‘Oh Caroline, I am so, so sorry!’ Charlotte’s enthusiastic sympathy betrays its underlying pleasure as usual. How can Mother possibly keep this woman as a friend, how can she be so blind and not see… Charlotte, who looks like a sucking fish, feeds off other people’s misery. She loves it… that is surely why she phones. Pain manifests itself in so many extraordinarily different ways. ‘That terrible woman,’ Daddy calls her, ‘that parasite with a bloodlust for pain! Is she still hanging around?’
But this evening Caroline’s misery comes over as so unaffectedly genuine that even the shameless Charlotte cannot pry further at this painful stage. Still, she’s been given her fascinating Christmas present; she cannot unwrap it, but it’s waiting for her and the anticipation of what it might be when revealed is even more enticing. So she sounds quite happy when she chats on, ‘Caroline you poor, poor thing. Of course I understand. Remember, all men are wankers and as I always said, I told you, you were demeaning yourself playing around with that little prick. I know it doesn’t feel like that now, but in a few weeks’ time you’ll wonder whatever you saw in him.’
‘I dare say I will, Charlotte. But I’ve booked in for Broadlands and I expect to go down there on Wednesday or Thursday so I might not be able to get back to you until I return…’ There is even a choke in Mother’s voice and for a moment Vanessa, her eyes still glued to her feet as if they’re the safest thing about her, worries that Camilla might be going over the top.
Charlotte is understandably miffed. It looks as if she is going to be thwarted. ‘Darling! I had no idea it was that bad. This is scandalous! You are upset! Are you quite sure you don’t want me to pop round? I could, you know. No prob. I could be over there in half an hour.’
‘No, really, that’s kind, and it’s good to think that somebody cares, but I need to be on my own.’
‘Kids okay?’
‘Oh, the kids are fine.’ Caroline, in the guise of Camilla, refuses to be drawn.
Deeply disappointed, Charlotte slyly goads, ‘Well, okay sweetie, if you’re sure…’
Still being painstakingly, frighteningly careful, but with the end so longingly in sight, Camilla goes on, ‘I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Under the circs I won’t say Happy Christmas.’
Charlotte cackles. ‘And I won’t say Happy New Year. Those greetings are loaded with bad vibrations… just you go back to bed, have another drink and don’t worry, there’s plenty more fish in the sea. You just have to dive deep and sharpen your spear in order to find them.’
‘Goodnight, Charlotte.’
‘Bye, Caroline.’
Vanessa has to ease the phone from Camilla’s rigid hand. She leads her to her chair where she slumps; her white-tighted legs sprawl in front of her, she runs shaking fingers over her cheeks and hair and she looks like an accident victim awkwardly arranged on the road by a passer-by. ‘Oh! Oh!’ she cries. ‘Oh, I was awful!’
Dominic wears an expression of worship as he stares straight at Camilla, a lock of dark hair curling damply over his forehead, the skin on his temples almost translucent. ‘You were not awful. You were wicked, brill—amazing. No one would know—I didn’t know! By the end of all that, honestly, even I didn’t know!’
‘If you can keep that sort of performance up, Camilla, we are going to be fine!’
‘Really, Vanny? Did it sound okay?’
‘Camilla, it was absolutely perfect. Mother would have been so proud! You didn’t just change your voice, you switched personalities! How I wish we’d recorded it so we could play it back. I’m sure you wouldn’t recognise yourself.’
The first phone call has been dealt with more successfully than anyone could ever have expected, but the twins are upset. They didn’t like the searing tension, the keeping quiet, the nervousness in the room that burnt cold fear like an opened freezer. And they are not enjoying their Christmas dinner. Quite obviously nobody wants it.
Poor little things. All this is disturbing enough for Vanessa and Camilla and Dominic, who are still trying to come to terms with the last awful visit to Daddy’s gym, but for Sacha and Amber, who are tired, who wanted to stay with Daddy, who are bewildered by the speed of the changes of the last twenty-four hours, for them this must be terrifying.
‘Come on you two, let’s make some cocoa and go and sit for a while by the fire. And then it’s bed.’ If only Vanessa could give them a loving home, a mother, security… all the blessings that make Suzie so smug, that Suzie takes for granted. She wants to remove the blight of this childhood… give me a child until it is seven… well, there’s only a year to go for the twins before they are doomed forever, before it’s too late.
‘The Skin Horse?’ Amber’s request is a pitiful plea.
‘Yes, of course, The Skin Horse. What else?’
‘Shall I clear up?’ Camilla is still shattered and shaking after her gruelling ordeal on the phone.
‘No, let’s all go. We’ll clear up tomorrow morning. Mrs Guerney’s not coming in until the day after and I doubt if Ilse will be back in the evening. Any excuse.’
‘But when will we have to go down and visit Mother again?’
‘Mother’s all right for tonight. I don’t want either of you to think about that… you’ll have bad dreams. Mother is not your responsibility and you are not to worry about her. Mother is perfectly all right.’
‘Screaming. With her bosom out!’ But Amber’s giggles are more like sobs.
The drawing room is warm and familiar and the twins cuddle up on the hard leather sofa as best they can, one either side of Vanessa who takes the ragged book down from the shelf. The book is given prominence in the drawing room, not because it’s a favourite book but because it is old and therefore valuable, but Mother says it must go for re-binding and then it must not be used. The Victorian book, which has pages of thumbed fluffy cardboard, smells of age. It was given to Mother’s mother when she was a little girl—her childish signature, Elizabeth May Scott, is in the front—and even then it was old. Dominic and Camilla, on chairs by the fire, pretend not to listen to the story. They are far too old for The Skin Horse and everyone knows it off by heart.
‘Once upon a time there was a skin horse.’
‘What sort of skin?’ Sacha is always alarmed by the fact that the horse is made of skin; annoyingly, she never fails to ask this same question. But tonight, because her sister is upset, Vanessa is prepared to answer. ‘Lots of toys are made out of skin… nowadays we call it leather.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the word skin is not very nice, I suppose. When you say skin, these days, you think of human skin.’
‘But the skin horse was not made out of human skin, was he, Vanny?’
Vanessa groans. ‘No, it certainly was not.’
‘It might have been.’
‘Dominic, I thought you weren’t listening!’ It is already late and she is not prepared to tolerate any of his gory interruptions.
‘They might have made it out of native skin, like they made umbrella stands out of elephants’ feet and rugs using tigers’ heads. They used to make purses out of Indian women’s breasts…’
‘Well, the skin horse was made out of leather which probably came from a cow. So shut up.’
‘Ugh!’
‘Like your shoes, Dominic, for goodness sake.’ Vanessa assembles her patience. ‘And the skin horse lived in the nursery that belonged to the parents of Amelia Ann Hunter.’
‘Who was lonely.’ Sacha is half-asleep. With one hand she twists a piece of hair, and the other thumb is in her mouth. Amber behaves identically sleepily on Vanessa’s other side. She yawns and judders, replacing her thumb.
‘D’you want me to read this or don’t you?’
Sacha gives an emphatic nod.
The tale is a hackneyed one, told in a thousand books in a thousand different ways. ‘Now Amelia Ann Hunter had lots of toys. She had a beautiful china doll with hair of gold and the biggest blue eyes that closed because of a clever metal hook in her he
ad. The doll, called Jemima, had a suitcase which was full of the most wonderful hand-sewn clothes, clothes which were every bit as good as Amelia Ann’s own. She had a pair of wonderful Punch and Judy puppets carved from the finest wood and there was no chip to be seen, not even on Mr Punch’s fierce long nose. And among all the toys in the nursery cupboard there was a mechanical, musical merry-go-round with a flag on the top and an awning striped in the pinks and whites of seaside rock…’
‘… and then there was that old skin horse,’ quotes Sacha. Vanessa frowns and obediently shows them the first picture before she turns the page. She has never particularly cared for this story, but it has always been Sacha’s favourite. She studies her sister for a moment and knows why. There is something wrong with Sacha; there is something wrong with all Mother’s children. The old skin horse is a sad-looking thing, forlorn as Eeyore, with a grave expression in his beady eye and a few ugly tufts of hair. It is hard to see how anyone could love him, other than an antique collector. It is hard to see how any right-minded child could favour such a dull brown thing over the other toys in that splendid nursery, and yet the rather haughty-looking Amelia Ann Hunter loves it, takes it to bed, trails around with it everywhere even when she is invited to go down to bid goodnight to her mother—a papery-looking lady who languishes feebly on the chaise longue in the drawing room, and her stiff-collared father who stands before the fire rigid as the poker, looking angry.
And in the nursery at night, lit by the dying fire, that old skin horse comes alive and explains to the other superior toys that you become REAL when most of your hair has been loved off, when your eyes drop out and when you become old and shabby. Vanessa reads on, brisk and breezy. ‘It is something that happens to you when you are REALLY LOVED,’ he says, ‘and it doesn’t happen all of a sudden, it takes a long, long time.’
It is slightly unfair on the other toys who can’t help being sharp, smart and elegant—and Sacha pulls out a wet sticky thumb and says, ‘What the other toys could do is make holes in themselves and scribble felt pen on their faces…’
‘No, Sacha, the skin horse is tatty because it has been loved. It wasn’t shabby to start with. It was probably quite smart when it came from the shop, like everything else.’
‘Like Suzie’s mother. But we’re making our mother all tatty and old now, aren’t we, Vanny? We have got her trapped in a cupboard. Perhaps we are going to make her real at last. Real and fat and homely.’
‘Homely? But we’re not giving her lots of love, not like Amelia Ann loves that skin horse.’ Mother would not be amused to be compared with the old skin horse. Surely Mother is far more like the posh china doll, hard and cold with sharp fingers. But then Vanessa pictures Mother at her bad times, without her wig and her make-up. No, Sacha is right. Suzie is the doll, while Mother is only pretending…
Why?
Sacha is silent for a while, sucking and thinking. She will pull that piece of hair right out of her head in a minute. She tucks herself more comfortably in beside Vanessa and she says hesitantly, ‘We’re doing it in a different kind of a way only because we have to.’ She has always been an odd, illogical child. ‘The skin horse didn’t DO anything to make himself loved. He wasn’t nice or kind or anything, he just had it DONE to him.’
Sacha is tired out. She must be put to bed before she becomes quite impossible.
Sixteen
‘W-I-G-H-T—WIGHT!’
‘That’s no good. You can’t have Wight—it’s a capital noun.’
‘Not always.’
‘Of course it is, Isobel!’ Suzie is the only one who dares to pick Isobel up at Scrabble. Robin would just as soon let her play her own game for the sake of peace and quiet, and Eileen doesn’t care either way.
But Suzie, of course, plays to win.
Suzie would dearly love to fling open a window and breathe in some of that fresh, icy air. She wants to fill her lungs with some of that silver cold and wake herself up from this stupor. Overfed, overstrained, overstretched, they are crouched round the coffee table with eyes flicking about like surgeons at a dangerous operation because competition can be extremely stressful. It is overwarm in the drawing room with the curtains closed and the fire at full blast, but Isobel feels the cold so the heating has to stay on. Since the children departed, the time at Ammerton Mews has crept slowly along. They left an atmosphere of strain that cannot be sprayed away with a can of Suzie’s lavender… and when he returns from Camberley Road, Robin’s gloomy face just adds to the general sense of unease. As Eileen quite rightly observes, ‘Christmas is a time for children, and if children aren’t happy, then who else can possibly be?’
Eileen’s upset, coming to terms with the fact that she’ll have to sell her beloved cottage. They’ve been talking about it for most of the evening and Suzie finds the concept of losing her childhood home almost too painful to bear. It’s just one more frightful thread that has woven itself through this intolerable day.
‘We had to do it.’ Isobel showed no sympathy. ‘Everyone has to do it. It’s called coming to terms with age. Oh dear me, those poor children!’
‘Oh, the children will be right as rain when they get home. The twins always play up when it’s time to go. I’m quite used to it now.’ But Eileen’s sharp, disapproving glance tells Suzie she’s been far too glib; she sounds cruel and heartless, not at all the sweet little Suzie her mother knows and loves, not at all like that happy girl who used to be so gentle and caring with her cats and her dolls.
‘I don’t know why you and Robin didn’t arrange to have them here for the whole holiday.’ Eileen regards her daughter speculatively as she props her glasses on the end of her nose in preparation for her turn. Her cheeks are a happy Father Christmas hue. Joe didn’t want to play. He has abandoned his solitaire and now he is happily absorbed in a jigsaw puzzle at the safer end of the room. ‘It’s nice to have children around at Christmas-time.’
Because Robin is obviously not going to answer, it is left to Suzie to defend herself. ‘We would have had them here, but it’s not as easy as that, Mummy. Caroline would never have agreed to let them come.’
‘But did you ask her, lovey?’
‘No, precisely because there would be absolutely no point in asking her. You really don’t understand, I’m afraid, Mummy.’
At nine o’clock Robin is going to run Joe and Isobel home to the bay-windowed suburban bungalow she chose to move into when she could no longer maintain a tight enough control over her Tudor country home, but Eileen is staying the night because there are no trains to Somerset until the morning.
‘Well, I thought they were lovely,’ says Eileen, needlessly protective, as she clacks down her double-word score with aplomb… O-Z-O-N-E.
‘Well, that’s a capital noun!’ Isobel bridles so the cameo brooch moves sharply on her hard flat chest. ‘It’s a brand name—I use it in my lavatory.’
‘It is a gas, Isobel,’ says Robin shortly, after wavering for only a second. ‘And therefore perfectly acceptable. And it would have been difficult for them to stay on because after tomorrow I’ll be at work, on and off, getting ready for the big New Year’s Eve edition of the programme.’
‘Suzie wouldn’t have minded entertaining them I’m sure, would you, Suzie?’
‘Well, I shall be doing other things, Mummy. I won’t be exactly moping here indoors for the whole week waiting for Robin to come home. The children would be bored to tears here, there’s not enough room for a start.’
Eileen raises her eyebrows mildly and Isobel purses her lips in reply—Isobel, who has no sympathy for the times in which she lives and no interest in putting anyone’s mind at rest.
‘If Caroline was different there wouldn’t be any problem.’ Suzie, infuriated, badly wants them to understand. ‘She, after all, is their mother, not me. And anyway, you heard, we invited them to stay the night and they chose not to do so.’
‘I thought that was rather strange.’ Robin always wins at Scrabble and Suzie wonders why they ev
er bother to play. Now he casually adds W-E-I-G-H-T to W-A-T-C-H-E-R and lurches further into the lead with a triple-word score. He leans back, crosses his legs, and takes a triumphant sip from his glass.
Suzie is angry. Everyone is blaming her. Is Robin secretly blaming her, too?
Suzie sneaks a glance at the clock without anyone noticing. They can relax as soon as Isobel has gone. She might even have a bath and get into her dressing gown. She might even get drunk. Damn, damn, damn and blast Isobel!
When Robin first took Suzie to meet his parents, the freezing atmosphere in that spotless bungalow with the fireplace of red brick—hoovered each morning, she’d never heard of anyone hoovering a fireplace—could be cut with a knife.
Robin and Suzie had been seeing each other, of course, for a good year before they finally agreed to live together and Robin decided the time was right to brave the consequences and move out of 14, Camberley Road. He spent the night at Suzie’s flat whenever the opportunity arose and for weeks before the move Suzie urged him, ‘You’ll have to tell her, Robin. You’ll have to talk to Caroline some time soon. I mean, surely she already suspects that something’s not right?’
But Caroline, so self-absorbed, so busy with her own games, had not suspected and when he moved out of Camberley Road the shock came like a bolt from the blue. By then Suzie and Robin jointly owned the mews flat; it was furnished mostly with Suzie’s antiques—she’d moved in a few days earlier—and it was all ready for him to come home to.
And on the day Robin left Camberley Road he phoned Suzie from his office. ‘Have you told her?’ Suzie asked, holding her breath.
‘No, I couldn’t. I just walked out in the end.’
‘And the children?’
‘No. No. I haven’t said anything to anyone.’
‘But what about all your stuff?’
‘I’ve just taken my personal papers… no clothes, no books, no records…’
‘But Robin, you can’t move out like that! You can’t leave all your things behind—a whole lifetime’s worth of belongings. You will have to return tonight and tell her; you will have to fetch them.’
Mothertime Page 13
