Ricochet Baby (5 page)

‘What are you, queer?’ Bernard had said to Michael, the last time they met.

Orla thought at the time that it was a cruel thing to say, even though in her heart she believes that Michael is as queer as water running up hill.

It is not just because he’s single, she tells herself. Look at how he stands with his thumbs hooked in his trouser pockets, and the
way he savours his food. Her mother would sense something
different
about him too, even if she couldn’t put a name to it.

No doubt her mother will also see that, in spite of plenty, Orla’s own housekeeping has become careless and frowsy. Her mother will behold her, in all her devastation.

When Bernard comes in, a few minutes later, she tests the idea on him. ‘My mother’s coming to stay,’ she says, making it an accomplished fact.

‘About time,’ he says, as if her news is of no consequence. He sits down and stretches his stockinged feet in front of him, picking up yesterday’s
Herald,
while he waits for her to serve breakfast. ‘The dollar’s down, thank Christ,’ he says.

‘You’ll have to stop blaspheming,’ Orla says.

He lowers his paper. ‘I’ll do what I like. This is my own house, isn’t it?’

But Orla can swear there is relief in his voice. Perhaps he has guessed her plan. She rattles plates together and shoves them down on the table, as if her embarrassment is anger.

At this moment, Bernard’s father knocks and enters without waiting for an answer. ‘Someone’s been playing funny buggers in the paddock.’

S
ARAH’S MOTHER IS
up and pouring muesli into bowls. I’m ready, she announces.

Sarah lies in bed and pulls the covers over her head. ‘I’m
temperamentally
unsuited to early mornings,’ she tells Wendy, when she comes to the door.

This does Sarah no good. Wendy stands with her arms akimbo. ‘I always had trouble getting you out of bed.’

‘I don’t like getting up when I’m told.’ Sarah hears herself behaving like a sulky child, and swings her feet on the floor. After all, she is at Ellie and Jack all the time to get up and go to school. This is regressive behaviour put on especially for Wendy’s benefit.

Still she dawdles. Instead of taking a shower, she pours
herself
a long, slinky, oil-scented bath. Her breasts bob in the water. ‘Great tits,’ her husband, Tony, used to say. Tony, who manufactures barbecues for rich clients, considered himself a connoisseur of women’s breasts and one of his clients had taken him seriously. She puts her hands beneath her breasts and watches them float, pinches
her suckable nipples, and thinks about her lover. He used to like front-to-back sex so he could hold them while they made love. Sarah considers lying down in the water and drowning but she tried that when Tony left her and knows it does not work. Somewhere she has read that swallowing a banana skin will choke you. There are more obvious ways of killing yourself, and the fact that she does not review them tells her she is not quite ready for that.

‘I don’t believe in garden tours,’ she announces, her hair under a damp towel. ‘They’re for geriatric greenies.’

Wendy does not reply. She is trying not to look as if she is hurrying or eager.

In the end, as Sarah has intended, they miss the bus. She parks the car, walks slowly to the bus terminal and checks. The bus has long gone. When she returns to the car, Wendy’s hands lie in her lap. She looks down at them so Sarah will not see the unshed tears.

‘I’m sorry,’ says Wendy. ‘It’s my fault. I shouldn’t try to
organise
you.’

‘No, it’s mine,’ Sarah answers. ‘Forgive me. I’ve got the route the bus has taken, and a map. We’ll go in the car.’

Wendy brightens, and Sarah knows, inwardly, that it will only be a matter of time before she is in charge again.

T
HE BEST HOUSE
Wendy and Mac and their daughter Sarah ever had was a little wooden Lockwood. They lived in it in the 1960s, not far from the seacoast, and within sight of the brooding white cone of the mountain. They watched the bright crimson and black-edged sunsets, and listened to the wooden house move in its joints on still nights. Together, in a sturdy but struggling Morris Minor, they travelled round the coastline, where the
ink-blue
sea lashes the black west coast rocks, and through the
countryside
. Mac and Wendy were always on the lookout for things they could turn into money.

Mac was an odd-job man who painted houses for pensioners, laid concrete paths and mowed lawns. He was also an inventor who sold patents on various agricultural implements, knowing that, if he could find the right buyer for his ideas, one day he would strike it rich. The work he did was so meticulous he was always in demand, but he charged so little, because he and Wendy believed
in the principle of doing unto others as they would have done to them, that there was never any profit. So long as I have my health, we can make ends meet, he told Sarah, ruffling her hair, and
smiling
. Towards the end of the 1960s, Mac’s health did begin to fail.

Wendy was full of ideas and optimism. ‘We can live from the land,’ she said. They collected bottles and tin cans for Wendy to sell, and in the summer they hunted for blackberries and wild japonica, so Wendy could make jelly and jam. Mac took a gun along in case they saw birds and rabbits. They even searched for fungus on fallen logs, like Chinese entrepreneurs at the turn of the century. For aphrodisiacs, no less. Sarah found some of the stuff one day; it looked like a frilly rubber diaphragm on a tree stump. Clever, clever Sarah. People knew them, waved out, shook their heads and smiled. A harmless bunch.

‘What a dear little girl. Now which side of the family do her looks come from?’ Farmers’ wives asked this of Wendy when the family was seeking permission to pick mushrooms on their land, or gather pine cones.

And Wendy would say, with pride, ‘She’s our chosen one — you can’t know things like that.’

‘Well, who’d have thought it,’ the wives remarked. ‘She isn’t exactly like either of you, I can see that, but goodness she certainly looks like one of the family.’

Sometimes the farmers’ wives slipped Sarah a coin. ‘Put it in your pinny pocket, and keep it fastened over,’ they advised.

When she was ten, Sarah asked her parents if they must go on scavenging like this. They laughed gaily at her. ‘Nobody has to do anything in this world, dear child,’ Wendy had said. ‘But it’s such fun and it does bring in the little extras, doesn’t it?’

‘Well then, if nobody has to do it, I’m not going to any more.’ Sarah can still see the way Wendy stood there, stung by her
daughter’s
failure to understand.

‘So we’ve got a little snob in our midst,’ Wendy had said. ‘I can’t believe it. That’s why I got away from England. From England and my father, the earl.’

Sarah often suspects Wendy of deliberately misunderstanding when it suits her, and also of untruths. Her father, the earl, is a
variable
whom she remembers with affection when it suits her and at other times disparages. But when Sarah thinks back over her life so far, that refusal feels like one of the cruellest things she has done to
anyone; it was also a day that marked the beginning of something between Wendy and Sarah, a cycle of guilt and repentance from which neither of them has since been free.

That is why, on this lovely spring morning, Sarah is driving Wendy through the countryside in search of beautiful gardens,
listening
again to the story of the earl.

Her mother, as she tells it, was born the third daughter of the Earl of Maudsley, an unfortunate man without sons to whom he could bequeath things. One of Sarah’s aunts had borne a son, and so now there was a cousin in England who was the Earl of Maudsley. This is the family mythology.

‘I left England with a trunk of clothes,’ the story begins. ‘I had some kitchen utensils I’d saved up for from my monthly allowance. I went into my father’s study one morning, and I said, “Father, I have packed my trunk and I am leaving.” I’d been such a blow to him, his last hope of an heir, because the midwife had said to my mother, “That’s enough. There’ll be no more of this, or you’ll be dead, and then where will the his lordship be?”’

‘I can’t believe people could go in for all that generational crap,’ Sarah says. She is sure they have missed the turn-off to the first stop on the garden tour. ‘It’s as bad as Diana being measured up as breeding stock for Charlie, and look where it got her.’

‘My father, the earl, was related to Diana’s family,’ says Wendy.

Sarah has heard this before. She sighs. ‘So the earl didn’t try and stop you from going?’

‘Well, that’s the funny part of it. He was furious. Loss of face, of course. He didn’t believe me at first, but when he realised I meant business, he gave me a parting gift.’ Sarah knows the parting gift as intimately as she knows her children’s faces. The one last gift from the earl was a pair of pure silver birds mounted on filigreed stands. They have outstretched wings like fighting cocks, and a
yellow
sapphire in each eye. ‘Took them off the bookcase by the
fireplace
and put them in my hands. Here, take these and don’t come back moaning for more when they’re gone, that’s what he said to me.’ Wherever the family lived, the silver birds held a place of
honour
. In the dingiest cottages, they stood shining on the mantelpiece, rubbed every day with a soft cloth.

‘If I’d been a man, at least I might have got remittance money. But good Lord, look what I got in return for running off. Your father, bless him, and freedom.’

‘Can’t you sell the silver birds?’ Sarah once asked, when things were particularly lean.

‘Sell the silver birds? My dear, the birds are your inheritance. See, they have the earl’s crest stamped beneath their stand.’

This is where truth comes unstuck. Sarah has long ago realised that, in her heart, Wendy is still the snob, the daughter of an aristocracy she claims to despise, and she cannot like this trait in her mother. Secretly, she describes her as a hypocrite. But Wendy also has an eye for what is beautiful and fine. The piano with the fire-eating dragons, the chiming clock and the pieces of china, delicate and rare, are not inheritances. They are items
bargained
and bartered for in old Taranaki homes; what others saw as junk, Wendy perceived as treasure, to put aside for Sarah.

So Sarah supposes she must love Wendy, in spite of
everything
for the energy and effort she puts into creating mirages, her boundless belief that things will turn out well. She thinks Wendy is foolish and vain, that her friends would be astonished if they met her, and would laugh behind her own and Wendy’s back, but she is used to that. She has grown up with this woman. They will go on, she expects, being exasperated and affectionate, and she supposes that in the end she will not know Wendy much better than when they began. Certainly, she does not expect Wendy to understand her. Mac is dead, and the Lockwood house sold long ago to pay his debts. Wendy lives in her rented cottage by the sea where, as far as Sarah knows, the silver birds still gleam in the crowded space that doubles as a bedroom and a living room.

‘Some day they’ll be yours,’ Wendy says. This has been a
persistent
refrain. ‘You can take them now, if you like,’ she had said, on the last of Sarah’s infrequent visits. ‘They’d be safer at your place than mine. Even if I’m out for an hour there’s the risk of being
burgled
. They’re only things, I don’t need them.’

But, unlike the other gifts, Sarah will not take the birds. She wants to give Wendy some money from the barbecue manufacturer, but her mother won’t hear of it.

Today, Wendy is oddly quiet about the birds; for the moment she has no more to say about them. She does not suggest that Sarah collects the birds, and Sarah finds herself unsettled by this
omission
, as if the last line has been left off a jingle.

‘About your birth parents,’ Wendy says.

This is what Sarah does
not
want to talk about, but it is this that has brought Wendy to see her. She is saved, for the moment, by the sight of a tour bus parked by a farm gate.

‘Yes, that’s the place,’ says Wendy, with a certain satisfaction.

I
HAVE TO
take tests for anaemia at the hospital, on the instructions of my gynaecologist, Mr Maitland, a short man with a pleated throat and a peppery disposition. I have been perfectly well up until now and I feel that he is simply justifying his existence and all the money my parents are paying him.

I get lost at the hospital, which is old and like a rabbit
warren
. You can as easily end up in the cancer ward when you have set off to visit an old lady with a broken ankle. I get into a lift. Lifts have never bothered me. Some people walk up six flights of stairs rather than get into an ageing lift, but I have always thought that, if a lift broke down, I would be calm and comforting to those less capable than myself.

It does not happen like this. As soon as the doors close, I realise that I should have turned left, back down the corridor, and I am headed for the wrong department. When the lift shudders to a halt, I am startled. There are six of us inside, two middle-aged women, an older man wearing a battered tweed cap, a smart young Asian woman and a sullen teenage boy. We stand apart from each other, the way people do, trying, in that compacted space, not to touch. When minutes have passed, we glance
sideways
at each other, our nervous smiles acknowledging that we are there. Only the Asian woman looks as if her self-control lies in being absolutely still. Nobody moves. It is surprising how quiet it is, even though we are trapped in the bowels of a huge and busy hospital.

‘It’ll probably start again in a minute,’ says one of the women. An acrid smell of tobacco clings to the boy’s clothing. I fight rising nausea.

And suddenly I’m up there again, with space beneath me, covered only by the flimsy floor of the lift cage. Don’t be afraid, says my coach’s voice, you haven’t got far to fall. But I know it is a long way down.