Separate Beds (22 page)

At a beat, the atmosphere changed.

‘Been in touch with my stupid, obstinate sister? No.’ Emily stuck her hands on the edge of the table and bent over. ‘Don’t you think I would have told you?’

‘Emily, don’t look like that. Please. But have you
any
news from anyone?’

‘No.’ Emily was wary.

The goodwill between them had vanished. Emily marched over to the phone, snatched it up and shoved it in front of Annie. ‘Why don’t you try and find her yourself? Isn’t it about time? We all spend so much time tiptoeing around the problem, agonizing over where she is, or just feeling guilty … so, just do it.’

Annie did not move. ‘Guilty?’

‘
Of course
Jake and I feel guilty. We’re her siblings.’
Guilty
, thought Annie. ‘Go on, Mum.’ She seized the phone, dialled, listened and shoved it against Annie’s ear. ‘Go on, ask Directory Enquiries. See if they can trace her name.’

Annie snapped off the connection. ‘Directory Enquiries don’t do that.’ She poked at the phone, which transcribed a half-twirl on the flat table surface. ‘Are you sure she hasn’t been in touch with Jake?’

‘Why don’t you ask him?’ snapped Emily.

There was a short, unhappy pause. ‘Emily, there’s no need for
you
to feel guilty.’

‘What do you know, Mum?’ Emily shrugged and the closed look came down. ‘Forget it.’

Annie glanced down at the phone. ‘I long for reconciliation. Especially now.’ She looked up at her daughter. ‘The family
is
important.’

Emily’s expression was unreadable. ‘Mum, it’s none of my business, really, but the-family-is-important shtick would go down better if you and Dad …’ She paused. ‘You were happy once.’

Yes, we were, Annie thought. Very.

She could duck the issue. Or she could acknowledge it. She could confess to her daughter that her parents’ good intentions and ambitions, and their capacity for happiness, had stumbled at the hurdles. And if this was true of marriage, it was true of everything else in life. At what point, for instance, had she realized that struggling with hospital bureaucracy was pretty much hopeless and that, tarred and feathered by her defeats, she took greater pleasure these days from drinking a cup of coffee and reading
the paper in peace than fighting the battles? At what point had Tom decided it was easier to stay late at the office than to come home and read to his son
whom he did not quite understand
?

‘So?’ Emily busied herself brushing crumbs off the table.

‘I heard you,’ admitted Annie at last.

Emily said, in the new mature way she was developing, ‘OK.’

Annie got up and replaced the phone in its cradle. ‘Mia can’t be happy without her family.’

‘Of course she can and probably is,’ Emily said flatly. ‘But I’ll tell you something, I don’t think she and Pete will still be together.’

Annie caught her breath. ‘What makes you think that?’

Outside, there were sounds of arrival and whatever Emily had been going to reply remained unsaid. The two women braced themselves.

‘I don’t want it there.’ Hermione pointed to the old-fashioned television that Tom and Jake had positioned as discreetly as possible in the corner by the window.

Despite continual airing, the smell of paint lingered in the room, the freshly washed windows glittered eerily and all traces of its previous occupants had been banished. It was a virgin place, urgent to be refilled and replenished.

Tom wiped a sweating brow. ‘Where do you want it?’

From her perch in the armchair under the window, Hermione pointed to the opposite corner. Tom and Jake took up position and flexed their knees, ready to lift the
TV. Restraining Maisie, who, seemingly overnight, had developed the ability and desire to walk, Emily hovered in the doorway.

‘Stop.’ Annie consulted the room-to-scale plan on graph paper over which she and Tom had laboured. ‘If you do that, you won’t get the chest of drawers and the bed in.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Hermione.

Annie hunkered down beside her and explained the diagram. ‘Believe me, we’ve measured it out carefully.’

Hermione gave Annie one of her I’m-looking-at-a-witless-person stares. ‘Tom, dear,’ she cut across Annie. ‘Do give it a go. I’m sure it’ll work.’

Annie whipped upright and walked out of the room. She wasn’t proud of doing so, but it helped to divert her desire to strangle her mother-in-law.

The old black battle lines instantly re-established themselves. ‘You don’t think a mother should be at home looking after her children?’ Or: ‘Believe me, Annie, I do know my son.’ Or, on the lighter side: ‘Good Heavens! You’ve never made a soufflé?’

The newly wed Annie had put down her difficulties with Hermione to the self-consciousness of a new bride. Traditional stuff, she concluded in what, she now saw, was a faintly patronizing way – until she overheard Hermione on the phone describing her to a friend as ‘un satisfactory’. That gave Annie food for thought. For God’s sake, she might have been a piece of shoddy clothing or a toaster with a permanent glitch. After a sleepless night, she decided to tackle Hermione and ask what precisely
would
make her satisfactory.

‘Annie,’ answered Hermione, not in the least discomposed
and, as always, impeccably made-up, coiffed and cashmered, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

Neither did Annie. It was impossible to put a finger on it and say:
That is what I mean
. For Hermione had been – was – both clever and subtle in the manner in which she fought to keep a hold over her son. Behind her waywardness was marshalled a thwarted intelligence, which had had too little on which to feed. ‘She should have had a job,’ Annie informed Tom. ‘She would have made a fine industrial baron.’

Tom, being Tom, never got it. His reaction used to make Annie laugh. ‘Her bark is worse than her bite,’ was all he could manage.

Pace
her own mother: clichés had their uses when dealing with tricky subjects and she forgave him. ‘All I ask, then, is that you always listen to me as carefully as you listen to her.’

‘Done,’ he said.

Thus she had borne the lash of the older woman. It was the cross she accepted in exchange for her passionate love and her happiness.

Had been.

She recovered a little of her composure and called out from the stairs, ‘I’ll make some tea.’

Actually, Annie felt sorry for Hermione, and very sorry for the manner in which this move had peeled away her privacy. The process had been a weary counting out of a life in black plastic bags and stacks of coat hangers. There were suitcases filled with no longer pristine sweaters, a rack of dresses in man-made fibres, for it was only the latter that could survive the slash-and-burn laundry tactics of a
care home, and a supermarket carrier bag filled with bars of soap. ‘People keep giving me soap,’ Hermione complained. ‘I’m like a public washroom.’ Having sorted through them, Annie had some sympathy. Hermione might yearn with all her might for the sensual perfumes of youth, yet once society’s inherent ageism had kicked in, she was relegated to dull lemon and lavender.

There was a crash from above and Tom hurtled downstairs into the kitchen. ‘Jake’s knocked a picture to the floor. The telly doesn’t fit.’

Annie fetched the dustpan and followed him back upstairs.

Over his shoulder, he said, ‘Am I missing something? I haven’t heard, “I told you so.” ’

‘Consider it said.’

The spectre of Hermione with an infected foot was not a happy one and Annie spent considerable time checking the carpet for glass splinters, which held up the moving in.

An impatient Tom stood over her. ‘Here, let me.’ He knelt down beside her and brushed over the pile. ‘Ouch.’ He examined his hand. ‘Splinter.’

‘Give it here, Dad.’ Jake applied pressure, Tom yelped and his son teased, ‘Hardly a war wound.’

Tom cried out: ‘Stop.’

Annie took pity. ‘Come with me.’

She led Tom to their bathroom and searched for tweezers and antiseptic. Tom sat on the edge of bath and watched her.

‘Hold out your hand.’ Annie dabbed the site with TCP and, tweezers at the ready, bent over.

Moving noises continued to emanate from across the
corridor but in the bathroom it was quiet while Annie probed. Embedded at an angle by the base of his thumb, the splinter was going to take a bit of finessing.

‘Am I hurting?’

‘Yes.’

‘Badly?’

‘Incredibly.’

Her eyes flew to his. His were wry, hers must have been registering alarm. His lips twitched, hers twitched.

‘Keep going. I’ll live.’

‘Hang on.’ Annie rooted in the bathroom cabinet for a safety pin, the tip of which she dipped into the antiseptic. ‘I’ll have to cut it open a bit.’

She peeled back a tiny flap of flesh and dug around. The wound flowered scarlet, and she dabbed at it. Then again.

Tom’s flesh … Tom’s DNA … Tom’s blood … which he had shared with her to create the children. Then it had seemed extraordinary, and now even more so …

‘You all right, Annie?’

The point of the pin hovered over his thumb. It was the well-remembered moment of tension: that second suspended between desire and its fulfilment, which they’d used to enjoy.

She blinked. ‘I’m fine.’

Triumphantly, she prised out the splinter and dropped it on to the cotton wool. Both of them peered at it.

‘Not bad.’ Tom laid his unwounded hand on her thigh.

Disconcerted, Annie stuck a plaster on to his thumb, and began to clear up. ‘We’d better go and see what’s happening.’ She bent over to drop the debris into the bin.

Tom stood up, towering above her. ‘Have I thanked you properly?’ Straightening, she almost hit him on the chin and he laughed and steadied her. ‘I do thank you, you know.’

He meant Hermione and all that was to come with her, and she divined his apprehension correctly. ‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘We’re looking after her and she’s not at the mercy of the state.’

‘Yet,’ he said. An eyebrow flew up. ‘I’ll remind you of this in a couple of months’ time.’

Annie searched his face. Dark shadows under the eyes, the still mainly dark plumage, the old swagger lurking there somewhere but buried for the moment. ‘You do that.’

She turned to stow the tweezers in the cabinet and Tom reached out to stay her hand. ‘OK?’

At his touch, Annie felt the faintest stirring of excitement. ‘Emily said a strange thing to me today. She said you and I were happy once.’

‘Well, we were,’ he said. ‘Weren’t we?’

‘Yes, we were. Very.’ She put away the tweezers and closed the cabinet.

‘Are you coming?’ Jake called. ‘I need a hand.’

Reassigned to the position it was originally allocated, the television dominated the room, which, after her possessions had been shoehorned in, had shrunk to one considerably less spacious than Hermione had occupied in the care home. Squeezed in elsewhere were Hermione’s chest of drawers, a small bedside table, the bed and a pair of cherished Chippendale chairs, which she never permitted out of her sight. On paper, this accumulation of objects had looked fine. In practice, it did not.

‘This really won’t do,’ Hermione was saying, but there was a desperate note in her voice.

‘It’ll have to, Hermione,’ said Tom. ‘It’s the best we can manage.’

Annie knew he was hating the exchange and hated not having managed his mother’s affairs better for her. ‘It looks fine,’ she said brightly.

Jake knocked a picture hook into the wall and hung up the portrait of Hermione as a young woman – a good painting and one that frequently took an observer by surprise for it depicted a slender, dreaming woman in a yellow frock.

Annie began to place a selection of novels and biographies in the bookshelf. ‘Hermione, shall I arrange them alphabetically?’

‘Do what you like.’

Annie glanced around. Her mother-in-law’s shoulders looked particularly vulnerable, and the set of them seemed to beg for care and kindness. To Annie’s shame, she would have to brace herself but it would be done. She returned to the task in hand. Biographies of Mary, Queen of Scots, Churchill and Margaret Thatcher were predictable enough, but a well-thumbed copy of Ian McEwan’s
Atonement
was not. She riffled through the pages and a photo slipped to the floor. Annie glanced at Hermione, who was busy informing Jake that he should have hung the painting a little lower, and picked it up. It was old – taken in the late forties or fifties – sepia-coloured, and the features of the young man in uniform it showed were indistinct. But it was pos sible to see that he was smiling as he leaned against an army vehicle on the edge of what appeared to be a tropical jungle,
smoking a cigarette. Except that it had been taken abroad, it did not give much away. Yet it was clear from the intense creasing around the edges that it had been handled often. On the back was written, ‘Max, 1952’.

It caught Annie up short. Of course, Hermione had her own past about which she, and very probably Tom, knew nothing. Of course she did, and it was to display carelessness and arrogance to forget. She slipped the photo back inside the book and placed it on the shelf.

Hermione paused between berating Jake and her son to direct a question at her daughter-in-law. ‘What about that tea?’

The house was full. Every room was occupied, and the cries of a young baby were mixed with the competing voices of young and old adults. Annie paused on the stairs up which she was sneaking to grab a moment of solitude.

Where could she go to think? Where, in this busy honeycomb of a house, could anyone find privacy? Where would Tom work?

In the bedroom, she sat on the bed and switched on her laptop. The world’s economies were still giving cause for alarm and a footballer had committed adultery. She clicked into her email and sent the following to Sadie:

Day one of full house. Mood resigned. Roots at risk.

Chapter Fourteen

Tom was woken by a screwdriver boring into his head. Someone was sobbing. Under the duvet, his hands balled into fists. If that was Maisie, what was Jake doing? Then, to his horror, the sounds cohered and became comprehensible.