Homecoming

by Susie Steiner

  ‘Primrose alright?’ she says.

  ‘Aye, grand,’ says Max, looking away.

  ‘Where’s she tonight, then?’

  ‘Dunno. At home. Doing her electrics probably,’ says Max, still avoiding Sheryl’s eye. Something about Sheryl talking about Primrose doesn’t feel right.

  ‘Hello Max!’ says Tony Crowther, slapping him on the shoulder. He’s on Max’s side of the bar, carrying a bucket full of cigarette stubs and ash. Tony’s face is open and benign, his voice like some friendly cockney policeman.

  ‘Hello Tony,’ says Max.

  ‘I’m organising the Christmas quiz,’ says Tony, straightening the mats on the bar. ‘Set to be a corker.’

  Max glances at Sheryl, saying: ‘That’ll get the village muttering. There were complaints after the last one. Dennis Lunn sang all the way home.’

  ‘People hate to see others havin’ a good time,’ she says. ‘I love a party. I’m going to really let me hair down.’ She winks at Max.

  ‘I don’t think people’ll begrudge us a spot of festive cheer,’ says Tony. ‘Anyway, I’d a thought the quiz has a special place in your heart, it being where you met your lady wife.’

  Max remembers Tony’s crackling, wheezing, high-pitched squeaking microphone; the way he tapped it, wearing one of his apologetic smiles, with a slight bow and a cough and said, ‘Evening Marpleton!’ And the team called the Co-op at the next table, and how he and Tal and Jake had started acting up in front of them. A distant country, that. Some of the excitement of those early days – a sense of life moving along at a tilt – had come back with the news of the bairn. All that approval from Joe had been like a shot in the arm for him, but it had waned, even though Max brought up the baby at every possible turn, looking to his father for another pat on the back. Like he needed it more now, was addicted to it. He can feel himself on the hunt for something – another boost.

  ‘Not really,’ he says to Tony. ‘It were too long ago.’

  ‘Aaah,’ says Sheryl, twinkling at him, pinching his cheek. ‘All the romance died has it?’

  Max pulls his face away.

  ‘You’ve got to keep the flame alive,’ says Tony. ‘Isn’t that right, Princess?’

  ‘If you say so,’ says Sheryl.

  ‘I think romance is overrated,’ says Max.

  ‘Me too,’ she says. They linger on each other for longer than is seemly.

  ‘Oh you two, honestly!’ says Tony laughing. ‘It’s all about the small touches – the things that show the other person that you care.’ Sheryl is taking Max’s money as he says this, then counting out his change from the till. ‘Only last week, I got her a teddy – di’n’t I, Princess?’ Sheryl gives him a hard stare. ‘She loves a teddy that one. Show her I was thinkin’ of her.’

  ‘I’ll make a note of that,’ says Max.

  *

  Maureen Pettiford’s voice has taken on an officious tone and Lauren sighs loudly. Maureen’s chin is raised and she directs her words over all their heads, into the echoey rafters of Lipton Hall. ‘Your aim is to keep a steady hand. Now, I know there aren’t enough wheels for everyone, so those that can’t get to one can practise turning their pots by hand. Plenty of water. Don’t worry about the mess. Pottery is all about mess.’

  ‘God, she’s loving this,’ whispers Lauren, and Ann smiles.

  ‘—and I will fire your efforts in the oven over the weekend. You can pick them up at the next class.’

  Maureen concludes her speech and there is a general clattering while the class settles down to their work. Lauren and Ann share a trestle table and are sat side by side on stools. Their table is already grey with rivulets of clay water and their hands thick with it as if made out of the stuff.

  ‘Yours is already better than mine,’ says Ann, leaning into Lauren while holding her hands out in front of her.

  ‘Shurrup,’ says Lauren, concentrating.

  The room smells like school.

  In the quiet of moulding soft wet gloop with her hands, Ann begins to run over the preparations she must make for Christmas – just three weeks to go which Joe would say was an age and why couldn’t they begin on Christmas Eve which is when he’d rush into Lipton for something half-cocked to wrap for her. But it wasn’t enough time at all. The pudding was done, yes, early autumn she’d done that, but there were sausage rolls to make and put in the freezer, the bird to order from Alan, cranberry sauce from scratch, chocolate cake for Boxing Day, toad in the hole – a meal-planning marathon it was. She decides to buy chocolates for after dinner. (Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Barry Jordan!) Peppermint creams or jellied fruits. Coopers is awash with festive boxes which send her into an excited spin at the very thought.

  ‘I’ve still got a million things to get,’ she says, still moulding and looking intently at her hands. The clay is cold and slippery. She feels an almost childish pleasure, squishing it through her fingers: delight and disgust at the same time.

  ‘Oh god, me too,’ says Lauren. ‘Shall we go together? We could get everything in York – make a day of it.’

  ‘Oooh yes. I’ll drive if you like.’

  ‘My car’s nicer ’an yours,’ says Lauren.

  ‘Fair point.’

  Maureen Pettiford’s imperious voice rises over their heads from behind them. ‘Less talking, more moulding ladies please!’ And Lauren makes a face.

  After a time, Lauren says, ‘I’d like to get Primrose something – for the little one. Is there something they’re in need of?’

  ‘That’s really nice.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ says Lauren.

  ‘No it isn’t,’ says Ann.

  He was always there, Lauren’s lost boy, Jack. Meningitis at the age of five. Thirty years ago this January. She remembers standing in the street with Lauren all those years back, when Max and Jack were two or three or thereabouts, playing around their legs, and Brenda had stopped to chat. And she remembers Brenda saying to Lauren, ‘He’s a little heartbreaker, that one,’ and nodding at Jack. ‘A dreamboat.’ And then Brenda had hastily added, ‘And your Max too,’ but Ann knew she hadn’t meant it. And she’d felt stupidly jealous, because she knew Jack was a proper looker.

  The shame. Begrudging her friend that moment. Begrudging that beautiful, beautiful boy . . . Ann knew it’d been hard for Lauren, to watch Max growing up. She’d loved Ann’s boys as if they were her own, buying them presents at birthdays (Lauren never forgot a birthday) and at Christmas. Football-themed aftershave when they were teenagers. Wallace and Gromit socks. Toffees that were still going hard in the wardrobe of the back bedroom.

  They’d never got mean with it, Lauren and Eric. Her and Joe, they would have got mean with it. Bitter against life. They’d never have survived it. She knows that. But Lauren and Eric, they seemed both to hold on to their boy – talk about him and remember – and to let it go. Oh, she shakes her head, she’s not making any sense. All she knows is, she’s never admired anything so much in all her life. Admired and envied it. And how could you envy a thing like that? But she does. Because she doesn’t trust herself and Joe to survive in the same way, even against lesser odds.

  ‘One of those baby gyms, I was thinking,’ Lauren is saying. ‘You know, they lie under it and stuff hangs down over ’em, to look at.’

  ‘Now ladies,’ says Maureen Pettiford, ‘I want you to think about form.’ She is wandering between the tables like she’s Margot Fonteyn, banging her stick on the floor. ‘Think about a smooth line. You want to echo the curves of the human body. Use your hands to . . . That’s right, Glynnis.’ Maureen has stopped at a table and stooped low, dropping her voice. ‘A bit less water.’

  ‘God, where does she get off?’ says Lauren.

  ‘She’s not that bad. She is there to teach,’ says Ann. ‘Mine’s not echoing the human body. More an alien life-form.’

  ‘She works in the bloody newsagent,’ hisses Lauren. ‘She’s hardly Barbara Hepworth.’

  ‘Oh for god’s sake. You could nev
er take instruction. It’s a wonder you sign us up for so many classes.’

  They simultaneously crane their necks back to look at their work, clay-wet hands in the air.

  ‘Ruby coming to yours for Christmas?’ says Lauren.

  ‘No, she’s not. I don’t know what’s going on between those two. Just us, the boys. And Primrose of course.’

  ‘You’ll need to get extra food in then,’ says Lauren. ‘She’ll be eating for three.’

  After a spell of moulding and considering and moulding, Lauren says, ‘What d’you suppose Joe and Eric will get for us this year?’

  ‘Oh, whatever riches Malton garage forecourt has to offer.’

  ‘Go on,’ says Lauren. ‘What are your top five worst Christmas presents?’

  ‘Joe gave me a hydraulic top link once,’ says Ann, her head to one side.

  ‘You’re kidding. For a tractor?’

  Ann nods, maintaining her gaze on her work. ‘Trussed up in a bow it was. Bought it on eBay.’

  ‘Eric has strayed into Tupperware in the past.’

  ‘Well that’s sackable.’

  Lauren nods.

  ‘Thing is, sometimes it’s worse when they get it almost right, you know? Like bad earrings,’ says Ann.

  ‘Or really nasty jumpers.’

  ‘Yes, always too small.’

  ‘Or in Eric’s case, too demure. D’ye not remember that polo neck he bought me? I looked like a toilet-roll tube made out of wool.’

  ‘What’re you two getting Sylvie?’

  ‘We want to buy her a new car.’

  ‘Goodness!’ says Ann. She feels the urge to pat her collar-bones but stops herself in time.

  ‘I know, I know,’ says Lauren, putting up a lead-coloured hand, ‘she won’t be the least bit grateful. But she’s our only one, Ann. She’s all we’ve got.’

  *

  Bartholomew’s kitchen is flat and still without her.

  He rests a hand on the over-shiny beech table and looks at the nasty wood units, the magnolia walls. It is all washed in a kind of rental beige under the strip light. There are no decorative touches – no paper chains or painted bowls or fairy lights. These things don’t occur to him, even though he feels their absence.

  Ruby’s flat is another story – full of rich, dark corners; cluttered and soft; festooned now with pin lights and tinsel. Like Santa’s grotto.

  He hears her key in the door.

  ‘How was it?’ he shouts to the hallway. He can feel the pleasure seep into him. He watches her take her coat off.

  ‘It was brilliant,’ she says. Bright, shining. She brings all the energy of the day into his flat kitchen: her apple cheeks, her hair frizzing in the warm. ‘They had these potato cakes,’ she is saying, breathless. She is taking out her mobile phone and scrolling through the images. She has photographed the potato cakes, to show him. ‘I think they had dill in them. They were amazing. With a poached egg on top.’

  ‘Sounds very haute cuisine for a book club,’ he says.

  ‘Yeah well, Sheila’s into it.’

  ‘You should go into business together.’

  ‘Elaine did a bean salad, which was nice. She’d cut chives into it. But the dressing was a bit sharp.’

  He looks at her. He loves that the book is of secondary importance to the food. He loves that she photographs food. He loves that she brings into his flat all this life and warmth and joy.

  And then he feels something inside him contract again. Is it the force of his feelings or the force of hers, which makes him shrink back? And then the pressure comes – pressure from he doesn’t know where, laden with obligation: to his parents, to the farm; the burden of that lease on the garden centre and the money he’s poured into it. Most of all, obligation to Ruby, who is backing him into a corner. Closing down his options.

  ‘How are you, anyway?’ she says, coming over to where he sits and cupping his face in both her hands. Kissing his cheek. ‘How was your day, my lovely?’

  ‘It was good thanks.’

  She yawns and stretches. ‘I might turn in. All that murder and intrigue has done me in.’

  ‘What are you reading next?’

  ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Can’t wait. Freya chose it. She always chooses good ones.’

  She’s walking out of the room when he says, ‘I’ve booked my ticket by the way. For Christmas.’

  ‘Oh right,’ she says, not looking back at him. ‘When are you going?’

  ‘Christmas Eve.’ He can only see the back of her in the hallway.

  ‘You’ll have a good time, I’m sure.’

  ‘When are you going up?’

  ‘Haven’t decided.’ She turns and leans her body against the kitchen door frame. Brittle and bright. ‘Dave Garside has joined our book club.’ She smiles a mean smile, right at him. ‘I invited him. Thought it might help him to settle in.’

  A frosty fortnight later, Bartholomew bends to pick up a tray from where it is propped on the floor against one of the kitchen units. The room is cheerless as ever, even in daylight. You’d never know it was Christmas Eve. He’s barefoot and wearing a faded towelling dressing gown which is falling open, causing a draught to whip inside his boxer shorts and T-shirt. He hops about on the lino, freezing, but determined not to put the heating on. The bills have been extortionate this winter – more than he can afford – and anyway, he’s catching the train to Yorkshire in a few hours, so he considers it profligate to heat the flat. Ruby has complained about the cold more than once, and a couple of nights ago slept in her bobble hat as a form of protest.

  He has set the tray with breakfast in bed for her. Tea. Toast with honey. Orange juice. And then he bends to retrieve her Christmas present from the cupboard where it’s hidden behind a stack of telephone directories. He looks down at the crinkled paper covered in rosy-cheeked Santas. It’s that slippery wrapping that’s extra thin – extra cheap. He has packed the rest of the roll to take home with him.

  He’d done several circuits of Blue Cross Shopping Centre, footsore and with a headache from its harsh lighting and the crush of festive shoppers, shuffling against each other, swearing and tense. He’d walked and walked, searching for something for her. And stopped, several times, outside the over-lit sparkle of Michael Roberts jewellers. But the prices were eye-watering and anyway, he’d never seen her wear delicate, dingly-dangly stuff like that. Ruby wore huge costume jewellery – stones which covered half her finger in turquoise, squatting in a thick silver setting. They were like boulders weighing on her hand as she cooked. And he was frightened for another reason. He felt this type of jewellery was as loaded as a gun. It sent a message and he wasn’t at all sure which message he wanted to deliver. So he’d walked, more and more. Until he ached more than he ever ached after a day’s labour at the garden centre. And in the final hour, he’d panicked.

  He carries the tray down the corridor to the bedroom, his feet relieved to be off that freezing lino. When he enters the bedroom, she’s just sitting up, her hair flattened against her head on one side and sticking out on the other.

  His half-packed bag is open against the wall. They’ve been tense this past fortnight, with the run-up to Christmas and the looming time apart. At times he could see how disappointed she was and felt wretched for being the cause of it. But defiance would quickly push all that away and he’d find himself thinking: ‘Why shouldn’t I spend time with my family at Christmas? Why does she have to go making things difficult?’ And he’d bank it as further evidence that life with Ruby – well, maybe it was just too complicated.

  ‘What’s this in aid of?’ she says.

  ‘Festive breakfast,’ he says. ‘I wanted to give you your present, as we won’t be together on the day.’

  ‘Ooh goodie,’ she says and leans out of the bed so that she is upside down, feeling for something underneath. ‘Here’s yours,’ she says, heaving herself up and presenting him with a small wrapped box.

  She watches him begin to unwrap it. ‘I’m really s
orry, Bartholomew, for being so arsey – about Christmas. I was just a bit hurt, that’s all. But I do understand, about you going home on your own. I’m sorry I’ve been a cow.’ And she lays a hand on his forearm and he stops unwrapping and kisses her on the cheek.

  ‘That’s alright, lovely. I am going to miss you, you know. You’ll have to send me lots of pictures of what you’re eating.’

  He lifts a white box from the wrapping and eases it open against a stiff hinge. Inside is a bed of black velvet and resting there, a watch. White face, roman numerals and a black leather strap. Classy. Minimal. He is taken aback, and then a kind of cold fear grips him. ‘Wow, Ruby, I didn’t expect. Golly, this is very generous. Yours,’ he glances at her parcel, still unopened, ‘yours isn’t your main present. That’s to come. It’s a stocking-filler really.’

  ‘Do you like it?’ she says, clapping her hands together. ‘Put it on. It’s waterproof, so it doesn’t matter if it gets knocked about when the sprinklers are on.’ She is tearing at her present absently, but looking at his watch and saying, ‘I thought it was classy. And you really shouldn’t be wearing that old digital thing at your age. Ah, very Sean Connery. It looks lovely. Really suits you.’

  She is lifting her present from its wrapping, holding it in the air between them.

  ‘A scarf!’ she says, bewildered, and he can see her trying to fashion her face into an expression which both hides her disappointment and also appears grateful. ‘Ooh, it looks warm,’ and she tries to sort of snuggle into it with vigour. The label is dangling down and she turns it. ‘Angora, lovely. And . . . reduced.’ He grabs it and pulls the tag roughly from the scarf but not before she says sadly, ‘You got a bargain there.’

  Then she forcibly brightens. ‘Thank you darling.’ And she kisses him. ‘I shall wear it all day.’

  Bartholomew has slept for the bulk of the train journey and now looks out at snowy countryside: black-silhouetted trees, their branches blown permanently one way – a row of melancholy dancers behind a veil of falling flakes. You’d normally see the slow crawl of ploughs across these fields, like bottom feeders tickling along the ocean floor. The snow has stopped them in their tracks. The soil will be hard as steel and Bartholomew knows the work on the farm will have slackened its pace with the short winter days. Lots of feeding up on the fell. He knows this without having to summon it. Nothing pretty about snow on a farm, much as it might look like a Christmas card. Winter is a battle.