Never Mind Miss Fox (12 page)

Martha considered. “Sort of.”

“Was it about me and the concert?”

“Not you, no. The concert a bit.”

Eliza was practical. “How did you get here?”

“In the car. It was late. I came to talk to Eliot, and then I sat in the car for a bit, and now I'm here with you.”

“But that means no sleep at all!” It was baffling. “Were you drunk?”

“No! Of course not.” They looked at each other, and then Martha smiled, this time with a bit more meaning. “How was the concert?”

“Oh, Mum.” The thought of it drove everything else from Eliza's head. “Amazing. Literally amazing. And we had ice creams in the interval
and
we got a taxi back. But you know what, Mum”—now Eliza put her head on one side—“I might want to learn an orchestral instrument. They're more
sociable
than the piano.”

Her mother looked at her. “That's a good word,” she said. “Did Eliot suggest it?”

“Yes,” admitted Eliza. “But I agree with her.”

“So do I. Sociable is nice.”

“Yes, and playing the piano is a bit lonely sometimes—Eliot says—because there's no one next to you.” Eliza's hands drifted over an imaginary keyboard on the duvet in front of her. “I was watching the people in the orchestra and they were all…friends, you know? Smiling and winking and things. I bet it's fun—I could be like that.”

Having made her speech, Eliza was embarrassed. She rolled forward onto her head on the bed until her pajama-striped bottom pointed up into the air.

This was Martha's cue to reach around and pull Eliza's feet over her head until she was lying flat again on the mattress, giggling. It was an old routine. “That sounds sensible,” said Martha. “Come on then, maestro: breakfast.”

It should have been nice, having her mother there in the morning, but it was not. Three was not as good as two, and Eliot no longer belonged to Eliza. There was no talk of the concert or of the promised breakfast in the café. Eliot said nothing at all, and Martha was hungover—Eliza could tell by the turned-down look of her mouth and eyes—which meant tired and cross. Eliza wished her mother had stayed away. “What was so bad about the argument that you had to come here?” she asked, peevish. “Why couldn't you have stayed with Dad? We were coming anyway.”

“Stop it, will you?” Martha said in irritation. “Anyone would think you weren't pleased to see me.”

This was met with a speaking silence.

Then it got worse: “There's been a change of plan,” Martha said. “Eliot's not coming with us to the cottage. We're going on our own.”

Eliza wanted to cry. “Why?” she asked.

“Stop asking questions. Just because.”

Yesterday Eliza had imagined sitting in the passenger seat of Eliot's two-seater, sharing a Twix and discussing
The Carnival of the Animals.
Today she and her mother drove in silence, the windows up and the radio off.

It was traditional for Eliza to jump out of the car and race up the field to the cottage but today, when they arrived, she did not feel like it. “Why not?” Martha tried to make her.

“Why should I?” said Eliza.

“You always do.” They sat in the stationary car, the engine running.

“Not today.” She was stubborn; it was an impasse.

“Fine.” Martha accelerated in a skid of stones.

Up at the house they both looked out for Clive but there was no sign of him. “Where the fuck is he?” Martha said under her breath.

Eliza shrank at the swearword and the spitting anger in her mother's voice. This was not right. She got out of the car and ran inside, shouting, “Dad?” but it was more to get away than anything else. She searched the house and found nothing different except a blanket on the sofa where it should not have been. She looked at it with a strange feeling growing like mold on her insides.

In the kitchen Martha was standing, doing nothing. “He's not here,” Eliza said, walking back into the room.

“I know.”

“Where is he?”

“I don't know. At home, probably.”

“What's going on, Mum?”

“Nothing. Why don't you go for a walk?”

“I don't want to. I wish I was in London with Eliot. It's boring here and you're being horrible.”

Martha seemed to collapse like a burst paper bag. “I know,” she said. “I'm sorry.” She chewed on her next words before she came out with them. “It's complicated.”

Now Eliza felt guilty. “We could make a cake?” she offered. “Or watch a film?”

Martha smiled a very sad smile. “Yes,” she said. “Let's.” But they both heard a car on the track and swung to the window to see who it was.

“Dad?” queried Eliza, her voice a hopeful treble.

“Tom,” said Martha, looking at the car. “Tom—” And she sank into a chair and started crying out loud—very loud—in a burst of tears with her face puckered into her fists.

By the time Tom walked into the kitchen Eliza was patting her mother's shoulder with a light, tapping hand that begged for help as much as it sought to comfort. Her expression made a worried, white disc of the face that she turned towards Tom.

The flat was empty and had not been visited. Clive stared down at the mute, white covers of his bed.
Our bed,
he tried to reassure himself.
The bed I share with my wife.

Next he stood in the kitchen, wondering, and looking at the washing-up in the rack. This place did not feel like home—but then nor had the cottage. Where could he go? He thought of his mother.

“You!” she said when he telephoned, stuffing the word with meaning until it seemed to burst on his ear like a flung cushion. “I thought it would be you. I've just had Tom on the phone. What a mess!”

Clive did not say anything.

“Do you know, Clive, if you weren't my son I don't think I would be able to forgive you.” She paused, as if hoping that he would feel at the mercy of such a fate. But the moment did not last long—the jeopardy did not convince—and she spoke next with a mother's resignation. “I suppose you want to come here,” she said. “I don't know where else you can go.”

Tom was like a cowboy crossed with an astronaut, Eliza often thought, but perhaps that was because of the car he drove. It was called a Space Wagon and the name spoke to her of starry nights, campfires and rockets to the moon.

He needed a wagon, he said, because of his two sons. He said what he would like best would be a wagon he could pull behind him like a pony pulls a cart, because then he would not have to listen to the shouting and fighting.

Sometimes he teased his boys, saying, “If only I'd had twin girls! Two lovely girls with pigtails!” It made the boys roar and blush.

Stan and Jack were younger than Eliza by two and three-quarter years but they seemed to take up at least as much room as she did. Their real names were Stanislaus and Jascha because their mother, Kathy, was Bulgarian. “But they've never even
been
there,” Eliza had said when she first learned this. “They don't even
speak
Bulgarian.”

“Kathy does, and her parents do,” Tom had replied. “Don't be such a bossy boots, and give me back those passports.”

Eliza did not like being told off by Tom and so had left the conversation there, but she bore a grudge. She was not sure with whom. Kathy? She knew that she wanted England to be more important to Stan and Jack than Bulgaria because she wanted them to belong to her family. She did not have brothers and sisters, two of her grandparents were dead and one had moved to France—she needed every remaining relation she could find. For Christmas and birthdays in particular.

Tom used to live with Kathy and the boys, but now he worked in a different hospital from hers and lived in another flat, only seeing them at weekends. This did not satisfy Eliza. “Don't you miss them?”

“I don't have time,” Tom had said, and it was bound to be true because he worked so hard.

Tom was a doctor, “with a particular interest in children's brains.” When he said this to Eliza he wiggled his fingers like Doctor Frankenstein. It was a private joke between them because of the time she had fallen on her head.
“Donk-donk-donk,”
he would say to her, rolling his eyes. “Do I hear the sound of Eliza coming downstairs?”

Anyone else making jokes about it would not have been funny but with Tom it was always all right. To be teased by him was not a punishment—it was more like a blessing. This particular joke, however, had to be a secret. It was not the sort that Martha or Clive would find funny. “But soon I'll be a surgeon,” Tom whispered to her. “Then you can fall down the stairs as much as you like, and I'll just stick you back together.” Eliza giggled.

Eliza could not miss having siblings because, as her father often said, “You can't miss what you never had.” But after her cousins had left—at the end of a half-term or a holiday—the cottage did feel very quiet. Cleaning her teeth on her own (and not being spat on or shoved out of the way) was not as nice as she remembered.

There was always a moment, however, when they first faced each other that she stared at the boys, and they at her, as if they had never met. This time was the same: Mum went to the bathroom to blow her nose, Tom got three Ribenas out from the cupboard, and the children stared at each other like fish in a bowl. “Out,” said Tom to them. “And don't come back.” He meant until tea, and he held the kitchen door open for them until they had shuffled out into the yard. Eliza wanted to stay—
What about Dad?
—but the door was shut in her face and once she was outside it did not seem to concern her. Now there was a simpler matter at hand: the field, the stream or the camp in the woods?

Jack said, “Let's make a dam—”

“—And then a flood,” finished Stan.

“Race you,” said Eliza, and off they went.

In photographs her cousins looked alike, but when they were running about or speaking they were Stan and Jack, and not identical at all. Tom had once given her mother and father a telling-off for calling them “the twins.” “Please don't,” he had said.

“Not even to you?” Martha had not really understood him.

“Call them by their names, like you would anyone else.”

Eliza had understood him perfectly—but then, she had not needed to be told. “It's like when Dad calls you ‘my wife,'” she had chipped in, trying to be helpful. “You don't like that.”

“Eliza, I wish you wouldn't interrupt grown-up conversations,” her mother had said, turning in her chair with a cross face.

That night Tom shouted in the garden, in the dark. Martha had gone to bed with a crash—too much wine again—but Tom liked to smoke outside and Eliza, who was awake, heard the click of the front door and smelled his tobacco. Smoke had a habit, Eliza had noticed, of creeping indoors—like spiders did before thunderstorms. She wrinkled her nose.

Now she heard him speaking. “You fucker,” she heard. She could hardly believe her ears. This was horrible. Was it even Tom? He had a different voice, like stamping on a cardboard box. “How could you?” These pauses meant he must be on his telephone. “How could you do it to Martha? To Eliot?” (
Eliot?
frowned Eliza in bed.
But what—?
) “And to me, you bastard, you knew how I felt…”

Eliza got up, with her heart leaping arpeggios in her chest. She shut the window without making any noise, put on her iPod and—back in bed—turned out the light. Music in the dark was better than hearing…
that.
This was a moment for
The Well-Tempered Clavier,
which made her think of Eliot and of the previous evening when, in the Albert Hall, everything had been not just all right but wonderful, marvelous, special and perfect. It seemed long ago and far away from here.

In the flat on Sunday night there was no sign of Clive. He had been there—his running shoes, toothbrush and laptop were gone—but he had not slept in the bed. Eliza stood at the door of her parents' bedroom and looked at the smooth, flat duvet which—like the blanket strewn on the sofa in the cottage—told her only that something was wrong. Her wondering imagination reached and roamed all over, looking for answers. The peculiar feeling inside was not going away but spreading, staining her bones, turning her green like old cheese in the fridge. She imagined the gradual rotting and spotting of her ribs and her fingers, under the skin.

Upstairs in the kitchen she was nervous of her mother and did not say anything. They had not spoken much today. Tom had made sausages and mash for lunch and Martha had sat and stared at nothing in particular, drinking red wine and pulling at a hole in her cardigan. She had stayed in the same position when her food was put in front of her, and then she had not eaten it. When she had asked Tom for one of his cigarettes Eliza had been courageous and said, “Please, Mum, don't.” Her mother had not even replied, just gone ahead and smoked. In the car they had not spoken at all. Eliza had put on
Just William,
but only to drown out the silence.

She waited, standing in the kitchen with her rucksack, to find out what would happen next. Martha shuffled through the letters and then opened and shut the fridge door. “Ugh,” she said. “How depressing.”

Eliza had an idea. “Why don't we ask Eliot to come over? And bring pizzas? We could watch a film.”

“No.” It came out in a snap, but then Martha took a deep breath and said, “Not tonight.”

So they ate cereal in their pajamas and watched something about lions, and Martha cried when the lioness attacked the baby elephant. This was normal—Mum always cried in nature programs—but what followed was not: she continued to cry for a long time afterwards, right up until the end. It made Eliza nervous. “Come on, Mum,” she said, patting her. “It's not that sad, it's just what lions do: she's got to feed her family group. It's like pizzas for them.”