Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman Read online

  Minty continued to stroke and perfect the body he preferred. With a shaking hand, I wiped away the damp that, in the heat, had flowered on my upper lip. I should face Minty and call her to account. But, trembling and afraid, I fled.

  When I got back to Lakey Street there was a rucksack in the hall. Poppy flew out of the kitchen as I stepped into the house. ‘Mum, I’m here.’

  I drew my daughter into my arms. She nestled into me and the relief at having her there was like a burst of sun. I thought, This is what matters. Eventually, she drew away, slid her arm round my waist and led me into the kitchen.

  ‘You look awful, Mum.’ She took off her glasses and polished them on her muslin skirt, her eyes widened with the effort of focusing. Poppy was extremely short-sighted, hated her glasses and was never comfortable with them, but hated more the idea of contact lenses.

  I tried to smile, failed, then explained that I had lost my job to Minty.

  The full red mouth tightened with fury and distress. At the best of times, Poppy did not find life easy and had not, as yet, had time to develop a sense of irony that would protect her. The pitfalls ahead of her were different from those that confronted Sam, but both were capable of being terribly wounded. That kept me awake at night, too.

  ‘Dad can’t possibly want to live with someone who’s done that.’ She struggled to get the words out, and her bewilderment was like a stake driven into my heart. ‘Can he?’

  I tried to explain that Nathan had not meant any of this to happen, and that connections between events do not necessarily exist even if they appear to. ‘It was coincidental, Timon’s decision. Dad didn’t know. I’d been there a long time, Poppy, and they wanted a different approach.’

  ‘Like hell.’ Poppy’s eyes filled and overflowed. ‘Timon wouldn’t have done it unless Dad had left you. He wouldn’t have dared. Oh, God,’ she wiped away the tears with the edge of her skirt, ‘I feel so miserable.’

  ‘Bet you haven’t eaten.’ I took refuge in being predictable and motherly.

  Poppy went over to stroke Parsley, who was sitting in her customary place. ‘Parsley looks older,’ she said.

  ‘Parsley is an old lady,’ I said quickly. ‘Look, I’ll make you an omelette.’ I was already reaching for the eggs and the cheese.

  ‘I’ll go and phone Richard.’

  Fifteen minutes later, I went in search of Poppy and discovered her fast asleep on the sofa in the sitting room, her mobile phone clutched in one outstretched hand. The tearstains were still on her cheek. When I kissed her awake, she turned to me in the old way and I caught my breath.

  Half-way through the omelette, she put down her fork. ‘There’s nothing Sam and I can do, is there?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It’s between your father and me.’

  Poppy tried to digest this. ‘How could he have left you?’

  My knees went weak with the effort to concentrate. How could I devise rules quickly for a situation of which I had no experience? I sat down, facing Poppy, and struggled to be dispassionate and fair. ‘We’ll try to make it as civilized as possible. We won’t treat you and Sam to scenes.’

  ‘Why not? You don’t feel civilized, do you?’

  I sometimes forgot how shrewd Poppy could be. There was a cloudy patch on the walnut surface and I rubbed at it. ‘No, I don’t. I feel as if a limb has been cut off.’

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  The kitchen was very quiet. ‘Neither can I.’

  With no evident enthusiasm, Poppy tackled the remainder of the omelette. ‘Dad’s behaviour is many things, and it’s embarrassing. Who does he think he is, going after a younger woman? It’s such… such a cliché.’

  Her vehemence made me anxious. ‘I’m sure he’ll talk to you about his feelings. You must go and see him.’

  She gave an impatient click of her tongue. ‘I’m not sure I want to see him. He’s ruined our family. He’s let us down.’

  ‘Poppy, you’re an adult now and he’s still your father.’

  She brushed me aside. ‘How you will live? Where will you live? Which one of you is home?’ Poppy put her hands up to her face and covered her eyes. ‘Lakey Street will be sold. Picture it, Mum. One weekend with you, one with Dad. Awful meetings at weddings and funerals…’ She went quite still. ‘It’s broken. Our life. The picture of our life.’

  If it curves too grandly a river will take a short cut, or so I had learnt in geography, which creates an ox-bow lake of drenched grasses, watercress and busy, secret life. Poppy had the same way of cutting across loops and corners as the river and I puzzled as to where she had got this stubborn, leapfrogging bit of her – the bit that also ignored rules, and inconvenient things like exams and the necessity of earning a living.

  ‘Let her – the child – tell you her needs,’ wrote one pundit, in whom we had initially believed. Nathan read from the book as I paced up and down with a squalling three-month-old Poppy, who had given notice that sleep was boring. It was a sentiment so thoroughly in tune with a society that wanted to reshape itself and rethink its women. By the time we discovered what the pundit really meant, that ‘We should bloody allow our children to stamp all over us,’ as Nathan put it (after a clash), Sam and Poppy were well advanced.

  I stacked Poppy’s plate in the dishwasher and put an apple in front of her. ‘Here, eat this.’

  She looked up at me. ‘It wasn’t anything Sam and I did, was it? I used to think we were such a drain on you that you didn’t have any time left for Dad. Then there was your work.’ She took off her glasses and placed them on the table in front of her. ‘It couldn’t be that, could it?’

  ‘No.’

  She pushed the glasses away. ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise.’

  Poppy bit into the apple. She seemed more relaxed and reassured. ‘I gave Dad what-for on the phone. I made him angry, actually’

  I did not want to look into those puzzled, short-sighted eyes so I busied myself at the sink. ‘Poppy, one day… everything will be more normal and we’ll have to build bridges. Do you see? Do you understand?’

  ‘Sure.’ Poppy picked up her mobile, which was never far away, and fiddled with the buttons. ‘Message from Richard. He loves me.’ She giggled. ‘I love him. He’s so full of life. So adventurous. So generous. I don’t think Richard could ever be a drag. By the way, we’re off east the minute finals are over.’

  ‘I thought you and Jilly were going to do something.’ Jilly was Poppy’s closest friend. They had met at university and fallen instantly into that absorbing intimacy which is only possible before real life begins.

  ‘Jilly is off to New Zealand to see an aunt or something.’

  Poppy spoke carelessly but I could tell she felt a little betrayed. I wiped down the sink and hung the dishcloth over the tap. My chest felt tight, as it had when Sam announced that he was going to Mozambique to teach in his gap year. It was partly the danger, but more that the nestlings were shaking their wings and flying. ‘Where will you go? And on what?’

  Typically, Poppy ignored the last bit of the question. ‘India, I think. Perhaps Thailand. I don’t know yet. It’s the last fling, Mum, before we become boring and serious. You mustn’t worry, Richard will look after me.’

  This was not reassuring. The last time Nathan and I had seen Richard, he had hair flowing over his shoulders, was dressed in a shalwar kameez and treated us to a lecture on the wickedness of western economic imperialism when he used expressions such as ‘way cool’ and ‘oppressors’. To this day, I was not sure if he was teasing or in earnest.

  I knew perfectly well what I should not say, and said it. ‘What about job-hunting?’

  Colour had crept back into Poppy’s mouth. ‘I don’t want to get all tied up and desperate a minute before I have to, Mum. Like you did.’

  ‘What do Richard’s parents think?’ They lived in Northumberland and were, as far we could make out, a fairly shadowy presence. ‘Has Richard thought about the future?’

  Boredom was
registered in every line of Poppy’s body. ‘I have no idea. Possibly’ She turned her head and looked out of the window. ‘Everyone insists on talking to me about the future – well, anyone who’s over twenty-five, which seems to be the age when brain degeneration seriously sets in. It’s like a disease. They can’t wait to get me sorted into a category they can understand. “It’s so exciting,” they say. If only they knew what they sounded like.’

  I looked round the kitchen, alive with murmurs from the past. ‘Remember the red shoes?’

  Poppy chased an apple pip around the plate. ‘That old story.’

  For her seventh birthday, Nathan, Ianthe, Sam and I had taken Poppy to purchase the exact pair of red shoes that the advertisements promised would turn her into a princess. The royal status failing to materialize (also the ballgown), Poppy’s cries had cleared the shop. ‘But they promised, and it’s not true,’ she sobbed. ‘They promised.’

  ‘It was one of the rare times Dad said, “Here, you take her.” He was usually the one who could calm you down.’

  Poppy’s face crumpled. ‘Oh, Mum,’ she choked, ‘it’s so awful. Everything’s changed. I thought the one thing that would never change is you and Dad. And it’s so awful that I’m not taking it better.’

  Poppy stayed for three days, pretending to work and refusing to see Nathan. She would not even to talk to him. That must have hurt him.

  ‘My dad,’ Poppy was overheard confiding to a friend at her ninth birthday party, ‘doesn’t get cross with me.’ But he got cross with Sam, of whom he expected different, sterner things. Other than the garden, it was one of the few things about which Nathan and I rowed. Sam’s gravity settled over him when he tumbled to the idea that life was intrinsically unfair. In successfully claiming a monopoly on Nathan’s heart, with witchery, a pair of large eyes and sulky red lips, Poppy had early taught her brother a brutal, useful lesson.

  Laden with food and vitamin pills, she took the coach back to Nottingham. I offered to pay her train fare but she was not having it. ‘I like all this sort of studenty thing.’ Stubborn and insistent. ‘After this one I have only one more term left.’

  Chapter Ten

  Since half of me was my mother, it was natural that I shared some of her habits.

  When it became intolerable, my thoughts too black and too weary to bear, I found myself pacing from room to room, as Ianthe had after my father died. Up to my study, an aimless rattle through the papers on the desk, along to the spare room, back down the stairs into the kitchen.

  It was a reflex I must have learnt from her – a way of making sure that the body still functioned, of dealing with great loss.

  The days dragged into night, night into day.

  A man from Gleeson’s rang me. ‘Is that Mrs Lloyd? I have the new vacuum cleaner you ordered. Will someone be in the house on Wednesday?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

  ‘Mrs Lloyd?’

  ‘Yes, yes, they will be.’

  I was frightened by my responses. Overnight I had lost the ability to decide the simplest matter. I spent hours working out what I would say to Nathan – a whole architecture of new beginnings and promises, and as many hours deciding not to see him at all, ever.

  If I closed my eyes, I was confronted by pictures of myself hurling violent abuse at Minty. If I dismissed them, equally vivid ones of hurting her took their place.

  I went through all the dreary how-could-you-do-this-to-me-Nathan routines. I pointed out that I had been a Good Wife, I had loved him, produced his children, contributed financially. I had been faithful. Was this not a rotten return on that emotional investment?

  And what about my lost job? How could that have happened? Where was the natural justice there?

  Thus I yo-yoed. From job to marriage. Marriage to job. One was greater than the other, yet they were bound together.

  I could not eat and, by the end of the week, I was shaky from lack of food.

  I tried to read, but books failed me.

  Music was worse.

  When it grew dark, I lay on the bed with hot, burning eyes and begged for sleep.

  From time to time, I was lucky, fell into a doze and dreamt, always, of a sun-washed garden: of the felty leaves of the olive tree, of smelling spring, fresh, light and sweet, of driving my fingers into the soil and letting it sift through them. In those dreams, a voice sounded across those gentle canvases: the garden anchors you, it suggested. Its complications and subtleties are never treacherous. Yet when I wrestled impatiently with the catch of the french windows and went out, I could not see it. The fug of traffic smothered its sharp, spicy fragrance, the soil was clogged and sour, the plants sullen. The garden was dead to me, and I to it. More often than not, I returned inside.

  So I drank Nathan’s whisky and, as my mother had before me, I paced through the house.

  *

  ‘He was so upset by the Suez affair,’ Ianthe told me, when I was old enough to understand what Suez was. ‘That was the killer.’

  I think she was right. Suez cut to the quick of my father’s old-fashioned honour, rattled what we knew too late was his damaged heart muscle.

  ‘He was so angry,’ she said. ‘And humiliated by the botch-up. He said we were supposed to lead the world but we had turned out to be Hitlers. He was never the same afterwards.’

  It froze hard and deep that January, the week of my eleventh birthday. The cold killed, cemeteries were overflowing and the council issued a notice forbidding people to die within the parish boundaries of Yelland. If there was the least likelihood of anyone doing so, they were to be conveyed to the next parish. My father had a good belly laugh over that one. ‘There’s nowt like a council that thinks it’s God.’

  I’m glad he found something to laugh about, and even gladder that he could not possibly have seen the irony.

  The cold flayed fingertips and cracked lips. On the morning of my father’s death, I pushed open my bedroom window and peered out. More snow had fallen during the night and cleared the sky. The moor was white and sparkling, and the wind had traced patterns on the beautiful snow plains. My breath vapourized into fog and my cheeks burned. I leant on the casement and imagined that outside was a giant birthday cake, just for me.

  Downstairs, in his chair by the stove, my father toasted bread on a fork, drank his tea, and went through the daily pantomime of finding his glasses. Then he buttoned his tweed coat, and put on his flat cap. ‘I’ll fetch the shovel,’ he said to my mother, ‘and clear the path.’

  He never returned.

  It was Ianthe who found him, still holding the shovel in his rapidly cooling hands. A heart-attack. The manner of his death was so commonplace that it was unremarkable as, indeed, was his omitting to have made a will, which resulted in even more muddle and anguish. It is possible that my father believed doctors could heal themselves. More likely, though, he ignored his condition. If he had suspected his heart was so fragile, I am sure he would have tried to pay off his debts, incurred from having run his country practice on the basis that need came before profit.

  I remember being so frightened by my mother’s face: it was tight, contained, dead-looking.

  Only at night when she paced through the cottage did she give way. Lying freezing and anguished in my bed, I knew exactly which stair would creak, which door was heavy with damp, and which floorboard shifted outside my bedroom when she halted outside to check my breathing.

  All the remaining winter and into a cruel spring, the wind rattled and snow crept into the oddest corners. It was a wet, dispiriting summer, too, and a dank autumn, and one day a van stopped outside Medlars Cottage.

  ‘These nice men are coming to take our furniture,’ a red-eyed and now wraith-like Ianthe announced. ‘We don’t need it, Rose, and we will have a little extra money for a new home. We’re going to a new home. Isn’t that a lovely surprise? Don’t worry, it will be fun.’ She held my hand tight as the men tip-tupped our possessions over their shoulders and carried them out to the van
.

  Tears streamed down her face and every line of her body shouted protest. Yet… ‘Rose,’ she proclaimed, through those tears in her trained way, ‘isn’t it lucky we have a new home to go to? We have lots to be grateful for.’

  I looked from my mother to the rapidly emptying room. I had not realized that the skirting-board sagged, that the paintwork was so shabby, or that the floorboard under the window was rotten.

  Why had I not realized, either, that Ianthe told lies?

  How’s my little chickaninny? I heard my father murmur, deep in my head. I wanted him to be there, I wanted Medlars Cottage to remain ours, even with the cracks, and space, and emptiness. ‘But there’s nothing to be grateful for,’ I cried.

  ‘Shush.’ Ianthe drew me close to her body. I felt her hip bones press into me, smelt clean cotton and soap. ‘Shush, now’

  But fathers came and went, homes were emptied, mothers were duplicitous. Despite the council’s best endeavours, death could not be ordered into obedience and the bright, scrubbed surfaces of my home hid secret caches of snow and ice.

  For the first week books, sent by publishers hoping to bypass the system, continued to arrive. I did not bother to open the packages for I could guess what they were. The heavy biography. The large illustrated cookery book. A manuscript.

  By the second week news had got round. The packages dwindled and, soon, the postman no longer rang the bell.

  Minty wrote me a letter.

  Dear Rose,

  You won’t believe me when I tell you that I did not know what Timon planned until very recently. However, presented with the idea, I was not going to turn it down. I reasoned that you had had your turn, had your day in the sun, and now it was someone else’s, mine, and there was a natural justice in that. I know that natural justice is a concept you believe in and I hope one day that you will acknowledge that I made the right choice for me. But the purpose of this letter is to tell you that Nathan did not know. I miss our conversations.