The Lives of Women (13 page)

Most of the people had been extremely well-spoken even if one or two were not quite respectable. But then artistic people were often that way. Even so, everyone – apart from the neighbours – had an interesting side to them. Mary Hanley had introduced her around like a special guest. And as for Ted? He was so sweet. Well, Ted couldn't – just couldn't have been sweeter, quite frankly. He offered her a cigarette and when she'd said no, he'd offered her a different variety, in case the first had been a little too strong for her. Ted had said she was ‘the perfect lady'. It had been the best night of her life.

‘Better even than your wedding day?' Elaine had asked her mother.

In the dark there had been a pause, then a quickly mumbled – ‘Don't be silly, of course not.'

When her mother fell asleep, Elaine had stayed at the window. She could hear the party sounds pop out whenever the front door
opened: laughing, talking, music. She saw the people who arrived late and the people who lingered at the door saying long goodbyes. She saw a man and a woman kissing in the shadows and then jumping apart when the Hanleys' porch door opened. And she began to understand why it was that her mother had left the party early. It was for the same reason she always seemed to enjoy looking at the photos from a holiday far more than she had ever seemed to enjoy the holiday itself.

 

It had been the middle of the night when her father finally came through the Hanleys' front door. She watched him shake Ted Hanley's hand on the doorstep, then turn and walk down the slope to the gate before coming back over the road with his hands in his pockets. In the streetlight she could see his stern, unhappy face.

She had tried to imagine him at the party – who he would have spoken to and what he could have said. If he had sat down on a chair or remained standing up all night. Or maybe he slipped off into an empty room and sat at a table on his own in the dark.

Ted Hanley had stayed on the doorstep saying goodbye to his guests; now shaking this man's hand, now helping that woman into her coat. How she had wished her mother had been awake to see him looking so pleasant. She would have just loved the way he was drawing the coat over the woman's shoulders, and the way he kissed her then on both sides of her face, the way the French were said to do.

It was natural to presume that not only did her mother love Ted Hanley but that she was a result of that love. Because she couldn't
see the point of the man who had just passed under her window and through the front door. This man who ate dinner on his own, read newspapers on his own, went racing on his own. Even spoke to unknown people on his own private telephone. This man who watched television in another room.

 

7

Winter Present

December

THERE'S A BLACK GUY
standing on the doorstep. I am taken aback by the sight of him and know this must show on my face.

There's a chance he'll think I'm racist but there's not a lot I can do about that. Unless I say something like, ‘Listen pal, you're not the first black man I've ever set eyes on. Places I worked in New York? Every second person was black. And as for Paris, where I trained? Not one white face amongst the porter staff, which says a lot for the French and their so-called sense of equality – wouldn't you agree?'

I'm having this conversation in my own little head with this guy on my doorstep who is so magnificently, so unbelievably gorgeous it's almost ridiculous.

Sunlight shoves through the cracks in the clouds and at the same time it has started to snow again. Not real flakes as such –
more like silver dust motes in this sudden gush of light. It flatters my visitor anyhow as he stands there in his white overalls, snow specks fussing around him. It gives him the look of a big black angel.

He holds out a business card. I take it from his long hand: fawn-coloured palm and round pinkish fingertips.

I read the card then glance up at eyes that appear to be lacquered with light – a deep green light – and ask myself how is that possible?

He takes a few steps back into the garden and lifts his face towards the roof.

I can see now how well put together he is – far from slim but not too bulky either – comfortable, as if he's been upholstered in soft brown leather. I can't help but notice his shoulders. I wonder how old he is and reckon on twenty-eight. Then I wonder about the shape of his feet and if he's married. Somehow I know he's not gay. For a split second, I see him standing naked at the side of my bed, my mother's lilac-coloured quilt crumpled behind him.

He brings his eyes from the roof and looks straight at me.

‘One moment, please,' I primly say.

 

I go into the sitting room. My father, in his wheelchair in front of the television, appears to be watching the racing at Chepstow, the sound so low he couldn't possibly be able to hear it. I suspect he's just staring at the coloured shapes jostling about on the screen. He's lost interest. Today's newspaper, like the rest of the papers for the past week or more, lies untouched on the bed, within its
folds the racing section still intact. And he hasn't eaten his lunch again.

‘There's someone to see you,' I say, ‘and you haven't eaten your lunch again.'

‘I'm not hungry.'

I'm a little surprised when he says this, as he has never struck me as someone who was motivated by hunger but rather one of those men who eat whatever is put in front of them. Besides, with my mother, he probably never had that much chance to work up an actual appetite before the next plate was shoved under his nose.

‘That's the fourth day in a row that you haven't touched your lunch. Lynette tells me you're losing weight. You know, she wants to call the doctor?'

He ignores me.

‘Look, you can't carry on like this – you need your nourishment, especially in this weather. You have to eat
something
. I mean, you left half of your breakfast and last night—'

He turns his head and we exchange a brief and startled look – it's as if the voice of my mother has just entered the room.

‘It's okay,' I say. ‘You don't have to eat if you don't want. Don't worry. Fine. It's all fine.'

I hand him the business card; he looks down and says, ‘Fenton?'

The old lawyer's glint comes into his eye. His bottom lip pushes slightly forward, one unruly eyebrow gets ready to pop out of his forehead: I imagine these to be two courtroom gestures that have served him well over the years. There's a pause before his eye glides back to the witness. ‘Am I to understand that he is, in fact, alive?'

I say nothing.

‘Send him in so,' he says, smugly tapping the card off the side of his hand.

I lift the plate and begin to move away. ‘You may find him a little changed,' I say.

I would just love to see his face when Othello walks into the room but I'm afraid I might laugh. And I don't like my father to see me laugh.

 

Lynette is standing with her coat on when I come back into the kitchen, patiently waiting to resume our conversation. ‘It's snowing again,' I say. ‘And you should see the guy who just walked into the sitting room.'

‘This weather,' she says, ‘this country.'

‘No, I mean it, you should see him.'

She looks at the untouched sandwich then gives her worried sigh. She thinks my father is pining for company, for conversation, for something. I wonder if she may be in love with him. When she talks about him, I sometimes have difficulty understanding just who she means. I wish she'd sit down and talk about something else for a change: tell me about what she does in the evenings, about the village in Malaysia where she grew up, about Hong Kong where her married sister is living. I want to distract her, to get her to change the record anyhow, if only for a moment or two.

‘What I miss about New York,' I begin, ‘
all
I miss about New York, I sometimes think, are the seasons: the well-defined, no-ifs-or-buts about it seasons. I like knowing when it's time to pack one lot of clothes away and take out another. I like knowing which
direction the heating bills are going. In summer the humidity will wipe you out; in winter the snow will move in and take over your life. But generally speaking, spring comes at spring time. Autumn in the fall. I'm not saying the weather is completely predictable – and we do have our treacherous days. But? At least you more or less know where you are. And, well, I miss that.'

Lynette continues to look at me, even after I've finished. ‘Maybe that's why people here so insecure,' she finally decides, ‘never know what come next.'

I look past her out into the garden. This morning started out with ice-spiked rain from a low grey sky. A while ago we had big fat snow clouds. Now it could be summer out there but for the veins of black shadow from the winter branches and the occasional confetti of snow.

‘Too lonely,' Lynette is saying, ‘need friends. Everybody need friends.'

‘My father?'

‘Of course.'

‘You think so?'

‘And no God.'

‘No God?'

‘No church. Church good place for people. Meet friends. One roof. All same. Before I come here, everyone say, ahhh, that good country for Christians. Where then? When then? I don't see. Old man and never one neighbour visit. To take for walk. To talk. Clever man and no one ask advice? In my country? In my country, a man like your father? He is honoured. Not like this way. A old forgotten no one, is all.'

She begins to put on her gloves, her cheeks reddened by her little outburst.

‘Do you know, Lynette,' I say, ‘he used to go to church on Sunday. Sometimes he even went to a Latin mass in town.'

‘What Latin mass? Where? We could take him.'

‘I think the church has closed down. There were gates on it anyway, last time I passed, big iron gates, a padlock.'

She shakes a sad head and begins to button up her coat.

‘You think what I say before?'

‘Before?'

‘Community centre, senior socials? Whole day sometimes, all meals, breakfast time to tea. Games, singing. A tour in bus to interesting places.'

‘Ah yes, the senior social days.'

I try to imagine my father sitting in the centre of a game of bingo or lifting his hands over his head for wheelchair Pilates or maybe playing ‘Jingle Bells' on the piano for the Christmas sing-along. Then I try not to laugh.

‘I'm sorry, Lynette, I'm afraid he's not really that kind of man.'

‘I know,' she says, ‘I know you say that.'

I think of the stony face on him whenever I enter his room, the strickening silence. And for a second I've a good mind to let her bring him. To allow him a day amongst people who are trying to make the most of the last scraps of their lives. It might give him a taste of what it would actually be like to live in a nursing home. To be spoken to by condescending voices, in overheated rooms. To be talked down to by people of lesser intelligence. To eat dinner
at noon and supper at six, be put to bed at nine o'clock like a child. To have to watch afternoon soap operas on television instead of the racing from Chepstow. To be denied his piano and his evening whiskey. To be patronised and ignored and made to feel worthless.

‘Lynette, my father is an unusual man.'

‘Yes, yes, and I know that too.'

She lifts her large handbag. It looks far too grown-up for her. I half expect to see her clopping off in her mother's high-heels.

‘What about cleaning lady,' she asks, ‘she talk to him?'

‘I suppose.'

‘Nice woman, though? Friendly?'

‘I don't know her. She doesn't start back till next week – she's been away, you see. In Australia.'

‘But your father say she work here ten years before.'

‘I wasn't here then.'

‘A whole ten year?'

‘I left here when I was sixteen years old.'

‘Oh, that right. That right. But I thought in between…'

‘I only came back when my mother died.'

‘When or because?'

She bows her head. ‘So sorry, I don't mean…'

‘That's all right, Lynette.'

‘How many time she come here a week – Missus, Missus…?'

‘Larkin? Four, I think.'

‘He didn't say?'

‘No, he didn't say anything.'

‘Few times a week, though – you think?'

‘I imagine so, yes.'

‘Not so much for you to do then?'

‘Not so much. No.'

 

When Lynette leaves, I find myself examining the sandwich. I have to wonder what possessed me to make such a thing in the first place: plastic ham, plastic cheese, styrofoam bread, a gob of mango chutney in the middle. Would I eat this sandwich myself? Only if I was about to die of starvation and it was the last sandwich left on earth. I hate this sandwich and everything about it. I hate all the replicas of this sandwich that I have been making, over and over, since my return – so why make it at all?

The answer is simple: I make it because it's the sandwich my mother would have made. It's the sort of sandwich I ate in my own childhood and the sort I saw my father eat countless times when I was young. I made it for the same reason I've been making most of his meals: because I believe it's what he's used to – and I have it in my head that he's the sort of man who can only approve of whatever he's used to. So that's: beef, spuds, peas and cabbage – plop, plop, splat on the plate; a puddle of powder-made gravy. Fried fish on Friday and Wednesday, mash, peas; a puddle of powder-made white sauce. Chicken and roast potatoes on Sunday. An occasional cutlet of salmon and boiled potatoes without a speck of skin on their souls. Steak and chips on Saturday night. Porridge and toast for breakfast; egg and bacon on Sunday. Sandwich and yoghurt for lunch. Tea and cake in the afternoon. Brown bread and hot milk before bed. On Christmas day – and
I can't begin to imagine the fun that's going to be! – I'm planning on going crazy and boiling the arse off a few brussels sprouts to complement his overcooked, cloth-dry turkey.