Honey-Dew

by Louise Doughty

  ‘He was around . . .’ I said. ‘Come through and I’ll make you a cup of coffee.’

  ‘I don’t want coffee,’ she snapped, and I looked at her in surprise. She is rarely that vehement.

  As I looked at her, the expression on her face changed. Suddenly, it softened, almost sagged. All at once, she went from middle-aged and furious to vulnerable, and old.

  Andrew stood at the top of the stairs. He had pulled on a pair of combat trousers and a vest t-shirt. He was smoking ferociously. His other arm was wrapped round his body as if his t-shirt needed holding to his chest. His body language screamed, leave me alone.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ he said, after a pause.

  How long was it since they had seen each other? Twelve, thirteen years? How different would he look to her? Or would she only see the truculent teenager whose parting shot had been to tell her she was mad and stupid?

  Her voice was low. ‘I’ve come to talk to you, Andrew. I know you don’t want to see me. You’ve made it quite clear. But there’s things I want to talk about. You can leave afterwards. I won’t bother you again.’

  Andrew did not change position. ‘What do you want to talk about?’

  I felt like climbing the stairs and giving him a good hard slap. How could he be so unkind? Couldn’t he make an effort, once in thirteen years?

  My mother turned to me. ‘Alison,’ she said, ‘I want to talk to Andrew on my own.’

  Andrew stared down at me in alarm.

  ‘’Course you do, Mum,’ I said pleasantly. ‘Of course. I’ve got to go out, anyway. I can come back later if you like, give you a lift back.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a card. He gave me a card. Andrew can ring for me.’

  I ran upstairs and got my bag and a jacket from my bedroom, shouldering past Andrew, who was glued to the top banister, as saggy and immobile as the men we used to make out of Play-do when we were children. I didn’t look at him. I had been dealing with Mum on my own for thirteen years. Now it was his turn.

  As I descended the stairs again I said to him over my shoulder, ‘I’ll be back later. Before lunchtime probably.’

  ‘Got to do some urgent shopping, have you?’ Andrew muttered, furious that I was leaving him on his own.

  I had reached the bottom of the stairs. I glanced up at him witheringly. ‘It’s work, actually.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Andrew sarcastically. ‘I forgot how important you are.’

  I thought he was being unnecessarily unpleasant. It wasn’t my fault Mum had turned up. I had protected him for over a decade. When was he going to grow up?

  As I left, they were still standing in the same positions; Andrew hunched and sullen at the top of the stairs, Mum defiantly deranged at the bottom.

  As I backed my car down the lane, I felt determined, in charge of my life. My family is pitiable, I thought. My mother had used a terrible accident during our childhood to ruin her whole life. I knew that I could not understand the scope or texture of her suffering. How could I imagine what it was to lose a baby? But she had done nothing to save herself. Instead, she sat in corners and raised us to be frightened of her. It was her own fault if neither of us liked her now. She was so helpless. It is impossible not to despise helpless people.

  As I turned the car, I saw a crow sitting in the centre of the road. I paused, waiting for it to spread its wings, but instead it hopped disdainfully onto the grass verge, towards the shade, out of the sunshine that flooded the lane with unoriginal, bathetic light.

  8

  ‘Tell me about Lorrimer. What was he like?’

  P. D. James

  Death of an Expert Witness

  Crows were vile. Crows weren’t even ravens. Ravens were just as sinister but at least they were majestic. Ravens guarded the Tower of London, after all. They stopped it falling down.

  In her youth, Edith Cowper (née Barnacle) had been described as having raven hair. She had worn it long then. It dropped about her face in a smooth, puffy swoop. Now only the face was smooth and puffy. The hair was short and crinkly. When she was young, it had been said of her, ‘Edith will be beautiful when she is older.’ Now she had turned fifty, she imagined others saying, ‘I bet Edith was lovely when she was young.’

  She held the poetry book in her hand and turned it over. Crow, it was called. On the front was a ghastly black shape. Why did the school give Gemma rubbish like that to read? Blood and guts and tiny, tiny poems with short hard lines – some lines were just one word. That wasn’t a poem. Poems were long and fluid, falling like water. They shouldn’t be a stab of syllables like all this modern rubbish.

  She replaced the book carefully where she had found it, on Gemma’s bedside table. Gemma was in the fifth year, sixteen years old. Edith couldn’t think where they were going to get the money to see her through her A-levels. The school fees were crippling them, but Thomas was insistent. Nothing but the best for Gemma. Her exams were coming soon. Then, Thomas said, they would see that all that sacrifice had been worthwhile.

  Edith sat down on her daughter’s bed. It was such a pretty blue, that duvet. They had chosen it together from Rackham’s in Leicester, years ago. Gemma had still been at primary school. They had talked to each other then, gone on shopping trips on Saturdays. They had had a relationship unfiltered by Thomas’s ambitions for his daughter.

  It was some time after Gemma had gone to secondary school that Edith began to realise that she had lost her. Gemma started to take herself so seriously, herself and her books. She became Thomas’s child. She and Edith didn’t go shopping together any more – they hardly spoke to one another.

  Instead, Edith knew, her husband was teaching their daughter to despise her.

  It started with the games.

  During the week, they would watch the box. Gemma would be sent off to bed mid-evening, then Edith and Thomas would catch the news. Afterwards, Edith made a hot drink while Thomas knelt in front of the television changing channels.

  At the weekends, there would be a break in the routine, partly because the news was never on at the right time. This seemed to liberate them. Sometimes, they would not put the television on at all.

  The games were limited while Gemma was young. It was mostly cards; gin rummy, German whist – sometimes it was snap, although that made Gemma a little over-excited.

  One evening, she taught them a new game, one she had learnt at school.

  She was in the first year, and coming home each day bubbling with newness. Sometimes it was a fact. ‘Snails are neither male or female, Mum. They’re both.’ Sometimes it was an observation. ‘When the teacher puts us in threes it’s quite good because you all have to work but if it’s fours then there’s always one who doesn’t do anything.’ Sometimes, she would simply glow with knowledge, as if everything she was absorbing was lighting her up from the inside. Edith was often at the kitchen window when Gemma came home from school. She would watch her walk down the drive. There was a freshness about her gait, a floatingness. Edith would gaze at her with awe, thinking, she is our ambassador – our oxygen supply.

  The new game was called Cheat. Gemma had learnt it one lunchtime, she said, from two boarding pupils called Lynne and Tamsin. Normally the boarders didn’t speak to the day girls. They were, Gemma said, stuck up.

  Each player was dealt an equal number of cards. The object of the game was to get rid of them. The players took turns to put several of them in the middle of the table, face down, while announcing what they were; three twos, two jacks, four aces. If the person on your left called you a cheat, you had to turn the cards up. If you had been telling the truth, they had to take the cards, plus any other cards that were already on the table. If you had been lying, the cards were all yours.

  Gemma won the first two games hands down. Early in the third game, when it seemed that all three of them still had fistfuls of cards, Thomas suddenly put four cards down on the table and declared, ‘Four fives! I’ve won!’ and lifted both hands to show that they were emp
ty.

  ‘Cheat!’ Gemma and Edith chorused in unison.

  Gemma reached out a hand and turned up the cards, spreading the four fives across the table with a disbelieving expression. ‘But you had loads a minute ago . . .’

  Thomas was sitting with his lips pressed together and his eyes lifted to the ceiling, his face fixed in an exaggerated, supercilious smile. His arms were crossed. He shrugged.

  There was a moment’s pause, then Gemma guessed. She rose and went over to where her father was sitting and gave him a push with one hand. Thomas, still grinning, levered his weight so that he would not budge. She pushed again and managed to shift him slightly, to reveal the wad of cards he had slipped underneath his thigh while Gemma and Edith were examining their own.

  Gemma grabbed them and threw them on the table. ‘Dad,’ she shouted, ‘that’s cheating!’ She was both furious and delighted. At twelve, she had not yet lost the childish capacity to be simultaneously angry and amused at some parental caprice. Her mouth was set but her eyes sparkled.

  Thomas shrugged again, arms still crossed, face still a mask of impish self-satisfaction. Gemma bashed his arm playfully with the flat of one hand, hard enough to demonstrate that there was some genuine irritation beneath a gesture which could also be interpreted affectionately. Thomas bashed her arm back in the same spirit.

  Edith watched them and felt secure. She and Gemma never had to engage in such ambivalent horseplay, the shoutings and gentle thumpings which showed that daughter and father loved each other to distraction while also driving each other mad. Things were straightforward for mothers. Thomas, she knew, was going to have a much more complex time.

  She smiled indulgently at both of them.

  Somehow, over the following year, the sands shifted. Edith realised only slowly what had happened. The simplicity of her love for Gemma was proving her undoing, for Gemma was no longer a simple child. She was growing away from herself, needing nothing, wanting everything.

  It was gradual, the change. Gemma became more and more irritable with her mother, keener to be physically independent – to iron her own clothes, use a different shampoo. She stopped telling Edith about the things she had learnt or overheard at school, saving them up for when Thomas came home from work.

  One day, just after she had arrived home, she came down the stairs to where Edith was cleaning the hallway skirting-board, stood over her and said, ‘Mum, I’ve started a period.’

  Edith sat back on her heels and gazed at her daughter. She hadn’t got round to explaining about the monthlies yet. She had been meaning to for the past year, but Gemma was often tired and cross when she got home from school and Thomas was always around in the evenings or at the weekends. And now, here she was, all grown-up and matter-of-fact, not asking her mother but telling her, letting her know.

  ‘Oh,’ Edith said, helplessly, pulling off her rubber gloves. ‘I’d better get you something.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Gemma. ‘Claire at school gave me some Lil-lets. I’ll need something for tonight, though, and tomorrow.’

  Edith stood, hesitated, then went up the stairs to the bathroom. She frowned to herself. It’s all right? A friend at school gave her something? Gemma shouldn’t be using tampons at her age. She bent to the cupboard under the bathroom sink and removed the hair-dryer and curlers to find where her sanitary towels were hidden at the back, wrapped firmly in Boots bags. How had this happened without her daughter needing her?

  All evening she watched Gemma for signs that she was feeling unwell or upset. She showed none. When Thomas came home, she was at the dining table with a mathematics exercise book.

  ‘Dad?’ she asked, without lifting her head, calling out to the hall where Thomas was removing his shoes. He came into the lounge.

  ‘Mr Roberts showed us a slide-rule today. Did you have a slide-rule?’

  It was later that year that Edith realised how completely she had lost her daughter, how far away from her she had moved.

  Three was only just enough to play most of the board games. They were really designed for families of four. Even the ones that could be played by fewer took for ever that way, as if to emphasise the inadequacy of a pair or trio. They had had some interminable games of Scrabble.

  When they took Gemma to the toy section at the back of Skeffington Furnishings, she spent ages with her head cocked to one side reading the instructions on the games, looking for one which would be suitable for her triangular family.

  ‘Here!’ she called over to them one afternoon, swivelling her head to where her parents waited patiently. ‘This one!’ She was holding Cluedo.

  Thomas gave a peremptory nod of assent. Board games were good for mental development, he said. They stimulated logic.

  At the till, while Thomas paid, Gemma came and put her arm round her mother’s waist. It was a cheerful, unselfconscious gesture of the sort she rarely made any more.

  ‘There are just enough of us, Mum,’ she said, nodding towards the counter at the game.

  ‘Yes,’ said Edith, hugging her daughter round the shoulders, ‘there are.’

  That evening, a Saturday, they settled down for a game. Gemma and Thomas opened the box while Edith made coffee. When she came back into the dining room, holding the tray of drinks, they had unfolded the board and were sitting close together at the table, heads bent, examining the rule book. Gemma was saying, ‘Dr Black has been found dead on Saturday evening at approximately 8.45 p.m. Foot of the stairs . . . it’s marked X.’ She and her father both lifted their heads and examined the board, where a white X marked the spot.

  ‘Mum, here, you’ve got to look,’ Gemma said, as Edith put the tray down on the dining table and turned to the sideboard for coasters.

  ‘I’m looking,’ she replied, over her shoulder.

  ‘Cause of death has yet to be determined.’ Gemma picked up a small plastic bag from the red carton inside the box. She opened it and tipped the contents onto the table. The murder weapons tinkled as they tumbled out. There was a tiny golden candlestick, a tiny dagger, an inch-long spanner and a miniature revolver, a little iron bar with a kink in it and a short length of bright yellow cotton knotted in a noose.

  ‘That’s the rope,’ said Gemma, pointing at it. ‘It was found in . . . the ballroom.’

  Edith sat down. ‘You mean they couldn’t tell whether he was shot, strangled, stabbed or hit over the head?’

  ‘Mum,’ said Gemma, dropping her shoulders ostentatiously and gritting her teeth, ‘that’s not the point.’

  ‘That’s not the point, Mum,’ added Thomas. He was assembling the suspects, tiny plastic people who slotted into little coloured circles, so that they could stand upright on the board.

  ‘Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, Reverend Green, Mrs Peacock, Miss Scarlett and Mrs White,’ Gemma declared, as her father placed them on the board. The figures were about the same height as the tiny golden candlestick. Edith imagined trying to kill somebody with a candlestick five feet six inches tall.

  ‘We have to put a character, a weapon and a room card secretly into the envelope. I’ll do it! I’ll do it!’ Gemma was shuffling the small packs of cards and selecting one from each, face down.

  A lengthy debate then ensued about whether the remaining cards should be shuffled all together before they were dealt, or whether they should each receive an equal number of characters, weapons and rooms. Edith did not participate. When she eventually received her cards, she found she had been dealt Reverend Green and Miss Scarlett, the revolver, the study, billiard room and conservatory. ‘So it could have been any of these?’ she asked, holding up her cards.

  ‘No, Mum,’ Gemma said patiently. ‘You know it’s definitely not any of those. The answer is in the envelope. It’s a process of elimination.’ She tore a sheet of paper from a small pad and pushed it over to her mother. ‘Here, you’ve got to make a note of everything. When you think you know you can accuse somebody, but only if you’re sure. If you’re wrong, you’re out.’

/>   ‘But an accusation isn’t the same as a suggestion. Explain to her, Gemma,’ Thomas waved a hand, then lifted his coffee to his lips.

  ‘When you go into a room, say you’re Mrs White and you go into the ballroom, you suggest who you think did it, like, Colonel Mustard with the candlestick. That’s just a suggestion. Say I’ve got Colonel Mustard, I show him to you, so you know it’s not him. But Dad doesn’t know I’ve got him. I could be showing you the candlestick or the ballroom, but if he’s got the ballroom and already knows that it was maybe the candlestick, he’ll guess that I’ve got Colonel Mustard and cross him off his list. So it’s not just you guessing when you’ve got your turn. You guess all the time.’

  ‘So,’ said Edith, pursing her lips, then un-pursing them, ‘if I’ve got Miss Scarlett and Mrs White, say, I know it’s not them, but what if I say Reverend Green and you don’t show me anything. Does that mean he did it?’

  Gemma paused.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ interjected Thomas. ‘She might not have Reverend Green but she might have the lounge. If you said lounge, she would show you that and I wouldn’t have to show you anything. I might have the Reverend Green sitting right here. I would only have to show you if she didn’t have the lounge or the murder weapon. You don’t know whether I’ve got it or not.’

  ‘So how am I supposed to know?’

  ‘You work it out, Mum,’ Gemma said impatiently, picking up the dice. ‘We’ll be here all night,’ she grumbled. ‘We’ve got to shake to see who goes first.’

  Thomas scored a six. He went first.

  It soon became clear to Edith that she was very much out of her depth. She had imagined that any game involving logical deduction would be simply a matter of working your way through the various options, but it was rapidly apparent that Cluedo was not nearly as logical as it first appeared. Her piece was Professor Plum. For some reason, Thomas and Gemma both seemed convinced that Professor Plum might have done it and kept calling her into different rooms on the board to account for herself. One minute, she was in the hall, trying to eliminate the lead piping. The next, she would be summoned to the kitchen and it would be suggested that she might have seen off Dr Black with the spanner. Just as she had nipped out of the secret passage from the kitchen to the study, she would be spirited off to the billiard room to be plonked suggestively down next to the rope.