Did The Earth Move?

by Carmen Reid

  'It's Friday!' she reminded them. 'Tomorrow we can do whatever you want, oh and Tom and Deepa are taking you out in the afternoon, on a surprise!'

  Tom had insisted: 'We're looking after them, we need the practice. You have the afternoon off. Go out, have some fun. Don't just hang around the garden all day.'

  It was no use telling him that was what she really wanted to do. Get the gloves on, tackle the ivy, which was trailing down off the walls and growing rampantly beyond all control. And the weeds! Nothing else would come through at all this year if she didn't get some serious weeding done and it was high time to set up the tomato plants against the sunny wall and she wanted to plant more herbs ...

  * * *

  When Tom and Deepa arrived on Saturday, they looked a little more relaxed and happy than Eve had expected.

  'Sit down, have tea and chat to me first, or else you're not allowed the kids,' Eve told them.

  'Now,' she said as she plonked mugs, teapot, milk and annoyingly over-sticky home-made flapjacks down on the table, 'what's happened? You both look so well!'

  'We've chilled out about it all,' Tom said, stuffing a whole flapjack into his mouth. 'Que sera, sera . . . Zen, good karma, all that,' he said, trying not to spray oaty crumbs across the table.

  Deepa, swathed in a black stretchy top and trousers, giggled at him and patted his arm. She said the feeling sick and exhausted had finally worn off and she was beginning to enjoy the process.

  'And then we had a visit from my Uncle Rani,' she added. 'He's quite a cool guy. He came to see us and then he went and sorted my family out.'

  'You'll absolutely love him, Mum,' Tom said. 'Oooops ... totally not supposed to say that.'

  More giggles on both their parts.

  'Well, whatever he's done for you, it seems to have worked,' Eve concluded.

  'Oh, he was great, Mum, "All parents are students of the profound nature of humanity", I remember him saying. He was great, I was blown away.' Tom reached over for another flapjack.

  'So, what's happening with your family?' Eve asked.

  'They've chilled out a bit, but boy are they fussing about the wedding,' Deepa said. Tom rolled his eyes and tried to make a joke about it: 'I can see why people only want to do this once in a lifetime.'

  'Is it going OK?' she asked, but when they both gave slightly short and huffy answers to this, she thought maybe best leave it alone.

  'I think it's going to be a bit too traditional,' Tom threw in. Deepa didn't say anything to this but Eve watched her cross her arms and press her lips together.

  'So who is Uncle Rani?' she asked, wanting to change the subject.

  'The family black sheep,' was Deepa's reply. 'My dad and all his brothers did medicine and became doctors, but Rani, who's the youngest, is a psychologist. He's pretty good, though. He lectures ... does family therapy.'

  'Ah ha,' Eve said. Then in a stage whisper added: 'Don't tell Anna!'

  'Don't tell me what?' Anna had arrived in the kitchen bang on cue.

  'You don't approve of psychologists, do you?'

  'Well, not if they haven't had any medical training,' she replied. 'Psychiatrists do full medical training, then study the mind.'

  'Well, I suppose Rani would argue that he spent seven years studying the mind and not a whole lot of organs he didn't need to know about,' Deepa told her.

  Eve gritted her teeth, expecting a flurry of disagreement from Anna, but unusually her daughter just said: 'Hmmm.' And helped herself to a flapjack.

  'Robbie!' she bawled. 'Mummy's got biscuits in the kitchen.'

  And Robbie made them all laugh because he came in running with his mouth open, bouncing the sound out of it: 'Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah.'

  'Do they have raisins?' he asked, coming to a stop right beside Eve's chair.

  'These ones don't, but I could put some raisins on your plate to eat with it.'

  'OK.'

  'Ah now...' Eve remembered. 'There is something else I want to talk to you about.' She looked up at Deepa and Tom: 'Your wedding present. Hard cash – and as soon as possible, so you can use it for the wedding, towards a flat, towards an all-singing, all-dancing electric buggy . .. whatever you like. No pressure what to spend it on. Please yourselves.'

  The two of them looked at her, a touch embarrassed. Eve's super-generous cash gifts always took everybody by surprise. She had come up with lump sums for Denny and Tom when they left school, sorted out their flat deposit, and, Tom remembered now, bought Joseph a stunningly expensive coat and briefcase for his first proper job. Still, this was a woman who had never once been on holiday, considered home-made soup and bread a dinner and had driven the same Peugeot 205 for about ten years now.

  'Can I send you a cheque?' she asked, considering this would be the easiest as she didn't want to hear their protests.

  Eve was always saving for something, including her fantasy future when she thought she might spend her retirement in the country in a perfectly Zen retreat, the kind of place where everything would be white and calm and there would be a labelled shelf for every single pair of shoes and socks. She would snip at teeny bonsai trees, live on green tea and ornamental rice rolls and spend most of her time tending her water feature, raking gravel and trying to perfect her unsupported headstand.

  By the time Robbie left home, she'd have been a mother with children in the house for over thirty years; she thought she could maybe do with some peace, quiet and order by then. But she wanted the children to live nearby, didn't think she could manage too long without them.

  But should she be alone? she wondered. Could the fantasy not include a kimono-clad love god waiting for her in the wooden bathtub?

  'The aquarium, Mum? Hello?' Tom was telling her. 'We're going to go off to the aquarium. And maybe the cinema afterwards if there's anything good on. Then we'll give them supper and have them back at bedtime.'

  'Are you sure?' She was looking at Anna and Robbie, who were grinning at her. Well, obviously that was what they wanted. Robbie was sitting on Deepa's knee now.

  'We need the practice,' Tom reminded her and smiled at Deepa. Oh it was cute, they were in love, despite all the anxieties.

  'And what are you going to do with yourself?' Tom asked.

  'Well I was going to garden for a bit . . .' Everyone groaned at her. 'I like it! Really! Then I might go out for a drive ... I don't know ... or just curl up and read something. Honestly, don't worry about me. I'll have a lovely time.'

  She kissed them all at the door, then closed it, turned and had the flat all to herself. Delicious.

  Now, she wasn't going to waste all this precious alone time cleaning up . . . but there were just a few chores to get out of the way first. And then on to planting. It was already May! And she still had the odd bag of bulbs she hadn't found homes for. Denny had given her a whole sack of mixed gladioli bulbs for Christmas, Gladioli!!! But he'd promised he'd seen them on some cutting-edge garden makeover programme. 'Gladioli are the new hollyhocks – or something,' he'd told her. She was going to bung them in and see what happened; the packaging promised beautiful shades of pink and the soft red she liked so much. Then she wanted to put pink cyclamen and blue violets into the windowboxes at the front because she'd decided that would look much more special than geraniums. She'd had a long, satisfying love affair with geraniums, from palest pink to deep red, with their clean-earth smelling leaves. But it was over. They looked prissy, fussy and old-fashioned to her now. Whereas cyclamen ... she was in the first flush of passion with pinky-purple cyclamen, the upright, translucent petals looking like brand new butterfly wings.

  'I'm completely insane,' she told herself as she took a shiny fork and trowel out from the cupboard under the stairs. 'I've got a crush on a plant variety ... Gardening has become my sex substitute.'

  Was there a glimmer of truth in that? Gardening had become Eve's thing not in Surrey – where every house they'd lived in had come with lawns, borders, even greenhouses, all tended to by part-time gardeners – but in
the first flat in Hackney where she'd started with houseplants and windowboxes, then found herself begging the people downstairs to let her mow the lawn and put in a few patio pots. Because suddenly her longing to grow things, to be surrounded by green and flowers and beauty – wasn't it about making their dingy and unpromising surroundings more beautiful and natural? – anyway, the longing could no longer be confined to houseplants and two windowboxes.

  At last she flopped down on the sofa with her book after a rare pampering bath. Her hair was wet and lavishly conditioned, up in a turban, her face under a mask. She was physically shattered from the afternoon's work in the house and the garden, but just as she was flat out on the sofa and halfway through the first paragraph, the phone rang.

  For a moment, she considered leaving it. Then just the slightest flash of worry that it could be Tom and some sort of child disaster gave her the strength to heave herself up and answer.

  'Hello, Evelyn.' It was her father.

  'Oh hello, Dad.' They phoned each other once in a while; she went down with an assortment of children to visit once in a while. It was a friendly relationship, not too close, not too personal –just the way he wanted it.

  The phone was on a shelf in the sitting room close to one of those fold-down canvas chairs, so she sat down, happy to chat, in her bathrobe and turban and mask. They skimmed through the 'how are yous? on to the children and then their gardens, which was a nice little interest they had in common. Very important to have some sort of neutral topic to chat about with fathers like Eve's. They just weren't comfortable with opinions, emotions . . . they wanted conversation about something concrete. And finally, sandwiched between long, awkward pauses, out it came.

  'I've had some rather bad news this week, Evelyn, which you should know about...'

  'Oh no,' she said automatically, wondering what was to come.

  'I've got a tumour in my bowel and it's not looking too good—' this delivered in what she referred to as his army officer mode.

  'Oh my God, Dad.'

  'Yes. It's a bit of a shock.' He sounded so calm, he could have been talking about someone else.

  'Oh my God,' she said again. It still didn't feel as if it had registered. 'How did you find out?' she asked, appalled that she hadn't suspected anything was wrong.

  'I've been a bit under the weather for a couple of weeks or so. I thought it was old age or maybe a flu bug I hadn't shaken off .. . finally went to the doctor's, he sent me for tests and here we are.'

  Here we are. Jesus Christ.

  Her father was 72 and only in semi-retirement. He was still reluctant to give up work completely. He enjoyed having his office and his colleagues to visit several times a week because he was not a man of many friends, or many hobbies. She had often worried about how he would fill his days when he finally decided to leave his partnership. And now she was hit by the awful possibility that maybe he would die.

  'I'm going to have an exploratory op in a month or so, they can't do it till my other medication has worn off or something. But they'll know more after that. Bloody doctors,' he added.

  'How are you feeling?' she asked.

  'Not the best. I'm off my food and pretty uncomfortable.'

  This sounded so strange. She couldn't think of a time when her father had been ill. He rarely even caught a cold.

  'Oh, Dad,' she managed, 'I'm so sorry. We'll come down and see you as soon as we can.'

  'Yes.' Still so calm. 'Janie's coming tomorrow for a few days,' he told her. 'Come when she's here, if you like, or whatever suits you.' He didn't want to impose. Even as a seriously ill man, he would never want to impose.

  'I'll get some time off work. We'll drive down tomorrow,' she said. 'And don't go to any trouble. We'll sort ourselves out with food and beds and stuff. Is Janie bringing the children?'

  'No,' he said.

  They made the arrangements, talking about travel and arrival times, maybe trying to talk around his news as much as possible.

  'All right, OK . . . well, so long then,' he said finally. Ending calls was difficult for him. He would never have said the sort of things she did to her kids: 'I love you . .. missing you already ... take care, darling ... lovely to speak'. But he felt their absence. 'All the best then,' he managed, stiffly. Stiffly – the word that summed him up.

  'Take care of yourself, Dad.' See, she couldn't manage all the love stuff either with him, he made it too hard. He saw an emotion coming at ten paces, ran away and hid. 'See you tomorrow,' she added.

  'Bye.'

  'Bye.'

  Slowly she put the receiver down and stared at it until it became a blur of tears.

  Tom knew as soon as he saw his mother that evening that something was wrong. Her eyes were pink and she was smiling too hard at them.

  'Hi,' he said. 'Are you OK, Mum?'

  She waved the question away. 'Have you had a lovely time? Deepa! Don't carry him!' She saw Deepa lumbering in behind Tom with a whacked-out Robbie over her shoulder. 'Your poor back.'

  Robbie was transferred to Eve and he managed a squeezy hug before conking out again. Anna looked sparkly and bright with the excitement of the day.

  'Will you stay for a bit?' She tried not to plead but she really, really wanted the comfort of Tom this evening.

  'Of course.'

  So Deepa, Tom and Anna went to the sitting room for drinks and crisps and chat while Robbie was eased into his pyjamas and tucked into bed.

  Only when Anna had been listened to, washed, teeth brushed, tucked in and left reading in her room, did Eve go back into the sitting room and collapse. 'It's Dad,' she told them, Tom really, not able to stem the tears now. 'He's got a tumour in his bowel. They have to open him up and take a look.'

  She saw the surprise of this register on Tom's face.

  'God,' was all he felt able to say.

  'Janie's going down and I'll take Anna and Robbie for a few days as well,' she explained.

  She suspected that Janie, much closer to their father, was going to find this very hard to cope with. Janie would manage little chunks of visit, but she wouldn't be able to stay long enough for her or her father to get really upset. Her sister and her father were much more alike, tried to keep most of their emotions locked up safely out of harm's reach.

  'This is going to be really hard,' she said. 'We'll have to go down a lot. He'll really need us.' She felt Tom's arm slip round her shoulder.

  'Mum, I'm so sorry,' he said, not sure of anything else that would help.

  Chapter Nineteen

  When Eve arrived at her father's house, in time for lunch as arranged, her younger sister was already there. Had been there for a couple of hours already, judging by the scrubbed-clean look of things.

  Janie had greeted her and the children at the front door wearing yellow Marigolds. 'Hello, Lynnie.' She'd hugged her as Eve had wondered, yet again, how she'd managed to acquire three first names in the course of one lifetime. 'Children!' she'd added because Janie, despite being a mother of two, was still one of those people who addressed children collectively rather than by their names.

  Anna kissed her politely but Robbie hid behind Eve's legs and felt shy.

  'Dad's in the sitting room,' she'd told Eve, but didn't come in herself. 'I'm going to finish the scrub-down I'm giving the kitchen.'