Homecoming (30 page)

‘That is one way of looking at it,’ Mrs Leonard agreed. ‘I say the same thing to my husband, you know. Don’t think he understands it. They all think they’re a catch, don’t they?’

‘True. The likes of Connie, they have it all. Why would you give that up to have someone ask you to wash their dirty socks? It’s having it all, you see. We didn’t have that in our day.’

Mrs Leonard nodded in agreement. ‘Having it all! In our dreams,’ she said. ‘They were different times, though, Barbara. There was no pill, no condoms.’ She lowered her voice. ‘No vibrators.’

‘You’re right there, Hilary,’ Connie’s mother said gravely.

Connie had to cover her mouth with her hand but she couldn’t hold the snorting laughter in. From her spinsterhood to vibrators in one minute.

Her mother turned round at the noise.

‘I got some of the little cakes for you,’ said Connie, with an admirably straight face, and slipped into the seat beside her mother as if she hadn’t been listening for the past five minutes.

‘Ah, you’re a great girl,’ said Mrs Leonard, shaking her head ruefully. ‘Tall, I’ll grant you that, but all cats are grey in the dark. There’s a lot to be said for the old ways, Barbara. The matchmakers had the right idea. Match them up, let them marry and they’ll get on with it. There mightn’t be so many unmarried girls around if the old ways still held sway.’

Barbara patted her daughter’s hand.

Mrs Leonard took a couple of small cakes, and got to her feet. ‘I’m off to mingle,’ she informed them.

Connie put the plate down beside her mother.

‘Do you think I have it all?’ she asked after a moment.

‘Well, you do,’ her mother admitted. ‘When I was your age, I had two children, not a moment to myself and there was no such thing as “me” time. That must be hard to give up.’

‘Mum, I’d give all the “me” time up if I had the opportunity,’ Connie said wistfully.

‘But you must have opportunities, love. You must have.’

And Connie realised that her mother thought it was her own fault she was single, that she was rejecting men left, right and centre.

‘If you knew how many dates I’ve been on, how often I’ve gone to a party hoping tonight would be the night. I’m fed up with it.’ For a second, she thought of Gaynor discussing Connie’s list and how no man would ever reach its dizzy heights. ‘Men don’t come near me. If you know what I could do to make a difference, tell me.’

‘Men like to be looked up to,’ her mother began.

‘I’m too tall for anyone except a basketball pro to look up to me,’ Connie said.

‘Don’t wear heels, then!’

‘I don’t.’

‘You never wear floaty, feminine clothes. When you’re tall, you have to make an effort to look feminine,’ Barbara countered.

‘I can’t do feminine,’ Connie said. ‘I look ridiculous. You need to be petite and fairy-like to wear floaty things. That suits Nicky, but I look like I’m playing dressing up.’

‘Your dad and I would love to see you settled. I wonder –’ Her mother’s voice shook. ‘I wonder if it was anything I did wrong.’

Connie felt more tears threaten. She didn’t know why she’d bothered with make-up at all. ‘Mum,’ she said, ‘it’s nothing you did wrong. I’d love to settle down, but it just hasn’t happened. There are lots of women living alone nowadays. That’s the way life is. And I can’t torture myself for the rest of my days crying over it. I have to get on with it. Don’t be sad for me, Mum.’

Her mother’s face wobbled.

‘Really, don’t be sad.’ Connie pleaded. ‘I’m happy, honestly I am.’

‘But what will you do without Nicky?’

It was the one question Connie didn’t know the answer to. Nicky had already moved into the new apartment with Freddie. In school, when asked something she didn’t know, Connie was brave enough to say so. She was wise enough to realise that the best teachers were able to admit what they didn’t know as well as what they did. But right now, she knew it was time to lie.

‘I think it will be a whole new life for me,’ she said, crossing the fingers of one hand under the snowy tablecloth. ‘I’ve relied on Nicky and Freddie far too much. Being on my own will force me to get out more.’

‘Oh, love, I do hope so,’ said Barbara anxiously. ‘Your father and I have been worried about you, worried what this will mean to you. You take such good care of Nicky…’

As if on cue, Connie’s father ambled up, looking both happy and relieved.

‘You’re sure the speech was all right?’ he asked them both, for possibly the tenth time that evening. ‘The
Father of the Bride
booklet said to keep it short, and I know I went on a bit long, but I wanted them to get a picture of Nicky when she was a child, so they’d know what sort of girl she is.’

‘Arthur, it was perfect.’ Barbara smiled at him, a smile full of love despite her talk about how she’d never had it all.

Weddings were bittersweet, Connie realised. Full of joy for the bridal couple and anyone who was happy, and tinged with regret for everyone else.

Freddie’s parents were still devastated that their huge financial losses meant they hadn’t been able to give their son and his bride the deposit for a house, the way they’d always planned to. And there was Connie, watching her parents enjoy sheer happiness at seeing one daughter happily married, while with obvious awareness that the other daughter had no sign of even a date with a man on the horizon.

‘Dad, what you said was wonderful. Will you bring me for a whirl on the dance floor?’ Connie said.

As her father whisked her off, telling her that he was always bad at waltzing and if she wanted to lead, it was fine, Connie reflected that she was getting good at appearing stoic at weddings. First Sylvie’s, now Nicky’s. if she’d ever thought of a career on the stage, she was getting plenty of practice for it.

Nicky and Freddie went to the Canaries for their honeymoon. Connie went home to Golden Square and decided she’d join a walking club to help her get fit. Or perhaps she should go to the local swimming pool and do lengths a couple of times a week?

Either way, she wasn’t mouldering away any more at home alone. No, sir. She was going to live her life to the fullest. Start again, as Eleanor had said. She was going to embrace life and show everyone how fulfilled she was.

And perhaps show them that a woman didn’t need a man to be fulfilled. No, sir, on the double for that.

16
The Queen of Sheba

It’s hard for you to imagine the hardship of those days when I was young, Eleanor. Housework wasn’t as easy as it is today. You’re used to me or Agnes heading to the shop for groceries or watching the coalman throw a sack of coal on the stoop, but in Kilmoney, everything we ate and everything we put on the fire we had to find ourselves.

From dawn till dusk, someone was working. If my mother wasn’t making bread, she’d be out digging vegetables in the garden. We’d have been lost without that little plot of land. Wide at one end near the turf stack and the road, it narrowed down into a sliver by the house where my mother grew rocket, because she loved it, and where Agnes had a rosebush that clung to the gable wall.

‘The Queen of Sheba’ was what she called that rose. It was creamy white, an old rose with many layers of petals like a doll’s skirts, and I’ve never found anything like it since. I’d know the scent at once if I ever smelled it again, but I never have, not in the garden shops or even in the florists.

I’d have loved a garden when we lived in Queens
in the old clapboard house, which is funny because, when I was young, I had no time for the garden at all. Worse than gardening was the field of turnips for the cattle.

Thinning turnips was what I hated doing most. You’d have an old grain sack tied round your waist like an apron, and you’d be on your knees in a long furrow with nothing ahead of you but lines of turnips. You’d start at dawn and you had to prick out half the young growth. The cattle ate the turnips and so did we. At least with potatoes you only dug up a few at a time, letting the fresh earthy smell overwhelm you as you hauled up a plant with the pale golden potatoes clinging to the roots. Turnip thinning took hours. By evening, your knees and your back would be in agony.

The meitheal was the best part of the summer work, when the local men combined forces to cut everyone’s hay for the winter – and woe betide us if it was a bad summer and the hay rotted in the fields.

On meitheal, the women of the house had to put on a fine feed. At lunch, myself and my mother would head to the fields with the tin flask of strong sweet tea and as many sandwiches as we could manage.

I can still smell the fresh scent of the hay when it was being stacked.

Do you know, it was simple then, now that I think of it. Today, we have all manner of geegaws to help us, but life’s more complicated in other ways. Looking back, I think we knew what was important about life then.

For the first time ever, Rae was grateful for her mother-in-law’s presence. Geraldine’s hip was so well healed, she was walking around the house without wincing, and could have easily gone home to her own house. But Rae didn’t want her to. Geraldine was proving a welcome distraction.

‘You’re so kind to my mother,’ Will said every night as they lay in their double bed, sinking into the sheets after a long day. It was a time Rae normally loved, the feeling of the cool of the bed on her hot, tired body and the knowledge that Will was beside her. Now, like everything else in her life, it felt wrong. Wrong that she was lying here beside her husband with a huge lie on her conscience. Wrong that she hadn’t told him about Jasmine. Wrong that she was sure the only option was to go on keeping the truth from him.

‘She needs someone to look after her,’ Rae said, which was a neat way of deflecting him. She didn’t want to talk about how kind she was. What use was kind when she was a liar?

‘She’s not always easy,’ Will said, and Rae loved him for saying it, even if she couldn’t take comfort in it.

‘She’s just strong-willed, that’s all. Goodness, I’m tired.’

This was code for not wanting to make love. In the three weeks that Geraldine had been there, Rae and Will had only made love once. Rae had lain in bed with Will’s arms around her and she’d cried silently.

Will had stopped kissing her breasts when he’d become aware of her quiet tears.

‘What’s wrong, love?’ he’d asked anxiously.

‘It must be this getting older thing,’ she’d said, shocked at how easily the lie came to her.

‘We don’t have to make love,’ Will said, and moved so he was lying beside her, holding her. She could feel his erection against her and knew how aroused he was. But she couldn’t make love. The pure honesty of the act would make her break down altogether.

‘Thank you,’ she mumbled into his shoulder. ‘I’m just so tired.’ More lies.

‘You know you can talk to me about anything,’ Will said, as he held her. ‘Has Mum been, you know, rude to you? I know how tactless she is…’

Rae shook her head. His skin was so warm and he smelled familiar. The Will smell she adored. How many times had they made love over the years of their marriage? She couldn’t remember and never before had she felt as if she was betraying him. It wasn’t only through sex with another man that a person could betray their husband. ‘Your mother’s been fine.’

Which wasn’t entirely true either. Bored now that she was recuperating well, Geraldine was becoming more irritable. Had Rae ever thought of sanding down the kitchen cabinets and painting them so they matched? Surely dogs weren’t allowed in the square’s garden off the lead? Geraldine had been looking out one day and seen a skinny girl with dreadful short hair letting two mongrel things run wild. One had done its business off the lead. Geraldine wasn’t sure which was worse, the dog being allowed off the lead or that the girl had bent to pick up the poop with a bag as though it were totally normal.

‘There aren’t many women who’d take their mother-in-law in with grace, don’t think I don’t know it, Rae,’ he said. ‘She’ll be gone soon anyway.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Rae, and thought how much harder it was going to be to hide how miserable she felt when his mother wasn’t there as an excuse.

On Monday, Leonora came to take Geraldine for a coffee.

‘I’m still not that mobile,’ Geraldine said testily as Leonora took her arm.

Rae hid a smile. Geraldine had been fine earlier and had taken a trip out to see Will in his office and to admire his work.

‘Oh, Mother, it’s been three weeks. If they’d taken your leg off, you’d be running around by now,’ Leonora snapped.

‘You’ve never had your hip done, so don’t talk like you know anything about it,’ retorted Geraldine. ‘You’ve no idea what I’m going through. At least your brother and Rae understand the pain I’ve been in.’

Rae held the door open patiently and said a small prayer of thanks that she wasn’t going with them. She’d been working in the tearooms all morning and was just taking a break before returning to Titania’s for the afternoon shift. But there was something she needed to look for while the house was empty.

It took ages for the pair to leave. ‘Hold my right arm, not my left,’ said Geraldine crossly to her daughter. ‘You keep forgetting I had my left hip done and you might bump into it.’

‘Fine,’ said Leonora in long-suffering tones.

They shuffled down the path, with Rae at the door, smiling and waiting until they’d reached the pavement. As soon as they had, Rae shut the door, ran upstairs and pulled the cord that opened the trap door to the attic. Reaching up, she pulled the folding stairs down and clicked them into place. She climbed up, flicked on the light and tried to remember where she’d left the box. The attic was a dumping ground for everything from toys to books, old clothes and Christmas decorations. Rae picked her way past Anton’s old tricycle and a box with silver and red tinsel sparkling out of it. Shoved in one corner was an old brown nylon suitcase that was so battered it was entirely unsuitable for travel ever again.