A Family Affair

by Janet Tanner

  When the photographs had been taken it was into the church hall for the reception – a glass of sherry, a sit-down meal of ham salad followed by trifle and the two-tier cake, topped by a miniature bride and groom, which had been baked by the Co-op. Afterwards there were the speeches and the usual jokes about the stork, which made Heather blush and caused Carrie’s mouth to set in a tight line for a few moments – the first and only time during the whole day.

  Heather and Steven were going to Paignton for a week’s honeymoon – since Heather intended to travel in the same outfit she had been married in there was no need to go home and change and the family showered them in confetti as they waved them off in Steven’s car with tin cans tied to the rear bumper.

  Carrie had ordered a taxi to take them home afterwards, dropping Glad and Walt off on the way, though David was going on for a drink at the Working Men’s Club with his friends. When she had packed Jenny off to bed – not easy, since although Jenny was tired, she was also overexcited and reluctant to take off her bridesmaid’s dress – she went to the sideboard and got out the quarter-bottle of brandy she always kept there for medicinal purposes.

  ‘I don’t know about you, Joe, but I could do with a drink!’

  ‘That would be very nice, m’dear.’

  His preferred tipple was whisky – ‘a nice drop of Teachers’ – but brandy was better than nothing, even if it did recall childhood days of bilious attacks when his mother had poured him a little to settle his stomach.

  ‘It all went off very well, didn’t it?’ Joe said.

  ‘Yes. Considering.’

  ‘She’ll be all right with Steven,’ Joe said. ‘He’s a nice chap. I felt very proud taking her up that aisle today.’

  ‘I’d rather circumstances had been different.’

  Carrie sat down in one of the fireside chairs they’d bought especially for the new house, feeling her skirt strain around her stomach as she did so.

  ‘She’s not the only one by a long chalk,’ Joe said philosophically, getting out a packet of Players and lighting one. ‘It’s just nice to see her settled.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You worry too much,’ Joe said.

  And you don’t worry enough, Carrie thought, but did not say. This was the Joe she had married, quiet, easygoing, taking the rough with the smooth stoically, good-naturedly. It occurred to her that in many ways Steven was very like him. Perhaps our Heather hasn’t done so bad for herself after all, she thought.

  ‘Well, if they’re as happy as us after twenty-five years, I dare

  say they’ll be all right,’ she said, smiling at him.

  ‘I hear your Heather had to get married,’ Joyce Edgell said.

  Carrie banged the lid down on to a container of cottage pie and swung round. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Come off it, Carrie, you know very well what I mean. She’s in the club.’ There was a smirk on her face.

  ‘You don’t miss a chance, do you, Joyce?’ Carrie said bitterly.

  It was true. Ever since the episode when Carrie had blackmailed George Parsons into giving them a house she and Joyce had been at loggerheads and things had been made even worse by Jenny passing The Exam. None of Joyce’s brood had made it to the Grammar School, nor were likely to, Carrie thought.

  ‘At least she didn’t get married in white, like some I could name,’ Joyce went on. ‘I expect you’d have liked her to, though.’

  ‘All I want for our Heather is for her to be happy.’

  Joyce ignored this. ‘Oh well, she’s been lucky so far, from what I hear.’

  That did it. Carrie rounded on her furiously.

  ‘Now look here, Joyce Edgell, just because you behave like an alley cat doesn’t mean everybody else does, and certainly not our Heather. So you can just keep your dirty mouth to yourself, or I swear I’ll swing for you.’

  ‘OK, OK, keep your hair on!’ Joyce smirked, knowing she’d touched a raw nerve. ‘All I’m saying is …’

  ‘I know what you’re saying. And you can just shut up. Talking about our Heather like that …’

  ‘Brought you down a peg or two though, didn’t it?’ Joyce sneered.

  It was all Carrie could do not to hit her.

  ‘I had that Joyce Edgell on at me today about you,’ Carrie said to Heather.

  Heather and Steven, who were living with Glad and Walt, had walked up to Alder Road as they often did for a cup of Bournvita and a chat. Steven had gone to the outhouse, where Joe was trying to sort out his tools and the garden implements that needed cleaning and oiling for the winter, to lend him a hand and the two women were toasting their knees in front of the open fire.

  ‘She’s heard from somewhere that the wedding was a rush job and she was determined to let me know she knew it.’

  ‘I hope you told her it was none of her business,’ Heather said.

  ‘I did. In no uncertain terms. But all the same, I wish …’ She broke off, looking at Heather’s bulge, now fairly obvious under her jumper and skirt.

  ‘Don’t start that again, Mum, please,’ Heather begged.

  ‘No. Well. All I can say is it’s a pity it arose at all.’ Carrie was aware she was taking her humiliation out on Heather, but she couldn’t stop herself. It had been burning away inside her all day like a dose of bad indigestion. ‘It’s a pity you never learned self-control. I should have thought after what happened before … well, I should have thought you’d learned your lesson.’

  Heather was on her feet, hurt and anger in her heart, tears in her eyes.

  ‘How could I ever forget? How could I ever forget what you and Dad made me do?’

  ‘Not your dad. Don’t blame him.’

  ‘No. Not Dad. You. What you made me do. Do you think I can forget it for a single day? A single moment? Do you think I’ll ever forgive you?’

  ‘Heather …’ Carrie was frightened suddenly, without quite knowing why. Only that she had never seen her daughter quite like this before. Heather was usually merry-hearted, if wilful. A smile to hide the pain, like her father. Now the look in her eyes was close to hatred and it chilled Carrie to the core.

  ‘Heather …’ she said again.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum, I’m going.’ Heather was reaching for her coat, hung over the back of a chair. ‘I don’t want to stay here and listen to this.’

  ‘All right – go!’ Carrie snapped, aware even as the words passed her lips that she didn’t mean them. But on the defensive she always attacked – within the family, anyway. ‘I just wish you’d realise what we did was for your own good.’

  ‘I’m sure you thought so,’ Heather said. ‘I’m sure you still do. That’s what is so terrifying about you, Mum. You think you can do anything – anything – and as long as it’s for our good then it’s all right. Only sometimes it isn’t. Keeping up appearances is what it’s about. And that isn’t always the same thing as our good whatever you might think.’

  Joe and Steven appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Hey – hey – hey – what’s going on here?’ Joe asked, mildly concerned.

  ‘Heather?’ Steven said.

  ‘Come on, Steve, we’re going,’ Heather said.

  She went through into the hall to the front door, deliberately avoiding the kitchen, the heart of the house, her mother’s domain.

  Jenny was on the stairs. She had been in her room, with the Aladdin oil stove to take the chill off the air, doing her homework, rushing at it in an effort to finish so that she could go down and spend some time with Heather and Steven – whom she already hero-worshipped – when she had heard the raised voices. Heather looked up and saw her, looked away again, opened the front door.

  ‘Heather!’ Jenny called.

  But for once Heather ignored her. Not waiting for Steven, not waiting for anything, she went out into the night.

  Chapter Four

  Jenny was not enjoying school. It was just the same as it had been in the Juniors – the lessons were fine – well, most of them
– physics and geometry made her mind boggle, but she could cope with everything else, even Latin, which she rather enjoyed. But when it came to her social standing, Jenny still felt like an outsider. On the whole the other pupils in her class seemed quite nice, but they already had their own groups, tight little knots of girls who had been together since infant school, which were self-sufficient and impenetrable – except by outgoing, confident girls like Valerie, who had quickly formed an alliance with a pretty but precocious girl from one of the neighbouring villages who was known, for some unfathomable reason, as ‘Baba’. The boys, of course, might as well have been aliens from another planet. As yet, they were a race apart; they took no notice of the girls and the girls, with the possible exception of Valerie and Baba, took no notice of them.

  Just as before, Jenny found herself paired off or left with the other outcasts no-one wanted to be associated with. The trouble was, she didn’t want to be associated with them either. At least they weren’t stupid, of course, not like poor Tessa Smith. They’d never have passed The Exam if they had been. But in spite of her problems, Jenny still saw herself as vastly superior to the wimpish Diane Witcombe and the gangling Penny Presley with her bandy legs and mouthful of teeth. Yet invariably she found herself forced into their company, left, with them, on the sidelines. Particularly when it came to games.

  To Jenny, games and physical education – as PT was now called – were the lesson periods she most dreaded. To begin with, her slowness at changing into aertex shirt and shorts meant she was always the last to leave the cloakroom, scooting hot and breathless after the others as they made their merry way down the road to the playing fields or along the corridor to the gym. And once there the nightmare began in earnest.

  Jenny hated the gym, hated having to line up and take her turn at balance hangs and gate vaults on the horizontal bars which descended from the ceiling by means of pulleys, hated rolling about on the mats and struggling to get a foothold to climb the ropes. But all these tortures were as nothing compared to the ultimate torture of the vaulting horses.

  Each time Miss Foster, the rosy-cheeked, mannish PE mistress, ordered them to pull out the bucks and horses and beating boards, Jenny’s heart sank and she felt sick with dread. She couldn’t do it. She simply couldn’t do it. She would stand in line, watching the others running purposefully on to the beating board and sailing effortlessly over the horse, and make up her mind that this time she too would clear the horrible obstacle even if it killed her. She would make her run, trembling inside but determined, but the moment her feet hit the beating board her nerve would fail her. She would jump on it too cautiously to gain any momentum and either crash into the vaulting horse or flop like a beached whale, landing ignominiously on top of it. Then she would have to climb down and slink to the back of the queue whilst Valerie or Baba or one of the others sailed over as if they had wings and her face would be scarlet both from the effort and from knowing that she’d made a fool of herself yet again.

  It wasn’t that she was physically incapable, she knew, but that she was afraid. Afraid, deep down, in a part of her psyche she could not reach with any amount of logic. Afraid because when she had tried to climb or jump or be wild in any way at all when she was little, Carrie had drummed into her: ‘Don’t do that, Jenny, you’ll fall. Don’t do it, Jenny, you’ll hurt yourself.’ The message had gone home and stuck at a time when Jenny had not doubted for a moment that her mother knew everything there was to know.

  She might have been quite good at hockey, Jenny thought, if only she was given the chance. It was something she could really put her heart and soul into and she longed to be part of a team. But she didn’t yet have her own hockey stick – Heather had promised her one for Christmas – and she had to use one of the school’s supply. Because she was always last changing, the best ones had invariably gone, and she was left with some battered relic with the binding coming unwound. Besides this, because she was so dreadfully useless in the gym, Miss Foster assumed she would be equally useless on the hockey field, and when she picked her two teams of eleven girls to play on the main pitch, Jenny would find herself left out yet again, banished to the second pitch, which didn’t have any proper goals, struggling to play some sort of ordered game with Diane and Penny and a few other rag, tag and bobtails who had also been excluded. Just occasionally Miss Foster, who was nurturing future stars for the school team, sent the best players off to practice on their own and Jenny got a chance in the match proper. But when she did she was so unpractised and overeager that she was liable to race all over the field for impossible balls and let go the ones she should have safely passed.

  She was a failure, Jenny thought, a total failure, and she hated it. Most of all she wanted to succeed. No – most of all she wanted to be popular! But popularity too seemed a goal too far. After all, being good at sport was the best passport to popularity if you didn’t happen to be witty or pretty. And Jenny was none of these.

  Another miserable time was the period devoted to cookery. Again, Jenny’s slowness with any physical activity meant she was always the last to finish rubbing in her pastry and oiling her tins, so the most favourable parts of the ovens were already in use before she tried to fit her effort in, and it ended up either burned or under-cooked. And her corner in the DS room was always the last to be cleared up, so she earned the dislike of Miss Weymouth, the cookery teacher, as well as the scorn of Miss Foster.

  One day, however, Jenny did manage to produce some very edible-looking biscuits, and she was pleased and proud as she loaded them into the tin and packed it away in her basket beneath a red-checked tea towel.

  ‘If they’re nice, we can have them for tea,’ Carrie had said, after complaining as usual about the expense of the ingredients she had had to provide.

  Jenny boarded the coach that would take her home and which picked up at the Secondary Modern school en route, and sat down, nursing her basket and trying to hang on to the strap of her satchel at the same time. The other children – particularly the older ones, who at the ripe old age of thirteen or fourteen should have known better – had been known to snatch her satchel if she didn’t hold on to it, take out her ruler and pencil case and exercise books and play catch with them. Today, however, someone spotted that Jenny had been baking.

  ‘What you got there?’

  ‘Biscuits,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Let’s have one!’

  ‘No,’ Jenny said. ‘I’ve got to take them home.’

  ‘Go on – spoilsport!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Well, just let’s have a look. Bet they’re rubbish. All burned or something.’

  ‘They’re not!’ Jenny said indignantly.

  ‘Let’s see, then.’

  And Jenny was tempted by the chance to show that she wasn’t a complete ninny, as they seemed to think. She wriggled the tin out of the basket and took off the lid.

  It was the biggest mistake she could have made. In a flash Wendy Pearce, who was an older version of Valerie, had snatched the tin and helped herself to a biscuit.

  ‘You can’t have them! They’re for our tea!’ Jenny protested.

  Some of the others mimicked her.

  ‘Not bad!’ Wendy said, munching first one biscuit, then another, and passing the tin around, always just out of Jenny’s reach. Before the coach reached Jenny’s stop half the biscuits had been eaten, the children were helpless with laughter, and Jenny was hot, flustered and close to tears.

  When she got home there was nothing for it but to explain to Carrie what had happened. Carrie was furious.

  ‘I’ll go up to the school and complain. Little toads! How dare they!’

  ‘No – you can’t go to school!’ Jenny pleaded. ‘You can’t!’

  ‘If they think they can get away with this, they’ve got another thing coming!’

  ‘No – please, Mum!’ Jenny said. ‘You’ll only make things worse.’

  ‘We’ll see about that!’

  Jenny felt sick with anxiety
. For the first time in her life she positively did not want her mother to come out fighting her corner. To have a parent turning up at school complaining about the behaviour of other pupils would be appallingly humiliating. She’d never live it down. With a flash of insight Jenny realised her mother couldn’t be there all the time and the other children would find other, subtler ways of making her life a misery. Even the teachers, whilst ostensibly taking the side of law and order, would feel nothing but scorn for her, put her down as a no-hoper, an overgrown baby fledgling unable to survive outside the nest.

  Argument with Carrie was, she knew, useless. Carrie’s mind was made up, and Carrie knew best. In the old days, Jenny might have sought Heather’s help, but not only did Heather no longer live under the same roof, but she and Carrie were barely on speaking terms. Since the night she had walked out, taking Steven with her, there had been no more weekly visits, and Carrie got a face on, as Jenny called it, whenever Heather’s name was mentioned. It was a thoroughly upsetting development and one which Jenny was at a loss to understand, though from the little she had overheard she had a dark half-formed suspicion, something she shrank from thinking about and certainly would not have dreamed of raising with Carrie.

  No, Heather couldn’t help her this time, and David as an ally never entered her head. David had a girlfriend now, Linda Parfitt from South Compton, about whom he was very secretive and evasive, and he spent less time at home than ever. No, there was only one person she could turn to – her father – though she rather doubted that even he would have much influence on a Carrie with her mind made up. Certainly if the subject were raised in front of her, she would not so much defend her plan of action as simply assert it – this was what she was going to do, and that was that. Joe would probably back her up without even listening to Jenny’s point of view. Even if she put it to him on his own there was always the possibility that he would simply say: ‘It’s no use arguing with your mother. She’ll do as she thinks best.’ He tended to take the line of least resistance, Jenny knew, because he hated discord of any kind, and his watchword seemed to be: ‘Anything for the sake of peace.’ The thought that she might put him in an awkward position also worried Jenny, as everything seemed to worry her these days, but this was too important to her not to at least try to do something about it.