A Family Affair

by Janet Tanner

  Her chance came later on in the evening. She had gone to bed, taking with her the map of South America whose states, mountains and capital cities she was supposed to memorise for homework, but which had refused to go in because concentration was beyond her, and was lying sleepless when she heard her father come upstairs. She knew it was him because she could smell the comforting aroma of his cigarette – for all her life Jenny would associate the smell of cigarette smoke and petrol lighters with safety and comfort. She heard him go into the bathroom – having ‘a swill’, no doubt, before going down to the Working Men’s Club for an hour – and when he came out again she called to him.

  ‘Dad! Daddy!’

  The door opened a crack and light from the landing spilled in.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Can I talk to you?’

  He didn’t say, as many fathers would, that he was just going out, and couldn’t it wait. The door opened wider and she saw him silhouetted against the light, a wiry, slightly built man.

  ‘I’m really worried, Dad,’ she said, and she told him what had happened, ashamed to admit to him that she had been the subject of teasing, because she thought it would belittle her in his eyes and it was incredibly important to her that, of all the people in the world, her dad should think well of her, but needing to share it all, unload some of her anxiety.

  ‘They’ll think I’m a terrible baby,’ she finished. ‘If Mum goes to school they’ll know I’ve been telling tales. I’ll never live it down.’

  ‘All right, m’dear, I’ll have a word with her,’ he said.

  ‘Will she take any notice of you, though?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it any more,’ Joe said. ‘She doesn’t always think, your mother.’

  Jenny was beginning to feel relief, but she was also rather shocked. It was the first time anyone had ever uttered a word against Carrie to her. Even Glad had her arguments with her up front, never seeking to involve the children. And for Dad to say ‘She doesn’t always think’, mild as it was, was still an admission that Carrie was not all-wise and omnipotent after all. But the four little words were somehow far more than simply a gentle criticism of Carrie, more than the simple comfort to Jenny he no doubt intended them to be. In that moment a bridge was suddenly built between father and daughter, a bridge of shared confidence, a feeling that he was no longer talking to her as a child but as a young adult, who could take on board the failings and imperfections of those she had always believed to be infallible.

  ‘She won’t go up to the school,’ he said. ‘I promise you.’

  When he had left her, pulling the door to after him, Jenny lay nervously listening to the rise and fall of their voices in the living room which was immediately below her bedroom, aware that, on Carrie’s part at least, the discussion was a little heated and realising that it would now probably be too late for Dad to go out for his drink tonight. She wondered what they were saying, but she was beginning to feel drowsy, and hopeful too. If anyone could get around Mum it was Dad.

  Her confidence was rewarded. Nothing more was ever said about the biscuits. Carrie did not go to the school to complain. And Jenny knew she had forged a very special bond with her father.

  As if the incident with the biscuits had somehow constituted a

  watershed, things gradually began to improve. The Grammar School

  no longer seemed such a vast and frightening place, the pupils on the coach home began to lose interest in teasing her, and she even made friends with Ann, Rowena and Kathy, three girls from South Compton who had seemed an inseparable trio but who had accepted her into what had become a foursome. She still disliked gym, physics and cookery – the Christmas cake she had made had been an absolute disaster, soggy in the middle, with garish green icing which hadn’t turned out at all the way she’d intended it – but she was doing well at practically everything else, and beginning to enjoy herself.

  The house in Alder Road was beginning to feel like home now, with lawn sprouting and new little plants poking bravely out of the bright red soil which became a quagmire of heavy mud in wet weather and a cracked desert in summer drought, and each of the rooms had taken on a character of their own. Jenny particularly liked the row of outhouses, joined by a roofed-over passage to the main house and consisting of an outside lav, a coal house and a store room in which her newest and most treasured possession was stored – her bicycle.

  As they had promised, Carrie and Joe had given her the bicycle as her Christmas present, and she still got a tickle of excitement in her tummy each time she remembered coming downstairs on Christmas morning to see it leaning against the wall in the hall covered with a blanket and swathed in tinsel.

  She had to learn to ride it, of course, never having been on two wheels before, and Joe and David took turns to go along the lane with her, holding on to the saddle and running behind, steadying her, until she got the hang of it and sailed off, wobbling, on her own. By the time spring came she was quite proficient, and on fine days, when she did not have cookery paraphernalia to carry, she was able to cycle the three and a half miles to school, her satchel propped in an old-fashioned bicycle basket which attached to the handlebars.

  But the really big event of that year was the birth of Heather’s baby.

  It came on a Saturday in February when spring seemed just around the corner. Jenny had gone into Hillsbridge, to do the Saturday morning shop for Carrie, with Heather, who was doing her own shopping. Jenny was acutely conscious of the stares of other customers as they queued for bacon and cheese at the Co-op – Heather was now very close to her time, and embarrassingly enormous. She was also behaving oddly this morning, shifting about impatiently while they waited their turn, not really listening to anything Jenny said to her.

  ‘Oh for goodness sake!’ she snapped when the little wooden cup carrying the money and paper check got stuck halfway along the wire which carried it to the cubicle in the corner of the shop where the cashier sat in solitary splendour. ‘Blooming thing!’

  Jenny glanced at her anxiously. She liked the change machine and when she was little had longed to pull the cord to send the wooden cup on its way high above the heads of the customers as the shop assistants did.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course I’m all right! I just wish we could get on and get home!’

  But for all that she seemed to be buying more than she usually did – as if she were stocking up for Christmas or a Bank Holiday, Jenny thought, as the assistant weighed out biscuits, sugar and tea at the grocery counter.

  ‘Thank goodness for that!’ Heather said as they eventually emerged from the shop. ‘We’ll just call at the bakery for a loaf of bread, and that’s it.’

  ‘I’ve got to get Dad’s cockles,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Oh – do you have to?’

  ‘You know I do.’

  For as long as they could remember Joe had had a quarter of cockles, swimming in vinegar, for his Saturday tea, eating them whilst listening to the football results. It was a ritual, and could not be broken.

  ‘Go on then, but be as quick as you can. I’ll wait for you down outside the chemist’s.’

  Jenny went to the Co-op wet fish shop and queued for the cockles and some kippers Carrie had asked her to get. When she came out of the shop, Heather was nowhere to be seen. Jenny walked down the hill to the chemist’s, looking round anxiously. One of the assistants appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Jenny! Your sister’s in here. She’s not well. She had to sit down.’

  Jenny rushed into the shop. Heather was sitting on a chair just inside the door, with Mr Mackenzie, the pharmacist, and another assistant hovering solicitously.

  ‘Let me see if I can get hold of the doctor,’ Mr Mackenzie was saying, but Heather was shaking her head.

  ‘No – no …’ She saw Jenny and got up with an effort. ‘I’ve got to get home, Mr Mackenzie.’

  ‘Well, at least let me call you a taxi.’

  ‘I’ll be al
l right.’

  ‘I’ve got my car round by the Hall,’ a man who Jenny vaguely recognised as someone who lived at the top of Westbury Hill said. ‘I’m going home myself now, and I pass right by the door.’

  Jenny’s concern was at last outranking her embarrassment. The car was fetched to the door of the shop, Heather installed in the front seat, Jenny and all the shopping in the back. When they were dropped off outside the house, she struggled to manhandle all of it by herself whilst Heather, with a very peculiar gait, hauled herself up the steps.

  ‘I think I’ve started, Jenny,’ she said.

  She opened the door and went in, calling out for Steven and Glad, only to be met by comfortless silence. Only Walt was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for dinner. When he was not at work, Walt enjoyed cooking and was actually rather better at it, Jenny thought, than Glad, who tended to be slapdash, and certainly better than Carrie, who never cooked at all if she could help it – probably put off by all the food she served up at the school canteen day after day.

  ‘Where is everybody?’ Jenny asked him.

  ‘Young Steven’s took your gran to get some flowers. It’s her turn to do the altar at church this week.’ He looked at her, registering her panic-stricken face. ‘What’s wrong, my old Dutch?’

  ‘It’s Heather. She’s …’ She couldn’t bring herself to say the words. Not to Grampy.

  ‘You’d better go and find them,’ Walt said, not looking unduly concerned. Joe got his stoic nature from his father. ‘I expect they’m down the market. Or they could’ve gone over to the nursery, I suppose.’

  The nursery they used was at South Compton. Jenny’s heart sank.

  ‘That’s no good then …’ She broke off, trying to think logically. If Heather was in labour the doctor should be told, or the midwife, or both. But she honestly didn’t know what to do first, and she knew she could not expect any help from Walt. Having babies and all it entailed was totally outside his field of experience – something women saw to. He would simply go on peeling his potatoes while the world turned upside down around him, and afterwards he would risk a cursory glance into the cot, mutter: ‘Well, well, well,’ and go back to his old routine.

  No, she couldn’t rely on Walt for assistance. In fact, there was only one person she wanted in this emergency – one person above all others who would know what to do. That person was Carrie.

  Carrie was doing the bedrooms when she heard the front door slam and Jenny’s voice calling her name. She went to the top of the stairs.

  ‘I’m up here …’

  Jenny was in the hall, breathless, her face scarlet from running the half-mile up hill.

  ‘What in the world … ?’

  ‘It’s Heather. She’s having the baby. Oh, Mum, come quick!’

  ‘Where is she?’ Carrie asked.

  ‘At Gran’s. There’s nobody there but Grampy. They’re all out …’

  ‘All right. You stay here.’

  ‘No … I’m coming with you …’

  Carrie was pulling on a coat over her checked nylon overall, calling to Joe to tell him where she was going. Then they were hurrying back down the hill, Jenny’s face still on fire, trying to explain breathlessly to her mother what had happened. There was a pain in her own stomach, a dull ache running from the very pit to her hips and back again; she assumed it was from running up hill – or perhaps she was empathising with her sister, feeling something of what Heather was feeling.

  They turned into Glad’s house; to Jenny’s enormous relief, Glad was there.

  ‘Steven’s gone to ring the doctor,’ she said.

  Bunches of chrysanthemum wrapped in paper still lay on the table where she had put them down when she and Steven had arrived home to the crisis; Heather had been despatched upstairs. Jenny went to follow Carrie up; sharply, Carrie told her to stay where she was. Jenny was quite glad to do so; she could hear Heather moaning, a frightening sound that reminded her, grotesquely, of the awful lowing cows made when the farmer took their calves away from them.

  Soon the house was in uproar. Steven arrived back, out of breath and looking more worried than Jenny had ever seen him, Glad was rushing to and fro boiling kettles and tearing up old bed linen, there was a ring at the front door followed by Dr Stephens’voice in the hall and footsteps on the stairs, a banging at the back and the midwife, aptly named Nurse Stork, bustled through carrying her bag and some sort of apparatus that looked like an oxygen cylinder. Steven paced; of Carrie there was no sign. Only Walt seemed unmoved by the chaos which had engulfed the house, appearing in the kitchen doorway still wearing his serge apron over an old pair of railway trousers and enquiring mildly what he should do about dinner.

  ‘The potatoes are spoiling …’

  ‘Go and dish up yours and Jenny’s,’ Glad said. ‘And Steven’s. You might as well get a good meal inside you, Steven. It could be hours yet.’

  Steven said he didn’t feel like eating, so Jenny sat at the oilcloth-covered table in the kitchen with her grandfather, eating bacon and potatoes and cabbage swimming in the fat from the pan. Then, when they had washed up and Glad was sitting down to eat hers, Jenny went into the front room, turned on a bar of the electric fire, and played Chopsticks on Walt’s piano in an attempt to drown out the sounds coming from upstairs. She wished she could go home, to Joe and David and normality, but she couldn’t tear herself away.

  Soon after four o’clock she heard a baby’s cry and suddenly all her fear and anxiety dropped away and she was filled with wonder. She went out into the hall and after a little while Dr Stephens came down on his way to the bathroom to wash his hands and told her she had a little niece. Then, a bit later, Carrie came down and asked her if she would like to go up to see the baby.

  Heather was propped up against the pillows looking dishevelled and tired but very happy and Steven sat on the edge of the bed with his arms around her so that they somehow both encompassed the little bundle she was holding. Jenny could just see a little face peeping out of the tight swathing, a little wizened red face topped with wisps of fair hair that reminded her oddly of a miniature version of Walt.

  ‘What do you think then, Jenny?’ Heather asked.

  She unwrapped a tiny hand, pink and wrinkled and perfect with tiny oyster-shell nails.

  ‘She’s lovely,’ Jenny said, shy suddenly.

  ‘Vanessa,’ Heather said. ‘We’re going to call her Vanessa, aren’t we, Steve?’

  She smiled at him, holding the baby close against the frills and ruches of her new nightie and quite unexpectedly Jenny’s awe was overshadowed by a wave of emotion she couldn’t put a name to, but which felt oddly like jealousy.

  She and Heather had always been so close; now, suddenly, she felt excluded. Heather and Steven and Vanessa were a unit, a family in which she had no place, and the sense of loss, of bereavement almost, was overwhelming. She wanted to join them on the bed, knew that if she did Heather would not push her away, but would put an arm around her, draw her into the group. But it would be a charade. She wasn’t part of their family and never would be again. With her innate honesty, Jenny could have none of it.

  ‘You timed that very well, Heather,’ Glad said, coming in with a tray of tea in the best bone-china cups – in honour of the occasion – and a plate of biscuits. ‘You missed your dinner, but you weren’t going to miss tea as well, were you?’

  Suddenly Jenny remembered the cockles she had bought for Joe’s tea.

  ‘Dad’s cockles!’ she said. ‘I’ll have to run home with them!’

  They all laughed.

  ‘And you can tell him he’s now officially a grandfather,’ Heather said.

  ‘Oh my lord, and I’m a great-grandmother!’ Glad said, and they all laughed again.

  Jenny put on her coat and left them to it, hurrying up the hill with both the news and the cockles. The ache was back in the pit of her stomach, dull and dragging, and there was a wetness that she thought must be sweat between her legs.

  When she had
told her father and David what had happened, she went to the lavatory – the upstairs one, because it was too cold for comfort in the outside one at this time of year – and that was when she discovered that what she had thought was sweat was, in fact, blood.

  Her face flamed even though she was alone. She’d started her periods! Oh no! She had hoped fervently that wouldn’t happen for a long time yet and wished now, even more fervently, that Carrie was here, not still with Heather. But they’d already discussed it and there was a packet of sanitary towels stored in the bottom of Jenny’s wardrobe against just such an eventuality.

  Jenny fetched them, feeling oddly grown up and terribly vulnerable both at the same time. Somehow the feeling related to the way she’d felt when she’d looked at Heather and Steven and the baby; for many years they were inextricably linked in Jenny’s subconscious.

  ‘It must be really funny to have a baby.’

  David shifted slightly, squinting down at his girlfriend, Linda Parfitt, who was sitting beside him on the sofa in her parents’front room with her head on his shoulder.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well – not funny. Scary.’

  David ignored this. The fact that he had become an uncle had left him totally underwhelmed; he was much more interested in snogging Linda. He had been seeing her for more than three months now, something of a record for him, and so far he had not experienced any of the usual warning signs that he was getting tired of her. This worried him slightly. Three months was getting serious and David had no intention of getting serious about anyone for a good while yet. He’d lost two precious years of his youth to National Service and he had a lot of catching up to do before he was ready to settle down. But he did like Linda a lot, even if she did annoy him sometimes by trying to have these deep and meaningful conversations when all he wanted to do was kiss and cuddle her – and more, if she gave him the chance.