Like One of the Family

by Nesta Tuomey

  Claire had yet to meet Sheena’s father, who was away all that month at a medical conference in Leipzig, but Sheena’s mother made a great fuss of her, getting her to come in out of the sun when she was tired and spending time with her in the cool kitchen, where she snatched frequent coffee breaks between patients. Jane flattered Claire, gave her little jobs to do and rewarded her by treating her like a grown-up.

  The garage was the centre of the children’s play. In it they performed all kinds of dramas, ad libbing as they went along. A big part of their garage repertory consisted of hospital scenarios, in which Terry, Sheena’s twin, insisted on playing his father most of the time, an old stethoscope dangling about his neck; and Sheena their father’s receptionist, or the bossy matron at his hospital, while protesting that she didn’t get to be the doctor more often. Claire and Hugh uncomplainingly acted the young married couple about to have their first baby, who was of course Ruthie.

  ‘Why can’t Claire or I be matron sometimes?’ Ruthie wailed, taking her cue from her sister. But Claire was quite happy to form part of a trio with the younger children.

  She was a little in awe of Terry, who succeeded in bossing everyone except Sheena, who was equally strong-minded. With his cleverness and agile tongue he could make Claire feel foolish, but she couldn’t hate him, only dumbly suffer it. He was too like Sheena.

  The twins, though not identical, were very similar physically, with dark mops of hair curling untidily on their necks, and expressive dark eyes in smooth, round faces. Each exhibited an effortless, unstudied charm and consideration which at once confused and disarmed their adversaries. Together they were formidable. All of them, from Ruthie upwards, had inherited the McArdle charm. When they fought for her favours, Claire felt both privileged and embarrassed.

  One thing wasn’t the same anymore. Claire was no longer Sheena’s twin. Out of school, Terry was restored to his rightful place. Claire felt her separateness keenly and, although they included her in all their games, felt supernumerary most of the time. It helped that Jane singled her out as she did.

  ‘Would you help me carry in the washing? It’s lovely and dry and it may rain later.’

  Claire was down the garden with Jane, behind the apple trees. A line stretched across the patch of grass Terry had begun mowing earlier in the day. He had left the edges untrimmed, the mower abandoned across the path.

  ‘I love my eldest son dearly but I have to admit he’s a minimalist,’ Jane said, stepping over it. Claire took the basket from her and carried it towards the house. ‘Now Hugh is a perfectionist like his father,’ Jane chatted on. ‘As for Ruthie, that little madam. she’s another Meryl Streep.’

  Claire said nothing. She was becoming used to Jane’s way of talking about her husband and children as though writing their biographies.

  As they passed the garage they could hear Terry and Sheena playing there. There was a steady drumming sound, punctuated by Sheena’s high-pitched laugh.

  ‘Come into the kitchen and we’ll make ourselves coffee,’ Jane said, tiptoeing exaggeratedly past the opening. Claire smiled and followed her into the house.

  ‘No need to disturb them.’ With a conspiratorial wink, Jane closed the kitchen door and locked it. ‘This way is more fun.’

  Claire seldom drank coffee but she liked the way Jane made it, sweet and milky. She sipped it slowly and munched shyly on a Kerry Cream.

  ‘Have another,’ Jane urged. ‘Go on! Don’t be polite.’

  Pleased, Claire obeyed, feeling flattered and a little overwhelmed. She glanced discreetly about her and wished that their kitchen at home was even half as roomy as this one so that they could have their meals in it like the McArdles did. The Shannon’s kitchen was little more than a scullery so they ate in the dining-room, sitting about the round mahogany table which took up most of the space. It was very cramped, especially when they had company, with Claire and her mother squeezing awkwardly past, carrying plates and apologising all the time. Claire thought everyone else lived like this until she saw how spacious the McArdle’s house was.

  Jane sat on a chair opposite Claire and cupped her hands around a china mug, sprigged with flowers. She eased her feet out of sling-back sandals and leaned her elbows on the table. ‘Another five minutes,’ she told Claire, ‘then it’s back to the grind.’ She pulled a comical face.

  Jane’s regular receptionist was on holidays and her seventeen year old daughter was standing in for her. After a minute, the girl stuck her head around the kitchen door to say that the next patient was in the waiting-room.

  ‘Okay, Babs. I’ll be right there.’ Jane yawned and sipped her coffee, looking as if nothing would ever move her.

  There was a clattering sound outside the window and a face bobbed into view. It was Terry standing on an upturned bin. He sank out of sight until only his eyes were visible above the sill. ‘We want to come in, Mum,’ he shouted. ‘Open the door.’ He began lashing the bin under him with a stick.

  ‘Stop that racket,’ Jane called, unperturbed. ‘Claire and I are having a chat. Off you go now. You’ll get your turn later.’

  Having a chat. How grown-up it sounded. Claire was suffused with pleasure, which quickly turned to guilt when Terry fisted the window and roared a rude word. Jane just laughed. ‘Brat!’ she said lazily, declining to go after him

  Released in the summer months from the discipline of school time-tables and evening surgery, Jane McArdle had become very relaxed. She let her children run wild, neglected to cut their hair and only remembered their toenails when jagged tears appeared in their canvas runners. Her own hair, which could have done with professional styling, she wore girlishly tied back from her face with one of Sheena’s hair ribbons. During the rest of the year she had no time to go to hairdressers, she maintained, and in summer no inclination. To save herself the chore of cooking she sent Sheena out to the local delicatessen every morning to see what she could find, and their lunches consisted of ham and salami salads one day, pizzas or barbecued chicken the next, and half a dozen buttered baguettes to fill them up. She refused to exert herself more than necessary in the summer months and meals were as labour-saving as she could make them. At the same time, she encouraged Claire to eat with them, saying that it wasn’t worth her while to run home and anyway she was a civilising influence on her own children.

  ‘Look how Claire never grabs but waits for bread to be passed to her,’ Jane praised, horrified at the speed with which her own brood cleared the table.

  ‘She’ll be waiting,’ grinned Terry, swiping the last piece. He gave it a quick lick before his mother made him return it to the plate.

  ‘Someone else might like it.’

  ‘They won’t now,’ he said simply. ‘I’ve put my saliva on it.’

  Jane sighed. Sometimes she wondered why she was sending her children to good schools. They didn’t have the first notion of table manners. Maybe they should all eat together more often. She met Claire’s eye.

  ‘See what I mean?’

  Claire grinned sympathetically. Even if she got a bigger share at home, she considered the McArdle mealtimes were much more fun,.

  Sometimes Jane asked after Annette in an absent kind of way. Claire didn’t say that her mother, after her initial pleasure in their reunion, was resentful of the fact that despite repeated invitations, Jane had so far failed to drop over for coffee and a natter. Just as she didn’t tell Annette that she was no longer passing her invitations on.

  Jane was inclined to fuss over Claire. How pale she was! Was she getting enough rest, eating the right food? She was a great believer in children drinking lots of milk and, when Claire admitted that she never drank a drop at home, slyly made her cups of milky coffee to get it into her that way. Pharmaceutical Companies sent Jane packs of vitamin samples through the post and she often encouraged Claire to take some home with her. No one, not even her mother, had ever shown such interest in Claire’s welfare. She felt warmed yet guilty to be the object of so much concern.


  ‘Don’t be!’ Jane hugged her. ‘I can’t help worrying about you, you little silly.’ Her manner was at once teasing and comradely.

  One day, when they were on their own in the kitchen, she told Claire to pull up her dress and, when Claire shyly revealed her tummy, gave her scar a quick, professional glance.

  ‘It’s healing nicely,’ Jane pronounced. ‘Luckily, you’ll be able to wear a bikini.’

  Claire hadn’t thought that far ahead. The incision had been fairly neat and, over the weeks, it had lost its livid colour.

  ‘By the time you’re my age,’ Jane promised her, ‘it will be just a tiny mother-of-pearl seam.’ She made it sound quite attractive. In this, and in other small ways, she was extremely solicitous of Claire in the weeks after her operation.

  Claire’s parents paid her little attention. The truth was that while they were not unkind to her, they were going through a rough patch themselves and had little emotion left over for anything else. Her mother was silent and abstracted most of the time, deep in her own thoughts. Her father was less and less at home, and when he was there he devoted his time to Christopher, who had always been his favourite. Comfortably ensconced on the couch, the pair of them watched the Wimbledon finals and any other ball that hopped. Claire, passing through on her way to the kitchen, would hear their voices rising to varying pitches of excitement as they recorded the scores. She wondered what it would have been like if Christopher had been a girl instead of a boy. And went back across the road to play with the McArdles.

  Sometimes Sheena dropped over to Claire’s house but mostly left it to Claire to call on her. There was always some activity going on in the McArdle’s garden and little or nothing happening in the Shannon’s. Claire could see that two deckchairs plonked out in the wilderness wasn’t all that inviting,. Nor was the inside of the house any better. The kitchen was poky, with a damp odorous dishcloth permanently draped on the sink, and there was never any iced lemonade like in Sheena’s house. It might have been different if her mother had gone out of her way to make Sheena welcome but any exertion these days seemed beyond Annette. The odd time she remembered to buy biscuits Christopher made short work of them, snacking before the television.

  At first Claire was disappointed by Sheena’s failure to return her visits; it was all so lop-sided somehow. Then she was relieved. It kept her relationship with the McArdles separate, which was what she had really wanted all along. She held on to the hope that when she and Sheena returned to school and Terry was no longer about, it would be the same for them as before.

  One consolation was her friendship with Hugh. Although he was two years younger he was surprisingly sensitive for his age. He owned a cocker spaniel called Hero and let Claire help feed and groom her. By degrees, Claire learned more about the dog. Hero had started out as Terry’s dog – she was given to him for his tenth birthday - but became Hugh’s when Terry got tired of taking her for walks. Or so Terry made out. But this wasn’t the real reason. According to Hugh, Terry was secretly galled at having a dog that wouldn’t answer his whistle or obey his commands to sit or beg so he made a great show of giving her away. From what Claire already knew of Terry she could well believe this.

  Towards the end of June, Hero gave birth to a sizeable litter, too many for her to be able to feed by herself. Hugh fixed up a bed in the tool-shed with plenty of fresh straw from a nearby riding stables and borrowed a doll’s feeding bottle from Ruthie and filled it with warm milk. Claire was thrilled when he asked her if he would like to try her hand at feeding them.

  It was evident that Hugh had his parents’ dedication to preserving life and his father’s skill with his hands. Watching him dose Hero with vitamins, Claire was amazed how he got her to accept the tablets. It was all done so smoothly. She was sorry when the pups got bigger and Hugh no longer needed her. She had never enjoyed anything so much in her life.

  During their coffee sessions in the locked kitchen Jane McArdle sometimes chatted to Claire about the children’s father and Claire couldn’t help feeling curious about Dr Eddie McArdle. She tried to conjure him up from his children’s faces. Hugh and Ruthie were so like Jane it was a safe bet the twins resembled him. She wondered what he would think of her when he returned and found her in his house every day. Would he object to having an extra child about the place, an extra mouth to feed? She felt sensitive about such things, having once heard her mother speak crossly when a schoolfriend regularly lingered on past mealtimes. ‘Hasn’t she a home to go to?’ Annette had grumbled, annoyed at having to stretch the shepherd’s pie to five portions when it was barely enough to feed four people to begin with. At the same time Claire recognised that the McArdles were different. They didn’t calculate so finely - didn’t have to! She had already seen evidence of this in the generous way Jane included her in all the picnics and treats she laid on for her own family.

  Claire began to see Dr McArdle as a slightly romantic figure, physically a cross between Sheena and Terry, yet inexplicably grim and brooding, with granite-hewn features and jutting eyebrows. She was reading Jane Eyre at the time and had unconsciously cast him in the role of Mr Rochester.

  It was a shock to find how closely he resembled a romantic hero.

  Eddie McArdle was broad-shouldered and powerfully muscled, with curly grey-black hair and a beautiful sad smile, which seemed to suggest that no matter what dreadful secrets you told him he would not be surprised or shocked.

  He arrived home from Germany one morning, not long after Jane had set off to collect him at the airport, having somehow got her lines of communication crossed. The children were playing in the garage when he suddenly appeared in their midst. Claire was lying on her back - they were enacting a childbirth scene - and Sheena was instructing her to “breathe deeply” and “bear down, my dear” while Terry pressed the stethoscope against the cushion Claire had shoved under her dress. The twins were noisily encouraging her to moan and scream and when they saw their father, they didn’t stop but, pleased to have an audience, exaggerated their antics.

  ‘Good God, is this what you get up to?’ he asked, genuinely appalled.

  Claire struggled up, feeling mortified. She saw herself as he must see her; an almost grown girl, legs sprawled, playing childish games. Her face reddened as she pulled the cushion from under her dress and quickly hid it behind her. She gave an involuntary cry and held her stomach.

  ‘Labour pains reoccurring, no doubt.’ Dr McArdle sounded sarcastic.

  Tears in her eyes, Claire stared down at the ground. Her tummy really hurt. She must have opened the wound.

  ‘It’s my tummy... I think I’ve pulled my appendix scar.’

  He stared at her for a moment. ‘Come into the house,’ he said, more gently.

  Still clasping the cushion, Claire followed him into Jane’s surgery, where he motioned for her to lie down on the couch. She put the cushion on the floor and eased herself up on to the couch. She felt a little shy, lying there, staring at the walls. There was the sound of water running as Dr McArdle washed his hands.

  He came over and sat on the edge. ‘Let me see.’ His hands were gentle as he pulled up her dress and peeled back her pants. Claire stared fixedly at a spot on the wall behind his right ear. She wondered desperately which knickers she had put on that morning. Annette was very lax these days about taking her shopping, or indeed, doing anything that required effort. With school holidays she had practically abandoned all pretence at housekeeping.

  ‘Nothing too catastrophic,’ he murmured, blotting a globule of fresh blood. ‘You’ll survive.’

  She made to sit up but he gently pushed her back on the couch.

  ‘Hold on. A swab of Betadene and you’ll be right.’ He stood up and crossed the room.

  She looked down at herself, her stomach bared, her faded cotton pants pulled down, revealing pale skin. Oh no, there was a hole in them. She flushed, wishing she could cover herself. Sheena wore flowered sets of lingerie. She wished desperately to have had underwear like Sheen
a’s. She looked away miserably. He was back.

  ‘Be prepared,’ he warned. ‘It’s cool.’

  She gasped as the solution drenched her warm skin. Quick competent fingers swabbed the area and with a grunt he straightened up. She let her breath out slowly. He turned away to put the stained dressing in the pedal bin, giving her time to rearrange her clothing before turning back.

  ‘How old are you, Claire?’

  She was surprised he knew her name.

  ‘Thirteen.’

  ‘I would have put you older. Got your periods yet?’

  She stared at him. She felt hot, confused. No-one ever talked about such things, especially no man. She nodded dumbly. There had been brownish red staining a couple of times so far. Annette had discreetly left a packet of sanitary pads in her room some time before. She told him.

  He nodded. ‘I have some booklets I can give you. Sheena found them helpful. She has hers almost a year.’

  Claire looked down at her hands. She and Sheena had not spoken yet of such things.

  ‘You’re both fairly young starting. Means you’ll go on longer. Possibly have babies in your fifties... if you want that.’

  She shook her head. Was she really having this conversation? She tried to imagine sharing the same dialogue with her father and failed. But then her father wasn’t a doctor.

  ‘It seems rather old,’ she ventured.

  ‘No accounting for tastes, is there?’ He smiled at her. ‘Modern young women want to put it off as long as possible. Careers first, babies later. You won’t be like that, will you, Claire?’

  Careers! Babies! She didn’t know how to answer him.

  He laughed, reading her thoughts. ‘That’s all a long way off... still, maybe not so far away.’ He looked at her consideringly. ‘You are mature for your age... your body strong, well developed. You are already taller than Sheena by an inch, I should say.’