The Lives of Women (5 page)

Elaine had wanted to say their friendship with Agatha had nothing to do with kindness, that they liked, no loved, Agatha as much as they liked or loved each other. But she has always found it hard to say anything to Mrs Hanley without feeling stupid.

That was when Mrs Hanley took the book out of her handbag. ‘It's about how our past turns us into the people we become,' she said. ‘It's about someone you already know from another book – I won't say who it is, but do let me know when you guess.'

Elaine hadn't particularly liked the sound of the book and had put it to the end of the queue and then forgotten all about it. She wonders how far down the box it is now and worries in case Mrs Hanley has come to discuss it.

But when the door opens, it's her mother standing there, leaning in, breathless and maybe annoyed at having to leave all her new laughing friends in the kitchen.

‘That was… that was… Mrs… Mrs Hanley on the phone. Look out the… You're to look out. The window.
Honestly!
'

‘Why?' Elaine asks, but her mother just makes a few impatient points at the window.

Elaine gets out of bed. When she goes to the window she sees Agatha standing at the Hanleys' front step, already waving.

‘Agatha!'

‘Oh that's right, yes, she's here for the summer.'

‘How long has she been here?'

‘I don't know. A few weeks maybe. But now, you can't see her yet. No visitors for at least a fortnight – remember?'

‘Why didn't you tell me?'

‘I did.'

‘No, you did not!'

‘I was sure… Did I not?'

‘You never tell me anything!'

‘What are you talking about? I'm always telling you things.'

‘You never tell me anything I want to know!'

Agatha is wearing a new yellow dress and, beneath her sunglasses, there is her smile. She is holding a large sign to her chest: ‘Welcome Home Elaine!!!'

Mrs Hanley stands beside her. If Mrs Hanley wasn't there, Elaine would open the window and hang out of it to call across the road to her friend. She would do it even if her mother said, ‘For God's sake, you're like someone out of a tenement in Naples!'

She can feel Mrs Hanley's eyes on her. Elaine lifts her hand, shyly waves. Then waves again. The sign slips in Agatha's hand and Mrs Hanley straightens it. Mrs Hanley leans into Agatha and says something. Agatha gives one more wave then begins to turn away.

Elaine stays at the window until she sees the Hanleys' front door close and the shadows pass over the glass of the porch.

There was a sea in the title, she remembers now. A wide sea or a wild sea, she can't remember which.

For days she remains on hospital time; waking not long after dawn, reaching for the rubber ball on her bedside table, squeezing it.

Until her father's slow step begins through the house and the world beneath her window hatches out of the suburban silence.

Each day is just like the last one.

The men leave around the same time each morning, except for Mr Jackson, who is usually first out of the traps, and Mr Donegan, who plays in the orchestra and goes out as everyone else is coming back in. Front doors snap and car doors gnash and from the house next door she hears Jilly Ryan imitate each engine in long, throaty arcs.

Men, mostly in suits, some with briefcases bricked by their side. Mr Hanley in sports jacket and mouse-coloured trousers. A scarf thing – a cravat – noosing his neck. ‘Because he's an architect,' her mother once told her when she was around eight and going through a stage of asking questions about Ted Hanley.

If two men appear at the same time, a few words may drift across a wall or over the road – rumours of a heatwave; something vaguely sporty; the gist of a radio news story half-heard while shaving. Abstract things that go on somewhere behind these houses, beyond these rooftops. Way out there, anyhow, in the big, broad world where the men live the hours of their day.

The men call each other by first name. Or even the short form of first name: Bill, Jeff, Terry. Lar. Bob. Bob – her father.

Doctor Townsend, they usually call ‘the Doc', although her father, Shillman and Hanley – the only other ‘genuine' professionals (as her mother would have it) – refer to him as Gordon.

She hears everything from this front upstairs bedroom: every hall-door slam, every echo of a slam. Every gate, every footfall, every word that drifts under her window. She hears the forced jaunty notes in the early morning mouths of the men.

*

Once the men are out of the way, the next rank can start coming through: secondary school girls with freshly brushed hair and pleated skirts to the knee. The shuffly steps of spotty Karl Donegan, schoolbag squeezed hard to his chest. From the Townsend house, beautiful Paul comes through the side entrance and carefully closes the tall gate behind him. And from the house with no number on its door, the new boy, the boy with the tired eyes cuts over the garden and vaults the wall like a colt, taking with him her heart squeezed in his fist.

And now the small children. They come wriggling out of their houses, flat footsteps stomping down driveways, schoolbags banging off backs. Little birdie voices joining other birdie voices and disappearing in a swarm towards the village school. Byyyyeeee. Byyyyeee. A wave to a mother shadowed in a doorway, like someone ashamed.

 

And, finally, Mr Slater.

Even though he's retired, he goes out every morning Monday to Friday, walking all the way into the city in long jaunty strides, grey coat billowing behind him. She often wonders if he has a turning point, something to touch before allowing himself to return – say a spear on the college railing or maybe he crosses the bridge to the far side of town to touch the feet on one of the statues of angels.

Because he's retired, she sees Slater more than the other men and, for some reason, likes him a lot. She likes his gangster hat and long coat. His garden of flowers where, from her bathroom
window, and even better with the help of her father's binoculars, she sometimes sees him working. She likes the way he pretends not to hear his hump-backed wife when she raps her angry knuckles on the window at him. She likes to look out the landing window in the dead of night and see that the lights in his garage are on, and know that he's in there playing with his model train sets, and to know, too, that she isn't the only one to be awake in the neighbourhood. And mostly she likes the way he never says hello to anyone, not even in reply.

She waits for him to lunge past her window, cross the road in a few diagonal strides, coast the side of Townsends' house and disappear around the corner. All gone.

A lull like a broad sigh over the estate. A window cracks open. Milk bottles jangle. A front door gives a wary creak. The squeaky sound of a baby's pram as Mrs Ryan eases it over the top step.

Other prams soon follow, nuzzling out of other front doors and lumbering down porch steps. One or two are pushed straight down to the shops, others parked in the garden while a start is made on the housework.

She opens her journal and reads over yesterday's page:

‘It doesn't matter what you write,' the doctor has told her, ‘it doesn't even have to make sense.'

But it has to make sense to her Doctor, and so she turns the pen in her hand and, stirring it like a spoon, buries her observation under a bed of scribbles.

 

Her bed by the window. If she pulls herself up and looks through the slit at the side of the curtain what does she see?

She sees a fat sleeping toddler stuffed into his pram, soother dangling from the side of his mouth. She sees an old pair of tights tying the Ryan gates together for when he wakes up and starts running amok around the front garden. She sees her mother's forgotten shears under a rose bush where she left them down to gossip with Mrs Caudwell. And a child's knee sock picked up from the pavement and strewn across the – by now unruly – hedge of the Osbornes' old house.

There's the identical faces of the three houses opposite, the profiles of the house to each side. On the right, the corners that turn onto the main road; to the left, the corners leading into the cul-de-sac. And all the jigsaw pieces from that cluster of houses: a poke of chimney, a brow of dormer, an edge of window frame. White bird-shit splashes on slate.

Little to tell one house from another. At least not on the outside.
Some detached, some semi-detached. Redbrick to steep roof. Some gardens bigger than others. Apron of lawn front and back; elbows of lawn at the sides of a detached house. A driveway. Square pillars, double gate. A hedge to the front: not so high that the house could hide behind it, but not so low that a child could climb over and hurt itself – or, worse, ruin the line of the hedge. The house with no number has no hedge. Almost all have a garage – although she's noticed since coming out of hospital that garage conversions are really starting to catch on. In which case the garage has been duly renamed: playroom, television room, utility room. Den.

The Hanley house, designed by Monsieur La Cravat himself, is by far the grandest. At the back of the house is a large extension made out of glass that is used for entertaining. The Hanleys call this the Garden Room. (A sign on the door, with a silhouette of a man swinging a golf club, also calls it ‘Ted's Den'.)

At the bottom of the back garden is a wooden prefab shed lined with books that Mrs Hanley calls her ‘little haven'. At the west side of the house is a further extension – again mostly glass – with clever curved walls and a special bathroom attached. The Hanleys call this the Guest Room. Agatha calls it the Glass Prison.

Outside each house, a patch of grass from which a caged tree grows. In the middle of the road, a pond-shaped green, trimmed with white plastic frill. Bins are left out on Tuesday morning. On Saturdays cars are given their sponge baths. Saturday nights are for occasional house parties. On Sundays, lawnmowers rumble.

 

3

Winter Present

November

WE ARE A HOUSE
of no names – I am thinking this as I come back up from the shop with my father's newspaper, eyes to the ground so they don't feel the need to meet the eyes of a neighbour – we were always that way: a house of no names. If my father wants me he lifts his little handbell or passes a message through his day nurse, Yin-lu, who goes by the name of Lynette. Otherwise he waits for me to come into his room.

I used to think her name was Wynette. For the first couple of weeks that's what I called her. One day she took a pencil out of her pocket and wrote on a piece of paper – Lynette with a heavy double line under the Lyn part.

‘Sorry,' I said, ‘it sounds like Wynette.'

‘You no listen, is all.'

*

I sometimes wonder how he refers to me when asking Lynette to give me a message. Does he say ‘my daughter' or ‘the woman in the kitchen' or simply ‘her'. I can't imagine him using my name.

And I never use his – except in my mind where I can sometimes catch myself off guard still calling him Daddy.

I can't remember my parents addressing each other by first names either. In fact, I can barely remember them addressing each other at all. I know my mother used my father's name, but only in his absence, when on the phone maybe, or if she wanted to be part of a general husband-themed conversation – Bob says. It depends on Bob. Bob likes. Bob doesn't like. Bobbedy, Bob. Bob-bob.

 

They left notes for each other on the kitchen table, business-like notes initialled at the bottom:

If you could oblige by leaving navy

pin-stripe into dry cleaners. B

Please leave cheque for E's visit to dentist. S

At Cheltenham for the next few days. B

E needs a new coat. S

And of course, they had me to act as messenger. ‘Tell your mother I'll be away on circuit until Friday.' Or, ‘Ask your father if he's going racing this evening and if he'll be eating out.'

And one time when I was small – at a funeral I suppose it must have been, what with everyone dressed in black – I heard my father respond to a woman's question with, ‘Oh, you'd have to ask Sara that.'

I had looked around at all these women clumped together on sofas and armchairs, or moving across the frame of an opened kitchen door with plates of sandwiches and cakes in their hands – Who's Sara, I had thought. Which one is Sara?

Sar-
ah
Sar-ah ah ah ah.