by Fiona Neill
Now when I am not feeling anxious, I am feeling guilty. I try to rationalise that nothing actually happened. I didn’t initiate this scene, nor did I respond in any obvious way. Yet I have to accept that I did play a role in events leading to this entanglement. I had engineered after-hours encounters with Robert Bass, indulged in inappropriately lustful daydreams and minor flirting.
I’m now scared of what I might have precipitated. I had never imagined even in my wildest fantasies that my feelings might be reciprocated, or that there would be any real temptation to respond. What I failed to contemplate with respect to Robert Bass was that our feelings weren’t synchronised and that my subtle withdrawal from our flirtation after our awkward evening at Alpha Mum’s only served to foment his interest. In short, I had forgotten how well men respond to a bit of cold shoulder. I had discovered too late that there is nothing more innocent or diverting than unrequited lust. I wanted the fantasy of Robert Bass, not the reality.
I feel annoyed with him because the aquarium incident occurred just as I had found some renewed equanimity, although of course that imploded the moment he touched me. Mostly I feel annoyed because, suddenly, the stakes are higher. There is a heightened reality to my dreams about hotels in Bloomsbury that is disturbing rather than pleasantly distracting. The bed is unmade, empty bottles lie on their side on the floor, and the room smells of stale smoke. The colours are sickly.
‘This is how affairs happen,’ Cathy tells me firmly when I phone her for advice, still hiding under the Laura Ashley bedspread with my mobile phone, in case anyone is listening outside the door. ‘If you felt any urge to reciprocate, stay well away. Even if he is just playing a game, it’s a diversion fraught with risk.’
‘I’ll try to avoid him,’ I say.
I tell her about a recent full-blown nightmare, in which my tummy played the lead role.
‘Sexy Domesticated Dad was lying naked on the bed and I couldn’t get out of my jeans without a struggle,’ I say. ‘Then when he saw my stomach he started screaming. I think he thought it had separated from the rest of my body.’
‘Well, just hold that image in your head if ever you feel tempted,’ she says. ‘At least you can forsake a new year diet to save your marriage.’
‘But what if Tom feels the same way about my stomach?’ I ask.
‘He’s had time to get used to it,’ she says.
I hear footsteps outside the door. My mother is showing Petra her room. I take the opportunity to get out of bed and slip down the corridor to go and see the children. I can still hear them jumping from the bed on to the floor. I don’t mind because at least it will keep them warm. I bathed them and put them in pyjamas and dressing gowns before we left London, because I knew that there would not be enough hot water for everyone to have a bath here. Sharing bathwater was an unquestionable backdrop to my childhood.
I open the door of my brother’s bedroom. The walls are mauve, painted by Mark during the term of his mock A levels after he read somewhere that red would incite passion and decided it would make a good setting to practise his seduction techniques with girls from school, mostly my friends. In the corner is an avocado sink unit with slatted doors that are also painted mauve.
I go over to his cupboard and open it. A bottle of Old Spice has fallen on its side and stained the shelf. There are half-bottles of shampoo; a toothbrush with splayed bristles; a half-full pot of Brylcreem; a couple of old copies of Playboy from the late 1970s that I remove and put on top of the wardrobe; and, bizarrely, there are my old copies of Jackie magazine that my brother must have purloined in his efforts to get to grips with the female psyche.
A poster of Bo Derek has faded and the area where her nipples once stood out so proudly has been rubbed into oblivion. Still, Sam is impressed.
‘Bosoms,’ he says, pointing at the wall.
Then he points at another poster on the back of the door. They have hung their Christmas stockings just below a poster of a woman shot from behind, wearing a very short tennis dress. She is casually lifting up a side of her dress to reveal that she isn’t wearing any knickers, her head turned back across her shoulder to look directly at the camera.
Looking at the stockings hanging just underneath the tennis player’s left buttock, I can’t help smiling as I vividly recall an argument between Mark and my mother about this poster. It must have been the summer of 1984, at the height of the miners’ strike. We were in the sitting room, watching the news, when extraordinary images of a pitched battle between police and miners somewhere in South Yorkshire flashed up on the screen.
‘Why do you hang all those posters of half-naked women on your walls?’ said my mother, as the police ran at the miners holding their plastic shields.
‘What would you like to see on my wall, Mum?’ said Mark, who was always much better than me at holding his own in an argument. I always tended to see the other point of view too quickly.
‘What about Nicaragua, the anti-apartheid movement, something more issue-based?’ my mother said. We all winced as a policeman struck a miner around the head with his baton.
‘Arthur Scargill doesn’t really do it for me Mum,’ Mark replied.
‘I think you should take that poster down. It shows a lack of respect to women,’ she persisted.
‘I have nothing but respect for her,’ Mark argued.
‘You have no interest in what is going on in her head, you’re fixated on her body,’ she insisted.
‘Of course he is,’ my father said, looking up from the newspaper. ‘He’s a teenage boy.’ We all stared at him, because my father, a quieter, more pensive character than my mother, had learnt early in his marriage that it was more tactical to keep his own counsel when she showed some sudden conviction in a new cause.
‘I thought you believed in freedom of expression, Mum,’ Mark argued, sensing he was close to victory. My mother said nothing and wandered off into the kitchen.
The bedroom door opens, and the woman with the bottom disappears momentarily, until Tom shuts it firmly behind him. He is adopting a positive attitude towards the heating problem, taking every opportunity to draw attention to the cold, which is a little exhausting, but facing the challenge with relish, like Scott in the Antarctic. He is still wearing a hat and gloves. This excitement will turn into resentment as the days go by and he can no longer resist the urge to criticise.
It is the coldest December since 1963. There is snow on the ground and the wind chill factor has been a news item for more than a week. It is a great time for those who like numbers, like Joe, who has been plotting the rise and fall of the temperature on a graph each day, applauded for his efforts by his father.
‘I wanted to check those toes for early signs of frostbite,’ Tom jokes, making the children line up for inspection.
‘That one looks a little black, Joe,’ he says, lifting Joe’s foot until his toe is level with his eye. Then, when he sees the worried look on Joe’s face, he tries to backtrack, but it is too late.
‘My toe will fall off in the night,’ Joe says.
‘If it does can we dissect it, Mummy?’ asks Sam.
‘Daddy’s just joking, it has to be below freezing to get frostbite,’ I say calmly.
‘The thermometer in the hall says that it is eleven degrees inside the house,’ says Tom.
‘I think I might add that to my weather chart,’ says Joe, distracted by talk of numbers.
‘Bottom, Daddy,’ says Fred, pulling Tom’s arm and pointing excitedly at the poster. ‘No pants. Like me.’
‘Dad, would you describe her bottom as sexy?’ asks Sam thoughtfully. He has been listening to too much Christina Aguilera.
‘What does sexy mean, Sam?’ Tom asks him, in a classic attempt at deflection. He uses the same tactic in discussions with me.
‘I don’t know really,’ he says. ‘I think it’s something to do with fruit. If a bottom looks like a peach, it’s sexy, I think.’
The children always stay in this room and it never ceases to be
exciting to them. Although there is a single bed, they prefer to all lie on the floor entwined in each other like puppies in a basket, and since it is generally cold, I encourage this habit. Fred, who usually has to be read stories into oblivion, is always wedged in the middle.
‘I can see my breath, Mummy,’ he now says proudly.
‘You’re smoking,’ says Sam. ‘Like Mummy.’
‘I don’t smoke,’ I protest.
‘Well, why do you keep those cigarettes in your boot?’ Sam asks.
‘They’re just for special occasions. What are you doing looking in my wardrobe anyway?’ I say.
‘I wasn’t,’ he says. ‘Granny told me.’
‘I can’t believe you are so devious, Lucy,’ says Tom.
‘That’s half the fun,’ I say. ‘You should be happy I still have some sense of mystery.’
‘Will Father Christmas know that we are here?’ asks Joe, sensing an argument brewing. ‘Because it’s so cold, he might think there isn’t anyone living here. Do you think he has those heat-seeking glasses?’
Sam is dragging Mark’s record player from the wardrobe and searching for his old singles and LPs. He picks out David Bowie from the pile and puts it on. I get into Mark’s old bed with Tom and pull the duvet up to my nose and listen to Scary Monsters. When Joe starts to chew his sleeves during the chorus, I ask Sam to carefully lift up the stylus and move it on to another track and tell them that I will come back in twenty minutes to switch off the light. I resolve to tell Tom everything that has happened. But when I come back all of them are asleep, including Tom.
12
‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’
OVER THE NEXT few days, allegiances are made and broken with alarming frequency. There are no outward declarations of war, just an undercurrent of tension that culminates in periodic bouts of verbal jousting. My brother, Mark, who arrived late last night, without his girlfriend, says that he is grateful for such family gatherings because they provide a flurry of patients for him in January.
When I go downstairs into the kitchen on Christmas Day, I sense a chill in the air that is unrelated to the weather. Petra is standing by the large pine table in the middle of the kitchen, struggling to stir a bowl of icing for a naked Christmas cake. I know this cake began the day dressed in the smooth, clean lines of an industrially iced factory cake and I try to work out just what is going on.
Tom is on the other side of the room, busy taking a large dose of prescription pain-killers that my brother has given him for a bed-induced headache.
‘Don’t drink too much with these,’ says Mark.
‘Just run through the classic symptoms of a brain tumour again,’ says Tom in between gulps of water.
‘Headaches, usually worse in the morning, dizziness, nausea,’ says Mark, without looking up from yesterday’s paper.
‘Do you think I should see a specialist?’ Tom persists.
‘No,’ says Mark. ‘It’s the bed. It’s always the bed. You always think you have a brain tumour when you come to stay here. Why don’t you go and do something useful like organise the spices? It’s a great displacement activity. The kind of occupational therapy I prescribe on a daily basis.’
‘If they go on, will you arrange a brain scan for me?’ asks Tom.
‘I can recommend someone in neurology, but we both know the headaches will disappear as soon as you stop sleeping in that bed. Just make sure you avoid any activity that might induce a sudden rush of blood to the head,’ Mark laughs uproariously. I wonder if he is more reassuring when he deals with his patients. Since he has just been promoted to head the psychology department of a big London teaching hospital, he must be doing something right.
Petra looks over disapprovingly, because this is what Mark expects of her, but she has always been surprisingly benevolent towards my brother. When she speaks to him, she uses an irritating high-pitched girly voice that teeters on the edge of flirtatiousness.
‘So tell me about your African adventure, Petra,’ says Mark indulgently. ‘When do we get to meet your lover?’ He says ‘lover’ slowly, with emphasis on the first syllable.
Petra is dressed in the same double layer of cashmere twinset that she was wearing yesterday. Pale pink atop cream, like a marshmallow. She ignores his question and blushes. I look over worriedly at Tom, who is still having difficulty coming to terms with the fact that his mother has a boyfriend.
Fred lies underneath the table in the dog basket, contentedly licking a wooden spoon. My mother tells Petra that she made the cake weeks ago. I know this is a lie, because I found the packaging in the larder last night. She must have picked off the original icing early this morning in order to engage in this deception.
‘I think you’ll find that if you add a teaspoon of lemon juice to the mixture, then it makes the icing easier to squeeze,’ Petra says to her in a clipped voice.
‘I have always made my icing with water and icing sugar,’ my mother replies confidently from the other end of the table. ‘Just keep stirring until it softens up.’
‘I think you’ll find that the more you stir the harder it will set,’ Petra says firmly, but she doesn’t put down the spoon.
She is using some effort to get the stiff icing sugar to move round the bowl and removes one of her outer layers of cardigan. I notice that she places the heels of her shoes firmly together and turns out her toes in that gesture of defiance that only those who have known her for many years would observe.
‘So, Petra, where are you going to live?’ asks Mark. Tom and I have spent weeks trying to muster the courage to pose such questions and I admire the ease of Mark’s direct line of enquiry. Since the infamous John Lewis lunch, a chill has once again set between us. Because although she managed to tell Tom of her plans, she opted for the most skeletal details and they have not mentioned the subject since, except to deal with organisational issues relating to the sale of her house.
It is as though the only way that she can make the guilt tolerable is to avoid all but the most superficial discussion. Perhaps she fears that any depth of communication might make her change her mind.
‘John owns a house in the Medina,’ she says. ‘But he has also bought somewhere up in the Atlas mountains and we’ll spend part of the year there, when it gets too hot for Marrakesh. He likes to paint there. He also has a house in Santa Fe. He’s American, you know, he’s quite well known in the States.’ Tom and I look at each other because we didn’t. She stops stirring for a moment and stares wistfully out of the kitchen window at the frost-bleached landscape. Everything is a different shade of pale. A herd of huddled sheep stare back at us from the field that marks the end of the garden. Occasionally they start bleating as though gossiping about what they are witnessing. Nothing like an audience to curb the worst family excesses, I think to myself, glad the sheep are enjoying their own Christmas special.
I struggle to assess whether this sudden flurry of disclosure makes the situation better or worse. It is difficult to read Tom’s expression. He is standing on a step opposite the cooker, studiously ignoring the détente between our mothers. Instead he has followed Mark’s advice and is organising my mother’s herbs into alphabetical order.
‘Do you think I should put the black pepper under B or P?’ he asks Petra.
‘I think you’ll find that it’s better to put it under P, followed by dried peppers and then white pepper,’ she says. This kind of exchange represents some deep communion between them.
I think sometimes that it is this diehard belief in domestic routine that has helped Petra to cope with the death of Tom’s father. Standards were never allowed to slip, even in the awful early days when he left her stranded following a massive and fatal heart attack. I remember a couple of weeks after he died, Petra asked us to go to the house they had lived in together for the previous forty years, to help clear out old clothes belonging to him. The gesture seemed a little premature. But from the moment of that terrible phone call in the early hours of Sunday mornin
g, Petra had been unnervingly dignified in her approach to the loss of her husband. There was no hysteria. No self-pity. No emotional outbursts.
‘She won’t cry in front of us,’ said Tom. ‘It’s not her style. She will save it all for when she is alone.’
So when I came down into the kitchen one morning during a bout of insomnia, to find her weeping silent tears, as she ironed underwear belonging to Tom’s father that she had obviously washed the previous evening after we went to bed, I was almost relieved. Her shoulders heaved and great pools of tears fell on to pairs of white pants and string vests. How come her washing never went grey, I wondered? How could she cry so noiselessly and gracefully? I considered my own emotional meltdowns, a salty mixture of water, snot and spit that left me looking bulbous and red. I needed a man’s handkerchief to mop those up. Petra, on the other hand, dabbed at the corners of her eyes with a small lace affair with embroidered roses.
In the corner were three large black bin liners, one neatly filled with striped shirts that her husband had worn for work. He was a man who considered himself daring for sporting brightly coloured socks with his sober suits and ties. Accountants are meant to be bland, he always said. No one wants an eccentric accountant. There were jackets from an era when smart-casual involved precarious decisions over whether other guests would opt for a blazer with big brass buttons, the more relaxed sports jacket, or even put on a lounge suit. A pair of large black Wellington boots lay felled on the floor.
