Never Mind Miss Fox (14 page)

But then Eliot turned to face her. She took Eliza's hands and clasped them in her own, holding Eliza above the swell of this swallowing sea. She looked straight into Eliza's questing, worrying face and said, “It's going to be all right. It will be.”

Eliza did not want to argue; she wanted to be told. Right away her churning, tumbling thoughts calmed to a simmer as if she had been taken off the hob. Her heart slowed to its normal speed and settled to its usual place. Now she felt tears come flooding up from somewhere deep below—they would spill from her eyes in a flood, she knew they would. Her throat tightened and prickled in readiness; her forehead pinched and her mouth began to tremble. There was nothing she could do to keep herself in check, and she could not even hide her face for her hands were still held by Eliot's. She went limp, hung her head and waited for the torrent.

Eliot went on speaking in a steady voice: “Not everything is fair,” she said. “Some things are hard and horrible—like this thing you've got now, with your mum and dad: it's not fair and it's not your fault, but there's nothing you can do about it. You can't figure it out and you can't stop it. You just have to live with it, for a bit. But I promise you: it will be all right. I completely-utterly-totally promise.”

Instead of lying on the floor Eliza curled herself into Eliot's arms. She stayed there until the tears—every tear in the universe, it felt like—had all come out.

Eliza enjoyed rehearsals as long as she did not have to speak to anyone, and no one spoke to her. She had perfected the art of going unnoticed—it had taken years of practice. Being left alone was preferable to being singled out. Anything was.

There were two performances of
Oliver!
Martha came to the first, and Clive to the second. Sometimes it seemed to Eliza as if the whole school was time-tabled for parents who were not speaking to each other.

“When did you decide to sing in the musical?” Martha asked on the way home. She smiled as if she were pleased, but Eliza could tell she was not. “Was it your idea?”

Eliza considered her answer. If she said “yes” it would be a lie, but “no” would get her into trouble—and probably Eliot too. “You stopped me from having piano lessons,” she squeezed out after a moment, “but not from
everything.
” It was the kind of artful, dodging conversation she was not used to having with her mother.

The second performance was on the last day of term. Eliza expected her usual ecstatic relief—
No more school for weeks!
—but this time it did not come. She had learned that school was just a place, and that people everywhere were sometimes nice and sometimes nasty. Even grown-ups, out in the wild, and even parents.

After the show everyone was elated, hugging and cheering on the stage behind the fallen curtain. Her father took her out for pizzas and in the restaurant loo she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror: an unfamiliar, glowing person—although still a bit smudged from the makeup—looked back at her. She almost didn't recognize herself. She pranced about for a moment singing “
Food
glorious
food
—” and then put her head under the hand dryer for a blow dry.

Back at the table her father tried to be cheerful but Eliza knew he was faking it. He ordered a Diablo, just like normal, and this time Eliza forsook her Margherita and had the same. She wanted to tell him something and this was a way, but it was not so nice and she had to pick the hot bits off.

Afterwards she was dropped off at home and she felt as if she were back in the playground with a sick feeling and a lump in her chest. She cried in the hallway and said to Martha, “I hate it here!”

Martha said, “Do you want to go to Granny's with Dad, for the night?”

“I hate it there too!”

In the morning she lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and picking at the corners of her fingers, peeling them away from her fingernails. She had not done this for ages—since before the piano. She could not do it and play because of the plasters, but that did not matter now.

At breakfast, when she was eating her cereal, her mother grabbed one of her hands. She looked at it, asked to see the other and then sat down next to Eliza at the table. She was still holding Eliza's fingers in her own, which made Eliza think of Eliot and want to start crying again.

“What about we all go to the cottage?” Martha searched Eliza's face. “You and me and Tom and the boys?”

“And Dad?”

“Eliza…”

“I don't want to go without Dad. He's not
dead,
you know.”

This was enough to make Martha consider. “All right. I'll ask him.” Eliza slumped in relief but now her mother began something new. “So guess what?”

Eliza stared at her.
What now? Will it hurt?

“I've got an interview for a job.”

This was not like having her hands held, it was like being cut open with a knife and then prodded with a fork. Eliza slipped her fingers out from her mother's grasp. “A job?” she said. “But you've got one.”

“No, a real all-day one, not a mum's one. Isn't that exciting?”

Eliza did not answer because she could not. She had the breathless, weak feeling she got in the swimming pool, halfway down a length of backstroke and veering off course. She had not known before today that “exciting” could mean bad as well as good.

I
n fact it was Tom who told Clive about the holiday. Martha asked him to make the telephone call.

“We're all going to the cottage. Martha too. I've got the time off, and I'm bringing Stan and Jack.”

Clive ransacked his brain for excuses. “But…” he bleated, “the bats. And then there's work. It's not possible—”

Tom might have said something in reply like, “Oh grow up, will you?” But a bus hooted behind him at that moment and the words—whatever they had been—were lost. “Just sort it out,” he went on, short-fused. “Believe me, the last thing Martha or I want to do is spend time with you. This is for Eliza.”

Faced with this, Clive could not refuse.

He came off the telephone and went back into the kitchen where his mother sat at the table with her newspaper.

Val liked to read the newspaper first. “It's not the same once you've pulled it to pieces. Can't you get your own? At the station?” But Clive did not want his own, he wanted his mother's. Depending on his mood he might delay his commute, waiting for her to finish reading, and then take the paper from the kitchen table. “You've read it,” he would bully her when she protested. “Who reads a newspaper twice?”

Today would be one of those days: Clive had been wounded and he wanted to wound in return. He went over to the kettle and switched it on. “I'm going to go to the cottage,” he said. “Tomorrow. For the weekend.”

“To talk to Martha?”

“Sort of. We're all going. It's for Eliza's sake.”

“Good.”

But Clive had not finished. “Tom seems to think that Martha is looking for a job, instead of working freelance.”

“Well, that's good too. She's often complained about wasting her brain.”

“It might be in Paris, Tom thinks.” Delivering this bombshell gave Clive a lick of satisfaction and then a sour taste.

Val began to turn the pages of her newspaper faster and faster until she had reached the back page, when she pushed the whole thing away from herself and sat back in her seat. “You can take that, now, if you want it,” she said. Her voice was neither kind nor unkind, but empty. Although she did not like to argue with Clive—he was too skillful and it sapped her strength—Val knew how to make herself plain. After a pause she cleared her throat and asked, “Are you making one cup of tea? For yourself?”

It was Clive's policy not to respond to the most ridiculous of his mother's questions and this was one: the answer was staring her in the face.

“There's a pot, you see,” Val said. “A teapot. It's for when more than one person might want tea. It's just more…
sociable,
I suppose.” She pursed her lips and spent a second or two arranging the salt and pepper cruets on the table. Then she continued, “I think after this holiday you had better look for somewhere to live. If you don't sort things out with Martha, that is.”

Clive stirred milk into his mug of tea, making a whirlpool with his rotating teaspoon and causing the tea to slop at the lip of the cup.
Even my own mother.
He was stung. Behind his eyebrows a horde of venomous thoughts amassed, ready to retaliate.
Shut up, you bloody old woman.
Afraid to say anything—in case he said everything—he merely chinked his teaspoon twice against the rim of the mug, and laid it on the scarred wooden counter. Now there was quiet in the room and the only noise—the surge of blood and fury—came from inside his head.

But after a moment or two he was taken aback: he glimpsed, from the corner of his eye, a tissue flutter from Val's handbag and up to her face. They came one by one, like hatching butterflies, and he knew she was crying.

Martha took possession of the moral advantage and made good use of it, forging ahead with her desires.

“Every memory I have is spoiled,” she said to Tom. “I need to take care of my future.” She was almost delirious with self-righteousness.

Tom had been listening to this, and to other versions of it, for an hour. He was subdued. “You know,” he said, “once a broken bone has knitted, it ought to be used. You'd be surprised,” he went on, looking out of the window, “how often people go on limping longer than they need.”

Martha pretended not to have heard him. “I want to work. I don't owe Clive a bloody thing. All these years I've been trying to make up for”—she swallowed—“well, you know what. And all the time”—her tone grew triumphant—“his rotten secret! I want to go back to before. I want to start again.”

“All this ‘I,'” protested Tom. “There's Eliza too, remember?”

Martha was surprised and annoyed. She did not need reminding of Eliza.

It occurred to her, waiting to be petted in the delicious snug of the hairdresser's chair, that as well as gaining a new career she might fall in love and have another baby.
I might meet someone else,
she thought as she leafed through a magazine.
This happens to couples all the time.

Val telephoned. “Eliza is very angry,” she said. “She's not herself. You must be careful, Martha, and not be selfish.”

“Selfish? Careful? Me? Your son, in case you'd forgotten—”

“I'm not talking about Clive, I'm talking about Eliza,” Val said.

Martha had never heard Val so assertive and it made her panicky. The hairdresser was poised, comb and dryer in hand. “I can't hear you,” Martha said into the phone, indicating with her free hand that she was finishing the conversation. “You're breaking up.” Now the dryer roared beside her ear.

Eliza traveled to the cottage by Space Wagon with her two cousins, her uncle and her father. “I'll come after my interview,” Martha had said. Eliza did not want to hear that word, and she had not wished her mother luck when asked.

“You come in the front next to me,” Tom said to Eliza when they set off. “I like a bit of civilized company up top.”

“What about Dad?”

“He can go in the back.”

It was a long journey and a tiring one—what with all the noise—but at last they reached the turning from the lane onto the track and there at the top sat the cottage, settled in its place like a bird on a nest. Tom stopped the car and said, “Right, who's running?” The boys jumped out and were off like scudding rabbits across the grass. “You?” Tom turned to Eliza.

“No, thanks.”

“Wise old lady,” Tom said, driving on up the drive.

Tom had only said one thing to his brother since they had left London, and that had been at the petrol station. “I want to make a phone call, Clive,” he had said, looking in the rearview mirror. “Will you fill up the car?”

Tom had paced about on the grass where the litter bins were, speaking into the phone and kicking at a Coke can with one foot. Her father had filled the tank and gone into the shop to pay.

Eliza had never been to the cottage without Martha. It was like walking into the wardrobe where her mother's clothes were hung: private and somehow protecting. She had sometimes spent Sunday afternoons hiding in that cupboard, sitting cross-legged on the floor with the dresses and coats dangling over her head, peeling her fingers and worrying about school the next day. When she had been very small and ignorant she had wondered if there might be a hole at the back of the wardrobe and a magical world beyond. Now she knew those worlds did not exist.

In the house Tom poured tea into mugs, and Eliza added milk. They listened to the weather forecast, which was for wind and rain, and Tom said, “Excellent,” and rubbed his hands together. After tea he put up two tents on the lawn and ordered Stan and Jack into one. “Go on, then: in you get. You wanted to go camping.”

“But, Dad—”

“You said—”

“Somewhere
nice.
”

“This is nice.”

Stan and Jack were not convinced. They sulked and stared at their father with fishy faces. “This holiday's rubbish.”

Clive was embarrassed but Tom was not. “Hard cheese,” he said. “We're staying here. You're sharing that one, and me and Uncle Clive are in the other—”

“I am
not,
” Clive expostulated.

“—and if he snores like a pig, I'm coming in with you two.”

This idea caused uproarious laughter from both boys, who got into their tent to make piglike snoring noises. Jack poked his head out and asked, “Like that?”

“Yes, like that.”

From inside the tent Stan said, “Dad, can we do whatever we want?”

“Pretty much,” said Tom. To him a camping trip meant no washing, bathing, brushing of teeth or regular meals. “No fires, no explosions and no broken arms or legs, please. See how long you can go,” he suggested, “without coming into the house.”

Eliza did not want to join in and muck about with her cousins. She did not want to stoop her way into their bitter-smelling tent. She felt too old and stiff for children's games. “My head hurts,” she said when they asked her to play—it was an old trick she had not resorted to for years.

She spent the afternoon in her bedroom, writing her diary and listening to her iPod. Every few minutes she thought she heard her mother's car and took off her headphones to listen but no, it was always the wind. Hearing it moan under the eaves, rattle the window and shuffle the holly tree outside made her sadder and more lonely than she thought she had ever been. She turned up her music and cried.

Loud knocking at the door woke her up. “Can you give me a hand? Please? I'm making supper for us and your mum.” It was Tom.

Eliza was groggy. “Isn't she here? When's she coming?”

“Before supper I hope.”

“Where's Dad?”

“Gone to the shop. He took Stan and Jack, for his sins.” This was said in an amused tone of voice.

Eliza got out of bed and stumbled downstairs. In the kitchen she stood next to Tom and pricked sausages while he cut up potatoes—very fast—for mash. “I may only know how to cook one thing,” he joked, “but see how handy I am with a knife?”

He was referring to brain surgery but Eliza was not in the mood to play along. “You're not a surgeon yet,” she said in a cold voice. “You might not even get to be one. You have to be
amazing
to be one. You don't have to be amazing to cook sausages and mash.”

“Quite right,” said Tom and went back to his chopping.

Eliza felt horrible. Crying and sleeping had made her weak; now she was so weak she started crying again. She frowned, trying to stop, but tears splashed onto the sausages.

Tom passed over a roll of kitchen paper to her and she mopped her face. When she had finished Tom said, “Did you know I used to know your friend Eliot?”

Eliza nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

“She was my best friend, at school—when I was a bit older than you.”

“What was she like?” Eliza managed to stutter it out.

“She was…”—
chop-chop-chop
went the knife, slower and slower—“she made everything fun and exciting—”

“She's like that now.”

“—and she made me feel just right. I don't know how she did it.”

“Me too. She—” Eliza faltered and then started again. “Dad said she was annoying. He said she was a show-off.”

Tom did not seem to hear this. “And when she played the piano it was like she'd tamed it—like it was her pet wild animal.”

Eliza remembered Eliot stroking the lid of her Bechstein. She felt love for Eliot expand in her heart like a blown-up balloon. “Tom, what's going to happen?”

“I don't know.”

“No one will tell me.”

“No one knows, not even your mum or dad.”

“But it's not fair.”

“No, I know. It's not.” This was what Eliot had said, and it was simple.

“People don't stay together. Not you and Kathy and not Gravel and Grumpeter either.”

“They want to, but sometimes they can't.”

“What about you and Eliot?” It just came out; she couldn't help it.

“We never were together,” said Tom. He did not ask her what she meant and nor did she ask him anything else because just then his telephone bleeped in his pocket. It was a message from Martha:
Got too late will come in the morning all love.

Eliza put the sausage-pricking fork down and went back to her bedroom, climbing the stairs on all fours as she used to do when she was a much smaller child.

There was a hole in this holiday and Clive knew he was the one slipping through it. He did not belong with the other four in their warm, gathered pocket; he was the toy that would be dropped on the road and not missed.

He was distanced from Eliza, and Tom—although he had not mentioned that long-ago incident—spoke to his brother with the politeness of a stranger.

My house, my daughter,
Clive told himself, but these were just title deeds: Tom had taken possession with his great, open heart, and there was no competing with that.

Clive knew that Stan and Jack had wanted to come to the shop because, for them, a trip in the Space Wagon meant an adventure, but he could not stump up the energy for a song or a guessing game. They were quiet in the back seat and it dawned on Clive, to his shame, that they were frightened of him.

In the shop Stan cheered up and stuck his head in the freezer. “Ice cream!” he shouted, and Clive got out a tub.

Jack ran a hand along the chocolate bars in an experimental fashion, looking over his shoulder to see if Clive would take the hint. Longing to make friends, Clive said, “You can choose one for each of us,” but in the end Jack took so long that Clive picked up a box of Maltesers and told Jack to put the others back.