‘Well, rest your arses,’ said Mrs Hardison.
‘Mum!’ tutted Eliza, in mock disapproval.
‘Er, when is it due?’ asked Abbie.
‘Last week. Look like I’m going to pop, don’t I?’
‘You must be exhausted.’
‘That one was early. Little ferret. Couldn’t wait, could you?’ she said, tipping her head in the direction of Eliza, who was sitting at the table grating a lemon. Eliza smirked in agreement. Mrs Hardison lifted the cigarette to her lips and drew the smoke into her throat.
‘But this one isn’t in a hurry.’
She sat down on a stool and straightened her back, kneading her spine with her fingers and leaving sticky handprints on her woolly cardigan. Her hair was light, like a faded version of her daughter’s, and she had a redness in her cheeks, maybe from the heat in the room, or maybe from carrying the weight of her unborn child. Or maybe from smoking while pregnant.
‘How about a drink?’
‘Let me,’ said Abbie. As Mrs Hardison untied her apron and wiped her hands on a doth, Abbie filled the kettle from the tap and took down three mugs hanging from hooks over the fireplace.
‘I was thinking of something a bit stronger actually,’ said Mrs Hardison.
‘Oh,’ said Abbie. ‘Are you sure?’
‘There’s a Guinness in the fridge. Shouldn’t really, but you’ve got to keep your strength up.’
Felix looked for Abbie’s disapproval, but with her back to him she dutifully collected the can and cracked the ring pull. Mrs Hardison pointed to a pint glass on the sink, empty apart from a thin layer of dark liquid at the bottom and streaked with white froth. Abbie poured the drink and carried it to the table. Felix perched on the arm of a large, threadbare chair next to the stove so as not to disturb the big, mean-looking tomcat asleep on the cushion.
‘Liza, why don’t you run up to the shop? I need a packet of raisins and fetch me twenty Benson while you’re at it.’
‘Aw, Mum.’
‘Go on. There’s money in my purse. And you can get something for yourself.’
Through the window Felix followed the bobbing blue hood of Eliza’s winter coat as she made her way down the garden path and around the corner. The kitchen became quiet, except for the long, circular breathing of the gas burners in the stove. The two women sat either side of the table. When the kettle boiled Abbie made tea for herself and Felix, and set her cup down on a coaster next to the glass of black beer.
‘It’s good of you to see me.’
Mrs Hardison nodded. The cat stood up on the chair, stretched its legs and arched its spine, then snuggled back into position on the cushion and dosed its eyes.
‘It was Felix who spotted the resemblance. I hadn’t noticed myself.’
‘Sometimes takes an outsider to see these things.’
There was quietness again, before both of them tried to speak at the same time.
‘Go on.’
‘No, it’s OK. You first.’
‘What were you going to say?’
Their words died out, prompting Felix to make a comment. ‘Abbie’s been looking for her family, but we had some bad news this summer. We found her mother’s grave. And that was the end of the trail really, until I called you.’
Mrs Hardison said, ‘Why don’t I tell you everything I know? Save a lot of fannying around.’
Abbie looked taken aback but nodded gratefully.
Mrs Hardison took a gulp of beer. ‘Your mother - Maria, wasn’t it? - she came here to the village from Spain. She met your father at a dance. She got pregnant, which was a scandal in those days. Big scandal. But this couple in the village - the Lawrences, was it? - they wanted a child. Wanted one badly. So they took you on. Are they still alive?’
‘They moved to the coast. They’re fine.’
‘And Maria died, didn’t she?’
‘In ’88. How do you know all this?’
Mrs Hardison sucked at the cigarette. ‘Your father told me.’
‘My father… and Eliza’s father…’
‘Same man.’
‘So Eliza is…’
‘Your half-sister. Correct.’
Abbie lifted the inside of her index finger to her face to blot the tiny droplet of brine forming on the rim of her eye.
‘I’m really sorry. I’ve come crashing in here. I don’t mean to cause trouble.’
Mrs Hardison waved her hand in the air, indicating that it wasn’t a problem. Specks of ash floated down towards the stone floor. Abbie sniffed back the tears. ‘You see, your little girl, she’s the first person… the only relative I’ve ever seen… the only one I’ve got.’
Mrs Hardison laughed. In fact it was less of a laugh and more of a cackle.
‘Except your father.’
Abbie looked up from under her hair. ‘You mean he’s still alive?’
‘Alive?’ She cackled again, louder this time, and ran her hands over the thin wool of her cardigan that was stretched to the point of transparency across the globe of her stomach. ‘I’ll say he bloody well is.’
Abbie’s jaw opened to full stretch. ‘Never.’
‘There might be snow on the roof but there’s fire in the front room. Know what I’m saying?’
‘But he must be…’
‘Sixty-five.’
‘Oh, my God.’
Then they both cackled, a raw, exultant noise that caused both Felix and the ginger torn to turn their heads.
‘Does he… know about me?’ she asked, swallowing the last part of the sentence so the final word was just a shape made by her mouth.
‘Oh, for sure.’
Abbie was nudging forward with each question. ‘Does he want to meet me?’
Mrs Hardison grinned, an enormous grin which gave a momentary impression of smugness. She took another slurp of the Guinness and licked the froth from her top lip. ‘I’m sure he’d love to see you again.’
‘He saw me when I was a baby, did he?’
‘He saw you seven months ago.’
‘What?’
‘Gave you a little peck, right there,’ she said, poking her finger into the soft flesh of Abbie’s face.
Felix was now convinced that Mrs Hardison was enjoying her part in the proceedings, and rather than holding back the truth to spare Abbie any sudden shock was actually cranking up the drama. And by her reaction, Abbie was enjoying it too. She put her own finger to the dimple in her cheek. In fact it was more than enjoyment - she was captivated. Enthralled. She gazed back at the woman in front of her, the woman whose every utterance was a step closer to home.
‘Let’s say he kept an eye on you. Just like he kept an eye on Eliza.’
Now she was hosting a guessing game. Abbie gazed and gazed. Mrs Hardison fed her the next due.
‘And if a father can’t make his own little girls Queen of the May, then who can?’
Abbie’s mouth began to form a word, but even if she was on the very brink of saying her father’s name, she was beaten to it by her husband. Her husband who had been replaying the last seven months of Abbie’s life through his mind, and at that very moment had reached the scene when the man in question bent forward and put his lips against Abbie’s cheek. A tall man of retirement age. In a playground. Kissing his very own, long-lost Queen of the May. Felix knew the answer.
‘THE HEADMASTER!’ he blurted out. ‘Mr… what’s-his-name.’
The cat shot from the cushion and out through the cat flap, chased by the clattering metal tankard that Felix had head-butted from its hook.
‘Mr Fellows,’ said Abbie, speaking his name on her breath. ‘Mr Fellows?’
Mrs Hardison’s head moved up and down in agreement and satisfaction. ‘William,’ she said. Then, in a puff of smoke, ‘Bill.’
They had more things to say to each other. Leaving them to it, Felix went outside with the kettle to top up the water in the windscreen-washer. Eliza was suddenly next to him, peering into the engine. ‘Are they talking?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can I check the oil for you?’
‘It’s filthy. You might get your coat dirty.’
Eliza put the shopping bag on the floor, rolled up her sleeve and drew out the long, dirty oil gauge, until it dithered in front of her face. She squinted at the half-inch of smoky, slow liquid on the end and pushed it under Felix’s nose. ‘It’s fine,’ she told him, before inserting it back in the hole.
‘Who told you about cars?’
‘My dad.’
‘William?’
‘People don’t know he’s my dad but they do really.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘Over there,’ she said, pointing in no particular direction.
‘And does your mum see a lot of him?’
Eliza shrugged her shoulders. ‘Not really. They’re just shagging each other.’
Felix lowered the bonnet, then pushed down hard with both hands to snap it dosed. To wash off the grease he plunged his hands into a water butt under the sawn-off fall-pipe at the corner of the greenhouse. A rainbow-coloured film spread across the surface.
‘Is she my sister?’
‘Who, Abbie?’
‘Her in there.’
‘Half-sister.’
‘Mum’s having a boy. You could see his willie on the scan.’
‘It’ll be nice to have a brother, won’t it?’
‘Mum says he was an accident. She was going to have an extermination, but Bill talked her out of it. I was listening through the floor.’
Eliza showed Felix around the garden and they made a lap of the house before going back inside. The two women were still hunched over the table, Abbie with a handful of tissues, Mrs Hardison with a cigarette between her fingers. Another one. She got slowly to her feet and waddled towards a large mixing bowl on the worktop.
‘Got any kids yourself?’ she asked Abbie.
Abbie looked at her feet. ‘No. We’re still trying, though. Aren’t we, Felix?’
From over in the corner Felix nodded his agreement.
Mrs Hardison said, ‘We’ve got a superstition down here about Christmas cake. It’s good luck if everyone has a stir.’
From the drawer next to the sink she pulled out a wooden spoon and offered it to Abbie. ‘Everyone in the family. That’s what I mean.’
For Abbie it was a triumph. A connection had been made. A transaction had taken place. A lifeline had been offered and she had taken hold of it without hesitation. And for one, photographic moment, Mrs Hardison and her daughter and Abbie were joined together in one common task, their six hands interlocked around the one wooden spoon.
For Felix, though, over by the stove, witnessing the spectacle, there came a second wave of discomfort. Like a mild nausea. Something like labyrinthitis. He’d felt it earlier in the conversation, with Mrs Hardison’s remark about how it takes ‘an outsider’ to recognize these things. And now he felt it again, but stronger this time, a kind of lurch in his senses. ‘Everyone in the family,’ she had said. This new family, she meant, the one forming in front of his eyes, these people connected by genes and DNA and complex physical bonds. There they were, huddled around the mixing bowl, celebrating their coming together, commemorating their new kinship. ‘An outsider,’ was how she put it. ‘Everyone in the family,’ was what she had said.
So where did that leave him?
The Father
‘I loved Maria and I thought she loved me.’
His hat hangs on a hook behind the door. The hat of an older man. Velvet. Banded. Black. On another hook behind the same door hangs the hat of a younger woman. Lilac. Stylish. It was left several months ago on a platform after a May Day parade. The older man had lifted it. Covered his face. Inhaled air from the dark, scented hollow. He had taken it home. Hung it next to his.
‘I still take flowers to the grave.’
His fingers are slender and scrubbed dean. Teacher’s hands. They have turned pages, explained ideas in the air. Now they handle a china cup and a jug of milk. He wears no rings. His watch is analogue, everyday, worn with a crumbling leather strap. The skin on the back of his hands is tight, stretched, and a patch that runs from the underside of his thumb to the outside of his wrist is skewbald with freckles or liver spots. Or an old burn. Or a birthmark. His white cuffs shoot now and again below the sleeve of his dark-bluejacket. His blue tie trails in the plate of biscuits as he leans to pour the tea. He hooks it aside.
‘But she loved God. She was ashamed. She said we had sinned.’
When he sits he crosses his legs, so a band of pale flesh shows above a hoop of black, elasticated sock. He wears brown suede shoes laced with a double knot. Comfortable. Old. Suede should never be polished or scrubbed, only brushed or sponged down with a damp cloth.
‘For me to have kept you… a single man… a teacher… in those days…’
The room is a bachelor’s room of mementoes and souvenirs. The mantelpiece carries trophies and cups for cricket and golf. Elsewhere, a pair of book ends. A cut-glass paperweight. An ornate cigar box. An art-deco reading lamp. A gallon whisky bottle full of copper coins. Nothing seems bought - only given or won. There is no organizing prindpk or overriding sense of style -just the random accumulation of material goods over time. There is evidence of a companion - hairs on the carpet, a bowl of water and a rubber bone. Man’s best friend.
‘The Lawrences were desperate for a child. It meant I could watch over you. It seemed perfect. At the time.’
The woman has heard, him speak on many occasions. Years ago. In assembly, reading the notices, calling out the names of star pupils or troublesome kids. In front of the blackboard inscribing letters and numbers, turning to ask a question, choosing the girl with her hand stretched high in the air, the girl with the right answer and the long black hair. At sports day, his confident announcements compressed and amplified through the PA system, his orders and instructions echoing around the playground, rippling out across the football field and the park. And singing once, stood next to her at the carol concert in the school hall, the only man on stage, his true bass voice bringing home the third and emphatic, ‘Oh, come let us adore him,’ after the boys and girls had floated their own weightless syllables into the ether. Never words like these, though. She came here for facts and detail - she didn’t expect to hear feelings and thoughts. She came for a description of the past. A lesson in history. But when he looks away, towards the window and the clear, winter sky, and says, ‘Forgive me,’ it is all about the here and now, the present moment, and whatever she replies will determine not just the minutes or hours that lie immediately ahead but the days and years beyond. And the hazy blueness he gazes towards, waiting for her answer, isn’t a place she expected to go. She can’t meet him there yet. Which is why she doesn’t answer or speak.
The LPs in the cabinet look like classical or jazz. The record player on the sideboard has a wicker handle and beige fabric cover. An umbrella is propped against the radiator. A fishing rod stands in a Wellington boot. Through the kitchen door, a rusty bike leans against a whitewashed wall gouged and grazed by pedals and brakes and handlebar grips. The archaeology of habit and routine. Maybe tomorrow she can join him in the future, but not yet. Which is why she does not reach out, touch him on the shoulder, close her hand around his wrist when he pushes his fingers beneath his glasses and holds them there against his eyes.
Her husband is waiting in the car. Before she leaves he hands her a gift. Something he prepared. Something he wants her to have. She opens it on her knee. Unwraps the paper. Unties the string. Inside, upside-down, is a wooden frame. A photograph frame. She turns it around. It is a face she has never seen before. A woman with long, dark hair, brushed until it shines. She is wearing a pretty lace blouse. She is wearing eyeshadow, lipstick and a small silver cross around her neck. She is nineteen. Twenty, perhaps. She stares unblinkingly into the lens. Abbie stares back. Meets her eyes. She is seeing her mother for the first time. A stranger, half her own age, gazing at her across the
years.
IN THE END
22
When the doorbell went, Felix had just prised the top from a bottle of Waggledance. The bubbles rushed up and over the lip of the glass as he poured and he had to slide the Christmas edition of the Radio Times underneath to stop the sticky liquid marking the coffee table. Abbie was at the door for half an hour, maybe more. After a while, Felix could feel the cold air from outside seeping into the living room. The flames of the gas fire burned thin and blue. He pulled a settee cushion over his lap and put his feet on the windowsill above the radiator. On the telly, the world’s strongest man was pulling a caravan along a length of running track with his bare hands. He thought of his parents. That holiday in Windermere. Even though it was against the law, his father had allowed him to travel to Cumbria in the caravan itself, on the proviso that he kept out of sight and didn’t use the toilet. They’d chatted to each other via a toy walkie-talkie, until Felix had grown tired and clambered up into the narrow bed in the bulkhead. It was the best journey ever, that’s how he remembered it. The greatest form of travel. There he was in something like a house with its rooms and doors, its tables and chairs, its photographs on the wall, its fixed dimensions, its measured and contained space, its undisturbed air. Something like a home. Yet outside, through the orange Perspex skylight, the world went by. Pylons, tree tops, the underside of bridges, cloud formations. Then empty sky, then the upper reaches of pine forests, then bare hills and escarpments and ridges, then rocky peaks and then the steep-sided, snow-topped mountains.
The back door dosed. When a car started up in the yard outside, Felix hooked back the curtain with his toe and saw Eliza Hardison waving from the passenger seat, and her mother at the wheel, steering away from the house. Abbie came into the room.
‘Why didn’t you invite them in?’
‘They couldn’t stop,’ she said. ‘They were dropping off a present.’
‘They could have said hello. Norfolk’s a long way to drive and not stop for a cuppa.’
The White Stuff Page 23
