Raking the Ashes (12 page)

He’d rounded on me in an instant. ‘That’s a bit mean, Til.’

‘It’s the truth.’

‘Not as I see it,’ he’d responded in a huff, and left the room on the excuse of fetching some pair of socks out of the drier. I’d sat on the bed, I remember, pulling on my tights and tipping my head from side to side like a small clockwork doll as I ran through his repertoire of tired phrases, all designed to make the point that he didn’t agree with me without going to the trouble of trying to persuade me. ‘That’s a bit harsh.’ ‘Not my experience.’ ‘I’m surprised that you
think
that.’ I swung my head faster and faster, like a metronome gone mad, and threw in the lofty disbelieving eyebrow that so annoyed me. ‘Honestly, Tilly, you do say the oddest things!’ ‘I know you can’t really believe that.’ ‘Oh, Tilly. I take it that’s a joke.’ By the time Geoff came thundering back up the stairs with his socks, the doll face I’d been making must have degenerated into that of a staring maniac.

He caught me muttering, ‘I think it’s best I ignore that,’ in a mechanical voice.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘Fine,’ I assured him. ‘Never better. Just seeing if I can say “if you say so, dear” in twenty different languages.’

To me, that is the sort of challenge a partner should stand up to meet. (‘What are you saying, Tilly? That I just fob you off?’) But Geoff chose to pretend he hadn’t heard. ‘You’d better get your skates on or we’ll be late.’

So I could argue I have Geoff to thank for pretty well driving me back into Sol’s arms. And Sol to thank in turn for keeping Geoff and me together over the next few years. Sometimes it was a matter of an afternoon, sometimes a whole weekend tacked onto the end of a few days on rig or slid in before the inspections. The company put their foot in it once or twice, phoning to ask if I could take over for people who had failed to show up, or gone off sick. More than once, Geoffrey
met
me at the door to take my coat and ask in a puzzled fashion, ‘Everything all right? Someone rang trying to get you. They seemed to think you flew home yesterday.’

I’d play it supercool. ‘Really? I shall be pretty pissed off if they fuss about last night’s hotel bill.’

Off Geoff would trot, persuaded both by my indifference and by his own need never to look trouble in the eye. And that’s how Sol became a pressure valve. Each time I needed someone to agree with me that facts were facts, Sol played the game.

Out of a sense of fairness I offered each conversation to Geoff first. ‘Guess what I’ve just seen. Minna, in the queue for the Odeon ticket office. Shouldn’t she be in school?’

‘That happens to me all the time, Til. I keep thinking I see one or other of them all over town. It is amazing how alike young people look.’

‘Geoff, while you were out, somebody’s mother rang. She wasn’t very coherent. She wouldn’t leave her name and she was in a real temper. But she said Harry’s been offering her daughter “substances”, and if it happens again, she’s going to report it.’

‘Harry? Ridiculous!’

‘Aren’t you even going to ask him?’

‘I wouldn’t insult him in that way.’

‘Geoff—’

‘No, Til!’ His colour rose. ‘One can be all too quick to think the worst of young people.’

So it was to Sol that I turned for sensible discussion of irritations through Harry and Minna’s teenage years: Minna’s persistent truancy; Harry’s strange, quiet slidings on and off the rails. Often Sol ticked me off for not tackling their problems a whole lot more forcibly. ‘Teenagers these days live in a dangerous world, Tilly. Parents have to stay on top of them. You must
make
Geoff listen.’

‘You underestimate the man. If he prefers to live in Happy Valley, nothing will shift him.’

‘But it’s so bad for Harry and Minna. Don’t you
care
?’

‘Sol, if I wanted something to worry myself sick about night and day, I’d have had kids of my own.’

Sol came out with the echoes of Donald and Ed I’d heard so often since we’d picked up again. ‘You’re a cold fish, Til. And if you can’t be bothered to kick the man into being someone you can respect, you ought to do the decent thing and let the poor bugger go.’

‘There speaks the man who’s ratting on his own wife!’

Sol shook a finger. ‘That’s the whole point, Tilly. I
adore
Lydia. We have an entire life built up. Our son, my daughters and a lovely house—’

‘I know! I know! Your splendid antique furniture. All her nice jewellery. Your place in France.’

He leaned back against the pillows. ‘Exactly! A life shared – that’s what we have.’ He ran a finger down my naked breast. ‘All except you, of course. And what have you got in common with Geoffrey? Nothing. You’re even too mean-spirited to marry him. Give him a break, Tilly. Set the poor sod free to find a nicer woman while he still has time. Do the right thing. Dump the poor bastard.’

I rolled away. ‘And just become one of your playthings? No thanks, Sol.’

But later, driving home, I gave the idea some real thought. What Sol said did make sense. How would Geoff feel if, after Harry and Minna finally grew up and became absorbed in their own lives, I was to stir myself enough to leave? Unless I thought we’d be together till the bitter end, then it was better, surely, to put an end to things now, not do it later and feel terrible because I’d left him all alone.

But in the end, as usual, I let the whole thing ride for the most trivial reason. Donald rang to say he’d found the perfect car for Harry: battered to bits on the outside, but sound as a bell. It seemed a shame to give the lad something so perfect for his birthday, then disappear at once. So, when I could over the next few weeks, I’d pick him up from Frances’s and drive him
to
the abandoned aerodrome beside a storage plant of ours a few miles north. Once or twice he turned up in a suspiciously elated mood. (Once, after the briefest look at him, I faked excuses and I drove straight home.) But, on the whole, the boy was all attention and all charm throughout the lessons, and got so good at handling the car that I used to leave him to it and sit, reading, on a wall till he was ready to go home. He took his test a fortnight after his next birthday, and phoned up, crowing. ‘Easy-peasy, Til! And the examiner even shook my hand after she passed me!’

From that day on, like Geoffrey, I was back out in the cold. In fact things were worse, for now when Minna needed driving anywhere, instead of phoning Geoff, as she always had before, Frances simply asked Harry to take his sister. After the car I bought him ended up smashed beyond repair in some ditch, she took to nodding at him to take the keys to her own. And since, in the grip of her treatments, Frances no longer had the will or energy to pay attention to just how often her son was emptying her purse to fill up the tank, Harry took full advantage, persuading his sister to say she needed to go into Newcastle time and again when he felt like a jaunt with his friends. Geoffrey would mope. ‘I never see them these days.’ It didn’t bother me. I just got on with my own life. Each time my brother rang, he made a point of asking, ‘And
how
are Harry and Minna?’ Again and again I’d spoon out the same deflecting answer. So it came almost as a surprise to hear myself saying one evening, ‘Oh, they’re both fine. But as it happens, Frances is back in hospital so tonight we’re taking them out.’

‘Somewhere nice?’

‘Pretty swish, yes.’

‘Your money’s still growing on trees, then?’

‘Not half.’

And maybe it was because the image of a money tree stuck in my mind that, when I watched Geoffrey fruitlessly scrabbling through his pockets for his credit card at the end of the evening, it struck me that almost every time, these days, it was me who ended up reaching across to slide the bill towards my coffee cup, and get the business of paying over and done with so we could leave.

It set me thinking yet again about the printing shop. Right from the start I had been mystified by Print-It! I’d had this view, presumably gleaned from Sol, that little businesses were always either ‘going up’ or ‘going down’; yet in the years that Geoff and I had been together, he’d never said a word that might lead anyone to think the small shop on the High Street was anything other than a steady thing that simply kept rolling along with his hand on the tiller. He never seemed to go in more or go in less. He never agonized
over
whether to manage without Mrs Mackie, or ask Doris to work extra hours. He never stayed there late to finish things, and I could only ever recall him rushing back to the shop on his free afternoon if one of the copiers had broken. Thinking about it more carefully I realized, too, that I had never known Geoff seek out business advice, or buy any of those books you see all over airports, or even pore over work spreadsheets. It came to mind that when we’d first got together I’d left the business sections of the newspaper lying about, presuming that, like Sol, he did at least run his eyes over the various articles and predictions. But after a while, seeing the inserts lying still folded, unopened, day after day, I’d started dropping them straight in the bin just as I had before, and not a word was ever said. I don’t believe Geoff even noticed.

And there were other things that made him seem far more like someone else’s happy-go-lucky employee than a man who held the fate of a business in his hand. When I asked idly, ‘How’s it going at the shop?’ he’d always answer, ‘Pretty busy this week,’ or, ‘Quite slack today,’ as if the amount of photocopying passing through was the important thing, not any overarching pattern of profit or loss. It made me curious, and for the very first time I realized that, if we had merged our finances, it would have made me most uneasy. But we had stayed apart on money matters, and he kept all his
paperwork
packed away. Indeed, the only negotiation between us I could even recall was when, right at the start, it was agreed that Geoff should shove more money in the communal pot to make up for the fact that I was making payments for the roof over our heads while he was still pocketing rent from his own flat.

So I had no excuse to pry. But now, as time passed, I became suspicious. Twice, Geoff borrowed quite large amounts of money from me and had to be reminded to pay it back. He took to blaming our local cash machine more and more often for the fact he was short of cash over a weekend, and I heard him chasing customers about the sort of bills he used to leave to gather dust. Almost in spite of myself, I started taking an interest in what came through the letterbox. I was there less than half of the time, of course. But, now my attention had been drawn to it, I noticed that almost nothing came for Geoff. Most bills were still in my own name regardless of which of us paid them. But other things I would have expected to see – his bank and credit card statements, offers from loan companies, pension stuff, anything to do with the flat – none of it arrived any more. I even looked for paperwork for his father’s house. (I’d remembered it falling in heaps on our mat after the old man’s funeral.) But there was nothing. I even found myself wondering if Geoff had opened a box number
somewhere
without telling me. Or taken to using his work address to receive all his own mail.

One night, I asked him casually, ‘Can you remember who owned Print-It! before you?’

‘It was a Mrs Bellacosa. Why?’

‘Oh,’ I said, shrugging, ‘I just remembered that she had a pretty name and couldn’t recall what it was.’ I prodded a shred of lettuce with my fork. ‘Why did she pack it in?’

‘Retired, I think.’

‘What, back to sunnier climes, clutching her fortune?’

‘No fortunes in bloody printing!’

He had such a grim look on his face that I felt pity. I didn’t press the matter. If I am honest, I didn’t want to give him the chance to ask me for money. I had a horrid feeling that any cash he took from me now would never be paid back.

That night, I phoned Ed. ‘Can I talk to you about Mum’s money? I rather think Geoff might be on the verge of asking me to lend him quite a bit of it.’

Ed might have been fond of Geoff, but he wasn’t stupid. ‘Is it the business? Is it going under?’

I didn’t answer. I just cut to the chase. ‘Whatever he asks, Ed, you do promise that you’ll say no? Absolutely not.
Nada
.’

‘We have joint power of attorney, Tilly. You can tell him yourself.’

‘Ed, I have to
live
with him. It will be so much easier if you’re the Big Bad Wolf.’

He didn’t take persuading. He knew as well as I did that, batty as she was, Mum might hang on for years and, once her money had run out, it would be some grim hospital, his house or mine. ‘No worries, Tilly. I’ll be as hard as nails. The man won’t get a bean out of me.’

Or out of anyone else with any business sense, it seemed. Over the next four weeks, Geoff changed suppliers twice. (He had a lot of airy-fairy reasons, but when I checked with Sol, he said it almost certainly would have been because they’d stopped offering credit. ‘Don’t lend him any loot, Til. It’ll be money down the drain.’)

Then Doris, who had worked for Geoff for almost eleven years, was suddenly ‘looking round for another job’. That’s why I didn’t hear alarm bells ring at once when she rang up one morning. ‘Is Geoff there?’

‘He left ten minutes ago. He should be with you any min—’

But she’d already interrupted to tell me her salary hadn’t gone into her account on the day that it should have. Even before I could decide which tack to take, she added hurriedly, ‘Ah, here he comes. No need to mention it, Tilly. I can ask him about it myself.’

I looked at my watch and it was only five to nine.
I’m
not the sort of woman to monitor her partner’s day, but after all those years I knew enough to be quite sure he rarely reached the shop before ten past the hour. So why had Doris rung at all? Was it to let me know? To give me warning?

It was the next call that brought me hard up against the facts. I’d scarcely put down the phone before it rang again. This time, it was Frances. Instead of following up her usual indifferent ‘Oh. Hi, Tilly’ with the traditionally dismissive ‘I think I’ll phone back later’, she asked me meaningfully, ‘Nice meal out?’