Hilary Bonner

by Braven

  Karen loved her mother deeply, absolutely adored her, as did almost everyone who came in contact with Margaret Meadows. There was something quite captivating about her. Maybe it was partly her vulnerability which made her so irresistible. Certainly she was the most emotional of women, which in her case meant not only that she gave more love than most people have in them to give, but also that the emotional demands she made on her only child at such a young age were quite mind-blowing.

  Most of the time Karen coped. She had had plenty of practice already. But sometimes she was overwhelmed by the various grown-up pressures which engulfed her. And when she was afraid or overly excited she invariably found it impossible to speak. It wasn’t a stammer. She didn’t stammer. It was more than that. The words just would not come. Karen understood all too well the true meaning of the expression to be struck dumb, and it terrified her. As she grew older she was to incorporate into her veritable armoury of defence mechanisms a strategy for overcoming what had been a real handicap in her youth, and for remaining calm and in control while she did so, or at least appearing to be calm. At thirteen that was not the case.

  And so Karen was rendered speechless by the scene which confronted her that day, and by its possible implications. The question she wanted to ask was too big to be put into words. Her face turned red with the effort. The only noise she could manage to get out from between her lips was a kind of strangled moan.

  “What is it, girl?” asked the policeman kindly, bending over her and putting a hand on her left shoulder. “Don’t upset yourself.”

  Karen just looked at him. Eyes wide.

  “That’s not where you live, is it?” he enquired, looking slightly puzzled and gesturing at Parkview.

  Karen managed to shake her head. She pointed to the villa next door.

  “Ah,” said the policeman. “Well, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about then. Are you going to tell me your name?”

  At that instant Karen couldn’t tell him her name. She wasn’t even sure she could remember it, let alone say it. She had to know though, she had to ask the question she dreaded. Eventually she somehow managed to get the words out.

  “Mum. M-my mum. Is she all right?”

  “Well, I expect so, darling, but you’re going to have to tell me your name or at least her name before I can be sure, aren’t you?”

  “M-Margaret Meadows.” Karen spat out the words, using all the willpower she could summon up.

  “Ah, Mrs. Meadows. Yes, of course. Laurel House. The trouble’s next door to you, girl. Your mother’s fine. Just fine. A bit upset by all the commotion, but then who wouldn’t be?”

  “Can I go in?”

  “Yes, ’course you can. Just walk along with me, all right.”

  The policeman lifted a line of taping behind him so that he and Karen could duck underneath. Karen, by nature a very observant girl, was beginning to function at least halfway properly again. She noticed that several of her neighbours were watching the proceedings, most of them covertly. Mrs. Stephens on the corner was outside cleaning her windows, but her head was all the time turned towards Parkview. Mr. Johnson, the retired schoolmaster who lived opposite, was washing his car very slowly, a job that his wife normally did. Karen looked up and down the street. The curtains twitched at the Beverleys, but upstairs at Hillden House the bedroom windows were wide open and old Mr. Peabody was leaning right out staring openly at all that was going on.

  A grunting noise behind Karen attracted her attention back to the policeman accompanying her, who, having also straightened up on the inner side of the tape barrier, was standing with one arm behind him pressed gingerly into the small of his back.

  “Anno Domini,” he muttered. “Don’t ever grow old, darling. That’s my advice to you.”

  Karen was interested in neither the policeman’s back trouble nor his age, which in any case seemed to her to be so great that it was quite beyond her comprehension. She peered anxiously up at him as they walked together towards the gateway to Laurel House.

  “What’s going on?” she asked eventually, in what she knew was rather a squeaky voice. “What’s happened at Parkview?”

  “Nothing to worry about. We’re just making some enquiries, that’s all.”

  “But you’re digging up the garden?”

  “I think I prefer you when you can’t get your words out, missy.”

  The policeman smiled down on her. Normally Karen enjoyed the company of people who were good-humoured and seemed to take things calmly. It wasn’t what she was used to, after all. But on that day she had other things on her mind.

  Abruptly she turned her back on the big affable policeman, flung open the wrought-iron gates to her house and ran as fast as she could up the driveway to the front door.

  She needn’t have worried about being late for tea. Her mother was always unpredictable. For some weeks now a full high tea had been laid out for Karen’s return from school and Margaret Meadows had given her daughter a lecture on how hurt and offended she was should Karen have been even a few minutes late home. It was the kind of emotional pressure Karen was used to from her mother, and sometimes it had the diverse effect of making her be deliberately and rather perversely late.

  But on this day Margaret Meadows had done nothing about tea. Karen’s heart sank. It seemed that her mother was bad with her nerves again. She was sitting morosely at the table in the kitchen, her head bowed, and did not look up as Karen entered the room.

  “Are you all right?” Karen asked automatically, although seeing her mother like that really made the question redundant.

  Mrs. Meadows made no attempt to respond.

  She remained in exactly the same position as Karen walked quietly forward and sat down opposite her at the orange Formica-topped table—a legacy of the mid-sixties, the last time the old house had been decorated or changed in any way. Margaret Meadows still did not look up. Her wispy blonde hair was a mess and had fallen over her face hiding it from view. Karen dropped her shoulders slightly and bent her head to one side so that she could see her mother’s face, or at least most of it. As she had expected, Margaret Meadows’ eyes were red and puffy and her cheeks were damp with tears and smeared with mascara and eyeliner. Her mouth hung open and slack. Lipstick was smudged all around it. Karen knew well enough that her mother, who never rose before she left for school, also never emerged from her bedroom without make-up. Today she would have been considerably better off without it, as it happened, Karen thought.

  Aware of her daughter’s scrutiny Margaret Meadows lowered her head even more until her upper body was bent right over and the top of her head was almost touching the table. She was wearing a vibrant pink cardigan over some kind of flimsy floating dress, clothes that seemed totally out of place. But she always dressed like that, a cross between Marilyn Monroe and a Barbie doll, Karen had once heard Mr. Peabody remark in the newsagent’s. Mr. Peabody had a rather acerbic turn of phrase and was invariably as direct in everything he did and said as he was in his blatant appraisal of the police presence around Parkview.

  Karen preferred to think about Mr. Peabody, or anyone or anything at all that might be a distraction, rather than thinking too much about the state her mother was in. It was one of her ways of coping. Nonetheless she accepted that, somehow or other, it was her job to deal with this. Her father never took any notice at all. He would return from work in an hour or so and if his wife was still crouched over the kitchen table in tears he would just walk away and leave Karen to it.

  Still somewhat distracted, Karen noticed that Margaret Meadows had found a screwed-up paper hankie tucked somewhere into her clothing and, conscious at last perhaps both of her daughter’s presence and of the likelihood of smudged residual make-up, was now scrubbing ineffectively at her face with it. Karen reluctantly prepared to turn her full attention back to her mother. At that moment she would actually much rather have been with Mr. Peabody or the fat policeman or her teachers at school or almost anybody who wasn’t totally neur
otic, as she had once also heard Mr. Peabody remark about her mother. It had been the first time Karen had ever heard the word, but she had somehow understood at once that it was just another way of describing her mother’s bad nerves. Although how Mr. Peabody knew anything about all that was a mystery to Karen, given that everything that happened within the somewhat crumbling walls of Laurel House remained a carefully guarded family secret.

  Almost at once Karen felt terribly disloyal. Her mother wasn’t bad with her nerves all the time. Her mother could be lovely, the loveliest mother anybody could possibly have. It was just that Margaret Meadows couldn’t always cope, and increasingly often Karen wasn’t sure that she could either. She knew that too much was asked of her too often, but she didn’t know how to put this into words that her mother would understand, and she knew that even if she did it wouldn’t do any good.

  Karen continued to study this person she loved who was capable of causing her so much distress without having any idea that she was doing so. A half-empty mug of tea was on the table in front of Margaret Meadows. It looked extremely unappetizing; a film had formed on the top of it so it had surely gone cold. The teapot, in its brown-and-orange-patterned cosy, was alongside.

  “Do you want me to freshen that up for you?” asked Karen. She had a habit of repeating the exact expressions she heard uttered around her by people much older than her. Sometimes they sounded rather strange emitting from young teenage lips. But much about Karen belied her youth. She had grown up very fast indeed. She’d had to. That had just been the way things were.

  Her mother shook her head, still not looking up. With one hand she began to make a gesture downwards which she then seemed to think better of. Karen sighed again and leaned further sideways so that she could peer beneath the table. It was as she expected. A whisky bottle stood on the floor by Margaret Meadows’ feet. There was just an inch or so of amber liquid left in it.

  Karen straightened up and then stretched forward across the table so that her head was close to her mother’s bowed one. She could smell the whisky then, on her mother’s breath and from the mug too, she thought. She couldn’t understand why her mother even bothered to attempt to hide the bottle, but it was something she always did. Karen really had no idea why. She reached under the table, picked up the bottle and put it in her school bag. Out of sight out of mind, she thought to herself.

  Aloud she said sternly: “I may be shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, but I think you’ve had more than enough of that.”

  Her mother did not protest, she rarely did, neither did she respond. She was quite used to being treated like this by her daughter, quite used to her daughter’s rather quaint phraseology and use of old sayings. Not that her mother drank often, Karen reminded herself, well, not very often. And only when she was bad with her nerves. It was just that when she did she was inclined to empty the bottle.

  “Look, Mum,” Karen continued. “Why don’t you go upstairs and have a nice lie-down?”

  There was still no response. Wearily Karen leaned back in her chair and found her gaze wandering idly around the big kitchen, a huge cavernous room in a huge cavernous house, which had about it none of the coziness traditionally associated with kitchens. In spite of its size there was no big cooking range, just a small gas cooker. A line of orange Formica-finished units ran along one dark-brown painted wall, another unfortunate legacy of the mid-sixties which contrived to make the north-facing room seem particularly dark and drab. The orange-topped table also wasn’t big enough for the kitchen. It was, however, quite big enough for the three people who lived in the oversized Victorian villa.

  Some houses have a warm feeling about them which hits you as soon as you enter. Some houses give you the feeling that nothing bad has ever happened in them, that they have by and large been happy houses. Laurel House was just the opposite. When Karen went to bed at night she always pulled the bedclothes right over her head. That way she could pretend she was somewhere else.

  She had no idea whether or not her parents had intended to have more children, whether they had planned to fill some of the six bedrooms on the three stories of Laurel House with lodgers, or whether they simply liked the idea of living in a big house. If the latter was the case they had made a mistake quite equal in size to the vast dimensions of their coldly austere home.

  Karen knew that her parents had lived in Laurel House ever since their marriage three years before she was born. Yet there was still not enough furniture to half-fill the place and all the rooms were shabby. There was no central heating and in winter the house was freezing. Karen always assumed that her father, who did something or other he never talked about in local government and dressed in the same grey suit for work every day until it wore out when he bought another identical one, just never made enough money to run the house properly. And her mother never worked at all, of course. Margaret Meadows, with her charm and looks, would probably have obtained a job quickly enough had it ever occurred to her to do so. But she was possibly as aware as anybody else that she would never have been capable of holding one down.

  One bitter cold winter’s evening when the three of them had been huddled shivering around an inadequate fire in the vast loftily-ceilinged front room with damp stretching in ever-increasing patches on either side of the chimney breast, Karen had asked her parents why they didn’t sell the big old house and buy something smaller which would be easier and cheaper to maintain. Typically, her father, who always had an air of terminal weariness about him, had simply got up from his broken-springed armchair, which twanged every time he shifted himself in futile attempts to find a comfortable position, and walked out of the room. He didn’t glance at either his wife or daughter. With the resilience of the young to all that is inevitable and unalterable Karen had long before accepted that her father had for whatever reason given up caring about anything much, including her and her mother. Colin Meadows, in his mid-forties then, was not an old man, but he gave the impression of being so, and a beaten one at that.

  She also accepted that all too often she had to be the strong one in this family. So, squaring her shoulders, she rose to her feet, retrieved a mug from one of the orange Formica cupboards, returned to the table and poured herself a cup of tea out of the teapot. She took one mouthful and instantly spat it back into the mug. It was disgusting. Even the tea from the pot which had been encased in its cosy was stone-cold.

  Obliquely Karen wondered then just how long her mother had been sitting at the table like that, emptying her bottle of whisky. And she wanted very much to ask her if this latest attack of bad nerves had in any way been brought on by the goings-on next door at Parkview. But she was afraid to mention anything that might make her mother worse.

  “Shall I make a fresh pot?” she enquired instead. “It would do you the world of good, I reckon. Nothing like a nice hot cup of tea to perk you up, is there, Mum?”

  At last Margaret Meadows looked up from the table. Her face was pale and pinched beneath the make-up smudges which her inveterate scrubbing with the paper tissue had done little to remove. Her eyes flicked pink and nervous in her daughter’s direction, her lips trembled. Her voice, when she eventually spoke, was flat and low but the words came out clear and unhesitant. She did not sound at all drunk. But then, she never did.

  “They’ve taken Richard,” she said. “The police have taken Richard.”

  Karen’s heart jumped. She knew who her mother was talking about at once. Their neighbour Richard Marshall, the proprietor of Parkview. Karen did not speak. Instead she sat staring at her mother, taking in the shocked expression in Margaret Meadows’ red-rimmed eyes. Her mother had obviously been knocked sideways by the police action. There were so many questions Karen wanted to ask her, but again she didn’t dare.

  For a few seconds Margaret Meadows stared bleakly back at her daughter, then she suddenly threw her upper body forward on to the table, knocking over her mug of cold tea, and began to weep noisily and copiously. Her body shook with g
reat heaving sobs. Meanwhile, in that curiously objective way she had developed, her highly observant daughter noticed that her mother’s tears were flowing so abundantly that they were running on to the tabletop and diluting the brown puddle of tea into which Margaret Meadows had lain her head.

  Karen knew that there was nothing she could do for the moment. Eventually her mother would stop crying and then Karen would help her back to bed. It was an all-too-familiar routine.

  Meanwhile all she could do was carry on as normal. Squaring her small shoulders she stood up, trotted upstairs to her parents’ bedroom, and picked up the various items of clothing, lying around on the bed and floor which obviously needed washing. She then went into her own bedroom and changed out of her school uniform into the jeans and T-shirt she wore around the house, after which she took her soiled school blouse into the big bathroom where the washing machine was plumbed in and loaded it and the dirty washing from her parents’ room into it. It was what she did every evening.

  By the time she returned downstairs to the kitchen her mother was no longer sobbing so dramatically. Instead she was sitting upright in her chair again and was once more dabbing ineffectively at her tear-stained face with a tissue. Karen took a cloth from the sink and began to mop up the spilt tea from the table.

  It was not the first time she had seen her mother in this kind of state, not by a long chalk. And neither, she knew only too well, would it be last. Often nobody had any idea what brought on her mother’s attacks of bad nerves. On this occasion Karen had little doubt that it had been, as she had suspected from the beginning, the goings-on next door at Parkview.

  There was so much Karen did not understand, and yet there were muddled half-formed memories inside her head, like pictures torn haphazardly from an album, which made her feel very frightened and would not go away. As she wiped up the spilt tea Karen stared at her mother. Margaret Meadows did not even seem to notice. Karen wished her mother would talk to her, explain things. But she never ever did. Karen would just have to sort her troubled thoughts out the best way she could, just like always. But sometimes, as she struggled to make sense of the crazy adult world around her, that was very hard to do. All she knew for certain was that she mustn’t tell anyone about her fears. The Meadowses were very private people. And if nothing else, Karen had been brought up to understand and respect privacy. Appearances were all. You didn’t talk about what went on behind your own locked front door. Not to anyone.