Did The Earth Move?

by Carmen Reid

  'That's my mum,' Deepa explained. 'We invited her for tea as well.' Deep sigh, lip wobble.

  'Is there anything we can help with? Mums are good... try us.'

  'I don't know ...'

  Tom was opening the front door now with his cheeriest sounding hello.

  'Kama, come in – lovely to see you. You remember Anna and Robbie, don't you?'

  Eve went out into the hall to say hello and then engineered mothers and little children to the kitchen and Tom back into the sitting room to Deepa.

  In the tiny kitchen she and Kalna chatted and fussed over teapots, mugs, the splash of milk left in the fridge.

  'Deepa is going to have to get more organized when the baby is here,' Kalna scolded, shaking the almost empty carton. And other things not to say to your daughter right now.

  'She's got a lot on her plate. It's probably Tom who needs the boot in the bum,' Eve was quick to point out.

  'Well, she'll soon give him that,' Kalna laughed. 'Once they know each other a bit better.'

  Eve liked Deepa's mother and the feeling was mutual, which pleased them both. When the two families had met for the first time, in the slightly fraught circumstances which came in the wake of the unexpected pregnancy and marriage announcements, the mothers had hit it off straight away, because they both recognized immediately that they were the same kind of devoted mummies, secretly gleeful at the prospect of a grandchild.

  Especially Kalna who had two much older, unmarried daughters all caught up with their medical careers who, in her words 'looked very unlikely to produce'. So, Deepa had found her parents' reaction to her baby and wedding news unexpectedly cheerful after the brief period of shock and disapproval had worn off.

  'I think they are having a bit of a row,' Eve confided to Kalna.

  'What about?' Anna piped up. Oooops.

  'Oh I don't think it's anything serious, honey.'

  'Pre-wedding nerves,' was Anna's verdict.

  'Come on, Anna, you take the mugs and let's go find out.' Kalna picked up the teapot and tray of cakes and gave Eve an infectiously wicked smile.

  It turned out to be the wedding, which was just five weeks away now. They'd both gone off the idea – not of getting married, but of the traditional white wedding they had arranged. Tom had never been too hot on it all. But now Deepa had changed her mind.

  'I'm going to look ridiculous . . . look at me,' she sobbed over her tea to the two mothers. 'And the hotel is so boring . . . And I don't like the church either ... or the vicar. It's all just really stupid and it's just totally not what Rich and Jade would do, is it?' Big sob here.

  'Forget about them,' Tom told her, beside her on the sofa now, stroking her hand.

  'But it's supposed to be about us... And none of this is us.'

  Tom looked up at Eve and raised his eyebrows in a slightly helpless kind of way.

  'What would you like, Deeps?' This from Anna who was sitting on the carpet at Deepa's feet.

  'Oh it just sounds silly. I'm a big fat, stupid, pregnant girl who needs to get married in a rush .. . None of the things I want can get sorted out in time.'

  'Just tell us anyway,' Tom soothed, not at all angry about this any more.

  And so Deepa told them, stopping once in a while to dab at her eyes and blow her nose with the big damp balls of hankie she was holding in both hands. 'I want to get married in a field, in the afternoon with home-made vows as well as the real ones ... and have a pink tent with lots of pink flowers and a pink cake . . .' She broke into tears here, but after a little patting from Tom, she managed: 'And lots of dancing in the open air while the sun comes down . . . and home-made food and everyone just really relaxed and . . . happy for us. And Tom,' she looked up at him, her face all puffed up and tear-stained: 'You won't have to wear a suit if you don't want to.'

  He kissed her on the nose: 'It sounds lovely, but we're not going to be able to rearrange everything now.'

  Kalna and Eve looked at each other a little bit misty-eyed. A little bit fierce and determined.

  This is obviously how the fairy godmother felt when she pitched up in Cinderella's kitchen, Eve thought. Deepa, you shall go to the ball!

  'How long have we got?' Eve asked.

  'Five weeks,' Kalna answered her.

  'Field, tent, obliging vicar, lots of food, servers, DJ, flowers ...' Eve was ticking things off on her fingers. 'Can the other wedding be cancelled?'

  'We'd only lose the deposit... no big deal,' Kalna told her.

  'Are you serious?' Deepa was asking them. 'What about Dad?'

  'Oh, leave him to me,' her mother said, as if she cancelled weddings every day. 'Now, if we divide things up between the four of us ...'

  'Denny will help,' Tom added, suddenly all bouncy with enthusiasm. 'He's always location scouting for photos, he'll help us find something.'

  'OK, so between the five of us...' Kalna looked absolutely calm, just as she had when they'd been organizing things for the first time.

  Pens and papers were coming out of drawers now, the Yellow Pages came down off the shelf, Denny was phoned. A rush of excitement was on the loose.

  'I wonder what Dennis will make of all this?' Tom said to Eve at some point.

  'Dennis?' She was startled by this because she usually managed to keep thoughts of the impending Dennis reunion at the very back of her mind.

  'He's going to be here in three weeks' time. Have I told you that yet?' Tom gave a distracted shrug, shuffle of hair.

  'No! You bloody have not,' she replied.

  'Yeah. He's here first on business. Then his family are joining him the week before the wedding.'

  'Right... three weeks' time?'

  'Yeah. August the 7th.'

  Why did she feel so panicky? Why did she want to shout: 'NO, NO... I'm not ready... I need to get myself together ...be much stronger...be able to cope with this ... be able to face him down'?

  Stupid woman. She told herself off. Get a grip. She put a hand on Anna's ponytail and felt reassured.

  Maybe Anna would know how to handle this. Maybe she had a book about it.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  'You know if I'm totally, totally honest with you, I just don't enjoy anything any more.'

  Eve watched her sister's plain brown bob, silvered with strands of grey, dip down as Janie bent her head over her teacup.

  She stirred at the tea over and over again, although the milk was long mixed in, then ting ting-ed on the rim of the cup several times and finally laid the spoon down. Eve had been surprised to get the call from her sister earlier in the week. It had been ages since Janie had come to visit her in London, but here she was, drinking tea in the kitchen, looking so sad and serious.

  Watching her, Eve couldn't help thinking that there had been a time when Janie, although never beautiful, would always have been described as striking . . . elegant. But now she looked drab. And even worse, her once uncork-able energy seemed to have run dry.

  The bob, no doubt expensively cut, was un-dyed and didn't really suit her long, angular face. Her charcoal grey, unlined linen trouser suit didn't help either. Janie looked dull, Eve saw as she studied her now – saggy, sad and shapeless. Middle-aged was the word that came to Eve's mind.

  The lines from her nose to the corners of her mouth were deepening and her face was about to set into a downturned, downcast expression of vague disappointment. She probably had those half-moon reading specs with a long chain somewhere in her briefcase-cum-handbag. And no doubt, if someone was introduced to the two of them now, they would assume that Janie was older than Eve, not the other way around.

  Eve didn't think this with any sort of smugness. It pained her to see her sister like this. 'You know . . .' Janie looked up from her tea again with tear-filled eyes, 'Cooking, for example. There was a time when I loved to cook, I'd buy the latest books, spend the whole of Saturday hunting down the best ingredients and it was a pleasure. Now I just feel like all these meals are coming at me, relentlessly, day in day out... break
fast, packed lunches, snacks, supper, four meals a day at the weekend. It's a nightmare. It's a full-time job just making sure that the fridge is full – and then there's all the bloody housework and washing and homework and listening to all this teenage moaning, and I have a full-time job on top of that which is damn stressful. And hardly surprising . . . my husband finds me boring. I am boring! And I'm bored . . . bored beyond belief!' Eve saw the little spurt of tears start down her sister's cheeks.

  'Oh, Janie,' she said and stroked her sister's hand.

  'I don't want to live like this any more,' Janie sobbed. 'Waking up every morning going through a mental checklist of everything I've got to do . .. existing in a house with such a miserable atmosphere . . . someone about to explode with anger or burst into tears at any time. I don't want it. I can't stand it.'

  Eve carried on with the hand-stroking.

  'What is it all for?' Janie demanded. 'What am I working myself this hard for? Why am I struggling to push my ungrateful children into the best universities? I suddenly haven't a clue what this is all about any more.'

  Eve let her cry for as long as she needed to without saying anything.

  'And I'm here, Eve,' Janie said finally, smudging at the tears on her face, 'because I always feel there's fun and ... I don't know... a lightness to your life and to your family and I want to know how you do that.'

  Janie looked properly round the kitchen now: at the mismatched pottery on the table, the crusted plates stacked on top of the dishwasher, the treasured baby paintings unpeeling from the fridge, plants in luscious health on every windowsill and the remains of cat food clinging to the sides of the bowl by the back door. The place was a mess, the floor was sticky and Janie had found herself scraping crumbs off the waxed tablecloth as she waited for her tea. But . . . but. . . but... it smelled delicious. Soup or something was cooking on the hob, the bread-maker was clanking its way through a program ... and it felt so relaxed. She sat at this table and knew Eve had time. Time for tea, time for talking. Later on, there would be a bottle of wine opened and they would sit out in the garden drinking just a little bit too much. They would eat something cobbled together from the kitchen and Anna and Robbie, currently playing a noisy game of hide-and-seek outside the opened back door would scutter in and out, before finally disappearing off to bed. It was relaxed... happy.

  Could it have been a bigger contrast to her home??? Where no-one came by unannounced, they came for dinner – proper with three courses and gourmet cheese and vintage liqueurs to follow.

  Her house was sleek, white, beige, greige . . . maple floors, banisters which were regularly polished, sofa covers which had to be dry-cleaned three times a year ... a stainless steel kitchen which showed up four fingerprints every time you opened a drawer.

  And in a funny way, Janie thought now, her house was quiet. Apart from door slamming. David hiding in his office behind a slammed door, Christine in her room on the phone behind a slammed door, Rick going out of the front door in a huff... SLAM.

  She sometimes had the radio on, quiet Radio Four, but Eve's house was a racket. Robbie and Anna laughing and shrieking, the telly, videos, the phone ringing a lot, Eve's own taste in music which veered from classical to the kind of get down with the kids anthems on in the background now.

  'Oh boy . . .' Eve was telling her, with a big sigh. 'We've had our really tough times in this house too, you know. Don't go thinking everything's perfect, because it's not. There's plenty of stuff I fret about in the small hours once in a while. I mean look at me! Why am I still single?!'

  'But you enjoy life, don't you?' Janie asked and hoped it didn't sound too accusing.

  'Of course I do, hon. Some of it's a drag and some days are a bummer ... but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't happy to be here.'

  Janie looked at her older sister and saw how she oozed – what exactly? A sort of fizz of care-freeness. Yes, maybe that was it. She wasn't burdened with the weight of what other people thought of her all the time, like Janie was. Worried, worried, all the time: did her lawyer colleagues think she was good enough? What would her friends think? Were the other children's parents doing this? What would Dad think? But there was Eve, single, hair far too long and blond for someone in their forties, clothes far too bright and tight, house a state, piss-poor career, accidental babies, listening to club music with her tin of marijuana on the top of the kitchen cupboards and she was happy. That elusive emotion which seemed to have bypassed Janie completely. And Janie's husband and, even worse, her children.

  'I don't have any advice for you,' Eve said, wondering if wine would have been a better bet than tea. 'I don't like giving advice. All I can tell you is that I've tried to work out what really matters to me, what I really want to be doing and ... well... stuff the rest.'

  Much later in the evening, when they were two bottles of wine down and Eve had finally persuaded her strait-laced sister to for God's sake take a drag, no she wouldn't get arrested and barred from the bench and stripped of her wig and gown for the rest of her life ... they giggled their way through a very long list of the things that Janie should just stuff.

  Doing all the shopping, cooking and cleaning for starters.

  'Are you completely mad?' Eve told her. 'Are you not in possession of an able-bodied husband and two able assistants who can do the supermarket run while you lounge in the bath under a face pack reading Hello! and fantasizing about being married to Antonio Banderas or whoever does it for you?'

  Snorts of laughter to this.

  'And you know, maybe you should take a holiday, just on your own, Janie, and do relaxing things. Massages, waxing – I don't know . . . What do barristers do to relax? Go and get spanked or something... put in handcuffs. Isn't that it?'

  More laughter.

  'And stuff your perfect house. I mean it's lovely—' Eve wasn't so far out of it that she'd lost all sense of tact completely – 'but it is so high maintenance. I have actually let my children eat off your floors. Well...' she ducked down under the kitchen table at this point, 'they eat off mine too. Because there's so much nice stuff down there.' She came back up with a very grubby looking square of jam toast: 'See.'

  Janie began to laugh now, so hard that soon her cheeks were hurting and then her stomach muscles.

  'God, I'm such a slob,' Eve said. 'You're really regretting this trip now, aren't you?' You're thinking, "If that's on the kitchen floor what the hell am I going to find in the sofa bed?"'

  'Stop it.' Janie was crying with laughter now. 'Stop it, I'm going to wee.'

  'Oh my God, Janie,' Eve said, deadpan. 'You're scarily high.'

  'I'm not am I?' Terrified look on the barrister's face now.

  'No. You're fine. This is called enjoying yourself.' Eve said this slowly, as if trying to make herself understood in a foreign country. 'You may have had enough enjoyment for one night now, we will have to bring you down slowly.'

  She looked at her sister, flushed with laughter and wine, looking a lot softer round the edges than she had for a long time.

  'You need to let go a little, maybe,' Eve added. 'Let go of trying to do everything, trying to control everything. Your kids will appreciate you all the more if you cut them some slack. I promise, they are good kids, they'll be fine ... in the long run. Who cares if they get into a few scrapes when they're young and silly? That's how they learn. Remember when Tom got hooked into that stupid sales scam? What was it again? Herbal slimming pills or something. God, I can't believe I can't remember it now. It all seemed so big at the time! He was almost £1,000 in debt before he told me what was going on. Silly twink.'