Raking the Ashes
Authors: Anne Fine
Lovers, colleagues, family – Tilly has always been brilliant at pushing people in and out of her life exactly as it suits her. Then along comes Geoffrey, gentle, compassionate, generous to a fault, with his miserable little children and his manipulative ex-wife.
Tilly’s own expertise in the arts of deception and avoidance should be enough to make sure she’s always one step ahead of Geoffrey’s crumbling family. Time and again she finds herself staying with him, although she knows the relationship to be doomed. How can Tilly plan her permanent escape?
RAKING THE ASHES
Anne Fine
For R.C.W
.
GEOFF DROVE FROM
the wedding in much the same mood he would have left a funeral. It was obvious something had died. In the end, I decided it must be his sense of closeness to his son, that firm belief of his that, however rarely the two of them might see each other, however long the intervals between one or the other of them picking up the phone, there had been between them some unsnappable – even unshrivelling – bond. He’d been gung-ho enough on arrival. ‘So there you are, Harry! Sneaking one last cigarette before the execution? And where’s your bonny bride?’ But from the way he’d taken to hovering in the background throughout the reception, I couldn’t help suspecting his confidence was draining away. And, by the time the grotesquely balloon-clad limousine finally cruised off down the drive, Geoff was standing shyly on the
edge
of the gravel looking rather as if he felt he meant no more to his son than any of the overdressed, overexcited guests who milled after the car, waving.
I, on the other hand, was in the merriest of moods. Even after we got stuck in a traffic jam at Reading, I was pursing my lips every few minutes to imitate the lady in the hat with the flowers dancing on wires. ‘In the summer, I am virtually a
fruitbat
!’
After another fifty miles or so, this clearly became tiresome. Geoff said accusingly, ‘You had a good time!’
‘I did.’ I couldn’t help snorting. ‘And I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a misprint more.’
Even forlorn Geoff had to chuckle. Most of the congregation had been singing with singularly little commitment. (Such a wet little hymn. I certainly never expected to have to warble it again after leaving my primary school.) And then we’d reached the small, unmissable, printed mistake:
He gave us lips to tell
How great is –
‘Gold Almighty!’ I crowed, and fell about laughing. I’d had a really good day. Something had vanished for me too; but what was gone was that humiliating sense of always being on the edge of things with Geoff and his children – as good as invisible sometimes: the
stepmother
who could be taken into account or ignored as inclination chose.
For we were both sidelined now. Geoff had his first salutary inkling of how I’d so often felt when word came – through Minna, not Harry – that the wedding would be in the first week of June.
I’d stopped on my way from the kitchen. ‘What, before the eighth?’
Geoff gave me a look, but said nothing.
‘It’s the week of the inspections,’ I said, not because I thought for a moment he might have forgotten, but to galvanize him back into speech. ‘You know they’re always at the start of June.’
‘I’ll ring Harry tomorrow.’
‘You can’t do that. We haven’t even been invited yet.’ To stop him trying to pre-empt me (‘Oh, Tilly! Of course we’re invited!’), I’d pressed on in a rush: ‘You can’t go telling them to change the dates for something you still only know about by accident.’
The father in him reared up, offended. ‘Scarcely by accident!’
‘I don’t see what else you’d call it. It’s not as if Harry’s had the courtesy to ring up and ask, after all. “Oh, by the way, Dad, Tara and I are thinking of getting married. Would this date be all right for you and Tilly?”’
Now Geoff was turning sullen. ‘So are you saying I
should
just let them carry on with the arrangements as they are now?’
‘I think that’s best. After all,
you
can still go. And it won’t be the first time I’ll have missed a family occasion.’
He couldn’t fail to notice the veiled attack. ‘Well, I am going to ring them.’
‘No.’
‘Now you’re just being silly.’
And that was the cat out of the bag. ‘Don’t call my feelings “being silly”, please. Your son’s wedding matters to you, but my pride matters to me and I don’t want you phoning on my account. If it’s their choice not to check dates with me, it’s equally my choice not to have you ring them.’
Geoff sounded so uneasy. ‘Look, I expect they just didn’t think about it.’
‘How would they not think about it? Harry knows my job. He knows that once a year I go off on inspections and that the schedule is set in stone. If he was bothered, he’d have phoned to check.’
‘Surely I could just mention it …’
On any other matter, I might have been more conciliatory. (‘You must do as you like, Geoff. He’s your son, not mine.’) After all, the sheer bloody rudeness of the oversight had come as no real surprise. Right from the start, every last one of the Andersons had treated me
as
if I were some pleat in their family economy – there to be taken in and then let out again just as it suited them. But weddings are different. A wedding is a public event, and if you’re not there it shows. (‘I thought the young man had a stepmother. Has she not come?’) The clear indifference behind their carelessness drove me to snapping. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Geoff! Haven’t you learned yet that, in a family like this, there’s no such thing as “simply mentioning” something?’ And it was true. I could have pointed to a million instances over the years, from way back when grave little Harry, swinging his legs tensely under the kitchen table, just happened to mention, ‘Mum doesn’t really like it when Tilly does our washing,’ right through to Minna’s recent greeting on the phone. ‘Oh! Hi, Til. I thought you’d still be up in Aberdeen.’
In the end, of course, what with the blow-out off Troendseim, all the inspections were delayed. (No one to fly us out.) Head Office agreed we could vanish. The blokes went off climbing. I thought of joining them, but in the end decided that would be too close to staying in a sulk. Instead, I made the effort to cadge a flight back. I picked up a rather smart dress in Newcastle on the way home, and, by the time Geoffrey and I set off for Sussex the next morning, I was as free as anyone to celebrate the beginning of Tara and Harry’s life together.
And start looking forward to the end of our own.
I WAS STILL
married to bill when I met Geoffrey. Things had been sticky from the start, and I had lovers – one after another – cheerful, juicy lovers who swept me out to concerts and films and restaurants. I can’t remember ever having to step behind a pillar or bury my face in a menu till someone who knew me had passed. I think it must be that great long conveyor belt that runs from antenatal classes and nursery groups right through to school and teenage-party car pools that sucks most people into the community.
Women like me can dance all over that. And Bill wasn’t ‘social’. In fact, he was a grump. When he was home, I often found myself counting the hours till he went back on the rig; and I’m quite sure that he was happier watching films with the lads in those great floating cages than sitting morosely back home with
me
. Later, when I was working in oil too, I’d often meet people who worked with him. ‘Great chap, Bill,’ they’d tell me. ‘Bundle of laughs.
Marvellous
sense of humour.’ For quite a while, I took it all as tongue in cheek. But gradually I came to see that, just as I can be sweet and soft and uncritical in someone else’s bed, in someone else’s life, so Bill could be a warm and cheerful bloke away from me, and I felt better, rather than worse, for ratting on our marriage regularly.
By the end, we had the timings that worked best for us. He’d do his three weeks on the rig and, when he came home, I would as often as not be tossing my clothes into the bag for my next trip, or yet another course. And (what with the lovers) I managed to keep going. I don’t have friends. Even way back in school, I’m supposed to have had a grudging attitude towards company my own age. Once, in a flu epidemic, I came home beaming. ‘Good day?’ my mother asked me. ‘Brilliant!’ I admitted. ‘Almost everyone was off.’ One of my many ‘stepfathers’ once asked me, rather pointedly, ‘Is there a single one of your so-called “friends” you actually
like
?’ And now I think about it, looking back, I do see what he meant. I chose my companions always because they interested me, never for any more soft-hearted reason. So some were sullen. Some were volatile. And some were downright mad. (Beth put her fingers in a switched-on blender and was
off
school for weeks.) Some were from families that made my mother’s hair curl. None of them lasted as friends, and when I went to university I took up mostly with boys. For one thing, back then women were so rare in engineering that any girl could be a queen. And for another, I’d lost my nerve with my own sex. My last attempt at friendship with a girl broke down in our first year. Sarah knocked on my door, and then, instead of sitting on the rug in front of the gas fire as usual, made a short speech. ‘I’ve just come from my therapist. And I was telling her that every time I come away from you I somehow feel worse, as if you’d secretly amused yourself by seeing how many little things you can slip into the conversation to make me feel bad.’
‘What on earth—?’
‘No! Don’t interrupt. You know exactly what I’m talking about. All your mean, sneaky ways of coming back to the fact that I can’t do the work as well as you, and you have more boyfriends. Why, you’ve even managed to make me embarrassed about the way my jaw clicks when I’m eating apples. And isn’t it odd how the fact that my brother has been in jail keeps coming up whenever we’re—’
‘That’s bec—’
‘No!’ Sarah lifted an imperious hand. ‘Me and my therapist have—’
It was an open invitation to scorn. ‘You and your therapist!’
‘See! There you go again, trying to make me feel crap!’ She kept right on, though by now I was pushing her towards the door. ‘My therapist thinks that’s all you want your friends for – to make yourself feel bigger by putting them down, and amuse yourself sticking in your little pins of spite.’
I slammed the door shut in her face. But clearly, having mastered her valedictory address, she was determined to finish. ‘So that’s it, Tilly!’ she shouted through the woodwork. ‘I don’t want to be friends with you any more because it’s not working for
me
.’
Nor for anyone else, after that. It wasn’t clear to me how much the girls on my corridor had overheard, or how much Sarah had told them. But certainly everyone started to treat me with that unfailing courtesy that doubles as distance. I just got on with my work. It meant I got a better degree than most people round me, and solid praise from my tutors. So you could argue Sarah did me a giant favour, dumping me like that. And certainly I’ve never felt any gaping hole in my life where women friends ought to be. I married stupidly young – at twenty, if you can believe it; I myself scarcely can – and, what with Bill and my work and my lovers, I was busy enough.
Then I met Geoffrey. He was sitting on the beach
with
two miserable children. The wind was bitter. The toddler was howling, and the bigger one was whining hard. I walked past twice, and then my curiosity got the better of me and I walked past again. ‘Why don’t you take them up to one of the cafés?’
‘I’m waiting for someone,’ he told me.
‘Their mother?’
He nodded.
‘She’ll have the sense to go and search up there, surely?’
He gave me one of those ‘Well, you-don’t-know-her, do-you?’ looks, and I realized he must be a Sunday father. I felt great pity for him. ‘Look, I’ll stay here,’ I offered. ‘I’m dressed for it.’ (You don’t visit North Sea rigs, even in summer, without picking up warm togs.) ‘You tell me what she looks like, and if she comes I’ll tell her where you are.’
And that’s what I did – sat on the beach and let the wind spit spray into my face while he took his caterwauling kids up for hot chocolate. I probably saved all their lives. When he came back, I gave him my number. ‘In case you ever need some help again.’
That night I told my lover, who was a fat and easy Jewish businessman who loved his wife, ‘I rather think I might have met your replacement today.’