How It Was

by Janet Ellis

  I was beginning to feel dizzy, I couldn’t take in enough air. The thought crossed my mind that this woman might be an impostor, not Philip’s mother at all.

  ‘Richard Matthews gave me your address,’ Beattie said. ‘I told him I was collecting anecdotes about my son from everyone who’d been in the choir.’

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  Beattie looked amused. ‘Not a choir member for long, then? He’s the conductor.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ I said. The aged young man in charge. My name must still be on a list. ‘I didn’t really—’

  ‘Did you love Philip?’ his mother said.

  The baby gave a lurch and I instinctively placed my hands to where its head or an elbow or a knee protruded, then receded.

  ‘It’s all in here,’ Beattie said. She bent her head over the still-folded paper like a nun in prayer. I stared at the little stalk of fabric in the centre of her beret. ‘I thought about not telling you,’ Beattie said. ‘I know it’s not going to make me feel better. Or make any difference to what happened. Then I thought if I have to think about it every day, from the moment I wake until I try to sleep, you should have to think about it, too.’ She half stood, pulling her coat taut and tucked one leg beneath her before she sat down again. It was a graceful movement.

  I was still wondering what to say. I thought any answer I gave would be the wrong one. I don’t know why I can’t just tell her to go, I thought. But I stayed where I was and waited, mute and still.

  ‘The thing is,’ Beattie said, ‘he didn’t die in an accident.’

  I felt a sharp pain in my chest, as if a thin slice was being shaved from my heart. Several images of him passed in a sort of unwanted slide show in my head: he bled, he hanged, he drowned. ‘Was he murdered?’ I said.

  Beattie looked at me with scorn. ‘Technically, no.’ She unfolded the paper and scanned its contents. ‘Ready,’ she said. It was an instruction to herself.

  Please don’t think I’m a coward, she read.

  At the end of a party in the nurses’ home, I had been kissed by a junior doctor. I was unravelling pleasantly with drink, the edges of me loose and remote. He had leaned towards me as he talked and then put his mouth on mine without preamble, as if he were steadying himself after missing his step. I let him stay there politely, waiting for him to stop, when desire clutched at me like a hand through a trapdoor and I’d kissed him back. He’d pulled away and looked at me as though he’d thought he’d been kissing someone else entirely. ‘Well, well, well,’ he said. ‘That was nice. What’s your name?’ He was close enough to see where each hair on his chin rose from its follicle.

  I’d recovered from the effect of the kiss as if my veins had been cauterised, the alcohol no longer reaching my head. Listening to Philip’s letter, hearing first my name, then, horribly, Sarah’s, as he wrote about ending his life, as he explained my part in his decision, was just as sobering. His choice of phrases: I have no hope, there is nothing else to live for, the only woman I could love struck me as clichéd. Did he sit on the little bed to write it, or at the table? It had one leg balanced on an opened copy of Catcher in the Rye to keep it steady. ‘Have you read it?’ I’d said, squatting on the floor and tilting my head to read the title. ‘Yes,’ he’d said. ‘Once is enough. Page 16 is just right for this job.’

  ‘Here.’ Beattie held the letter out. ‘Read it yourself.’ I noticed that the green-stoned ring she wore was the sort with an adjustable clasp, like something a child would wear. The two ends crossed over each other to keep it in place on her thin finger. She twisted her mouth, tugging at the skin inside her cheek. ‘Did he give you anything?’ she said.

  I felt suddenly panicked. How would I stop this woman searching for the drawing?

  ‘I’d like it back, if he did.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  Beattie frowned. ‘He always said he sketched everything he liked,’ she said. ‘That’s very odd.’

  ‘Perhaps he was planning to,’ I said and cursed myself for saying so. I shouldn’t have mentioned anything that hinted at Philip’s plans for his future.

  Beattie tucked the note back inside the pocket of her flamboyant coat. ‘I suppose it wasn’t about you, really,’ she said. ‘It’s about who he thought you were. He thought you were special. He thought you really loved him, that you would leave your husband for him. He had no idea that you’d be able to just go on living your life without him.’

  I could feel a small area of loose trim on the chair’s upholstery. A pin was missing. I could easily repair it myself, if I could find one to match. Beattie couldn’t possibly imagine Philip and me together or understand what had happened between us, however much she questioned or stared hard at every inch of me.

  She pushed herself forward and stood for a moment on a single flamingo leg as she uncurled the other. ‘He slit his wrists,’ she said, cinching her belt.

  I thought of the sealed, scarred wounds on his arms. Had he reopened them? Just cut along the dotted line. He’d tried to kill himself before, hadn’t he? An attempt that couldn’t possibly have been my fault. He should have mentioned that in his letter. He could at least have rescued me from listening to this woman. I began to cry.

  ‘About time, too,’ said Beattie. ‘You can’t weep for him in front of anyone else, can you? I’d say, “poor you”, but your unhappiness doesn’t really mean anything to me.’ She paused, giving me a final once-over, then shook her head. ‘I just can’t see what he saw in you,’ she said. ‘You’re so ordinary.’

  After she’d gone, I went around the room picking up and replacing ornaments in turn, as if they needed to be exorcised of Beattie’s low growl and her tiny, swinging feet. Philip lay deep in cold darkness. He couldn’t ever hold me again, say my name or make me laugh. Whatever happened next, each new kiss or careless lie, was his fault. I would punish him until he was sorry about dying. Until he regretted every single moment he had deliberately left me to outlive him.

  Chapter 21

  25 September

  Eng. lang homework: Describe your environment, inside and out.

  My name is Sarah Jane Kathryn Deacon. My mother told me she always wanted to call her little girl Sarah Jane. She even had a doll called Sarah Jane, but she says she wasn’t allowed to keep it because her father sold the house and everything in it when her mother died. I was called Kathryn after my mother’s mother, who’s dead. I wasn’t given any name for my dad’s mother, who’s also dead. If I could choose my own name, I’d be called Emma. I have one brother.

  The other night, Eddie woke me up because he was standing on the landing crying loudly. He said Alf the old window cleaner man had told him about our houses being built on fields. Eddie wanted to know what had happened to all the animals that used to live there. He was wailing about hedgehogs having no homes any more. I said they were all dead and one day he’d understand about progress. I swear his eyes changed colour with grief.

  I am waiting, all the time, for things to be different. The other day in choir, I sat next to Bobbie. I always try to. We were singing ‘The Silver Swan’; it’s high and everyone wobbles on the long notes. Mrs W said that Gibbons would be disappointed in us. Bobbie did this thing, this tiny movement, tucking her hands under her arms and looking like a monkey. I couldn’t stop laughing. Bobbie nudged me. I could feel the warmth of her in the small place where her elbow met my ribs and she was laughing too.

  At least I got out of swimming yesterday. We hardly have any time to change afterwards and have to sit through French smelling of chlorine and with the backs of our necks damp. The first time I had to sign the swimming book, I could feel the ST between my legs, as bulky as a nappy. Mum had put a packet of bunnies and a belt on my bed, so I’d be ready. I’d never ever seen anything so ugly. I was convinced everything would slip round or slide down. Or that you’d be able to see the huge lump through my skirt. Bobbie told me about a girl in their class who got up to read in assembly and walked all the way to the front of the hall with
out knowing that the whole of the back of her skirt was bright red. I asked Mum for a packet of Tampax, but I haven’t used any yet. Reading the leaflet about how to put them in always makes me feel a bit faint.

  Eng. lit homework: Puck says to Oberon: ‘yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger’. Use ‘harbinger’ in a sentence of your own.

  That is easy: Bobbie Cavanagh is a harbinger of my future.

  Chapter 22

  ‘Look at this,’ I say to Michael. He squints and attempts to identify what I’m holding. The envelope reads Mr M Deacon, but there’s no address. ‘It was hand-delivered,’ I say. I take out the card. A street scene, wobbly brush-strokes to look like the work of a renowned impressionist artist but fooling no one. ‘There’s a little verse,’ I say. ‘But we won’t bother with that. Happy birthday and so on. Then it says: Best regards, Rosalind Piper.’ I look at Michael. ‘Why don’t people hide things?’ I say. ‘Diaries and cards, for example. Much less trouble that way.’

  Michael is impassive. Just as he was when I’d first found this. Lying in the hallway where it had fallen from his bag as if it were waiting for me. ‘It’s perfectly normal for one’s secretary to send birthday greetings,’ he’d said. I noted the formal sign-off and the way Michael took it from me, rather than add it to the mantelpiece display. ‘Miss Piper always remembers,’ he’d said.

  Saying ‘Miss Piper’ was easy for him, it tripped off the tongue, but then she’d married an Unwin-Taylor which would have been a bit of a mouthful. Luckily she’d saved him from linguistic embarrassment by leaving. And it would be years before she was just ‘Rosalind’ to him.

  I can picture myself long ago in that little kitchen. I was measuring out tea leaves from the tin with a pink plastic spoon. Sarah, coming home from school, rapped on the glass in the back door then swung it open. ‘You made me jump,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. Her tone was a long way from apologetic. She flung her satchel on to the table and kicked her shoes from her feet. They hit the bottom of the back door with two loud thwacks, making the key and bolt rattle with the blows. ‘Oh, I forgot.’ Sarah retrieved the satchel and unbuckled it, releasing a slew of exercise books on to the table.

  I winced. Her every movement was too big and loud and brash these days. Her limbs seemed to enlarge hourly. The sleeves of her school cardigan were tight over her arms, her thighs bulged beneath her short skirt. In the days when I’d collected her from school, she used to rush up and fling her arms around me. The idea now seemed as incongruous and challenging as the prospect of hugging a seal.

  ‘Here!’ Sarah scraped the spilled contents haphazardly back into her satchel and handed me a large manila envelope. A used ink cartridge rolled across the table leaving a trail of blue dots and dashes on the Formica. The envelope was unaddressed and unsealed. ‘School photo. Grotty.’ Sarah made a face of elaborate distaste. She took off her blazer and picked up her discarded shoes, bundling everything together in a jumble of stiff wool and scuffed leather. ‘Down in a minute! Strawberry jam, please!’ she called out, sliding in her socks on the polished hall floor.

  The room settled behind her, as if she had been a rapid swimmer making waves in a pool. I opened the envelope and pulled its contents free. Six photographs. In each image, bordered with brown card and sitting against a background of cerulean blue, Sarah was smiling and neat, her hair flattened and her eyes wide. She looked at once very young and strikingly mature. All I could remember of being fourteen was starting my period alone in the dorm and Sally Gibson having an epileptic fit. Those incidents must have been weeks, if not months, apart, but they were fused in my memory. The rest of that year was a blur of my father’s extravagant, sobbing grief and the occasional sympathetic glance from one of my teachers. Poor girl, they implied, when I hadn’t done well in a test or ran too slowly down the hockey pitch, your mother died of . . . It was over a year ago, wasn’t it, but you’re still struggling, aren’t you? Easily the worst thing about my mother’s death was my father melting into a puddle of alcohol and self-pity afterwards, but I hadn’t thought the school staff would want to hear about that.

  It was ludicrous to envy Sarah her untroubled adolescence. It was exactly what Michael and I intended, wasn’t it? But something about her expression in the photograph made me want to grab her neatly folded hands and scrape them against a wall till her knuckles bled. I felt winded by the violence of my thoughts. I sliced and buttered bread and spread jam with resolute efficiency, in an attempt to cancel them out.

  Where was Eddie? He should have been home by now. I was being punished for my attitude to one child with the absence of another. That was how fate worked. It watched you, waiting for your complacent remark or a slip in your way of thinking or a squeak of temptation, then pounced. There were many reasons why Eddie could be late, of course. He couldn’t really tell the time, for a start. He was easily distracted, too, captivated by a particular stone or dead animal. ‘Mark Wilson said a man waved his thing at him, in the woods,’ Eddie reported one day, prompting a long explanation from me about why you should avoid strangers. Only a few days later, he’d brought a dishevelled tramp to the door, asking me to give him some food. I had produced a tea cake. I watched the man carefully unwrap its red and silver foil. He ate it in tiny bites, cupping his free hand underneath his mouth, rescuing dropped chocolate from his palm with a snakelike flick of his tongue.

  ‘Eddie,’ I’d said afterwards, ‘do you remember what I told you? About not talking to strangers, or going anywhere with them?’

  Eddie had looked cross. ‘He’s called Laurence. He’s not a stranger. He’s got a name. He told me his name.’

  His generous logic could easily be undoing him now, I thought. I imagined him bundled against a grimy coat, his mouth silenced with a clasped hand. Should I go and look for him? ‘He knows the drill,’ Michael would say. ‘And he knows the way home.’ I could only think of Eddie’s little arms and legs, his flesh still new over thin bones, too small and weak to resist anyone or run away fast enough.

  I went to the drawer and tore a page from the little pad I used for lists and notes. It had a drawing of some owls on its cover and one of the children had filled in their large, circular eyes with a black pen. The ink was still sticky, it had never properly dried. I moved aside the ever-present pile of books and comics that were always waiting to be sorted through on the kitchen table.

  ‘Please do not park here,’ I wrote. As I fixed it to the window, I looked up to see Eddie approaching the house. He wasn’t alone. A tall man strode next to him; he was carrying a large square folder under one arm, a battered leather satchel hung from his other shoulder and he held an empty, lidless jam jar in front of him like a torch. Eddie was talking animatedly although I could tell his companion wasn’t paying much attention. I opened the back door and stood and waited for them.

  As they got nearer, two things became obvious. The errant car belonged to this man. And he was handsome. His features were slightly too large for his face, giving him the cartoonish sensuality of an actor.

  Michael and I had once been at a dinner party when an actor friend of our host’s had arrived late, straight from the stage. Despite having ‘scrubbed with the Pond’s’, as he’d roared in explanation (he was very loud), he’d seemed to be still made up, his features defined more clearly than anyone else’s round the table. We had all watched him while he ate with gusto and noisy appreciation from a plated meal saved specially. ‘This is so good,’ he’d bellowed to the hostess, ‘you’re a wonder, Kate.’ He’d affected a weary ennui with the play he’d just been performing: ‘It’s not one of his best,’ he’d said. Michael said afterwards that the chap had given a virtuoso performance of The Returning Actor Entertains Another Audience, for the assembled company. He’d found him jarring, he’d said, but I’d liked the bounce of him, the way he’d turned his full attention to whoever he spoke to. When we’d both helped the hostess by clearing dishes, he’d brushed past me in the hallway, one hand resting for a while
on my behind.

  A single lock of hair hung over this man’s forehead. If Michael’s hair were not held in place with Brylcreem, I doubted it would fall over his face like that, as if it were meant to happen.

  He opened the boot of the car, nodding towards where I stood without looking at me. He piled the satchel into a space already full of bags and boxes, balanced the jam jar against it, then placed the large folder on top with some care. I watched him, feeling like a teacher waiting for someone in the class to admit to a crime. He was in no hurry. Eddie jogged from foot to foot, obviously wishing that these two people would talk to each other, as they surely must, so that he could slip away.

  The man finished his task and looked up. ‘Oh my God!’ he said, clapping his hands theatrically to his cheeks. ‘I shouldn’t have parked here, should I? Hell of a nuisance for you.’

  ‘That’s all right, I’ve only just replaced my note,’ I said, aware that my bare feet trapped me in the kitchen. I could sense Eddie’s disappointment at my letting this man off so lightly.

  ‘I have been here a while, I’m afraid.’ He furrowed his brows, pretending to be embarrassed. ‘Until . . . ?’ He gestured at Eddie.

  ‘Eddie,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, until Eddie discovered my lair and I became aware of the time.’ His manner was breezy and light, as if he’d just arrived in this English village from a warm, foreign climate and he’d never encountered any clouds.

  ‘Mum?’ Sarah stood in the doorway. Her feet were encased in soft tartan slippers, trimmed all the way round with sheepskin. The fur had aged to a stiffened, grey band. They’d been a Christmas present two years ago. Sarah hadn’t feigned delight when she opened the festive wrapping, she’d just put the slippers straight back in the box, refolding the tissue that protected them as carefully as if she were tucking a baby into bed.