by Maggie Joel
During the War a number of houses in Oakton Way had been demolished, some in the Blitz, but most later when the V-2 rockets came. Some time in the fifties the council had finally got around to bulldozing what was left and putting up ugly blocks of flats and later those dreadful sixties maisonettes. Not too long after that the entire street—the ugly concrete flats and the hideous maisonettes, even the gasworks—had been pulled down to make way for the supermarket. Or was it a municipal car park?
‘You awake, Mrs Kettley? Just tek your temperature, love, and ’ave a luke at your vitals.’
Caroline frowned in an effort to see who was talking and who was being spoken to and into her vision came a very young face, two spectacled eyes and the pale blue of a nurse’s tunic. The nurse looked to be about eleven years old and Caroline wondered why the local primary school had seen fit to send its pupils to work in the hospital.
Mrs Kettley. I am Mrs Kettley, she thought with mild surprise. And then she felt surprised that she had forgotten she was Mrs Kettley and that forgetting such a thing didn’t really seem so very important. After all, so long as someone knew who you were, so long as the doctor knew and this little nurse and presumably Mr Milthorpe too, that was the important thing.
Mr Milthorpe, it appeared, had discreetly got up and withdrawn to the window so that—what was it?—her temperature and her vitals could be ascertained? Discreet, that was Jack Milthorpe; thoughtful and discreet.
‘Just turning your head to one side, dearie. That’s grand!’ stated the girl-nurse as she placed a digital thermometer in Caroline’s ear and glanced at the upside-down watch pinned to her chest.
Dearie! Cheek of the girl, thought Caroline. I am old enough to be... To be what? Her mother? Her grandmother?
But she wasn’t anyone’s grandmother. Old enough to be her great-aunt then.
‘There now. How’re you feeling, pet?’
Not waiting for a reply, the girl-nurse had gone and in her place Mr Milthorpe now sat, leaning over with a jovial smile as though a spell in a hospital ward was even better than Scarborough seafront on August bank holiday.
Dear Mr Milthorpe. How long had he been here? she wondered. But to know that, she would need to know how long she herself had been here. Some days? She was sure it was days. But not weeks. She would know, surely, if she had been here for weeks.
Dear Mr Milthorpe, sitting there at her side, patting her hand and wonderfully unconcerned as though she were merely here to have her wisdom teeth out. She’d never got round to calling him by his Christian name, which was Jack, of course. But in the twenty-odd years they had been neighbours, they had somehow never got on to first-name terms.
Jack. It was a good name, a solid, dependable, English name. No pretensions, no nonsense. Jack. She wanted to say it out loud but there you were, just when you really needed to speak you found you couldn’t. Ah well, Mr Milthorpe it would have to remain.
How kind, how sweet, how neighbourly of him to sit here with her like this when he wasn’t family, when they had only ever exchanged good mornings and discussed twenty years’ worth of weather over the garden fence—first with Ted and then, after Ted died, with herself. He had come to the funeral, she recalled, he and Mrs Milthorpe, dropping by afterwards with a bunch of lilies. White they had been, and he’d left them in the doorway. In recent years he’d taken to sweeping the leaves from her pathway in autumn, clearing the snow from her driveway in winter and mowing her lawn in summer, and Mrs Milthorpe had offered cuttings from her fuchsia bush and her delphiniums over the fence. But they had never set foot in each other’s house, not once.
‘Warm enough?’ asked Mr Milthorpe suddenly, and then he smiled and settled back in his chair as if not expecting a reply. ‘Mind, it can get that stuffy in these hospitals,’ he added as an afterthought, and Caroline remembered with a shock that his wife had died. In this very hospital, not six months ago.
The nurse looked in again, perhaps she had more vitals to take, but she merely glanced at a chart and left without a word.
Jean, that was his wife’s name. Jean and Jack Milthorpe. The sort of couple you would meet in the bar of your hotel in Marbella and get to know over a glass of sangria and then swap addresses with at the end of a fortnight and never see again. Not that Caroline had ever set foot in Marbella, nor wanted to, but she could imagine it.
‘I telephoned Mrs Denzel for you,’ remarked Mr Milthorpe. ‘They’ll be along shortly. Mind, it’s a fair ways to travel in this snow and the days are that short. The Pennines are blocked, I shouldn’t wonder. Not that they’ll be coming that way; it’ll be the M1 to Leeds for them.’
Caroline considered this information carefully. Who was this Mrs Denzel and why had Mr Milthorpe taken it upon himself to telephone her? He certainly seemed very sure that Mrs Denzel would be coming here—and via the M1. So she wasn’t local. Caroline felt she ought to know. He obviously assumed she would know.
Mum. Why hadn’t he telephoned Mum? They had got the telephone reconnected after the V-2 in Nelson Terrace had taken out the telephone lines, so why hadn’t he called her? Perhaps he didn’t know her number. Caroline tried to remember. Acton 2867. The numbers popped into her head in a most satisfying way but there was still the problem of speaking them out loud. Perhaps she could write them down? No, little point in trying really.
Acton 2867. Maybe she could think the numbers to him. She concentrated very hard and Mr Milthorpe leaned a little closer and appeared to be listening.
‘I meant to say, they did a right good piece on’t Radio 4 last evening about dahlias and rhododendrons. You’d have enjoyed that, Mrs Kettley. Fella from ’Orticultural Society, it were, and right interesting, he were, after that daft bugger from Poland last week.’
Caroline gave up thinking Acton 2867 and found her mind wandering. What daft bugger from Poland? All she could think about Poland was Hitler invading in 1939.
Deirdre, she thought suddenly. Why doesn’t someone telephone Deirdre?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
DEIRDRE DENZEL PAUSED in her vacuuming of the landing carpet. If she had been alone in the house she would have turned the vacuum cleaner off rather than stand here not vacuuming and therefore wasting electricity. But Eric was downstairs listening to Radio 2 and he might notice she had stopped vacuuming and come and ask her what was going on.
No, he wouldn’t. That was exactly the point—he wouldn’t notice.
Deirdre took a firmer grip of the handle of the vacuum cleaner. It was a FireFlash™ 3000 with a 1500-watt auxiliary suction vacuum cleaner with a built-in filtration system, 4.5-litre capacity dual dustbags and, according to the salesman at John Lewis’s, a little red light that flashed when its bags needed changing. She had had to change the bags twice so far, and to date the little red light had failed to illuminate.
She attacked a particularly resistant dirty spot on the carpet, running the vacuum in a frenzy over the pinkish stain until she remembered this was where one of the girls had spilled a pot of nail varnish in a previous decade and it had left a pale pink stain that no amount of sugar soap or salt or chemically questionable stain-removers had been able to eradicate.
How long had it been like this?
Eric had retired eight years ago amid a blaze of executive farewell drinks and tastefully boxed gifts, of Enjoy Your Retirement! cards and demands to Keep In Touch. In the first few weeks there had been a flurry of golf club membership forms, community college enrolment forms and overseas travel brochures. Six months later the Enjoy Your Retirement! cards had been recycled, the gifts had been stored in a drawer still in their tasteful boxes, and no one had Kept In Touch. The golf club had proved to be too far away to make it easily accessible and the community college, far from offering the anticipated courses in Advanced Car Mechanics, Basic Italian and An Appreciation of Mahler offered instead courses in Accessing Your Inner Self, Basic Body Piercing and An Appreciation of the Sitar and Indian Music, and was full of dreadlocked youths, expectant mothers and blue-rinsed e
lderly ladies. The travel brochures had sat in a pile on the telephone table in the hallway offering passers-by enticing glimpses of suntanned flesh, golden beaches and lush green palms. Eric had seemed unable to come to any decision about their first holiday destination.
And that, Deirdre realised with the hindsight of eight years, was the crux of the matter. Forty years of decision-making had used up all Eric’s decisions. He had none left.
Deirdre, by contrast, had suddenly found that she had an abundance of decisions. They had been welling up inside her for—well—forty years. Possibly more. And now she had a surplus of them. She couldn’t stop making decisions. She had booked them two weeks in Florida. One week in Orlando including Disney World and the Epcot Centre, one week in Miami. And they had gone. It had been relatively successful, though they had exhausted Disney World after one morning and in Miami they had mostly been too terrified to leave the hotel complex. Deirdre had arranged everything: travel insurance, luggage labelling, clothing, medical supplies, maps and schedules, currency and traveller’s cheques. It had been terrifying and exhilarating and the holiday itself had proved less significant than the fact that she had organised the entire thing herself.
She led the vacuum cleaner round into the computer room which used to be the study then, for a brief time, Mum’s room. Then it had reverted to being the study. Now, as the computer seemed to take up a lot of space and people rarely stayed overnight, it had become the computer room where Deirdre typed up extensive lists of Things That Needed To Be Done and surfed the net comparing brands of venetian blinds and resort prices in Tenerife.
This was a room she enjoyed having under control. The two years in which Mum and a lifetime of Mum’s bric-a-brac had squeezed themselves into this room had been traumatic. The system had, in fact, completely broken down. The cleaning and dusting and washing and tidying and vacuuming that went on routinely in other parts of the house had simply ground to a halt here. It had proved too difficult to instigate any sort of routine in this room, and only sporadic incursions could be made when the main opposing force (Mum herself) had been occupied elsewhere (the television). Those two years had seemed like a lifetime of smash-and-grab cleaning and dawn-raid vacuuming. Then suddenly it had ended. So very quickly. And a week later Caroline, who hadn’t done much to help during those two years, had swooped in and cleared all Mum’s things away and the room had been reclaimed.
There were, Deirdre realised, more people who no longer lived in this house than there were who still did. She led the vacuum cleaner out of the computer room across the landing to the girls’ bedroom.
The room looked exactly as it had a week ago when Deirdre had last vacuumed it. A light layering of dust, yes, but otherwise exactly the same.
She paused in the door, vacuum cleaner in hand, and caught a whiff of the teenage chaos of tangled unwashed clothes, used tissues, open make-up tubes and hairspray cans. It was a whiff, no more. A lingering memory of disorder long reined in. Of people who had moved on. Now if the girls visited they tended to stay an afternoon. Jennifer would start to get fidgety around four o’clock and drive off back to Clapham before the afternoon rush hour began. Charlotte, who visited once or twice a year during the university holidays, did at least stay overnight.
Deirdre sat down heavily on one of the beds. What had Jennifer been thinking? What had possessed her? Why had she said those things? And on that awful television program?
Perhaps Charlotte knew something? You could never tell with Charlotte, with either of them. How could you know if anyone was telling the truth?
Could it be true? Could it?
She tried, tried, tried to remember the evening Jennifer had talked about but it was so hard. There were so many evenings like that, so many illnesses. There was always one of them wrapped in a blanket on the sofa.
And school uniforms. They were forever tearing and getting holes in and losing bits of it—except Graham, oddly, who never seemed to ruin or destroy any of his uniform.
Suppose something had happened and she, their mother, had missed it?
She smoothed down the duvet cover impatiently. Nothing had happened. They were a normal family. They didn’t have those kinds of dramas. Boyfriends, of course. Jennifer had gone through a few. She had always seemed very keen on that Darryl boy. No, it was Darren. Darren McKenzie, and his mother had worked at Lloyds Bank in the high street. Then it had ended—very suddenly, it had seemed at the time. But that was teenagers. There was no accounting for them. Hopeless to even try.
Charlotte had never had any boyfriends as far as she knew—but did mothers ever know? Charlotte had seemed happy enough. Well, no, not happy; moody. She’d always been one for moods, spending all her time with that Zoe from school. But Zoe had moved away, up north somewhere with her mother who was that presenter from the telly. And that summer Charlotte had insisted—quite out of the blue—that she be allowed to do her A-levels at the sixth-form college in the town and not at the school, even though it meant two buses and none of her friends being there.
Deirdre fingered the creamy frill of the duvet. The black and red and white duvet that Charlotte had picked out of a catalogue twenty-five years earlier was long gone, replaced by a creamy-white carnation design from John Lewis’s.
It didn’t make sense. The bed, the empty bedroom, this creamy-white duvet. None of it made sense. It had made sense before. Now, suddenly, it didn’t.
Why would Jennifer say that? And on television?
For a few days she had actually considered telephoning Caroline.
And now this Mr Milthorpe had telephoned late last night from a hospital ward and she and Eric were about to drive up to Yorkshire. And here she was vacuuming.
From downstairs she could hear Brian Matthew’s Sounds of the Sixties on the radio followed by a burst of Roy Orbison then abruptly Roy Orbison was cut off and, from the hallway, Eric called up the stairs.
‘We should be off, love. Traffic’ll be murder. Contraflows round Newport Pagnell.’
‘Be right there,’ called Deirdre, not moving. She looked at the layer of dust that had accumulated in just one week, pulled herself to her feet and turned the FireFlash™ 3000 to maximum suction. The little red light on the body of the cleaner began to flash urgently.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
IT WAS IMPORTANT SHE speak to Jennifer, there was something that needed saying. And Charlotte, Charlotte too. What was it? And why hadn’t they come when she’d called them?
Caroline closed her eyes, opened them again. All she could see were the lopsided venetian blinds at the window, the harsh fluorescent light above her head, the green curtains on metal rails that framed her bed and, on the wall opposite, a large, wistful watercolour of three kittens at play that someone, inexplicably, had gone to the trouble of framing and placing in the ward.
But Jennifer had come, she remembered now, only a few days ago. And it had snowed. Mr Milthorpe had cleared the snow off his driveway then done her own, waving to her from the path, and she had just decided to go off and make him a nice strong cup of tea when Jennifer had turned up in her Peugeot, all the way from London. She must have had a day off. People nowadays had all sorts of days off, it was a wonder they got any work done at all. And at the same time all you heard about was people working eighty-hour weeks. How could that be? How could both those things be true? But that was the way of the world now; everything was true and nothing was.
What had they talked of, she and Jennifer?
‘Alright, Mrs Kettley?’
The girl-nurse was back. She materialised out of nowhere and picked up Caroline’s hand, studying the back of it thoughtfully like some amateur palm-reader who hadn’t got the technique quite right.
‘Eh, you’ve had some cuts there, haven’t you, love,’ she remarked, observing the network of fine white scars that showed faintly on both of Caroline’s hands. The girl-nurse adjusted the tube that attached Caroline to a drip, then she tapped the back of her hand. ‘Just move that drip,’ she
murmured, not looking up, and she fiddled with the needle that was sticking half in, half out of the vein.
Caroline watched and wondered if she herself needed to be here, or if the girl could do all this on her own without help.
‘There now,’ said the girl-nurse, standing up. ‘Doctor’ll be along presently.’ And she left.
Presently. You didn’t hear people say that often; it was a word that had gone out of fashion.
Jennifer had driven up and they had talked of Charlotte. Jennifer had been worried about Charlotte. No, not worried, annoyed. There had been a television program. There was always a television program nowadays. You did what you could to escape them but it was a battle you could never win.
High up in the corner of the room was a small television set on a long metal arm suspended on a sort of platform. Mercifully the screen was blank, the set switched off, but as if on cue, from the room across the corridor, came a sudden burst of studio audience laughter. It didn’t sound like real laughter, it sounded like people trying too hard to enjoy themselves.
What had Jennifer done? Or was it something Charlotte had done? She had needed to speak to them, it was important, and Jennifer had come but all they had spoken of was the television program then Jennifer had said it was getting late though it wasn’t even three o’clock and she had only been there an hour and a half, perhaps two hours. But it was a long drive back to London and in that snow. So Jennifer had left and Caroline hadn’t said what she had meant to say.
And Charlotte hadn’t come at all.
It had seemed important. But perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps to anyone else, it wasn’t important at all. Most things that seemed important weren’t important to anyone else.
