by Jenny Eclair
Bel loves a scented bath. Expensive bath oils are one of her few extravagances. It comes from being brought up in a home where her mother insisted on all soaps being triple-milled and French. Bel has sensitive skin; anything cheap brings her out in a rash. She has to be very careful what she uses, for example, the bath bombs Maisie bought her for her birthday set her vagina on fire, she might as well have rubbed her genitalia with chilli powder.
Posh soaps and scented drawer liners, her mother made such an effort to keep things nice. Everything on the surface had been so perfect, so ordered and yet . . .
Don’t go there, she admonishes herself. Her past is a scab she has learned not to pick; it is so much less painful if she leaves it alone. Pulling herself together, Bel surveys the contents of the fridge. For a moment she thinks about making her own pesto. She has a pestle and mortar, but she hasn’t got fresh basil – and anyway, she can’t be bothered.
No, tonight it’s dried pasta and pesto from a jar, but she will set the kitchen table and be generous about opening a decent bottle of wine. Red or white with pesto, she wonders. What would Natasha choose?
Her mother had been a stickler for doing things properly. Every evening in Claverley Avenue, where Bel grew up, her mother set the dining table with a proper cloth and matching napkins – late-fifties-style wedding gifts mostly, varying from simple Irish green linen to extravagant lace numbers. On top of the tablecloth she placed circular melamine mats, each featuring a different species of rose. Napkins were rolled into silver rings and slim red candles placed in silver candlesticks. Natasha took her table settings and flower arranging seriously, she had a book of Constance Spry designs and collected all sorts of accessories with which to experiment. Bel recalls a scaled-down ornamental wicker wheelbarrow containing a selection of spider plants jauntily placed on an Ercol sideboard.
That’s all the rage again now, all the mid-twentieth-century stuff that only a few years ago everyone was slinging into skips.
Her blood-pressure monitor squeezes her arm so tight at this moment that she finds herself gasping. Sod the thing, she can’t even have a bath tonight, the nurse had made it very clear she mustn’t get it wet. What a complete drag. If Benji were alive she would take him for a walk; she doubts she’s done more than three thousand steps in any one day since the poor thing was put out of his misery.
‘I can’t see what’s so miserable about lying in front of the fire farting all day,’ Jamie had sniped.
‘Yeah,’ Ed laughed, ‘if that was the criteria for human euthanasia, Mum, you’d be well fucked.’ And Maisie had laughed until she was slightly hysterical.
There are six around the dinner table this evening. It’s a dreary rainy night in April; Maisie and Ed can’t afford to go out, Jamie has no one to go out with, and Andrew doesn’t like going out if he can help it and would be happy to spend the rest of his life eating supper off a tray in front of the television. He isn’t fussy about what he eats, the only thing he doesn’t like is bony fish. If she gave him baked beans and sausages for the rest of his days, he’d be quite happy. Thank goodness for Andrew, thinks Bel, allowing herself a brief moment of congratulation for having chosen a man who is so very different from her adoptive father, a man who wasn’t afraid to lift his hand to either women or children, a man who was proud to call himself a disciplinarian, when in truth he’d been sadistic. In hindsight, Hugo was probably to blame for a lot of Natasha’s behaviour. What’s that phrase she heard on Woman’s Hour the other day? Coercive control. Her father was a bully and, even though the circumstances had been traumatic, it was a relief when he died.
Andrew, by contrast, is a pussy cat in an extra-large Marks and Spencer’s woollen jumper. He does need to lose some weight though, she thinks fondly, deciding that Lance’s party in August will be a good diet incentive for both of them.
‘Pasta and pesto,’ chorus the boys, spying the ingredients out on the counter after she calls them down.
‘Retro,’ adds Ed, and Maisie giggles, signalling that she is in a good mood, which is a relief because when she isn’t giggly she is morose and prone to weepiness. Having Maisie as a house guest for the past few months, Bel is now glad she never had a daughter. Her son’s girlfriend is mercurial in her moods; everything seems to affect how she is feeling. She is allergic to an ever-changing roster of food groups, sometimes dairy, other times gluten, she won’t touch sprouts and gets sulky if an avocado which looks perfectly normal in the fruit bowl turns out to have gone brown inside. Maisie takes everything personally.
Bel must walk around on eggshells, weight must never be mentioned, spots are a no-go area, and yet Maisie will sit in front of the television and systematically reduce every female to ‘hag or slag’.
That’s another thing – the sofa. Once upon a time when the boys were little and went to bed at a reasonable hour, Bel had the sofa all to herself. Now the sofa is full of twenty-somethings. Maisie takes one corner and arranges her legs over Ed, who sits in the middle, while Jamie takes the other corner and Bel is relegated to the second-best armchair.
How have they allowed this to happen, how come she has bred chicks who refuse to leave the nest? What will it take to get rid of them?
Obviously she knows she’s not the only one currently sailing this particularly overcrowded boat. God knows, it’s London, and with Brexit still ongoing no one has a clue what’s happening; rents are ridiculous, mortgages impossible to get hold of and jobs that aren’t badly paid and menial seem incredibly hard to come by.
Bel grates some parmesan and thinks fondly back to the eighties, how easy it was to be independent back then. You could literally walk into a job off the street, careers in journalism and advertising welcoming you with open arms and expense accounts. There were grants and schemes for people who wanted to be creative, and if you couldn’t afford rent then you squatted.
Bel racks her brains but she can’t recall anyone back then over the age of twenty who lived at home with their parents, not unless they had something medically wrong with them, like Brenda Ennis’s poor wheelchair-bound brother, Trevor.
Parents were different back then too. They wouldn’t have tolerated the smoking and drinking and soft-drug-taking that is considered the norm nowadays, not to mention the casual promiscuity and the daylight hours spent in bed, the ridiculous facial hair and sloppy ‘chill-out’ clothes. Bel has a sudden image of her father silently eating breakfast in a shirt and tie, her mother running in and out of the kitchen fetching him his toast, his fury if the butter in the dish was too hard to spread. ‘Strewth Natasha, is it too much to ask?’ Her mother’s instant apology and accompanying too-bright smile, the smile that gave Bel the tummy ache she could never explain to anyone.
Fortunately, before Bel gets truly maudlin, it’s time to put supper on the table, and the kitchen is humming with noise and chatter and a slight whiff of BO. Jamie can be terribly shower shy.
Tonight her sons resemble giant toddlers with beards; both are wearing jogging bottoms, although neither has been jogging in years. The fleece-lined trousers – bottle green for Ed, navy for Jamie – resemble the first pull-up trousers she dressed them in for nursery. Zipless and buttonless, so they could manage trips to the bathroom more easily.
It dawns on her in that moment that her sons don’t possess a single tie between them. If she dropped down dead this evening, they wouldn’t have anything to wear for her funeral.
The idea of her unshaven, out-of-shape sons sitting in a church pew, wearing tracksuit bottoms and T-shirts with rude words on them makes her want to weep. She’s glad that death would render her incapable of witnessing the spectacle.
In stark contrast to the boys, Maisie is wearing skin-tight burgundy pleather trousers and what looks like a pair of high-heeled wooden clogs.
Bel has been on a steep learning curve over the last six months. The world of young women is very different from that of her sons. For starters, there is a lot of obsessing over eyebrow shapes and the ‘right’ kind of
yoga pants.
‘Oh, I didn’t know you did yoga,’ Bel had commented – foolishly, as it turns out. Maisie doesn’t like yoga, but she occasionally likes wearing trousers with a gusset that reaches her knees.
On the plus side, girls eat a lot less. Jamie and Ed eat like shire horses. They scoop whole tubs of hummus onto entire packets of pitta bread in a single sitting. There is no point in buying anything smaller than a bag of crisps the size of a pillow. Maisie on the other hand picks at food like a bird, especially in company. She is forever pushing her food around, or ‘playing with it’ as Bel’s mother would say.
The way she uses her cutlery makes Bel wince too. She cuts everything up before discarding the knife completely and transferring her fork into her right hand and stabbing at her meal. ‘Is she left-handed?’ she’d asked Ed, but it turns out this is the way some people like to eat. ‘And anyway,’ her son had snapped, ‘what’s the big deal?’
I was brought up to believe that it is rude to wave your cutlery in the air, thinks Bel, and that elbows on the table are the height of bad manners.
If Natasha – or God help her, Hugo – were here tonight, neither of them would understand why a group of young adults were slouched around the kitchen table in various states of inappropriate dress. Maisie is sporting a cropped orange top, which is basically little more than a bra. A bra, at the dinner table! Jamie has a filthy baseball cap perched on top of his unwashed hair, while Ed is wearing what is commonly known as a wife-beater, which means that every time he reaches for something on the other side of the table, his gingery underarm hair brushes over the salad.
‘Ed, why don’t you ask someone to pass you the salt?’ she snaps.
‘Because I can reach it,’ he responds, lifting one buttock off his chair to squeak out a fart.
Even Andrew is letting the side down. Her husband has taken off his shoes and socks because his ingrown toenail is hurting, and has sat down to dinner with bare feet. It’s like a chimpanzees’ tea party.
The blood-pressure monitor starts its infernal buzz the moment she lifts her fork to her lips.
‘What in fuck’s name is that?’ asks Ed. When Bel tells him, they all snigger.
‘It sounds like a vibrator,’ titters Maisie, colouring slightly and glancing at Ed.
It’s enough to make you puke. Bel can’t see what’s so clever about sex toys. She knows Ed and Maisie have a whole drawer full of silicone dildos and objects that require batteries; she found them when she went on a snooping mission and now wishes she hadn’t. Fact is, thinks Bel, if you’re already bored of gadget-free sex by the time you’re twenty-something, then God help you by the time you reach fifty.
To change the subject, she produces the invitation she received earlier.
‘Lance has invited us to his fiftieth,’ she announces.
‘Fiftieth what?’ asks Ed, reaching for the last of the Merlot. Two bottles don’t go far between six.
‘Birthday, of course. His half-century.’
‘I think I’ll put my head in the oven when I turn fifty,’ sneers Maisie, and Bel is tempted to retort, Good idea, then you’ll have cooked at least one thing in your life.
But she doesn’t. Maisie’s thin little South London voice grates. Where did she grow up again? Croydon, wasn’t it? She went to school with those girls that bullied Cicely Frayn’s daughter on the bus.
‘Well some people think turning fifty is worth celebrating,’ Bel retorts huffily. She’s sick to death of being patronised by young people.
Five years ago, Bel and Andrew went to Paris for her ‘big five-O’. They spent a fortune on an expensive hotel and she started a period as soon as they arrived. It wasn’t even due, she had nothing on her and it was one of those frightful clotty kinds of bleeds. She had to sit on the lavatory until Andrew managed to get some pads from the local supermarché. So that had been romantic.
‘Who is Lance, anyway?’ Maisie asks. She has a habit of making a question sound like an accusation, as if his very existence should be called into question.
‘Lance is my . . . ’ and Bel pauses as she does every time she has to explain. He is not her brother; they share not a shred of DNA. ‘Lance is,’ she starts again, ‘Lance is my non-blood brother.’ Maisie doesn’t even blink, and Bel continues, ‘I was adopted, but Lance wasn’t, he was my parents’ birth child.’
‘I wouldn’t mind adopting,’ Maisie responds, turning the conversation immediately back to herself, as she so often does. ‘You know, like one of them Chinese babies, cos they’re so cute. Ah, a little chubby Chinese baby.’
Bel interrupts – she actually holds her hand up like a policeman – and says, ‘I beg your pardon, Maisie, but I believe, for once, we were talking about me.’
There is a silence around the dinner table. She can feel her sons squirm. ‘The fact is,’ she continues.
‘Oh, here we go,’ interrupts Jamie and he mimes playing a tiny invisible violin against his plump shoulder.
Bel shoots him a withering look and takes up the thread of her story again. ‘I was an abandoned baby,’ she begins, pausing while Jamie proceeds to beat out the cliff-hanger sequence from the EastEnders theme tune.
12
The Housekeeper’s Tale
Kittiwake House, Cornwall, 1963
She was wiping a damp cloth around a window frame on the landing when she first heard it. A cat, thought Bren, or maybe even the shriek of a mouse caught by a cat? No doubt she would stumble upon a bloodied little grey corpse soon enough – though headless mice didn’t bother her, being a farmer’s wife.
But then she heard it again and this time her breasts tightened, which was odd. Bren was in her fifties, it was over twenty years since she’d fed her babies, but the sound was undeniable: a baby, there was a newborn baby nearby. Bren’s nipples tingled like a bloodhound’s nose as she checked all the rooms along the first-floor corridor, the wail growing progressively louder with each step.
She found the baby in the mistress’s old bedroom, wrapped in black velvet and tucked up in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe. It was a good job the tot was crying, otherwise Bren might have accidentally closed the drawer and left the infant to suffocate amongst the piles of rust-spotted sheets and ancient plaid blankets.
A girl (she had a quick peek to check) no more than a couple of weeks old, a tiny scrap of a thing. Not much to look at, as bald as a potato, spotty all over – milk rash, most likely. Sickly, too. Lucky to have survived, you might say.
It was the February of 1963 and the winter had been long and lethal, snowing even in Cornwall. No one had ever seen anything like it, the sea frozen into a block of ice like a science experiment.
Bren carried the baby back to the farmhouse, swaddled her in an old apple crate by the Aga, and watched as her little blue fingers turned pinker by the minute. It was as if the baby was defrosting.
Matthew went mad when he came in from the fields. ‘This isn’t some kind of dumping ground for waifs and strays,’ he bellowed. ‘It’s not a depository for lost-and-found brats.’
But as Bren explained, the baby was Kittiwake lost property, and as such she was Bren’s responsibility. ‘There’s such a thing as loyalty,’ she told him. ‘They trust me, I’ve been working up at that house for the past fifteen years, ever since the Carmichaels bought it from that actor chappy . . . ’
‘It’s primarily a vacation home,’ Peggy Carmichael had explained in her American accent, waving her bejewelled hand airily, prisms of light bouncing off her diamond-and-emerald rings. ‘But when we do come down from London for holidays or the occasional weekend, I shall expect flowers in the drawing room, the fire laid and few simple provisions in the kitchen – milk, eggs, bacon, bread and so forth.’
As it transpired, the Carmichaels were accompanied by their own staff whenever they did visit. A cook, a butler and a ‘mother’s help’ were all driven down a day or so before the family and, once they were all in situ, Bren was expected to find a girl from the village to come in
and help her clean on a daily basis.
It wasn’t a bad job as jobs go, better than gutting fish in the factory down the road, and it was interesting to see how the other half lived.
Peggy Carmichael had some rather outré ideas about décor and colour schemes. As for her clothes, they were ridiculously impractical for Cornwall. Heels and dimpled ostrich leather handbags on the beach, for heaven’s sake, and a cartwheel-sized straw hat from Chanel that constantly blew off in the wind.
Mrs Carmichael hated the weather when it didn’t match her expectations and she would stomp around in her ridiculous shoes, muttering, ‘This godforsaken fucking country, it’s the only goddamn place in the world where you need a sable in April.’
But it was nice to see the place being used again. And as soon as they all went back to London, Bren and her village girl got to clear out whatever was left in the big American fridge that stood like a giant stainless steel thumb in Kittiwake’s otherwise traditional kitchen.
Duck pâté and whole sides of smoked salmon went into the rucksack she kept specifically for the purpose, along with half-drunk bottles of blood-red wine and fancily labelled Napoleon brandy. Once she purloined a few cigars from the silver box Teddy Carmichael kept in his study, but Matthew pronounced them filthy, threw them on the fire and went back to his tin of tobacco.
Then came that fateful Easter holiday when the boy died. Ivor, the eldest son and heir, the sweetest and politest of the three Carmichael children. She’d heard the bells of the ambulance that April morning and stood on the steps of the farmhouse watching the drama unfurl from a distance, had seen the butler carrying out the child’s body. Peggy’s screams had carried on the wind, eerily similar to the screeching of the birds that wheeled around the cliffs below the house. She could never hear them again without thinking of poor Peggy Carmichael.
