Irene shrugged, and looked cross.
“Would you like that, Maria?” Irene’s mother said again. She was still holding her hand. Maria nodded, and in that moment, she was filled with a love for Irene’s mother so pure, so strong, that she wished she could stay there for ever, in that yellow room, with the warmth of Irene’s mother’s hand in hers.
“We must ask your mother, then, when she comes to collect you,” Irene’s mother said, and Maria’s spirits plummeted: surely her mother would say no. And indeed, when Margaret arrived at six o’clock—barely greeting her daughter, standing awkwardly in the hallway, impatient to be gone—she tried to do just that. “Well,” Margaret said, “that’s very kind, Mrs. Lewis. But I should think you have enough on your plate with all these children, don’t you?”
Maria felt her heart slip into her mouth.
“Oh, they keep me busy,” Irene’s mother said lightly. “And I can’t promise to turn Maria into the next Myra Hess. But I’ll teach her a few scales. Then, if she takes to it, perhaps you might like to find her a proper teacher?”
Margaret gave a tired smile. “Well, as I say, that really is very kind of you. Thank you. If you’re absolutely sure you can spare the time.”
That night, after Margaret had tucked her into bed, Maria imagined it was not her own mother crossing the carpet, closing the door behind her, but Irene’s: cool-skinned and sweet-smelling, and drawing after her the soft, pealing music of her piano.
Maria liked watching her father in church. She saw him, there, as a man distinct from the father at home, with his slippers and reading-glasses, his Daily Telegraph, the sweet, bemused expression he wore as Maria’s mother crashed and thundered around the kitchen, or fell into implacable silence, lying motionless for hours behind the closed bedroom door.
It was the unpredictability of Margaret’s moods—there were also weeks when she would rise each morning humming to herself, clear-headed and capable, steering her way through days marked out with meetings of the flower-arranging committee, the ladies’ prayer group, the parish council—that defined the atmosphere of the vicarage. There, Maria’s father appeared blurred, not quite in focus: a quiet man, watching his wife as he might an animal of whose reactions he could never feel quite assured.
In church, Francis was different. He grew taller. On Sundays, he wore a white surplice over his black cassock—he had taught Maria the correct nomenclature, showed her the garments hanging, starched and pinned, in the vestry—and a white stole tipped with gold. She watched him process along the nave, his head lifted towards the altar, and above it, the great north window, which sent shards of coloured light scattering across the heads of the congregation, and she felt her pride swell and thicken in her chest.
When he spoke from the pulpit, he did so in a fine, warm baritone, and the worshippers looked up at him, and listened. Maria, herded back into the church with the other children from Mrs. Harrison’s Sunday school, would stand beside the arched entrance to the lady chapel, and watch her father, and believe that he was speaking only to her.
She remembered nothing, consciously, of the nights when Francis had lifted her, pink-faced and bawling, from her cot, and walked her up and down, speaking of stories she didn’t yet comprehend. But he still liked to read to her, even now that she was eight years old and happily spent hours reading by herself. It was a special treat: after tea and homework, Francis would call Maria into his study, close the door, and take down the book they were reading together from the shelf. They were grown-up books—Great Expectations, The Thirty-Nine Steps, A Pilgrim’s Progress—and they would read until Maria’s eyes began to close, her head to fall back against his chest, though she always did her best not to allow herself to dive headfirst into sleep.
Sometimes, Margaret would open the door, and stand there watching them.
“I don’t know why you bother, Francis,” she’d say. “They’re far too old for her. She doesn’t understand a word.”
But I do, Maria wanted to cry out, though her father would only reply, mildly, “It’s as much for my pleasure as for hers, Margaret. Leave us be.”
Once, during one of these reading sessions, Maria dared to ask her father, in the slender portion of silence that fell as he turned the page, “Why doesn’t Mummy like me?”
Francis looked down at her, his gaze frank, clear.
“What a question, Cassandra,” he said. He used her middle name sometimes, when they were alone, and she thought of it as their own, private code. “She’s your mother. Of course she likes you. She loves you. But she feels things more deeply than most people do. Her skin is . . . thinner than most people’s. She’s not as strong, so we must be strong for her. Do you understand?” Maria did not, but she nodded and said nothing, so that her father might continue to read. As he did so, she settled back against his chest, enjoying the slow music of his voice: its comfortable cadences, its resonant rise and fall.
There was a photograph on Margaret’s dressing-table, in a silver-plated frame.
Maria saw it only a handful of times through her childhood, on the occasions her mother permitted her to sit on the edge of the double bed—unmade, the pillows still bearing the faint, rumpled impressions of her parents’ heads—while she applied her face-cream, her powder, her perfume.
So rare and special were these moments that Maria experienced them with a particular intensity, each sense seeming sharpened, more acute—the sweetish, floral cloud of scent; her mother’s face reflected in triplicate by the three-leaved mirror—and the framed photograph etched itself indelibly on her mind. A slim, smiling, clear-skinned woman in a knee-length cotton dress; not beautiful, or particularly glamorous, but carefully, painstakingly, put together—her hair neatly curled and set, her legs shining in immaculate, unladdered nylons. Margaret Lyall, nineteen years old, couched in a deckchair on the back lawn of her parents’ house in Colchester, the looming silhouette of a man’s head just visible above the bottom left-hand corner of the frame.
Decades later, Maria—Cass, by then, of course—would find the photograph among her father’s papers and puzzle over it, wondering who that ghostly disembodied shadow had belonged to. Cass’s father? Her grandfather? Or an old boyfriend, later tossed aside by her mother in favour of the new curate, Francis Wheeler, almost twenty years Margaret’s senior?
For Cass would be familiar, by then, with the details of her parents’ unsuccessful marriage, as her childish self had never been. At thirty-two, she would be able to see them clearly. Margaret Lyall, the ordinary suburban girl, swayed by the interest of the man—the vicar, no less—to whom she could look up from the pews, watching his spare, unhandsome features rendered glorious by the dual magic of authority and conviction. Francis Wheeler, the older man, settled on the priesthood after an unhappy decade in the City, looking about him for a woman to make his wife, to root him to a parish, a home, a family. The couple’s move to London; the gradual realisation of how ill-suited they truly were; the slow onset of Margaret’s black moods, her rages, her lassitude.
No name was ever given to her mother’s malaise—at least, not in the child’s hearing. And so Maria was left with the assumption that she herself was the author of her mother’s unhappiness—that if she could only be different, better, somehow other than herself, her mother would be happy once more.
On those rare mornings, then, when she was alone with her mother behind the closed door of her parents’ bedroom, Maria stayed absolutely silent, concentrating so hard on not moving that her limbs would ache with the effort for a good while afterwards. And it seemed to her that with each dab of the powder puff, each spritz of scent, her mother was transforming herself, turning back into the young woman in the photograph: easy, unburdened, free.
In the year Maria turned nine, whole months passed during which Margaret did not take to her bed. She was busy again, frenetic with activity: committees, cooking, laundry, church bazaars. And o
ther, private engagements whose object she did not divulge to her daughter, and which began to draw her away from the vicarage for broader and broader stretches of time.
Several times, on her return from school, Maria found the house empty, the front door locked, and was forced to cross the busy road to the church to find her father or Sam Cooper, the handyman, and ask them to let her in.
After this happened for a third time, Margaret presented her daughter with a set of keys, tied together with a length of string. “You can be a good girl, can’t you,” she said, placing a kiss on Maria’s cheek, “and let yourself in after school?”
In truth, Maria didn’t mind those hours in the afternoon, alone in the cool kitchen, spreading thick slices of white bread with butter and strawberry jam. In her mother’s absence, the house was quieter, free of tension; and sometimes, if Margaret were still not back in time for evensong, Maria and Francis would improvise a rudimentary tea—boiled eggs and soldiers, or ham, lettuce, and salad cream, eaten at the kitchen table with a rather rakish, celebratory air—as if they were enjoying a picnic, or a holiday.
On the occasions when Maria did arrive back from school to find her mother at home, Margaret’s mood was breezy, even affectionate.
“Not to worry,” she said when Maria nervously showed her the ink-blot on the sleeve of her new school blouse. “I was terribly clumsy at your age, too.”
Another afternoon, finding Maria reading in the living-room (she was working her way through the adventures of Nancy Drew), Margaret lingered for a moment in the doorway, watching her. When Maria looked up, self-conscious, bracing herself for criticism, she saw her mother grinning at her.
“My bookworm,” she said. “My little reader.”
And then, one bright Saturday in late autumn, Margaret announced at breakfast that she was going to take Maria shopping.
“A ladies’ outing,” she said. “Won’t it be fun?”
Francis, looking up from his Daily Telegraph, caught Maria’s gaze, and smiled. “What a lovely idea, Margaret.”
And they did have fun: riding the bus across the common, stepping off outside the big department store, pushing open the heavy brass-handled doors to enter the crowded, brightly lit lobby. For Maria, Margaret bought two dresses, a skirt, a jumper, and a pair of navy patent Mary Janes; for herself, a Revlon lipstick in a frosted-pink shade called Raspberry Icing, two blouses, and a set of mysterious undergarments shrouded in white tissue paper.
Then they had tea, lemonade, and iced buns in the café, and Maria looked around her, swinging her legs, watching the other mothers sitting with the other daughters, and feeling, finally, that she had done something right.
Afterwards, in the ladies’ toilets, Maria watched her mother apply the new lipstick, blot it carefully with toilet paper, and then draw her head back, taking the measure of herself, and smiling at what she saw.
For Maria’s tenth birthday, Margaret organised a party in the church hall.
Maria, Irene, and their other friends from school—girls whose names would soon slip entirely from Maria’s mind—were set to work making paper chains, while Margaret and the other mothers laid out sponge cakes, prepared sandwiches, poured jugs of orange squash. Mr. Raynsford’s piano was brought through from the vestry, and the children played musical statues, and pass the parcel, and when they had tired of their games, Margaret—flushed and exuberant in her Raspberry Icing lipstick—hushed them, and announced that the birthday girl was going to play them all a tune.
Maria had been practising; as she walked up to the piano, she caught sight of Irene’s mother and her heart quickened its beat. It was some years, now, since her first tentative assaults at the piano in Irene’s front room, and they had not come to much: each time Irene’s mother tried to sit with Maria, to guide her fingers through the major scales, Irene would appear, sulky and wheedling, or one of her brothers would come through from the garden with some new boyish demand. And so a teacher had been found for her—Mrs. Dewson, a whiskered, elderly parishioner, whose house, a few streets back from the common, smelt of damp and wet dog—and Maria had been permitted, once a day, to practise on Mr. Raynsford’s piano. And though her hands were still lumpen and fumbling on those slippery, treacherous keys, those hours in the vestry, and in Mrs. Dewson’s front room, were precious to Maria; and as she practised, she heard Irene’s mother playing, and it was Irene’s mother’s face that she held in her mind.
That day, at her birthday party, Maria played Bach: the Prelude and Fugue in C major from The Well-Tempered Clavier. Reading the name on Mrs. Dewson’s sheet music for the first time, Maria had pictured a kindly, red-faced German—a publican, smiling at his customers over beer-pumps of polished brass. A man of good temper. And the prelude did seem to soothe her spirits: after several weeks of missed notes and broken chords, Maria found that she could play it, if not well, then at least fluidly, and its arpeggios, rising and falling, began to follow her through her days, and to spool unbidden through her mind in the sweet, unguarded moments between sleep and dream.
At the party, she played the piece through almost from memory, looking only once at the sheet music propped on the stand. When she finished, the silence in the room seemed deafening; and then there was clapping, and the babbling murmurs of the other children, and she felt her mother’s arms around her, and heard her voice in her ear. “Very good, Maria. Very good. Happy birthday, my clever girl.”
She felt her mother’s touch, the echo of it, for a long while after Margaret had let her go. As Maria found Irene and her other friends, and danced to the record somebody—Margaret, she supposed—had put on, a great happiness rose in her. So it was true, she thought: that other hard-faced, angry mother had disappeared, and this kinder, prettier one had come to live with them for ever in her place.
Two weeks later, a Saturday, Maria came downstairs to find Mrs. Harrison and Mrs. O’Reilly preparing breakfast.
“Your father has been taken ill,” Mrs. Harrison said.
Maria stared. “Where’s Mummy?” she said, and the women exchanged a quick, furtive glance.
“She’s gone away on a little holiday,” Mrs. O’Reilly said. “Nothing for you to worry about, dear.”
She laid a plate of scrambled eggs down on the table. Maria looked at the yellowish mass, fighting a rising nausea—she hated scrambled eggs—and said, “Aren’t Daddy and I going too?”
There was a short, tight silence.
“Eat up, child,” said Mrs. Harrison. “Don’t let your breakfast get cold.”
Maria ate as much as she could bear. With each mouthful, she pictured her mother as she had been at the party: bright, animated, moving quickly around the room with the platters of sandwiches and cake. She wondered where she could have gone, and why she would have left the two of them behind. She would ask her father, of course—he would know. How could he not?
Setting her plate aside, she said, “Where’s Daddy? Can I see him now?”
Mrs. Harrison placed a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t ask so many questions, Maria. Your father needs to rest. You can see him later.”
Through the course of that long, peculiar day, Maria stayed upstairs, listening to the noises from the rest of the house. The front door opening and closing; footsteps on the stairs; women whispering in the hallway. She tried to draw, to read, to continue with the game she and Irene had devised in recent weeks—Maria’s new Sindy doll had fallen out with Irene’s, and was now attempting to win back her friend through a series of impassioned letters of apology—but she couldn’t concentrate. There was a picture in her mind: her mother, packing her dresses and cardigans into a case, and stepping off alone across the common while Maria and her father slept on. And her father himself, downstairs behind the closed door, wrapped in his mysterious suffering.
By mid-afternoon, Maria could bear it no longer: she slipped from her room, went down to the first-floor landing, and s
tood outside the door to her parents’ bedroom. She placed her ear to the door, and heard a low, inarticulate, shuddering sound. Was her father hurt? Was he in pain? Ought she to go in to him? She placed a hand to the brass doorknob and was just about to turn it when Mrs. O’Reilly appeared at the top of the stairs.
“What are you doing, lovey?” she said softly. “We said your father needs rest. Now, is there a friend you might like to stay with tonight?”
When Irene’s mother came to collect her, she spent a while with the church women in the kitchen. Maria waited outside, but the women hadn’t quite closed the door, and snatches of their conversation floated out through the gap. A terrible thing. None of us had any idea. Just upped and left this morning. A note on the table. The reverend’s beside himself.
Irene’s mother was the first to emerge. She saw Maria standing there, beside the door, but she didn’t chide her. Instead, she knelt down and pulled Maria into her arms. “Come on, love. Irene’s so excited you’ll be staying the night. Max is going to sleep in with the other boys. We’ll have a party.”
She was true to her word. There was fish and chips for tea—real fish and chips from the chip shop, still wrapped in greasy newspaper—and jam roly-poly. It was all so exciting—so deliciously out of the ordinary—that Maria was able, for a time, to forget the strange, unsettling events at home.
After tea, they played a game where each person wrote the name of a celebrity on a piece of paper, and then stuck it to someone else’s forehead, and that person had to guess what was written there. Maria guessed hers quickly—she had Elizabeth Taylor—but Irene’s mother took an age with hers, which was somebody called Charlie Parker. When she finally got it, she pretended to be cross.
“Trust you to come up with that, Tony,” she said, and kissed Irene’s father on the lips. And then Maria remembered her own father, lying in the vicarage all alone, making that horrible sound. She wondered again where her mother had gone, and felt a dizziness come over her, as if she was standing on a very tall building, and looking down at the long, long drop below.
Greatest Hits Page 3
