Faustine (6 page)

No, as I was saying, he irritated her, your grandfather, when he came to the flat, because he walked around like the male lion in the pride, checking glasses and plates in the cupboard, passing remarks about the carpet and cork tiles being worn, that kind of thing.

Your mother Anna didn’t go for that either, as you can imagine. She often said that the only way forward was to destroy the authority of the father altogether.

No, she didn’t get on with Bert very well.

It was Muriel who put herself out, almost in spite of
herself
. She’d had a hard day, but she still stopped off at the butcher and got chicken for a
coq
au
vin.
Anna told her that those attitudes to male supremacy would keep women in slavery until the day they woke up and came to terms with themselves. But then your mother was in the very forefront of the new generation of feminist women – not that that was the name they called themselves at that time.

 *

Now I look back to that room on a river wider and deeper and more treacherous than the chalk stream that winds slowly behind us down to the weir at Slape. I look back, and I remember – Muriel was the one who made shadows on my bedroom wall with her hands: a rabbit, a fox, a silly dog with waggling ears. Muriel was like a magician to me, for
she could do anything, she could pull any surprise out of a hat, she could get me what I wanted just as soon as I asked for it.

 *

It maddened your mother, Jasmine says, as if she is the one this time to guess my thoughts. There was Anna trying to bring you up to be self-sufficient, to go about the world with the same sense of belonging to your share of it as a boy would have: putting you in dungarees, making sure you had building bricks and counting-beads …

 *

And there, I think sadly, was Muriel, coming home with dresses of spun strawberry silk, a Viennese outfit with a tiny apron and a dirndl skirt and, of course, the dolls.

But my mother it was who sent me away.

 *

The arrangement was, Jasmine says, as a wind whips in from the downs and she pulls her raincoat close round her, that I should pick you up from the nursery and Muriel would buy the food for supper on the way home. Greg and Sammy Chen would come about seven, the same time as Bert was expected to turn up.

Now, I said that Muriel didn’t exactly want to protect herself from your grandfather by having other guests, but, consciously or not, she was making sure that Bert couldn’t steam ahead with his condescending remarks about her work, if the art director of
New
Image
– which Greg was (Sammy Chen was his boyfriend, all very discreet in those days) – was there to lead with a few conversations of his own.

As it turned out, the whole thing was a disaster.

You must remember that Muriel had taken quite a few knocks in her time. It was insensitive of me, I know, not to
see it then, but I think she was really upset by the rift that was widening daily between her and your mother.

Everything Muriel was, Anna seemed to despise more and more.

Muriel was superstitious, for instance, always consulting her stars and once even going to an astrologer. Actually, we went together – it was just good fun – but Anna was too solemn about these things. She took it all very seriously, and she actively disapproved.

– Oh come on, Anna, Muriel would say. You’re the one who’s likely to get an exciting new man in your life, not me. Jasmine and I just go for a good laugh.

Now there were two things there that gave Anna the pip – and anyone but Muriel could have seen what they were. One was, of course, the implication that Muriel’s life was boring. It makes the young feel guilty, I think, to believe their parents are washed up. Well, it
was
boring; and so was mine (for a living I typed up manuscripts for technical or scientific authors, and it was lonely, tedious work).

And Muriel’s days in the offices of
New
Image
weren’t much better. She used to tell me – with that rueful laugh of hers, again – that she’d had another invisible day at the office, and at this rate, they could give away her desk
altogether
. Not one single soul – with the exception of the gays from the art department, Greg and Sammy Chen – had so much as looked at her or said hello all day.

– Once you get to a certain age, Muriel would say, you simply cease to exist.

The other implication in Muriel’s guileless remark about visiting astrologers was that Anna was on the look-out for a man. It went, I suppose, against everything Anna believed in so fervently – along with the rest of the collective, of course – that women must show they didn’t live only for
love, and having children (and here Jasmine looks away from me, as if she’s suddenly embarrassed to find me there, to remember who I am). It suggested that Anna’s new vantage point in life was nothing more than filling in time before a new man came along.

Yet the irony is, Jasmine goes on, after a pause, and a long sigh, the irony is that a new man did come along. Not, she now adds hurriedly, for she must see the conflicting emotions in my face, not that Anna let that stand in the way of the Press – not for long, anyway.

And Jasmine’s voice trails off. What do I show her, in my features; and what lies behind the very thin skin, the paper that lies in folds, like a badly wrapped package, round the bones of her face? Could she still blush? She seems too bloodless for that. Yet she must have seen that I knew nothing of any new man – not consciously, at least – in my mother’s life. She has opened a wound. Has she done it on purpose? And if so, why?

That evening, the evening of Bert’s arrival, Jasmine says, the night of the dinner party. First, I had a work crisis at the last moment and I had to tell Muriel I couldn’t pick you up from the all-day nursery. Your mother was busy, of course.

 *

Of course, I say to myself. Anna was always busy. It’s the hardest word for children to bear, this ‘busy’ that means they must wait another age for food/love/care.

 *

So Muriel had to pick you up and you went to buy the food together. Now that’s all I know, with any certainty, for I couldn’t think what the matter could be when I came to the flat in Chelsea at seven o’clock and there was no one there to let me in.

It was one of those intercoms that’s high up on the wall
– the whole building looked as if it had been built for giants, Victorian giants with big demands on space, at that – and one had to stand on tiptoe and shout into the damned thing in order to get heard at all.

After I’d rung about ten times the buzzer went and I was let into the hall.

I did notice that Anna’s bike was there. The freeholder, a Major Heathcote, was fairly kind about that sort of thing, and it saved having to lug it up three flights of lino-covered stairs and through a narrow door – and that followed by a flight covered in a haircord stair-carpeting that Muriel had tried to lay herself and was all bunched at the sides.

My first thought was that Muriel might have mixed
feelings
about Anna being there so early. I knew she rather dreaded a lot of members of Anna’s all-female group turning up as well – not because Bert would mind it, I can assure you, but because he might make a fool of himself by liking it just a bit too much and making a pass at a couple of them. I mean, Bert was an attractive fifty-two year old and he needed reassurance every minute of the day that he still was just that.

Still, there was no proof that the collective was round, or planning to come round, and I walked up the three flights. To find, rather surprisingly, the flat door closed.

I heard you crying, Jasmine says, looking at me right in the eyes for the first time. And I began to worry that
something
had happened in there, though I couldn’t think what. I banged on the door – as anyone might – but no one came down to open it.

Then I heard the doorbell, followed by the buzzer again. And Bert Twyman was right behind me, bounding up that purple lino with the white, swirling pattern – for some reason, in all the time I spent going round to see Muriel at
that flat, it was the puky pattern on the floor-covering that sticks with me longest. But I don’t know why.

 *

I can tell you why, I think, but on no account say. Because there’s one thing you have no control over, and that’s memory. It insists. You push it away; it comes back again like a hungry dog, to gnaw at the bones you throw to make it go away.

And I tried so long not to let it in, to keep the past a place where Muriel, like the star at the top of the little tree she decorated, with my ‘help’ each year, was the only constant, shining thing.

 *

The flat door was opened by Muriel in the end, and after Bert and I had made a few awkward jokes together (he doesn’t like middle-aged women, they make him feel uncomfortable – that’s easy to see), we followed her up the stairs into the flat proper. She was shaking and obviously in a very bad way indeed. But when we asked her – when Bert had gone with his usual stride into the sitting-room and looked around with a proprietorial air, automatically
checking
the positions of the sofas and chairs, going over to the drinks tray as if a loyal wife had laid it out for him after a hard day at the office, Muriel would only say it was nothing, really. She didn’t know what had got into her. – It was just that the door handle broke … the china one … I was afraid poor little Ella would hurt herself, you see.

It just didn’t seem convincing. And it didn’t explain the kind of crying I’d heard from you – loud, really frightened crying. You know the kind of thing.

 *

Yes, I do, I think, I know the sound the kids in the nursery in Melbourne make when their mums don’t come and fetch
them – because they’re in hospital having another baby – or the sad sobbing, after an example of grown-up wickedness or selfishness has been witnessed.

Yes I do remember the door handle. Now I do.

I’m running ahead of my grandma up the stairs (she’s carrying heavy shopping-bags and she’s panting and
groaning
a bit with the effort) and she calls up after me to go to my mother’s room.

– See if Anna’s in, Ella darling. Her bike’s in the hall, she might be. And say she’s here for supper, isn’t she? Here for supper. Now you can say that.

It’s true, I could pass on little messages like that. Muriel was very proud of what she called my ‘reading’. But on this occasion I decide not to shout it out by my mother’s door. I decide to run in.

The door handle is round and white, with a blue wreath painted on it. It’s probably been on the door since the artists and Rossetti types who lived in these gloomy Chelsea studios and mansion blocks first furnished the flat. That, however, is not something I know about, and I attack the knob with gusto, wrenching it from right to left until it wobbles and begins to break away from the door altogether.

I’m afraid of getting into trouble – children always are, even if someone as kind as Muriel is in charge – and I let out a piercing wail. One last pull at the handle and the door suddenly swings open, while the china knob stays in my hand like an uprooted plant, with wood shavings round its base and some of the porcelain chipped off and lying just below me at my feet.

 *

Greg and Sammy Chen came, Jasmine says, but the dinner was completely spoiled. It was almost uneatable, for one
thing. And that was very unlike Muriel, who was a very comfortable cook, if you know what I mean.

Well, something in her – what Anna would
contemptuously
call the ‘Little Women’ side of her – had made her struggle to the shops for that chicken for the
coq
au
vin.
And what came out of the pot tasted of – well, nothing, really. Leathery and awful.

I sometimes think, Jasmine adds in a thoughtful tone, that it was the presence of Bert Twyman that made the food go off like that. You know, like the old superstitions about menstruating women touching household utensils, that kind of idea. Except, I suppose you could say that Muriel was menopausal, and maybe Bert couldn’t take it and that turned the food sour.

Jasmine laughs. Then she says with another sigh, I was being frivolous, my child. Whatever had happened earlier in the evening had ruined Muriel’s powers as a cook. And I can tell you, Greg and Sammy Chen were disappointed too. All the stories about office politics fell completely flat. We all went home early.

 *

I stand at the end of my mother’s bed and I start to scream. I advance, still with my ridiculous little china door handle, right up to the side of the bed, and I try to pull him off; I try to kill him.

The man who is lying on top of my mother and pushing himself with angry kicks right into her, while his hands are throttling her, like the worst boys do at the nursery.

But this is a man.

They don’t seem to be able to see or hear me. And my mother is moaning – it takes me a long time to understand the sound, because I’ve never heard my mother make it before.

She is loving it. The moans are pure pleasure.

Then my grandma, searching for me, white in the face, runs into the room after me.

 *

Muriel told me the next day, Jasmine says. On the phone from the office. She said Anna had a new boyfriend. She sounded a bit funny about it, I have to say. But I put it down to a spoiled evening, and I pointed out that any plan that concerned both Bert and Anna was bound to be a social disaster. They’re both strong-willed – I call it pig-headed, I said to Muriel, to cheer her up.

But she never did seem to cheer up about it, I don’t know why. And I never did know what happened that evening, while I and then Bert Twyman were trying to gain admission to the flat.

 *

As Jasmine finishes speaking, a bell sounds from the house. It’s a deep-throated bell, and I think at first it must come from the little church and be announcing a death or an impending burial.