Midland

by James Flint

  ‘I think we’re all going to feel pretty wretched for quite a while yet.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He looked around the kitchen for something else to do with his hands. ‘Shall I put the kettle on?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Please. I’ve got lunch if you’d like some. There’s a fresh loaf and Connie went over to Evesham yesterday and brought back some lovely sliced ham.’

  ‘I’m not really that hungry, to be honest. Just a cup of tea will be fine. Is Connie here? I didn’t see her car.’

  ‘I gave her the day off. She’s going to have her work cut out for the rest of the week, so I thought it would only be fair. I had to practically force her. She wouldn’t hear of it to begin with. She’s such a dear.’

  The kettle began to rumble and Sheila took the opportunity to sit at the kitchen table and collect her thoughts. This alone was unusual; Sean could not remember her ever sitting there and letting someone else make the tea. When he brought over a cup she was gazing out of the French windows and over the long patio at the fields beyond, on whose left-hand side you could just make out the summit and eastern slope of Round Hill rising anomalously out of the Warwickshire plain. The view of the hill was much better from Sean’s old bedroom window, from which vantage point the house and the hedges didn’t get in the way, and he had looked out at its silhouette every day of his teenage years. But there was something about that image that had been bugging him for the longest time, and now, all at once, it came to him. The shape. He’d have to check back through his photographs, but he could swear that the curve of the hill’s dome was almost exactly the same as that of la Duna do Por do Sol as seen from the Club Vayu in Rosaventos. God, how peculiar was that?

  ‘I called Jamie,’ he said abruptly, before he could change his mind about broaching the subject of his half-brother.

  Sheila reached for her tea with two hands.

  ‘Did you? I was wondering if you would.’

  ‘Tony was his father, too.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you have preferred that I hadn’t?’

  ‘No. I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ve been to see him, you know. A couple of times.’

  ‘Yes. I thought you might have done.’ Sheila had set down her teacup again and was sitting brittle and motionless, as though the slightest vibration might crack her.

  ‘Did Dad know?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I didn’t want him to know.’

  ‘I think that was wise.’

  ‘I didn’t want to hurt him.’ Sean swallowed, unsure how far he could go. ‘I didn’t want him to hurt Jamie.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or Caitlin.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or you.’

  Around them the house hovered, listened, held its breath, and for a moment it was as if they were no longer on Earth but on a strange island spun from the tides of a far distant planet. And then Sheila reached her hand across this interstellar divide, clasped her son’s fingers, and squeezed. As she did so, the doorbell rang.

  ‘That will be the wine merchants,’ she said. ‘With the drinks.’ She sighed, a momentous sigh that closed the wormhole that had, just for an instant, collapsed space and time. ‘You couldn’t be a dear, Sean, and go and let them in? They’re going to need help.’

  Sean smiled and pushed back his chair.

  ‘Of course Mum,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’m here for.’

  —————

  Seven miles away in Snitterfield, Margaret Wold was staring at a tree through a window. The tree was one of the two large cedars that stood to the west and the south of her house, and the window was one of the many that formed the eastern wall of her aged conservatory. She was thinking about her garden and, by extension, the land all around: the woods, the rivers, the farms. She was thinking about the land and the sky, and the relationship between them. Thinking too about the rain, or rather the lack of it. Here they were, in January, the depths of winter, and there was a drought. It was absurd, but there it was. It was on the news. On Gardeners’ Question Time. A hosepipe ban. That was the threat. In January!

  She picked up a plastic watering can, tomato-red in colour but here and there gnawed grey by the dogs, and positioned it beneath a tap, lagged with rags, that poked out from the whitewashed conservatory wall. First the Argyranthemum, then the Dianthus, then the Datura. They didn’t need much, this time of year, the poor things. Just to be kept damp while they were sleeping. The Ficus was already beginning to shoot, which was early. And the Clivia needed a drink.

  A twist of her wrist – wrenching the usual twinge from her joints – and out shot a veined plait of icy water. It broke across the bottom of the drum and belched a methane-rich cloud of algae-stink up through the neck of the vessel.

  It was a smell that never failed to trigger a memory of one of the many gardens Margaret and Miles had visited. On this occasion visions of Cornwall’s Heligan, where the two of them had spent a glorious day just the year before last, rose up in her mind. Margaret felt the sap of emotion rise in her chest at the thought, and swallowed it back.

  Miles. How strange that she should have met him because he handled the sale of the house in Walsall after she and Tony had finalised their divorce. She’d had no idea what she was doing and had gone with the first number she’d found in the Yellow Pages. What if she’d picked a different firm, or if a different person had picked up the phone the day that she’d called? Would Emily, Alex and Matthew never have been? Would all their troubles and trials, their achievements and upsets, the whole family tapestry they had woven together in this house they’d all shared, would that just wink out of existence? It had to be so. And how terrifying was that, how utterly, completely contingent? That everything she counted on to be most solid hung on the stitch of one random call. Well, that and the peculiar incompatibility of her and Tony Nolan’s reproductive systems. They’d never known for sure what had caused it. More recently she’d read that a woman’s immune system can attack and reject a man’s sperm if it doesn’t give out the right molecular signals, but back then no one knew anything about any of that. Back then things were so very different. Back then it was somehow her fault, her failure. And Tony’s fault, in the eyes of his family, for marrying a non-Catholic like her.

  It wasn’t just his parents that had opposed the match – hers had too, although their prejudice had not been religion but class. The Nolans were descended from the wave of Irish labourers that had come to Walsall to work the limekilns and the gasworks in the mid-nineteenth century. They’d made good since then, had built up a small but profitable electromechanical business of their own, with solid contracts supplying the Lincoln Works, one of the town’s biggest employers, and they lived three streets away from the Jacksons in a house of comparable size. But the taint of the western slums of St Peter’s parish was hard to shift. Margaret’s mother thought her dazzled by Tony’s smile and Kerry wit; her father, a council architect and planner, wouldn’t even grant her that, and had seen the whole relationship as some kind of token Sixties rebellion. And maybe they’d both been partly right, in their way. But Tony’s sense of purpose, his raw intelligence, his profound aura of struggle, of determination – these things had touched her deeply. He had never seemed to her just another boy following his father into the family firm, and so it had proved. Half the county seemed to owe Tony Nolan something now, and countless more besides. Even her father, bless him, ended up teasing her that she might have been better off staying married to him.

  But then he’d gone and betrayed her, hadn’t he? And for that, all these years on, she really did still blame his mother. Margaret didn’t like to speak ill of the dead, but she had not once managed to think a charitable thought about Ena Nolan. A short, oblong, armoured personnel carrier of a woman, Ena had waged a slow campaign of attrition against their marriage, needling Tony so incessantly and upsettingly about their childlessness that – in Margaret’s view – she’d all but driven him in
to the arms of Janice Blake, just so he could prove to Ena that the fault was not his.

  Margaret would never forget the expression of glee in her eyes when Ena broke the news. Yes, because it had been from her that she’d heard about Janice. That had been the culminating reason she’d left. Not the infidelity. She could have forgiven Tony that. Had done, in fact. But letting her find out from her mother-in-law? With a few decades’ perspective she could see that he couldn’t have known that Ena would do something so blatant, so base, and so – and here she checked herself at the politically incorrect content of the thought – so female in its raw emotional cruelty. And he’d said as much at the time. But that missed the point, and this was the attendant male naïvety that to Margaret’s mind proved the gendered nature of the tactic: it was the fact that he even gave his mother the opportunity to do such a thing that so hurt and outraged her, more than the fact of its being done.

  Ena hadn’t been able to accept Janice either, of course, the illegitimate nature of the proof her son had offered had seen to that, and after Tony had torn himself to shreds discovering that he could make neither woman happy he had written to Margaret and asked if they could meet.

  Margaret was engaged to Miles by then, and living in a room rented from a family in Alvechurch where she’d found a position as a primary school teacher, so she felt secure enough to agree to the request. But she couldn’t very well have Tony come to visit her in her digs, so she suggested instead that they meet in Rackhams tearoom one Saturday.

  On the date in question she’d travelled into central Birmingham on one of the city’s fleet of black and cream Daimler double-deckers, buses that had always reminded her of humbugs, and got off at the stop right outside the department store. She loved Rackhams: its immaculate concrete corners and two-tone blue window panels were the most modern thing in Corporation Street and promised a future more clarified and convenient than the tough, constrained decades that had followed the war. So caught up was she by this notion that when she saw Tony waiting for her by the entrance she wondered if she’d made a mistake in choosing the store as a venue. Because he surely belonged to her past now, a part of all that messy stuff that stores like Rackhams suggested she could parcel up and leave firmly behind.

  They went upstairs and found a table and the waitress took their order for a pot of Lipton’s and a plate of shortbread. While they waited Tony pulled out his cigarettes and began to smoke, a habit Margaret had always abhorred.

  ‘You haven’t given that up then?’ she observed.

  Tony grinned apologetically. ‘No. Do you want me to put it out?’

  She glanced around. Half the people in the room had cigarettes in their hands, but the ventilation system seemed to be coping. ‘It’s fine.’

  Their tea came. He pushed the biscuits towards her, toyed with his cup. He seemed unwilling to talk, which wasn’t like Tony. In the end she had to prompt him.

  ‘Come on then. What is it? You didn’t bring me here just to blow smoke in my face.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ Tony stubbed out his cigarette. ‘The old man’s had a stroke.’

  ‘Oh Anthony. Oh that’s terrible. Is it very bad?’

  ‘Pretty bad. He’s been paralysed down the whole of one side. He can’t work.’

  ‘Who’s looking after him?’

  ‘Ma, of course. She blames me though.’

  No surprise there, Margaret thought. ‘Why?’

  ‘You can ask me that?’

  ‘The divorce?’

  ‘That. Janice too. She’s refusing to have anything to do with me, still. Won’t accept any help, won’t even let me see the boy. I’ve heaped up a big pile of it, Maggie. A lot has been said.’

  ‘You’ve had it out with Ena?’

  Tony lit another cigarette. ‘A lot has been said.’

  That was the apology. If she had blinked she’d have missed it. It was more like an admission of guilt, to be honest. But it was close enough. Immediately Margaret could sense the flux of anger that still pulsed within her begin to subside.

  ‘I’m going to have to take over the business,’ Tony continued.

  ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘I’ve got to. Patrick and Conor aren’t ready for it.’

  ‘All right. Well. If you want my opinion, I think you can do it.’

  ‘I’ll give it my best shot.’

  ‘You’ll be fine Anthony. I know you. And if you ever need any moral support around Ena – or Janice – you know where I am.’

  Tony nodded. ‘She wants to call him Jamie.’

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘It’s a name, isn’t it? Not my choice.’

  Margaret saw his eyes, always so green and clear, blur briefly with fluid. She reached across the table, took his hand, gave it a squeeze.

  ‘You can always call me if you need to. Miles won’t mind.’

  ‘Thank you Maggie. You’re a good girl. Too good for me.’

  She shook her head. Now it was her turn to fight back the tears. ‘It just wasn’t meant to be, that’s all. Friends?’

  ‘Yes. Please. Friends.’

  They finished their tea, the waitress came by and they paid. As they were preparing to leave, Tony gave her another surprise.

  ‘I’ve started going to church, you know.’

  Margaret looked at him and laughed, partly with genuine amazement and partly with relief at the change in his mood. ‘You haven’t? After everything that’s happened?’

  ‘I was walking past one day and I found myself going inside. And just sitting at the back, you know. Thinking. Not doing confession or anything.’

  ‘Did it help?’

  ‘A little, maybe.’

  ‘Good. Be careful though,’ Margaret teased, attempting jest but failing to prevent it from being tainted by venom. ‘They suck you in.’

  On the humbug bus back to Alvechurch, a Rackhams bag filled with yarns from the haberdashery on her knee and a pretty mauve cardigan that had caught her eye round her shoulders, Margaret experienced a sense of hopefulness so distinct that even all these years later she could still vividly recall it. At that moment it had seemed that her life, which had earlier taken such a terrible and destructive diversion, was heading back in the right direction again, and that everything was going to work out for the best.

  And so it had proved. She and Tony had indeed remained friends. She had gone on to marry Miles and have three lovely children; he to marry Sheila and father Caitlin and Sean. And of course Tony had not only taken over Nolan Engineering but had gradually transformed it into an electronics company of some significance, adapting what became NolCalc to the advent of the integrated circuit and the semiconductor and guiding it through the oil shocks of the early Seventies, Britain’s entry into the Common Market and the Winter of Discontent. In the 1980s the company even produced a machine – the Torus – that nuzzled out a niche on a silicon savannah already alive with Lynxes, Commodores, Ataris, Sinclairs, Acorns and Amstrads, brands with which Margaret became familiar when she and Miles bought a couple of them as educational tools for their children, although to Margaret’s disappointment they had seemed to use them largely for playing those awful video games.

  By this time NolCalc had relocated to a business park in Edgbaston and Tony had moved his family to a house in Shelfield, which Miles had found for them just as the home-computer marketplace was swamped by the IBM PCs pouring in from America – a development that Margaret remembered as a cloud hanging over the sale at the time. But the experience of building the Torus had given NolCalc the ability to adapt, and Tony switched over to producing car phones just as they became a serious business accessory, a decision that made him a very rich man.

  She and Miles hadn’t done too badly either, Margaret reflected. Certainly they’d had a very comfortable existence on the back of the ever-inflating property market, although it wasn’t a patch on Tony’s success. But all those comfortable years, all those cars and houses and holidays and private educations,
had it made any of them genuinely happy? Had her premonition on the bus outside Rackhams in 1968 actually, in the end, been correct? Because look at Tony, dead now, ravaged by lung cancer from all those horrible cigarettes he’d smoked, gone to his grave unreconciled with Jamie and barely on speaking terms with his daughter. And while she and Miles were stable enough, Alex and Matthew were forever at each other’s throats and poor lovely Emily, the most sensible one of them all, was having such terrible problems finding a job, not to mention a husband. If anything, life for her children appeared to be getting harder and more complicated as time went on, and she worried for them now more than—

  ‘Oh!’

  The water had overflowed, she’d lost her grip on the can, and there was the Clivia in a clump on the floor: a molehill of soil crowned with terracotta shards and mashed, startled stalks, with the water pooling darkly around it and soaking into her deck shoes – Matthew’s deck shoes, really, cast-offs from years before, though she’d got more use out of them than he ever had.

  She shut off the tap and lifted the watering can in an underhand grip by one of its struts, feeling the muscles tighten down her back and pull on her hip as she did so. The hip sang out sharply with pain, a high note over the deep bass ache that never really went away. Nor would it ever, now, she supposed. Part of her wanted just to let go, to drop the can on the floor and leave the mess to its own devices. But that part had never been given much rein, and kick and scream though it might she didn’t see any reason to give in to it now, bad joints or not. And there was the broken plant in the midst of it all, reaching up to her in supplication.

  ‘Oh dear, oh you poor thing. What have I done?’

  Talking to plants now, was she? A sure sign she was losing her marbles.

  Then: Emily’s voice, calling to her from somewhere inside the house.

  ‘Mum? Is everything all right?’

  A pause. Trembling hands.

  ‘Fine, dear. It’s all fine. Don’t you worry.’

  She went down on her knees, began to pick the sharp pieces of pottery from the damp rooty tangle.