When the World Was Steady (11 page)

Virginia did not speak until they reached their picnic spot, a bench beneath a copper beech in the communal garden opposite. The lawn was dotted with other university employees, all of whom looked more cheerful about their lives than Virginia felt. She was immensely tired.

‘What exactly are you trying to do, Mother, lose me my job?’

‘Honestly. I’d swear that when you found God you lost your sense of humour, you crabby thing. It was a
joke.
’

‘You don’t know who you were talking to. You think it’s funny, you don’t do battle with him every day.’

‘Martin seemed perfectly charming to me. If he weren’t so young I’d suggest him as a prospect.’

Virginia glared. At her mother, at the plastic boxes, at the china. ‘I’m not sure I’ll stay for lunch.’

‘I’ve made potato salad. And brought the best plates.’

‘I’m surprised they didn’t break.’ Virginia was grudging, but when presented with a cherry tomato she popped it in her mouth.

‘I thought I might take the bus to Marks after lunch,’ said Mrs Simpson between bites. ‘I’d like to buy a new dress.’

Virginia nodded, a small glob of garlic mayonnaise on her lip, her jaws champing in time with her nods.

‘I thought,’ Mrs Simpson went on, ‘It would be useful for our holiday. For the trip to Skye.’

It was hard to tell whether Virginia had heard. She kept nodding and chewing for a moment and then settled into just chewing. She was scanning the lawn as if checking the horizon at sea, as if everything were blurred and far away. But she didn’t say anything, and Mrs Simpson knew they would go after all.

Melody Simpson chose nylon against her better judgement. The saleswoman, a buxom girl with a lank pony-tail, insisted that the cut was flattering, and Mrs Simpson allowed herself to be convinced. The print was red and blue stripes on white—‘Vertical,’ said the girl in a Liverpudlian accent, ‘Very nice. I wouldn’t advise horizontal stripes, but vertical … Looks very nice indeed.’

And Mrs Simpson was so pleased to hear this, as well as quite taken by the matching red leatherette belt, that she bought it almost at once. She was halfway home when she realized that she had abandoned her John Lewis bag in the fitting-room at Marks & Spencer, and that inside the bag were the two china plates, now smeared and greasy but her very best plates nonetheless. It wasn’t easy to force herself off the bus and across the road to the stop opposite, but she did, and so didn’t get back to Chalk Farm until well after six.

It was a surprise to see Virginia already sitting at the kitchen table, with the
Evening Standard
in front of her and the late mail
unopened in her lap. Mrs Simpson was not by nature demonstrative, or even eminently sympathetic, but she could see that Virginia was in some distress and she wanted to do the right thing.

‘Lovely dress, I’ve got,’ she said. ‘You can have one just the same if you’re nice to me.’

Virginia smiled weakly. ‘Show?’

‘In a minute. In a minute. Such a fuss, all this wrapping. My dear, but aren’t you home early!’

Maybe it was because Mrs Simpson, usually so gruff, called her daughter ‘dear’; maybe it was because Virginia was so very tired; or maybe it was just bound to happen. Virginia put her head in her hands and burst into noisy tears.

‘What on earth is wrong?’

Virginia shook her head. ‘Everything. Everything’s wrong.’

Mrs Simpson too behaved in uncharacteristc fashion: she stood next to her daughter and pressed Virginia’s trembling head to her foam bosom. She stroked her daughter’s hair as she hadn’t done for years, and worried about who might do so when she herself was gone. ‘There, there, dear, it can’t be so bad. You can tell me. Tell me everything.’

Virginia didn’t want to, but at the same time, she did. She struggled against an inner weight that wouldn’t let her speak. It had been so many years, after all, since she had confided in her mother. ‘Everything,’ she said again, muffled against her mother’s cardigan. ‘It’s just …’

‘You weren’t attacked, Virginia? Or hurt? Were you?’

‘No.’ But the shuddering sobs worsened. ‘It’s everything. It’s last night and Angelica … and my Bible and
today.
’

‘Today? We had a delicious lunch, didn’t we? Should I not have come? Did I spoil it?’

Virginia’s torrent of tears gurgled on, unabated, louder.

‘Is it today? It’s this afternoon, isn’t it? What’s happened? Something this afternoon—what is it? You must tell me, force
yourself.’

Virginia began to make a high, keening sound, like a medium in a trance. In between the pure moaning, Mrs Simpson heard her daughter say, like a faraway truth in a language not her own, ‘They’ve sent … me, sent me … away.’

Guilt was on Mrs Simpson at once, heavy, clouding the room. ‘Virginia, Virginia, don’t tell me you’ve been sacked?’

She gave her daughter the words and Virginia used them. ‘I’ve been sacked,’ she wailed. And again, ‘Sacked. I’ve been sacked.’

The full story, or as much of it as Virginia could bring herself to tell, was a long time coming. She had not, in fact, been sacked; her own words were more accurate: she had been sent away, for a month at least, six weeks, it wasn’t clear.

When she came back from lunch, there was a note on her telephone in Simon’s squat, messy handwriting. ‘V,’ it said, ‘Come and see me when you’re free.’ She decided she wasn’t. She got on with the requests for temporaries that had come in that morning, sorting them into types of skilled and unskilled work and then making small piles of possible candidates for each one, drawn from the sectioned file-cards in the boxes on her desk, each ‘possible’ pile containing at least one person who had worked successfully for the University before, and preferably one with a red star on their card that meant they had been highly thought of. But, distracted, she put a typist in with the security staff pile, and failed to find a tried worker for the gardening post, although she could conjure the faces of at least two temporary gardeners not already in use. Her inefficiency annoyed her, and when Simon poked his head around her door, she was jittery and ready for a break.

She had not thought anything of the summons, but Simon was stiff with her, and this heightened her already anxious mood. When he shut the doors to his office and offered her a seat, she felt her chest tighten and declined. This, she knew, was the
formula for hiring and firing people. This, she thought at the same time, had something to do with Martin. Simon, too, would not sit: he paced the room and straightened all the pictures, one by one. He brushed his plaque for dust. He did not seem to know how to begin. She noticed that his bottom was wide in its loose covering and in her confused state she couldn’t tell whether this was appealing or not.

‘I’ve been thinking, since this morning—’

‘Yes? What?’ Her eyes popped open and shut. ‘Is it something I’ve said?’

‘Don’t be so defensive, Virginia. I just wondered whether you had any holiday plans? You haven’t mentioned it.’ He took from his desk a chart that marked off all the holidays and sick days members of the department had taken. ‘It’s June now. You’ve only taken two days all year, you know. And one was for a root canal.’

Virginia shrugged. ‘I’ve got a lot to take care of.’

‘We all do, but we take holidays. Don’t you want some time off?’

Something about this didn’t ring true to Virginia. ‘Why since this morning?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Why have you been thinking about it since this morning?’

‘You seem tired.’

‘Of course I’m tired. But it doesn’t mean I want a holiday. You don’t take a holiday just because you get out of bed on the wrong side, do you? There’s work to be done!’ Even as she finished she could hear her shrill voice. It echoed among the pictures. ‘Besides,’ she said more calmly, ‘Selina is taking a lot of time very soon. Maybe I’ll take some later on, August, or September.’

‘You don’t do Selina’s job. It doesn’t matter.’

‘The summer’s very busy for me. I can’t leave everything on Mandy’s shoulders.’

‘You don’t have to: Martin needs to learn. He can fill in for a
couple of weeks. He’ll do it fine.’

Little fluorescent bulbs exploded in her head. ‘No,’ she said, only it came out of her mouth as a shriek, and a long one at that. Later, to her mother, she said, ‘I suppose I saw red.’

‘Virginia—’ Simon was coming towards her.

‘I knew it. I knew he was behind this. It’s his idea, and you—I thought we were friends! I thought we were colleagues.’ She spat this out, her eyes screwed shut as she tried to regain composure, so far lost she couldn’t imagine it. He put his arm on her back, on her shoulder.

‘I won’t go. Not for him, I won’t go. You can’t make me.’ She could feel Simon’s chest very close and she pummelled at it a little but he didn’t move away.

‘I think you need it,’ he said, and she opened her eyes to see a mixture of curiosity and pity on his close, coarse face. And of course she cried: for the first time in the many years they had worked together, she cried in front of him, fell against him and cried into his damp neck, into his department store cologne smell, while he patted her awkwardly on the back. To Mrs Simpson she said only, ‘I had a bit of a tantrum.’

And the funny thing was that amid all the fuss and the tension and the clammy body fluids, Virginia could see the absurdity of her fantasies, of ever having imagined this man crooning to her or disrobing. She almost started to laugh among her sobs; and for a second she didn’t care that her whole life had gone wrong, that she had lost control at such an inopportune time. It was just plain funny.

The hilarity didn’t last long. She didn’t remember it as she told her story to Mrs Simpson—although she wouldn’t have said had she recalled—and it was certainly not very amusing to be on indefinite leave on the grounds of nervous exhaustion. It was not amusing at all.

In the telling, however circumspect, of the afternoon’s
goings-on, Virginia shed still more tears. It was like losing blood: she was reduced, trembling and small by the time Mrs Simpson more or less understood what had happened, her eyes swollen and bloodshot, her nose crimson and damp. But the rest of Virginia’s face was pale—testimony, Mrs Simpson felt, to great trauma and shock.

After plying her daughter with Bovril, Mrs Simpson called the doctor, who came swiftly and provided an immediate sedative along with a prescription for some more. At the door she whispered to Mrs Simpson, ‘We’ll see how it goes. Might be a good idea for her to talk to someone. Therapy, you know. NHS covers it, although a lot of people don’t know.’

‘Thank you, Doctor, but I don’t think she’ll need to. My daughter gets her counselling straight from the source. She’s probably praying as we speak.’

Virginia wasn’t, in fact. She was lying in bed, where it seemed she had not been for ages, watching little transparent creatures swim back and forth across her closed eyelids. She felt free of the leaden weight of her limbs, inconvenienced only by the blockage in her nostrils, and sleepy, terribly sleepy. By the time Melody Simpson came in and kissed her daughter’s brow, Virginia was almost smiling and very far away.

Which left Mrs Simpson to the dusk, to a tin of baked beans, and to the past that had led her and Virginia here. This was not as bad as it could have been; it was not as bad as the other two times, after the last of which Virginia had found God, and after the first of which she had come home for good.

Virginia had been pretty then, always better built than her sister, with delicate wrists and only a slightly too-long face. Emmy had already left, and Virginia was jealous. Melody Simpson could see her eldest tight-lipped at the mention of William Richmond’s growing fortune, listening over Sunday lunch to stories of Emmy’s climb through Sydney society.

For almost a year Sunday lunch was the only time Mrs Simpson saw Virginia. Even then they didn’t get along; Virginia wasn’t exactly rebellious, but when Emmy left she grew ambitious out of spite, and needled her mother in ways Mrs Simpson could not stand. Virginia was a secretary, taking evening classes, in control, never late, never a ladder in her stockings. But terribly shy, really, which only her mother knew—no wonder she hated her mother so—and which, at that time, was about all Mrs Simpson could have said with certainty about her daughter.

She never saw the flat Virginia lived in with two other girls; she was never invited and wasn’t the sort to poke her nose in unwanted. She never met the man, and once it was all over, he was never mentioned again. But when her Ginny slumped on to the settee in three-day-dirty clothes, without stockings in March, without having called in sick to work, Mrs Simpson had known how to take care of her own. It was much worse than ‘nervous exhaustion’ then: the words for it left you blighted for life, were better left unsaid. Remembering that time, Melody Simpson thought again that one didn’t live through such periods and grow to like people any better—she would always prefer Emmy as a person, selfish though she was—but that one learned something stronger, and better, than easy affections. And she poked at her baked beans in a fury as she thought how Virginia’s flatmates had only been to visit her once.

It wasn’t until she had finished her meal; not until she had washed the few dishes and hung up her new dress—which looked, now, with its red leatherette belt, like an announcement of her guilt for Virginia’s state of mind; not until she was wiping down the table and tidying for bed that Mrs Simpson came across the pile of late mail.

There wasn’t usually much in the noon delivery; a flyer or an insurance document, perhaps a reminder for Virginia from the greedy dentist. But this evening, among the worthless wastepaper,
Mrs Simpson found a worn blue envelope of the cheapest quality, one half of one side covered with large, ornate stamps. These threw her slightly, and she turned it this way and that unopened, and examined the smudged postmark, before recognizing the generous, swooping slant of her younger daughter’s hand. She was tempted to run into Virginia’s room and shake her, to force her awake to the rare prize of a letter from Emmy, but she did not. Mrs Simpson took a sharp knife from the drawer, slit the top of the envelope, stealthy as a spy, and withdrew the flimsy sheets. She paused before unfolding them to fetch a bar of chocolate from the fridge, then settled down to the compounded indulgence of devouring sweets and words at once.