Raking the Ashes

by Anne Fine

  ‘Sorry?’ I looked up from my trowelling. ‘Am I missing something? Is there some problem with Frances?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘No? Or not really?’

  ‘Well, you know.’

  ‘No. I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, weren’t you listening yesterday?’

  ‘What, to your call? No. As it happens, I wasn’t eavesdropping your call with Frances. I was busy getting on with my own life.’

  ‘Oh.’ He looked as if he could have kicked himself. ‘Well, it’s just that she’s the tiniest bit sore with you at the moment.’

  ‘With me? But I assumed you were just squabbling about the children’s dates and times, as usual. So what was it all about?’

  It took some winkling out, I can tell you. But in the end I managed to piece together Frances’ side of the call. The tell-tale phrases gradually stacked up: ‘take it upon herself’, ‘interfering’, ‘knows next to nothing about children’, ‘embarrassing Minna’, ‘alienating the school’ and, most particularly, of course, ‘mind her own business in future’.

  Each time I prised out a nugget, I’d find some different way of asking him ‘So what did you say to that?’ I can’t remember a single one of his slippery, back-pedalling responses. But all of them were definitely along the lines of ‘I promise I’ll have a little word with Tilly.’

  ‘Can I please get this straight?’ I ended up saying. ‘You and your former wife have had a conversation about my limits of responsibility. She thinks I take too much upon myself.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that, Tilly.’

  ‘Well, how was it? I need to know, don’t I?’ I affected innocence. ‘I mean, I presume the two of you still find it acceptable for me to look after your children when she’s late picking them up and you have to rush down the printing shop—’

  ‘Look, please don’t think that either Frances or I is anything other than truly grateful whenever—’

  ‘But if, for example, I were to turn up at the school and find someone threatening Minna with, say, the sharp end of a compass, I’m not to – what was it? – “take it upon myself” to “interfere”, because I “know nothing about children”. Have I got that right?’

  ‘Now you’re just being silly.’

  ‘Oh! So I misunderstood. I am allowed to make my own decisions about what’s safe and what’s not.’

  ‘If you could just bear in mind—’

  ‘Of course! Minna’s embarrassment! The possible alienation of the school staff!’

  He’d had enough now. He was making for the door. I called out after him, ‘But I can still chauffeur Minna around, I hope, for your convenience? That’s still all right, I take it?’

  Safe out of the room, he could pretend he hadn’t heard that. Or what I called out after.

  ‘Well, fuck your ex-wife. And fuck you!’

  It was the sheer disloyalty that got to me most. As if my house were good enough for us to live in, but I were some hired help who could be taken on for this particular morning or that rather busy afternoon, and dropped off when the job was done. I felt insulted. That night, I clawed back all the ground I’d lost the first time we’d quarrelled and I had been the one to end up on the sofa. At supper time I gave him the frigid ‘no, I’m not hungry, thanks’ routine, and stayed at my desk. At least three times he must have come to hover by my shoulder. ‘Tilly …’

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said each time with icy courtesy. ‘I must just finish this. I won’t be long.’

  I sat there, rooting further and further down the pile of stupid things to do until I realized I was checking specifications passed two weeks before. So I just read the paper until the football he was watching on telly reached a crescendo. During the action replay, I whipped into the bathroom. There, I kept up a steady clattering as I ran water into the tub, knowing he’d judge it best not to knock until I was settled. I never offered him the chance. I slid into the water while the taps were still running, and out again almost at once, so even before he realized what was happening, I was back in the bedroom, and his pyjamas were in a heap outside the door.

  I don’t know if I really thought he’d take it lying down. I heard the footsteps, then his knuckles rapping. ‘Tilly? Tilly, open the door, please. Don’t you think we ought to talk?’

  He kept it up so long I felt I had to answer.

  ‘No, honestly,’ I chirruped. ‘Just so long as you’re still talking everything over with Frances, that’s all that matters. Don’t you worry about me.’

  ‘Tilly, this is ridiculous.’

  ‘I’ll decide what’s ridiculous. And, believe me, the one thing that’ll come top of the list of ridiculous things from now on is giving a damn about you or your children.’

  ‘Look, I know I was tactless—’

  ‘Tactless?’

  ‘And seemed ungrateful.’

  ‘Seemed?’

  ‘But, honestly, Tilly, I truly didn’t mean you to be so upset.’

  ‘I’m sure you didn’t. I’m sure you would have very much preferred I’d had some sort of silent and invisible lobotomy, and was happy to fit in with whatever you and Frances decide between you is most suitable, without having any feelings of my own.’

  Men hate it when you hit home. ‘If you’re so keen on having feelings, Til, don’t forget that there’s one you could try having a little more often.’

  ‘Oh, yes? And what’s that?’

  ‘A bit of gratitude I don’t share your bad temper.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ I told him. ‘There you go. Nobody’s perfect.’

  5

  STRANGE THINGS RESULT from anger. Within a day or so of acting cold indifference, I truly think that I began to feel it. Families are creepy things, and other people’s families are even creepier. So, if I’m honest, it was something of a relief to be, not just given permission, but as good as ordered to stay out of the Andersons’ hair. And the following week, something else happened to turn what might have proved a passing sulk into a settled frame of mind.

  It was a dark grey afternoon, with icy spitting rain. Geoff thundered up the stairs. ‘Tilly! Come down and look at this! It’s amazing!’

  It was a parrot perched on the tree opposite, jaunty with colour. I watched for a minute or two, sure it would fly off again almost at once, then went to find the binoculars in the back cupboard.

  ‘Is it still there?’

  ‘Yes. Still here. Look at that greeny blue streak all along its belly! It’s as bright as that coloured foil wrapping when you toss it on the fire.’

  We stood, his arm round my shoulder, passing the binoculars from one to the other. It just so happened I was the one holding them when Frances’s car drew up outside. In turn, the children leaned forward to kiss their mother before scrambling out. I lowered the glasses in case Frances glanced towards the house and took offence at being watched so closely. Harry and Minna rushed up the path to greet their father. We had a perfectly pleasant afternoon. I raised the topic only over supper.

  ‘Did your mum notice the parrot?’ I asked Minna.

  As usual Geoff didn’t give her space to answer. ‘You didn’t even know it was there till I pointed it out, did you, Minna?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I thought your mother might have stopped the car a little way up the street, to watch it.’

  Both children were staring. ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘It’s just that neither of you was wearing a seat belt when you arrived.’

  Minna stayed silent, of course. But Harry thought he was on solid ground. ‘Oh, no. That wasn’t the parrot. That’s because all the strap buckles are stuck under.’

  ‘Under the seat? Doesn’t your mother worry?’

  He made a ‘never-really-thought-about-it’ face, though I could tell from Geoff’s uneasy shifting that he, at least, was sniffing trouble. But I kept on. ‘It’s a real nuisance, of course, putting those sorts of back seats up and down. The strap buckles always seem to vanish. What were you carr
ying, anyway?’

  ‘The Christmas tree,’ Minna remembered. ‘You can still get needles in your legs.’

  ‘Prickly!’ I sympathized (though I meant ‘Bingo!’). I changed the subject. Geoff’s unease melted away, probably before he even realized he was feeling it. And only when the children were safely gone that evening did I open fire.

  ‘It’s January the twelfth,’ I reminded Geoffrey. ‘If Frances had her tree up by Christmas Eve—’

  He wasn’t thinking. ‘Christmas Eve? You must be joking. Frances is so bloody organized her tree is always up well before that.’

  ‘Say the eighteenth, then. That makes five weeks, at least.’

  ‘Five weeks of what?’

  ‘Of Harry and Minna not wearing safety belts in the car.’

  There was such silence, I felt sorry for him. There he’d been, offering me a friendly nugget about his former wife, and, in return, what had I given him? Any way you look at it, trouble.

  ‘I’ll dig the straps out for her next time she comes.’

  ‘She’s driving the children down to York tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll give her a ring.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘In the morning.’

  ‘But you don’t know what time she’s leaving.’

  ‘Then I’ll ring early.’

  ‘Maybe you ought to ring her now.’

  ‘Tilly …’

  ‘Geoff?’

  He was looking at me strangely, and seeking something in my face. I turned away, ostensibly to get a fresh drying-up cloth from the drawer, but really to stop him trying to work out what was fuelling my relentless pursuit. His own suspicions sparked off mine. Was it, I asked myself, truly what I’d have answered if he had challenged me? That my entire career revolved around matters like these. The safety standards of over a hundred oilmen lay pretty well in my hands. I’d watched more safety videos than I’d seen washing-powder adverts, and knew the exact force of bodies hurling through the air. Of course I wasn’t going to say, ‘Well, you know best, dear. They’re your children,’ and let the two of them get on with their sloppy and dangerous habits.

  Or was it, at root, nothing to do with Harry and Minna? Something a little darker? Perhaps some predatory desire, born of sheer irritation, to hound the man who had so recently humiliated me on this same issue of the welfare of children. Perhaps I was simply getting my revenge – taking advantage of the situation to stamp on the shadows behind him and keep him on the run. Because Geoffrey never did make the effort to ring Frances. And I didn’t make him because I didn’t really care. It must be the worst thing on earth to grow to love a child yet have no say in things that happen to it. Either you would go mad with anxiety or you’d bail out. And on that evening after the parrot came, I had to face a quite unpalatable fact about myself. One little setback had stopped me bothering. I look back now and see my only real purpose was to set Geoffrey squirming so I could better see how he unravelled, in exactly the same way I’d try to understand a piece of machinery by taking it apart.

  And so that wrangle came, like every other, not to a proper conclusion, but to an end. Yet most of the time we were still perfectly happy. That summer, Ed came home to help me move our mother yet again as her condition worsened, but I remember it as one long pleasant time. Poor Mum’s relief at no longer being ‘strongly encouraged’ to get out of bed each day was plain from the start. Her brain worked no better in the new place; but, no longer baffled by handles and switches and taps, she clearly felt warmer and safer, and her fantasies became less fearful. I started coming home from the nursing home in perfectly good spirits.

  ‘Good visit?’

  ‘Went a treat.’

  ‘So who did she think you were today? Good or Bad Tilly?’

  ‘It’s not quite as simple as that,’ I told him wryly. ‘Even within an afternoon it shifts about. Today I even wondered if it might depend on something as simple as where I happen to be sitting. I mean, she did ask, “Where’s that other one? You know, the one with hair like yours who sits reading the paper by the window?” But when I said, “Mum, that one’s me as well. It’s just that sometimes I sit over there because the light’s better,” she just let it go – except to say she hoped the other one didn’t come back till after I’d gone.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  I burst out laughing. ‘Because she’s rather standoffish, apparently. And Mum says she much prefers me.’

  Geoff pulled the cork out of the celebratory bottle of wine that signalled Duty Done. ‘So what do you reckon, Tilly? Has she settled enough to be left for a whole month? Is France on or off?’

  And France was on. When I looked back, I realized that I hadn’t had a proper holiday in as long as I could remember. And Geoffrey did it all. He fixed up a lovely rented cottage in an apricot orchard. There was a tiny shaded pool. Cows stared at us over the hedges. And everywhere we walked, we saw signs warning us of bulls. I felt my bones melt as days drifted past. I didn’t notice what we talked about, and, in that heat, all conversations were desultory.

  It was a magic, magic time. I’d look at Geoffrey, looking down at me with real desire, and think myself so lucky. He’d put his arm around me as I picked my way in high heels down the rutted path on the nights we went out to smart restaurants. He peeled me oranges, and skimmed the dead bugs off the surface of the pool before I swam. And I have never in my whole life thought, I’d love these days to last for ever, as I did then.

  Then we drove back to the ferry. Even the crossing seemed to be part of the holiday. It was only as the car tyres rolled over the noisy metal sheeting between the boat and the quayside that Geoffrey showed his first doubt. ‘We could just skip this visit. He doesn’t know we’re coming. We could just shoot up to the motorway straight away, and miss the traffic.’

  ‘Geoff, he’s your father.’

  ‘We’ll simply pop in, then. Just for a cup of tea, that’s all. We’ll make it clear right from the start that we’re not staying.’

  I was intrigued. Did he suppose his dad was going to hate me? Geoffrey kept glancing at his watch. ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked him. ‘Even if we don’t get as far as home tonight, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘What is it, then? You keep on checking the time.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Geoff,’ I said. ‘Stop the car.’

  ‘Don’t be daft, Tilly.’

  ‘I mean it. Stop the car.’

  He pulled up on a garage forecourt, out of the way of the pumps. ‘What is the matter?’

  ‘I want to know why you’re looking at your watch every few seconds.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  I sat there patiently, watching the traffic flash past as if I’d be happy to sit there for ever. ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘Maybe I am. I didn’t realize that I was, but maybe I am.’

  ‘But why?’

  It was like watching something made of mud attempt to think. He made the process appear downright painful. ‘I suppose …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I suppose …’ He squirmed. ‘I suppose I’m worried that, the later we get to Briar Cottage, the drunker he’ll be.’

  Too right! Geoff’s father might not have been swaying or puking, or saying, ‘See you, Jimmy!’ every thirty seconds like half the drunks in Aberdeen. But he was no picnic to visit. He spent a lot of time pretending I wasn’t there, and, when he did admit that I was on the planet, he wasn’t pleasant. He made a face as I kicked off my sandals – honestly, you’d have thought I’d stepped out of my knickers – and glowered as I picked my way barefoot down the bank into the tiny brook that ran along the end of his garden. I paddled in a daft way, up and down, willing the moments to pass. He stared at me with utter scorn for a while, then said to Geoffrey loudly enough for me to hear, ‘Is she always this idiotic? Doesn’t she realize she’s ruining my precious marsh marigolds?’

  Mortified, I clambered out and, in a desperate attempt to
prove myself more sensible than a paddling toddler, asked, ‘Do you get much pollution in the stream?’

  ‘None,’ he said, ‘till you stepped in.’

  I couldn’t help but gasp. I don’t believe that, since I left primary school, anyone has ever been so rude. I would have thought that I’d misheard, if he’d not followed it up as we were leaving. Staring down at the car as I was climbing in, he said to Geoffrey, ‘What’s that on the back seat?’

  Geoff glanced at the unopened packet of batteries lying there, waiting to go back to the shop to be exchanged for ones the next size up. ‘Oh, that’s just one of my mistakes.’

  In the wing mirror, I saw his father’s thumb jerk my way and, with the car windows open, heard him say it clearly enough. ‘You mark my words, boy. So is she.’

  We must have driven for at least a mile with neither of us saying anything. I could only suppose Geoff was waiting for some explosion. But what did it matter to me? Geoff had as good as warned me. And, after all, it’s not as if I were eighteen and dying to be part of a brand-new family, or planning to have children who might want to paddle in the stream in their turn, and call the grumpy old fart ‘Grandpa’. So after a while I said, quite fascinated by the whole grisly experience, ‘Do you know, I do believe your father is the rudest man I’ve ever met.’

  Geoff’s fingers tightened round the steering wheel. ‘Well, he was drunk. I did warn you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘You did warn me. And a good thing too, since he is almost unbelievably offensive.’

  That’s when he said it. ‘Tilly, he is my father.’

  People who use cloth for brains have always got on my nerves. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you are right that he’s your father. And I am right that he’s the rudest man I’ve ever met. Both of these statements can be true at the same time, and both of them are.’

  I don’t know what made me mutter under my breath, ‘Unless, of course, you were adopted.’ But that was a step too far. Geoffrey fell in a sulk that lasted for sixty miles. I did try pulling him out of it once or twice. I twittered on about the colour of some cows in a field, as I recall. And once or twice I remarked on the number of squashed pheasants. But after a while I felt more cross than guilty. After all, what was Geoffrey doing except for closing down a conversation that was making him a shade uncomfortable? Well, he might prefer to live in his own little Noddy world in which no one – not even his father’s most recent victim – had the temerity to point out that the man was rude; but I’m on the planet too, and I didn’t see why I had to sit beside him in the car all the way home, forbidden to speak of what was uppermost in my mind, or talk about the visit properly. After all, it would have been interesting. Had Geoffrey’s father’s behaviour been unusual for him? Or was that always the sort of thing he dealt out to strangers? And, if it were, then when did he turn that rude? Who let him get away with it till it became a habit? Did he have any friends? I would have loved to hear Geoff’s views on why his father acted the way he did.