by Rosie Thomas
‘Perhaps it was for the best,’ Kath said at length. ‘Better than him being handicapped for ever. They can start again, when they’ve put this behind them.’
‘Maybe,’ Harriet said sadly.
Kath faced her. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’
Harriet thought briefly that it would be much easier to talk to someone else, anyone at all, rather than her mother in her dream kitchen.
‘Harriet?’ Kath was anxious now.
There was no point in choosing mollifying words. Turning her back on the tree of heaven Harriet said, ‘Leo and I are going to separate.’
As soon as it was said she wished that she had wrapped it up a little. Kath went red, banged down her coffee mug, didn’t even notice the little pool of spilled liquid that collected on the white worktop.
‘No you don’t, my girl. You’re a married woman. You don’t come back here and say you’re giving up after your first quarrel. You have to work at marriages, don’t you know that? You’ll work it out between you, whatever it is. You’ll be all the stronger together after it’s all blown over.’
Harriet saw that Kath was already smoothing over the damage, making it orderly again in her mind, as if her daughter’s life was her own kitchen.
‘Don’t talk like an agony aunt,’ Harriet said. ‘We’ve been married for four years and had a thousand quarrels. I’m not leaving him because of the quarrels. The truth is that we don’t make each other happy. It’s time we admitted to the truth. It’s quite clear-cut, really.’
She hadn’t expected that Kath would be so upset. Her mother cried easily, but she looked too shocked even for tears to come.
‘How can you say that? You make a perfect couple. You always did, at the wedding, ever since.’
The wedding, Harriet thought. I should never have let myself be put through all that. It had been a big white one, of course, mostly paid for by kind-hearted Ken. Harriet herself in a tight-waisted long dress with a sweeping train and a veil; her half-sister, then fifteen, trying to hide her puppy fat inside folds of corn-gold satin, two other small bridesmaids in cream silk. A hired grey Rolls with white ribbons, and a lavish reception following the carefully ecumenical service. Leo’s parents had decided to make the best of the inevitable. Harriet could have spoken their reasoning for them; Leo’s girlfriend was presentable and was no fool. She had her own little business and was making a go of it. His family had turned out to the wedding in force and had sent absurdly generous presents.
Now Harriet imagined Averil Gold shaking her well-groomed silvery head and murmuring, ‘These mixed marriages often come to grief.’ Before adding, adoringly, ‘But Leo always was a naughty, headstrong boy.’
She looked across the expanse of pine and tile at her mother. ‘We’re not even a couple. We never were, probably. It’s a difficult notion, for people as selfish as we are.’
‘You’re not selfish,’ Kath insisted. ‘And Leo’s a good husband. He looks after you.’
Harriet’s forbearance deserted her. ‘He’s a filthy bloody husband,’ she snapped. ‘Do you know what I found him doing? Can you guess? No, don’t try to guess. I found him in his studio, screwing a model.’
‘Are you sure?’
Jane had asked the same question. The realisation made Harriet laugh, a gasp of real laughter that made her eyes water.
‘Sure? What else might they have been up to?’
‘How can you laugh about it?’
Yet Kath seemed more shocked by her daughter’s flippancy than by the news itself. It occurred to Harriet that even her mother might have guessed at what she had taken so long to discover for herself. Anger strengthened her determination.
‘I’m not going back to the flat. It can be sold, we’ll each take fifty per cent. I’ll use my share to buy a smaller place.’
‘You’re very cool about it.’
‘Am I? I want to know my own mind, that’s all.’
Kath was recovering herself. She mopped up the spilt coffee, took her mug over to the sink and dried the bottom of it.
‘You always did. Always, from a tiny thing.’
Kath remembered how Harriet had been, long ago, when there were only the two of them. Single-minded and possessed of her own unshakeable certainties. She shook her head now, sighing. Kath wanted to see her daughter happy and believed she deserved it. But for all her other capabilities, Harriet was always restless rather than contented.
‘I think you should give him another chance. Probably he’ll never do it again.’
‘No,’ Harriet said, leaving no margin for contradiction. ‘He will do it again, because he’s done it before.’
She laughed once more. ‘Do you know, I think it might have been different if he hadn’t tried to cover himself up with his shirt?’ The absurdity of it made her want to laugh harder. ‘As if he had something mysterious down there, that I shouldn’t see.’
Then she caught sight of her mother’s face, and the laughter subsided. She went to Kath and put her arms around her. ‘I’m sorry if you’re disappointed. I’m sorry for Leo and me, too.’
‘Is that all?’ Kath demanded.
Harriet thought. It seemed so little, after so much.
‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘It appears to be.’
She dropped her arm from her mother’s shoulder, walked back to the garden doors and looked out at the big tree again. Its leaves were beginning to show autumnal colours. The tree of heaven drops its leaves every winter, Harriet told herself bracingly. It would be a sentimental mistake to regard it as an emblem.
‘May I stay here for a day or two? Until I can rent a place? I can go to Jane’s, if it’s a nuisance.’
Her childhood bedroom was across the landing from Lisa’s, kept nowadays for visitors.
‘How could it be a nuisance? Of course you can stay. What shall we tell Ken and Lisa?’
‘The truth, of course.’
As Harriet had guessed, Kath’s anticipation of their shock and outrage was much greater than the reality.
‘He’s a stupid bugger,’ Ken pronounced. ‘You do whatever’ll make you happy, love. Or I can go round there and thump him for you, if you want.’
‘Well no, thanks,’ Harriet murmured.
Lisa came back only just in time to change for a date with her latest love. Harriet sat on the corner of the bed and watched her half-sister diving between the wardrobe and the dressing table.
There were too many years separating the two of them, and too many differences, for them ever to achieve friendship. As children they had fought bitterly, too different even to enjoy the satisfaction of being in the same competition. It was to Kath’s, and especially to Ken’s, credit that the girls had always been treated even-handedly. But still, even in adulthood, the two of them didn’t fully trust one another. They existed in a state of uneasy truce, always aware that hostilities might break out again.
Kath’s younger daughter had her mother’s fair, curling hair and the same full, soft lower lip. Harriet’s features were thinner and stronger. Lisa was easy-going to the point of laziness, except when there was the faintest threat that she might not get her own way. She was like her mother, too, in that she would go to any length to avoid scenes, preferring that everything should be pleasant and comfortable. Harriet preferred clarity and justice.
‘I think Kath believes I’ll go back to him,’ Harriet said.
‘And will you?’ Even before she had finished speaking, Lisa’s attention returned to her mirror. She was busily painting her mouth with a fine brush. Harriet remembered that ten years ago she had been absorbed in similar preparations herself and Lisa had been a plump, complaining nine-year-old. She had no desire to go back to those days, with or without the help of hindsight.
‘Of course not.’
Lisa snapped the cap back on to her lipstick, rolled her lips inwards over her teeth and then pressed them forwards into a pout. ‘I can’t say I blame you. But it’s a big decision, isn’t it? Couldn’t you tr
y to forgive and forget? Leo’s not bad, even though he’s usually the first to tell you so.’
Harriet accepted that for Lisa this was an unusually profound speech.
‘I don’t love him.’
Lisa shrugged. ‘Then that simplifies it. Are you afraid of being on your own?’
Harriet thought of her married home, with all its symbols and reminders, stuffed with domestic comforts, the possessions of strangers.
‘It would be a relief.’
Downstairs the doorbell delivered its double chime. Lisa sprang to her feet, no longer listening. ‘Have a good time,’ Harriet called after her, feeling her age.
Kath and Ken were watching television downstairs. Harriet read a book, an Agatha Christie belonging to Kath, and went to bed very early. She lay in the dark in her old bedroom. She could hear the drone of the television below her. It reminded her of being a little girl, despatched to bed so that adult life could go on in her absence. From those long wakeful evenings she knew the contours of this room and its predecessors, the patches on the ceiling and the exact, unseen position of the picture rail and wardrobe and armchair. The creak of furniture and the hissing of pipes behind the skirting boards was like a language spoken after a long silence.
The familiarity of the room, the very smell of it, should have been oppressive, but after she had been lying there for a few minutes Harriet began to experience a strange sensation. She felt light, lighter than air. She felt as if she might bob up off the mattress, if it were not for the weight of the covers over her. It was as if she had had a great deal to drink, but without the dizziness or the confusion of drunkenness. Her mind felt very clear, and she knew that sleep was a long way off.
It occurred to her after a little while that what she did feel was free. She was on her own again.
It was exhilarating and also frightening. With her fists clenched on the bedclothes, as an anchor, Harriet reflected on what she might do. Her responsibilities to Leo, to marriage itself, seemed leaden in retrospect. The future possibilities, by contrast, shimmered around her. They were limitless, and there for the taking. She was afraid, but her fear was of failing to recognise the opportunities when they came. The thought of missing more of her chances than had already slipped past her, while her horizons were obscured by Leo, made her heart thump and panicky gasps rise in her chest. She made herself breathe slowly, in and out, to calm herself again.
The visions of freedom that came to Harriet, lying in the darkness of her old bedroom in Sunderland Avenue, were all of what she might achieve. She was briefly, thrillingly convinced that she could direct herself whichever way she wanted to go. She could reach out and pick off success for herself, as if it grew on the tree of heaven outside her window. She felt the power of it in her fingers.
The images of success and fame and happiness drifted in front of her. None of the visions had anything to do with love. She had had Love, and it had turned out to be Leo.
Everything that Harriet saw for herself was clear and vivid, but it was like a hallucination. When she tried afterwards to recapture the splendour of it all, or even to remember the simple steps that had carried her to such glory, she could come up with nothing at all. It had gone as conclusively as a dream.
She didn’t know how long the sensation lasted. After a while she felt her limbs growing heavy once more. She closed her eyes and was immediately too tired to open them again. A moment before she had felt that sleep was impossible, now it was catching up with her. She made no effort to resist it. Harriet gave a deep sigh of contentment and fell into a dreamless sleep.
Harriet and Kath were talking. At Harriet’s suggestion, because the pine bastion of the kitchen oppressed her, they went out into the garden and sat on folding chairs in the shade of the tree of heaven. It was a warm day for late September and the garden was suffused with yellow light. The buzz of Sunday afternoon lawnmowers drifted over the fence.
Harriet saw the neat suburban tableau with extra clarity, as if layers of dust had been washed out of the air by a thunderstorm. The memory of her waking dream had stayed with her, through a night’s sleep, through a family Sunday morning spent with Kath and Ken and Lisa. She knew that the dream had been profoundly significant, although she had no specific recall of the alluring images that had danced before her in the darkness.
She moved carefully with her sharpened awareness, as if there was a physically tender spot inside her that must be protected. As she looked at familiar things her clear sight seemed to give different, surprising perspectives.
Kath was wearing summer sandals on high cork heels, her toenails were painted with a dark, jammy red varnish.
Looking at her mother’s feet Harriet said musingly, ‘You used to have a pair of sandals like that when I was small.’
She remembered a blue skirt, too, and a small sandpit, perhaps in a playground. Kath in her blue skirt bent down to her with a cigarette curling blue smoke between her fingers.
‘Cork wedgies, that’s right. What a memory you’ve got,’ Kath said. ‘You can’t have been more than four or five.’
‘I can remember all kinds of things,’ Harriet answered. There was something else about today that reminded her of long ago. Perhaps it was the light, oblique and golden, the standard illumination of memory.
Kath looked at her with curiosity. ‘Can you? What things?’
‘Places where we lived, before Ken came. The one up a lot of stairs, where you could look down on the railway lines.’
‘That was a horrible place. I wish you’d forget it, I certainly have.’ Kath’s voice was sharp. They rarely talked about the time before Ken, before the advent of comfort and respectability.
‘It was all right, wasn’t it? I remember playing on the stairs. There was a fat woman who used to take me into her room and let me touch some china animals. Where were you?’
‘Working. Sybil used to mind you while I was out.’
‘Those days can’t have been easy for you.’ Harriet often wondered how she had managed, Kath who liked things nice and who hated rows or scenes, or even passion, any demonstration of naked feeling. Yet she had supported herself and an illegitimate daughter, in a series of menial jobs, until Ken Trott had come along to rescue them both. Except that Harriet hadn’t wanted to be rescued.
‘I had you, love. I wanted to look after you. I wasn’t going to let anything come between us, whatever else I had to do.’
Except Ken and Lisa, Harriet thought, and then almost laughed aloud at the tired old resentment that still came creeping up to assault her. Harriet was eight years old when Ken took Kath and her daughter into the first house and embarked on the processes of refurbishment, bathroom after bathroom and kitchen after kitchen, that had reached their high point here in Sunderland Avenue. Lisa was born when Harriet was ten. Adult Harriet knew that she had hated them both, stepfather and half-sister, until late into her teens. Young Harriet did not know what the feeling was, only that it cut her off. She dealt with it, and with other emotions that did not seem to fit in with being a Trott, by suppressing them. She played up the aspects of herself that were approved of, or at the least tolerated, and so she became Harriet the clever one, the determined one, the self-reliant one. Harriet with the wild temper, if you provoked her. Lisa was the pretty one, the one who was the image of her mother, the good little girl. The very memory made Harriet want to grind her teeth. She knew that she must have been a difficult child.
‘Poor you,’ she commiserated with her mother.
Kath was shocked. ‘I don’t know why you should say that. I’ve been very lucky. I could have ended up anywhere, considering the way I began.’
Harriet knew that the euphemism meant considering I was pregnant at eighteen, not married. She understood her mother’s fear of it, even now. It was serious, getting into trouble in the English provinces in 1952. Kath hardly ever talked about it.
Suddenly, in the sunny garden, Harriet’s consciousness of her dream suffered a dizzying change of focus. From
feeling light and free, she felt sickeningly cut adrift. Her marriage was over. She was grown up, twenty-nine years old, without dependants, without a centre to her life. Kath had her centre, here with Ken, and Harriet felt ashamed of her adolescent, submerged resentment of it. For herself she had a job, perhaps a dozen real friends. It seemed little to show for thirty years of existence. Thinking of her mother’s much more frightening isolation at eighteen, Harriet was possessed by a longing to link herself with that vanished girl.
‘Tell me about it. You never have, not really.’
‘It’s all too long ago, love. Ken’s your Dad, isn’t he?’
‘Please.’ Harriet hadn’t speculated for years about the existence, somewhere, of a real father. Even in her most intensely separate years she had barely imagined him, and she was not asking about him now. It was Kath she wanted to hear about. She was afraid for herself and drifting. Kath’s story would expose the roots that went back before Ken’s time. The roots were buried deep; she could hold on by them.
‘Tell me,’ she begged. ‘Tell me about what you were like then.’
Kath was touched by her eagerness. She sat for a few seconds looking down the garden to the open patio doors that led into the quiet house, seeing beyond them. Then, surprising Harriet, she tapped her hands on the metal arms of her chair and began to laugh.
‘I was a bright spark in those days. I thought everything I wanted was just there for the taking.’
‘How strange,’ Harriet said softly. ‘I thought that too, last night. I had a peculiar dream about it, except that I wasn’t asleep.’ She wondered if their visions of everything were the same, linking them across thirty years. Kath was busy with her own memories, not listening.
‘I was very pretty, and I knew it.’ She turned to Harriet and pushed out her soft lower lip in a flirtatious pout that her daughter had never seen before. They both laughed.
‘I had plenty of boyfriends. There’d be the cinema on Friday nights, dancing on Saturdays. One or two of them even had cars. On Sundays we’d go for a drive, right out into the country, to a pub.’
‘What were they like, the boyfriends?’
