First Aid (9 page)

She had never told Dilys and Geoff anything about Felpo. Not even of his existence. She hadn't wanted to share him. The questions would have started straight away. So where does he come from? That's not his real name then? So he
is
English? Dilys and Geoff wouldn't change. Past attitudes took up most of their mental space. There were a few more recent additions, such as a tolerance of the Tory party that would have shocked their ancestors, but they didn't encroach. The weight for them was all at the beginning. Their early lives crammed with people, blood relatives, family friends, church ministers – all with firm opinions, generally the same ones. They weren't what they had been – having been filtered through Dilys's mind they had lost their fire. Sin and damnation downgraded to cause and effect.

Where did you meet him, Dilys would have asked, and Jo would have had to reply, at Lois Lucas & Son. Though the pub or the sea front would have been a better choice because, at the mention of Lois Lucas, Dilys would immediately have thought of a man in a navy blue blazer or a tweed jacket who was looking for a Welsh dresser. Not Felpo's style. Whatever Jo said about the shop – joking or despairing – Dilys thought antiques more than junk and the impression never shifted. It was probably her own fault for trying to make the job seem acceptable in the first place. Near home, part-time, a friendly boss whose mother had recently died. She might even have used the phrase bric-à-brac, but she hoped not. Dilys saw what she wanted to see. She and Geoff would never have understood Felpo: his lack of family ties.

He told her that he'd lost touch with his relatives on the Sunday after he moved in with her. They were walking up on the cliffs with Annie – carrying Annie. They had gone in the van to Eastbourne to walk up Beachy Head. They had reached the part of the path where the In Memoriam benches ran out. Engraved with old-fashioned names, they stood looking out to sea at respectable distances apart – dedicated but shunned. No one sat on them. It was the limit of the town excursion. Most people turned back at that point. Jo remembered exactly where they had been because, in her mind, she had connected the benches with the mother he hadn't seen for twelve years, the father last heard of in Plymouth, the brother last heard of in Scotland, the second brother in Canada, half-brothers and -sisters he didn't know where. He talked about them, the ones who were still alive, as if the world were small enough for the chances of coming across them in a bar to be quite high. She felt lucky that he'd touched down in Kent for long enough to have met her. There hadn't been quarrels, he said. He always phoned his mum at Christmas and sent a card on Mothers' Day. He just didn't get on with the man she had living with her. He spoke about past girlfriends in a matter-of-fact way too, indicating that he and they had gone, or grown, in different directions. He had moved around a good deal. She guessed that there had been more of them than he had let on about and that maybe the ends of the relationships hadn't been as pain-free as he had made out. She didn't press him. Some people didn't like raking up the past.

The conversation had to stop when they reached the gorges that the streams made before cascading into the sea. Steps were cut into the steepest slopes but mostly the footpaths slithered down between gorse bushes and brambles. They needed to concentrate on walking, taking it in turns to jump Annie down the steps. The ground was too slippery to carry her. Out in the open again, Felpo didn't seem to have anything else to tell her and she was sorry that they'd been interrupted. She told him about her childhood, instead. She wanted to tell him. With Peter she had played down anything connected with her family or upbringing that wasn't, as far as she knew, within the limits of what normal people would consider normal. She had given the impression that it had all been pretty standard. But with Felpo her memories felt safe. The great upheaval of her life – her parents' death – had somehow been accommodated, bedded into life's structure, its jagged aspects ground down for everyone's sake. She discovered she could dig around a bit without incurring disaster. He didn't have an immaculate family of his own to measure her by.

She told him that she had known about the motorbike accident on the new roundabout from as early as she could remember. Dilys and Geoff had been in their late forties when it happened. She might even have been their daughter by something resembling an Old Testament miracle – but she wasn't. She was Gail's. They had been quite open about their daughter's death. The rest of the information had come later – that Gail, aged eighteen when Jo was born, had never married or left home and that her boyfriend, Jo's father, had been driving the motorbike Gail was on the back of when they were both killed.

Gail was never criticised, she said. She had been much loved – and she had died. No doubt there had been trouble at the time of the pregnancy but this was never referred to. She, on the other hand, had been praised and blamed in the old-fashioned way. Gail had been different from her. She had entertained all the relations – not minding singing in public, or sitting on anyone's lap. There was a photograph of her dressed up as a princess and waving at the camera. Another with the cousins on a birthday picnic – piles of sandwiches and a cake, everyone sucking through drinking straws, their eyes bulging. There was a trouser leg spoiling the edge of the picture, cutting off half of a cousin, but otherwise there were no grown-ups in sight. Jo used to hold up the album and look in the mirror to discern a likeness – that was Dilys's word – but her cheeks were a different shape and that changed everything. No one else in the family had that shape – hollow, then going up and round the corner – only Ella. So the bones of their faces must have come from her father. She might have disliked Gail for being popular if she'd been her sister, but, because she was dead and her mother, she had felt sorry for her and, in a way, relieved, that she wouldn't ever have to disappoint her. She had been envious of her life, though. Picnics for Jo had meant being propped up between Geoff and Dilys in London parks picking off skin from the boiled eggs and drinking still lemon made up in a Thermos flask. No other children. She had got tacked on to the previous generation and there simply weren't any.

Walking with her back to the wind, looking at the chalk land tilting away from them, Jo felt she had regained a carelessness that she had known about as a child but mostly missed out on. She suddenly saw through a clear expanse that had been cloudy up until then. There was something about Felpo that made her not mind seeing with clarity – and it was the not minding that was new. Dilys, Geoff, the mother she knew only from the photograph album, the father who was just a name – though not one that appeared on her birth certificate – she felt she could tell him about them. He listened and laughed at her jokes. He had an open-air kind of laugh. He seemed to grasp the idea of Dilys. He was kind about her. She'd have sorted him and his brothers out, he said. They had needed a firm hand. The only orderly things about the place he was brought up, he said, were the goldfish and the pine disinfectant. Jo imagined a sort of tenement – iron fire escapes and lavatory tiles on the walls of the stair wells, more Dilys's idea of a slum, really – until he mentioned the small house in Stevenage that needed rewiring and re-roofing. She told him about the tenement. He laughed and said that he often dreamt up the wrong pictures – at least she had the excuse of the missing generation. Having been brought up by her gran, her points of reference were pre-war. She had never thought of it like that before.

He didn't ask to meet Dilys and Geoff and that suited her because she preferred to keep him separate, postponing, for as long as possible, building herself another replica of home, with all the old difficulties creeping up the walls like rising damp. Rob and Ella kept quiet about him too. Rob liked Felpo but he wasn't good at talking to Dilys on the telephone. He only uttered single words. Ella pretended Felpo didn't exist. Occasionally she challenged him with rude questions which he didn't rise to. Then she remembered he didn't exist and reverted to ignoring him. She wouldn't have wasted her breath mentioning him to the grandparents. So the moment to announce that he had come to live with them passed. It never had been the right moment.

Jo heard the door open. There was a pause while someone stood and looked at her. Then Dilys said, ‘Aren't you so well, dear?'

‘I'm all right,' Jo said, getting up from the floor. ‘It was stuffy in here. What time is it?'

‘Ten. You've had a good long sleep. Are you sure you're not going down with something?

‘Yes. I'm sure. Please don't worry about me,' Jo said.

‘You're not depressed, are you? That's a terrible thing.'

Jo shook her head.

‘I'll get you a dressing gown from upstairs,' Dilys said.

‘I don't need one. It's summer.'

Dilys moved the pillow from the sofa on to an armchair and began to fold up the sheet.

‘Don't do that now, Gran. I'll do it later. Let's go and have some tea.'

Dilys finished her folding and they walked along the passage to the kitchen. All the noises were outside. The house felt quiet.

‘Where is everyone?' Jo said.

‘Gone to the shops and to do this and that. Forget about them. It will do you good to have a rest,' Dilys said.

‘Is Annie all right?'

‘Perfect,' said Dilys. ‘She came looking for you but I stopped her. Rob gave her her breakfast. Then they both went out with their grandad. Annie walked. She's getting too big for that pushchair. It'll make her lazy.' Dilys nodded at the teapot and the tea caddy. ‘You know where everything is, don't you? I'll let you get on with it.'

Dilys pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘I didn't like to ask any questions yesterday, darling. I could see you needed time to settle.'

Jo slowly filled the kettle, her back to the room. She left the tap on a quarter turn, and the water took a long time to get to the top.

‘All that luggage you brought with you,' Dilys said.

‘I know, Gran.'

Jo still didn't turn round. Water was coming out of the kettle spout. She had overfilled it. She tipped some water out, mopped up the front of the sink unit, then stood the kettle on its stand and switched it on.

‘You don't usually bring so much,' Dilys said.

‘I know,' she said. ‘I understand what you're asking. I don't really have an answer. I might not be going back. I don't know. It would be better if I were someone different. I'd manage better.'

Dilys nodded. Jo waited for the water to boil, then filled the teapot and brought it across. There were two cups and saucers and the biscuit tin waiting on the table. Dilys must have set them out earlier.

‘I tried that,' said Dilys, after the pause.

‘Tried what?' Jo asked.

‘Changing myself,' said Dilys. ‘I looked through the hymn writers at the back of the Congregational Hymn Book, not the ones who wrote the tunes. They were men. Settled on Eliza Cross. I thought the world was ready for Eliza Cross. Mother found the little notes and things I'd written. “What's this Eliza Cross?” she said. I wasn't pleased, but after a while she got it out of me. “Well,” she said, “I know why you chose that name. It's because you are cross.” I cried my eyes out. Mother was like that; a reason for everything, everything cut and dried.'

She paused. She hoped her granddaughter would say that she, Dilys, wasn't like that, but Jo didn't. Dilys carried on as if she had done.

‘I made up my mind to be different. I was at the wrong end of her tongue too often not to know about it. Funny, you know, I can still remember how I felt. I'd gone to so much trouble to choose that name.'

Jo had heard the story before, though not for a few years. So her grandmother had tried to be different once too – she'd forgotten that.

‘Do you think you might try to find a job here?' Dilys said.

‘Maybe. I don't know.'

‘You'll be lucky to find anything as convenient as Lois Lucas.'

‘I know. The big ones will be off my hands before too long. But Annie's so little.'

‘You don't regret it, do you?'

‘What?'

‘Having Annie.'

Jo hesitated.

‘I mean, I know you didn't get what you wanted,' Dilys said.

‘What did I want?'

Dilys stopped. She was choosing her words.

‘What did I want?'

‘Well, to keep the family together.'

‘Annie was a mistake. I've told you before.'

Dilys shook her head. ‘Babies are always welcome when they arrive.'

She meant it too. Jo's own welcome had never been in doubt, in spite of the shock and upheaval.

‘An accident then, if that sounds better,' Jo said. She could tell as soon as she spoke that the word was as cheerless. ‘He didn't stay, anyway. You're right about that.'

‘And what was
she
thinking of? That woman?'

Jo didn't reply. Dilys was stuck with an out of date story. She was looking for a man to blame and having failed to unearth one had fallen back on Peter. Dissolution of marriage was, to her, like a fatal illness. You were unlucky to be visited by it, but the way you'd chosen to live your life made you prone. That anyone could still be alive on the far side astonished Dilys. She and Geoff had worried about her and the children. They had been kind, but Jo had had to carry their kindness as an extra weight, in a container that was already full. The feeling that she, not Peter, had been the less predictable of the two of them had kept her going. Let him play house all over again. She had been the one living on the edge. Her grandparents had expected her to be part of the old family again – in attitude, if not in reality. But she hadn't wanted a refuge. It would have been easy enough to make one; with children it was already half-built. She had known women whose husbands had gone, who had carried on building upwards, leaving a window for the sad and lonely and, with any luck, the man himself to look into and feel left out. But drawing strength from her own rockiness – she couldn't have expected Dilys and Geoff to understand that. Trevor had been more help. He hadn't asked questions. He had sat her in one of the plush chairs, put a glass of red wine in her hand, tuned in to bright chat on the radio and carried on as usual. He had once said that his work triangle was the shop and The Dog and she had imagined the missing part as the sky above, or the air in between, because there was something expansive about Trevor. He didn't fuss in the way other people did. He never had done. She had been able to rely on him for weightless sympathy.