Half Broken Things (38 page)

There followed some disturbed nights and days of frantic gnawing, bad temper and a burning temperature. It was Steph and Michael together who saw him through it. They took it in turns to rise as soon as they heard him cry and dose him with Baby Calpol. For four nights in a row they walked the hot little bundle up and down with a cold flannel against his face. Then there were two twin white stumps in the centre of his lower jaw. It seemed to bring Michael round. His smile, which had been tight, filled out again. He laughed. Sally, who rang Steph once a week or so, sounded sorry in a remote kind of way to have missed her baby's first tooth. Steph promised to take a photograph. In the meantime Simon, Sally said, was no worse, but neither was he much better. She could not come home yet. Steph told her not to worry.

Not only the colours in the garden faded, but the skies changed too, and in the afternoons the light shining on the walls of the house was gold. Inside the house Jean noticed the scent of roses and from the windows, looking up from what she was doing, she liked to watch Michael and Steph in the garden with Charlie, whose good humour was quite restored. Now once again there would be singing, and shrieking and laughing, and Michael and Steph swinging Charlie up high between them, then quiet spells. That was when Jean liked to walk slowly outside to join them. Charlie would be either asleep, or amusing himself on a rug in the shade, Steph would be lying or strolling about nearby. Michael most often would be reading. A pretty picture they made, or perhaps they created something more like a line in a poem than a picture, because the faint reluctance Jean sometimes felt to walk in and become part of it was not a fear of sullying the thing visually. It was an appreciation of the scene's completeness, and her utter contentment in standing there beholding it, that sometimes made her wonder if adding herself to it would be clumsy. For she was beginning to feel the slight separation that comes with being the first to realise something important, ahead of other people. The date was beginning to weigh on her mind, and, with her face as calm as ever, she now, as she went about her work, would be wondering about it, thinking what to do. She would not discuss it with the others, not yet; she liked to be thinking it over for herself as she watched them out in the garden, oblivious. She did not want to burden them with it yet. Then they would look round and see her, and call out, and she would go towards them, smiling. So they would lie about talking and playing until it was time to go in. They were impossibly happy.

I did say earlier that it is amazing to me the way this house seems to provide what we need. It amazes me further that it provides it just
when
it is needed. For it is only now, in August, that I have remembered about monkshood although I have been tending the flowers, picking them, learning about them from the gardening books, arranging them, all this time. And I have known for years that monkshood is a poisonous plant, but it was only when Steph was talking about Charlie, who is now crawling and putting all sorts in his mouth, that I wondered how safe he would be in the garden, and then, as if I had only just seen it for the first time, I became aware of the monkshood.
Aconitum,
to give it its proper name.

And I also see, but only now, that the things I have been remembering and writing down here about Mother—things which I have not thought about for years—are part of all this. Not just rambling digressions on my part, but stopping places on the way to where I am now. All this time I have been becoming the person I am. I have always been heading this way.

This is the point. On the day of that row with Mother, eighteen years ago, with the buddleia swinging in the wind outside, it wasn't the news about the clock that did it. Mother and I had stopped screaming at each other. The row was over, really, and we had reverted to our usual calm hostility. But in the silence, when I was going about all the things I had to do to her—the washing, the wiping, the hair, the tablets, the breakfast, the cleaning up, the rubbing of her elbows and heels with meths to stop her getting bedsores, tidying the bed—we were both thinking up things to hurt the other with.

Who can say what might have happened if she had not got in first? But worse than the actual information she gave me was the offhand pleasure she took in it.

‘Oh, yes, moan moan. You can moan,' she said. ‘Go on, I'm used to it. But if you didn't have me you wouldn't have anybody, would you? I'm all you've got. It's not as if you've got any friends, is it?'

‘May I remind you,' I said, ‘may I just remind you that in actual fact I
do have a mother?' I was plumping up her pillows, bashing them with my fist. ‘Not you
. I don't mean
you
. I'm talking about a
mother, a real one. I at least have a blood relation.'

‘Oh,' she said, looking past me, ‘you still think that, do you? Well, allow me to inform you that you are sadly mistaken.'

I was confused to begin with. But hadn't she said, just after Father died, that my real mother had
not died when I was four, she had given me up? Wasn't that what Mother had said? (Wasn't that what I had been holding on to, the hope that I would find her some day?) Mother said, still breezy, oh, yes, but she died later. She had not bothered to remember quite when.

I wanted to die myself then, for shame perhaps. For shame that some ordinary day, any dull old day when I got on and off buses, filed carbon copies, ate biscuits, bought stockings, God knows what banal things, was the day on which my real mother died. On that day I had been oblivious. I spoke no word, took no farewell, did not grieve. I did not know the day or even the year she died. Oh, well, Mother said, relishing it, it was maybe fifteen or twenty years ago. Then I thought, she's lying, the whole thing is a lie. But no, she knew this because my real mother had kept in touch with the adoption bureau, keeping them up to date with her address, in case one day I ever wanted to contact her. Mother had never told me that, either. The bureau had been informed when she died and had passed the news on to Mother but, as she pointed out, what was the use in telling me? It wasn't as if I knew her.

Until that precise moment I had considered the Mr Hapgood episode as the worst thing that had ever been done to me. In a way it was—as a deed actively done, I mean, or a set of deeds performed but then over and finished with—but now I suddenly saw that Mother's treatment of me so outclassed Mr Hapgood's in malice that it amazed me that I had not seen it before. For Mother, without actually
doing
very much, had been busy. Over the years, forty-one of them by that time, she had been so constantly and perniciously denying me her care and approval that my state of permanent want had become a strand, no, the very substance of my character. I suppose I had grown to think of it as an inability on her part, something she couldn't help, but suddenly I saw that she had withheld things from me so conscientiously, in so meticulous and thorough a manner, that it must have been deliberate, worked at. It had not occurred to me before then that I had a right to be angry. But now I thought, what sort of person would do that?

Mother's bedroom was on the ground floor, behind the kitchen. I opened the top pane of her window, because the room really did need freshening up, though she complained that it was too windy. I left her door open a crack. Perhaps I was in shock and perhaps I wasn't, but I must have omitted to turn off the burner of the cooker when I had made her usual breakfast of porridge. Then I fetched my coat, bag, purse, keys and shopping bag. And before I left, I must have dropped a tea towel carelessly, because one edge was touching the burner and the other fell over the worktop where there were three or four cotton wool pads soaked with methylated spirit (left from when I had been rubbing her elbows and heels to keep the skin strong). The bottle stood alongside the roll of cotton wool, and evidently I had omitted to replace the cap. The wind must have blown it over. I left the door from the kitchen into the front hall open, too. I didn't go to the office that day or, in fact, ever again. I did some unnecessary shopping, slowly. Then I sat for half an hour over a cup of coffee. Then, as it was a fine, blustery day, I took a long walk along the towpath, and I thought about my mother, my real one. I must have been out for over four hours, but what with the through draught and our old-fashioned kitchen cupboards of painted wood (I had been on at Mother for years to change them) the ground floor had gone up in less than two hours.

Everyone was so kind. Mother had been found in the kitchen, they said, obviously trying to make herself a cup of tea or something. I kept quiet about the fact that Mother would rather lie for a week with a mouth like a desert than get up to make her own tea. They said she could not have noticed what she was doing with the tea towel, and she must have panicked when the meths caught alight. Anyway, although she might also have suffered a mild heart attack, it was smoke inhalation that killed her.

The fire almost destroyed the house, which turned out to be under-insured. The sale of the house was just enough to pay off the builders for the rebuilding work. I have been a house sitter since, joining Town and Country with a reference from nice Roger Palmer of Oakfield Avenue, who agreed with me that there was no need to mention the house fire business. All this time I have been becoming the person I am today.

So, as you see, I am capable of such an act. I admit it, but because I am still not sure what I intended, I cannot say exactly just what the act was. I do know that it was the opposite of coldblooded. My blood that day was close to boiling, but I certainly was not out of control. I am not sure whether or not that makes what I did deliberate.

Nor am I cold-blooded now, in considering the monkshood. If I can contemplate the next step calmly, it is only because I know that that is the state of mind necessary. Besides, I am doing it for all of us. And I feel responsible, and that always has a calming effect, I think.

I looked it up in the garden book, just to be sure. It says, ‘Monkshood is a useful plant, bearing graceful, small bell-like blooms of an intense blue up and down its stem. Its leaves are attractively pinked in appearance, and it makes an effective filler for the back of the mixed border. No attention is necessary. All parts of the plant are very poisonous, especially the roots.'

Because there is nothing I can do to stop the Standish-Caves coming here. They are expected soon. I have the date. In fact I have always had the date, though I have been unable until now to connect it with something that might actually happen. But Shelley rang to check up on me again and to confirm the date. She has informed me that they will be taking a taxi from Heathrow and will be here by half past four on that day. They want me to be here to hand over the keys, and expect me to be ready to go by six o'clock.

That being so, I thought, I shall have tea ready for them. They shall be received with such ceremony and circumstance, by this humble, fawning, slightly embarrassing house sitter, that they will not refuse. I shall make such an obsequious fuss and show of this cake I have made for them that they will indulge me. I shall bake them a cake to welcome them back, made with apples, honey, fruit and spice, which will mask any foreign taste, assuming that monkshood has any. I think it more likely that it imparts a bitterness, that is all. And with the spices to distract the tastebuds, any slight bitterness on the tongue will not be noticed until after enough has been swallowed.

———

Jean began to glow with her idea. As she worked in the house, she planned it in detail. On the day when she believed that she had it perfect in her mind, she went to the walled garden. Michael stretched up from picking beans and together they strolled down towards the paddock. It was after five o'clock, and Steph had taken Charlie indoors for his bath.

It was, of course, unthinkable. But it was less unthinkable than all of them having to leave Walden and have all the other things catch up with them. Only that would be truly unallowable. Michael saw that at once.

‘A cake? Are you sure it'll work?'

‘I'm going to use the roots. They're the most poisonous part. I'll grate it up small, it'll look like ginger. All the books say it's deadly.'

‘But even if it works . . . even if it does, somebody will know, won't they? People will know they're coming back. They'll be missed.'

‘Listen. I'll tell Town and Country that the Standish-Caves came back as planned but then they decided not to stay here after all, and went off back to the States. But even though the contract with Town and Country has expired they're keeping me on themselves, privately, because I know the house so well by now. And it's for an indefinite period, because Mr Standish-Cave's been developing some business interests over there. All right?'

‘But what about money? There won't be any more coming in. How will we manage?'

We can write to their bank again, can't we? We can instruct them to carry on paying me, double my salary even. And they'll have credit cards on them. Chequebooks for their other accounts, passports. We'll be able to get at all their accounts.'