by Judy Astley
‘Joe. It’s ringing.’
‘Just ignore it,’ he said, staring at the ceiling, conscious that he hardly had the energy left to blink.
‘I can’t. It might be Simon. I’ll just have a quick peek.’ Catherine sighed and hauled her naked self out of the bed, pulling on a pink satin robe and tying the belt tightly. Joe was conscious of a small display of impatience in the act of the tying. The sharp tug of the fabric, the brisk knot. The leisurely tenderness of the past half-hour had evaporated. Catherine carefully positioned herself at the window where she thought she could look down at the street and not be seen.
A girl stood there, a girl with long hair the colour of butternut squash, blowing on her cold hands and looking up and around for signs of life in the building. His daughter. Catherine stepped back quickly from the window, telling herself she hadn’t been seen, not from that angle. It was her turn to have Joe this weekend, not theirs.
‘Nobody there, they’ve gone away,’ she told Joe as she slipped off the robe and climbed back into bed, smiling.
Chapter Five
‘Jeez, Mum what are you doing, you scared me! It’s not even seven o’clock yet!’
Emily stood in the kitchen doorway, hair sleep-tousled and feet bare. She was wearing an old Metropolis Studios T-shirt that Nina assumed she’d purloined from Joe on her last visit to him. It stopped at mid-thigh; her long pale legs looked chilled and vulnerable.
Nina was sitting in her old blue towelling dressing gown on the floor in front of the bookshelves, sorting paperbacks and allocating them to various supermarket boxes.
‘I’m clearing stuff out so we can paint this room. I woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep. Then when I was fidgeting about the cat came in and assumed it was morning so I thought I might as well get up and make a start. I won’t have time later. Anyway,’ she said, looking up at Emily, ‘I could ask you the same. I bet you can’t remember when you last saw this hour of the day. You’re usually not out of bed till about thirty seconds before you need to leave for school.’
Emily rubbed the back of her left leg with her right toes. ‘The birds woke me up,’ she said. ‘Um . . . shall I make some tea?’
She wandered across to the sink and filled the kettle. She’s looking shifty, Nina thought. If she didn’t look so obviously sleep-sodden, I’d wonder if she’d only just come home. She watched Emily reach up to get cups out of the cupboard and wondered what she got up to with Nick. She assumed it was something. The boy, struttingly confident of his own desirability, could clearly have his pick of the entire sixth form and probably most of the two years below that as well. With his lean, tall body and sun-streaked hair, he reminded Nina of an advert for surfwear. It was naive to imagine he’d put in time with a girl who wouldn’t venture beyond a chaste good-night kiss, however astounding her personality.
‘Are you still seeing a lot of Nick?’ she asked, cursing herself for such an obviously mother-like question. Emily turned and smirked at her pityingly. As well she might, Nina conceded. ‘Seeing? What kind of a question is that?’ Emily mocked. ‘Do you mean am I having sex with him? Because if you do the answer is “Not right at this moment because I’m busy making tea for my mummy”, OK?’ She flicked her hair and did a pert turn back to the kettle and filled the mugs with water.
‘Serves me right I suppose,’ Nina said, laughing. She was none the wiser, just as she was meant to be. It was probably more comfortable for both of them that way.
Genghis, stretched out on the sofa, woofed gently in his sleep and lifted his head a few inches. ‘Newspaper’s here,’ Nina said, looking at the end window and catching sight of the Nike-trainered feet of the girl with her delivery bag plodding up the path. ‘He’s quite good, old Genghis,’ she said, reaching out and stroking his ear. ‘He sensed she was coming before she’d even opened the gate.’
‘Huh. He doesn’t exactly do much about it though,’ Emily commented, handing Nina her mug of tea. ‘Even if the mad axeman came creeping up, he’d just go “Oh woof-hello” and drift off back to dreamland again. About as much use as Lucy’s hamster. We should get a great big evil Rotty, then we three girlies could feel safe in our beds.’
‘Do you actually feel less safe without a man around the house?’ Nina asked. It hadn’t occurred to her before that it made a difference, since Joe had gone. Man as guard-dog had never really been an issue – it had been more a case of trying to keep Joe in than intruders out. ‘We could get a lodger, I suppose, put him in the old music room.’
‘No, no lodgers, please. I’m fine, truly. I feel just the same in the house as I always did. Anyway, it’s not as if Dad was even here all the time, is it? He was often away, or in really late or whatever.’ Emily picked up her tea and headed back towards the door. ‘Actually I’ve got to make a quick phone call, so I’ll leave you to the books. OK?’
‘Good grief who on earth do you need to call at this hour? They won’t thank you, whoever it is.’
Emily was halfway up the stairs now and her voice was trailing away, out of earshot. ‘S’OK, it’s just someone about a Wordsworth essay. They’ll be just getting ready for work . . .’ If more information was being volunteered, Nina could no longer hear it. She didn’t waste time wondering over why Emily didn’t stay and use the kitchen phone. She was perfectly well used to the teenage need for phone privacy, even if it was only for checking the time with the speaking clock.
Concentrating again on the piles of books, Nina looked around the room and fought off the feeling of defeat which threatened to overtake her now she had started on this job. After the books there would be the pictures to take down, all the plates, dishes, vases and collected bills, catalogues and bits of paper on the dresser to be sorted and put away, the kitchen equipment to have cupboard space found for it, curtains and their rails to be dismantled. Then there was the actual painting. There seemed to be acres and acres of wall. It suddenly seemed a pity that her brother had never been the kind of man who’d taken to DIY, but then it was deplorably sexist of her to expect him to. Instead Graham did have an enviable address book full of tradesmen, which he consulted the moment Monica so much as glanced at guttering or gatepost and pronounced them sub-standard.
‘No. I can do this,’ Nina assured herself, turning back to the books and refusing to look towards any further effort till that one job was done, and done properly. That evening she would ring the local Scout group. They were sure to be having a fund-raising sale soon. She felt as if she was nesting, though for her own comfort, not for the raising of new babies. Presumably Joe would have to think about the baby sort of nesting soon, if Catherine got her way. Lucy and Emily would then have a half-brother or sister. They’d be connected with it, would have moved on into the future with Joe but she wouldn’t. There was something in that which made her horribly miserable, left out, like being the only child in an infants’ school class not invited to a party. She hurled a copy of Brave New World into the box of books for the jumble and then just as quickly took it out again. Lucy might want to read it one day – or even her little brother or sister.
The slam of a car door at the front of the house made her look up and out of the window. The day seemed to be starting early for the entire street. Across the road she could see the legs of two men climbing out of an Audi and walking up the path of the empty number 26. Aha, the new arrivals, she thought, going to the window to indulge natural curiosity. She watched them on the doorstep, the taller, blonder of the two fumbling for the right keys. They both wore jeans; one of them also wore a long denim jacket and the other was in soft butter-coloured leather. Within seconds, she’d decided they were a gay couple, about to fill their house with interesting treasures, with souvenirs of unusually exquisite taste from foreign travel and that they’d hang soft silky kelims on the walls. They’d grow their own herbs. As an afterthought she gave them a small and ugly dog which they would make fat from treating it to Smarties. As she turned back to the book-sorting, smiling at her own ludicrous assump
tions, she decided to take them a box of Maison Blanc’s most delectable cakes as a moving-in token, and she already planned to be thoroughly disappointed if they didn’t eat them with a stunning set of art nouveau cake forks.
‘Hello Catherine? It’s me, Emily. Emily Malone.’
Emily’s feet felt cold, even on the sitting room carpet. She curled herself on to the sofa and wedged her knees up under the big T-shirt, and then quickly unfolded her legs again, smoothing the fabric down and crossing her legs neatly in a way that felt more suitable for talking to the immaculate Catherine. She imagined her, even at just after seven in the morning, already made up for work and wearing a sheeny Joseph suit set off with one of the horribly twiddly little gold-chain necklaces that she seemed to like. If I had clothes like that, she thought now as she had before, I’d wear chunky stone jewellery, or stark wide silver bands.
‘It’s awfully early.’ Catherine’s voice sounded like Mrs Hutchins whingeing about an overdue essay. She didn’t actually go on to say ‘What do you want?’ in a really rude way, but Emily could sense that she’d like to. Perhaps Joe was in the room with her, she thought, trying really hard to keep the picture of a fully dressed-for-the-office Catherine in her head and not replace it with one of her in bed wearing nothing but something tiny, rude and lacy.
‘I’m really sorry,’ Emily apologized resentfully. ‘It’s just the only time I can be sure to catch you at home and it is a bit of an emergency. You know your brother, Simon?’
‘Well of course I do,’ Catherine snapped. ‘What about him?’
Fierce and unexpected tears stung Emily’s eyes at this impatient rebuke. I hate her, she thought, but continued, trying to smile to make herself sound like a sweet, nice girl: ‘Well it’s just that when I met him we got talking about A-levels and he mentioned that he’d done a lot about Wordsworth for his degree and that he still had the essays and notes . . .’ Emily paused for breath, sure that she was gabbling in a stupidly desperate, juvenile way. Catherine remained silent. Emily imagined her inspecting her fingers, picking a teeny crumb of stray wholemeal toast that had dared to creep under one perfectly varnished nail. A big tear trickled down Emily’s face. What was her dad doing living with the kind of woman who spent a whole hour doing the base, polish and topcoat ritual with nail varnish? What went through her head while she did it? Why isn’t she pleased to hear from me, why doesn’t she even ask how I am?
‘It’s just that he said I should call him if I had any problems about the Wordsworth stuff, and I haven’t got his number. So please could you give it to me?’
It felt like begging, especially into the prim silence that was at Catherine’s end of the phone. If Emily told Nina, Nina would probably say something kind like ‘Oh perhaps she’s shy, not everyone’s comfortable talking to teenagers.’ Too generous by three-quarters, that was the trouble with Mum. What would it take for her to know, just know that Catherine was a cow?
‘Your father could have given you the number at a more reasonable time of the day. It’s in his address book too, you know. Just wait a moment.’ Catherine put the phone down and Emily could hear her footsteps trit-trotting across the miles of wooden floor in the flat. So she was up already then, and not in the bedroom and dressed in proper shoes, Emily realized, feeling a snug glow of satisfaction warming her.
‘I’ve got his home number and the one at work. Which do you want?’ Catherine demanded.
‘Oh both please, if that’s all right, then I can be sure to catch him. It is a bit of an emergency.’ Emily, hating herself, heard herself grovelling. Never apologize, never explain, wasn’t that the saying? But who could ever live like that? Only Catherine, probably. She scribbled the number down on the back of her hand and drew a quick heart round Simon’s name. ‘Thanks so much,’ she purred. ‘You’ve been really kind and I’m terribly sorry to have bothered you so early in the morning. Love to Dad.’
She put the phone down carefully and wiped her hand down the T-shirt. ‘Bitch cow from hell,’ she then said, racing up the stairs back to her room, passing Lucy on the stairs on her way down for breakfast.
Emily glanced at her watch and smiled. Somehow she’d managed to use up the time quite satisfactorily; it was now, as her mother put it, about thirty seconds before she should be leaving for school.
Henry looked so comfortable sprawling on the sofa, cradling his mug of coffee to his chest. Nina felt quite a pang, sharply missing the sheer rangy bigness of a man around the place. They took up such a lot of room, like Irish wolfhounds – you couldn’t just not notice them. Even when quiet, just like naughty children being suspiciously silent, they tended to draw the eye. Joe had been a great one for slouching around. He’d done a lot of reclining upstairs on the music room sofa, eyes closed, pained that anyone should mistakenly think he was not actually working. Even now, sometimes when she went up the stairs, she half expected to catch sight of a naked foot dangling over the sofa’s edge. Then as she came level with the door and there was just the empty room, the sofa gone to the flat with Joe’s recording equipment, there was a small shock as if she’d just realized she’d been burgled.
‘So what do you think? Cream? Yellow? What about blue? Or is blue too cold?’ Nina asked the lolling bulk that was Henry. She strode around the room, stacking magazines, collecting up stray bills and school notes, trying to imagine a clutter-free, refreshingly empty space, just solid blocks of fresh flat stain-free colour. She didn’t want any twiddly, dated fancy paint finishes, no splattered stippling or wobbly dragging, not even soft and tentative colour-washing, that much she knew, but deciding which colour was a problem. Joe had been so very good at that sort of thing. Even when they’d settled on just plain basic white for their bedroom, when they’d first bought the house, he’d pinned up a selection of at least twenty different white shades round the room, waiting for the right light to catch the right one. This was the first major change she was planning to make to their home since he’d moved out. It seemed important to get it right, prove that her own taste was competent and confident. All the decisions were now hers and she would have to live with the results.
‘You could just have white,’ Henry suggested, lazily closing his eyes and sighing. ‘Have you got a bun to go with this coffee, Nina my darling? Breakfast seems to be a long-distant memory.’
‘You look as if sleep is a long-distant memory too,’ she said laughing, ‘What were you getting up to last night? You look terrible.’
‘Drinking for Britain: I think I won a gold,’ he said with a groan and a hand to his head. ‘Down at the Fox – darts night. They were asking about Joe, no-one’s seen him for months. I told them he was working away.’
‘You could have told them the truth,’ Nina said with a frown, handing him a packet of Hob-nobs, ‘I mean it’s not as if he’ll be back. I don’t think he’s much of a pub-goer any more. I get the impression Catherine’s more into dinky dinners at home that her mummy told her were the motorway to a man’s heart.’
‘Ooh, I hear bitchery!’ Henry said, sitting up to pay attention. ‘Go on, what else?’
‘Only if you promise to paint the ceiling for me,’ Nina teased. ‘And then I can do the rest myself.’
As she walked past the sofa, Henry’s hand shot out and took hold of Nina’s wrist. ‘You said you were over him,’ he accused. She wriggled her hand out of his grip. ‘Hey, that hurt,’ she complained, rubbing at the pulled skin. This sudden, rather sinister gesture was quite alarming. It showed deep-rooted dormant power, capacity to hurt like the swift clawing of a normally fond cat, disturbed from sleep.
‘I’m really sorry,’ he drawled with no real concern, slapping the back of his right hand with his left. ‘Don’t know my own strength. And of course I’ll paint the ceiling, any old colour you like. Friends again?’ he looked up at her, mock-humble and casually sure of forgiveness.
‘OK. And we’ll do it white. Clean, fresh-start white,’ she said. Henry chuckled. ‘White. Fine. But only some of it white. The ceilin
g and some wall. But I can see you want colour. You’re yearning for colour. You’re just holding back.’
Nina sat on the arm of the sofa and picked at loose threads that the cat had pulled from the fabric. She wondered, after the wrist-grabbing business, if they were really still talking about paint colour or if there’d been a subtle detour in the direction of her sex life. She decided that she was imagining things, this was only Henry. If she chose any other interpretation, then he’d be the alarmed one and she’d have to get professional decorators in, chosen at random from Yellow Pages.
‘You’re right,’ she told him. ‘For someone who spends their working life selecting and rejecting bits of art and craft and trusting my taste, I’m being pathetically indecisive about my own home.’
‘Hmm. It’s only lack of practice,’ Henry decided. ‘We’ll start with white and you can add. Take it one step at a time, like alcoholics.’
‘And babies,’ Nina added, wondering where that little notion had sprung from.
Emily stood as close as she could to the girl using the school payphone, hoping to intimidate her into cutting short her call. She was practically breathing in her ear. You sure have to suffer for love, she thought, trying not to inhale the soupy smell of exuberant hockey-field perspiration. ‘Get on with it!’ Emily hissed at her, prodding her muscly hip. ‘Some of us have a life to get on with, you know.’
‘You’re so fucking rude,’ the girl told her, face blotched red with anger as she hung up the phone. ‘That was an emergency, my mum’s having a baby.’
‘You’re joking,’ Emily said. ‘Whoever would want another kid like you?’
The end-of-break bell rang and Emily swore as she punched in Simon’s numbers, copied from the back of her hand. ‘Oh shit,’ she murmured as a recording told her to leave a message after the beep, he’d get back to her later. He sounded so strangely adult, almost like her father. This was probably a serious mistake. Nick’s mobile had a silly message, ‘Leave a name, dame,’ that kind of thing. Everyone’s did, silly attempts to be slick or cool and not managing to be either.
