The Whole Day Through (12 page)

Having never seen the point of sweets or baking, having raised little Laura on a scrupulously healthy and frugal diet, Mummy had developed a childishly sweet tooth in her old age. Laura had to buy her several chocolate bars in the weekly shop which Mummy evidently ate in secret, as they were never shared. Occasionally Laura would find squares lost down the sides of chairs
or backs of pillows and, if unobserved, would eat them swiftly and without compunction. She suspected she was putting on weight.

Mummy had already laboriously set tea things on a tray. Laura put the kettle on to boil then hurried out ahead of her to bank up her wooden garden seat with the pile of cushions stacked by the door for just this purpose.

‘I was looking for something in my tights drawer when I found a box of stuff. Junk really. Photographs and so on. It’s by the breadbin. Keep what you want and we can chuck the rest.’ As was her wont, Mummy carried on talking as she walked slowly into the garden and out of range. ‘And talking of chucking, we should clear half the things out of that drawer. I’m never going to wear tights again, just hideous knee-highs, so one might as well…’ She said something about making tree ties then her words became indistinct.

‘Can’t hear you,’ Laura said, too quietly to be heard herself, and she lifted the lid of the box – an old Terry’s
1767
one – and began to pick through the contents. There were holiday photographs that had all been left out of the albums for some reason. Laura with her father, smiling, bearded and now crazily young-looking, in front of Christchurch Priory, and with her mother at Wimborne Minster. Laura’s parents photographed lopsidedly by Laura, beaming on either side of a seaside donkey in a straw hat. Laura on her own, aged about six, in a Ladybird jersey and trousers with little elasticated straps under the feet, looking tense and isolated in
an expanse of anonymous grass. Then there were several buttons and toggles to longlost garments and a conference badge announcing Professor Harriet Jellicoe. There was a picture of her and Dad looking glum beside the Arsénal canal and several holiday postcards from illegible friends, inexplicably retained.

As the kettle whistled, she tossed the lot in the rubbish bin and made their tea and set slices of cake on plates. Then she retrieved the box from among the kitchen scraps to take out the small photographs of her father looking young and of her smaller self, of solemn Lara, which she tucked into her pocket before carrying the tray out to the garden.

The sun had been shining all day so their little oasis was rich with the scents of sunbaked lavender and sweet pea. Bees were becoming noisily drunk in two great potted stands of candidum lilies in pots that framed the sitting area. Mummy was ever more reliant on pot gardening to create her effects since it involved less stooping and merely required Laura to move the pots about. A rotating quartet of pots in the same place had already seen dwarf daffodils and anemone blanda give way to delft blue hyacinths and green and white parrot tulips. Autumn would bring acidanthera and nerines, whose strong shade of pink always gave concern. Winter ushered in a quieter, longer display from winter pansies and a variegated ivy or two.

Mummy sat in dappled shade with her mottled, still skinny legs on what had been a gardener’s kneeler but
now served as a footstool. With her pretty frock and hair recently brushed and sitting in a kind of bower, she might have been an advertisement for a retirement bond or geriatric emergency support.
Mrs Lewis can rest assured. Can you?
Only she was Professor Jellicoe and was reading a gruesomely illustrated book called
Plagues of Venus
she was reviewing for the
TLS
, which made the image a little less cosy.

Laura poured their tea and passed cake, which Mummy ate at once, shedding yellow crumbs across her open book.

‘Did you find the box?’

‘Rubbish mainly.’

‘Thought so.’

Laura handed her the photograph of herself on the expanse of grass. ‘Where was this?’

Mummy stared at it. ‘God knows,’ she said. ‘Could have been anywhere. If you find the album with you at that age you could probably match the clothes and work it out that way.’ She looked at the picture again. ‘You were such a
serious
little girl.’

‘I had pretty serious parents.’

Mummy handed the picture back without comment, brushed the crumbs off her book and continued to read. ‘Is there any more cake?’ she asked.

‘Of course,’ Laura said and fetched it. She knew it was irritating asking questions of someone trying to read but she didn’t care. She had fetched the cake, she had earned the right. ‘Did you regret it, ever: your relationship with Dad?’

Mummy carried on reading as she answered, an old trick, like broaching tricky subjects when driving. ‘Of course not. He saved me. My father was of that generation that would only give up a daughter to another man, whatever they thought of him, not to a career.’ She laid the book on her lap thoughtfully. ‘I feel guilty sometimes, of course. Your father would have been happier with a more womanly woman.’

‘No!’

‘He wanted far more children. Maybe to make up for his lack of family. For all his disapproving talk about patriarchy, deep down he’d have liked a tribe but I wasn’t one of nature’s mothers. Not really.’ She caught Laura with her cool, patrician gaze. ‘Was I?’

‘I had no points of comparison,’ Laura said and looked away to watch a thrush that was hunting through a flowerbed. It pounced on a snail and threw it hard against the wall.

‘Do you want to go to Evensong later? I mean, would you mind?’ Mummy asked.

‘Not at all. I’ll drive us down at five.’

‘You’ve got hardly any work done today. I’m sorry. Tomorrow can be more peaceful.’

‘That’s all right. No. It was simply that I was lying on my bed just now looking at the furniture and I realized that, apart from the book garages, which were always yours in any case, you didn’t keep anything from Ripplevale Grove.’

‘All that awful pine!’

‘But you lived with it for decades.’

‘I had to. We were poor and it was cheap. After a while I stopped seeing it. But after he died, and I was retired, I started seeing it again and without him it wasn’t very bearable. Or London. Lara, it was only tables and chairs.’

‘Laura.’

‘Laura. I think of him often. Every day. Don’t you?’

‘Probably.’

‘What’s happened to that nice man who came by? The one like the sexy BBC man with the gap in his teeth. I liked him.’

‘So did I. Oh. You know. It’s complicated when you’re grown up. More tea?’

Mummy shook her head, glanced at her father’s watch and returned to the plagues of Venus.

So. Ben had at last been mentioned, made a topic of conversation. Laura continued to think of him as she set their tea things back on the tray, carried them back to the house, put away the cake and loaded the dishwasher. Her thoughts began to overwhelm her.

She hurried up to her room, closed the door, kicked off her shoes and lay on her bed, just for a moment. She rolled onto her front, pressing her fists into her groin. She felt his weight above her, his voice at her ear and cried out into the depths of her pillow.

Darling. You always said – you probably don’t remember – we should never call each other that because it’s what people call lovers they no longer love. So I’m sorry but I like it. I like its sturdy Saxon feel. Would deorling be less offensive? (Don’t be impressed – just looked that up on the net.)

Your wonderful little visit to find me at work, totally unlooked for, unhoped for, unearned, has sent my mood rocketing and sod work, blow patients, I want to share it with you. You know I’m hopeless on the phone and not much better at explaining myself face to face. There are already several versions of this torn up in the office bin and still I’m stumbling.

We couldn’t talk when you visited but perhaps that was a good thing if it stopped me blurting things that should be said with care. But now that I’ve had a while to think everything seems so clear, so simple suddenly
,
as if you’d blown the clouds away and all the shades of grey were gone.

I love you and I want to be with you always, whatever it takes and whatever compromises or sacrifices that involves me in and mess that means wading through.

Bobby will cope. He’ll adjust and cope, of course he will. It’s taken this time of worry and not talking to make me see I had my priorities in a twist and I’ve been crazily overprotective of him. Change is a part of living and he has to get used to it if he’s to have independence.

But all of this assumes agreement on your part. Typical male bloody arrogance, I can hear you say. My behaviour has offered you an insult that would perfectly entitle you to tell me to bog off. Oh but I hope you won’t. Can you ever forgive me? Can we somehow not forget but draw a line, at least, and start again? Christ, I hope so.

I probably won’t post this, my deorling. I think I’m too shy. Either that or I’m just rehearsing on paper, building up my courage for the things I need to tell you. I love you and all will be well. All my love. Absolutely all of it. Bx

It was a perfect evening, a sky of intense blue, swifts swooping down across the Close’s lawns after flies, a handful of the local youth, blasted by cider and sun, flopped across one another beneath the lime trees.

Laura parked in a disabled space by the long run of flying buttresses along the great nave’s southern flank. She could hear the choir rehearsing in a nearby chamber as she unfolded her mother’s walker and rolled it up to the passenger door.

Scorning as ever to go into the cathedral with the tourists and face embarrassment at the begging boxes – which, in any case, represented a big detour if one was aiming for the quire – Mummy struck out for the passage called the Slype where a sort of service entrance was tucked away from public view. She had once stood behind one of the canons as he let them both in there
and had memorized the code for the lock, OISJBN850H, as a mnemonic.

‘Once I was 16. Joy! But now am 85. Oh Hell!’ she told herself as she punched letters and digits into a little pad. And in they went, through the south transept, past the angels kneeling around the Wilberforce tomb and up the steps to the quire by the quickest route. There was a wheelchair lift but Mummy disliked that as it was on the far side of the building, and preferred to tug herself up the stairs by the handrail while Laura walked close beside her just in case, carrying the walker.

They were greeted by a sideswoman as though they were regulars, which perhaps they had become by now, and found themselves seats, thrones effectively, in the choir stalls. Laura still found it hard to believe that such splendid, ancient seats, just feet from choir and clergy and each a museum piece, were available to the public. She looked around her defensively, prepared as ever for some verger or official to move them on.

Religion had played no part, good or bad, in her life until now. She was raised in carefully scientific godlessness and sent to schools where RE was judiciously ecumenical and thus deeply confusing and dull. Apart from the most obvious, primary school bits like Adam and Eve, Jonah and the Whale or David and Goliath, she was quite unfamiliar with the Bible, especially with its New Testament, her school in Camden having been eager not to offend its Jewish constituency. So she had always felt disadvantaged visiting art galleries and churches on
holiday because so much of the painting and sculpture was a literature she could barely read.

Slipping into Evensong, like good quality chocolate biscuits and George II side tables, was one of the luxurious tastes Mummy had acquired in widowhood. She claimed she had simply been exploring the cathedral one afternoon during her first year in the city when the service was announced. She was making her way to one of the exits along with the other flustered godless when the choir began singing an introit. The beauty of the music forced her to take a seat to listen, if only from a distance. She had come back several afternoons after that, always sitting well outside the quire so she could enjoy the music and words but not feel implicated in the act of worship.

‘But then I thought,
This is silly. Who am I so scared of? I don’t care what people think; my faith or lack of it is entirely my affair.
’

So she took to sitting in the quire with everyone else and soon discovered one didn’t have to sit in the boring modern chairs towards the altar but could sit in the stalls, on tough tapestry cushions, above exquisite misericords, and while away the service’s drier intervals admiring the carvings on every side – oak huntsmen, animals, leaves and fruit. She remained in her seat for the prayers, but then, looking around, she saw that kneeling was beyond many of the older worshippers and beneath the dignity of many of the younger ones. She stood for the creed, however, with everyone else.

When Laura first attended with her she was astounded at this. ‘But it’s mumbo-jumbo!’

‘Yes.’

‘But you know all the words!’

‘Of course. I was a nicely-brought-up girl. I attended confirmation classes at St Swithun’s for a year when I was twelve and was confirmed at thirteen, by the Bishop of Winchester in this very cathedral.’

‘But you don’t believe it now?’

‘I’m not sure I believed it then. I was just being obedient. You got confirmed in the same spirit that you got married, in the fond hope that something solid would follow on the heels of faith. And since I don’t believe, I don’t see the harm in saying the words. They’re nice words. Certainty is so reassuring. And it seems courteous, somehow, like joining in a native custom. If we were in a Hindu temple or among Zoroastrians, I expect I’d try to fall in with whatever they were doing in the same way. To be polite. The music and the building are so beautiful it seems a cheap enough offering in return.’

Laura did her best to remain her father’s daughter. She looked pointedly about her or even read inappropriate parts of the prayer book or cathedral pamphlets during the prayers and remained staunchly seated when all around her stood and faced east for the creed. But it was hard. She didn’t like people staring, didn’t like to draw attention to herself. And, for all his brave words about bigotry and patriarchy and opiate of the masses, her
father never faced the enemy on home ground. So she compromised and took to standing and facing east like everyone else, but kept her silence and resisted the cowardly urge to move her lips and did not rise to Mummy’s mischievous offer to teach her the words.