Sweets From Morocco

by Jo Verity

  ‘I’ll take that as a yes then, shall I?’ She slammed the door.

  *

  ‘Did Lewis bring you home?’ her father asked when they were eating breakfast.

  ‘Yes. We had a good chat. Caught up a bit.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ her mother smiled.

  Tessa noticed how enthusiastically she was tucking in to her cooked breakfast. She looked fuller in the face and less apprehensive. She wasn’t constantly fiddling with the cutlery or picking crumbs off the cloth.

  ‘You look really well, Mum.’

  ‘Thank you, dear. I’m feeling well. The new baby has put a smile on all our faces.’

  And they were off again, into the mind-numbing province of shawls and pushchairs.

  Tessa and her mother were in the garden when Lewis and Sarah arrived. ‘Andrea’s taking it easy,’ he explained and went into the house to make coffee.

  Tessa expected there would be intimacy – cuddles, jokes, indulgences – between grandmother and granddaughter but it soon became obvious that no such bond existed. Her mother addressed the child as though they were teacher and pupil on the first day of a new school year. ‘Do you like my roses? Would you like one to take home for Mummy? You must be careful – they’ve got very sharp thorns.’ The little girl looked anxious and kept her distance.

  When she and Lewis were that age, long before Gordon was born, when they pleaded ‘what can we do, Mum?’ she always came up with something interesting. Old sheets and bamboo canes to make a wigwam; a treasure hunt: Bring me a round pebble and a red flower and a feather. Quick as you can; Newspaper and flour-and-water paste for papier mâché puppet heads; Let’s make the longest daisy chain in the world. I’ll help. Their mother had been so approachable, so full of fun then.

  Or was that the mother she wished she’d had?

  Lewis watched from the kitchen window. Every now and again Sarah turned to stare mournfully at him, a silent plea for rescue. She was a mixture of timidity and tenacity that he supposed she had inherited from him, and he wondered if he would find it easier to empathise were she a boy. Tessa and his mother were talking, ignoring the child, and he nodded and waved, willing his daughter to do something charming or amusing to grab their attention.

  He’d not slept well. Andrea had been restless and at three o’clock he had taken himself off to the spare room, but he could not forget his conversation with Tessa. He couldn’t deny that her observations were accurate. His mother had always seemed – what was the word Tessa had used? – chirpy, that was it, when Uncle Frank was around. But he was repelled by her suggestion that his mother harboured ‘feelings’ for her husband’s brother.

  Despite the open windows, the kitchen was hot and beginning to fill with the sickly smell of roasting lamb. The table was set for three – cutlery, tumblers and cruet set at the ready. Similar Sunday meat and two veg rituals were gathering momentum in kitchens all over the town, all over the country. Even now, Andrea would be putting a small chunk of dead animal in the oven at Cranwell Lodge. Lewis sighed.

  ‘Did you have a good night?’ His father came in from the shed to wash his hands at the kitchen sink. ‘Where did you go in the end?’

  ‘That new Italian place. Near the bridge.’ How easy it was to slip into dishonesty.

  His mother waved. ‘Is there a film in the camera, Dick? We should take a snap now we’re all together.’

  Lewis should have been offended that the ‘all’ did not include Andrea but he understood that his mother still considered the four of them to be her family.

  His father produced the camera that only came out on holidays and special occasions. The project set off a ripple of high spirits as they debated where they should stand and who should take the photograph.

  ‘We could take several – rotate the photographer. Or is that too radical?’ Tessa laughed.

  And that’s what they did, Dick Swinburne, Lewis and finally Tessa each taking their turn with the camera. Then they milled around in the garden. Tessa, evidently determined to show how good she was with children, tossed a tennis ball to Sarah, failing to appreciate a four-year-old’s inability to anticipate the trajectory of a moving object and also failing to spot her niece’s misery as, time after time, her small hands came together too late and the ball rebounded off her narrow chest. Lewis willed his daughter to pick it up and hurl it at Tessa’s head, to stamp and scream, to say it wasn’t fair. But, like an automaton, she retrieved the ball, threw it feebly back and waited for the next humiliation.

  ‘How’s Uncle Frank?’ Tessa faked concentration on the game. ‘D’you see much of him these days?’

  ‘He calls in, once in a while.’ Their father’s reply was uninformative and their mother, bending down, pulling weeds from the rockery, had her face turned away.

  Tessa persisted. ‘Uncle Frank used to be so great with us when we were young. It’s a shame he didn’t have kids of his own.’

  ‘We probably put him off for life.’ Lewis severed the thread, unprepared to let Tessa tug it again. ‘C’mon, Sarah. Say goodbye to Auntie Tessa. And Granny and Granddad.’

  ‘Spoilsport,’ Tessa muttered.

  ‘When might we see you again?’ Lewis asked as they walked to the gate.

  ‘When it’s most inconvenient. When you least expect it. When I need something.’ She laughed. ‘I’m sure you’ve all worked that out by now.’

  ‘Why d’you insist on casting yourself in the role of black sheep? You can’t go on playing the naughty schoolgirl forever. You’re thirty-one. We don’t mind what you do. We don’t much care what you do—’

  ‘In that case why did you bother to ask when you’d be seeing me again?’ She smiled triumphantly.

  ‘You’re so childish,’ he snapped. ‘I hear better arguments every day in the playground. And I asked because it’s the polite thing to do. Manners. Ever heard of them? They sort of prevent the world descending into anarchy.’

  ‘You’re a boring fart, Lewis. All these years I’ve been holding my breath, waiting for you to turn in to a proper man. But you’re never going to are you? Now toddle off home to your little wifey. Go on. Go and populate the world with dozens of dreary kids. Although I can’t imagine you ever get aroused enough to—’

  Lewis stepped forward and slapped his sister across her left cheek.

  Chapter 20

  Before they left for the station, Tessa checked the local telephone directory. Rundle was an uncommon name, nevertheless she was disappointed not to find a single entry. She flicked on to the S’s. Saunders. Searle. Smith. Stoddy. There. T. J. Stoddy, 8 Winchester Crescent. Diane’s parents were still at the same address and, seeing the words, black and unalterable on the page, she was back in the prosaic semi that smelled of lavender polish and the Stoddy’s fat spaniel, the house where she and Diane had failed to establish a lasting friendship. The next entry was M. J. Stoddy. Could that be Mike? She made a note of both numbers.

  She told her parents just to drop her off at the station and go back home but they wouldn’t hear of it, making a great performance of their farewells as though she were emigrating to the other side of the world. She hugged her mother and father, promising that she would return before too long.

  ‘You’ll want to see the baby as soon as it arrives, won’t you?’ Her mother’s question was as near as she ever got to an instruction.

  They made desultory conversation, Tessa keeping an eye on the huge hands of the station clock as they crept towards the moment when she was at last able to say ‘I’d better go and check which platform it goes from. Thanks for a lovely weekend.’

  As she entered the station, she turned and they were still there, standing by the car, arms raised in salute, like two cardboard figures from the toy theatre that Gordon had brought with him.

  Lunch, during which her father probed crudely into her financial situation while her mother loaded her plate with food, had been an ordeal. And her exchange with Lewis had been unpleasant. She smarted not from his stinging slap
but from his sharp words filled with barbed truth. Her visits generally started off well then the devil, or some such malevolent force, took possession of her and she found herself compelled to jerk them all out of their complacency; to apply her own brand of electro-shock therapy, powerful enough to jump-start the living dead. Her parents were beyond help so she’d directed her efforts at Lewis. All she wanted him to do was to make an honest appraisal of his situation. Then, if he was genuinely happy in his rut, so be it.

  At each station, another band of London-bound travellers got on the train, returning to the anonymity of the city. Tessa watched them shuffling along the aisle, looking for seats. Had he, or she, spent pleasant days in the bosom of their family or had they, too, been setting loose evangelising devils to stir up the provinces?

  She closed her eyes, picturing the collective guts of the passengers, churning away, digesting gobbets of lamb and beef and pork; gallons of gravy and custard and rice pudding. Were they, simultaneously, digesting hurtful remarks, painful revelations, unwanted information? Births. Deaths. Marriages. Divorces. Rapes. Murders. If the train crashed and they were all killed, would the world be better or worse for their mass passing?

  The sun slanted in, warming the carriage and, as the train swayed along, her thoughts swirled lazily around the events of the weekend, inevitably arriving at the Gordon conversation. So Lewis, too, entertained the possibility that their brother was alive. Her thoughts meandered on. Had she and Gordon ever passed in the street? Or sat in the same cinema? What if he were on this train? Perhaps she should slip the guard a pound note and ask him to make an announcement on the intercom. Will the young man who was snatched from a pram twenty years ago, please make himself known to the dark-haired woman in Coach E.

  ‘Are you all right?’ The question came from the man sitting opposite.

  ‘What?’ She sat up and opened her eyes, feeling something trickle down her cheek. ‘God. Sorry. Yes. I’m fine thanks.’

  She swiped her cheek with the back of her hand. How long had she been crying?

  ‘Here.’ The man offered her a leather-covered hip flask. ‘Brandy. Essential before tangling with … whatever demons await.’

  If she accepted, he might think she was a pushover and, if she didn’t, a prissy puritan. Before she could make up her mind which one to be, he leaned forward. ‘I’ve been racking my brains. I think we might have met before.’ He grinned. ‘Not very original I know, but I think we have.’

  She took a proper look at him. A little older than she was. Thirty-five? Clean but unkempt brown hair. Grey eyes. Full-lipped. The individual elements were nothing out of the ordinary but assembled they produced a wholesome, pleasant but unfamiliar face.

  ‘About ten years ago. Or perhaps a bit more. In Cornwall. You were staying with Jay and Liza.’

  ‘I was,’ she said. ‘Summer nineteen sixty-two. I was eighteen. You’ve got a better memory than I have.’ She took a sip from the flask. ‘I’m afraid I can’t—’

  ‘Well you wouldn’t. I spent most of the time asleep or out of my skull on that Albanian white that Jay was peddling.’ He closed his eyes and slumped in his seat, tongue lolling. ‘Recognise me now?’

  She laughed. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Dan Coates.’ He held out his hand.

  ‘Tessa Swinburne.’ They shook hands and she noted that, although his hands were clean, there was a deposit of dirt beneath his fingernails.

  The train crawled through the graffiti-ed suburbs towards Paddington and, as it pulled into the station, she was sorry that the journey was coming to an end.

  It wasn’t until their third date, when Tessa was starting to think that he didn’t fancy her after all, that Dan Coates kissed her. And another month before they became lovers.

  He was a sculptor, quite well thought of in his field. To supplement his irregular income – ‘Only a handful of sculptors make a living wage’ – he taught a couple of sessions a week at the Slade School of Art. In his early twenties, Tessa learned, he had married a painter who was a lot older than he and who, after a year, had left him for another woman. ‘So, you see, I no longer take anything for granted.’

  Tessa did not want to fall in love. It didn’t fit in with her plan to write another bestseller, save Lewis from himself and make sure that Tony Rundle got his comeuppance. These objectives required her to be hard-nosed. Feelings of love, generosity and tolerance might divert her or weaken her resolve. She suggested that they should stop seeing each other but he laughed and asked, ‘Why?’

  Tessa found it easy to make men friends. In cafés, shops, on trains, walking down the street – the signals they gave out were easy to read. Female friends were more difficult. Thinking back to her school days, she couldn’t recall one single girl whom she’d admired. The Diane Stoddys and Pam Blackmores had been okay when she needed someone with whom to go to dances or the cinema, but none of them had any gumption, none had been on her wavelength.

  When Liza Flynn no longer needed her to look after Valmai and Connor, she’d ended up in London where she invested in Learn to Touch Type in one Week and signed on with a temping agency. She liked working in different parts of the city, glimpsing different worlds. The lack of responsibility suited her. If she made a mess of something, she’d moved on before the mistake came to light. The majority of employees in offices were women, some of them good fun, but as she rarely worked in one place for more than a couple of weeks, they were never became more than acquaintances. Eventually, she’d landed up at Ward & Cox. During her time there, she made several real friends, in particular Charlotte Jamieson, a diminutive redhead who worked in the Rights Department. Charlotte was an ex-Cheltenham Ladies College girl, who drank like a navvy and smoked roll-ups. She was witty, urbane and shamelessly rich.

  ‘I’m disappointed, darling,’ she said when Tessa told her about Dan Coates. ‘We can’t have you mooning around with some artsy-fartsy no-hoper. Fuck him if you must but if you’re starting to daydream about white dresses and all that nonsense I’ll have to dig out my little black book and find you a nice rich boy.’

  ‘But I don’t need—’

  ‘What you don’t need is to subjugate your life to some second-rate artist.’

  ‘He’s not second-rate.’

  Charlotte sighed. ‘Oh. God. You’re going to tell me that he’s a genius and you’re not worthy to wash his socks. It’s nineteen seventy-six, Tessa. You should be at the barricades not the kitchen sink.’

  Charlotte was inclined to exaggerate; nevertheless her remarks reinforced the warning voice nagging away at the back of Tessa’s mind. But the thing with Dan wasn’t serious so where was the harm?

  *

  One Friday evening, two days before the baby was due, Andrea bathed Sarah, put her to bed and went in to labour. Lewis had assumed he would be at school when this happened and that he would have to abandon his class to make the dramatic dash home. But even in childbirth Andrea was her usual efficient self. The whole weekend lay ahead – plenty of time to set support systems in place. No fuss. No drama.

  He telephoned his parents and they were at Cranwell Lodge within twenty minutes, clutching a holdall containing their overnight things, ready to ‘hold the fort’.

  Between contractions, Andrea made a list of what Sarah liked for breakfast and the clothes she should wear next day. ‘You could take her to the park. Or the library. Her books are on the table next to her bed.’

  Listening to his wife and watching her calm determination, it occurred to him that she expected very little of him other than to be the taxi driver.

  Andrea lay in the back of the car, moaning occasionally and making odd animal sounds and he could see her, in the rear-view mirror, her hands covering her face. The loci of their lives were about to be inexorably re-plotted and he wished that he could say something to set everything right between them, to erase the blots and false starts, but he sensed that she was excluding him, withdrawing, taking herself to the place where she needed to be. He concentr
ated on the one thing he’d been required to do – drive carefully.

  The sun was setting, casting long soft shadows across the hospital car park as they walked through the revolving doors into the muffled staleness of the maternity unit. They went through the admission procedure, the nurses making encouraging noises whenever a contraction caused Andrea to gasp and close her eyes. It seemed to go on and on and he wondered whether a mother had ever been turned away, doubled up in agony, because her date of birth or address failed to tally with a list.

  A nurse took Andrea’s suitcase from him. ‘Leave her with us, Mr Swinburne. You can go home if you like. We’ll ring you when there’s some news.’

  ‘I’ll wait, if that’s okay.’ He knew that was what Andrea expected him to say and his decision was ratified by her grateful smile.

  ‘Fine. We’ll get her settled then you can come and keep her company.’

  The doctors had agreed that, if there were no complications, he could be present at the birth. ‘They’ve put a note on my file,’ Andrea explained. She ought to have discussed it with him first. The prospect of the blood and the slime, the real possibility that he might faint or vomit, alarmed him and he hoped that, when it came to it, he would be banished.

  A nurse directed him to a featureless room with eau de nil walls and strip lighting. Spindly plastic chairs – pillar box red, electric blue and raw green – lined the walls, as though a ‘bit of colour’ was all it took to distract anyone who waited there from the pain and danger that surrounded childbirth. Having expressed the desire to stay, he had committed himself to this dismal place and, grateful that he had it to himself, he studied the floor, imagining the feet that had paced away endless hours, depositing the scuff marks on the grey vinyl tiles. The wall clock had stopped at four fifty-three and, unbidden, Uncle Frank’s words came joking across the years. At least it’ll be right twice a day. Lewis, then seven or eight years old, was reluctant to admit that he didn’t understand and joined in the family laughter.