by Moran, Beth
“Don’t be ridiculous. How is sitting in the back of a car exhausting?”
“Grandma’s on her way to London to visit her sister.” Maggie had taken a seat next to Timothy, kicked off her Dr Martens and grabbed a handful of sandwiches. “Where do I sleep?”
“Is anybody going to offer Brown a cup of tea?” the dragon snapped, referring to her driver. “Or will I have to fetch it myself?”
“No, of course not,” Mum smiled. “We were just about to ask. Ruth?”
I spent as long as possible taking tea to Margaret’s driver, dropping off a cup with Maggie, now lying on her new bed with headphones on, then killed more time reassembling some fresh cakes and sandwiches.
“Would you like something to eat, Margaret?” Mum genuinely believed all it took was a few kind words and the dragon would morph into a bunny rabbit. “I made them myself. Or a cup of Earl Grey? Peppermint?”
Margaret sniffed. “No. I do not. Hasn’t Brown finished that tea yet?”
She left, not a second later than her driver’s allotted break allowed for, and the waistband on my trousers expanded to fit me again.
Dinner was at six. It did not turn out, I am guessing, quite as my mother had hoped. She had really tried, too.
“Did you have a lovely time in Scotland, Maggie?”
“All right.” Maggie stabbed a piece of carrot with her fork, eyes on her plate.
“The grounds there are spectacular, aren’t they? Did you go for any walks?”
“No.” She jabbed at a pea, sending it bouncing onto the table top.
“Was it nice and sunny?”
“No.”
Mum pushed on, relentless, only pausing to top up her youngest grandchildrens’ water glasses. “Oh dear. I suppose that’s why you didn’t walk then. Did you meet any Scottish relatives while you were there?”
“No.” A flick at her mashed potato this time.
“Oh. What did you do then?”
“Not a lot.”
End of conversation.
Arianna cried because, well, she always cried, and Timothy refused to eat the pastry on his chicken pie because it wasn’t wholemeal. Esther gritted her teeth as she tried to make herself feel better by having digs at me about jobs, money, clothes and general life choices compared to hers for the past twenty years. She had a hilarious story about when I got sacked from the bakery in Southwell after a monstrous nose bleed contaminated the cream cakes. Hilarious! Every sixteen-year-old girl thinks it is funny to leak blood all over a crowded shop, including a load of kids from her school, one of them being Meat Harris.
By the time we started on the ice-cream, I actually missed Dad.
“Where is Dad?” I had to ask this three times before Mum stopped pretending she couldn’t hear me.
“Out.”
Timothy looked confused. “Didn’t he know Maggie would be here?”
Everybody froze. Except Maggie.
“No, little cousin. He knew I would be here, which is why he isn’t. Haven’t you heard? Pop can’t stand to be in the same room as me because I’m a bastard, and the irrefutable evidence that Auntie Ruth had sexual intercourse outside marriage and is therefore a fallen woman.”
“MAGGIE!” I dropped my spoon with a clatter.
“What’s a bastard?” Timothy smirked.
“What’s sexual intcourse?” Arianna stopped crying, and tried to prize Esther’s hands off her ears.
“Why did Auntie Ruth fall down?”
“Timothy. Enough.” Esther gave him that look, and he squiggled down lower on his chair, delightfully watching to see what would happen next.
Mum slammed the ice-cream scoop decorated with four tiny red hearts onto the table top. It was somewhat muffled by the tablecloth, tablecloth liner and two-inch-thick heat-resistant mat, but the force of her slam made up for it.
“Maggie. How could you possibly say – how could you possibly think – such a terrible thing?” She shook her head, distraught. “Pop loves you. We were sorry and sad you lost your dad. Devastated you had to leave your lovely big house. But this is a wonderful blessing to us, to have you here. To have you home!” She waved her hands at the rest of us, blinking back her tears. “We love you, Maggie. Pop loves you. He has a prior engagement tonight, that’s all.”
“Yeah. He’s had a lot of those in the past fourteen years.” Maggie got up from the table and walked over to the door of the dining room. “Thanks for dinner, Nanny. I don’t want any ice-cream.”
I followed her upstairs. She let me sit on the bed and put my arm around her. But really, what could I say? She was right.
“You know Nanny’s telling the truth. If Pop has issues, they’re with me, and they are wrong, and it’s because of me he stayed away, not you.”
“What’s with him, anyway? Hardly anybody gets married these days.”
“Oh, Maggie, it’s not really about that. It’s way, way more complicated. One day I’ll tell you, but not tonight when we’re tired, and Nanny is upset, and Esther has to try and explain what a fallen woman is to her over-protected six-year-old, who already thinks you’re a witch.”
And when I can maybe get the words out past the huge lump of broken glass wedged in my chest.
“Why don’t you come and teach them how to play poker?”
Maggie blew the hair out of her eyes. “That would be cool. To have a witch teach you poker. Plus, it would really annoy Auntie Esther.”
I grinned. “Esther will just be glad to see you getting along. Uncle Max – he’ll blow the roof off when he finds out.”
I left the kids in the sitting room practising their poker faces in the gilded mirror above the mantelpiece. Esther was helping Mum clean up the kitchen.
“So, what’s with Maggie’s hair? Are they going to allow that at school? Doesn’t colouring it like that wreck the condition? What will the other kids make of her with hair like that? Won’t they think she’s weird?”
“I wouldn’t lose sleep over it. It will probably look totally different by the start of term.” I started rummaging in drawers for something to wrap the leftovers up in.
“But why would you allow it? Next thing, she’ll be having a tattoo, or one of those things in her ear that stretches a hole until it swings about near her shoulders.” She wiggled her hands underneath her ears to demonstrate where Maggie’s lobes could end up.
“No, she won’t. She’s promised to do nothing permanent until she turns eighteen. And, by the way, how I raise my daughter is none of your business. I am a young mum, not a stupid one.” I slammed a drawer shut. Tried another one, yanked out the food wrap and banged it closed with my hip. “When Arianna is fourteen I’m going to have so much fun watching you go nuts. She’ll be eating McDonald’s, watching videos of half-naked pop stars on YouTube and saying ‘innit’ and there’ll be nothing you can do. Grow up.”
I took a deep breath and stepped outside. I could blame my emotional state for taking control of my mouth and letting these things come out, but I still hated myself for it. The truth was, Maggie’s hair had nothing to do with teenage rebellion, or even bad taste in hair fashion. It was a message to the world. A message that she was hurting, bruised and bereft. And it killed me that I couldn’t make the hurt go away.
A few weeks after her father’s death, I signed Maggie up for bereavement counselling. The first signs of Fraser’s financial betrayal had surfaced. I was floundering. I managed to get up each day and function – smile at Maggie, check she’d done her homework. But trying to hide the extent of my own grief from my daughter left me no strength to deal with hers, so I found someone else to be the emotional rock I thought she needed right then.
I thought it helped. When people asked me how Maggie was coping, the honest truth was I had no idea. What was coping for a fourteen-year-old? Wasn’t it enough simply to cope with puberty, getting through school and that boy you have been obsessing about for weeks asking out your best friend?
With the sudden jolt into a single-parent fam
ily, a lost, broke, barely-holding-it-together-parent family, a new house, new town, new school – wouldn’t anyone scream at their mum, stop doing their homework and shoplift a few bottles of nail varnish?
As far as I knew, Maggie didn’t smoke, drink or mess about with boys. I wanted to believe she coped okay. But part of this involved electric blue hair. Or, I should say, blood red, Shrek green, zebra striped, flame orange, curly, choppy, extended, back-combed hair. Maggie’s counsellor had asked her to find a creative way to express her emotions. I suggested writing poems. Rapping. Learning the trumpet. Sculpting. Baking cakes. Gardening. Building furniture… Maggie wanted to express herself through creative hair. I advised she write a journal. Maggie: hair. I proposed synchronized swimming. Maggie: hair. Dressmaking? Jewellery? Nail art? No. Hair. So black dreadlocks announced her grief. Red extensions symbolized her growing, writhing anger. The yellow fluff ball demonstrated the thrill of her first concert.
Electric blue? To her it meant: “I want to shock my snobby, stone-hearted grandmother, my sophisticated, stylish nanny and my snotty aunt with a stonking great ‘up yours’. And if I make my weird, wimpy cousins afraid of me, so much the better.”
What did my uncut, rarely washed, frizzy brown ponytail say? I was too darn tired to care any more.
Esther took the kids home to bed soon after dinner, before they had time to move on from poker faces to actual poker. Mum got straight to work in the kitchen, kneading bread dough. I sat at the kitchen table with a piece of paper and a pen, sketching a family of swans. The female swan wore a flowery apron. She span in a frantic circle, balancing a three-tiered cake stand on one wing.
“Where was Dad this evening?”
“Out.”
I looked at Mum, my eyebrows raised in question. For forty-eight years, my parents’ marriage had been a Viennese waltz, a close-hold, eye to eye, in perfect synchrony. I suspected that selling the studio had ended the dance.
Mum paused in her work to fling a leaflet at me.
“What’s this?” The leaflet was for an organization called U3A. The University of the Third Age. “He’s gone to university?”
She continued kneading, pummelling the bread so hard I thought the counter would crack. I flicked through the leaflet. The U3A was an organization for retired people who wanted to “keep learning, develop new skills and broaden their interests”. It seemed to be about older people getting together and having some fun. I approved.
“Which class is he doing?”
Mum snorted. “Which isn’t he doing? I don’t know. It started with photography. Then Italian. Architecture. Theatre. Whatever.”
“Why don’t you go along with him?”
“Go along with him? Because I am far too busy. I am not ready to while away my days at a geriatric singles club indulging my hobbies when there are people in this town needing my help. It is a pointless little group. Why would I want to learn Italian?” She started punching the dough with rapid jabs, one fist after the other.
“You might go to Italy.”
“Then I’ll get a CD out of the library. Not join some club.” Pummelling complete, she pulled the stretchy dough off the work surface, squished it into a ball and slammed it back down again with such force I almost felt sorry for it.
I didn’t point out that my mum’s entire career, the business she had given her life to, the hours spent sewing sequins, perfecting turns, pinning hair in buns, could very easily be described in a similar way. Mum knew life needed art, and beauty, and a chance for human beings to connect via a common goal. That learning a new skill, particularly with others, fed our souls.
I suspected the truth was more complicated. She didn’t want to feel old and useless. She chose to fill up the hole of retirement by making herself needed, and was sulking that Dad preferred a different dance.
Chapter Four
Sunday, Maggie stayed in bed while my parents went to church. At least they still did something together. I thought about cooking Sunday dinner. Then decided even thinking about it was enough of a step forward for one week, so continued lying on the sofa staring at the ceiling until they came home.
Maggie had met Pop only twice before – at Lydia’s wedding, when she was six, and Fraser’s funeral, when I don’t think they even spoke. While we lived in Liverpool, Mum came to see us once a year, during the dance school breaks. Dad had been catching up on paperwork, in the middle of decorating, attending urgent meetings – making rubbish excuses for every single one of those visits. I had no idea how to nurture a relationship between a man who had built a wall that high and the child who believed he disapproved of her very existence.
Of course, my mother had been scheming about it for weeks.
After a very late lunch of garlic chicken, roast potatoes, parsnips, sweet potato mash, caramelized baby carrots, minted peas, roasted leeks, two varieties of homemade stuffing, chipolata sausages, cauliflower cheese, cabbage and French beans picked that morning, cranberry sauce and gravy, Mum folded her napkin and announced that Maggie and Pop would be washing up, seeing as I had helped cook the dinner. This wasn’t quite a lie. Once Mum got back from church and the house began to fill with cooking smells I did find the energy to mash the sweet potato.
“What?” Maggie looked disgusted. Translate: scared.
“Grand Prix is on,” Dad added, confused.
“Gilbert!” Mum said with such piercing intensity Dad jolted in his seat.
“I can watch the highlights later,” he muttered, getting the point.
He stacked up the empty plates and disappeared into the kitchen. Maggie slunk in after him.
Mum and I sat in silence for a moment, listening to the clink of crockery and the scraping of plates.
“You’ve just made them both feel really awkward,” I said.
Mum began folding the napkins into quarters. She kept her eyes on the job but I could see them sparkle. “Yes. For the first time they actually have something in common. Don’t you dare set one foot into that kitchen.”
Over the next few days we fell into some sort of rhythm. Mum rushed about bringing sunshine into the lives of the gloomier residents of Southwell. Dad learned Italian, studied wild flowers and hid behind his newspaper. Maggie scowled, picked at her nails, vented her fury on the internet and was dragged along behind my mother on various act-of-mercy outings designed to show her that “things could be a lot worse”.
I slept. Cried a couple of times. Stared at the reptile drawings on my wall. Wished I could be like the red-eared terrapin, carrying a rock-solid home all to himself that no bank could take away; hibernating through the harsher months in the quiet solace at the bottom of a pond. I occasionally wondered, in an abstract sort of way, what on earth I was going to do. Did I think about David? What a pointless, heart-wrenching waste of time that would have been.
By Friday, Mum’s patience had reached its limit. Me scrabbling off the sofa and pretending to be searching for jobs on Dad’s computer as soon as she came in the door fooled no one. It had taken an initial few hours on Monday to search for jobs in the area, followed by a ten-minute check each morning to confirm that no, there were still no jobs requiring the first year of a maths degree, six years of higgledy-piggledy temp work followed by eight months pushing paper for a pervert, no references and a mini-meltdown.
She arrived back from taking an elderly friend to the doctor’s just after ten, sweeping in with a blast of vanilla. “Is that computer even on? The time has come to stop this imaginary job search. There are obviously no pretend jobs that are suitable. Therefore, I have taken matters into my far more capable hands. You start on Tuesday.”
I muffled my scream using a green gingham sofa cushion.
She ignored me. “And to celebrate I have a fun afternoon lined up. It’s the final day of the holiday club at Oak Hill and Eloise Mumford has a dreadful bout of her dicky tummy. Your offer to save the day by filling her place has been graciously and enthusiastically accepted.”
My head remained
in the cushion until she twirled out of the room. I know she twirled, as I could hear her pointy heels clicking out the quickstep on the wooden floor.
I heaved myself off the sofa and slumped into the kitchen, as she knew I would.
“Go on, tell me about it then. And don’t miss out any details. I am too tired for your schemes.”
“Vanessa Jacobs. You remember Vanessa? She was kept behind a year at school. Lived in that orange puffa coat and had a dad who dressed up as David Bowie. Well, she runs a clothes shop in town and needs a new assistant. Twenty hours a week. It will be a breeze for a genius like you, Ruth. And she doesn’t care if you have no retail experience; she is prepared to give a hard worker with a great attitude a go.”
“Really? Vanessa Jacobs is prepared to give me a go?” Oh, yes. I remembered Vanessa Jacobs. Half the girls in the school had copied her and bought puffa coats, but nobody else ever managed to find an orange one. We had not been close, maintaining a mutual mild dislike from a distance. Until I found her arms around the neck of the boy I was in love with.
“I have been cutting Granny Jacobs’ toenails for the past three months while she languishes on the chiropodist’s waiting list. Vanessa owes me one.”
“Mum. I know nothing about working in a shop and the thought of having to greet people, smile and say ‘That looks wonderful, madam. How about this matching scarf?’ all day is too much. I can’t do it. I need something simple, no pressure, safe. No interaction with the general public. Or preferably anyone else.” Especially if they happen to have stomped on my heart and laughed about it.
Mum sat down at the table, pushing out another chair with her foot to indicate I should join her.
“Ruth. You need a job. This is two and a half days a week, a fifteen-minute walk away. Vanessa schmoozes the customers. She’s looking for someone to sweep the back room and count the stock. You are a mathematical wizard. This is no pressure and as safe as you’re going to get. Why not try it until you find something better? It’ll be something to put on a CV. And a chance for a good reference. All I’m asking is that you try it.”
