Separate Beds (27 page)

It was raining determinedly when a dripping Annie returned from work one evening. ‘What an awful June it’s been.’ She dumped her briefcase on a kitchen chair, peeled off her damp outer things and brushed down her plain cotton skirt.

Untidy it might be, but the kitchen was warm, the table laid – albeit in a manner that suggested haste rather than thought – and something was cooking. Annie brightened.

Tom wheeled round from the stove. ‘Surprise,’ he said. He moved over to the counter and began to chop cabbage with enthusiastic slashes.

Still in her office clothes, a cheerful-looking Emily searched in the cupboard by the back door, which served as a general dumping ground. ‘Aha.’ She extracted a carrier bag filled with old toys and games. ‘Got it.’

Jake lounged against the dresser, the tell-tale anguish in his eye that indicated a bad day. Annie averted her gaze. If only she could help his suffering and take it on herself. But the time when it was possible to mend a child’s broken heart with a cupcake, a hug, or a well-aimed swipe of her mother tiger’s paw at an enemy had gone.

She shook out her hair and sprayed raindrops. ‘What surprise?’

Whipping open the smaller of the two ovens, Tom produced a maiolica plate (much loved and bought in Siena) piled high with mash into which he had stuck sausages.

‘Wonderful.’ Annie instructed herself to concentrate on the surprise, and not on the treasured maiolica that might, at any second, crack from the heat of the oven.

Instead she kissed Jake, relishing the faintest whiff of the cedars of Lebanon, apple wood, olive wood, all the poetry and romance of wood that she fancied hung over him. ‘Maisie OK?’

Jake pressed down affectionately on her shoulders. ‘Sleeping like … well, she’s sleeping like a baby.’

Smiling, Annie turned to Emily and kissed her. ‘What
are
you doing with all that stuff?’

Emily submitted to the embrace. ‘Wait and see.’ Then she said, ‘Mum, are you going to leave your hair like that?’

‘Oh, God.’ Annie ran a hand over the damp untamed mess. ‘Better?’

Having heard Annie’s arrival, Hermione came slowly down the stairs.

‘Do you need help, Gran?’ Emily called up from the kitchen doorway.

‘Gran’s getting a bit lame, isn’t she?’ Jake muttered to Annie as Hermione appeared in the doorway.

‘How lovely to see you all.’ Hermione was her usual orderly self. She eased herself into Annie’s chair. ‘Supper ready?’

‘Is your back giving you trouble?’ asked Tom.

‘It’s fine, dear. I’m just a bit stiff. It happens at my age.’ She switched into Cassandra mode. ‘As you will discover.’

‘Are you sure, Gran? You hate admitting if anything’s wrong.’ Emily was concerned.

‘Hermione, would you mind shifting up one?’ Annie ran water into a jug and set it on the table.

‘Why, dear?’

‘That’s my place.’

‘I didn’t know there were
always
set places. Are there? How very formal.’

Annie said politely, ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

Hermione considered. Then she appealed to her son: ‘Tom, dear, would you mind if I sat here? Otherwise I’m in the draught. I’m sure Annie will see the point.’

Several pairs of eyes were trained on Tom, including those of his exasperated wife.

Annie
would
mind, she reflected tartly, and resents his lack of support.

Tom wore the despairing look of a man cornered by
harpies. ‘Hermione …’ He threw Annie a look.
Sorry
. He tried again. ‘Hermione, it is Annie’s place …’

The woman who was outsmarting her at her own table, Annie thought, was also the restless, troubled woman of the nights. Where Annie sat at the table was a small issue, and Hermione knew perfectly well that she was unlikely to stir up too much trouble over it. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake. Hermione, sit there for today and we’ll talk about it later.’ The smile flickering at the corners of Hermione’s pink-lipsticked mouth implied that talking about it would be over her dead body. Despite this, Annie gently refastened the rickety brooch on Hermione’s blouse. ‘You must get this mended or you’ll lose it. I expect you’re hungry. I am.’

She sat down in her unaccustomed seat with its new sightline. The kitchen was bursting at the seams. The family were like the bees coming home after searching for increasingly sparse clover banks and poppy fields, and the household had changed. How things have changed, she thought – and, after a moment, for the better?

‘It’s been a long time since lunch.’ Hermione was on a roll, ‘and I’ve been alone in my room all that time. No one has come near me.’

Tom said, ‘Rubbish. I brought you a cup of tea.’

‘But you didn’t really talk to me, Tom.’

‘At least you have a telly, Gran.’ Jake was ranging about the kitchen like an under-exercised dog. ‘I’d better have a go at mending ours.’

Emily rolled her eyes and Tom said, ‘Don’t be silly.’

‘Dad,’ said Jake, ‘you’ve no idea what I’m capable of.’

Annie could have sworn she heard Tom mutter, ‘Too right,’ but since he was stooped over the oven she could not
be sure. She jumped up, seized the empty water jug, jabbed

Tom in the ribs and issued a
sotto voce
warning: ‘Don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’ he muttered.

‘You know what. What do think you’re doing?’

The mash was lumpy, and that was to throw a kindly gloss over it, and the sausages required a touch more cooking. Nobody much cared, though, and to the accompaniment of companionably clacking cutlery, they ate the lot while a dismal day deepened into dusk and rain pattered against the windows.

Annie was tired and ate mostly in silence until she put herself back on duty. ‘Emily, how was work?’

Emily had indulged her disgusting habit of squirting tomato ketchup into her mash. She surveyed the bloody battlefield on her plate. ‘I’m getting used to it.’

‘Not too unhappy, then?’

‘Could be worse.’ Emily poked Jake in the arm. ‘It’s a job.’

But the Jake who would normally have laughed at the tease did not respond. Instead he flushed and his mouth set in a tense line.

Oh, Jake
, thought Annie, aching for him.

Hermione laid down her knife and fork with an elegant precision. ‘I miss Mia. She always used to come and visit me.’

There was a tiny pregnant silence.

Emily turned to her grandmother. ‘Do you feel more settled, Gran?’

‘How do I feel? If you really want to know, I feel pointless. No, don’t look like that, Tom. I am pointless, no two ways about it.’

‘Oh, Gran,’ said Emily. ‘You mustn’t feel like that.’

Hermione embarked on further mischief. ‘Tom, dear
… this is very good.’ She hooked a final wedge of sausage on to her fork. ‘Do you have to cook often?’ She gestured in Annie’s direction. ‘I know how busy Annie is.’

The rapidity – to be precise, the beat of an eyelid – with which the determination to take in and care for her mother-in-law could turn to truly murderous rage left Annie almost breathless. ‘Hermione, that’s
unfair
…’

Having failed her once, her repentant knight-errant now whipped in. ‘Actually, Annie does the lion’s share of the cooking, as you will have noticed.’ One eyebrow raised a fraction and sent a private signal.
Calm, Annie
. He returned his attention to his mother and deployed a diversionary tactic: ‘I used to love your steak and kidney pies. Do you remember the butcher when we lived in Deadforde who used to put a calf’s eyes on the newspaper and make me read through them?’

Anne breathed in deeply.

Emily gathered up the plates and stacked them in the dishwasher. Tom and Hermione were reminiscing, and Jake was helping Emily to clear the table.

Annie surveyed this activity. How was she going to cope with all this coming and going, negotiation and renegotiation? Craving peace and solitude, she let herself out into the dripping garden and squelched down the lawn.

The garden smelt drenched, and the night sky was obscured by cloud. Music floated out from the house on the right and someone in a house further down the terrace was shouting to someone else in a good-natured way.

However you dressed it up, growing older was no fun. It was a subject she and Sadie had discussed at length, the loss of looks, health, energy, and even the irrepressible
Sadie had agreed she couldn’t fight it on all fronts. ‘Just the face-lift one.’ There was nothing for it but to accept a future scaled back to more modest lines – but she had certainly not anticipated this invasion of number twenty-two. Was it so bad? The alternative – silence and isolation – was said to be worse by those who endured it.

‘Pah, to growing older,’ she murmured and, because the explosive constant was pleasurable on her tongue, repeated it: ‘
Pah!
’

The light appeared reluctant to vanish entirely. After all, high summer was (technically) just round the corner. Weighed down under its slick of water – she smiled at the fancifulness – the garden appeared to be frustrated by its inability to get on with it. Weren’t they all? Wandering down to the shed, she was surprised to see paving stones had been laid leading up to it and the grass cleared. She also spotted a new catch on the door, plus a light rigged up inside.

She turned it on and stepped inside.

Tom has been here
. The interior had been cleared and swept, the window painted. Tools were arranged on the shelves and hung on wall nails. A small, battered armchair had been inserted into one corner on top of a garish red-and-white rug, which had, clearly, been brought in from a charity shop.

Exuding Essence of Masculine Refuge, it was all that the male stereotype was often described to be, and Annie liked it very much. How nice it would be to skulk in this peaceful, rooted place. How clever it had been of Tom to create a refuge. And unexpected, too, for Shed-man Tom was not the person with whom she was acquainted.

Balanced across the chair was a garden fork with a roll of duct tape slotted on to a tine. Setting them aside, she
dropped down into the chair, closed her eyes and relished a little high of creosote and fresh paint.

Subject: Hermione. Question: how do I cope?

… An immaculately groomed Hermione had not said much when Annie, on first being brought to meet her by Tom, had turned up in jeans, T-shirt and clumpy cowboy boots. She had merely looked and thought plenty.

‘How do you do?’ she had said. ‘I’m always delighted to meet Tom’s friends. But, and you will have to forgive me, I can never remember their names. He has so many, you know.’

She had been polite, attentive and coolly well-mannered, but the look in her eye had suggested more violent feelings. Those Annie did fathom. She had served a Sunday lunch of roast beef with trimmings in a dining room furnished as if it was a miniature stately home, which was a little ridiculous for a tiny cottage. Annie had been struck by the neatness of the rooms and, despite the ancestral furniture crammed into them, their lack of personality. Save for a couple of invitations displayed on the mantelpiece, not one stray object or piece of paper had been permitted to roost on a surface. Did Tom’s mother knit? Or cook using recipe books? Appreciate flowers? To Annie, she appeared a woman without form or vanity or hinterland.

They drank coffee in the garden, and the shadows thrown by the
leylandii
hedge fell across disciplined flowerbeds and a manicured lawn. Hermione worked away at her charm-school questions – where did Annie live, what did her parents do, what did she hope to do? Tom sent her lustfully loving looks and Annie felt both guilty and disloyal to him. Hermione, and her set-up, was all that she disliked.

Eventually Tom had cleared his throat. ‘Mother, we want to tell you something. Annie and I are going to get married.’

In a trice, Hermione’s stream of polite inquiries had dried up, and the mask was peeled back to reveal a snarl:
no one is worthy of my son
. After several painful seconds, she managed, ‘That’s ridiculous.’

Tom’s eyes had narrowed. ‘Why?’

Hermione recovered herself, but only just. ‘Because you hardly know each other.’

It was only when Annie had produced her own children that she began to divine the measure of the other woman’s desire to keep her son close for ever. She had had no way of knowing how instinctive, how powerful that reaction was and had been deeply hurt and offended. Neither had she understood that time would be on her side. If Annie grew older, Hermione went from older to
old
. If Annie discarded the jeans and boots in favour of the office skirt and blouse, Hermione was forced by varicose veins to give up wearing sheer stockings in favour of support tights, grew fatter at the waist and thinner in the bosom. ‘Oh, how lumpen I am,’ she once confessed in a rare moment to Annie, ‘how desexed’ …

‘Annie, what are you doing here?’

Annie awoke from her doze with a start. The smells of creosote and paint had become almost unpleasant, and her head buzzed. She ran her hand over her face and pulled back her hair. ‘Dozing,’ she confessed. ‘When did you do all this?’

He reached down and retrieved the discarded fork and duct tape from the floor. ‘Now and then. During the day.’

‘It’s nice.’

‘Yup. It is. Listen, you’re wanted indoors.’

‘Can’t we stay out here?’

‘Not really.’

He was short to the point of curtness and, with a slight shock, Annie understood she was unwelcome in
his
shed. ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’

‘It’s a bolt-hole, if you like.’

She swallowed. ‘I understand.’

The disturbed moths and flies enacted their own dramas as backdrop to their conversation. Tom shrugged. ‘You have your
work
… I have the shed.’

As if that explained everything, she thought sadly.

Tom took up a pair of scissors that had been stowed in a flowerpot, wrestled with the duct tape and cut a length.
He was waiting for her to move
. Wrestling with it, he managed to wrap it around the fork handle. ‘I’ve been meaning to do this for some time. I’m pretty sure this fork belonged to my father.’ He looked up at Annie. ‘I was going to throw it out.’