by Janet Davey
19
IT TAKES ME two hours to get back to Palmers Green station. At the moment Deborah Lupton imposes herself, I am in a trance, ascending to street level in the mass of commuters returning from work. The stairwell is poorly lit; the steps intermittently padded by damp, discarded newspapers. Her voice penetrates my coat at the level of my thoracic spine and travels up to my ears. Through thuds of disordered footsteps, it reaches me. I am in a state of holding steady, semi-stoical and semi-absent like an animal, a horse or an ox, pulling a cart up a hill, urged on by an unseen driver. Trapped between bodies and a brick wall, the paint of which has flaked into map-like patterns of green and sand-coloured continents, I hold and shall continue to hold, as I do every day, until the press of moving, breathing people eases, and I am out in damp air, walking along Alderman’s Hill, heading towards home and able to be human again. I keep my feet on the steps, all the while forced to feel the woman’s breath on my neck and to hear the powerful broadcast that reaches me in gusts. ‘… as you know, he failed to attend the performance review. Absolutely typical. What we have come to expect … didn’t even have the nous to give a pathetic excuse … guess is, he knows he’s floundering and didn’t want to face the …’ It is only through willpower and a reminder to myself of the social contract that I resist an overwhelming urge to give Deborah Lupton a backwards kick that will send her toppling down onto the upward-climbing strangers who will not know what has hit them.
Once on the level, I continue to press forward. I turn right out of the station but she grabs my sleeve.
I whirl round. ‘Just stop it. Calm down. Your voice is so bloody loud, everyone can hear you.’
Her large, astonished face is close enough to be out of focus. The mouth twitches and opens. ‘Well, I don’t think anyone is—’
‘They might be. You don’t know that. We are not a million miles from school.’ I blast words into the face and then take a step back.
Deborah is staring at me as though I were a family comedy that had flashed up a scene of indecent assault. ‘Point taken, Lorna.’ She stands firm in her waterproof trousers. Her wellington boots are a foot or more apart.
‘Say what you’ve got to say.’ I breathe in and I breathe out again and by the second breath I see my surroundings. We are in front of the pharmacy. The interior is lit but partly shielded from sight by notices. ‘Do You Know your Cholesterol Levels?’ ‘Free Prescription Service’. A man smokes a cigarette in the doorway. The smell is oddly comforting. People walk past us. ‘I’m sorry, Deborah. I lost my temper. I just need to get home.’
She wrinkles her nose and raises her upper lip; something between a sniff and a wary smile. ‘All right, I won’t mention his name but we know who we’re talking about, don’t we? I hope you’re keeping notes, Lorna. I am. A, his setting and marking of coursework are haphazard. B, he aims at the lowest common denominator. C, he leaves lessons as soon as the hooter goes and never makes himself available to answer questions. D, he fails to enthuse. To sum up – an all-round lacklustre performance.’
She invites me round for a drink the following week to discuss an action plan. I agree to go though I loathe this kind of thing – middle-class people on their high horses.
‘I scanned for viruses after he sent that email. I advise you do the same.’
‘Which email are you talking about, Deborah? I haven’t had anything.’
‘It was blank. No content. No subject. But he sent it. [email protected]. Ginny Lu had one too. I haven’t yet checked with the others. Ginny says he may be depressed.’
‘Perhaps he is.’
I knock on Ross’s door to report on the conversation with Dirk. All family information should be in the open.
‘What will you say to them?’ Ross asks, referring to the coffee plan.
I say that I guess we will just chat.
‘Why? You don’t know them,’ he says.
‘I realise I don’t but it’s good to be friendly to people. These difficulties Dirk mentioned, have you any idea …?’
‘They’ll get a shock when they see you,’ Ross says.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know why. But they will.’
‘Tell Jude her dad called, will you,’ I say.
‘Meaning what?’
‘Not meaning anything. It’s polite to tell her.’
He slaps the side of his head. ‘Man, you are bigging this thing up? This is disproportionate.’
I think, since the conversation is not going especially well, that I should ask him if he is up to date with his coursework. My mother used to tell me that this was a bad tactic and that it is better to wait for a pleasant spell before tackling an unwelcome topic. First, when is this pleasant spell? And second, why spoil it? I prefer to soldier on – unless we are eating. I go in for any kind of appeasement at mealtimes.
20
CD REVIEW FOLLOWS the news on the car radio; different recordings of the same Schumann Trio meticulously compared, movement by movement. Scenery goes by, an irrelevant backdrop to the passages of music. I keep my eye on the road; on the stream of cars ahead and behind. Through the speakers, strings and piano rush forward in bursts of intensity against the pull of an opposing tide. It begins to drizzle so I switch the windscreen wipers on, then a squirt of detergent because the glass is greasy.
I am on my way to Brighton. Another year nearly over. Oliver with a new life, Ross with a new life, William widowed which is a kind of new life. The sump of the year. Memory and expectation defeated by shopping. A fir tree lies on the living-room floor under the bay window. I realised too late that it is not wedged into a block and will not stand upright. I have made online donations: £50 to Crisis, £50 to Shelter and £50 to www.arrest-blair.com and bought Jude a present. A scarf and a pair of sheepskin mittens. I wrapped them in shimmery paper and tied the ribbon in a big bow. The boys never spend Christmas at Randal’s. They are conservative about arrangements and act as a pack to thwart changes. There is an element of loyalty to me in their refusal but this is, I believe, subsidiary to their obstinacy. The first Christmas without Randal, I failed to put decorations up in the hall and living room and, as soon as the boys noticed, they questioned me belligerently. Randal had left at the beginning of the month: 6 December, the anniversary of the establishment of the Irish Free State. I get things astonishingly wrong. I try to adapt to my sons’ increasing years and put away childish things, sometimes with a pang and sometimes with a light heart, but I had to unearth the large red honeycomb paper bell, the paper chains made from gummed strips on a long-ago Sunday afternoon, the strings of silver stars, from the cardboard box marked ‘Brother’ that had once contained a printer. I dusted them off, got the stepladder out from under the stairs and suspended the bell from the central light fitting, draped the paper chains from nails that my father had banged into the architrave for that purpose, twisted the strings of silver stars over the fireplace and around the banister rail. The boys stayed in their rooms while I performed the neglected rite and afterwards said not a word. I could tell from their faces that they harboured hurt feelings and thought, not for the first time, that the distance between making amends and getting something right from the outset is immeasurable and that it might well be better to brazen things out because brazening confers a feeling of strength whereas reparation debilitates.
Oliver has grown taller since October; he is also broader across the shoulders. He bears the invisible marks of a person who has got away and whose return will be temporary. He is a little more lordly than previously and a shade more polite. I remember a similar atmosphere of otherness around Ewan on his first vacation from university. The effect was stronger because he was the eldest and a pioneer. The burner was lit and the balloon lifting. Well, that’s Ewan on his way, I thought.
Coming up to Pease Pottage, Oliver asks me to stop at the service station so that he can buy coffee. I dislike negotiating the interchange at Pease Pottage and feel sorry for anyone who lives there a
nd has to grapple with it on a daily basis. From the A23 northbound, it is necessary to leave at J11, where the road becomes a motorway, turn right at the roundabout and immediately right again. I manage to do this in the correct order without being sucked onto the M23 or into the slipstream of a jumbo jet taking off at Gatwick airport. Aeroplanes fly low over the road there, stark and blackly three-dimensional against the sky – one-trick predators. I shall make thirty-six of these journeys. I totted them up. This is the fourth. I have now covered the permutations: down with Oliver, back alone, down alone, back with Oliver. Each is subtly different and the one I like least is back alone.
For God’s sake, Lorna, Randal said when I rang to let him know Oliver’s dates. You don’t need to ferry him about. I said, I don’t ferry him about. I’m not that sort of mother. News to me, Randal said. Let him go on the train. Or by bus. Even better. The whole of humanity is at Victoria Coach Station. Let him learn. I did it for Ewan, I said. I can’t not do it for Oliver. Exactly, he said. Look where it got him. Think.
Oliver returns with a lidded beaker and immediately the smell of coffee pervades the car. We set off again. After a few gulps, Oliver comes partly to life. He tells a funny story about a lab assistant and a flask of benzene and mentions the names of new friends. Following the burst of communication, he falls silent again. I tell him that Ross has a girlfriend, Jude.
‘Ewan?’
‘He’s the same,’ I say.
21
I AM TRYING on a short, mainly green, tartan skirt in front of the bedroom mirror when my phone rings. The cupboard doors are open and garments strewn on the bed. My legs are bare and I am wearing old socks. I am practised enough to see beyond the immediate aesthetic disaster and make a judgement. Hideous. These sessions that might or might not fill a carrier bag for the charity shop prove what I do not quite believe, that we are a succession of selves rather than a single identity. I am not the woman who bought that skirt.
‘I’m about five minutes away.’ There is a whooshing sound of traffic in the background. It is Randal.
‘Make it ten.’ I gaze at myself in the mirror.
‘Whatever are you up to, Lorna?’
‘Nothing. I just need the extra minutes.’
There is a slight pause. ‘Oh, OK then. I’ll take the scenic route.’
Although the days and the times of Randal’s visits vary, his appearances at Dairyman’s Road are as much reiterations as my callings-in on my father at the Winchmore Hill flat. The randomness, over a given period, feels almost the same as a fixed routine. Randal presses his face to the glass of the front door – something he has always done. After dark his silhouette is light against black and in the afternoon, the reverse.
I call up to Ewan to tell him that his dad is on his way and send Ross a text. I take off the skirt and add it to the pile of clothes on the bed.
I put my jeans back on and attack my hair with a brush. It is now long enough to pull back into a stubby knot. I snap a band around the clump and fasten the loose ends with clips. Seconds later the doorbell rings.
‘Hi, Lorna. Happy New Year.’ Randal kisses me casually on the cheek; one side only. The chinstrap beard that was in evidence when he delivered the Christmas presents has gone.
I return the greeting and tell him that Ross is out with Jude and that I do not know when they will be home.
‘Ewan?’
‘In his room.’
‘How is he?’
‘Same.’
‘I’ll go on up then. See you shortly.’
Randal goes up the stairs two at a time and stumbles, as he generally does, at the point where the matting is loose. I hear him hammer on Ewan’s door.
He is up there for about twenty minutes.
‘Hmm,’ he says when he reappears. He is a scientist and has his own thing going. He pretends to be less enmeshed in parental emotion. In any case, he no longer lives at Dairyman’s Road.
He looks around the kitchen as if viewing it for the first time. The greasy cooker hood, a half-eaten banana on the table, Ewan’s never-to-be-thrown-away painting of an auroch.
‘What are you looking at?’ I say.
‘Sorry. Just making shapes.’ He doesn’t immediately comment on Ewan. Sometimes he doesn’t.
‘So, the girlfriend’s still on the scene. Splendid. How old did you say she was?’
‘Seventeen. Same as Ross.’
‘You like her?’
‘She’s lovely. She’s half Dutch, did I tell you that? Her parents are doctors. They’ve lived in different places. Leeds, Utrecht, London. Jude’s well-travelled.’
‘Where does she sleep?’
When he realises I am not going to reply Randal walks over to the back door and peers through the glass at the unmatching pieces of garden furniture, the barbecue fire pit without a grill rack, the collection of old bikes. The tree is the main feature. It stands tall and straight with its domed crown high above the suburban rooftops; the bark cracked into jigsaw-puzzle shapes of light and shade. An earlier owner gave up the struggle to grow anything and paved over the entire plot. It is an expanse of moss-encrusted grey, partly hidden by fallen sycamore leaves. We had a long-term plan to break up the paving and redesign the space in a more pleasing way but years went by and we did nothing. I shall probably continue to do nothing.
22
OLIVER AND ROSS faced their father’s departure to North Hertfordshire in utter silence. The house that up to that point had been a single entity became a series of doors, floors, ceilings and stairs. They kept to their rooms in a more studied way and with greater secrecy, as if they were ghosts of past inhabitants, former lodgers who turned keys in the locks, undid their collar studs and loosened their braces. We were, in a sense, back to what we had once been. Mother with children at home. Two of them – and then three when Ewan returned from Warwick for the Christmas vacation. Although I went to work every day, I was the old retainer. There was a bleak simplicity to our life and, when the evenings and weekends came, no sign of father. I worried for us all in our state of isolation. The thought that the atmosphere might have been different with daughters – or with another set of sons – brought no comfort. These were my sons and I could not change them.
My inclination to relax the rules was immediately thwarted. I had to put back the middle leaf that I had removed from the dining-room table and drag the sofa to its original position, facing the bay window. I was told not to play Shostakovich loudly, or Janis Joplin at all, and my suggestion that we might buy a pet was greeted with derision. It was as if they needed to experience our predicament in a pure state, unsoftened by adjustments. Home ritual that had previously hummed along in the background like an innocuous but essential item of domestic machinery exposed itself as the dark rhythm we dance to.
Here he is again, though, solid and faintly menacing in his new tight cord trousers.
‘Let’s go and sit in the other room,’ I say.
We walk down the passage and into the living room. I carry the tea. Whereas in our married days I would have flopped down next to Randal on the sofa, now I take the armchair. He places his phone beside him.
‘Unusual tea. What is it?’ Randal sniffs at the mug.
‘Holy basil with jasmine. “Take a sip of ancient Wisdom”.’
‘It’s weird. Smells of turps.’ Randal takes a gulp. ‘He was on the phone when I went up.’
‘On the phone?’
‘Yes, walking about and talking. I admit he was under the duvet when I came in December but the boiler had packed up, hadn’t it? I really don’t think you were right, Lorna.’
I take a deep breath. ‘Let’s forget it, can we?’
‘To be honest, it was one of the weirdest things I’ve ever heard anyone say.’
‘It. Was. A. Joke.’
I have never learned not to expose mental speculation to Randal. He wants to establish facts when there are none and like a militant atheist, as long as there is a single believer left in the world he can
not leave the thing alone.
He rubs the lower half of his face and then picks up his phone and checks it for messages. One reason I find my father’s company restful is that he fiddles only with unresponsive objects, his reading glasses or a biro, and although he might polish the glasses with his handkerchief, or make a note to himself with the biro, these items give him no feedback. I do not say that he gives me his full attention. He has never been flooded with fascination for me – I would be appalled if he changed in this respect – but no other presence intervenes. When we are together it is just him and me and a few everyday distractions.
Over the course of minutes in which I watch Randal and wait, I bottle up anger. Bottling up need not take years. It is equally effective in the short term.
‘Are you losing interest, Randal?’ I say in an offhand kind of way.
‘Interest in what?’ as he composes a reply.
‘Ewan. There is still a problem. It hasn’t been solved.’
He lays the phone down. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Lorna.’
‘I wondered whether he had become like a …’ I pretend to search for a word. ‘Calendar?’
Randal looks at me in bafflement. He has, I think, genuinely forgotten that in the self-justifying list of my failings that he used to explain his departure with Charmian he likened me to a calendar, a reminder of the passing of time. When he spoke the words, his face contorted with excuses, I imagined something more Pirelli. It was only as he continued with more mundane accusations that the women in swimwear faded and I saw instead my husband of twenty-odd years troubled by numbers – groups of thirty or thirty-one days – that ate away at his life. I had become too closely associated with the process: back to the wall, spiral bound. If only he had compared me to an hourglass.
