The Past and Other Lies (6 page)

She pushed her office door shut with her foot and was disappointed to see Gary Harding was still at lunch—a phone call from the board of directors was something she’d quite like him to overhear.

‘Hello, Mr Gasp—’

‘
Arumpa-pum-pum!
’ sang Bing, and Jennifer stabbed at another button.

‘Mr Gaspari?’

‘Oh, Jennifer, there you are. It’s Aunt Caroline.’

Aunt Caroline?

‘Your secretary put me on hold. I’ve been listening to ‘The Little Drummer Boy’. I think I prefer the Boney M version—’

‘Aunt Caroline, I have to put you back on hold—’

‘Oh, I only wanted to be very quick. It’s about that television program yesterday—’

‘Ah, you saw that? How—did Mum—?’

Jennifer had been about to say
Did Mum tell you about it?
but as the idea of her mother ringing Aunt Caroline for a cosy chat seemed unlikely she stopped herself.

‘This might come as a shock to you, dear, but I do occasionally watch daytime television.’

It did come as a shock.

‘Now I did want to talk to you and I thought you should come up. Shall we say tomorrow? Afternoon tea?’

Jennifer experienced a moment of panic. If Aunt Caroline had watched Kim’s program, who else had? She had deliberately told no one about it—except Nick, of course. And Mum and Charlotte...though hopefully they hadn’t, in the end, watched it.
Had
they? Neither of them had emailed her. Perhaps they had rung? She hadn’t been home to check her messages.

‘I can’t possibly come up tomorrow, I’ll be working. Sorry but—’

‘Don’t you get days off? Aren’t you the manager?’

‘Yes and that’s why—look, I’ll call you straight back,’ and she stabbed the other line.

‘Mr Gaspari?’

‘At last! My dear girl, do you have any idea how long I have been kept waiting on this telephone?’

Mr Gaspari, whom Jennifer had never actually met, sounded exactly like a petulant great-uncle she dimly remembered from childhood. She had an idea most of the board of directors were well over seventy and she adjusted her manner accordingly.

‘Yes, I am sorry, Mr Gaspari, I was just caught with a customer.’ That was good, the older directors liked management to stay in touch with the consumer.

‘Don’t you have sales staff to do that?’ he snapped back.

‘Well, yes...’

‘Never mind. It is about this television program. Yesterday afternoon—’

Surely the board of directors didn’t watch daytime television? Had word somehow got out that she was going to be talking about kids’ computer games? But the producer had cancelled that show and instead she’d done ‘I Saved My Sister’s Life!’ because Kim was desperate. The board could hardly complain about that, could they? Anyway the show had been recorded on Monday night in her own time and you couldn’t get in trouble for talking about your personal life in your own time.

‘Board isn’t happy. Company policy to clear all media interaction through Marketing and P.R. You know that. It’s in your contract.’

Jennifer tried to recall that particular clause of her contract. Then she tried to recall if she had, in fact, ever read her contract.

‘This is a clear breach. Board wants a letter of explanation before the next meeting. On my desk 9 am Monday. Understand?’

‘Yes but—’

‘Good.’ The line fell silent and so did Jennifer.

AUGUST 1981

I
T SEEMED TO CHARLOTTE that everything changed after Grandma Lake came to live with them.

On a Monday evening nearly a year after Grandma Lake had moved in, Charlotte sat silently in the doorway of her and Jennifer’s bedroom and looked across the landing to the study that was now Grandma Lake’s room. Downstairs
Crossroads
had just ended and, in the bathroom, Jennifer vomited noisily into the toilet bowl. But here in the doorway it was still. Calm. The door to Grandma Lake’s room was shut.

Even before Grandma Lake had arrived a year ago, silent and bewildered in the back of the Austin Maxi, the signs had been ominous. How, for example, could there possibly be room in the house for an extra person? It was a three-bedroom semi, five people already lived there. And for how long was she expected to live with them? No one had said, and to ask would have been tantamount to saying, how long will Grandma Lake live?

Dad had been furious.

They had all sat around the kitchen table at the tail end of last summer—Mum, Dad and Aunt Caroline—and, when the suggestion was made, Dad had looked up from the sports section of
The Times
long enough to halt the conversation around the table. Then he had shaken out the paper as though someone had been reading it on the beach and there was sand between the pages, folded it, stood up and left the room. He hadn’t needed to say anything to make his position quite clear.

Who had first made the suggestion that Grandma Lake should come to live with them? It certainly wasn’t Grandma Lake herself. She was living quite contentedly (you presumed, if you ever thought about it) in the poky Victorian terrace in Oakton Way, Acton, where she’d always lived. That was where she’d always been and that was where, in your mind, you always put her.

You didn’t put her here in your own home.

Acton was less than twenty miles away, though Grandma Lake rarely came to visit. It had been left to Mum and Dad to drive over there to collect her at Christmas or on Easter Sunday or August Bank Holiday and bring her over for the day. This had meant a fraught ninety-minute drive into west London that encompassed twenty-two sets of traffic lights and eight roundabouts and probable roadworks at Hangar Lane, as Dad never tired of observing. If Grandma Lake could just find it in herself to take the bus to North Acton and get the Ruislip train, he could pick her up there and save himself an hour-and-a-half round trip twice in one day.

But Grandma Lake didn’t like to take the bus, much less the tube.

And once a year, on Grandma Lake’s birthday, everyone piled into the Austin and spent a grim day in Acton, an ordeal that far outweighed the inconvenience of Grandma Lake coming to visit you because it was a whole day of your weekend gone and, worse, you were stuck there until Dad successfully caught Mum’s eye and Mum announced it was time to leave.

On the face of it, then, you would think Dad had more reason than anyone to wish his mother-in-law closer to home. And perhaps he
had
wished it. Perhaps he had envisaged her selling up and purchasing a nice little bungalow or a ground-floor flat or a room in an old people’s home somewhere close by like Uxbridge or Hillingdon or Ickenham. Close enough that Mum could tootle over there in the Austin every week to take her to the shops or for a pot of Earl Grey at the tea shop in the high street.

He probably hadn’t envisaged her selling up and moving into the study.

So it must have been either Mum or Aunt Caroline who had made the fateful suggestion that morning. They were the only ones likely to notice a change in Grandma Lake’s circumstances. And there must have been a change—no one would suggest their elderly mum move in with them unless there was a pretty compelling reason. Whatever the reason, one Sunday in late summer as the roast was spitting and hissing in the oven and Graham was watching
Happy Days
on the telly, Mum and Aunt Caroline and Dad had had a discussion around the kitchen table and by the end of the discussion Grandma Lake’s house had been valued, her possessions assessed, her longevity and health analysed, the problem of the stairs up to the study sorted and Dad had shaken out the sports section of
The Times
and left in disgust.

There had been no question that Grandma Lake move in with Aunt Caroline.

Aunt Caroline, who was in her mid-fifties, had quite suddenly become betrothed to a Yorkshireman, Ted Kettley, whom she’d met a few months earlier at an auction in Skipton. He was a valuer or something, employed by the local council. This meant that, after a lifetime of having a maiden aunt whom you could reasonably expect to remain a maiden, Charlotte and Jennifer and Graham had found themselves in the unexpected position of preparing to attend Aunt Caroline’s wedding in North Yorkshire to a red-faced, large-eared, pipe-smoking Yorkshireman who was, suddenly, their Uncle Ted. It had seemed to Charlotte at the time an example of the unforeseen and world-reeling changes that were suddenly dumped on you and that, as an adolescent, you had no control over. You were simply meant to deal with them. Grandma Lake’s arrival was another example of this unsettling phenomenon.

Aunt Caroline had sold her high-ceiled Art Deco flat in Perivale and moved into Ted’s modern and centrally heated bungalow in North Yorkshire. It had been disturbing, though not nearly as disturbing as the realisation that North Yorkshire was too far away to relocate Grandma Lake and that an ageing mother-in-law was hardly a wedding present Uncle Ted could be expected to take on.

‘Grandma Lake will be coming to live with us,’ Mum had announced one Sunday over lunch as she’d spooned roast potatoes onto each of their plates.

‘Why?’ asked Graham.

‘Where will she sleep?’ asked Jennifer.

How long for? thought Charlotte.

‘In the spare room,’ Mum had replied, craftily changing the name of ‘The Study’ to ‘The Spare Room’ as though by changing its name this room became a place they didn’t really need and that could easily be handed over to someone else with very little inconvenience to anyone. She’d ignored Graham’s question.

After that nothing was the same again.

The change came not suddenly, but bit by bit. An encroaching sort of change that you ought to have seen coming but somehow, because you were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, you didn’t. As the days and nights passed and record players had to be turned right down so as not to disturb Grandma Lake, and
The Professionals
had to make way for
3-2-1
with Ted Rogers and
The Big Match
was abandoned in favour of
Songs of Praise
, as chicken curry and spaghetti bolognese made way for lamb chops and casserole, as Dad’s armchair became Grandma Lake’s armchair, it began to dawn on everyone that this house that had for so long been a children’s house and then, briefly, a teenager’s house, was now, very definitely, an old person’s house.

Everyone had dealt with the change in their own way. Graham, in a show of masculine territorialness, had decided to decorate his bedroom and spent long hours testing various colours, painting and repainting until the dimensions of his room must have shrunk by some inches and the fumes sent Grandma Lake to bed with a migraine. Jennifer had selected a boy at school—Darren McKenzie—to go out with and spent all her free time at his house.

Charlotte stayed late after school and no one ever asked why. She read books in the library that weren’t on the curriculum (
War and Peace, Animal Farm, Madame Bovary)
, she wandered aimlessly around the shopping precinct near school, avoiding the gangs of fifth-formers who gathered near the fountain and threw each other’s school bags in the water. And she spent at least three evenings a week and most of the weekend over at Zoe Findlay’s house.

Nearly a year after Grandma Lake had moved in, Aunt Caroline still hadn’t been down to visit.

Mum alone had carried on as though nothing had happened, vacuuming around Grandma Lake as though she were a fixture that came with the house, reducing her array of culinary dishes down to about five that all included potato, carrots and peas as though potato, carrots and peas were what she had secretly yearned to cook all her life.

Dad said very little on the subject of Grandma Lake but he didn’t have to. On a chilly March morning, some five months after Grandma Lake’s arrival, he had turfed the Austin out of the garage and onto the driveway and in a day-long flurry of shifting and rearranging and throwing out and rewiring and hammering had turned the garage into a den. Here he had moved the second-best armchair, the desk that had once been in the study, a bookcase, a transistor radio, his case of dusty old 45s (the Everly Brothers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, Del Shannon, Dion and the Belmonts, Adam Faith), the old black-and-white portable television set that still occasionally worked and, finally, himself.

A sort of calm had descended.

Charlotte sat up, listening. The door to Grandma Lake’s room was closed. Downstairs the theme tune to
Crossroads
had just ended and in the bathroom Jennifer coughed and sobbed noisily into the toilet bowl. And tomorrow was the first day of the new school year. Not just any school year: her first day in the lower sixth form, Jennifer’s first in the upper sixth.

Tomorrow.

It was curious, mind-numbing even, to think of a tomorrow. To think of the rest of this evening. The next five minutes.

She wouldn’t go in to school. She would spend the day curled up in bed even if it meant Mum telephoning the doctor’s surgery. Perhaps she would never go in. Perhaps she would never get up.

Jennifer had stopped vomiting and was breathing loudly with jerky sobbing breaths as though she couldn’t get enough air into her lungs.

‘
...an unlikely place to find a soup tureen
.’