Faustine (9 page)

I’m walking through the garden of Woodford Manor. I go down over the lawn, where moles have thrown up their piles of bright, fresh earth. I go past the greenhouse, where glass is missing from the whole of one side and a fig, once bursting with fruit, now stands with nothing to offer but small, unripe swellings of green.

How do I know this? Did I eat a fig here once, when the greenhouse was flourishing with peach, apricot – and orchids at the far end, which I see in my mind’s eye now – vulgar, flashy, the colour of the smart beige and maroon luggage that belongs to the strange lady who brought me down here in the car …

The lady who was, and was not, Muriel.

It all seems very close and far away, that day. Like looking into an aquarium, and seeing a world there, complete with highly coloured fish and weed in clear, waving detail; and yet not being able to touch it, sealed from it by a pane of glass.

But I must have come here. I can see the fig – it must have been the first I’d seen or tried – and the millions and millions of scarlet filaments in its flesh, like a secret light bulb that would glow at night when the lady had taken me away and no one was there to see.

I bite into the fig. I make a face. The lady laughs down at me.

 *

It’s well after noon by now and very hot. The grass yields to a kind of scrub, dotted with daisies and some swampy bits too, where my foot goes in suddenly, to mud buried under an army of apparently dry reeds.

I pull out, but my sandal has gone, and I stand there on one leg, looking and feeling a fool.

But even that is better than feeling what I really feel, after seeing Muriel’s ring on the fourth finger of the left hand of Lisa Crane.

Further down the riverbank – and I hobble there, over the broken bridge where Jasmine and I walked this morning – I hear guitars playing and voices singing; and I stop, to see where the hippies encroached on Woodford land.

I’m surprised by how proprietorial I feel at the sight of these trespassers. They’ve done no harm, really, and yet I recoil when I see the mess they’ve left behind them – the rusting cans and the buckled plastic utensils, useless, garish, indestructible.

I feel like a conservationist: prim, English, shocked by any intrusion from the modern world into my idyllic rural retreat. I stoop and pick up a smashed toy train, bright and blue synthetic material of some kind, and without wheels, beyond hope of repair.

But there is nowhere to throw it and I drop it again, in the long grass by the edge of the woods where they have made a makeshift sort of camp.

And then I see him a little further on, as I limp along the bank of the river, away from the house and the relics of Lisa Crane.

I am a little higher than he is, for he’s standing almost in the water and staring at the opposite bank, as if trying to decide whether to go on down to the weir and use the bridge there or walk across.

He wouldn’t do that, of course. He is too smartly dressed. The black suit looks out of place here, where everything is so green and the celandines and flag iris make the only colour, under a sky of the very palest blue.

He stands out like an exclamation mark on a blank page. And yet he does not denote surprise, for me. I have seen him before.

Behind the man in the black suit, the hippies return to their camp. A fight breaks out, and empty beer cans clatter against the trees. In front of him the river swirls, at its deepest point here. And all the effluvium, all the filth in the west of England, seems to have choked into the river now.

Where this morning the water had been as clear as the glass of a child’s marble, with the blue and green moving shadows of the trees and the sky trapped in its transparency, now it is evil, indescribably filthy, ruined by the outpourings and detritus of man.

I know the stranger by the side of the river brings all this with him: the fighting, drinking, swearing louts in the woods; the foul pollution of the stream.

He turns and sees me. At that moment I know the earth is very old, and cannot much longer endure the chaos and ruination brought upon it.

The dark, quiet man pulls a gold watch on a chain from his pocket and stares down at its face.

The gold catches a fierce ray from the sun. I see a million haloes come down on the river and fly up again; and when I can see once more, he has gone.

Jasmine is in the kitchen, stuffing a chicken. Since I saw the image of Lisa on the screen in the room across the hall, since I saw the man who stands as patient as a fisherman on the riverbank, I have understood fragments of my past which I can fit together now, make a pattern where before there was only the blank of absence and trying to forget.

– I’ll tell you, Jasmine says. She is blending sage and breadcrumbs and egg together in a Magimix and her hand goes deep into the bird, pushing in the glutinous stuff. Then two rashers of bacon go down over the back of the bird, and a blob of butter that suddenly reminds me of the way Muriel would get Sunday lunch ready. Chicken was my favourite, she always remembered that.

The bird goes in the oven and Jasmine sits at the table, motioning me to join her. There’s a trug with broad beans – there must be a vegetable garden at the back somewhere, and maybe the Neidpaths are curators of that too – and Jasmine pushes a pile of them over to me. I slit my thumb along the pod, and draw the beans that look as small as a child’s milk teeth from their cotton-wool setting.

Jasmine begins to speak.

 *

– I was very worried about Muriel, as I said, at that time. So I decided to take her to a health farm I’d read about – not
too expensive, you understand – it was called Summer … well, it’s so long ago, something like Summerfield Farm.

At first it was all a big joke. Muriel still thought it was funny to start minding, at our advanced age, about our appearance – her word, she was always laughing about the vanity of the women she worked with on the magazine, especially the editor, a tartar of the old school by the sounds of her. But we went on all the machines in the gym just for the hell of it.

I remember, we even got ourselves buried up to the neck in mud in some sort of rejuvenation treatment, and came out a few hours later looking, well, muddy.

It was so obvious that we weren’t going to change into beauties overnight – and I was hungry too, I must admit; I used to smuggle in biscuits and the like – that I decided to quit after a week. Muriel was annoyed at first, because she said she’d be lonely. Then she told me to go, and to watch out for the results she’d be showing after another couple of weeks in the place.

‘Suit yourself,’ I said. (Truth to tell, I was very cheered up by Muriel’s attitude to the whole thing. I thought – I have to admit I was wrong not to look deeper – I simply thought the poor woman had had too much work and too little play recently. That was all there was to it. What Muriel needed was a holiday. And, even if it meant a health farm with a woman friend, she’d got one.)

True, there was one night – after we’d got used to the orange juice and found we could talk freely without the usual intake of gin or wine – when Muriel started harping on about your mother and Harry again. How Anna didn’t understand him. How she took him for granted, that kind of thing.

‘Oh belt up, Muriel,’ I said. ‘He’s happy – anyone can see that.’

‘That’s the trouble,’ Muriel said.

 *

And those, says Jasmine, rising with a colander of beans and putting them to one side, laying out a row of new potatoes that need scraping and already smell of the wild mint she gathered this morning from the riverbank – those were the last words Muriel spoke to me.

As her old self, I mean.

 *

– I remember the dress. I find I have spoken suddenly, when a silence has fallen on the kitchen and Jasmine is washing earth from a bunch of baby carrots, immersed in the present, as if the past and Muriel’s election to put back the clock to an impossible, artificial present could never really have taken place.

But I do remember the dress. I saw it earlier, in a flash of those bright psychedelic colours of the time, when Jasmine spoke of Anna putting on dresses at last, discarding the jeans and dungarees so as to look more attractive for her lover, Harry.

 *

The dress is lying on the floor.

Something terrible has happened. There has been a fight or a scene – like an animal, I smell trouble, but alas, like a child, I run in the big flat with its shadows from the light on the water outside for my grandmother, for Muriel.

But that, it turns out, is the trouble. My mother wants Muriel too.

 *

– Yes, Jasmine says. Your grandmother came back in the middle of the day from the health farm and went straight to
the flat. There was no point in going to the office, you see; it was afternoon already.

She found a note asking her to babysit you that evening.

I only heard this much later, you understand, when I talked to her on the telephone and tried to get her to make sense. I was frightened by then – very frightened. I didn’t know who to turn to, you see.

 *

– But she didn’t come back in time for them to go out, I say.

It’s an evening in the middle of summer, because it’s light, but I know it’s late from the indigo band of cloud that moves over the Thames and lies like a basking shark in the depths of the sky opposite our window.

It’s so late that Anna and Harry have missed their date. They are imprisoned here with me. They hate me for keeping them under lock and key.

After all, they’re young.

But I have never known my mother in such a rage. The lovely dress she was wearing, the kinetic dress that looks like a sorcerer’s robe, with moons and stars and wild cabbalistic patterns, is scrumpled up and lying on the floor, near her kicked-off shoe.

Harry stumps out of the flat and the door bangs.

Anna locks herself in her room now, sobbing into her pillow.

 *

– I discovered later, Jasmine says, they’d been planning to get engaged over dinner.

But they did make a scapegoat of Muriel, you know. When she was there she was in the way, like mothers-in-law are conventionally meant to be. When she was out, she was no good to them because she wasn’t there to look after you, so they could go out.

 *

– I was in the way, I say.

– Still, it was bad luck that evening, Jasmine reproves me, but in a kind tone. They’d booked a table at a romantic restaurant – you know the kind of thing …

I don’t, but I say nothing. For I remember what happened later that night. And this time I tell Jasmine how it really was.

 *

I’m in my small bed in the room with the old wallpaper that my grandma says should be replaced with something I would really like – teddies perhaps, or cartoon characters disporting across the walls – and I’ve had to climb in by myself, without a bedtime story or even cleaning my teeth.

I hear the door – first the front door, at the bottom of all that purple and white swirling lino, then the door of the flat.

I know I’m not supposed to get out of bed, but I do. I stand for what seems like for ever at the door of my little room.

Then I hear footsteps. I can feel my face, all these years later, puckering into the frown I must have worn then, at the unfamiliar sound of those footsteps in the corridor outside.

At the far end of the passage the door of the sitting-room opens; I can hear the creak of the hinge that Anna always says she really will get round to oiling.

I’m just about to slip down the passage too, when the two doors go again, one after the other, like a couple of shots going off.

Someone has come in angry or – I’m too young to know about this yet – drunk.

Steps come up the stairs and turn left to the sitting-room.

And I, like a fool in one of the books Muriel reads to me – for there are stupid girls sometimes in the stories she chooses, and then Anna fights with her and says there
shouldn’t be – like a baby (as I suppose I really still was), I walk down that passage to find Harry is in the far end of the room, which is dimly lit; he’s at the end where my mother’s dress lay, when she hurled it from her in a rage.

Harry is standing behind a woman, and he has his arms round her, he’s squeezing, he’s muttering something …

I bang the door with my head and the noise makes them turn round.

Harry growls at me to get the hell out.

But the woman, who smiles down at me but seems a million miles away, is wearing my mother’s dress and she’s not my mother at all.

Harry seems only dimly to realize this as I stand there, for he pulls away from the stranger and takes a long, hard look at her.

– Well, I’m damned, says the man, whom I suddenly recall with such horrible, painful clarity. And he takes the woman’s hand playfully. She smiles straight back at him, right in the eyes. Then she looks at me.

– Go on, Ella, it’s time to go to bed, she says.

I run along the passage and climb for the second time alone into my bed. Then I get out again, I go into the
bathroom
, and it’s the first time I’ve ever been ‘naughty’ on purpose. I push her cloudy blue ring over the shelf and down the little black hole. And the man and the woman come in – and the man fishes it out again and the woman smiles and says, Thank you, and gives him a kiss. The woman was my grandmother, but she was young.

 *

I finish, and Jasmine sighs as she closes cupboard doors and runs a cloth over the kitchen table, where flour lingers from the scones she’s baking in the big old Aga in the deep recess in the kitchen. Plates sizzle as she lifts covers, a pan of water
goes on, and then another. I realize how hungry I am. But I also know I now fear seeing my grandmother.

Jasmine must have felt what I was thinking, for she turns now and asks me to be patient one more time.

She’ll be here tonight, she says. She has promised me to … to go back to being her old self. She’ll be so happy to see you again, Ella. Just think!

 *

I wonder if Jasmine, who says she was so baffled at the time of the change in Muriel, can even guess at what really happened the day she came back from Summerfield. And if she could, wouldn’t she refuse to believe it?

 *

I remember:

I’m in the park. The wind is blowing the trees about and a man is running hard with me in a pram.

Thunder’s coming on; people are scattering to little white pavilions.

Muriel has come back today. I’m so happy. I don’t mind where we go or what we do so long as we are together.

 *

The man sits with my grandma on a bench, in spite of lightning and big claps of thunder that are then followed by gusts of wind and rain. She is out of breath from running with him when he did his dash with the pram, and she is laughing.

I peer over the sides. I am too old to be in a pram, I want to get out and I begin to wail.

My grandma and the man pay no attention at all – because she is signing a piece of paper and he is helping her with the words on the form.

I scream like the baby Muriel now seems to think I am, and I rock the pram until it tumbles over.

My head gets a cut and the man takes a white handkerchief from the breast pocket of his immaculate dark suit. He mops my head and the white lawn handkerchief is splodged with blood.

 *

But before I can begin to tell the tale of the afternoon I remember in the park, when the trees were blowing about and a man ran with me in my pram, against the crashing thunder and rain, Jasmine has started to whisk egg whites in a bowl, and as she whisks she talks on, in a low monotone, as if afraid, now, that someone will hear.

 *

Jasmine says:

For a few days after Muriel was back from Summerfield, I didn’t see her.

I had a very complicated job on my hands, a new book by a professor of quantum physics, with diagrams and the lot – and, don’t forget, there were no word-processors in those days.

As well as that, my aunt had come to stay from the country, and after I finished work we’d go out to Bendicks for a light lunch and take in the sales – that kind of thing.

So when Muriel rang me from the office and suggested I look in that evening, I had to say no. I mean, there wasn’t any point in taking poor Aunt Elsie out to a place like Anna’s flat. She’d have been terribly shocked by the feminist politics – and by Anna and Harry sleeping together without being married too, I expect. So I told Muriel it would have to wait until I was on my own again. Of course, I asked her how the health farm had gone, but the whole experience had been an expensive waste of time for me, and I wasn’t expecting to hear anything very different from Muriel.

– But Jas, you’ve got to come over tonight, she said.
There’s been a … well, it’s too terrible for me to explain on the phone. There’s been one hell of a bust-up between Anna and me.

This didn’t sound so unusual to me – as I said before, they’d been getting on each other’s nerves for some time.

– She hates me now, Jas, I know it. Muriel was practically in tears. And I don’t honestly know what I’ve done. Please! Couldn’t your aunt … just for one evening? I do beg you, Jas!

I went, of course. For one thing I’d never heard Muriel sound quite like that. She was … well, breathy, sort of startled and, well, her voice sounded younger, I suppose, is what I mean.

It didn’t prepare me, though, for what I found when I got round there.

It was an evening right in the middle of summer – I do remember that very clearly, because the syringa outside that giant Victorian door in the mansion block by the river was smelling so sweet I couldn’t resist picking a sprig on my way in. It smells a bit like orange blossom, you know – and I thought of weddings and young brides. I can remember that as I went up that purple and white swirling lino on the stairs I wondered whether Harry and Anna would get married in the summer, or wait until after her launch of autumn books, before going to the altar. And I thought, secretly, that it would be a good thing if they got it over with sooner and asked Muriel to move out. After all, they could bring you up together … and maybe if they were feeling a bit on top of one another, a nice summer wedding would be just the thing.

 *

I sit watching Jasmine’s snowy peaks of egg white. She is folding them into a tin with shallow indentations, after
beat
i
ng
in sugar. The door of the big wide Aga swings open at her touch, like the child-sized stove in the kitchen in the forest where Hansel and Gretel wandered, lost.