The Twilight Hour

by Nicci Gerrard

  ‘Do I argue, you mean?’ He thought for a moment. ‘It has to matter a great deal and even then, I think I’ve learnt that you can never win an argument in a relationship. What does it mean to triumph over someone you love?’

  ‘Oh.’ Thea made a face. ‘That’s a bit virtuous. I love arguing. I can’t stand it when the other person won’t. It makes me spitting mad. Of course, I’ve not had many long-term relationships. Actually, I probably haven’t had any. I definitely haven’t had any. I have flings.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes. Much more exciting. Grandpa’s scattered there.’ She nodded toward the hornbeam tree. ‘We all came for the ceremony. Gran scattered his ashes and some of us read poems.’

  ‘Did Eleanor read anything?’

  ‘No. She’s a very private person. I think there are lots of things she never says. She holds them inside herself. She’s full of hiding places.’

  For one moment, Peter thought about Eleanor’s secret – though he still only had hold of the slippery edge of it yet.

  ‘She is,’ he said. ‘But isn’t everyone? We all have to have our secret selves.’

  He didn’t meet Eleanor during the day, though from his window he saw her walking slowly with Rose through the garden. She didn’t have her stick, and was instead resting her hand on her grand-daughter’s arm. The old woman looked frail and weary; her skin, thought Peter, was like paper just before it catches fire, brittle and crumpling. Her expression was sad and stern. Beside her, Rose bloomed; she was supple and smooth. Her pale cheeks glowed and her bright hair shone in the winter sun. She bent towards her grandmother, intent on her. Were they talking about how she would soon leave this place? He hated to think of Eleanor in a home, however well run it was. Sitting in one room, with all the belongings she could no longer see removed from her. Then she could only look back, at the long journey that had taken her to this resting place, this waiting room as she called it.

  Now Rose had her arms around Eleanor’s shoulders. Her copper locks were mingled with her grandmother’s silver-white ones. Soon he would be gone and they would be like figures from a dream. He turned back to his work but his heart wasn’t in it. He wanted to hear about Eleanor and Gil and this Michael from Leeds, who’d travelled on the Red Train to Spain. Peter had read several books about the Spanish Civil War. The war where poets drove ambulances and idealists lost hope and everyone betrayed everyone else. Poor Gil. How could solid kindness compete with such death-soaked glamour?

  Thea and Rose, it turned out, were staying the night. He wouldn’t talk to Eleanor alone, then, but he would have dinner with the three of them.

  ‘Rose and Thea are cooking,’ said Eleanor. ‘I fancy that means Rose is cooking. I don’t think Thea knows how. Though she used to love helping me in the kitchen when she was little.’ Eleanor put her hand out flat, palm down, to indicate Thea’s size.

  He could smell garlic and chilli and also something sweet. Apples, cinnamon, the comfort of baking. He thought of the painting he’d seen in Amsterdam when he was there with Kaitlin. The woman pouring milk. Her yellow blouse and white kerchief, her strong hands holding and steadying the earthenware jug, the bread in its wicker basket and the whitewashed walls in light that fell softly from a window that was only just in the picture. Her intense absorption in the task; her stillness and the flow of the milk. Kaitlin had stood beside him with her arms folded, gazing up. She was the Vermeer maid’s antidote: restless, sharp-boned, dissatisfied, sexy. Very sexy. She had red nails and red lips and eyes that flicked from person to person, assessing, dismissing, desiring; she always knew when she was being looked at. She had taken him from the picture to a coffee house where they had smoked a joint so strong it had made his brain reel and his body melt and burn. He remembered the way Kaitlin had sat like the wick of a candle in the haze of blue smoke, hair dark golden, smile cruel and sweet.

  ‘Peter!’ Thea’s voice ringing up the stairs. ‘Time to eat!’

  They had all changed for dinner. Thea wore a lurid purple tee-shirt, with a picture of a ladybird on it. There were words underneath, just large enough for Peter to read without seeming to stare at her flat breasts. ‘More bird than lady.’ Her bare arms were shockingly white and thin; her hands seemed too large; her boots too heavy for her skinny legs to lift. When she lifted a pile of plates to set on the table, her shirt rode up and Peter could see the edge of a tattoo on the small of her back. Rose had put on a moss-green shirt and tied her hair up. Her face, without make-up, was flushed from cooking. And Eleanor had unearthed a long blue dress, too big for her emaciated body and whose hem brushed the floor and sleeves came over her arthritic hands. She had looped a long bead necklace round her neck that chinked when she moved, and put on pink lipstick. She looked like a girl who’d been delving into a dressing-up box.

  ‘Something smells good.’

  ‘Rose has made us a three-course meal,’ said Eleanor. ‘We seem to be celebrating something – what is it?’

  ‘Being here.’

  ‘Being here. Yes. The final days.’

  ‘Gran,’ Rose said. ‘We’ve talked about this. You know you have choices. You can live with Mum; she’s all alone and lonely in a house that’s too big for her, and she wants you to.’

  ‘No. She doesn’t. We would drive each other quite mad.’

  ‘Or Quentin, or Leon.’

  Why not Samuel, Peter wondered. Samuel who leapt over hedges. The one Eleanor worried about the most.

  ‘No, my dear. Not with Quentin or Leon either. Or Samuel, for that matter,’ she added as if responding to Peter’s unasked question. ‘I’ve always sworn never to let my children become my carers.’ She set her hands before her on the table. ‘I really would rather be dead.’

  ‘But if people want to, then—’

  ‘No.’ Her voice was harsh.

  Thea put a glass of wine in Peter’s hand. He sipped it and looked at the soft fuzz of hair on the nape of Rose’s neck.

  ‘When I was young,’ said Eleanor, ‘I never thought much about food. I liked it, but I didn’t like preparing it. My mother always did the cooking, and Merry and I just cleared the dishes, or I did and Merry frisked around, keeping us amused. Then when I was living in London, before I married, I used to eat at Lyon’s tea houses or at the cheaper little restaurants. Sometimes I would just have a glass of milk and a roll with butter for my evening meal. It sufficed. Sometimes that is what I have now, when I am here alone, and then I can feel myself to be that young woman again. The past never removes itself to a distance, you know.’

  There was a silence; she seemed to have stopped speaking.

  ‘Then you taught yourself to cook after meeting Grandpa?’ prompted Rose.

  ‘Later,’ said Eleanor, as if Rose hadn’t spoken. ‘Years later, I began to see how we all need ways of comforting ourselves and others. I used to have a certain contempt, or call it rage, for the way women darned socks and made biscuits and put flowers on the table, while the men were out in the world, making money or losing it, saving lives, getting killed or killing. Gil would come home having given men and women their faces and their identities back to them, and what had I done? Washed nappies and put plasters on grazes, cleaned the windows so that light could enter the house.’

  ‘Sounds tedious,’ said Thea. She kept hooking her lower lip between her teeth and then letting it go again.

  ‘It probably does. It often was. I had a powerful need to be back in the world, working. But I often think of all the thousands and millions of women who’ve done the same, day after day and week after week, year by year. Tending. Making ends meet. Stirring the pot. Giving a rhythm and shape to the great mess of life and making it bearable. I was lucky; I was a teacher and an educationalist as well as a wife and mother. After all my children started school, I was no longer tied to the home. But even so, first and foremost, I was a wife and mother. Gil was a husband and father, none more devoted than he, but first and foremost, he was a doctor.’

  She lifted
her glass and swirled the wine in it gently.

  ‘You girls are lucky,’ she said. She turned towards Thea. ‘It must be annoying to have an old woman to say that to you.’ Thea gave a glittery smile of agreement. ‘But however bad times are now, you have choices, even if your choice is to refuse, to say no. It doesn’t necessarily make you happy, of course, and it can be very scary to be free. Intolerable even.’ She took a sip of wine. ‘I once saw Virginia Woolf, you know,’ she said, as if it were a logical sequitur. ‘In Hyde Park at dusk, walking alone in a grey suit. So fine, like a creature from a different world. I wanted to say something, but I was greatly in awe of her; she was almost the only person in the world I looked up to because in spite of her snobbery and her neuroses she was a noble woman and a writer whose sentences took my breath away, and so I just watched her going by. When she drowned herself, walking into the river with stones in her pockets, it was like another light going out on the horizon and the world became a little darker. Those were terrible times.’

  ‘Gran was a heroine in the war,’ said Thea cheerily.

  ‘I was no such thing.’ Eleanor’s voice was sharp.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Peter. There’d been nothing in the papers about it and for some reason he hadn’t wondered about her experience of the war. He’d simply imagined her here, in this house, with horror happening far off.

  ‘That’s because it’s completely untrue,’ replied Eleanor. ‘I did nothing at all. My girls were sent away to the country. They lodged with families. I remember the day I walked with them to the station and saw them on to the train. Some of them were quite alone – as young as six or seven and going off to some stranger. I can see their faces now, staring out from the windows. But I stayed behind. I married and had a child and waited for it all to end. Most of the time I was in the country with my mother, keeping Samuel safe. So you see, I was one of the lucky ones. There were many times I wished I was in London, helping, playing my part in the terrible drama. But once you’re a mother, you can’t follow your own wishes. I remained on the sidelines.’

  ‘You sound bitter,’ said Thea, rather pleased. ‘I thought you were a pacifist. You wear a white poppy on Remembrance Day, don’t you?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Gran can be rather fierce, can’t she?’ Thea said to Peter.

  ‘I was not a pacifist during that war. I believed it had to be fought.’ She made a gesture, as though ending the discussion. ‘Rose, what are we eating?’

  ‘Fish. Do you like fish?’ she asked, turning to Peter.

  ‘Except skate.’

  ‘Lucky it’s not skate then,’ said Thea. She managed to seem rude even when what she was saying was perfectly polite. There was a rowdy grimness about her tonight. Perhaps it was the wine that she was swigging back, or perhaps she’d taken something else as well. She prowled round the kitchen, picked up a cat and then put it down rather roughly, peered over Rose’s shoulder, standing too close to her. Then she went outside for a smoke and returned in a more conciliatory mood.

  They ate fish in a tomato and garlic marinade, then a soft wheel of cheese before the apple tart that Peter had smelt cooking. Thea barely ate anything. She kept dropping pieces of fish on to the floor for the cats – not surreptitiously but blatantly, wanting everyone to see. Her white face gleamed in the dim room. Eleanor ate slowly, delicately and surely spearing the food with her fork. Once a piece of fish dropped on to her lap and Peter saw the look of distress that crossed her face. Polly sat beside him and laid her soft muzzle reassuringly on his knee.

  They talked about Eleanor’s birthday. Samuel and Esther were going to be the main cooks. Leon and Quentin were providing the wine. Giselle would make a cake. Samuel would bring fireworks with him. He had always loved fireworks, said Eleanor, but he was not entirely to be trusted with them. They mustn’t set the house on fire again now that it had a buyer. The whole family would arrive in time for the Friday evening and leave by Sunday afternoon, and during that time they would select the things of Eleanor’s that they wanted to take with them. They would choose who was to have which paintings and which photographs; which books, china, silver; which of the jewellery that Eleanor no longer wore. Everything would be up for grabs. Her clothes (‘though most of them are moth-worn,’ she said, lifting up a fold of the blue fabric of her dress to demonstrate), Gil’s beautiful suits, some of which were sixty years old but still wearable, and his many dozens of ties. Rose and Thea, it turned out, had been helping sort them all out that afternoon. The wine cellar would be emptied. On Monday a removal van would arrive for the furniture that would be put into storage. During the next week, several more of Eleanor’s grandchildren would arrive to do their duty by the old woman, folding blankets and sheets, sorting crockery, climbing up into the attic to haul out old carpets and curtains that had hung in this house sixty years ago. What remained after they’d all left on the Sunday would be offered to whoever bought the house, or auctioned off after the contract of sale had been signed. Booksellers would come in on the Monday afternoon to take away any remaining volumes.

  ‘I don’t want any family feuds,’ said Eleanor. ‘No fierce, self-righteous, resentful quarrels over who’s to get the grandfather clock or the dresser or the falling-apart book of nursery rhymes that everyone scribbled in when they were toddlers. No one saying or thinking that it’s not fair.’

  ‘Of course there won’t be,’ said Rose.

  ‘Of course there will!’ Thea brightened. ‘It’s never fair.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘Who’s stupid? It’s not the value of things, the financial value I mean. It’s what they represent. That.’ She pointed. ‘That biscuit tin with the dented lid. I remember that from when I was tiny, and Mum says she remembers it from when she was a child.’

  ‘It was my mother’s; it must be well over a hundred years old.’

  ‘There. I want that tin! Don’t you, Rose?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But there are things you want.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Of course you care. Gran’s thin gold necklace that she always wears. Don’t you want that?’

  ‘Not if anyone else wants it.’

  ‘I will be buried in it,’ said Eleanor mildly.

  ‘That seems a waste.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Or that wedding photo of her and Grandpa Gil. Wouldn’t you want that, Rose?’

  ‘Of course I do, but no, not if it means falling out with everyone. Everything seems urgently important, and then a few weeks later you realize it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Grandpa Gil’s desk, with all those dinky little drawers. Everyone will want that! I can see Leon and Quentin coming to blows over it – though Quentin never comes to blows. He’ll be forgiving and forbearing but sure as hell he won’t give it up without a fight. I bet he gets it, in fact. People like him are very good at getting their own way while still seeming wounded and sacrificial. He’ll make taking it seem like a favour to us all.’

  ‘You make us all sound like vultures.’

  ‘Yes! I guess Tamsin will want the hats. Marianne will want the cut glass. Giselle – hmm, let’s see, Giselle will want Gran’s old evening dresses and the tailored coats she wore in the forties and those lovely little button-up shoes she still has at the back of her wardrobe.’

  ‘I am still here,’ said Eleanor. ‘I am still alive, you know. Ancient and blind, but still breathing.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Thea looked blithe.

  ‘It’s quite all right. In fact, it’s rather a relief when people are honest. So what do you want, Thea my dear?’

  ‘Me? God, everything, nothing. I live in a tiny bedsit and keep most of my clothes in a suitcase under the bed. What would I do with diamonds? Sell them for drugs? Joke, Gran!’ she added hastily, although the expression on Eleanor’s face hadn’t changed. ‘That was a joke.’

  ‘I don’t have any diamonds. I hate diamonds.’

  ‘OK.’ She drew
a deep breath. ‘Your moonstone ring and one of Grandpa Gil’s top hats and his walking stick and that big copper bowl on the top of the piano that you put nuts in at Christmastime and the rocking chair!’ She spoke so fast the words ran into each other.

  ‘You have been thinking about it,’ said Eleanor drily.

  ‘And I would quite like that tin.’

  ‘You shall have it. First, we must eat the crackers that are in it with this cheese. What about you, Rose – any requests?’

  ‘Oh ho, this is going to be like that scene in Beauty and the Beast. After your wicked elder sister has asked for all sorts of greedy things, you’re not going to ask for one red rose in honour of your name, are you, Rose?’

  ‘No! I don’t know what I want. I haven’t thought about it.’

  ‘I bet you have.’

  ‘Stop it!’ Her face flamed. ‘I don’t know why you’re trying to pick an argument.’

  ‘It’s Thea’s way of dealing with emotion,’ Eleanor said. ‘Isn’t it, Thea?’

  ‘Probably.’ Thea cut a tiny slice of cheese and laid it on her plate. She didn’t touch it after that. ‘Will you give something to Peter, Gran? Some books, perhaps.’

  ‘Of course, if he would like that.’

  Peter thought of the purloined photographs in his room, in plain sight next to the bed so that if Rose or Thea happened to walk in they’d see them there. But of course they wouldn’t walk in – though now he considered it, he wouldn’t put it past Thea.

  Who’d be young? thought Eleanor. And answered herself: she would.

  From his room, Peter could hear the faint sounds of a piano being played; a thin, clear trickle of sound, like a stream making its way towards the sea. He pulled on jeans and an old flannel shirt and went downstairs to the living room and stepped inside. There was only a standard lamp lit, so the room was full of shadows and pockets of darkness. Eleanor sat at the piano, quite upright, her hands moving over the keys. The copper bowl that Thea wanted to inherit glowed above her. Peter wondered how her arthritic fingers could move so fluently. It was as if music released them from their crabbed stiffness.