Authors: Elizabeth Buchan
‘Help, help,’ was issuing from Hermione’s room. ‘Someone help me.’
His heartbeat notching from zero to sixty in two seconds, Tom was out of bed in a trice, leaving a recumbent Annie. Various scenarios flashed through his mind. His mother had fallen out of bed. She had banged into the furniture in the overcrowded room. Why hadn’t he put his foot down and insisted that the worshipped Chippendales went elsewhere?
He discovered Hermione in an enveloping, lace-edged nightdress and plaited hair, sitting bolt upright in bed, terror written all over her face.
‘Hermione, are you OK?’
Her head jerked in his direction. ‘Why are
you
here?’
‘You’re living with us now, Hermione. Remember?’
She shook her head in a confused way. ‘I didn’t know where I was. I couldn’t work it out.’ She pressed the ball of her thumb to her cheek. ‘
Where
am I?’
Tom hadn’t seen his mother in her nightclothes for years, and it was an intimacy that made him uncomfortable. ‘You’re living with Annie and me now. In London. You’re bound to be a bit confused to begin with, but it will pass.’
‘I see.’ But Tom’s words had hop-skipped over a membrane and Hermione didn’t see. ‘I should be in my room.’
‘Why don’t I make some tea?’
It helped to do something practical and he ran downstairs and boiled the kettle, returning with a mug of Lapsang Souchong, which she accepted. The tea settled her a little and, while she drank it, Tom explained yet again where she was living and why.
Hermione fussed around, searching for a buffer on which to put the hot mug down on her pretty bedside table. ‘I thought husbands and sons made sure they provided for their women.’
Only just masking a snort of semi-hysterical laughter, Tom explained, ‘Things have changed a little.’
‘You
think
they have, Tom.’
She looked past Tom to the clock on the shelf, and he was reminded of how hard it had been as a child to elicit any show of give from his mother. He never doubted that she loved him, but it was a love that burned from a distance, encased in a glass lantern. When he had been a tiny, clinging boy, she had peeled him off her like sticky tape, or refused to come when he cried. ‘We mustn’t spoil Tom.’ He had learned not to take it personally.
In the quiet, the clock’s tick magnified. ‘Are you sleepy? Shall I try and make you more comfortable?’
She shifted fretfully, and Tom read her thoughts.
She was a prisoner … she ached to take flight … she ached to be young
… ‘I don’t know what I want.’
To his relief, Annie appeared at the door. ‘Is everything OK?’
‘Hermione wasn’t sure where she was,’ Tom explained.
In the low light of the bedside lamp, hair tumbling over her shoulders, Annie was mussed, yearningly soft and sweetly tousled. Under her open dressing-gown she wore a sprigged cotton nightdress, washed so often that it held more than a hint of transparency. As she moved towards Hermione and him, he caught the painterly flash of flesh tones, and was reminded of the hidden surprises of her body, the goose-down give of it under him …
Annie tied her dressing-gown cord around her middle and assessed the situation. ‘Hermione, you don’t look comfortable. If you get out of bed – can you do that? – I’ll remake it.’
Tom lowered his mother into the chair, and Annie set about the bed with much stretching of undersheets and patting of pillows. An initiate in the temple of bedmaking, Tom watched.
‘There.’ Annie straightened up.
She helped Hermione back into bed, then leaned across her to tuck in the sheets and he was presented with a vignette of the entwined figures of his still supple wife and his stiff, lined mother. Annie moved and her hair fell down, obscuring both their faces from Tom’s view. It was – what was it? – a living sculpture composed of two women and every woman, absorbed in a simple task, and it most definitely excluded him.
Most people suffered from feelings of isolation: it was a condition of being human, for God’s sake. Annie used to understand and responded to Tom’s confessions. Silly ones –
the feedback wasn’t that great, the bastards
. The big ones –
what are we all trying to do?
In return, she had dropped her own secrets and fears into his willing ear. Messages had
flowed back and forth between them, like those racing down optic fibres, binding them ever closer, giving colour and depth to their life together – and he missed them.
The final tuck made, Annie straightened. What would he, could he, confide to her now? Miserably aware that others were judging him –
he failed
,
kicked out
– he suspected she was judging him, too. What would she confide in return? He didn’t know, for he had no clue as to her thoughts these days.
Hermione murmured something and Annie answered in an undertone.
All long ago. His memories of having young children were patchy but those he retained were sharp enough. The family on a cool, darkening English beach, the children’s cries to each other echoing in the dusk. Annie crouched over the picnic basket. Four faces outlined in the white flicker of a driftwood fire. The taste of imperfectly cooked spare ribs. He and Annie had never reprised those times much either. Those particular experiences had come – and they had gone.
‘There.’ Annie looked at him. ‘All done.’ Hermione was peacefully settled.
Back in bed, under their separate duvets and occupying their separate sides, Tom and Annie whispered to each other.
She brushed her hair off her face. ‘I never imagined we would be back to broken nights.’
He rolled over to face her. ‘Sorry, Annie. I’m sure once she’s settled, it’ll be fine. The home didn’t say anything to you about night waking?’
‘No.’
‘Nor me.’
It was Annie’s turn to ask a question: ‘Do you think her mind is still a hundred per cent?’
He was startled. ‘Why?’
‘Sometimes I get a feeling she isn’t quite here. She is, obviously, but she isn’t.’
‘Rubbish.’
Annie turned on to her side, but not uncompanionably. It was more a shifting of bodies into comfortable alignment. ‘OK, rubbish.’
He fingered a strand of her hair spilling on to the pillow. ‘You’ll be tired tomorrow.’
‘I know,’ she murmured, with the little snuffle he remembered she gave when falling asleep.
He imagined the line of her limbs under the nightdress and the slope of her breasts. ‘Sorry about that, too.’
The snuffle again. ‘So am I. Big meeting.’
Touching her hair gave him a pang and he thought of the times when they had been happy and free with each other – when he had had job, a healthy bank account, a firm purpose and commitment. Now they were not happy and free with each other, and Annie had had to sell her ring because his bank account could no longer rise to the challenge. He hated being a witness to her distress, and her new habit of rubbing her empty finger. But he hoped to sort that with the spread-betting and buy her a new ring out of the proceeds. And, of course, contribute to the bills.
Note to himself
: whenever he thought about his ventures on-line, which were frequent, his spirits lifted. It was a good feeling.
Additional note:
at five thirty the previous evening the
market had steadied and his position on recovery had been several points in his favour.
Tom breathed a sigh of relief into the dark and, again, Annie stirred.
‘Tom, do you mind very much being at home?’
The cold air rushed to colonize the trench between the duvets. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘I’m sorry, truly sorry.’
‘Home isn’t
so
bad,’ he admitted, with reluctance. ‘But I hate … I hate feeling so powerless.’
In the morning, Emily ran downstairs, dropping a sour remark through the open door of her parents’ bedroom as she went. ‘You made enough noise last night.’
‘Remind me. Was it you who got up to help out?’ said her father.
‘Uncalled-for, Dad.’ She dropped down a couple more stairs and shouted over her shoulder, ‘Some of us have to work. Some of us have been at our new job for a week and need the beauty sleep.’
Silence.
Oh, God, why did she have to say
that
? How could she?
Breakfast was eaten at a lick before she flung herself out of the door, clutching a large handbag that contained a spare toothbrush and paste. Too much coffee in the office gave one coffee breath.
As she strap-hung on the crowded bus, Emily ran over her finances for the nth time. If she put aside that much each week, dropped Topshop – well, cut down the visits – absolutely no cappuccinos, then, yes, the new job meant she could afford to move out of home. Early days and
probably too risky to do anything definite – but it was on the agenda.
The bus driver was one of nature’s jokers who lived to challenge his passengers’ powers of balance and endurance. Emily was obliged to forget other considerations and concentrate on keeping upright. Passenger ebb and flow pushed her up the centre of the aisle and back again, each time passing the man in a window seat, dressed in jeans and a shabby jacket, with a rucksack on his knee. He gazed serenely out at the passing parade of streets and shops. Obviously he was not on his way to work. Or not in the sense that she was.
She felt a spasm of homesickness for her bedroom eyrie, followed by resentment, which, she reminded herself briskly, was unjustified. Resentment was self-indulgent. Totally. Nerves always upset her equilibrium – and, as a new recruit of one week, she was still at the nervy stage of the job.
Condor Oil was housed in an office block in a style that could only be described as ‘extreme brutalism’. It was daunting, ugly and made no concession to the joys of architecture. In fact, concluded Emily, as she hastened towards the gloomy lifts, the architect could not have been aware there were any joys to be found in life, let alone in his creations. Yet there was something in his dour vision. You got what you saw with Condor Oil. Pausing at the entrance to the office, she inhaled, held her breath and steadied herself, knowing that she had a lot to learn about office demeanour, whose rules she still had to investigate.
Don’t be too exuberant first thing. If you’re late, disguise it. If you want to get on, observe the hierarchies.
That was a start.
Very soon, she was clacking away on her keyboard, composing a press release on the latest oil-price hike, which had to be tactfully conveyed to the public. Her face was a pale reflection on the screen and she grimaced. No longer did she have the luxury of dickering over a word’s
resonance
;
description
was of no use. Neither was a highly charged sensuous
atmosphere
– although it could be said that a degree of psychological
insight
was obligatory. Goodbye To All That. Eyes closed for a second. Summon the image of a kitchen sink in which swirled hundreds of thousands of words. Squeeze eyes tighter shut, pull the plug and they were gone.
Positioned by the keyboard, her mobile jumped as a text message came in. ‘Pedi at Zara?’ Emily did a double-take. For a second, she read the signature as ‘Mia’ not ‘Kat’.
Go away
, she addressed Mia silently.
Go
.
Would she ever get the measure of the situation? Her feelings for Mia scuttled about like mice and never settled. The good Mia crusading for the world and the insufferable Mia who ensured that the family spotlight was always trained on her. Hate her, love her. It would be easier to settle if Emily was just plain indifferent. Twins and their mysterious connection she understood, and Mia and Jake would always commune even if they didn’t meet. But why should she bother with the sister who had walked out on them with her boyfriend, Pete – a blazing, spitting firebrand who hated the family, ‘and that includes you, Emily’ – who could ‘tolerate no longer the smugness, the insensitivity,
the lifestyle
’, and never wished to see them again?
She tried to imagine the tiny, fastidious Mia in bed with big, shaggy Pete, and failed. Easier to remember was the
car-crash of Mia’s accent after Pete’s Yorkshire vowels had been grafted on to her southern intonation. ‘Isn’t that affectation?’ Emily had inquired of her sister. ‘You can’t avoid being who you are.’
It was a mystery why Mia, that shiny, sunny sprite, should have undergone such a metamorphosis into the grim, the humourless and, furthermore, one who hated so much so vehemently … Finding Mia asleep over a Marxist tome in the big armchair in the sitting room, one thin hand tucked into her neck, the other, a pale, frail thing, in her lap. Sleep had relaxed the coppery head and her out rageously long lashes were on display. (At one stage Emily had longed to pull them out.) At Emily’s approach, Mia had woken and looked up expectantly, thinking perhaps it was Pete or Jake. When she had realized who it was, she had scowled. ‘Oh,
you
,’ she said.
Emily had looked down at her sister and thought,
Mia will never love me but I can cope without that love
…
A ray of sun struck Condor Oil’s upmarket pot plant, positioned by the water-cooler, which made it look healthier than it was.
‘Are you with us?’ Mike, her immediate boss, was hanging over her.
Emily gave a tiny start. ‘Of course.’ She pointed to the screen. ‘I was about to wing this over to you.’
‘Sure.’ Mike was very attractive in a metrosexual way and Emily was sure he knew it. But he seemed good-humoured enough. ‘We thought you might like to join the team for lunch.’
Reposing in Emily’s bag beside the toothbrush and paste was a seeded spelt bread tomato and bean-sprout sandwich.
No butter. No mayonnaise. It was exactly the sensible, economical and worthy lunch she intended to eat most days. As she and her mother had discussed: (1) spending money on lunch was wasteful; (2) she could do a little work on the novel; (3) needs must, she didn’t know anyone.
‘That would be very nice.’ Emily looked up at him. ‘What time?’
The chosen restaurant had been written up recently in a Sunday colour supplement. The floor was polished oak, the décor minimalist and the lighting state-of-the-art. One wall glittered with a long mirror, and an aluminium bar ran the length of the room, the waiters dodging expertly around it.