We Had It So Good (34 page)

Now she gets in her car and drives across London. They're all in on it, she thinks, looking at the women in head scarves and the men in white knitted caps. Then, recognizing the stupidity of that idea, stopped at the traffic lights changing from green to red, and a young man waiting to cross the street, a backpack over his shoulders, she says aloud, in her private box, “But maybe
you
were.”

“S
o I did what you told me and I took the train to Kent and the weird thing was how much it was the same, you know, it's thirty-five years since I made this journey but I saw the oasthouses and the wheat fields and the rosebay willowherb growing on the sides of the railway embankments and church spires and I could remember the names of all the flowers and the trees. I saw a flight of rooks rising from a wood and the pale sliver of moon in the morning sky, and there it all was, the sweetness of England, putrid fucking England.

“My hands were shaking, I really had the shakes. Maybe it's the DTs but it's not like I drink much, alcohol gives me a headache these days and even eating hurts my stomach. When I lived with the Algerian, he had a job as a sous-chef in a hotel and he got really pissed off with me because he didn't want to come home to do more work in the kitchen and I hadn't prepared any food. He used to get up sometimes on his day off and make croissants from scratch and bring them to me in bed and I just wasn't hungry and I'd turn my head away and he would slap me hard on the thigh beneath the covers and say,
Be nice
.

“I got the bus from the station, the same bus, at the same stop, and it went along the same streets and there was the house with its four chimneys, redbrick and black beams, ugly, pretentious,
expensive and too big for us. Do you remember the woods? Were they still there when you used to come to stay? There used to be woods where I played when I was a child, there were foxes, badgers, voles, and beautiful goldfinches in the winter, but there were no more woods now, they chopped them down and built over them. The house seemed very hemmed in to me.

“I really didn't want to go in. I think I would have just stood and looked at it for a while and then gone back to London, but all the way down on the train I was thinking about the hats, me making hats, hats with ears and hats with horns, hats with bells and hats with whistles, hats that came down over the face with eyeholes. There's a lot of potential in hats, they're quick to make and you can design them in your dreams, more or less, so I'd decided that yes, I would be a milliner. And that meant going up to the attic to find the hats I made before I came up to Oxford, I never showed them to you, I spent the summer designing and making them, and I wanted to know if they were still there.

“And, of course, to prove you wrong. You know you have spent far too long with an American, who believes that everything is a problem and so has a solution instead of being a situation, and that all it takes to be happy is a happy ending. Because he's still the same idiot he has always been when it comes to trouble. All Americans are, not just him. Apart from the ones who made the temporary gardens, they were different.

“Eventually, I rang the bell and no one answered. The house was silent. I just heard birdsong, I don't know where they nest since the woods were got rid of. I went to the side of the house where the gate was open as it was always open when I came home from school, and I walked past the kitchen door with the lavatory next to it for tradesmen, past the dustbins, odorous and strange, and as I looked down the long sloping garden there was my mother, bent under a cotton hat, weeding.

“She looked terrible. Her face was marked with brown age spots
and her hands were like birds' claws in leather gauntlets. She looked up at me and then she bent down again because she was working along a flower bed cutting the heads off chickweed.

“When she had finished she leaned the hoe against a tree and walked inside through the French windows where tea things were laid out on a white cloth. I followed her in. I had the letter in my hand in case she was gone in the head and hadn't remembered that I was coming and I held it out to her, I wasn't sure if she even recognized me. The letter signed
Yours sincerely, Mummy.

“She went into the kitchen and came back with a pot of tea, and still she had said nothing, not a word. Finally, she spoke. ‘It's Earl Grey. Philip didn't like it so I didn't buy it while he was alive. He liked common tea, very dark. I hope you don't share his taste.'

“When I picked the cup up to drink it, it tasted slightly sour. I said, ‘Antonia, the milk's not right.'

“It was as if using her first name was like pulling some old thing out of a trunk. I had never called her Antonia when I lived at home, but what was I supposed to call her now? She shook her head. ‘Call me Mummy,' she said, but I couldn't, the word stuck in my throat like a crumb.

“And then she asked about you. She said, ‘Do you still see your friend Andrea?' I told her I was staying with you in London and she said she supposed you were married, so I replied that you were. And then she said the most extraordinary thing, talk about breaking the ice. She said, ‘She wanted a husband. I suspected she was after mine.' Isn't that funny?

“And in all this time she had not asked a word about me. I felt like a long-lost cousin, not her own child. She finished her tea and said she'd put me in my old room and I could take my luggage up. Of course, I hadn't brought any luggage because I wasn't planning to stay the night, I thought if I got there midafternoon, she would stop gardening for a few hours, but that was a vain hope.

“She stood and put the tea things on a tray, the sour milk, the
cooling pot of Earl Grey, the plate of currant-speckled biscuits neither of us had touched which looked like they belonged in the century before last, and she said, ‘There's still so much light. I have hours of work to do. If you can wait until nine I'll make supper. The television reception is acceptable. We can talk then, I suppose you've come to talk.'

“So I had to leave then, or stay. And I knew you wouldn't let me come back here empty-handed, it was you who forced me into it. I walked up the stairs and stood on the landing looking at these rooms that radiated out from the central stairwell. The house was succumbing to mold and dust and cobwebs and grime and subsidence, it was awful. In my old bedroom almost everything had been cleared out, nothing was left of my childhood but a single bed, a table with a vase of garden roses, and an empty wardrobe. The desk where I did my school homework had gone, not a book or a toy or a picture had been kept. Only the green carpet remained, with burn holes from the cigarettes I used to smoke while I was reading.

“Yes, it was the same room I came back to after the abortion. I remember lying under the bedcovers and counting up to a hundred then back down again, it gave me something to do. I decided I would never see James again, he had done this to me, I hated him. He had been too shy and stupid to go to the chemist and buy a packet of rubber things, so I said I'd do it, I didn't mind, but the chemist wouldn't sell them to me. I came out empty-handed and he was standing there, his face burning with the shame of me, then we went to the woods and did it, until a walker came along with his dog and disturbed us. James pulled out in a rush of sticky fluid. It will be okay, he said. I'm sure it will be fine.

“All I remember about him was that he had red hair like you and wanted to be an architect. His last name has gone completely. I haven't thought about him since I went up to Oxford. It's strange to think that if I'd had it, there would be a forty-year-old with red
hair, or blond hair like mine. What a fuck-up that kid would have been.

“All the other rooms in the house had been emptied, there were just stripped beds, and in my parents' room my mother had got rid of the double they'd slept in and replaced it with a single. I felt she had ruthlessly disposed of us. She had got what she wanted, the house and the garden and not its inhabitants.

“I looked in the wardrobe, it was full of the most terrible old clothes, nothing of my father's, just her pull-on trousers with elastic waists, cotton shirts with and without sleeves, and jumpers. The smell of soil was everywhere, and everything was stained with grass and sap and roots.

“I walked through all the other rooms that had waited for new babies that hadn't come, and they were all empty too. I remember grandparents sometimes coming to stay in those rooms, I remember a moustache, a breath-smell of boiled eggs, an old lady whose hair was piled on her head, and held in place with tortoiseshell combs. Cousins sometimes came, older boys and babies. I used to look inside the babies' prams and unpin their nappies to see what was hidden there. The boys played cowboys and Indians in the woods and wouldn't let me join in until my mother came out and told them they must play with me. They took me down to the leaf-floor where there were rabbit holes and a badger's set, and tied me to a tree and I just waited there stoically for hours until my mother came and untied the knots.

“She said I was a silly girl to let them do this to me and that next time I had to be more firm. While I was waiting for her, tied to the tree, I thought of the story of Ariel, who was trapped inside a tree by a witch. I thought I would like to be deep inside the trunk, fused with the wood. When I grew up, I was going to be a tree.

“I went down to the kitchen, which was exactly the same as it was in my childhood. My father went to the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1955 and ordered a modern fitted kitchen which cost a fortune.
In the sixties he had covered its surfaces with strips of that plastic called Fablon which was all the rage, but now it was torn and dirty and it curled at the edges.

“Only the drawing room had any signs of life, gardening magazines, library books, a basket of knitting and a pair of sheepskin slippers laid out on the hearth. And through the windows I could see my mother at the end of the garden, by the compost heap.

“It was six o'clock by now and there was no sign that she was coming in so I turned on the television to watch the news. God, this shitty little country, this flyblown rubbish tip, it's sinking into the sea, all right.
Good-bye
.

“I suppose I must have fallen asleep in my mother's armchair because when I woke up, the sun was well down in the garden, there were long shadows and I could hear Antonia in the kitchen clanging pans so I got up and went to see if anything was being cooked.

“‘I'm making rice,' she said, ‘and there's some tomatoes from the garden.'

“She put this miserable meal on a pair of plates and we ate it in silence.

“So finally, after we'd finished, she said, ‘Well, why have you come?'

“I've never put up with bullshit, so why did this witch tie my tongue? I was struggling, so I just came out with it. ‘What did you know about Daddy?' It was an overly large question, I realize, but that was what I said.

“She sat there with her hands on the table, and soil under her fingernails. I couldn't take my eyes off them. She must have seen that I was fixated on her hands, because she said, ‘When you're a gardener the earth settles in and stays. Some of the ladies use dark red polish when they go out socially and your father was always nagging me to do it, but I could never be bothered. If he wanted nail polish he could get that from his mistresses. As long as he kept them in town they could have all the war paint they liked.'

“I said, ‘Why did you put up with it?'

“Her blue eyes were staring at me in that walnut face.

“‘But that is what gentlemen
do
. Everyone knows that.'

“I said, ‘In an Edwardian novel, perhaps. What about your self-respect?'

“‘Such modern words.'

“She cleared the plates and put a bowl of raspberries on the table. There wasn't any cream or sugar.

“I said, ‘I met one of Daddy's mistresses.'

“‘Did you?'

“‘Aren't you curious about her?'

“‘Don't be silly. I was never curious about those tarts.'

“‘She wasn't a tart, she was more of a secretary.'

“‘It amounts to the same thing.'

“‘Don't be ridiculous.'

“‘Secretaries are always out to pinch other women's husbands. That's the reason they learn to type. Did you bump into them on the street in London? I assume he went about with them in public. He came home reeking of scent on his evening clothes.'

“‘No, it was in his flat.'

“‘Oh, the flat. Wasn't it an awful place? That hideous decoration, like a Harley Street waiting room. I always knew your father was common, but I didn't mind because I thought that sort of thing was unimportant, the war turned everything upside down for a while, but it didn't last. My mother always said he was a bad egg. A bad egg with elocution lessons, he'd been to a teacher, you see, who had taught him not to drop his aitches.'

“‘I had an abortion in that flat,' I said.

“Her face was stained with raspberry juice, it ran into the cracks around her mouth. Her tongue was engorged and pink.

“She stood up abruptly and cleared the table, snatching the spoon from my fingers. She took the dishes into the kitchen and I could hear the sound of tap water running. I waited for her to
come back, night had finally fallen on the garden and my reflection looked back at me in the glass of the French windows, a double image, I saw myself twice. So I stood up and drew the curtains.

“She came back into the room holding a tarnished silver coffeepot and demitasse cups and she put them down on the table and said, ‘Why didn't you give it to me?'

“‘Give you what?'

“‘The baby.'

“‘I didn't want to have a baby, I would have been expelled from school.'

“‘Education isn't everything. Has it done you any good, do you think?'