Daughters (13 page)

‘I remember,’ said Sarah. ‘It was a very, very expensive thing to do. I was quite shocked.’ She was only half joking.

‘Are you implying that Mum was extravagant?’ asked Maudie.

‘Maudie,’ interjected her mother.

‘It was wonderful,’ she pressed on. ‘The
best
thing. It was the first time we’d been on holiday for years and we didn’t stop laughing for the whole of it.’

A boatload of shrieking sisters, fierce sun, the friendly slap of water. Looking shell-shocked, her hair bundled up into a baseball cap, their mother had been clamped to the wheel. ‘Am I going to make this, girls?’

None of them had had the least idea how little Lara knew about driving a boat, but she had said, ‘We have to do something that takes us out of ourselves. Something bold and unusual so we can talk about it for ever.’

There had been the very interesting moment when Lara underestimated the width of the harbourage, an even trickier one when she misjudged the speed at which one should take a choppy sea, but they
had
talked about it for years. Still did, and the allusions to it were threaded on the string of their family mythology, like beads.

Captain, is that a wall?

How long is a foot, Captain?

Sarah put down her coffee cup. ‘How about the guided tour?’

‘I want to talk to Lara,’ said Bill. ‘We’ll join you later.’

‘Mum?’ Maudie lifted an eyebrow. ‘OK?’

Sarah said, ‘Of course, she’s OK
.
Your father isn’t going to eat her.’

Five bedrooms, two reception rooms, one kitchen, one larder … Later, Sarah led them out of the french windows on to a patio of grey flagstones peppered with white and yellow lichen. It had been an expert channelling … ‘Don’t you think this room will be lovely? I’ve got my eye on a wallpaper based on an old Chinese print. If wishes were horses … but one day we’ll get it done. We’ll have to win the lottery. It’ll take time. Lots of time, actually’ (slightly nervous laugh) … through a house whose insides were being dismembered in the worst areas and where the dust lay in heaps from forays into piping, wiring and floorboard replacement, and from the hunting down of dry rot, mould and exhausted materials.

It was a relief to be outside.

A brick wall enclosed a generous garden. The brick was old, weathered and pleasing. There was talk that Jane Austen had once driven by on the way to visit her brother in Kent. Sarah pointed out a gate, ‘which Jane Austen may have passed’, with a possessive gesture.

Maudie said, ‘But it hasn’t been proved, has it?’

Sarah’s mouth tightened.

More obvious work had gone on in the garden than in the house. Even she could see that.

‘Your father has been labouring night and day. Can’t keep him out of the garden,’ said Sarah.

‘Really?’ said Jasmine.

‘We’ve ordered masses of plants – lavender, catmint and more box – ready for the wedding,’ reported Sarah, happily.

Jasmine touched Sarah’s arm. ‘You’re very kind. I’m sure Eve’s thrilled.’

‘I wonder where your father is.’ A hint of anxiety.

Aha, thought Maudie.

‘He can’t be far away,’ said Jasmine.

That depended on what you meant by ‘far’. ‘Far’ meaning stuff that did not involve Sarah. Maudie would have thought Sarah – safe in her house and new status – wouldn’t mind that her parents were talking, almost certainly about Maudie. But houses and status were no protection against feelings.

In the vegetable patch outside the kitchen – the
potager
,
as Sarah called it
– they noted dutifully the caged raspberry canes, the chard and onions, which had been bullied into neat rows. Sarah treated Jasmine to a short lecture on growing vegetables.

That was too much. Maudie detached herself and set off across the lawn towards the paddock she had spotted beyond the stream. It was here she came upon her parents.

They faced each other across the beehive. Even from a distance, she spotted the tension crackling between them.

Actually, this was how she always thought of her parents: at odds with each other, even though things were
better between them now. If questioned – and nobody ever did question her – she would have had to confess that it stank – but, hey.

‘You should have told me, Lara.’

‘Did you ever ask Maudie what she was up to?’

The exchange veered towards shrill. Quick as a flash, the terrors that had bedevilled her childhood raised their heads. Maudie breathed in. Slow, slow. Going away, she told herself, would help to wipe her mind clean of childhood baggage.

‘
Stop
it, you two,’ she called.

Her father turned his handsome head towards her. With a tiny chill of exclusion, she recognized a change in him. She had got her father wrong. How healthy he looked. How contented. The chastened inner man had taken himself off. In his place was a man who fitted his setting. He was thriving here. It suited him.

That hurt.

‘Maudie,’ said her mother, clocking her. ‘Talk to your father about your plans. He wants to be kept in the picture.’

‘Wants!’ said Bill. ‘I need to know. You’re my daughter.’

Only when it suits you
, she was tempted to say.

Lara was pale and agitated. There and then, Maudie renewed her vow to defend her.

A snippet of sun struggled for attention through the clouds. Lara lifted her face and sniffed. ‘It
smells
as if spring is coming.’ She folded her arms across her stomach. ‘I’m going to look round the garden. You two sort this out.’

She sent them a tight little smile and picked her way
across the paddock. Maudie watched her hunker down to examine the blooms under the tree.

‘Crocuses.’ Her father followed Maudie’s line of gaze. ‘We’ve discovered hundreds of them. They throw up a blue and white blanket. Sarah plans to plant many more.’

Her mother straightened up and drifted over to a couple of shrubs by the wall. Even at a distance she had a dreamy look about her – absorbed, detached.

Maudie pointed to the beehive. ‘And this?’

‘A long-held ambition.’

It was the first Maudie had heard of it.

‘The bees are getting to know me,’ he added, ‘and I them. It’s taken a few weeks but we understand each other now.’

She thought, Better than he understands us. Her father knew what his daughters looked like, how they spoke, what they did, but he knew zilch of what went on in their heads. He had not the foggiest about (1) her teenage love for the Kaiser Chiefs, (2) her ridiculous stab at trying to save money in a high-interest account, which turned out not to be much at all (3) her plans,
because he had never asked.

Bill said, ‘You blow smoke into beehives to subdue the bees before opening them. No one really knows why this works, but the theory is that the bees, thinking there might be a forest fire, take on honey in case they need to evacuate the hive, thereby becoming heavier, slow and docile.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘You should open the hive as little as possible. Disturbing the bees makes them more inclined to bugger off. But it’s a good idea to have a look every
week, to check for signs of swarming because there are too many queen cells, too many drones, overcrowding, not enough stores. Then you can take appropriate action. Also you must watch for signs of varroa mite.’

Yup, her father knew his bees better than he knew her or the others.

‘What happens if they swarm?’ she asked.

‘They won’t if you manage them properly.’ Comfortably into his stride, he gestured at the paddock, scrubby grass, thistles, rusting roller and all. ‘The key is good management.’

Her mother paced alongside the stream. As she passed under a tree massed with pale pink blossoms, the wind shook the branches and rained petals over the blonde head and black jacket. In a dim, groping way, Maudie had always understood that her pretty, striving mother was unhappy. Now, she understood better what it felt like.

‘Maudie,’ said her father, ‘can we cease hostilities?’

She returned her gaze to her father. ‘Why did you leave Mum?’ she hissed. ‘Why?’

‘Is that your business?’ he replied, after a moment. The usual evasion.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But it’s important, don’t you think?’

Sarah had made sandwiches and laid them out on a table in the dining room. It was desperately in need of paint. Flakes curled off the cornices, two of the sash windows were crooked and the carpet was, frankly, disgusting. At least, the room overlooked the lawn, and a bowl of massed
white narcissi, almost past their best, had been placed by the window.

‘Jasmine, I made egg for you and, Lara, I know you like tuna.’ In her customary hospitable way, she moved around the room pouring water, doling out paper napkins, fetching extra mayonnaise from the kitchen across the corridor.

Finally she sat down beside Maudie. ‘Reading anything interesting at the moment?’

‘I’m researching Eliza Hamilton.’

Sarah looked a tiny bit panicked. ‘Should I know her?’

‘She wrote
The Cottagers of Glenburnie
.
Very
famous.’ Maudie ground the words out.

‘Ah,’ said Sarah.

‘It has a handicapped housekeeping heroine and is stuffed with fascinating detail of nineteenth-century Scottish domestic life. The heroine is crippled from an accident and hot on personal cleanliness. In it, she battles with hairs in her food, bugs in her bed and trying to find water to wash in. Clean underwear was almost unheard of – can you imagine?’

They all stared down at their sandwiches.

‘Spare us, Maudie,’ said her father. He meant:
Please behave and don’t the rock the boat of my nice new life.

‘I was just getting started …’

‘I’ll make coffee,’ said Sarah. Lara offered to help. The two women left the room and could be heard chatting in the kitchen.

Bill addressed his daughters. His splayed fingers on the table left foggy imprints. ‘Sarah and I want you to think of Membury as a home.’

Jasmine gave a tiny sigh. ‘Dad, I think Mum’s worried about money.’

Bill twirled his water glass. ‘I’d like to point out that I’ve treated your mother as fairly as possible.’

Neither daughter commented.

His gaze moved from one to the other. ‘I know you blame me. I just wish to say in my defence that there are two sides to a coin.’

‘Not to a child,’ intervened Jasmine, unexpectedly, and Maudie applauded silently.

Bill turned the water glass round and round, like the magician’s lamp, only there wasn’t any magic. ‘I can’t – don’t – expect you to understand.’

‘No,’ said Maudie. ‘Children don’t understand being left.’

Silence. A pregnant one.

Bill now pushed the glass to and fro, leaving a smudged water mark on the table surface. Maudie was tempted to lean over and wipe it dry with her napkin. But, she didn’t. She was never going to help him with so much as a swish of a napkin. Never. Ever.

She recollected the times when she had considered running down the street.
Dad
, she had planned to say,
please come. We need you
.

Bill regarded his daughters. A nerve twitched at his temple. Did she catch a trace of regret, longing even, in the blue gaze?

That night, back with her mother in the London house, Maudie couldn’t settle.

She recollected her father, or she thought she did, sitting at the end of her bed reading her a story:
Each Peach Pear Plum
 … The room was filled with light and she lay spellbound.

She remembered the silence that dropped over the house the day he went, except for her mother’s frantic sobs. And the Scottish neighbour who had come in, scooped up Jasmine and Eve – ‘a lovely pair of jessies’ – and taken them away for the night, which Maudie had hated.

After that, there were no more stories at bedtime and the bedroom became a dark place where she huddled up and tried to work out what to do. As the youngest, nobody told her anything, but she knew she must try hard not to be a nuisance.
You’re helping me by being a good
girl
, said her mother but, however hard she tried, Lara still wept bitter tears.

Looking back, the sisters agreed they had all felt cold and hungry. Not physically, but inside. Between the waking moments of her current dreams, Maudie questioned if that was how all rootless people felt – if deep cold and hunger was a condition of displacement and loss.

Maudie banged her hand on the alarm clock to shut it up. Then she lay on her back, legs straight, and ran her hands lightly up her body. All there.

What would it be like to wake up and find that a fundamental part of you was missing? An arm, a leg, part of your mind. All of your mind. Soldiers at war faced the prospect every day and she owed it to them to spend a few seconds empathizing. It was so little, yet it was something.

Another day.

Nick.

She was not going to think about him. She sat up and clasped her hands around her legs. Then, because anxiety was a road companion, these days, she bent over and pressed her forehead to her knees.
Did I do OK in the SAT exam?

All too evidently, her mother was taking a shower. The house was badly insulated. ‘Don’t ever stay with us,’ she’d advised Alicia, when they had talked about her home. ‘Intimacy’s forced upon you. You can hear everything.’

Today?

After lunch, it was back to college for an afternoon class and the long haul. Before that, she was meeting Jasmine, who had taken the morning off to go shopping with her for the prom dress.

She got up, dressed, applied a lot of mascara, ate a piece of toast, packed up her rucksack and said goodbye to her mother for the week.

Deciding to leave school had been painless. Dealing with the consequences of finding her feet at college and in her aunt’s home had been harder. The translocation had taught her that being on the move was not as easy as she had supposed. She had always been contemptuous of people who stayed put. Almost two years on, she conceded they might have a point, but to pay too much attention to her discovery would be to deter her.

On the way to the bus stop, she looked in on Donwell House, a centre for the homeless. The sights that occasionally greeted her there were sometimes frightening but she made herself do it
.
‘We have to do something,’ she told her friends. It sounded good.