by Rosy Thorton
Nothing more appeared to be forthcoming, so Laura stood to take her leave, stealing a surreptitious glance at her watch, as the thought of her office pressed back into her mind.
‘Well, goodbye, Marianne. I hope you didn’t mind my coming here.’ Though she saw now that it had been an irrational impulse, a fool’s errand. She wouldn’t come again.
The woman’s head lifted. Laura wondered if lucidity had returned and she would say goodbye. Instead, she stared out wordlessly at a point beyond Laura, her brows drawn together as though in puzzlement or consternation. Then, all at once, her frown dissolved and she was smiling like a child.
‘Skittles,’ she said. ‘Falling down like ninepins. All the pretty skittles come tumbling down like ninepins.’
Chapter 20
There was little immediate reaction to Laura’s confession, that evening, of her trip to Stanforth House. Beth, it is true, had stared in disbelief and demanded baldly, ‘Why?’ but a minute later she was peering in the Rayburn and asking what they were having with the jacket potatoes. From Willow, too, there was a shrug and a rapid switch of subject. Laura waited until after supper when the girls were upstairs before she rang Vince, but if she’d feared his censure, she’d been worrying for nothing.
‘I can see that. That you’d want to go and talk to her, after your encounters, to get more of a picture of her. And why not? Better that than to stay away and let it eat at you. She could always tell you to get lost. Did she tell you to get lost?’
‘Not in so many words.’ Laura grinned. ‘She didn’t have to. I think I worked it out for myself.’
‘What did Willow say about it?’
‘Not much.’
‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Give her time, maybe.’
But the subject of Marianne did not come up again for the rest of the week, and it seemed that the matter of Laura’s visit was forgotten. Beth’s, and thus Laura’s, attention was diverted by a telephone call on Wednesday evening from Simon. It was not Beth’s weekend to go over, but Jack, who was five on Saturday, had announced that his birthday celebrations would not be complete without the attendance of his big sister.
‘If she can stand it,’ said Simon, ‘we’d be very grateful. Eleven little boys and Beth. Tell her to bring protective clothing – and ear defenders.’
The party was set for a two pm start, so Laura dropped Beth off. She chose to arrive a little early; Beth was useful in the kitchen and they might do with the extra pair of hands. When Simon let them in at one forty-five, however, the house was quiet and apparently deserted.
‘Tessa’s nipped out,’ he explained, as he led them along the hall to the kitchen. ‘Gone to fetch a new paddling pool. That is, she hopes she can borrow one, from Kathy down the road, but if not she’s going to Homebase.’
‘A paddling pool?’ Beth’s face lit up. ‘Brilliant!’
But Laura eyed him sceptically. It was a cloudy April day and blowing a crisp easterly: ten or twelve degrees at best, without allowing for wind chill.
‘Yeah. Jack was adamant he wanted a pool party. Alfie had one for his birthday, you remember, and everything Alfie does, Jack has to do, too.’
It seemed finicky to point out that Alfie’s birthday was in August. Instead, she said, ‘I thought you had a pool.’
‘Mice. At least, we think that’s what it must be. The pool’s been in the shed since last summer, and when we brought it out this morning and started to fill it up, there it was all full of holes. Come and see.’
He led the way through to the dining room, where French windows opened on to the small back garden. In the middle of the lawn was the old paddling pool, semi-inflated and sagging slightly to one side; around it spread a broad quagmire, in which hopped and danced all three of Simon’s offspring. As they watched, Jack grabbed Alfie by the knees and they both went tumbling to the ground in a squealing splash of muddy water.
‘Tessa thought carrier bags might do the trick.’ Simon had assumed the detached manner of the experimental physicist. ‘Spread across the bottom of the pool, you see, to cover the worst of the holes. We thought the weight of the water would hold the bags in place, if the boys didn’t kick them up too much. And it did work, too,’ he added. ‘For a while.’
‘Should we fetch them in and get them changed?’ wondered Laura. The boys were barefoot with their trousers rolled up, but the muddy spatters didn’t stop at the knee.
‘I could take them up and do it,’ offered Beth, ‘if you’re busy with food and stuff.’
Simon’s face was glum. ‘They changed already. That’s Jack’s new party shirt.’ And now that Laura looked more carefully, she saw the crisp white cotton beneath the smears of brown. ‘Doesn’t seem much point now, anyway. They’ll only get wet again.’
Leaving the birthday boy and his brothers to their mudbath, they returned to the kitchen, where plates of sandwiches and mini sausage rolls competed for table space with unopened packets of Jammie Dodgers, a laptop and a muddle of handwritten notes. Centre stage, on top of an industrial sized box of drinking straws, stood a large layered sponge cake, coated over approximately two-thirds of its surface with chocolate fudge icing.
‘It ran out,’ said Simon, catching the direction of Laura’s gaze. ‘I tried to spread it thinner but the cake began to crumble and lift away. I could have made another batch, but I’ve got this article to finish for Monday at nine, and it’s barely started. I thought maybe I’d just stick some chocolate buttons on that side and they wouldn’t notice.’ He cocked an optimistic eye. ‘There’ll be candles.’
Beth moved to stand beside him. ‘I’ll do it. Where are the buttons?’
He flapped a hand vaguely. ‘Somewhere around. I’m sure Tessa said she bought some.’
Just then, Alfie appeared in the kitchen doorway. ‘Jack says, can Beth come out and play with us? We need someone to squirt the hosepipe.’
‘In a minute,’ said his father, ‘when she’s done the cake.’
Alfie took a sausage roll and began to munch. ‘I had a cake, when I came home from hospital. George’s mum says I could have died. She says anyone can die when they have an operation, even if it’s just for their teeth. It’s because of the anaesthetic.’ He pronounced the word with reverent pride. ‘Mum got my cake from Tesco’s. It wasn’t as big, but the icing was all over.’
Laura was wondering who was ensuring that Jack and Roly weren’t drowning in the inch of water that hadn’t escaped from the paddling pool, when the front doorbell rang.
‘Aha.’ Simon looked relieved. ‘That’ll be Tessa back with the new pool.’
But it wasn’t. It was the first of the party guests, running into the hall ahead of a mother who carried a lumpy, gold-wrapped parcel.
‘I’ll leave this with you, shall I? Pick him up at five, I think you said? And he mustn’t have dairy.’
‘They’re in the garden,’ Simon told the child, who was already heading off. ‘You know the way.’
‘Great, then,’ said the mother, and backed out rapidly.
Back in the kitchen, Beth had found the chocolate buttons and some jam from the fridge and was pebble dashing the cake. On her hip was a mud-drenched Roly, who was sobbing in short bursts between the chocolate drops that Beth was pressing into his mouth. ‘Ja-a-ack,’ he wailed. ‘Pushed me o-o-ver.’
The doorbell rang again: two short, commanding blasts. ‘Would you mind?’ said Simon. ‘You could get the door on your way out. Everything’s under control here – you go.’
Gratefully, having shown in three more small boys, Laura went.
There was something perverse in Laura’s attitude to the weekends – or in this case, just an afternoon – when Beth was over at Simon’s. Beforehand, she looked forward to the peace and quiet, which should have been a chance to get some work done, clearing space in the week ahead to spend with her daughter. But when the time arrived and the house was silent, she could rarely settle to her desk. It wasn’t exactly that she missed her. It was something less sentimenta
l than that, something more atavistic, perhaps, like a dog that sleeps with both ears pricked for his master’s return. Whatever the reason for it, Beth’s absence was often more distracting than her presence would have been.
Today, after ten ineffectual minutes at her desk, Laura rose and drifted along the landing to her daughter’s room. For some minutes she stood at the window. The lawn was long and lush and needed mowing; the pumphouse, with its gleaming exterior woodwork, lacked only a final coat of paint inside before the furniture could be moved back in – and with it, finally, Willow. Three weekends in a row, now, Laura had promised to get it finished, and Willow had said she’d help. But the emulsion still stood on its shelf in the shed.
At random, she turned and opened a drawer, then dropped to kneel in front of it, inspecting the contents. Beth’s sweaters. She had the habit of wearing them for a week or so until they smelt lived-in and then putting them away again, and taking out another. By this means of rotation she apparently believed that knitwear somehow reached some kind of happy stasis in which it never needed washing. Unashamedly, Laura bent and inhaled, drinking in the aroma of her absent daughter. Then, on impulse, she lifted an armful of sweaters and pulled them out on to the floor, and then another and another. It was a fresh, breezy day and the morning’s threatening clouds had dispersed; she would give Beth’s jumpers a spring clean.
The hand washing of woollens was not her favourite domestic job. The soap flakes tickled her nose and, unable to work in rubber gloves, she always finished with her hands red raw. But the job needed doing, and she sensed it might be beneficial to her mood. She turned the hot tap on to full and poured in a handful of soap, agitating it beneath the blast. Then, scooping up a red sweater, she plunged it into the foaming water and began to rub.
Hard at her task, it was some time before she noticed that Willow had entered the kitchen, and was standing quietly by the table, holding an empty glass.
‘Oh, sorry – I didn’t see you there. Am I in the way? Did you want some water?’ Turning the spout away from the bowl, she turned on the cold tap and let it play down the side into the sink, testing it with her fingers until it ran cool. ‘Here, let me.’
Watching Willow drink gave her a thirst herself and she went to fetch a glass, filling it and drinking deeply, then filling it again. When she went back to her washing Willow seated herself at the table behind her. It was disconcerting: rinsing the red sweater, Laura couldn’t rid herself of the feeling of being watched. After the red sweater came a navy blue one. Almost too small now, with anchor buttons at the neck, it had been a longstanding favourite. She saw that the wool was worn thin in places, when she held it, dripping, to the light. Then came the birthday jumper: the black Fair Isle with the snowflake pattern. She ran another bowl of water, tipped in another scoop of soap.
When Willow finally broke her silence, the words made Laura start.
‘My mother never washed things.’
Laura’s hands paused for a moment above the suds; then she re-submerged the jumper and continued her scrubbing. She neither spoke nor turned.
‘Not like that, anyway, not by hand – at least, I don’t remember it, if she did. We did go to the launderette sometimes. Or one or two places, there was a machine.’
Still working at the wet wool, Laura said, ‘Hand washing is one of those jobs, I suppose. I always put it off, too.’
‘No.’ Willow sounded impatient, almost angry. ‘That’s not what I mean. I mean she really didn’t wash things. She hardly washed clothes at all. They weren’t things you kept and looked after and had for years, until they wore out or got too small for you. Not like you do, with Beth’s stuff, here.’
Laura was puzzled. ‘What, then?’
There was a short pause, and Laura wished she dared turn round. Then Willow said, ‘It was just baggage, and she hated baggage. Things weighed you down, she once said. I don’t know what happened to it all, really. Given away, I suppose, or left behind when we moved on. She always just bought more stuff – jumble sales, charity shops – or else people gave us things. If she had money she spent it; she’d buy me new shoes, new dresses. But she never had money for long. And then we’d up and leave and the new shoes would be gone.’
It was hard to imagine that life, for a child. Laura pressed out the snowflake jumper on the draining board and tried to bridge the gulf of empathy; tried, and failed.
‘Stupid loser.’ Willow spoke with sudden venom: a bitterness that Laura had rarely heard in her voice. Once before: useless bloody hippy.
Of course then Laura had to stop what she was doing; wiping her soapy hands on a tea towel, she came and took a seat beside Willow at the table. But she couldn’t think of anything to say.
After a moment, Willow asked, ‘How was she when you went up there? What sort of state was she in?’
‘Well …’ Laura hesitated. ‘We talked a bit, about this place, and you. But, you know, with the medication …’ What was it Willow had said? Flatter, hollow. ‘She’s not herself, I suppose.’
‘Useless junkie.’
The cold fury was almost shocking.
‘Prescription drugs,’ Laura reminded her gently. ‘That hardly makes her a junkie.’
Willow, listless, stared at the table. ‘Now, maybe. And what’s the difference, anyway?’
‘She needs the medication, you must see that. You know how she was before, without it. She wasn’t exactly coping.’
‘What – and now she is? Now her life’s so great, is that it?’
Laura felt the weight of her impotence. You shouldn’t blame her, she wanted to say. You shouldn’t blame yourself. It’s nobody’s fault, the way she is. But what did she know about Willow’s life, or Willow’s pain?
‘She’s sick.’
‘Bloody right, she is.’ But then the anger seemed to ebb away as quickly as it had come. Willow picked up her glass and took a sip of her water. ‘Sick,’ she said quietly. ‘Yes.’
It appeared to signal the close of the conversation and, awkwardly, Laura stood up again, glancing back to the draining board and the bundled, wet sweaters. She should get the water wrung out properly, and hang them up outside on the line.
‘Better get on,’ she said. ‘Unless … you don’t have any jumpers you’d like washing, do you?’
A quarter of an hour later, Laura was back upstairs at her desk. She had booted up the computer and opened the file containing the half-finished draft on which she ought to be working. She scrolled to the end. Rotational cutting, she read, has the effect of letting in varying levels of light to the understorey layer. This makes for a diversity of microhabitats, encouraging – But what did it encourage? She found she had very little idea, nor the inclination to try to recall.
What must it have been like, growing up with Marianne? Washing, clean linen, the provision of meals: these might seem like trivial or mundane matters, but for her they represented a solid physical core, which lay at the heart of her notion of parenthood. If Willow at times seemed older than her years, this might be the reason. If the mother could not be a mother, how should the child be a child?
Rather than go back to her report, she clicked to open her e-mail inbox. A dozen new messages, most of them university or departmental circulars, but one was different and caught her attention. It was a Facebook alert – a novelty for her.
Punita Chand sent you a message on Facebook. To reply to this message, follow the link below. The message itself was just a quick hello, no doubt sent round to all and sundry, but it invited Laura to visit Punita’s profile page and there to view her wedding photographs. This she did, and was entranced. The young woman who in Cambridge she had only ever seen in the student uniform of jeans and T shirt, appeared here resplendent in scarlet and gold, and garlanded with flowers. She looked like a princess from the Thousand and One Nights. Clicking back to Punita’s message, she moved her mouse to the reply box. ‘You both look so beautiful,’ she typed, ‘and happy’ – then pressed ‘send’.
After that, she idly selected her own home page, still with the anonymous white silhouette in place of a photograph and just two listed friends: Punita, and Beth. She clicked on Beth’s page almost without thought. The profile picture her daughter had chosen brought a smile at once to Laura’s lips; taken last summer on Laura’s camera, it showed Beth in the garden, sitting astride her old spacehopper with a grin as wide as the one on the spacehopper’s painted face. They had found it in the shed, beneath some old packing cases that Laura had been sorting for the tip, and Beth had insisted on fetching the car pump and restoring it to full size, before pounding up and down the lawn on it until she was breathless with exertion and laughter and Laura had had to warn her to be careful of her asthma.
The wall posts, when she scanned them, were innocuous enough; there was nothing here to raise alarm – except, perhaps, among grammarians. ‘heeyy, im good n you? yeah i know :)’ read one, presumably in reply to some earlier post of Beth’s. ‘i’s well bored lol but drama @ 2’ said another, beside a photo of a girl whom Laura didn’t recognise. Scrolling down a page or so, she found what she was looking for: the glamour model image with the straight blonde hair. There were two messages from Rianna; one read ‘hey there bethy babe you ok?’, the other simply ‘hiiaaaa!!!!’
In a side bar on the left, a box informed her that Beth had two hundred and eleven friends. Pictures of a handful were visible immediately; curious, she selected ‘see all’ to reveal the rest. The faces included few she recognised. Here was Alice, and Gemma, and her own anonymous silhouette. And boys, she noticed, as well as girls. Feeling suddenly conscious of intrusion, she thought of Vince: like listening at keyholes. She was about to close the page when her eye fell again on Rianna’s photo, and on impulse she moved onto it and clicked the mouse.
She saw it straight away. Beneath the box for friends was one marked ‘photos’, and in the box was just one photograph. It was a casual snap, the quality less than pristine, doubtless taken on a mobile phone. In it, three girls were standing on a river bank, which Laura recognised as being the Cam, somewhere in one of the Cambridge parks, perhaps Jesus Green or Midsummer Common. The girls were leaning towards one another, arms linked and clutching shopping bags, the three laughing faces pressed close together. The one on the left was unfamiliar. A dark girl, but not Caitlin; this one was taller and more broad-faced. In the middle, unmistakable, was Rianna, daring the camera with a cool, unflinching eye. And on the right was Beth.
