Margaret Holloway
Saturday, December 14, 2013
THE HOLLOWAYS WERE WALKING IN EPPING FOREST NEAR their home, taking an easy three-mile circular route that they had done many times before. It was Saturday morning—the last before the school Christmas holidays. They were going to drive up to Rugby to visit Margaret’s father in the late morning, and it had been Ben’s suggestion to go walking first thing, to get some fresh air before the drive.
It was icy cold and the sky was heavy with snow clouds, but so far it had been dry. The snow on the ground had frozen and crunched under their feet.
The children were running ahead, tagging each other. Paula was fast and would catch her brother quickly, but Eliot was retaliating with hard snowballs.
“Mum!” said Paula, when an icy snowball hit her between the shoulder blades. “Will you tell him not to do that?”
“The snow’s a bit hard for snowballs, Eliot,” Ben called.
Ben and Margaret were walking hand in hand. Her nose was cold and her ribs still ached a little, but physically at least she felt better than she had earlier in the week. The pines were expansive and blue-green against the white snow. Margaret was wearing dark blue skinny jeans and boots, and found that her body and feet felt warm while her legs were cold. It was the same with her mind: she was functioning as normal, except for one important part of herself, which felt frozen.
It had been a hard week at work. She was not sure what was happening to her, but things were not all right. She had told Ben about shouting at Malcolm and breaking down in her presentation, but she had not mentioned her visit to the hospital and finding the burned man. She had not talked to Ben about what was happening to her because she didn’t fully understand it herself. She wasn’t sure if she would be able to explain it to him. The doctor’s diagnosis didn’t seem to explain how she felt inside. It felt as if she was separating, precipitating. Things were rising to the surface that had previously been invisible.
The memory of being in her burning car haunted her. She could still smell the gasoline and hear the roar of flames. For some reason, it was the fire that had shaken her most, and it was the fire that was causing her to reach into herself and sift through fractured memories and feelings she had not considered for a long time.
When she was alone, Margaret found herself alternately ruminating on her childhood, then fixating on the burned man: who he was and why he had saved her specifically. It was five days since she had visited him at the hospital, but she had called the ICU twice to ask after him. He was stable, but still in a coma.
It had been her suggestion to go up to Rugby to visit her father. Her mother had died fifteen years ago—when Margaret was at university, not long after she met Ben. Her father was in his late sixties, and she wanted to see him before Christmas. The crash had filled her with a strong desire to go home. The roads were clearer now, but Ben had still thought the trip could have waited because of the weather. Even if there had been a blizzard, Margaret needed to see her father. Ben had acquiesced—whatever you want—and she knew he was worried about her—you want to see your dad, we’ll go.
There was another reason. She wanted to go to Rugby to get a box from the attic. She couldn’t wait until the weather was better. She could visualize exactly where it was, packed in a corner beside her mother’s things.
Ben squeezed her hand twice to jolt her from her thoughts.
“You OK, sweetheart?” he said, leaning down to speak through the flaps of her woolen hat.
“I’m all right,” she said, looking up at him, her eyebrows raised. The children ran back toward them and tugged on either side.
“Mum?” Paula asked, breathless, pink-cheeked. “How’s Stephen getting on? He’s not been round in ages.”
“Yeah,” said Eliot, using his father’s elbow for leverage as he did long jumps in the snow. “How’s Stephen?”
Paula had been just six years old when Margaret had begun to teach Stephen how to read and write. After she had taken the deputy post, Stephen had still visited to tell her of his progress. He had stayed for dinner when he came around to show her his GCSE certificate.
“He’s doing not too bad, love,” she said, wincing at her lie, putting a hand on her daughter’s face. “I don’t see him so much with my job now.”
The children ran off and Ben took her hand. “What will happen to him?” he asked.
“I really don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference, but I think that if I hadn’t had the accident I could have stopped Malcolm excluding him. Stephen’s whole life’s been about exclusion … I would have fought it all the way.”
“You never know,” said Ben. “You helped him get back on track. He might surprise you yet.”
“I hope so, but I don’t know.”
“Don’t get hung up on this. You’ve achieved so much. Think of all the kids you’ve helped, and now that you’re at the top you’re helping the whole school change for the better.”
Margaret sighed and leaned into him gently. “It’s just he was my success story. I get so angry that kids can go to school and leave without even learning the basics. Stephen was another of those kids with so much potential that no one else could see.”
They walked in silence for a while, until Ben squeezed her hand.
“You started to relax yet, after your week from hell?”
“Yeah.” She sighed, taking the cold air into her lungs and then letting it go. “You were right after all, I suppose. I should’ve stayed off.”
“Hang on, hang on,” said Ben, breaking free of her hand and patting the pockets of his jacket. “Can I have that on record?”
“What on record?”
“You saying I was right.” He bit his glove off with his front teeth and pulled his phone from his pocket. He flicked to the recording tool and held the phone up to her, his eyes shining. “Go on, say it again … Ben, you are right.”
“You’re an idiot!” It felt good to be teasing each other again.
“It’s OK, I won’t cast it up, like. I’ll just play it back to myself when you’re at work … y’know, to build my confidence.”
She laughed despite herself. He had always been able to make her laugh. When she was pregnant with Eliot and her blood pressure was too high, she had been made to stay in bed for a whole month. Only Ben had kept her sane.
“It’s all right laughing, but I want it on record.”
The children were quite far ahead now and Margaret smiled at the recognizable shapes of them chasing each other.
“Fine,” she said, stopping and leaning close to the phone’s microphone. “Ben, you are right, on this one occasion …”
“Oh no no no,” he said, putting the phone away, “no qualifications are necessary, thank you very much.”
“On this one solitary occasion,” she continued, “you were right, however you’ve a way to go before you get to be like me … right almost all of the time.”
She hadn’t finished her sentence before Ben pulled on the strings of her woolen hat, yanking it over her face. While she was blinded, he slipped his hands under her winter jacket and began to tickle her. Margaret shrieked with laughter, and tried to wriggle from his grasp. Together they fell down into the snow. Margaret knocked her hat off and then climbed on top of Ben and pushed lumps of hard snow down his neck.
“Mags, give over.”
When they got up, they had left indentations of themselves in the snow. Ben brushed the snow from her jeans and jacket, kissed her, then put her hat back on her head.
They kept on walking and he put his arm around her shoulders. They were both breathing hard. “You could take the rest of the term off—hardly any time now till Christmas,” said Ben.
“Oh, I’ll make it through.”
He stopped again and stood in front of her, hands resting on her shoulders. She felt the weight of them. “It’s not about making it through.” After being so playful, his face was serious. She hated it when he was serious—it
was so rare. “You’re my girl. I need you to be OK. I want you to take this seriously and give yourself some time to get over it. I don’t know what you went through, but if it happened to me I’d be a mess.”
She nodded and swallowed.
“I mean I’d take a month off, at least,” he said, grinning expansively.
Sometimes just looking at his face was enough to comfort her.
“What would that be about for you?” she said. “Not going into your study … you’d never manage it.” It had been hard at first, but Ben had become very successful in the past five years. He regularly wrote for the New Statesman and sometimes the Guardian.
“You’re a bigger workaholic than me.”
“Ah, don’t you turn this back on me now,” he said.
They linked hands and started walking again. Paula was a hundred yards up ahead, turning like a ballet dancer.
Margaret couldn’t see Eliot. She frowned, but they were near the corner. She quickened her pace and Ben matched it. Around the next bend, she still couldn’t see her son.
She let go of Ben’s hand.
“Eliot?” Her voice echoed among the trees.
The path was empty of other walkers and he was nowhere to be seen. Margaret jogged to catch up with Paula, hearing the crunch of Ben’s feet behind her.
“Where’s your brother?”
“Em …” Paula lifted up her fringe and looked around. “He was here a minute ago, he was saying …”
“Eliot,” Margaret called, panic rising inside her again. She was panting, her quick breaths visible before her in the cold air.
“It’s all right,” said Ben, putting a hand on her arm. “He’ll be here.”
She broke into a run, but couldn’t get enough air and her chest was hurting. She tried to call Eliot’s name again, but couldn’t. Her mouth and throat were so dry she couldn’t swallow. Paula and Ben were running too. The sun had come out and every time Margaret blinked she saw a flash of red. Everywhere she looked there were trees and snow—a kaleidoscope of green and white and red before her.
They both saw him at the same time. A man was walking his Labrador on the edge of the park and Eliot was kneeling in the snow, petting the dog. Ben slowed to a walk, but Margaret kept running up to Eliot. The dog turned as she approached and began to bark.
“I’ve told you not to walk off like that. You have to tell me where you’re going.” Margaret took Eliot by the shoulders and shook him lightly as she turned him to face her.
“I was only petting the dog.”
The dog walker smiled at Margaret. “Don’t worry, I know that feeling,” he said, but Margaret did not smile in return.
Ben and Paula arrived, hand in hand.
“He’s desperate for a dog,” said Ben to the owner, who nodded and left them. Eliot’s face was rueful—brows furrowed and lower lip visible.
“I was just petting the dog,” he said again.
Ben lifted him up and put him over his shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said, swinging his son down to the ground again. “Back to the car. Let’s go see your grandpa.”
As the children walked ahead, Ben put his arm around Margaret and squeezed her.
“I … I just thought … I had a bad …”
“It’s all right,” said Ben. “We found him.” Margaret was trembling, but she tried to smile.
Her father, John, was watching for them out of the living room window when they arrived in Rugby. He lived in the same detached Georgian redbrick house in which Margaret’s mother had died. She had developed melanoma and John had nursed her at home for nearly a year. Although she had been gone fifteen years, the decor of the house was still the same, right down to the honesty and catkin bouquet in a vase by the telephone in the hall. Margaret couldn’t look at the dried plants without imagining her mother choosing them and sliding the long stems into the vase. Each time she visited, she would thumb the dust from the honesty’s shiny dried seed cases, which reminded her of the communion wafers she had placed in her mouth as a child, the rare times her mother had taken her to church.
John threw open the door and his arms. He claimed to be the same height as Ben but he had shrunk a little. He still looked good for his age, but he had grown thinner since her mother died: bones shining through his skin, like fine marble. The children stood on tiptoes to embrace him.
Margaret waited until John and Ben shook hands and the children had taken off their shoes before she hugged her father. The smell of him was a deep comfort, and she was glad that they had made the journey. She held on to him for a moment longer than she might have, and found that he squeezed her instead of breaking away.
“I’m so glad you made it up here,” he said. “I just wanted to see you—make sure you were OK.”
“I was lucky.”
Ben had called to tell him about the crash, and Margaret had spoken to her father on the phone when she got out of the hospital.
John had bought in lunch: sausage rolls and pasties, coconut cookies and strawberry tarts. They sat at the table while he tried to make a pot of tea, opening and closing the cupboards as if unaware of their contents. John still moved around his house with estrangement, as if he didn’t belong here, or as if he had recently moved in. He had retired properly only last year and was finding the adjustment difficult. As an engineer he had worked long hours all his life. He played golf and liked looking after his cars, so that although he had stopped work he was seldom home. It was as if retirement forced him to remember, once again, that he had a life to face without her mother.
“Let me help you,” said Margaret, getting to her feet and making the tea as John unwrapped the paper bags containing lunch.
“I should have had this all organized,” he said, smoothing the scant hairs on his scalp.
“You sit down and let me do it,” she said, placing a protective hand on his arm. She was grateful to have a distraction from her own unease.
John settled into a chair at the head of the table as Margaret placed the food on plates. She gave instructions to Eliot and Paula and they laid the table and folded napkins.
“So how’s the house-husband thing going?” said John with a smirk, slapping Ben lightly on the shoulder.
It was a joke that John always found more amusing than Ben did.
“Hard work,” Ben conceded.
“Only kidding. How’s the writing going?”
Her engineer and scientist father always gave a grandiose emphasis to the words. Margaret knew that part of her father didn’t think what Ben did was real work; while another part of him admired Ben, as if his son-in-law were an alchemist.
“Not bad. I’m working on a piece on children and social media at the moment.”
John nodded. “I read your article on the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons winning the Nobel. That was marvelous. Marvelous. I passed it on to a friend of mine.”
“Oh really?” said Ben, and Margaret turned to watch the gentle color rise in her husband’s cheeks. He was bad with praise.
“Yeah … it’s all going well at the moment. There’s a chance I might get to go to Brazil next year. I’ve pitched an article about child footballers in the favelas, to run at the same time as the World Cup.”
“That would be jammy,” said John, winking.
They were all hungry after the drive, and there was silence as they ate. Eliot had red sauce from his strawberry tart dotted on his cheeks and nose. Margaret was suddenly flooded with exhaustion and found it difficult to eat.
“So you’re on the mend then?” said John, raising an eyebrow at Margaret as he took a sip of tea.
Margaret nodded. “Yes, just some bumps and scratches. It was scary but I was … lucky …”
“It doesn’t bear thinking about what could have happened to you,” said her father, his brown eyes murky with worry. “It terrified the life out of me …”
Margaret turned to him and watched the concern gather on his face. He had always had difficulty expressing his
emotions. It reminded her of times in her childhood when she had needed him, and he had been unable to comfort her.
“But she’s doing well, aren’t you, Mags?” said Ben, smiling across the table at her. She could tell from the way her husband spoke that he was trying to protect the children from hearing the details about the accident.
Margaret cleared her throat and took Ben’s cue to change the subject.
“Hey, Dad, I wanted to go up in the loft and have another sift through the stuff from the old house—if that’s OK?” she said.
“Of course,” said her father, eyebrows raised. “What’s it you’re after?”
“It was some stuff of Mum’s. I think I know where—”
“I told you I gave away some of her things last year?”
It had taken over a decade, but her father had finally sorted through her mother’s possessions and given her clothes to charity.
Margaret smiled at him. “Yeah, and it’s fine if …”
“You’re welcome to whatever. You’ll need to go up yourself if that’s OK. My knees are playing up a bit today.”
There was a rope swing attached to the big oak tree at the bottom of the garden, which her father had made when Paula was small. It was almost identical to the one that John had made for Margaret when she was a child. Ben took the children outside to play on it while Margaret stayed in the house with her father. She watched the children push each other on the swing before she turned away to follow him upstairs.
Her father had been a young man—in his early fifties—when her mother died. He had shown no interest in marrying again and had thrown himself into work until retirement.
John used a hooked stick to pull down the stepladder from the hatch that led into the loft. He held the bottom of the ladder to steady it as Margaret climbed.
“The light’s on the left-hand side,” he called as she neared the top. “There’s a box of her jewelry that’s behind the beams on the far right.”
“Thanks,” she said over her shoulder. “It wasn’t jewelry so much, just some bits and bobs I remembered were up here.” She twisted on the stairs to watch his expression. The skin on his brow wrinkled as he looked up at her. From that time, she might have added, but did not.
Everything She Forgot Page 7
