Blaming (Virago Modern Classics) (11 page)

In fact, Ernie was disappointed because he did. There were thoughts which came into his head now, seeming to threaten his own future. Whenever he could, he would put in little remarks about the doctor’s housekeeper. He had seen her in the supermarket buying individual fruit tarts instead of making her own. “All pastry and but a smear of apple they are,” he said, and Amy wondered how he knew this if he had not at some time bought them himself. “And calves’ liver. He must be a millionaire. She knows nothing of the cheaper cuts. Smokes in the street and standing at the bus stop – a thing in a woman that makes me sick, literally sick. Jumped the queue at the check-out ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I believe this lady was before you. She just stepped aside to take a tin of golden syrup.’ ‘Then stepping aside lost her her place, didn’t it?’ that woman said, and she laughed right in my face. I fancied I smelt drink on her breath. Eleven-thirty in the morning. She wouldn’t do for you, madam, that I know.”

“Perhaps she’s the best the doctor can get.”

That evening, a little later, Gareth and Amy sat down to a curry made from the cheaper cuts, and after that some apple snow.

“I believe these are real apples,” Gareth whispered. “Miss Thompson never gives me real ones.”

“At least it will be a change of scene,” James said, driving Amy to Campden Hill. He had always had a slight hesitancy in his speech, more marked when he was embarrassed, and his words came unevenly as he tried to cover it.

As Amy seemed ill-disposed to see her outing as a treat, he added that it was uncommonly good of her, and that he h-h-hoped that Isobel would give not-trouble.

With a good grace, Amy reminded herself, I shall do it all with a good grace. For grimness wouldn’t make it any better. But she wasn’t going to be so complacent as to set a precedent.

“I daresay I shall cope,” she said, and set off the stern words with a cheery laugh. Illness only, she was thinking. Not for childless trips abroad, or anything of that kind.

When they arrived, Maggie was giving the children their tea in the kitchen. Tacked to a shelf was a list of instructions and telephone numbers, as if she were to be away for a month. She already had her coat on, ready to go to the hospital.

“Have a lovely time,” Dora said, lifting her face to be kissed, but Isobel clung to her mother and screamed to be allowed to go, too. They had never let her set foot inside a hospital, she complained. Everyone else could go but she, poor deprived child. All she had ever wanted, she sobbed; and Amy watched with interest,
if dismay as well, the real tears trickling down the swollen face.

“You were born in a hospital,” Dora said.

“Be quiet, when I’m crying.”

“I only said you were born in one.” Dora took a strip of bread-and-butter and dipped it into her boiled egg. She enjoyed being calm and airy.

“Well, dear, I think we should…” James said, shuffling about by the door. He had made plans not to hurry back home. Although not fond of pubs, he felt enthusiasm for a drink at The Windsor Castle on his way home from the hospital.

“I don’t want to be left with Grandma,” Isobel now stated, using a lower, confidential tone.

“Now, Isobel,” Maggie said sharply, for show, “I won’t have you being rude to kind Grandma.” The ‘kind’ was used as a cue to Isobel’s attitude. She never learns, Amy thought, gazing amusedly at her daughter-in-law, trying to imply that the reins were still in her hands until she had gone from the house.

“I don’t like her,” Isobel cried, having received new strength when very little had been needed. “And I mean that.”

“Of course you love her,” James said stupidly, and he looked at his watch.

“No, I don’t. And I don’t love this bloody old egg, either.”

“Go,” mouthed Amy, parting her hands, and then making a pushing movement with them towards the door. So Maggie went off in distress, with Isobel’s screams still ringing in her head, which should have been used to them.

When she had gone, Isobel shuddered with a few left-over sobs, and then her face cleared. She bashed her bloody old egg, got shell into it, dribbled bits onto her plate. Dora finished hers primly, laid down her spoon.

“Can I get down?” Isobel asked, having done so.

“And wash your hands and face,” said Amy.

“Mummy never makes us.”

“I do.”

“Did she wash her hands when she was a little girl?” asked Dora.

Isobel lingered by the door for the reply.

“I am sure she did.”

“She doesn’t now,” Dora said gravely.

“Did Daddy wash his hands?” Isobel asked.

“Yes, of course.”

“You seem more certain about him than Mummy,” Dora said.

“Well, I didn’t know Mummy when she was a little girl.”

“Didn’t know her. Whatever next?” Isobel took a grip of the door knob with her sticky hands. “Where was I, then?” she asked, coming back into the room with a look of concern on her face.

“You weren’t there,” Dora said.

It was beyond belief to Isobel, an outrage, that sometime, somewhere, she had not existed.

“Rude pig,” she screamed, and then she fled to wash her hands and think of answers.

Dora spread honey on bread-and-butter. When Isobel returned, a change seemed to have come over her. With her finger-tips under the gushing tap, she had
tried to sort out the problem of her own identity and of the limits of its being. She was disturbed, as many children and all egoists are (and she was both), by the idea of a non-existence at any time with relation to the present. She knew of cavemen with clubs dragging women along by their hair. She had seen them on television cartoons, and she could accept the fact, and be glad of it, that in those days she had not been born. She came by most of her theories from the television, and was ready, most ready, to believe that when children slept in air-raid shelters she was not among them, that she had been missing from scenes of antique carnage she had viewed: but to think that her own parents had been alive when she was not was disturbing to her, as were her mother’s references to a school she had gone to without her little child. “Who stayed with me?” she had asked. Torrents of tears met any sort of answer.

She came back quietly into the room, sidled towards Amy, lifted her arms to be lifted, and when she was, sank her head and began to suck her thumb. Her eyelids wavered slowly. I will carry her up to bed, Amy thought.

But no. Dora took a biscuit and bit little scallops round its edge, looked menacing. As if continuing a conversation, she said, “Yes, I did love that house where we lived before Isobel was born. There was a magic well in the garden.”

Isobel pushed her head quite hurtfully into Amy’s bosom and let scalding tears soak through her blouse. Amy rocked her gently, amazed at all the tears inside the child, and the ready manufacturing of them. If the
tears went on strike, Isobel, she supposed, would burst. “Would you like another biscuit?” she asked Dora, to change the conversation. But the conversation, apparently, having done its work, had been completed.

“I haven’t finished this one yet, thank you,” Dora said politely, nibbling daintily at her chocolate Wheat-meal Dairy Crisp.

Isobel, worn out, and no wonder, dozed heavily against Amy, who was astonished at a rapture she felt at this. She hadn’t so touched or held anyone for a long time, and hadn’t, until now, realised what she had missed. She thought that other people go through half a lifetime without touching or being touched. It would be a dreadful deprivation. She drew the back of her finger up the side of Isobel’s neck, over the jaw, up the cheekbone – all silk and firm, and the rosy cheek lightened by tiny, silvery hairs. She clasped the child closer to her – a mistake. Isobel at once sensed that someone else was getting more from the contact than she. “Let me down,” she cried, bashing away Amy’s arms, kicking her shins. “I’m not a baby.”

“Then why behave like one?” Dora asked, now unscrewing without fuss the top of a very difficult peanut-butter jar.

It wouldn’t be too good to have a sister like that, Amy thought.

Dora’s tea seemed unlikely ever to end. It was going through one phase after another.

When James at last returned, Dora and Isobel were in bed, as by now Amy, too, would have liked to be. She had read
Les Malheurs de Sophie,
and had also
refused to bring trays of eggs and bacon, which Maggie was said by Isobel to do.

“Tomorrow I’m going to be pretty,” Isobel had said, choosing the clothes she would wear.

James had not stayed long at The Windsor Castle, where there had been too many young people, and no one he knew. He had been reminded of the difficulty with his hair, which had never grown luxuriantly, and now had to be draped about, and flicked up above his collar. Nothing was there for those over thirty any more, though he felt young still, and had never been strident. On his way home, he wondered if he should buy a dark blue velvet suit.

To make up for the disappointment of the pub, he gave himself a good stiff whisky. Amy had already helped herself, going downstairs and straight to the drinks cupboard, like a sleep-walker. James’s preoccupation with other things – Maggie in hospital, his future clothes, his thinning hair, his mother’s widowhood – was making him drink haphazardly. He watched Amy laying the table for supper, putting knives and forks on a plastic cloth with a William Morris design. Maggie had left a casserole in the oven, and the kitchen was filled with a smell of meat and wine and onions and peppers.

Opening drawers, Amy asked, “Where are the napkins?”

“Oh, don’t bother.”

“What do you mean ‘don’t bother’? What bother is it?”

“They just have to be washed.”

“It’s all right. I’ve found some.”

He watched her making her selection, not telling her, ‘We only use them when you come.’

He fetched an uncorked bottle of wine from the draining-board and put it on the table. It was wine he had made himself, which his father had always refused to drink. Having also set out two odd glasses from the dresser, he felt he had contributed something. He topped up his whisky and sat down.

Amy, so rarely allowed to be busy in a kitchen, felt like a little girl playing at keeping house. Self-consciously she bustled about, shifting things round needlessly, just as Dora did when she was acting shops or dolls’ hospitals.

James went on watching her. Hadn’t really looked at her for ages, not since the early days after his father’s death, when he had anxiously scanned her face for signs of grief receding. As far as he could now tell, she hadn’t altered greatly over the years. Her hair was still cut short and fringed, as it had been for as long as he could remember, and always, probably; but its dark blue, Japanese sheen had gone, and perhaps she would soon begin to turn grey. Her face was pale – never had been otherwise – and there were little dents beneath her eyes, set in slight puffiness. Nothing much going on but anno domini, he thought, and passed a hand anxiously down the back of his head. She was wearing a dress of striped silky material with very wide long sleeves, which she had pinned up to her shoulders to bathe the children, and now for cooking. She had had this dress a long time, and perhaps Nick had chosen it. It was the sort of thing he would have liked to paint, with those black and
white striped folds imposing a pleasant exercise.

“How were the children?” he asked.

Not answering the question, she said, “Dora said some prayers, because her friends at school do.”

“Aloud?”

“Yes.”

“What did she actually say?” he asked, interested.

“Oh, some old rigmarole. It should be ready now,” she said, opening the oven door.

He finished his whisky and poured out the wine. She served from the casserole, standing up, as she was rather short. Then she unpinned her sleeves and sat down.

“Smells pretty good,” he said, as steam rose from his plate. “I wonder what Maggie’s having.”

“Nothing, I should think. In any case, supper in hospitals is at about half-past five. I know Nick used to have his evening drink at four-thirty.”

Now that she was sitting, he found that the stripes kept forming different patterns, broken by her movements. In fact they made him feel rather dizzy.

He had, all day, quite dreaded having a meal alone with her; could not recall having done so before. He had wondered what they would talk about – the children, most likely. He loved his children, but he did not look forward to talking about them at the end of a day’s work and worry. Yet he, from poverty of ideas, had started it. But no risk run, as it had turned out.

Drink seemed to have taken away some of his awkwardness. He managed to look directly across the table at Amy and ask, “How are you making out, Mother?”

She affected surprise, but he had seen that it had quickly overlaid distaste. “I make out very well,” she said.

“Are you lonely?”

“No,” she lied.

“Well, of course it stands to reason you must be. Silly of me. Not a bad old wine, is it?”

Dutifully, she took a sip and nodded.

“That American friend of yours…”

“Martha.”

“See much of her?”

“Often.”