Raking the Ashes

by Anne Fine

  In my mind’s eye I had the sharpest image of Geoffrey, way back in April, hanging up the phone starry-eyed at the news of the christening. I heard our voices as clearly as if the little exchange had taken place yesterday: ‘What with the wedding date at least being fixed …’ ‘I didn’t know.’ ‘Well, no. Minna’s only just told me.’

  I took the deepest breath. ‘So,’ I asked Gloria innocently, ‘what notice would you have been able to give? Just the full month?’

  She stared as if she thought I might be tipsy. ‘Three months, Tilly.’ Scrabbling in her handbag, she pulled out the packet she’d been hiding from Tara all day, and tapped out a cigarette. ‘Pretty well to the day. I remember distinctly because the woman in the travel office told me that, if the worst came to the worst, she’d be able to save me from falling into the next penalty period, but only because her computer had been down the day before.’ She glanced round nervously to check her daughter wasn’t watching her, then lit her cigarette and took a deep drag. ‘But then you came up trumps! So I was lucky.’ Like some sophisticated dragon, she let the smoke slide out of one side of her mouth. ‘Tilly?’

  I don’t know what she thought she was seeing on my face. Exhilaration? Relief? Pure blinding ecstasy? Perhaps she took me for the sort of soppy soul prepared to be thrilled by somebody else’s good fortune. In any case, she grasped my arm and told me warmly, ‘I ought to thank you for offering to switch your work dates around so very promptly.’ She gave a throaty giggle. ‘Really I should buy you a drink, but—’

  I don’t know how she would have finished up. Perhaps: ‘– but it’s a free bar.’ Or even, ‘– but it looks to me as if you might have had a few already.’ But I had interrupted. ‘I must say, Gloria, if you really do feel that you owe me a favour, I wouldn’t say no to one of your cigarettes.’

  She beamed. ‘Another smoker? Bliss!’ She peered round, clearly still on the look-out for her stern daughter, then offered furtively, ‘Come round the back of the marquee and we can sin together.’

  We picked our way in our high heels around the guy ropes. I clutched my handbag safely to my side, all too aware of its precious paper cargo. However you stretch it, halfway through April to the first week in June is not three months. And there, hidden safe inside, lay my reprieve, fresh as the day I dictated it: No lies, no leaving information out, no sneaky little deceptions of any sort. That is the deal.

  My open sesame. My brand-new passport out.

  I took the cigarette that Gloria offered me. As I inexpertly puffed great clouds around us, then fell into splutters, the dizzying feeling of freedom grew and the coughs turned to laughter. Suddenly I found myself confessing to my hostess with perfect honesty, ‘You see, the problem is that I don’t smoke really, Gloria. Never – well, hardly ever. Only if, like today, it is a very, very special occasion.’

  12

  THAT IS WEAK people for you. Their only strength lies in their little secrets. The only power that they have comes from keeping things from others. And, bingo! That was it. Geoffrey had hanged himself on the old, old habit. The only question was, why had he been so stupid as to try and grub up a tiny bit of goodwill from a woman he hadn’t even met yet, at such risk to his life with me? I can only assume he was confident I wouldn’t find out – or, if I did, that he’d be able to ride out the storm. It was that same incorrigible complacency that causes all too many husbands to lose their wives – that lasting and impregnable assumption that, just because they themselves are too smug and idle either to change themselves or anything around them, the woman they live with will not rouse herself to change anything either. Geoff knew as well as I did that our life together was built on a fault line. Right from the start we’d felt the tremors and quakes. What Geoff had chosen to forget is that it’s both halves of a couple, and not just one, who are free to decide that some companionable old rift has become an unbridgeable chasm. He thought I’d stay because to stay was easy, and idleness ran through him like letters stamped through seaside rock. It stopped him ever facing facts that might have stirred his stumps. But one of the facts that he’d refused to face was that my life with him had always had one thing in common with that marriage to Bill which ended with such ease: it wasn’t the time we spent together that kept it going, but the time we spent apart. We had no joint ambitions and no common plan. We didn’t even share passions. In fact, I felt like someone living in a pleasant hotel. I was well fed, the rooms were comfortable, and, day to day, everything ran on oiled wheels. But, at heart, none of it was anything to do with me. That was the way he had preferred to keep things, and that’s the way they’d grown.

  But in the end everyone gets to choose. And you can settle for emotional fog blurring the edges of failure. Or you can get out.

  Interesting that they all tried stopping me. ‘He probably thought he was just being nice.’ Donald tried to defend him.

  ‘Nice? Telling some stranger in Sussex I’ll be able to make a date I won’t, just to save her the inconvenience of shifting her holiday?’

  ‘You know how these things happen. You want to be helpful and it just sort of slips out because it would be so convenient if it were true.’

  Ed said the same. ‘Oh, Tilly. Why make such a meal of it? The poor clown probably intended to ’fess up from the moment he said it, then simply didn’t dare.’

  Next time we slept together, I asked Sol, ‘Why wouldn’t he have said?’

  Sol pushed the flaming curtain of my hair away to stare at me somewhat incredulously, but all he said (and rather mildly) was, ‘Tilly, you are a rather frightening person when you get angry.’

  So there you are. Three men. And all agreed on it. All sticking up for one another, as usual. I have to admit it enraged me. All week I stamped round the rig, staring at all those signs I’d copied out to intrigue Harry all those years ago. NO SMOKING, NO EATING, NO DRINKING. NO ENTRY BEYOND THIS POINT WITHOUT A SAFETY HARNESS. YOU BREAK THIS RULE, WE FLY YOU OUT. And that does happen. Only the week before, we’d lost a good motor man simply because he wouldn’t follow the company rules about pushing wheeled gear along catwalks. Oh, yes! Men can be quick enough to act if the issue is one, like an all too likely compensation claim, that might affect company profits. Or to squawk if it personally affects them. Try cheating Sol on a deal, and I can’t see you coming out unscathed. I wouldn’t mess with my brother about things that matter to him. And as for Donald – even mild-mannered Donald – try telling lies to him about whether or not you’ll make it up to Aberdeen in time for the next relay out. You’ll soon see your cards in your hand. But point out some personal betrayal that matters to you, and they’ll be practically queuing up to urge you to let it slide. ‘Come off it, Tilly. He was trying to be nice’ (or ‘keep the peace’; or ‘stop you getting upset’; or any one of a million excuses for not having the guts to be straight). They just can’t see decisions have to rest on something over and above just being ‘nice’. Once you start off down that street, we could all go round making other people’s lives a misery, all the while telling ourselves we’re acting from the best of motives. It would turn out as easy to call Geoff a fine upstanding man for trying to save Gloria a pittance as label him craven for telling lies to me, presumably in order to keep a little bit of an edge on his own family – the only thing he had and I didn’t. The only thing that was still offering him a tiny bit of self-esteem.

  But it’s not for each of us to decide for ourselves which things in life are going to be important. We have to get a grip on our subconscious minds, the feelings we hide, not just from others but from ourselves as well. We have to live so others know where they stand. That’s why, beneath the surface crap of things like good manners and a reasonable amount of willing helpfulness, lie other, tougher things. Because they’re more important, they’re even given a different name. We call them virtues.

  And one of the virtues is honesty. But none of them could see it. They simply couldn’t see it. ‘You’ve made me tell a good few whoppers on your behalf,�
�� Donald kept reminding me.

  ‘Hark at the pot moralizing about the kettle,’ scoffed Ed. ‘Have you forgotten how you lied to Geoff about where Mother’s money went? And bullied me into supporting you.’

  ‘You are deceitful too,’ said Sol. ‘I expect you’re being deceitful now, simply to be in bed with me.’

  I closed my ears to all of them. I refused to listen.

  Easy enough to put the question to me now. ‘Tilly, why didn’t you just walk away?’

  You try it. There’s a staying quality about weak people no one can match. It is a tyranny. Live with a man while, one by one, he loses his savings and his property, his income and children, and I defy you at the end to have the guts to say to him, ‘And now I’m leaving too.’ I think I had no choice. You can ask: ‘Why didn’t you solve the problem by selling up and splitting everything two ways?’ I think the answer’s clear: why on earth should I? I’m not the one who dribbled my assets away, one after another, in the face of all warnings. If you spend years indulging yourself in ‘thinking everything will work out right’, you can’t expect everyone round you to compensate you if things go sour. Fools suffer. That is the way of the world. I might have had a bit more sympathy if Geoff had been an idiot by birth – someone too stupid to understand a contract, or grasp the hidden costs of a loan. But sail through life sunny and carefree, deliberately ignoring the possibility that things might go awry, and you should pay the price.

  Besides, it was entirely his choice to try to come after me. (Admittedly I knew he would. But is a woman to be held to blame if a man’s made it plain he is unlikely to make the slightest effort to manage without her? If he gets needier and needier over the years, is she supposed to choose only those paths that take into account the fact that, in his determination to be a leech, he might well follow?) All very well for you to say now, so accusingly, ‘Tilly, you must have known exactly what would happen.’ I can still answer fearlessly: ‘It’s a free country, isn’t it? That was up to him.’ In any case, the way I looked at it, he’d wasted years of my life. When I met Geoffrey, I was only in my twenties, flame-haired and made for passions that would follow fast on one another’s heels. Now I was forty-three, with streaks of grey I couldn’t even be bothered to hide, and such a habit of settling for whatever came next that I felt I’d let the life I should have lived slip through my fingers. It seemed to me he’d taken my best years. And, if I’m honest, I was angrier – oh, far, far angrier – than simply wanting to leave.

  I wanted to make Geoffrey pay. And pay with interest.

  Fascinating, the way the problem of Geoffrey could best be solved by mirroring his habits. Up until then, I’d lied only about the big things: exactly where I was, and who I was sleeping with. That was as easy as blinking compared with keeping petty day-to-day secrets under a shared roof. Having to keep that up really sharpens the wits and stretches the memory. There was a lot to think about and a lot to get done. And all the while, I kept up the steady drip, drip, drip, of pretending that nothing had changed. I fussed about the new rotas. I grumbled endlessly about the one-day safety reviews. I moaned about last-minute crew changes. Nobody listening would ever have thought for a moment I might have been paying sufficient attention over the weeks to work out that the one day Geoff would definitely be away was Harry’s graduation.

  ‘Such a pity that each of them is only allowed two guests,’ he said for the twentieth time as he polished his shoes again. I could have said that, as the one who’d sat with Harry through a thousand homework sessions, bribing him with cake, I had more claim than Tara to the second ticket. But I sat tight. Nor did I bother to remind him that all those concerts at the primary school, those plays in secondary, and those perennial parent–teacher discussions had had no limits on the numbers at all, and no one had ever expressed the slightest regret about not inviting me to those. I only nodded at the clock. ‘Hadn’t you better get going? It’s a long drive.’ To speed him on his way, I added one more lie direct to his face. ‘Tara said she and Harry would be there by noon.’

  ‘Really? As early as that?’ He reached for his jacket. ‘Right. I’m off.’

  ‘What time will you be home?’ I asked, as if I actually cared.

  He shrugged. ‘The ceremony starts at three. How long do these things last?’ He made a guess. ‘Sixish? Unless the three of us go for a cup of tea after, in which case I suppose it might be seven. Or even a little later.’

  ‘Take all the time you want.’ Maybe I even pulled my dressing gown closer around me and yawned, as if to make it clear that today the pressure of time meant nothing. The moment he was out of the house, I threw on my clothes and started dragging the cardboard boxes out from where I’d been storing them flat, hidden away in the garage, sandwiched between the ladders along the back wall and the huge metal safety sign I’d smuggled out of the company’s on-shore store and into the back of my car, draped with tarpaulin. I didn’t hang about. I went round the house like a tornado, hurling every last thing that belonged to either Geoffrey or his children into the boxes.

  Less than an hour later, the first of the vans I’d ordered drew up outside, but I was ready. Checking my way along the pegs in the hall for any last jackets or scarves I’d overlooked that belonged to the Andersons, I said to the driver, ‘You’re sure you’ve completely understood? Pack all these boxes in the van. Lock them up safely, and you’re free to do what you want so long as you’re back here by five. And when the owner of this stuff finally shows up, tell him the deal.’

  He reeled it off, parrot-fashion. ‘Van fully prepaid for three days, including the cost of delivery to the address of his choice.’ He added off his own bat, ‘Even if it’s Cornwall?’

  ‘It might very well be Cornwall,’ I warned.

  ‘Or John O’Groats?’

  ‘Less likely,’ I admitted, and went back into the house to get on with the next load of packing.

  The second, larger, van arrived an hour later.

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Everything except carpets and curtains, the ladders in the garage, the washer, drier …’ I read them off the list, then handed it over as an aide-memoire. As we walked through the house, I glanced across at the old rocking horse I’d bought for the children. By rights I really should have taken it, if only to remind me of how hard I was trying, at the start, to welcome this family under my roof and to become a living part of it. But in the end I decided it would probably only go on reminding me strongly of Bill. ‘And that can stay. But everything else is going, and it must all be out by four o’clock.’

  ‘No problem.’

  And there wasn’t, even with the locksmith getting under everyone’s feet as he changed all the door locks. I’d learned the knack over the weeks of sorting things in piles then simply draping one large garment over them to make them look more casual: less a house on the move than something I was sorting out and putting somewhere else.

  The removal men swarmed everywhere. ‘And the food in these cupboards?’

  ‘That’s all to be cleared out. There’s someone moving in at five o’clock.’

  The one in charge raised an eyebrow. ‘Today? Cutting it a bit fine, aren’t we?’

  ‘Not if you keep it up at this rate.’

  And they did. As fast as they cleared each cupboard, I was there with my cloth, sweeping stray lentils and bits of dried-up pasta out onto the counters below or onto the floor, then wiping and mopping. I don’t believe I’ve ever worked so hard in my whole life or been so glad to hear the words: ‘That’s it, I reckon.’

  The boss and I walked through the house together and checked the garage. ‘Pretty good,’ I said.

  ‘So we’ll be off.’ He glanced down at his paperwork to check one last time. ‘And it’s indefinite storage for the whole lot.’ I watched his eyes fall on the four huge black bags I’d filled with perfectly good tins and cereals, sauces and pastas and herbs, and the piles of ready meals from the freezer. ‘Want us to do you a favour and drop all this stuff
at the dump?’ he asked me hopefully.

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said, peeling out notes to lay on their outstretched paws. And then, because I have a special responsibility for safety at work, I couldn’t help blowing his dignified little deception by saying sternly to all of them, ‘Now, remember you must never re-freeze meat or fish. So use those up today or tomorrow, or not at all.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ they chorused with that obedient eyes-down look men use when they have other plans. I couldn’t bring myself to care. Let the whole pack of them poison themselves, their wives and their children. I simply waved them off down the street, then went back to pick up both new sets of shiny keys. I locked the doors behind me, sat on the step and waited. None of my neighbours was around. No one was watching. No one walked past to say goodbye. It is a dreary area, actually, and I’m not sorry to be done with it.

  I didn’t have to sit long. Shortly before five, a huge removal van from Newcastle pulled round the corner. I went over to greet it. ‘Here are the keys.’

  The driver reached down to take them from me. ‘Is it your house?’

  ‘No,’ I said, presuming that my solicitor had done her job, and by now this was true. ‘I’m just a neighbour. I don’t know anything at all except that these are the keys.’

  The driver transferred his worried look from me to the house. ‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘The new people aren’t far behind. I suppose till they get here we can just use our common sense and guess where they’ll want things to go.’

  He looked as if it was by no means the first time he’d faced this problem. And, after all, how far wrong can you go, arranging furniture in a small semidetached house on a small boring street?

  * * *

  I won’t say where I went. Some day I might want to go back again, and not be found. Ever. But it was a quiet week. I needed time to think. Sometimes I walked along the coastal paths. It seemed to me the waves were speaking and the moon sent messages. I don’t mean I went bats. I mean that all that dark and peace and moonlight seemed to be gathering together to make the decision I made one of significance. I heard it in the rhythm of the waves. Just do it, they seemed to be saying as they crashed on the rocks. Just do it. Do it. All of the reasons not to are puny and unconvincing. Almost absurd.