My mother left the piece of paper propped on the mantelpiece like a suicide note. It was an advertisement torn from the Times Educational Supplement for a Head of Classics job at my father’s old school in Bristol.
‘You’d stand a good chance, wouldn’t you, as an old boy – a scholarship boy, too?’
It was a Sunday morning; mother had come back from church and put the lunch on and the three of us were in the sitting room reading the papers. It was my first weekend at home in months; Frances was in bed with flu.
‘Oh no,’ said father from behind the Arts section. ‘I haven’t got the right pedigree at all – especially not now that we’ve gone Comprehensive.’
‘Not the right pedigree?’ mother echoed. ‘But you’re one of them.’
‘Would you like me to apply for it, dear?’ my father said wearily, laying down his paper and staring at her through the top of his bifocals.
‘Well, of course. Wouldn’t you like to move back to Bristol? Get away from here and all its …’ Even without looking up I could sense her glancing at me before she petered out. I had only been half listening to the exchange which had just taken place, but at the mention of ‘Bristol’ I was all attention.
‘What do you mean move to Bristol?’ I said stupidly. ‘You mean leave here?’
‘Yes, of course. Your father couldn’t very well commute. It’s a beautiful city – there are some lovely shops in Clifton. Good schools for you too.’
‘But we wouldn’t know anyone,’ I said, panic rising in me like bile.
‘Oh, you soon make friends,’ said mother dismissively, forgetting that it had taken me a full eleven years to meet the one friend I had.
‘What about my cello lessons?’ I knew this would carry more weight with mother than trivial concepts like friendship. I had just passed my seventh grade with distinction; my teacher was pleased with me, and had gone to some trouble to find me a place with a local youth orchestra that met every Monday evening. It was the moment when you either gave up or started to take it all seriously.
Mother hesitated. This was a tricky one, but there was no weakening now. ‘There will be other good teachers in Bristol. There are probably schools which specialise in music. We wouldn’t let the move jeopardise your cello-playing. Don’t worry about that.’ Opposing one of mother’s sudden enthusiasms was rather like trying to escape the jaws of a shark: the more you struggled, the deeper the bite.
‘But I don’t want to move. I like it here.’
‘We couldn’t very well go without you,’ said mother.
‘You could – I could stay with Frances.’
This made her flare up. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I dare say it’s not as exciting here, but we happen to be your parents, and I don’t suppose it’s ever occurred to you that everything that goes on here is for your benefit. I couldn’t even begin to explain what sacrifices have been made for your happiness.’ Mother’s cheeks were crimson and her eyes as close to tears as they ever got. She would have a migraine tomorrow and it would be all my fault.
Father intervened. ‘The argument is academic. I haven’t even applied for the job and if I did I wouldn’t get it. Can we consider the subject closed?’
That night I lay awake for some time worrying. I knew my parents: if mother was determined that father apply then he would. As for his not succeeding, I couldn’t entertain that hope. He was my father – how could any other candidate possibly be preferred? Some time after eleven I heard voices from their bedroom. My mother always kept the door ajar so that she would hear the phone if my granny should be the subject of some medical emergency overnight. I crept on to the landing.
‘… hadn’t brought up all that business about sacrifices in front of Abigail. What was she supposed to make of that little outburst? It was very unfair.’
‘All right, all right. I regret it now. It just came out: I thought she was being unfair to us.’
‘But could you really face the upheaval of moving?’ This was father.
‘Yes. This place has associations. It would be nice to go somewhere completely new.’
‘Happy associations, too?’
‘Oh, yes, Abigail and so on.’
‘The thing is, Monica, I don’t know if I could cope with a new job. I’m not very good at change.’
‘But don’t you have any ambition?’
‘You talk as if it’s a virtue.’
‘It is, isn’t it, in a man? Aren’t you frustrated stuck where you are with all those youngsters getting promoted over you?’
‘Mildly, I suppose, but …’
‘Well then.’
‘If you really want me to apply for it, dear, I will.’
‘I don’t want you to apply for it. I want you to want to.’
‘I shall try my best to want to.’
As predicted mother had a migraine the next day. I knew this the moment I turned into The Close on my way home from school. Her bedroom curtains were closed – a signal as unmistakable as a quarantine flag on a ship. As I dropped my bag in the hallway she called down the stairs. ‘Abigail, can you bring me some more frozen veg?’
I climbed the stairs, ice-pack in hand. Mother was lying in the gloom with a wet flannel on her forehead and a bucket by the side of the bed. This was a bad one, then. Her skin had a familiar grey tinge. She unpinched her eyes a fraction as I approached and reached out for the peas. The room smelled musty and stale as if all the air had been recently exhaled. I propped the door open, admitting a wedge of light from which mother shrank back fearfully like Count Dracula.
‘Here, before Dad comes in,’ she rasped. Her migraines were often accompanied by a semi-paralysis of the vocal chords. I was never entirely sure whether this was a genuine symptom or whether, feeling rotten, she couldn’t help assuming the cracked tones of an invalid. ‘I just wanted a word about this Bristol business. I know how strongly you feel about moving, but I want you to promise not to put any pressure on Daddy. He wants this job so badly. Success is very important to a man, you see. Sometimes it’s hard for us women to understand things like ambition …’
I nodded dully. It was a shock to have caught my mother out in a piece of vicious dishonesty, but I couldn’t very well challenge her on the basis of my shabbily acquired knowledge. Liar and eavesdropper, we faced each other across the bed.
‘I don’t see why you couldn’t stay the odd weekend with Frances if it came to it. Or have her to stay with us. And there’s always the telephone …’ She reconsidered quickly, remembering my frequent hour-long calls to Frances, ‘… or rather the post. You wouldn’t have to lose touch.’
Lose touch. She had no idea. Didn’t she realise that our friendship was proof against separation, conflict, change? I wasn’t afraid of losing touch. I was just miserable at the thought of not seeing Frances every day, of missing her and Rad and Lexi and even Mr Radley; of no longer being part of their everyday lives.
‘You do promise, don’t you?’
‘All right,’ I said ungraciously.
And so father spent the next couple of evenings composing a letter of application. He would emerge occasionally and read out a paragraph or so for mother’s approval and comment; if she ventured to suggest an improvement he would defend the original at some length and then retire to his study with a martyred air to make the alteration.
A week later he reported that references had been taken up. His headmaster had passed him in the corridor and said he had recommended father in the most extravagant terms. ‘He’s desperate to get rid of me,’ was father’s interpretation. The letter inviting him for interview arrived while he was at work. Mother, seeing the school’s crest on the envelope, felt it, shook it and held it up to the light to try and divine its contents. ‘It feels too short to be a simple rejection,’ she said, weighing it in the palm of one hand. She pressed it against the glass of the front door. ‘“Dear Mr Onions, Thank you for your letter of application for the post of –” Oh bother! There’s a sort of fold.’ She would not have dreamed of opening the envelope: that would have been altogether too crude.
But her intuition proved correct, and so began the preparations for father’s Great Test. Mother cut his hair with more than usual care, so that his fringe when combed actually lay straight rather than raked. His one suit, which had gone in and out of fashion all over again since its original purchase many years before, and which served at all official functions, including his last unsuccessful interview, was retrieved from the back of the wardrobe and inspected for blobs, moth-holes and signs of wear.
I had kept my promise, up to a point. I didn’t mention my despair at the prospect of moving, and tried not to sigh and groan when the subject arose, and considered myself quite a pillar of neutrality. It didn’t occur to me that my silence was itself exerting a form of pressure. In the few days before the interview father had the air of a man forced to choose the method of his own execution: upset me or disappoint mother – he couldn’t win.
On the eve of the great day I had gone up to my room early to avoid the Poetry Circle who were meeting below to ‘do’ Tennyson. I had begun to nurture a vague contempt for this cabal, ever since we had started to study poetry at school and I had formed the idea, along with most of the class, that I alone understood it properly; that it had been written with me in mind. It irritated me that my mother’s enthusiasm for her Wednesday night hobby didn’t spill over into the rest of the week – I never saw her so much as glance at a poem at any other time. This struck me as the mark of a phoney. Father had been twitchy and nervous all through supper. I could see him drifting off every now and then into imaginary debates with the interviewer. Even when he was composing the questions himself he would come back to earth looking thoroughly worsted.
I was in bed reading Mansfield Park when I heard the study door open and then father’s slow tread on the stairs. He hesitated outside my door before tapping lightly with one fingernail, a diffident pattering which lasted through several calls of ‘Come in’. This was very different from mother’s technique which was to knock once loudly and walk straight in.
‘Oh good,’ he said, hovering in the doorway. ‘I thought you might be downstairs with the ladies.’ He looked at my book. ‘But I see you’re in a more prosaic mood.’ I nodded. ‘Who’s under the scalpel tonight?’
‘Tennyson,’ I said.
‘Ah. Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of hell. Abigail will you be terribly unhappy if I get this job? You can say Yes.’
I wavered for a moment, and then said, ‘I’ll be happy for you, but unhappy for me.’
‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Good answer. Thank you.’ And he kissed me on the top of the head and left.
The next morning all his anxiety seemed to have evaporated, and he looked almost cheerful as he ate his breakfast, his suit swathed in tea-towels to protect it from milk splashes and deposits of marmalade.
‘I’m glad you’re not too nervous,’ said mother, observing him with some surprise. ‘I thought you’d be in an awful state.’
It was then that I realised why father had questioned me the evening before. Overnight he had made his decision, and I was sure that when he came home from Bristol he would not have got the job, and we would not be moving. And so it proved. I never knew whether he had performed badly on purpose, was not good enough anyway, had been offered the post and declined it, or had simply not turned up to the interview. But I did know that this was another of those sacrifices made in my name to which mother had alluded.
For mother, of course, who was ignorant of our conversation, his failure was a sign of two things: the indifference of Fate to her needs and desires, and an insufficiency in father himself. In future she would stop petitioning him to try for promotion, not because she had given up wanting the extra money and prestige, but because she could no longer envisage him as a success. In the past she had blamed the interviewers for their poor taste; now she blamed father for lacking whatever mysterious quality it was that they sought.
Since then I have often wondered how different things might have been if I hadn’t chosen selfishness. We might have moved to Bristol; Father would have re-invented himself as a successful man; mother would have been proud or at least grateful, possibly happy; I would have moved out of the Radleys’ immediate orbit; I would have missed Anne Trevillion’s party; I wouldn’t have gone back to the house alone on that terrible afternoon; I wouldn’t have lost what I had so recently found.