Raking the Ashes

by Anne Fine

  So what should I have said? The actual truth? That I had covered for the stupid cow through all her half-brained shiatsu and her reiki, her idiot zen, her numerology crap, her daft magnetic therapy and, for all I knew, classes in bloody runes. And in return, she and her unthinking ex-mate had fixed up to choose a school without the very person who would have to care for her son if (more than likely, when) her little cancer cells came back in force.

  I really didn’t have a lot of choice. Harry was only twelve. How can you tell a boy that age that you wish both his bloody parents dead?

  Sadly – you can’t.

  8

  BUT YOU CAN brood. Brood on the reasons you might still be around. It clearly wasn’t anything to do with why women usually stay, grimly prepared to get less from a partnership simply because they need that partnership more. After all, it was my house. I had my freedom and a salary, and I can fix the washer. Someone like me had to think again. And think I did. I gave up idly blaming all those other things – the timelessness of sky and sea, Geoff’s kindness and caresses, even the tempting smell of casserole – for the fact that I stayed with a man I was coming to despise (and at times truly hated). Gradually I came round to facing the truth.

  Living with Geoff suited me.

  The thing is, I am not a nice person. (That, or I’m normal and no one else tells the truth.) Way back in primary school, I used to pray for the death of Ingrid Molloy. She was everything I longed to be: blond, sweet and clever. (It turned out I was clever too, but no one had realized.) So every night I lit the candle stub that I kept hidden, and prayed for Ingrid’s death. I didn’t pray to God. Even to me, that would have seemed a dreadful blasphemy. And I did not admit to myself I prayed to the Devil. But I’m not sure who else I might have thought would use his powers to make her drown, or eat a poisoned tart, or fall under the wheels of the school bus. Each morning I greeted Ingrid with a cheery smile, sat at the desk beside her, shared my sweets, joined in the games she played, and quite enjoyed her company.

  The only thing was that I wanted her gone.

  So maybe I have an inbuilt leaning to ambivalence. But Geoff did play his part. Oh, he was unfailingly charming and kind, still treating me each day as if I were a precious gift that had, by sheer good fortune, come to him. But underneath, with all his petty betrayals, all his small deceptions, you might have thought he was in two minds too, and deliberately seeding the weeds that would rise up and choke us.

  Because, as months passed, it became more and more clear to me that there are real advantages in sharing life with someone so determinedly denying you the one thing you want. It makes you feel quite justified in being selfish back, and for someone like me, that is very much an asset. Doing exactly what I want has always come naturally. Indeed, I take it rather as a virtue, remembering with a shudder my Aunty Jean, who was forever twisting herself out of shape trying to do the very best by everyone and, under the strain of it, turning into a harpy. I think, too, of Ed’s former wife, who was continually asking visitors what they would like to do, or eat. ‘No, honestly. That’s fine by me. I would have chosen that too.’ Even in other people’s houses she was quite intolerable, responding to every single question with another. ‘So are you hungry yet, Alice?’ ‘How about you?’ ‘Would you care for a walk?’ ‘Is that what you feel like doing?’ Spending a weekend with Alice was like an endless round of Liars’ Dice, with all the polite fibs and the second-guessing – and with, as often as not, the creeping and dispiriting suspicion that no one in the room was either getting what they really wanted, or even the pale satisfaction of being sure that someone else was taking pleasure in their stead.

  So there was something to be grateful for in facing facts. The woman Geoffrey loved was not the one who stood before him, flawed but real; it was some pedestal job, some figment of his boyish fantasies, unsuitable for grown-up life. Starved of the openness on which a relationship thrives, ours quietly shrivelled, till I was having more honest conversations with Donald in the company office than ever I had with Geoffrey. ‘Poor bloody bugger.’ Donald kept sticking up for him. ‘You should be glad you’ve got him.’ (Echoes of Ed.) And I would shrug, finding it hard to explain that in a way I was. And not just glad. Grateful. Because, as time passed, there was something more and more beguiling about being left to hide in silence and work. All the convenience of a second body in the house (‘Could you help with this ladder?’ ‘While you’re in town, would you pick up some milk?’) but none of the frustration and effort of engagement. Our conversations, which, when real, so often used to sour, now turned more easy and affectionate. I found it restful, and it made decisions easy. I did exactly as I chose, feeling no guilt, for after all a partner cannot cherry-pick their way through life. And since all Geoff’s decisions over the last few years had made it clear he gave me no real standing in Harry and Minna’s lives, I took it as fair dealing he couldn’t interfere in mine.

  ‘Off to North Africa? For three months? Tilly, can’t you say no?’

  I made a face. ‘That might be difficult. I mean, there’s such a power struggle going on between the contractors and the service company. I’m sure as soon as it’s sorted they’ll stop squeezing my schedule. But in the meantime …’

  ‘There must be someone who could go instead.’

  I shrugged. ‘I’m sorry. Right now, there just aren’t enough of us to pick and choose.’ He still looked doubtful, so I added airily, ‘You know – what with the cream-off of good engineers to all this new wind-farm technology.’

  Bollocks on stilts, but he bought it. ‘You will be back in time for Christmas?’

  ‘Of course I will. Probably before, if all this spatting between the contractors stops.’ I gave him a smile. I felt quite sorry for him, knowing he would be lonely. He hardly saw the kids now. Each week they acted more and more offhand, constantly cancelling midweek visits – even whole weekends – because of things they wanted to do more: hanging around shopping malls, having sleepovers with friends, going on school trips to France. Whatever strides Harry made towards independence, Minna seemed almost instantly in his wake. It was as if the gap in age between the two of them was fading to nothing. And as time passed it somehow gradually became more and more difficult to stay plugged in to any of the small progressions of their lives: Harry’s first set of real exams; Minna’s attempts to get in the county swimming team. In the absence of regular updates, even the seemingly endless decisions about which subjects each child should study further and which should be dropped became hard to discuss. Soon, both had become so leggy, so forthright, so very independent, that it was difficult even to get them to phone when they weren’t going to make the effort to show up and sleep over.

  ‘You ought to be pleased,’ I tried to comfort Geoff. ‘It’s good they’re ready to stand on their own feet. This is the age when young people are supposed to break away and need their parents less.’

  He looked so wistful. ‘Tilly, do you suppose, if you and I had had children …’

  I can’t bear maudlin sentimentality. In the old days, I would have pulled him up with acid talk of living in Noddyland. Now, I used simple distraction. ‘How about trying bribery? Teenagers love showing off. Why don’t you invite them somewhere really special and tell them each can bring a friend?’

  ‘What sort of somewhere special?’

  ‘Tatiana’s? Or The Oyster Bed?’

  He looked embarrassed. ‘As it happens, Til, I’m a bit short this month.’

  ‘I’ll pay.’

  So that’s what we did. At least the two of them showed up. It worked a treat. Harry and Minna were all over their father, and more forthcoming than they’d been for as long as I could remember. Even the presence of the inarticulate and staring friends wasn’t a problem. So over the next couple of years we fell into the habit of dealing with the business of getting to see them by offering lunches or dinners out. After a while, I couldn’t help but notice that arrangements for any old pizza joint or cheap Mexican dive were
as often as not cancelled. (‘Sorry, Dad. Something’s come up.’) It had to be fancy French restaurants. Smart Italian places. And it was in one of these, Giovanni’s, that one day I caught sight of Sol, a little older and a whole lot stockier after the missing years, lunching with two other men in the corner.

  Our eyes met. Neither of us smiled or waved, making it clear, as Sol said afterwards, that both of us were in the market for a touch of discretion. I admit I had no real need to get up from my seat and go off to the Ladies. And it was no surprise to find him lurking in the vestibule when I came out.

  ‘Sol!’

  ‘Tilly! As lovely as ever.’ Taking my outstretched hand in both of his, he turned it over, bent to kiss the palm, then pressed into it one of his lavish business cards with raised gold lettering. ‘See you soon, sweetheart.’ He vanished into the men’s room.

  I looked at the card. New office address, new phone number, and, when I turned it over, scribbled on the back: ‘Phone me.’

  Was it so clear-cut that I would? To Sol, perhaps. As for myself, I went round and round the houses offering myself excuses. The conversation that I’d tried to have with Geoff about what should happen to his father’s house, now the old bugger had died. (‘I think I’ll take my time on this one, Tilly.’) The forceful attempt I’d made to get him to talk to the children when Frances’s cancer came back in force. (‘I think, what with their exams coming up, I’d rather leave it a while.’) Every attempt to live in the real world seemed strangled at birth. Why, only that morning Geoff had muttered, ‘Not the best day for a long lunch, as it happens. I’m a bit pushed,’ and I had answered cheerfully enough, ‘Well, if you want Harry and Minna to cry off, just send a message that we’ve switched the venue to Mexican Joe’s.’

  He’d rounded on me in an instant. ‘That’s a bit mean, Til.’

  ‘It’s the truth.’

  ‘Not as I see it,’ he’d responded in a huff, and left the room on the excuse of fetching some pair of socks out of the drier. I’d sat on the bed, I remember, pulling on my tights and tipping my head from side to side like a small clockwork doll as I ran through his repertoire of tired phrases, all designed to make the point that he didn’t agree with me without going to the trouble of trying to persuade me. ‘That’s a bit harsh.’ ‘Not my experience.’ ‘I’m surprised that you think that.’ I swung my head faster and faster, like a metronome gone mad, and threw in the lofty disbelieving eyebrow that so annoyed me. ‘Honestly, Tilly, you do say the oddest things!’ ‘I know you can’t really believe that.’ ‘Oh, Tilly. I take it that’s a joke.’ By the time Geoff came thundering back up the stairs with his socks, the doll face I’d been making must have degenerated into that of a staring maniac.

  He caught me muttering, ‘I think it’s best I ignore that,’ in a mechanical voice.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine,’ I assured him. ‘Never better. Just seeing if I can say “if you say so, dear” in twenty different languages.’

  To me, that is the sort of challenge a partner should stand up to meet. (‘What are you saying, Tilly? That I just fob you off?’) But Geoff chose to pretend he hadn’t heard. ‘You’d better get your skates on or we’ll be late.’

  So I could argue I have Geoff to thank for pretty well driving me back into Sol’s arms. And Sol to thank in turn for keeping Geoff and me together over the next few years. Sometimes it was a matter of an afternoon, sometimes a whole weekend tacked onto the end of a few days on rig or slid in before the inspections. The company put their foot in it once or twice, phoning to ask if I could take over for people who had failed to show up, or gone off sick. More than once, Geoffrey met me at the door to take my coat and ask in a puzzled fashion, ‘Everything all right? Someone rang trying to get you. They seemed to think you flew home yesterday.’

  I’d play it supercool. ‘Really? I shall be pretty pissed off if they fuss about last night’s hotel bill.’

  Off Geoff would trot, persuaded both by my indifference and by his own need never to look trouble in the eye. And that’s how Sol became a pressure valve. Each time I needed someone to agree with me that facts were facts, Sol played the game.

  Out of a sense of fairness I offered each conversation to Geoff first. ‘Guess what I’ve just seen. Minna, in the queue for the Odeon ticket office. Shouldn’t she be in school?’

  ‘That happens to me all the time, Til. I keep thinking I see one or other of them all over town. It is amazing how alike young people look.’

  ‘Geoff, while you were out, somebody’s mother rang. She wasn’t very coherent. She wouldn’t leave her name and she was in a real temper. But she said Harry’s been offering her daughter “substances”, and if it happens again, she’s going to report it.’

  ‘Harry? Ridiculous!’

  ‘Aren’t you even going to ask him?’

  ‘I wouldn’t insult him in that way.’

  ‘Geoff—’

  ‘No, Til!’ His colour rose. ‘One can be all too quick to think the worst of young people.’

  So it was to Sol that I turned for sensible discussion of irritations through Harry and Minna’s teenage years: Minna’s persistent truancy; Harry’s strange, quiet slidings on and off the rails. Often Sol ticked me off for not tackling their problems a whole lot more forcibly. ‘Teenagers these days live in a dangerous world, Tilly. Parents have to stay on top of them. You must make Geoff listen.’

  ‘You underestimate the man. If he prefers to live in Happy Valley, nothing will shift him.’

  ‘But it’s so bad for Harry and Minna. Don’t you care?’

  ‘Sol, if I wanted something to worry myself sick about night and day, I’d have had kids of my own.’

  Sol came out with the echoes of Donald and Ed I’d heard so often since we’d picked up again. ‘You’re a cold fish, Til. And if you can’t be bothered to kick the man into being someone you can respect, you ought to do the decent thing and let the poor bugger go.’

  ‘There speaks the man who’s ratting on his own wife!’

  Sol shook a finger. ‘That’s the whole point, Tilly. I adore Lydia. We have an entire life built up. Our son, my daughters and a lovely house—’

  ‘I know! I know! Your splendid antique furniture. All her nice jewellery. Your place in France.’

  He leaned back against the pillows. ‘Exactly! A life shared – that’s what we have.’ He ran a finger down my naked breast. ‘All except you, of course. And what have you got in common with Geoffrey? Nothing. You’re even too mean-spirited to marry him. Give him a break, Tilly. Set the poor sod free to find a nicer woman while he still has time. Do the right thing. Dump the poor bastard.’

  I rolled away. ‘And just become one of your playthings? No thanks, Sol.’

  But later, driving home, I gave the idea some real thought. What Sol said did make sense. How would Geoff feel if, after Harry and Minna finally grew up and became absorbed in their own lives, I was to stir myself enough to leave? Unless I thought we’d be together till the bitter end, then it was better, surely, to put an end to things now, not do it later and feel terrible because I’d left him all alone.

  But in the end, as usual, I let the whole thing ride for the most trivial reason. Donald rang to say he’d found the perfect car for Harry: battered to bits on the outside, but sound as a bell. It seemed a shame to give the lad something so perfect for his birthday, then disappear at once. So, when I could over the next few weeks, I’d pick him up from Frances’s and drive him to the abandoned aerodrome beside a storage plant of ours a few miles north. Once or twice he turned up in a suspiciously elated mood. (Once, after the briefest look at him, I faked excuses and I drove straight home.) But, on the whole, the boy was all attention and all charm throughout the lessons, and got so good at handling the car that I used to leave him to it and sit, reading, on a wall till he was ready to go home. He took his test a fortnight after his next birthday, and phoned up, crowing. ‘Easy-peasy, Til! And the examiner even shook my hand after sh
e passed me!’

  From that day on, like Geoffrey, I was back out in the cold. In fact things were worse, for now when Minna needed driving anywhere, instead of phoning Geoff, as she always had before, Frances simply asked Harry to take his sister. After the car I bought him ended up smashed beyond repair in some ditch, she took to nodding at him to take the keys to her own. And since, in the grip of her treatments, Frances no longer had the will or energy to pay attention to just how often her son was emptying her purse to fill up the tank, Harry took full advantage, persuading his sister to say she needed to go into Newcastle time and again when he felt like a jaunt with his friends. Geoffrey would mope. ‘I never see them these days.’ It didn’t bother me. I just got on with my own life. Each time my brother rang, he made a point of asking, ‘And how are Harry and Minna?’ Again and again I’d spoon out the same deflecting answer. So it came almost as a surprise to hear myself saying one evening, ‘Oh, they’re both fine. But as it happens, Frances is back in hospital so tonight we’re taking them out.’

  ‘Somewhere nice?’

  ‘Pretty swish, yes.’

  ‘Your money’s still growing on trees, then?’

  ‘Not half.’

  And maybe it was because the image of a money tree stuck in my mind that, when I watched Geoffrey fruitlessly scrabbling through his pockets for his credit card at the end of the evening, it struck me that almost every time, these days, it was me who ended up reaching across to slide the bill towards my coffee cup, and get the business of paying over and done with so we could leave.

  It set me thinking yet again about the printing shop. Right from the start I had been mystified by Print-It! I’d had this view, presumably gleaned from Sol, that little businesses were always either ‘going up’ or ‘going down’; yet in the years that Geoff and I had been together, he’d never said a word that might lead anyone to think the small shop on the High Street was anything other than a steady thing that simply kept rolling along with his hand on the tiller. He never seemed to go in more or go in less. He never agonized over whether to manage without Mrs Mackie, or ask Doris to work extra hours. He never stayed there late to finish things, and I could only ever recall him rushing back to the shop on his free afternoon if one of the copiers had broken. Thinking about it more carefully I realized, too, that I had never known Geoff seek out business advice, or buy any of those books you see all over airports, or even pore over work spreadsheets. It came to mind that when we’d first got together I’d left the business sections of the newspaper lying about, presuming that, like Sol, he did at least run his eyes over the various articles and predictions. But after a while, seeing the inserts lying still folded, unopened, day after day, I’d started dropping them straight in the bin just as I had before, and not a word was ever said. I don’t believe Geoff even noticed.