Never Mind Miss Fox (19 page)

A
wake at dawn, Martha watched the sky begin to blush as the day came. She thought of Eliza and wondered whether every sunrise, from today and forever, would remind her of yesterday: the day her daughter had run away.

She pictured Eliza's journey and its obstacles: cycling to the train through the cool, white bloom; setting her small, stickered bike in the rack; withdrawing cash from one machine and tickets from another; shivering on the platform as she waited for her train. And all of this to get to Eliot Fox.

Martha had asked Eliza, last night on the telephone, “What made you go? Was there one thing?”
Please don't say it was me.

But Eliza had not wanted to confide. “No. I just…” and then her voice had drifted away.

“There's nothing for you to worry about,” Martha had stated.

This blatant untruth had not been contradicted—there had been no response at all.

Martha had tried again. “Don't worry about things that might not happen.”

Now the silence had spoken:
But that's what worry is.

“Eliza?” Had she put down the telephone and walked away? “I love you,” Martha had pleaded. “Everything's going to be fine.”

Tom had left as soon as he knew that Eliza was safe. He had dismantled the tents, buckled his sons into the Space Wagon and driven away. “Eliza would rather be with Eliot,” he had said, “and so would I.”

Martha had stared at him, dumbstruck. After his car had pressed its way down the track she had gone outside and sat on the flattened grass where his tent had stood.
I'm sorry,
she had whispered, pressing the ground with her palms.
Please don't leave me.

On the telephone to Clive, Martha said, “This has gone on long enough.”

No response—neither protest nor agreement—came in return.

“I will fix it,” she told him, “if you won't.”

Lying on her side in the bed, Martha did not move. Outside the window the rakish green of the holly shook its leaves at a wide-eyed blue sky.

It had never seemed so quiet here. She had never felt as alone. This was what “separated” meant: not kissing strangers, smart clothes and a new job, but alone and apart from the people she loved. She wanted her family.

She wanted her attachments to pull at her like kite-strings, keeping her both airborne and grounded.

Deep in her chest a dull pain ached like a bruise.
It's my heart,
she thought. She did not move—perhaps if she stayed quite still she could keep all hurt and all feeling in check.

Eliza ran away. If I had not gone to the pub and kissed Jimmy, Eliza might have stayed.

“It's only a bit of kissing,” Jimmy had said. “You won't go to hell.”

The memory made her cringe in the sheets where she lay.

Incidents and accidents collided in Martha's head. She wanted to thread them into order like pearls onto a string, but they would only clash together and apart like marbles. There was no making sense of them.

There's been an accident.

Martha had said those words many times on that dreadful night.

After the ambulance, from the hospital, she tried to reach Clive again at his hotel. The same receptionist took her call but this time Martha gasped, “There's been an accident. Please find him—you have to.”

Still there was no answer from Clive's room. “His key is here,” the girl said, slick and efficient.

“There's a colleague—”

“Yes. Shall I try her room for you?”

“Yes—yes—”

“One moment.” There was no more “please” or “ma'am.”

Then an English accent: “Belinda Easton speaking. Who is this?”

“It's Martha—” Martha wondered how her voice was stringing these words together when she did not seem to be giving it any instruction. “—Clive's wife. There's been an accident. A fall—stairs—head—hospital—”

It was not what Belinda said—

“All right. Martha? It's all right: I'll find him, I'll tell him and I'll get him on a plane.”

—but the tone of her voice, a mother's voice, that reassured Martha.

When Clive rang back she gabbled, “I woke up and she was crying—Oh God oh God—They won't tell me anything—It was only for a second—”

Clive asked, “What have they said?” and then, “How did it happen?”

Martha did not answer and later she wondered,
Why did he even ask?
She knew he would have imagined it, exactly as it had occurred. He would have seen it all, vivid with his mind's eye: the crying child, the broken sleep and the open gate on the stairs.

I woke up and she was crying—

Martha was asked to describe what had happened—how it had happened—so many times that it became a story, and one that always began the same way. She learned where to breathe, just as if she were making a speech.

First she told the men from the ambulance, crouched at the bottom of the stairs. Then, at the hospital, she was asked to start again:
I woke up and she was crying.
Val pushed through the swinging doors with a crumbling, quake-struck face, and Martha told her too. Uniforms, stethoscopes, clipboards and lapel badges all stepped up to be told. When she finished—each time—they went away again. Doctors, nurses, specialists and then—
What?
—a social worker. A psycho-someone, and then another. Martha began to lose track.

She noticed that although she had arrived in the noisiest part of the hospital—
It's an
emergency
—she was soon, somehow, in a quiet place. Nothing here seemed about to happen fast. There was no confusing wall of noise. Aside from the
flick-flap
of a door and the squeak of a rubber shoe there were only two sounds to speak of: the
mip-mip-mip
of one machine, and the regular
click-shush
of another.

All these people asked to hear it over and over again:
What? How? And then what?
When Martha reached the end there would be someone else, someone new, who needed to know from the start.

She was almost mad with fear, but afraid of sounding mad. She tried to make herself sensible, or at least to sound sensible, but it was hard—it was so hard that she began to wonder if perhaps she had gone mad. She could not seem to get a grip on herself. Was this what insanity was?

It was hours—the night was over and it was day—before she realized what they suspected: not that she was mad, but that she had hurt Eliza.

She said nothing at all after that.

When at last she spoke again it was to Clive: “Don't you want me to be punished?”

In bed, they were lying on their backs and looking up. They could not seem to move closer together or further apart but only to lie with this fixed distance between them, like two railway sleepers.

“You're punishing yourself,” Clive said. “It was an accident.”

It was not an answer to her question but he had told Martha what she wished to know. When she shut her eyes she saw a row of black-capped judges who shook their heads and pronounced her guilty. It was easy to recognize Clive, sitting in the midst of them.

Martha was too feeble to contain herself, here in the cottage alone, and what was the point in self-government? She made a little comma of her body in the bed, and rubbed her cheek with the pillow. As if she had given herself a signal, tears spilled from her eyes. All those marbles in her palm—accident, incident, blunder or crime—tumbled from her grasp and rolled away.

After lying awake all night—flat on his back like a felled tree—Clive got up, dressed, and surrendered.

“We'll leave after breakfast,” he said to Eliza.

“For the cottage?”

“Yes. Isn't that what you want?”

Eliza did not answer but asked a question of her own. “Will Tom be there?”

“No. He's gone. It's just your mother and me.” Clive felt the weariness of defeat.

“You and Mum?
Huh.
” It was a new voice: a weapon as blunt as a hammer.

Clive looked at his daughter. “That wasn't very nice.”

“Good.”

He could think of no reply to that and Val, wiping a dishrag over the counter, seemed not to have heard.

The sound of a car on the track wrung Martha from her bed. Upright—or near enough—she staggered to the window. She stubbed her toe but even that sharp pain did not dislodge the headache from her temples. She must have drunk some wine the night before.

A stranger's car—small, clean and white—was creeping up the track. Bother! How awkward.

Martha looked down at herself and found she was still dressed in yesterday's clothes. Pieces of the day fell into her mind:
Eliza safe—Tom gone—red wine.
The recollection made her swallow.

Downstairs she opened the kitchen door and found a neat man with an apologizing face. “I've come to have a look in your roof,” he said. “For the bats?” He showed Martha a laminated identity card.

“Oh!” said Martha. “I didn't know…”

“I had an appointment? With someone called Eliza Barkes?”

Tears threatened; Martha gulped. “She's not here.”
Because she ran away.
“But come in.”

They climbed the stairs to the attic door and Martha clicked the latch. “It's a bit of a mess,” she apologized.

The man got out a torch. “Everyone's is,” he said with a sigh.

Martha scrambled in after him and they crouched beside each other on the rafters, staring into the gloom.

Under the sorrowful beam of the torch a misshapen and half-remembered landscape of junk-filled boxes stretched away. Everything in here was degenerating into a clogged heap the color and texture of pipe tobacco. Martha's heart sank to look at it.

Into the attic had been posted everything that she and Clive had no use for, but could not throw away. Her father's clothes and the manuscripts which she had never read. Broken Christmas tree lights. Boxes of records, cassettes, CDs and videotapes. Equipment that marked the beginning and end of self-improvement: diet books, juicers, dumbbells and weighing scales. Eliza's old school uniforms, her outgrown shoes and even that detested helmet, issued by the hospital, which made her scream until her parents took it off.

These things were meaningless now, but to look at them filled Martha with despair. Nothing could ever be got rid of. Even if something were carted away for trash it would still exist somewhere, buried in a hole or shredded into bits.

“Are they still here?” she asked her companion. “Will they come back?”

“They're going to keep coming back,” he said, “but does it matter?” He pointed the beam of the torch into the crevices above their heads. “They were here all along, after all—you just didn't know about them.”

Martha sat back on her heels and considered. She could find nothing to argue with. “It doesn't matter, does it?” she said. “It's perfectly fine.” A sudden exhaustion—weakness—resignation—made her want to laugh. It was so quiet and warm up here. She smiled, yawned, felt hungry and thought of Eliza, traveling home. “My daughter will be very pleased,” she said.

When the man had gone Martha found her telephone and got back into bed to use it. She propped herself up on the pillows and her heart thumped with nerves.

“Eliot?”

She would begin like this, but had not thought how to go on.

Afterwards she sat in the silence and stared out of the window. This day seemed to have many beginnings. She rested, pillowed by a new feeling of calm, before getting to her feet and starting again: undressing, washing, dressing, drinking coffee and finally taking the lamp from Eliza's bedside and moving it into the attic. She attached it to an extension cord and plugged it in on the landing, and then she climbed back into the roof and switched it on. Everything seemed to wince—to shrink back into its shell—but Martha would not be put off. She stared at it all with folded arms and a fierce look, and then she got to work.

Later—her eyes and nose clogged with dust and a rummaging pain in her back—she went down to the kitchen and made herself a fried-egg sandwich. She ate it sitting on her father's bench, in the garden.

Tom liked to sit here and smoke as her father had done. Martha wondered whether Tom was with Eliot—perhaps they had woken up together in that empty, echoing Hampstead house.

The morning's activities had brought a welcome peace, and now Martha could think of both Tom and Eliot—of everyone—with equanimity. She stretched out her legs and looked down at the field. It was warm, here in this corner where the sun kissed the bench all day, and it felt a long way from London, Paris, or anywhere else she might be.

What will happen?
This had been Eliza's question and now Martha asked it musingly of herself. Getting no answer she turned up her face to quiz the air, the tree and the skating swallows.
What will happen?

She still sat in that spot, face tilted to the sun, when Clive's car drew in at the gate. At the sight her heart expanded with welcome.

Today, Martha guessed, Eliza would jump out of the car and run up the field to the house. Yes, here she came now: zigzagging with her arms outstretched and her palms brushing the tall, feathery tips of the grass.

Martha got to her feet, raised an arm and called out, “Eliza!” The shout was instinctive:
Mine!
In a moment her daughter was wrapped in her arms and Martha said, “Don't run away, never again, please. I was so frightened.”