Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva (16 page)

‘I have a feeling she might have gone up to London and seen someoneat the time. But she never said anything to me. Anyway, nothing came of it.’ Joe smiled, unsure why.

‘How is she?’

‘Lenny? She’s wellworks too much, but I can’t get her to stop. She’s in Birmingham today.’

‘Birmingham?’

‘A lot of soldiers in hospitals in BirminghamScottish soldiers with partners in Scotland who can’t visit because they haven’t got any childcare and the MOD won’t issue rail passes…. We should get these boys to the beach soonthere’s a haze coming in; might rain.’ Joe got to his feet.

‘What about you and Mum?’ Jessica asked.

‘Me and Mum, what?’ Joe said, staring at her, surprised. They never talked about Linda; rarely ever had done.

Jessica was as surprised as him at the question. Only lately, she had begun to feel haunted by the failure of her parents’ marriage, and wondered, increasingly, whether her real struggle lay not in trying to be herself, but in trying not to be her mother.

‘Why didn’t you and Mum have any more children? Why was there only me?’

Joe was silent for a moment. ‘Things were difficult after you were bornwith Linda. I think we both sort of knew we couldn’t go through that again.’

‘How difficult?’

‘Well, you know how it isonly with Linda it was worse. She was put back in hospital when you were six months oldon a general psychiatric ward.’

‘A psychiatric ward?’

‘I thought you knew.’

‘I never knew that.’

‘She just couldn’t copethe shock of responsibility, I suppose. But it never got any better. I didn’t want her in
hospital, but I ran out of ideas and nothing I did made anything any better; didn’t even make things bearable. But…’

‘But what?’

‘When they started the electric shock treatment, I wished I hadn’t taken her.’

‘You never told me Mum had to have electric shock treatment after I was born,’ Jessica said, unnerved.

‘That’s what they did thenpeople didn’t use the expression “postnatal depression”. They said she was depressed and that’s the treatment they advised and I’d sort of gone under myself and suddenly we were in this place neither of us had any control over.’ He paused, staring unseeing up the length of the garden. ‘I don’t think we ever got over it, and we both knew we couldn’t go through that again.’ He broke off. ‘You all right? You did ask.’

‘I knowI know.’ She looked at him. ‘Have you got any notes or medical records or anything?’

‘Whatof Mum’s? No.’

After another minute’s silence, Jessica said, ‘What’s the time?’

‘The time? Around two.’

‘We should take the boys onto the beach.’

Neither of them moved.

‘I did love her at the start.’

Jessica watched him, unconvinced. ‘You don’t have to say that.’

‘I did love her at the start,’ he insisted. ‘I meannot being able to get your keys in the front door your hands are so busy shaking with excitementlove.’

‘I don’t think I ever loved her. She didn’t seem to get anything out of being around me and I never got anything out of being around her. Most of the time, I just couldn’t work out the point of her. I don’t think a single day of my childhood went by when I didn’t wish her dead.’

‘Jess,’ Joe said, ‘that’s a terrible thing to say.’

‘Then when she did die…’

‘What?’

Jessica shrugged, her eyes fixed on the cedar tree at the end of the garden that Findlay and Arthur had been attempting to climb for the past thirty minutes. ‘I don’t know…’

She forgot what she was about to say. There, on the baked mud beneath the cedar, was a small dog.

She shielded her eyes from the sun and stared. It was digging for something. ‘Whose dog is that?’ She pointed.

‘What dog?’ Joe, distracted still by their conversation, briefly scanned the garden.

‘That one therelooks like a dachshund.’

This time he looked properly. ‘I don’t see no dog, Jess.’

The dachshund had gone.

By the time they got to the beach there was a sea haze beginning to drift in, muffling the sun.

Jessica stayed up in the beach hut Joe and Lenny had bought while Joe took the boys out in the dinghy. She stood outside the hut, her hand raised over her eyes because of the glare coming off the sea, and watched Joe tow the dinghy out while Arthur and Findlay attempted to coordinate the oars. The unnerving flat of a dead calm was taking its toll on people and, as Jessica stood there, at least six groups of women with young children started to leave. Even the emaciated teenager who had been running down the rocks screaming when they’d first arrived, trying to dodge the empty beer cans that a group of friends was hurling at him, stopped suddenly and slid off the rocks.

The group left soon after this and their departure left the beach feeling strangely silent. Jessica went back into the hut and made tea on the gas stove, her eyes scanning the hut as she waited for the kettle to boil. The hut felt much more like Lenny and Joe’s than the house on Marine Drive. The house on Marine DriveJessica realised now for the first timefelt too big. The house on Marine Drive had been bought
after they’d sold their respective businesses, in anticipation of a family of their own. She wondered why they stayed.

There wasn’t much in the huta shelf full of shells and smaller bits of driftwood, with seagull feathers stuck in the cracks, like trophies; a pair of binoculars hanging from a nail by the door and a collection of buckets, spades, kites and fishing nets bought for Arthur from the beach shop that backed onto the hut, and a series of photographs on the back wall of the Grand after the Brighton bomb in ‘84.

As the kettle boiled, a woman in white espadrilles and white T-shirt dress with gold tassels stuck her head round the door.

‘Oh,’ she said, surprised to see Jessica. ‘Joe around?’

‘He’s in the sea.’

‘Oh,’ the woman said, exhaling smoke into the interior of the beach hut and smiling vacantly through it at her.

‘I’m Jessica.’

‘Jessica?’

‘His daughter.’

The woman picked something out carefully from between her teeth. ‘Lovely.’ She smiled awkwardly. ‘I thought so.’

She stood on the threshold of the hut, swaying slightly, the hand that wasn’t holding the cigarette clasped tightly round her waist as she stared out to sea, looking for any sign of Joe.

Jessica, pouring herself a cup of tea, had the impression that the woman spent a lot of time hanging round the hut in carefully contrived outfits, waiting for sightings of Joe. She found herself smiling and the woman, turning round, caught the smile.

‘I’d better go.’

Jessica nodded.

‘Tell him I called by, will you? Tell him I called by about Sunday.’

‘Who called by?’

‘OhAlexa. Alexa did.’

Jessica nodded again and watched her leave. There was a definite resonance of Linda in Alexashe wondered if Joe had noticed.

A cup of tea in her hand, she went outside again.

In the hut next door, Alexa’s legs lay dark and glistening with a glittery oil that defied the absence of any real sun. Alexa’s legs, stretched out on a plantation lounger that was half in, half out of the beach hut, was all that was visible of Alexa, whose toenails, Jessica noted, were painted gold to match the tassels on her T-shirt dress.

The snack hut behind them was playing a local radio station, and she heard the DJ advertising a hot-air balloon show and the fact that the Shoreham Theatre was staging Basil Brush and the Pirates of the Caribbean that summer.

There were people in the water still, and she could hear the bang and drone of a motorboat crossing the bay westwards. Beyond this, she made out a small dog, yapping. She thought it might be coming from Alexa’s hutAlexa looked as if she might keep small dogs. Then the sound vanished.

She went back inside to check on the timeit was 3.30: they should be getting back. Sipping at the rest of her tea, she took in the picture of the Grand. Joe had been in Brighton with Lenny the night the Grand went up. The night the Grand went up was the night Linda died.

Jessica swung away from the Grand collapsing in on itself, in black and white, back towards the sea.

There were three dinghies out on the water nowone of them was making its way back to the shore. She walked slowly down the beach towards the water’s edge, letting herself slip down the banks of pebbles marking the year’s high tides.

The tide had turned and was going out now, leaving a
strip of wet sand on an otherwise pebble beach for her feet to sink into as she watched the waves wash the blue and yellow dinghy up on the shore. Arthur was climbing over the side, yelling at no one and nothing in particular as he flung himself belly first into the cold water and came up gasping. Joe, laughing, started to splash him.

Jessica shouted, ‘Dad,’ but Arthur came up again, laughing and swallowing mouthfuls of water, trying to speak then giving up.

The three of them made their way reluctantly out of the water, with Findlay pulling the dinghy as the day lost the last of its brightness and the mist turned to a fine, hot drizzle.

Jessica followed the boys and the dinghy listlessly back to the beach hut where Joe had already changed.

As they walked back to Marine Drive, the tarmac on the pavement was still soft with the heat as the drizzle turned finally to rain.

Margery woke up.

She didn’t know where she was. It felt strange and smelt strange.

It wasn’t East Leeke and it wasn’t Prendergast Roadthe two places most of her life happened in.

To make matters worse, there was somebody padding around in the green and beige area just beyond her peripheral vision. After a while she made out a pair of grey leggings and a shapeless pink sweatshirt. It might be EdithEdith cleaned in an outfit not dissimilar to that, but Edith wore mauve, never pink. Pink, she said, clashed with her varicose veins and the burst blood vessels on her face. And it wasn’t Kate. The pink and grey shape was shifting towards her, talking.

‘Margery? It is Margery, isn’t it? I didn’t wake you, did I?’

Margery made an effort to haul herself up in the sofa until she was sitting right back in it and her feet had left the ground.

‘It’s coming up to four,’ the woman’s voice carried on. Then, ‘I’m Joe’s wifeLenny. I bet Joe made his sangria, didn’t he? He says he puts loads of lemonade in it, but he doesn’t.’

At last Lenny came into focus, and what a bloody mess she washer hair was wet, and she wasn’t wearing any make-up. Margery couldn’t even conceive of dying in a state like that, let alone receiving visitors.

Lenny must have read her face because the next minute she said, ‘I only came in about forty minutes ago and went straight upstairs to shower.’ She paused. ‘Can I get you a tea or anything?’

Margery nodded, distracted.

‘Sorry I wasn’t here earlierI had to go to Birmingham to see one of our soldiers and their family.’

‘Birmingham?’

Lenny nodded. ‘I run a charity for ex-soldiersWalking Wounded.’

‘Does Joe mind?’ Margery asked.

Lenny laughed. ‘Does Joe mind what?’

‘You out and about all the time?’

‘No idea,’ Lenny said, disappearing into the kitchen. ‘Anyway,’ she called out a few minutes later, ‘we’d go nuts cooped up in this house together, day in day out.’

Margery didn’t respond to this. She couldn’t imagine anything nicer than being cooped up with someone day in, day outand what was the point, anyway, in finding the perfect mate only to lead separate lives. She didn’t understand it, she really didn’t.

She sat in silence as the first few drops of rain fell gently against the window. The corners of the room had gone dark, and the conifers outside had started blowing over to one sideit was strange to think that they had eaten lunch outside.

‘Anyway,’ Lenny’s voice came through from the kitchen, ‘Joe’s got his garden and allotment.’ She appeared in the lounge doorway, wiping her hands on a towel with a map of Devon on it. ‘It was the first timetodaythat some of those soldiers had seen their wives since getting back from
Iraq. It’s difficult when there’s no homecomingpublic or private.’

‘Terrible, isn’t it?’ Margery said, watching the rain get steadier through the window, her mind drifting to other wars, other soldiers…other homecomings.

‘It wasn’t much different after the Falklands.’

Margery stared at her drying her hands, the rolled-back sleeves of the sweatshirt a darker pink in places where they’d got wet. ‘They’ll be wet,’ she said.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s rainingthey’ll be wet.’

‘Is it?’ Lenny stared through the window.

‘That your kettle?’

She jerked away from the doorframe she’d been leaning against and ran through to the kitchen.

Margery continued to watch the conifers blow over to one side and the rain spit against the window, but her nostrils were suddenly full of the smell of paint; a soft rosy paint that her mother and aunt had repainted most of the house in, in time for Tom’s homecoming. They’d been going through the motions of celebration ever since they’d got the letter giving them a datean exact datewhen they could expect to see Tom again because Tom was alive. Tom had survived when others hadn’t and that was reason enough to celebrate, to repaint the house a soft rosy pink when they still thoughtbefore the car pulled upthat there was some part of Tom intact enough to appreciate being surrounded by soft rosy pink. How old had she been? Five? She remembered kneeling at a window for what seemed like ages; she remembered the pins and needles and not daring to get up and stretch her legs in case she missed the car pulling up. It was the car she was waiting for, not Tom. They didn’t get many cars up their street. Then the car did pull up and she started shouting and everybody was suddenly franticall the women desperately pulling aprons off and tearing at
the scarves on their heads. She wondered what it must have looked like to Tom with all those faces at the downstairs window. He probably hadn’t seen any of themalthough he said later, much later, that he’d seen hers.

Then Tom had got out of the car.

Someone had helped him.

And at that moment, everyone had known that the new rosy pink walls probably wouldn’t mean all that much to Tom. Sam, who’d been hanging streamers and couldn’t even see out the window, left off and jumped down from the chair she’d been standing on, shoving the rest of the streamers in the cutlery drawer.

They weren’t excited any more, just afraid.

The man who brought Tom in didn’t take his hat off and spent barely five minutes on the doorstep with Aunt Teresa, explaining what they should do and what they shouldn’t dofor Tom, to Tom.

‘You’re thinking of someone,’ Lenny said, putting two cups of tea on the coffee table that had a basket on it with some wrinkled apples in it.

‘My cousin Tomhe was taken prisoner in Burma during the Second World War. He came to live with us after.’ Margery stared at the steam rising from the cup of tea, hearing her aunt Teresa’s voice saying over and over again, ‘What they did to him was terrible; it was terrible,’ until the rest of them had had enough and told her to shut up. ‘Everybody realised,’ Margery said out loud, ‘that it would have been better if he hadn’t survived.’

Lenny nodded. ‘That happens a lot. It’s an awful moment. When families realise that the person they’ve been hoping against hope comes back alive, does come back alive, and that their life is going to be more of a burden to them than their death would have been.’ She paused. ‘If you see what I mean.’

‘I do see.’ Margery watched Lenny lean forward and pick up her cup of tea. ‘Somehow he survived, came homeand there was us lot wishing he was dead. Especially Teresahis mothershe wished him dead more than any of us. I wished him dead as well, in the beginning, just because everyone else did, but then I was only five or something. After a time, though, I got used to him. The only person he didn’t bother was his dadUncle Tedand nobody had expected that. Ted did everything for himeverythingbecause his mum wouldn’t go near him. We just had to teach ourselves about Tom because we never heard from the authorities again…’

Margery picked up her tea and took a few sips, not caring when she burnt her mouth, wondering why she’d said what she’d just said to Lenny. It was the first time she had talked to anybody about Tom. She looked around her, stunned, as though she had been talking in her sleep and somebody had just told her what she’d been talking about.

‘Walking Woundedmy charitydo more grief counselling with families whose relatives come back alive than they do with families who have lost people in action. It’s just not something people think about.’

Margery nodded, but wasn’t really listening any more.

Then Lenny stood up suddenly. ‘They’re home.’

Margery watched her leave the room then stood up herself, half expecting to see the black Ford pull up and Tom step out. It took her a whileeven with her face pressed up to the glass, staring straight at themto make out Joe, Jessica and the children, wet from the sea and the rain, filing one by one into the porch.

Even after the front door was shut and the house became suddenly full of voices, Margery carried on standing at the window, waiting.