Hush Hush (15 page)

The call came early on Wednesday morning, shaking
Angela out of her cosy pre-work routine and idle thoughts on Conor
McGinlay.
‘
Oh my
God,’ wheezed Angela down the phone as she heard the news.
‘
Oh
my God, oh my God, oh my God.’

‘Get a grip!’ snapped
Mrs Ambrose on the other end of the line.
‘
The
doctor’s been and says she’s OK, just a bit shaken up and
cold from lying on the bathroom floor half the night.’

Angela shut her eyes in horror.
While she’d been lying in bed, having a DIY orgasm, Sadie had
been upended on her bathroom floor like a stranded beetle, the phone
out of reach.

‘She’s getting on a
bit,’ said Mrs Ambrose accusingly.
‘
She
should be in a bungalow with a warden and round-the-clock
surveillance.’

Annoyance helped Angela get a
grip.
‘
Thank you,
Mrs Ambrose. I’m even now speeding round to see her.’

Angela called a taxi, fighting
her propensity to tears. She felt irrationally tearful. It was just
too bad of her mother to issue a health warning while Robert was
still a raw memory. Was this fall ‒ however accidental ‒
a fated, subtle reminder of Angela’s daughterly neglect?

She knew about the arthritis, of
course she did. But only Sadie’s version of sporadic, easily
deflected pain. If Sadie had been concealing her true frailty all
along, she had only herself to blame for ending up on the bathroom
floor. A bathroom floor that Robert and Angela had offered to carpet
a few years ago, along with the coldly tiled kitchen and hallway.

Fortified but unfooled by these
delusions of her past helpfulness, Angela swept into Sadie’s in
combative mood.
‘
I
haven’t brought grapes,’ she announced, then paused on
the threshold of Sadie’s living room, too shocked to speak.

Sadie lay across the settee.
Purply legs protruded from a grubby dressing-gown. Her uncombed hair
lay flat and grey on her scalp, a cold sore forming in the cracked
hinge of her lips. Sadie’s petiteness suddenly smacked of
diminishment. Angela was used to her mother moving about briskly and
fully dressed, all corrugated curls and support stockings that
camouflaged her varicose veins.

‘I’m absolutely
fine,’ croaked Sadie, reading Angela’s face.
‘
The
doc says I’m as healthy as a horse.’

‘Maybe he meant Shergar.’
Angela moved into the room, deciding jokey briskness was the best
policy. She got precious few opportunities to tell Sadie what to do.

‘Had breakfast yet?’
she asked, turning up the single bar on the gas fire to a blazing
three.

Sadie puffed like a mad
Englishman sweltering in the tropics.
‘
That’ll
singe Binky’s fur and give me blotchy legs. Can you ring work
and tell them I won’t be in till tomorrow?’

‘You should take the rest
of the week off,’ frowned Angela.

‘No, I’ll be right as
rain by tomorrow. Speaking of work, hadn’t you better get your
skates on?’

Light dawned on Angela.
‘
Oh
God, I haven’t rung in yet. Hang on a sec.’

She
grabbed her mobile and went to make the call
, followed by
Sadie’s quavering imperative,
‘
Don’t
skip work on my account, lovey. You don’t want to get on the
wrong side of your boss!’

Gritting her teeth, Angela
changed direction in mid-dash and ran upstairs to get a blanket for
Sadie’s legs, to protect them from fire-blotch.

She grabbed the duvet off Sadie’s
bed and ran downstairs again. Even in so flying a visit, she’d
thought Sadie’s bedroom shambolic and unwelcoming-looking. It
was beginning to look horribly like an old person’s room when
the old person had given up on dust, sheet-changing and talcum powder
spillages peppered with paw-marks. And was it her over-critical
imagination, or did the whole house smell of cat ‒ of
l’air
du litter tray
, to be precise?

‘Here you go, Ma.’
Breathlessly, she threw the duvet over Sadie, swaddling her legs.
Peering helplessly out of her cocoon, Sadie looked defeated ‒
and manageable.

Angela made her phone calls,
laying it on a bit thick for Marla’s benefit to justify a whole
day off. Then she scuttled into the kitchen to make breakfast,
whether Sadie had already partaken or not.

She had a few moments to collect
her thoughts while the kettle boiled. It was at times like this she
wished she’d moved away, like Owen. Not to avoid caring for
Sadie, but because she was so crap at it. Social services would’ve
done a better job and been appreciated more. Angela’s meagre
efforts to cook and fuss, put the telly at the right viewing angle,
and lay in supplies of
Woman’s Weekly
, would be undercut
from the start by Sadie’s silent forbearance of Angela’s
low caring standards, and her spoken dismay at
‘
being
a burden’.

Face facts, sighed Angela, facing
her distorted pout in the side of the kettle. I’m not martyr
material. She had never risen to the heart-swelling challenge of
being depended on. Look at the time Robert had got gastroenteritis.

Angela, to her eternal shame, had
hidden downstairs with a book while Robert staggered about upstairs,
mopping up vomit that had missed the toilet. He’d even had to
load the washing machine with the sheets and towels he’d
ruined.

He hadn’t spoken to Angela
for a week afterwards.

Angela tottered back into the
sitting room with a mug of Bovril and buttered triangles of toast.
‘
Ah,’ she
harrumphed, surveying Sadie’s wan face.
‘
Toast
‒ can you manage it? With dentures, I mean?’

‘Not wearing any.’
Sadie wrinkled her gums ghoulishly.
‘
I’ll
just suck the butter off the soft bits and leave the crusts. Then you
can run upstairs and get my teeth from the bathroom.’

‘OK,’ shuddered
Angela, annoyed at her revulsion. Bloody hell, she’d be old and
toothless herself one day. Maybe incontinent. She arranged the food
on her mother’s lap and plumped up the cushions behind her.

‘Mum, up in your room just
now, I saw the electric blanket me and Robert got you was still in
its bag.’

‘That’s right. I like
to keep it clean.’

Angela eyed her balefully.
‘
It’s
supposed to be on the bed, under the under-sheet.’

Sadie picked up a piece of toast
and looked pointedly at Angela until Angela looked away. Angela did
so, trying not to flinch at the terrible suction noise as toast was
sort of inhaled through her mother’s slackly moist lips.

‘Truth is, I prefer my hot
water bottle to that electric blanket yoke,’ revealed Sadie,
plonking down a toast crust.
‘
I
don’t like the thought of electric volts zapping up and down
the mattress. Does it short-circuit in a power cut, for example? Does
the mattress catch fire if you forget to switch it off? Mattresses
are very flammable, full of foam.’

‘I really don’t know,
Ma.’ Perching beside Sadie, Angela struggled to hide her
annoyance. She and Robert had bought the electric blanket to coddle
Sadie’s stiff joints.
‘
Lots
of people use them without a problem.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning, just give it a
try. I’ll put it on now for you, if you like.’

‘Sit there!’ Sadie
pointed an imperious finger.
‘
Rumours
of my demise have been greatly exaggerated by that tittle-tattle
Ambrose. I’m neither too senile nor too immobile to put an
electric blanket on my own bed!’

Angela decided to regain the
initiative by adopting an equally imperious bedside manner.
‘
Never
mind that. Tell me straight, Mum. Did you fall over from an arthritis
attack? And why couldn’t you get up again? If you can’t
cope
…
’

‘You might be lumbered with
me.’

‘Yeah, it had crossed my
mind. How do you feel about voluntary euthanasia? It’s all the
rage for oldsters with a social conscience who don’t want to
burden their relatives.’

Sadie chased crumbs around the
duvet with a moistened fingertip.
‘
You
don’t get rid of me that easily.’

‘I thought not. So don’t
play silly beggars acting the martyr. Let me help you.’

Sadie said slyly,
‘
Are
you back to your original offer of putting a carpet in the bathroom
to cushion any future falls?’

‘God, you’re
impossible!’ Angela leapt up, pushing her hands through her
hair to stifle the impulse to wrap them round Sadie’s neck.
‘
You are not sending
me on any more guilt trips, Ma. I’ve packed up my rucksack of
remorse and done the round-the-world trip. What I had in mind was
getting you a mobile phone
,
or a phone extension next to your bed, so I’m never more than a
few digits away.’

Sadie snorted.
‘
Maud
Ambrose is only a wall thickness away, but I was still banging half
the night before she heard me.’

‘Right!’ snapped
Angela.
‘
How about
teaching you and Mrs Ambrose Morse code, so you can tap out a message
through the wall?’

Sadie sighed tragically.
‘
You
can’t help it, can you? At the first sign of someone besting
you in an argument, you get sarcastic. I hope you haven’t let
Conor see that side of you. Men find it very unfeminine.’

Angela wanted to scream.
‘
The
mobile phone,
’ she repeated faintly.
‘
Do
you think it’s a goer as an idea ‒ yes or no?’

Sadie mushed her lips together.
She was trying to purse them, Angela realised.

‘What if Maud was out when
I needed her? And even with a phone, supposing I rang you in an
emergency, and you were out gallivanting with Conor?’

‘Talk about a remote
chance.’

‘With Rachel, then.’

‘Isn’t risking that
remote chance better than feeling isolated?’

‘I’ll certainly
consider it,’ decided Sadie, with an hauteur that covered her
panic and ‒ to some degree ‒ her shame. She was behaving
badly, but her fall had been a demeaning shock. As for that stuff
about guilt trips ‒ what was Angela on about? After all she’d
done for her. A spark of self-pity ignited briefly in Sadie, flaring
under her breastbone like heartburn. Was it really too much to expect
her daughter to at least offer to care for her in her dotage? Why
couldn’t Angela throw self-interest to the winds and suggest
they live together? The offer would suffice. She would, of course,
refuse it grandly.

Her eyes met Angela’s. The
plea was only a flicker, but nakedly obvious.

Angela cleared her throat and
looked into the fire.
‘
There’s
another option. You could, of course, move in with me.’

‘Wouldn’t that cramp
your style with Conor?’ asked Sadie quickly.

‘I have no style to cramp.
We’re just good friends.’ And never likely to get beyond
that stage if she became the carer of an aged, demanding mother, ever
in need of clean sheets and soaked teeth. Horror loomed in Angela,
followed by a wave of utter self-disgust. How could she be so
selfish?

‘In that case,’ said
Sadie, watching her daughter carefully,
‘
no,
no! I’m only joking! You don’t seriously think I’d
give up my independence, do you? I wouldn’t want to move into
your shoebox and you’d hate living back here. I’m not
ready to be wheeled round in a bathchair just yet.’

‘As if,’ grinned
Angela.
‘
And we
haven’t explored the third option, putting you in a home. The
money from selling this place would keep you in rubber sheets for
years to come.’

Sadie smiled thinly at the joke.
Angela had grasped too quickly at a climb-down. It was proof positive
that she did not want her mother living with her.

‘When are you seeing Conor
again, lovey?’

‘He’s invited me to
Shane’s sports day on Saturday. Now look, if we’re going
to make you comfortable
…
’

‘Rachel said you saw a
picture of the ex-wife.’

‘I glimpsed a photo in
passing. She’s beautiful,’ admitted Angela, with a
generosity that hurt her heart,
‘
long
white neck, longer red mane than
My Friend Flicka
.’

‘Who?’ asked Sadie,
who obviously hadn’t read the book.
‘
Where
did you meet this Flicka?’

‘She’s a girl at
work,’ muttered Angela, too irritated to explain that Flicka
was a horse in a kids’ story.
‘B
ut
before you ask, no, I didn’t dig up the secret of their failed
marriage. Does there have to be a secret? Couples grow apart and
split up, end of story.’

‘It’s unusual to hop
on a plane and leave your only child behind,’ mused Sadie.
‘
She
must’ve been desperate to get away. I wonder if she sued for
custody and lost?’

‘I’ll have to ask,’
decided Angela, squaring her shoulders. Really, it was all very well
for Conor to lay bare his sexual liaisons. But there were too many
unanswered questions about his marriage. A sneaky idea crept into her
mind. Maybe she could pump Shane, subtly, for info.

‘The lad’s obviously
prickly because of his broken home,’ pondered Sadie.
‘
I
ask myself, how could any mother walk out on a twelve-year-old?’

‘You haven’t met
him,’ said Angela uncharitably.

‘It must’ve been a
wrench for her. I wonder if a third party was involved.’

Angela started. God, how stupid
of her not to consider that! She’d just assumed that Rosie, the
fling, was a direct consequence of the marriage break-up. Maybe she
was also a cause.

‘Yes, she could’ve
run off with another bloke and your Conor’s loath to admit it,’
said Sadie, who’d been thinking along different lines.