it forgot to put it back and nobody has needed it for ages so we didn’t notice it was gone. Doesn’t matter. I’ll leave my key for Jon.’
‘No!’ My voice comes out very sharp and startles her. I take a breath. ‘We’ve had a few break-ins in the road,’ I say. ‘I think we ought to be a bit careful. Why don’t you tell Jon to go to Ellie’s house and get her key?’ ’
She opens her mouth to argue but I think the agitation she’s picking up from me stops her. She shrugs. ‘OK,’ she says and retreats into the room, closing the door on me.
I go and shower, taking care with my dirty feet, and dress for a day which involves a morning with Freda, an afternoon with my wives and an evening in the abbey gardens (where I shall, of course, be wearing a farthingale). I offered yesterday to take Freda out this morning because she has had her allotted quota of holiday activities, Nico was still fretful and Ellie was looking fraught. This afternoon I shall go in to teach the wives but I’m not sure how many will be there. I have managed to get news of Jamilleh by the simple expedient of finding her husband’s university email address and contacting him. I got a reply – brief and guarded – yesterday evening, telling me that Jamilleh was improving but would be in hospital until next week. I doubt that Farah will be there, if she has had the be aware warning, and it may be that the others are steering clear of the campus too, if Andrew’s anxiety for Lavender is anything to go by.
I cycle round to Ellie’s and inspect Nico, who is looking much better. I tell Ellie about the missing key. She looks vague and says she doesn’t think she’s got it, but she supposes she might. She looks helplessly round her chaotic kitchen and I can see that there is no point in pursuing this. Ellie was once the orderly member of our trio but motherhood seems to have put paid to that.
‘But you have got your own key to my house?’ I ask. ‘The one you’ve always had?’
‘Yes,’ she says doubtfully, ‘I’m sure I have.’
‘Well, find it. Jon’s going to need it this evening.’
‘Why?’
‘Because Annie and I will both be on stage.’
‘Oh, yes. I don’t think I’m going to be able to get to Annie’s play. With Nico and everything.’
‘It would do you good to get out. Have you even been out of the house this week?’
‘I had a nice trip to the doctor’s.’
‘Seriously. Get Ben to look after the kids and come with me tomorrow afternoon.’
‘I don’t know. I’m not sure he can manage both of them.’
‘Ellie! Don’t do this. Don’t assume that he’s useless. It’s what I did and look what happened to me. Nico’s looking better, isn’t he? He’ll be fine with Ben.’
‘I’ll see.’
She looks so exhausted that I’m thinking of offering to take Nico out as well as Freda. ‘I could—’ I start, eying Nico, but Freda’s sharp eye has noted my wobble and she takes command.
‘Come on, Granny,’ she orders, taking my hand firmly in hers and dragging me towards the door. ‘We really must be off.’ And that is that.
The plan is to visit the playground, where Freda intends to attempt the black run of the big slide, to move on to The Pumpkin for elevenses and then to pass the rest of the morning browsing in the children’s sections of Marlbury’s two bookshops, where I shall spend far more money than I meant to because buying books is virtuous, isn’t it?
The playground goes well. Freda baulks, in the end, at the dizzy height of the big slide and is disappointed with herself, but my definition of a successful playground outing is that it is one in which no blood gets spilt, so I am quite happy and try to console Freda with my philosophy of refusing the arbitrary challenge. ‘You don’t have to do things, you know,’ I say, ‘just because they’re there.’ She looks doubtful but I persevere as I push my bike into town with her strapped into her seat on the back. I need to go carefully: recently she has become resistant to my teacher’s instinct to extend the range of her understanding. I don’t get it, she will say dismissively, and shut the lid on me.
‘You wanted to be brave,’ I say, ‘but slides are supposed to be fun. If it’s not fun for you, then why do it?’
‘Because it’s good to be brave,’ she protests.
‘Yes, it is, but it’s good to be brave when you need to be. Like when you had an injection at the doctor’s and you didn’t cry. That’s brave.’
‘You were brave with the spider,’ she says, ‘in the bath.’
‘I was. You have to learn to be brave with spiders because you’re bound to meet them from time to time, but you can take or leave slides. I’m not brave with slides.’
I have stopped wheeling and I turn to look at her. She is grinning. She is picturing the absurd sight of her grandmother hurtling down a slide, but she is too polite to say so.
At The Pumpkin, she is thrown into an agony of indecision as she presses her nose to the glass display cabinet to view her cake choices. She gets her choice down to a shortlist of three and dithers for a long time between a chocolate éclair, an iced gingerbread man and a fancy cupcake. In the end, the cupcake wins and we order it, together with a bambinoccino for Freda, a latte for me and the éclair for me too, in case the cupcake proves disappointing and she wants to swap.
We claim the best table, in the window, and watch the street outside as we wait for our order. A dog with a squashed-looking face is led by and I am reminded of the dog, Billy, and the impostor in the niqab and the boy with the angelic voice. ‘Has Liam been coming to the holiday activities?’ I ask Freda.
‘Yes,’ she says, watching the dog, ‘but he was sad.’
‘Why was he sad?’
She gives a disconcertingly grown-up shrug, which must be copied from someone. ‘Someone murdered his dog, didn’t they?’ she says.
I restrain myself from telling her that only people can be murdered and ask, ‘When did that happen?’
She turns to look at me, surprised at my stupidity. ‘Everyone knows about that, Granny,’ she says. ‘Someone murdered his auntie and his cousin and his dog.’
‘I didn’t know that was his dog.’
‘His mummy gave his dog to his auntie because she was too much trouble.’
‘His auntie was too much trouble?’
She sighs in exasperation. ‘No, the dog. She was too much trouble.’ She says, and gives another of her grown-up shrugs. ‘His mummy’s got depression,’ she adds.
So the dog wasn’t called Billy but Billie, I think, as in Holiday. I have several other questions for Freda but our order has arrived and demands her full attention. Freda likes to dismantle food, to arrange it in its component parts. Give her a pizza and she will carefully remove the slices of mushroom, bits of ham, chunks of pepper and whatever else and put them in neat piles round the edge of her plate. She will then eat the base and follow up with the toppings. She does a similar job with her cupcake, which has a mound of pale pink butter cream on it, and two deep pink spun sugar roses, with leaves, perched on top. It is, in fact, very like the kind of cake to which I compared Lavender earlier this morning, but Freda is a little young for metaphor so I don’t tell her that she is, in effect, eating her step-grandmother.
We linger over our repast but after that things have to speed up a bit if I’m to be on campus to teach the wives at two o’clock. To accelerate matters, I spend freely in the bookshop, then deliver Freda and her pile of loot to her home and head for my office, skipping lunch to make up for the éclair. I notice, as I check my emails, that the job application form is still sitting on the top of my in-tray. Later. Later.
Only Ning Wu turns up for the class. She has no information to offer about the others, is disinclined to chat and wants to take the opportunity of the one-to-one to sort out some specifically Chinese problems. These are mainly with pronunciation. Ning Wu has been here for a whole academic year; she has attended classes religiously, done all her homework and made lists of new vocabulary on her iPad. What she has not done at all, I suspect, is speak English socially outside the classroom. Her husband is one of a group of Chinese graduate students studying in the Business School and he and Ning Wu socialise entirely in that group. Her sons, one at Acorns and one at infant school, are completely fluent of course, and she is frustrated by her lack of progress. She has tried to socialise more widely but people find her so hard to understand that she gives up and retreats into her Chinese world. It’s a bind many overseas students find themselves in.
Her main difficulty – and it’s a very common difficulty with both Chinese and Japanese speakers – is consonant clusters. Chinese has a much higher vowel to consonant ratio than English does, so Chinese speakers tend to put vowels in between consonants. Thus, spread, for example, will become something like sapared and is likely to be heard as separate by a native English speaker. Of course, our consonant clusters don’t seem like a problem to us but consider the word strength: seven consonants to one vowel. What a nightmare for anyone more accustomed to a one-to-one ratio. A word that is one syllable for us can extend to four syllables on a Chinese or Japanese tongue. Or crisps: think about that. What chance of getting what you want when you ask for a packet of cirisipis?
For pronunciation work you need to be uninhibited and to have a sense of humour, because it involves a lot of facial contortion, aspirating and spitting. Ning Wu is solemn and dignified, so I am the clown, twisting my face about making exaggerated efforts with lips and tongue. Ning Wu follows my instructions politely but she is just too ladylike. After three-quarters of an hour, I give up and ask if there’s anything else she would like to work on. He, she and it, she tells me. And my heart sinks because there is no answer to this. You just have to remember I want to say. How hard is that? Bizarrely to us, in spoken Chinese, the same sound stands for he and she and it. It’s not that they don’t make gender distinctions – they do in writing – but in speaking they all sound the same. I draw a clumsy picture on the board: a man, a woman and a dog – what else? She practises sentences about these three and I go home with pronouns ringing in my ears.
I arrive home just in time to see Annie and co heading off for their evening at the Aphra Behn in the flat-tyred Volvo and a cloud of noxious exhaust. I remember that I’m supposed to be leaving supper for Jon and I curse Annie when I find that all the convenient food I stocked up on has been demolished and not replaced. I’m quite hungry myself, having skipped lunch, and I know the evening ahead will be long and trying, so I throw together a large macaroni cheese with bits of mushroom and tomato in it and eat a third of it, leaving the rest for Jon to heat up. I find a bag of salad leaves and instead of my usual random sloshing of oil, lemon and salt, I make a proper vinaigrette, which I hope will compensate for the leaves being two days past their Best Before date. I write a note to Jon, introducing him to his supper and inviting him to help himself to beer (in the fridge) or wine (in the bottle just opened and partly consumed by me), and to fruit and ice cream. I think of leaving him instructions about reheating the macaroni cheese but decide that this would be patronising. He is, after all, nearly a doctor; he must have done harder things than this, mustn’t he?
I am, by now, tired and grumpy. My supper may sustain me later but at the moment it’s weighing me down, and my glass and a half of wine has taken me straight to the sleepy stage, bypassing the cheerful lift I was hoping for. I climb onto my bike and pedal on leaden legs down to the abbey. My only comfort, as I turn the wheels, is that everyone else will be feeling as grumpy as I am. The technical rehearsal is the nadir of the rehearsal period as far as amateur actors are concerned. You are tired at this point as rehearsals have become more frequent and combining them with the day job has become hard work – though nothing to the week ahead, when you will be performing every night. On top of that you are terrified because first night is forty-eight hours away. What you want is to get on stage and rehearse, to reassure yourself that you do know what you’re doing and you can remember the lines, but instead you are tantalised by being required to go on stage but not to act. You are in the hands of the technical crew, who move you about the stage and shine lights on you as though you were no more than a piece of scenery. It is at this point that you realise, if you didn’t know it before, that the techies regard the actors simply as a nuisance, an irritatingly unpredictable intrusion on the perfection of their staging. A friend of mine, a great lighting man and much in demand for amateur productions, once complained to me that he was lighting a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘What a terrible play that is,’ he said. When I said that I supposed it might seem a bit heavy-handed these days but … he interrupted me. ‘Oh it’s not that,’ he said. ‘It’s the hats. All those bloody great hats the women wear. Impossible to light their faces. Four hats in the final scene and will they wear them on the backs of their heads? No! What am I supposed to do?’
In theory, I straddle the two worlds of cast and crew this evening since I need to scrutinise the costumes under the lights as well as doing my bit as an actor, and because of that I do grudgingly appreciate what a difficult job it is to light an open-air production, where you constantly have to adjust to the fading of the natural light. In fact, I think as we proceed and the unfriendly evening chill starts to seep into me, everything is more difficult in an open-air production: actors have to project twice as hard – and then some, if an ambulance goes screaming by or a low-flying plane amuses itself up above – in damp, cold conditions which are disastrous to the vocal cords; costumes need constant restoration – muddy hems, ruffs that detach themselves in a brisk breeze, torn sleeves from attacks by tree branches, sodden velvet crushed by a sudden squall. And then there’s the audience: the cold, the wet, the inaudibility, the hard chairs. Yes, we have all of us been to the one magical open-air performance on a still, balmy night, when no extraneous sound could be heard but the gentle song of a nightingale and the light faded exquisitely until, in the velvet darkness, the magical final scene was played in a golden pool of light and a pin could be heard dropping in the breathless silence. But haven’t we paid for it, that one rapturous, remembered moment? In trying to recapture it, how much cold, misery and boredom have we suffered? As evidence of the triumph of hope over experience it trumps second marriages every time.
With my costumier’s eye in, I can’t say I’m very happy with my costumes. I hired them from the Aphra Behn and I took trouble with colours and have altered things to fit, but the effect is not what I hoped for and I decide that the actors are to blame. They are just not wearing them right. They have had several opportunities to wear them for rehearsal but they have mainly only worn bits of them – a skirt or a cloak or a hat. Now they are in full fig they look awkward. The men have no swagger and the women no grace, I think gloomily. Several of the men have little, short cloaks which are meant to swirl dashingly from one shoulder, but they all look as though they’re auditioning for Richard III. And the women stride about in their skirts as though they were in jeans and trainers (some of them, I suspect, are indeed wearing jeans under their skirts to keep warm, and I do sympathise but there will be none of that in performance). Conversely, Michael Da Souza, who is playing Friar Francis, is mincing about in his cassock, holding it up in front of him like a pantomime dame.
‘Michael,’ I say, ‘you won’t trip over it. I’ve made sure it’s the right length. You can stride about. Go into the abbey and watch the priests in there. They stride about and their cassocks billow about nicely round their feet.’
‘Yes,’ he says dutifully, but he doesn’t move.
‘Well, go on then,’ I say, sounding very much like a hearty PE teacher, ‘let’s see you stride.’
He turns and I see his hands go to lift up his skirts. ‘Hands by your sides,’ I order, now moving into RSM mode. He drops his hands and walks on. I watch to see if his cassock billows out nicely round his feet and I am assailed by the memory of the niqab person and the dog running at his/her feet and I know that there is something wrong with the picture but I can’t work out what it is. One thing I do see now, in my mind’s eye – and I should have thought about it before – is that the ‘woman’ was wearing trainers. They were black trainers, admittedly, but definitely trainers, all the same, and I think, now, that that was what the child, Lara, might have been laughing at. Now I feel bad because I think that if I had been paying attention the trainers would have told me that this was an impostor of some kind and I could have told Paula or David, and Jamilleh need not have been involved and would not, now, be lying half-strangled in hospital.
There is something else, though. Something else is wrong with my picture and I can’t work out what it is. It hovers there, on the edge of my consciousness, like a word you can’t quite find, and just as I think I’m going to reach out and touch it, Michael’s plaintive voice comes breaking in. ‘You’re not even watching me!’ he protests, like an aggrieved child, as he comes marching back towards me, and I realise that I have been standing with my eyes closed as I try to recover the picture and its soundtrack.
‘Sorry, Michael. That’s great,’ I say and then, without even knowing that I’ve made a decision, I turn and head for the dressing room. I need to think and I can’t do it here. It is already nearly ten o’clock and we have just reached the beginning of act four. We could be here for hours yet and there is no chance that I can find my inspiration while I stand around getting cold and cross. The dressing room is empty because everyone is needed for the big scene of Hero’s and Claudio’s aborted wedding. Focus, focus, I tell myself as I change out of my costume. Don’t think about anything else.
I pick up my bag, take a look round the room, promise myself that I will come in in the morning and clear up the chaos that will be left, and slip out. The quickest way to make my escape would be through the darkness of the cloisters but I have been told to be aware and I have had a bad experience once before in these cloisters so, instead, I set off the other way, through the school courtyard where, rounding a shadowy corner, I bump straight into our director, the loathsome Dominic. Caught, I try going on the offensive. ‘Skiving off, Dominic?’ I ask. ‘Leaving it all to the techies?’
It doesn’t work. ‘And you? Some sort of emergency?’ he asks.
I could invent an emergency but I don’t feel like it. Instead I say breezily, ‘Something like that,’ and make to sashay past him. He grabs hold of my arm, though. ‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’ he asks, his face close enough for me to get the benefit of the gin and cigarettes that have been sustaining him. He has a cigarette in the hand that isn’t holding me, and I wouldn’t put it past him to stub it out on any bit of bare flesh he can find on me. I go still. We stare at each other. He seems to realise that he is overacting. He releases my arm. ‘Well?’ he asks, more mildly, dropping his cigarette and grinding it under his foot.
I decide to try the truth. ‘The fact is, Dominic, I have something on my mind and I have to go away and think about it. If I stand around here any longer I shall lose it and it could actually be a matter of life and death.’
He looks at me, and even in the murky light of the tasteful ‘antique’ lamps that light the courtyard, I can see an expression of such dislike on his face that I am slightly taken aback. ‘You really think you’re something, don’t you?’ he asks, but because it’s obviously not really a question I don’t try to reply. ‘You walk out of here,’ he says, ‘and you don’t come back.’
I stare at him. ‘And who plays Ursula?’ I ask. ‘Who gets the costumes sorted and back to the Aphra Behn?’
He turns away and starts to walk back towards the stage area. ‘You are eminently dispensable,’ he calls. ‘Eminently.’
Exit stage left.
*
Well, I really don’t care about being out of the play; the prospect of a week not spent shivering in a farthingale feels like a release, actually. Which leads me to wonder why I got into it in the first place. Another case of hope over experience, I suppose. Dominic has unsettled me, though. I think, as I pedal home, that he did, at least, say dispensable and not disposable but I can’t shake off the sense that there seems to be a threat there, all the same. And, infuriatingly, the altercation with Dominic has blown away that fragile thought that I was trying to hold on to. As I approach home I see lights on, which calms my paranoia about the missing key, though it still occurs to me, as I unlock the door, that a really clever assassin would lull me by switching lights on, wouldn’t he?
Inside, I call out a greeting and get no reply. I go cautiously into the kitchen, where I find macaroni and salad eaten and everything scrupulously washed up and put away. Jon has eaten and gone to meet Annie, presumably. The message light is flashing on the phone. David? I pour myself a glass of wine and press play. At first all I hear is heavy breathing and I am seized with fright. Then a voice emerges, thick with tears. Oh Gina, I’m so sorry. It’s your mum. She passed away, Gina. I’m so sorry. There is some wordless weeping and then, It’s Margaret here, Gina, I should have said. It was a stroke. Very quick, the doctor said. I found her. Just in her chair. Quite peaceful, bless her. You take care of yourself, Gina. Bye now. And that was it.
Why does shock attack the knees? The first thing I feel is that I must sit down. Then I take a gulp of wine. Then I think that I don’t believe it. Oh, I believe that she is dead. I’ve felt that coming for a while now, and so did she, I’m sure. It’s very quick and quite peaceful that I don’t believe. Killed instantly, wasn’t that what the families of soldiers killed in the First World War were always told? Even if they had hung, screaming, on the wire in no-man’s-land for three days? How long was it before Margaret went in and found her? How long did she lie, helpless? Did she want me? She wanted me yesterday, didn’t she? And I said I’d see her in three days’ time. Why didn’t she say come now? Because. Because of who she was. Because of who I am.
I look at the clock on the cooker. It’s nearly eleven. Too late to ring Margaret now. I stand up and go to the phone to play her message again and I freeze as I hear the sound of a key turning in the front door. I don’t know if I scream but I certainly let my glass fall from my hand, so that when Jon opens the kitchen door he finds me standing on a battlefield of red wine and glass.
‘Are you all right?’ he asks and all I can say is, ‘My mother’s dead,’ before the tears come.
He is, of course, wonderful. He sits me down, makes me a cup of tea (better for shock than wine) and clears up the bloody mess on the floor with quiet efficiency.
I don’t weep for long. Weeping isn’t really my thing and these tears came from shock and fright more than from grief. Grief I shall have to think about later. I realise, as my tears subside, that I am hugely relieved that Annie isn’t here.
‘Did you see Annie?’ I ask.
‘Oh yes. Thank you for supper, by the way. Delicious, and just what I needed. I saw her after the show but they were all going out for a drink and I didn’t think I could match the post-performance euphoria after the day I’ve had.’
‘Annie should have come back with you.’ Why doesn’t she look after him better?
‘She needed her wind-down. It was a good audience tonight, apparently.’
‘So you came back for some peace and quiet and found a hysterical woman.’
‘Very mild, as hysterics go.’
‘I’m sorry about your bad day. Do you want to talk about it?’
‘No. People die, you know, when you don’t expect it, and too young. I’m learning to get used to it.’
‘Is that a way of reminding me that my mother had had her time? Well, I know that. The tears aren’t grief, you know. Shock. And guilt a bit. She rang me and asked me to go and see her – well, as close to asking as she ever got – and I said I’d see her on Sunday. And now she’s dead and I wonder if I’d gone right away …’ I stop. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t think you could have stopped her dying, do you?’
‘No.’ I drink my tea while I think about how to phrase my question to him. ‘I’ve always suspected, without any evidence really, that doctors have a sort of freemasonry and help one another out at the end – something painless, an extra shot of morphine and something bland on the death certificate. Does that happen? Have you heard of it?’
‘I’m only a student. If it does happen, I’m not in the freemasonry yet.’
‘No. But I can’t get it out of my mind. I knew my mother was expecting to die soon but now I wonder if she was planning it.’
‘And asking to see you was what?’
‘A test, I suppose. If I’d gone right away, maybe she would have said something to me. As it was, she went ahead without me.’
‘What do you think she would have said?’
‘I have no idea. We never understood one another. But she gave me a letter the last time I saw her, to be opened after her death. Very nineteenth-century novel, though she wasn’t like that at all, in fact. Well, you know. You met her, didn’t you?’
‘Several times. I liked her very much.’
‘Most people did.’
‘Are you worried about opening the letter?’
‘I’m not rushing. I know it’ll be disappointing. I have to prepare myself.’
‘Yes.’
I look at the clock. ‘Could you do something for me, Jon?’
‘Of course.’
‘Could you tell Annie when she comes in? I’d really like to have a bath and go to bed. I’ll ring Ellie in the morning.’
I take myself upstairs. I feel the kind of exhaustion that is actually quite pleasurable when you know you have a good night’s sleep in front of you, but I’m afraid I shan’t sleep, even drugged by a hot bath and some more Wodehouse. I go through the motions, though, soaking in soporific bubbles, and then, when I’m in bed, I put paid to any hope of sleep by opening the bedside drawer and taking out my mother’s letter. Giving myself no time to change my mind, I rip it open and scan it rapidly. It is dated 1st July 2012 and it is short but not quite to the point – at least not to any point that I understand. The writing, I notice, is fainter but no less precise than my mother’s usual hand (she had no truck with stereotypically illegible ‘doctor’s writing’ and her prescription forms were renowned for their clarity).
Her letter reads as follows:
My dear Virginia,
My solicitors, Hart and Lyman, have my will. The arrangements for my burial will come as a surprise to you, I realise. We buried Christopher in the churchyard because I wanted to be able to go and talk to him. Your father wanted to be cremated, but his ashes are there too. I prefer burial. Earth to earth seems right to me. The churchyard plot may mean that a church funeral is obligatory. I don’t mind that if you don’t. It’s a good service and I am sure you will appreciate the words.
We did not intend to keep secrets from you. It was too painful at first, and anyway you were too young. Then time went by and there seemed no point. There was no conspiracy,
With love,
Mummy
It’s the Mummy that gets me first, though that is hardly the most striking thing about this letter. When did I stop calling her Mummy? At fourteen or fifteen, I suppose, when I decided that Mother was more grown-up. It always seemed right to me, appropriate for the adult detachment of our relationship, but did she always think of herself as Mummy?
But this is not really the point. Thinking about this is just a displacement activity to avoid thinking about the other stuff, which is making me dizzy. My mind moves cautiously from the outside in. A church funeral; let’s start with that. I have thought about her funeral from time to time, knowing that I would, eventually, be the person who would have to organise it. I assumed a nice, rational, secular affair for my atheist mother, in the crematorium. I anticipated a big crowd, of course, because she was admired and respected, and even loved, I suppose. She had cured and comforted and saved the lives of generations of her patients. My main concern was how we were going to fit everyone in. But now it’s to be in a church – large or small, I don’t know – and I shall have to choose hymns and bible readings, shan’t I? And negotiate with the vicar and not be difficult or make it obvious that I think it’s all nonsense.
Then there’s the burial. I had assumed cremation. It’s what I choose for myself and I know my choice is based on a rather childish horror of decay, of blowflies and worms, fluids and corruption. Cremation has its horrors too, of course, the coffin sliding away behind that prim little curtain always turns my stomach. I was twelve when my father died and I remember that moment when the coffin started to move. My mother had explained to me what would happen but at that moment I was seized with the irrational fear that he was not actually dead and would be burned alive. My mother must have sensed my agitation because she put a hand on my arm. ‘He really is dead,’ she said. At the time I was angry with her for the matter-of-fact way she said it; now I think it was remarkable that she read my mind.
But now we come to it, the centre of all this. She must have a church funeral because she must be buried in a churchyard, and she must be buried in a particular churchyard because that is where Christopher is. Christopher. It means nothing to me. I never heard the name pass between my parents, not even in a muttered aside. It was too painful; I was too young; there was no point; there was no conspiracy. Off the top of my head, I have three theories about Christopher. One, the least painful, is that he was my mother’s beloved brother, dead tragically young and mourned ever after. I don’t believe this, however, because my mother talked often about her childhood and her sister, Alice. Wouldn’t Christopher’s name have slipped out at least once?
Option two, then, which owes a good deal to a certain kind of romantic novel. Suppose that Christopher was my mother’s lover and my real father? He died, leaving my mother pregnant or alone with a small child, until decent, kindly Harold Sidwell came along to give her respectability and a father for her child. The problem with this is that my mother was thirty-eight when I was born, and a respected professional woman. My birth out of wedlock could hardly be a matter of such shame that it could never be spoken of, could it?
Option three, then – the only viable one, I know, and have known ever since I read the letter. The other options were just further displacement exercises. Christopher was my brother, wasn’t he? And since I don’t remember him I assume he was born and died before I existed, and I came along eventually as a poor substitute. This would be the real reason why my parents never mentioned him, wouldn’t it? Because they couldn’t have done so without revealing the depth of their disappointment in me. There is an even worse version of this option, one that also has its inspiration in fiction – this time the genre of psychological thriller. Suppose he was not born before but after me? Suppose the reason why he couldn’t be mentioned is that I was somehow responsible for his death? Were we twins, and did I – greedy and demanding even then – get the lion’s share of nutrition in utero so that he was born too fragile to live? Or did I kill him? Did I smother him, drop him, drown him? Did I suppress the trauma and did my parents decide that the best thing was to do the same? No conspiracy? How can two people, living with a third, impose a complete embargo on the mention of a fourth member of the family without conspiring to do it? My mother’s sometimes brutal truthfulness has caused me pain and rage over the years, but they were nothing – nothing – to what I feel about this mealy-mouthed apology for a letter.