Authors: Elizabeth Buchan
‘Double negative,’ Emily pointed out acidly.
Jake had gone too far but he didn’t care. ‘For God’s sake.’
‘Don’t we like each other any more?’
Emily was hurt, but Jake didn’t care about that either. That was what emotional adversity had done to him – turned him hard and unresponsive – and he tried to mind. He brushed back Maisie’s hair, licked a finger and smoothed her eyebrows. He had always hoped he would be the sort of person who rated empathy and worked to achieve it.
That
seemed to him to be the most profound moral duty in life but, just now, the will to act on it had vanished.
‘Here.’ Emily handed him a pot of baby food. ‘Lovely apple purée and additives. Shouldn’t you be making her food, not feeding her this stuff?’
‘Shut up.’ But he took the pot with a grateful smile. Emily bent over and kissed her niece, who gurgled politely.
‘Did she keep you awake? I do try to cut her off before she goes full throttle.’
Emily straightened up. ‘You must be tired.’
‘I am. By the way, what’s up with the parents?’
‘You wanna know?’ Now he was paying proper attention he saw she was brimming with a secret and anxious to tell him.
Just like Mia used to do
.
‘Jake.’ Emily’s seriousness was almost touching. ‘I’ve got a job.’
This
was
unexpected, and Jake felt a flicker of chagrin. He busied himself with Maisie and did not look at Emily. ‘A job? That’s – that’s wonderful.’
‘You could make more effort to sound enthusiastic.’
‘I am. I am.’
‘This is a proper job. Salary. Benefits. Pension, the lot.’
He switched on the wholehearted smile. ‘You must be the only person in the country to have pulled off such a coup right now.’
Emily ducked her head, which meant she was pleased. ‘Thanks.’
In every family, Jake supposed, there was a hierarchy of both expectation and contempt. If his father despised Jake’s occupation, then Jake had taken (shameful) comfort from Emily’s pennilessness.
His hand shook as he wrestled the bib away from a replete Maisie. One chair. One coffee-table, small. Those were the sum total of orders in Nicholson Furniture’s book. Whichever way he looked at his current position, it appeared more excruciating than anything else. Plus, and there was no merit at all in this reflection, there would no longer be the luxury of regarding Emily as an even weaker link than he was.
‘Do you understand?’ Emily heaved Maisie up and began to pace up and down, the baby pinned to her breast like a brooch. ‘I’d like you to understand, Jake. Tod doesn’t. He thinks I’ve sold out. I know I sound like the worst sort of indulged kid, but I don’t want to do this job at all. With things as they are, though … I don’t expect much sympathy, but a bit would be nice.’
The truth was Jake had no sympathy to spare.
Upstairs something thumped on the floor, and there were sounds of a tense exchange.
Emily shrugged and pointed to the ceiling. ‘Don’t go there. But aren’t you going to ask about the job?’
‘Consider yourself asked.’
‘Condor Oil. Writing press releases and speeches and things. One of a big in-house team.’
‘Good God.’
‘Had three interviews.’ She looked so pleased and eager. ‘But I got through.’
This was worse than anything, for Jake now realized the extent of Emily’s sacrifice. Never … never would he have imagined that his shy, dreamy sister would fetch up working for an oil company. The quality and depth of that sacrifice dealt him a sharp knock.
*
Annie noted the time on her watch, then rechecked – the automatic gesture of a long-time working mother. Technically, this was a normal Saturday morning: the weekly shopping (no pesto, beef, French cheese or blueberries); her newly instituted weekly cooking session (fish pie, spaghetti Bolognese, and chicken breasts in some sort of sauce, to be decided); an exhausted perusal of the papers; a couple of loose ends to tie up on work projects.
But this was not going to be exactly a normal weekend and she and Tom were going to shop together to get the stuff required for what was now called Hermione’s room. List in hand, she made the final inspection. Post-Mia, post-Tom, it had been emptied, neutralized and fumigated of its previous inhabitants. She inspected the window catches, peered into the cupboard and punched the mattress on the single bed – the bed Tom had occupied for so long. Squinting at the curtains, her lips twitched. Tom always said she had a nasty habit of checking up on his handiwork. It was, he teased, a feature of obsessive-compulsives. And which category, she countered, did his habit of checking up on her come into? Tom protested loud and long that he did nothing of the sort. ‘Well, then,’ she had said, ‘I’ll suggest to the
OED
they rewrite their definition of “control freak”.’
Not for the first time she wondered about the power of one’s own nature to direct behaviour, even if one knew it was unproductive behaviour, and how little one could control it.
Unearthing a cache of single socks, a pair of rogue pants and a rolled-up shirt in a bottom drawer, she felt warmly smug. Having been boiled once too often in the washing-machine,
the socks were past it. Annie chucked them, plus the pants and shirt, into the bin liner.
A screw had worked loose on the cupboard hinge. She fetched a screwdriver and wrestled to re-anchor it. Tom reappeared. ‘You’re not doing it right. Here, let me.’
‘Go away, Tom. I can manage.’
‘Annie, you’re putting it in at the wrong angle.’
She swirled around. ‘Go away, or I’ll drive it through your head.’
Left alone, she continued with her work. The radio played Schubert’s String Quintet, which always made Annie ache, yearn and mourn but for what she had never quite managed to locate. Finding it too disturbing, she fiddled with the dial and a voice filled the room, explaining the HIV rates in India. ‘Tom!’ She whisked out of the room and leaned over the banisters. ‘Tom, the India programme – they’ve put it on Radio 4.’
She went back into the room and sat down on the bed to give it her full attention. It was a good, thoughtful programme – no doubt about that – and Tom would have spent energy and passion on ensuring it got made. As the credits were listed, she glanced around and spotted him hovering by the door.
‘Any good?’ He seemed nervous and more than a little sad.
She smiled up at him. ‘Excellent. The best.’
He nodded. ‘Well, that’s something. At least I did something,’ he said, before disappearing back downstairs.
A final search of the cupboard. She scooped up a single cufflink, which had rolled into the back, a simple green knot from which much of the colour had leached. Minus its partner, it seemed forlorn in the palm of her hand.
Ages ago on holiday in the South of France, when the children were still young and the Nicholson economy was booming, she had bought the cufflinks for Tom. Then they had seemed interestingly non-conformist and she had enjoyed seeing him wear them.
She had lived so intensely that summer, rejoicing in an unburdened mind, a captive to sensation. There was sun. Scratchy sand burning the soles of her bare feet. Swanky yachts painted in dazzling whites, and windmill sails in reds and blues. The turquoise slap of the sea. The violet and granite hues of the
maquis
rising behind the bay. Tom holding her as they watched a sunrise. Tom buying fruit in the market, tousled and satiated with food and sex.
Definitely, some memories were there to act as life-belts, to be thrown over waters of extreme distress and sadness and clung to.
Cufflink in hand, Annie descended to the kitchen.
Here, the table was still littered with breakfast things, the pile of crockery in the sink had mounted, and the occupants seemed to be scratchily at odds with one another.
A piece of buttered toast dangled from Emily’s limp hand. Jake was eating a plate of congealed porridge by the window. Tom was drinking coffee and making faces at Maisie, a spatter of slop trailing across the draining-board indicating his flight path.
Maisie lolled in the high chair and blinked rapidly, which was a sure sign she was sleepy and needed her nap. Annie almost said something to Jake but bit it back. She had resolved that Jake was in charge of his daughter, and intended to keep it that way.
None of them indicated that they had registered Annie’s
presence. She was used to being wallpaper. And at this point, with her kitchen taken over by a noisy, fractious army, being wallpaper was absolutely fine.
Remember?
… The kitchen had been ringing with the shouts of three small children and two adults at bay and, in the background, the radio rumbled on regardless.
‘Sit,’ Tom had commanded the seven-year-old twins. ‘Down.’ Then he turned on Emily who (no doubt to impress the twins) was zooming around the kitchen on her scooter. ‘If you don’t stop that …’
The table groaned under a pile of sausages, mash, ketchup, buttered peas, a white loaf (they hated brown), orange juice, token sticks of celery and an apple crumble.
Hands on hips, Annie sidestepped Emily and laughed at the chaos. ‘If you don’t all sit down, you won’t get supper.’
And Mia, coppery hair tied on top of her head, darted out of range with elfin cunning. ‘Can’t catch me.’ She executed a couple of pirouettes, dancing out of the kitchen into the hall and, with hindsight, it seemed to Annie even then that Mia was taking herself away.
The neighbours must have heard Tom’s half-enraged, half-amused bellow: ‘Come here!’ …
The light shifted off the coppery tints in Jake’s and, just discernible, Maisie’s hair. Before Tom, Annie had gone for men with looks that were basically Saxon and chimed with hers. The surprise (among many surprises) of being overwhelmed by a dark smoulderer had always intrigued her. Still did, if she was truthful.
The twins looked indisputably English – autumn tints, freckles and hazel eyes. Mia berated her parents for her division of the genetic spoils. ‘I so long to be pretty,’ she
told her mother, before she had become serious and ignored issues like beauty. ‘But no chance if you look like a milkmaid.’ Emily – ‘lucky, horrible Emily’ (Mia’s terminology) – had inherited the allure of the mysterious Celt, all white skin, blazing blue eyes, dark hair and a tendency to uneasy introspection that had made for a rocky adolescence.
Jake had been born with inner poise and had set sail through childhood and adolescence on a fair wind. Annie had marvelled at his seemingly effortless progress. He was a craftsman and tinkerer. ‘I like to know how things work, Mum.’ Kettles, machines and, of course, searching for pieces of wood to store in his room. ‘Don’t get him,’ said Tom, more than once, who wanted Jake to study politics or, at the very least, economics – the subjects he felt were of use in the modern world. ‘You don’t know him,’ she responded. ‘You must try to understand him.’ To his credit, Tom had tried and, when Jake was still quite small, they had fiddled around with carpentry together. The results still roosted in the attic. A half-finished doll’s cradle, intended for Mia, and a box for treasures that had never got its lid, if Annie remembered correctly.
Mia’s going had thrown the family but, for obvious reasons, it had affected Jake from the roots up. He was never angry or obviously down but Annie knew, she just knew, that an element had gone missing. ‘It’s like eating food without salt,’ he confessed, when she’d tackled him on the subject. Then Jocasta had come on the scene and Jake was diverted. It wasn’t an obvious coupling but, concluded the ever-watchful Annie, it was likely that the restless and ravening Jocasta was attracted by Jake’s unruffled good spirits as much as his rangy good looks.
Her lips tightened. If Jocasta was ever arraigned before a court of human justice, Annie would be on her feet to condemn her for extinguishing the glow and sweetness in her son.
Abandoning the porridge, Jake cut himself a piece of bread and shoved it into the toaster. ‘Maisie needs a sleep. I’ll put her down in a minute,’ he said tiredly.
Tom trod carefully: ‘Are you going to the workshop at all? If you like I’ll look after her, but not for too long as your mum and I have to shop and paint your grandmother’s room later.’
Good Lord, thought Annie. That must be a first.
It was an olive branch. Of sorts.
Jake considered. Annie held her breath.
‘Thanks, Dad. That just might suit.’ Jake balanced the toast in one hand and spread raspberry jam over it with other.
Annie let her breath out. ‘Don’t any of you do anything as revolutionary as eat your meal at the table?’ she asked, by way of diversion.
Emily threw her a look implying that her mother had only recently emerged from Noah’s ark. From over his shoulder, Jake said, ‘Haven’t noticed you sitting down, Mum.’
She dropped the cufflink into Tom’s lap. ‘Recognize it?’
He frowned. ‘Should I?’
‘Oh, never mind,’ she said.
Jake finished the toast and put on his denim jacket. If possible he had lost weight and it hung more loosely on him. ‘I’ll be off.’ He bent over and kissed his daughter. ‘Tweet, tweet, Birdie.’ He flicked a look at Tom. ‘Thanks again, Dad.’ Then he was gone.
Emily stacked her used crockery in the dishwasher and wiped the table. She seemed grave and preoccupied, and Annie said, ‘It’s brilliant news, Emily.’
‘Do you think, Mum?’ She sent Annie an apprehensive smile. ‘Yup. It’s OK.’ But she seemed disinclined to discuss it further.
Then she, too, was gone.
Tom was muttering nonsense to Maisie. He undid the safety strap, extracted her and cuddled her into his shoulder. ‘Bed for the Bird, I think.’
He nodded at Annie – and for a terrible moment she had the feeling that he was acknowledging an acquaintance he had met in the street.
Then he said, ‘Got to get used to this.’
Yes, they would have to, thought Annie, left to herself in the kitchen. She didn’t know whether to laugh because most of her family had come home, or to cry because Jake was badly hurt and her routines and peace were well and truly shattered.
Dirty saucepans tottered on the sideboard. ‘Bloody family,’ she muttered aloud, as she ran hot water into the sink and began to make inroads into them. She glanced across to the noticeboard where she had pinned up the angel. ‘I’m glad I rescued you,’ she said, and hoped nobody had heard her.