Raking the Ashes Read online

  Brilliant! A small reminder of why we got so close in the first place. He’d solved my problem, so I made a point of not creating one for him. As soon as he’d finished I said to him, ‘Bill, you’re a gem! If I’d only had the sense to stick with consulting you rather than marrying you, both of us would have been a whole lot happier.’

  Before he could blow it and queer the pitch between himself and the eavesdropping Janet, I hung up. ‘Sorry. Got to go!’

  That’s how it is when you’re childless. People like us can simply walk away. When it’s over, it really and truly can be over.

  Not like for poor Geoffrey. He might have tried to draw a veil over his big mistake, but, by God, the old fist kept punching through. Lost socks. Forgotten trysts at nursery school. Changes in payment schedules. Dates for holidays. It just went on and on.

  At the start, his ex-wife was quite rude to me. I’d lift the ringing phone and say hello, and there she’d be, distant, dismissive: ‘May I please talk to Geoffrey?’

  The first two times, I handed him the phone, or called to him to pick up somewhere in the house. The third time, I was tougher. ‘Listen, Frances,’ I told her, ‘this is my phone line and, as you know, my name is Tilly. So, when you ring, at least have the manners to say, “Hello, Tilly,” before you ask to speak to Geoff. It’ll make all the difference.’

  Then I called Geoffrey and left the receiver lying on the kitchen counter.

  Next time, she tried it on again. ‘I need to speak to Geoff.’

  I put the phone down and she rang back at once. ‘Did you hang up on me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You forgot the “Hello, Tilly” bit.’ And I hung up again.

  She rang a third time. ‘Just give me Geoffrey, please. It’s quite important.’

  Here is another thing about the childless. We don’t spend every hour God sends imagining urgent messages about our precious offspring coming in, unheard, from Accident and Emergency.

  I pulled the phone plug out of the wall.

  A few days later, Frances rang again. Things went quite well. The moment she heard my voice, she let out that little annoyed noise you make when you reach a recording. Then, with the restrained impatience with which people offer their security password for the third time in a row, she rattled off, ‘Good morning, Tilly. Can I talk to Geoff, please?’

  ‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘I’ll get him at once.’

  And that was that. From time to time, she would forget. I’d let it ride unless it happened twice in a row, in which case I’d say carelessly, ‘Hello? Hello? I’m sorry, I can’t hear you,’ and hang up.

  ‘What is her problem with me?’ I asked Geoff. ‘It’s not as if I’m the other woman, after all. You’ve been divorced for ages.’

  ‘It’s nothing personal,’ he assured me. ‘She’s just a woman who thinks in stereotypes. Her mother’s the same.’

  ‘And you,’ I said, because he’d just come back from London with a present for each of his children. For Harry he’d bought a puzzle. It was a complicated, three-dimensional affair, tremendously clever in design. (I have to think that, since I spent a good deal of time over the following weeks trying to solve it.)

  For Minna, he had bought two pretty hair slides.

  ‘I see,’ I told him. ‘“Man does, but woman is”?’

  He didn’t get it. ‘Minna likes pretty things.’

  ‘Minna likes presents,’ I told him. ‘All children do. And Minna especially likes getting presents from you. But what you give her shows her what you think of her. And pretty hair slides send a very unaffirming and sexist message.’ I twisted the puzzle round one last time before reluctantly surrendering it for wrapping. ‘Especially when you give a teaser as fiendish as that to your boy.’

  I never expected something like that to lead to a quarrel. (It was our first.) He had the nerve to argue. I pointed out that what I’d said was no more than the truth. He still kept at it, wittering on about how Minna actually collected pretty things, and liked doing stuff with her hair. ‘That’s not the point,’ I kept telling him. ‘She could like licking poisonous toads, but you wouldn’t offer her one as a present.’

  I can’t believe how long I kept trying. ‘It would be fine,’ I tried to explain, ‘if you’d bought Harry something equally pretty and pointless.’

  ‘Like what?’ he crowed, as if the fact he couldn’t think of anything equally vapid to give a boy proved his point, not mine. When I pointed this out, he fell in a giant sulk (manifesting itself as a hoity-toity claim to have ‘far too much work to do to spend any more time on this futile discussion’).

  I should have ended things right then. I look back now and realize that was the moment. That was the first step down the slippery slope of mere accommodation, whereby a pair of rolling eyes foretells the death rattle. He might as well have cut the crap and come straight out with that grim marital hostility, ‘Well, if you say so, dear!’ At least then I would have had the sense to go after him with a pipe wrench. ‘Discuss this properly, or leave right now!’

  No, it is all my fault. I take the blame. I should never have let all the pleasant and easy things about living with Geoffrey outweigh the fact that right from the start we were incapable of coming to a shared understanding of any single problem, however trivial, let alone make any progress on the way to a solution. I wish I’d had the sense to face the truth back then: ‘This will unpeel. I’d better get out now.’ But he was very nice in bed. Clean. Pleasant-smelling. Attentive. He never spoiled the mood by lapsing into lectures on thrifty asset-management, like Sol, or trying to cadge money, like Stefan. And he was wonderful when we went out, never panicking when I reached across to take my turn at picking up the bill, and brilliant at getting taxis for exactly the right time, with no rushing or waiting. So I ignored the bad signs and just kept taking pleasure in his company – shilly-shallying, my mother would have called it – until one day, before I knew it, he had rented out his flat behind him. ‘Well, it seemed sensible. After all, I can’t afford to leave it sitting there doing pretty well nothing for ever.’

  I took up the cudgels. ‘How could you do that? Without even asking me?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Tilly!’ (He was actually trying to pre-empt me by acting more put out than I was.) ‘We must have discussed this a dozen times. You’ve always agreed that it’s plain stupid to leave the place for weeks on end, and get no rent for it.’

  ‘Maybe I have. That’s not the same as saying, “Oh, yes. Go ahead. Let someone else move in and come and live here for a year.”’

  ‘It’s not a year. He’s signed a six-month lease.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘What is the point, then?’

  ‘That you didn’t ask. You didn’t even phone and check!’

  ‘You weren’t here, Tilly. You were up in Aberdeen.’

  ‘Well, there are phones.’

  ‘This man was in a hurry. It seemed the sensible thing. I had to decide and I didn’t want to bother you.’

  ‘How thoughtful of you,’ I said bitterly. (Halfway to ‘If you say so.’)

  Geoff played the counter-move. ‘All right, I’m sorry. Clearly I misunderstood. I’ll phone the man right now and tell him the deal’s off and I need the place back for myself.’

  ‘That isn’t what I said.’

  ‘It’s what you mean, though, isn’t it?’

  And, since it wasn’t, I had lost the argument. Within a couple of days, it had become so official that Frances was even told about the change. And I will have to admit it worked quite well. I bought bunk beds, and painted the spare room yellow. It was a treat to go in parts of shops I’d never even seen before to buy things like novelty wallpaper borders and pillow cases sporting favourite telly characters. In a stepmotherly fit, I even lashed out on a moody-looking rocking horse that stood in the corner, reminding me of Bill, till I finally had the sense to turn it to the window.

  Only my brother expressed concern at the speed things were going. ‘Moved
in? But Bill’s side of the bed is scarcely cold!’

  ‘Ed, Bill left months ago.’

  ‘Still – to have moved in already! What about his children?’

  ‘They’ve moved in too – well, you know, Wednesday tea times and alternate weekends.’

  ‘Oh, really, Til!’ And I got quite a lecture about how long it used to take the two of us to come to terms with change, and how these things should be done gradually. ‘Suppose it doesn’t work out?’ he kept saying. ‘What then? Another upheaval?’ And then he asked me what their mother thought.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I remember saying petulantly. ‘No one’s invited me to meet her properly yet.’

  That set Ed off again; and I must say, when I put down the phone I did feel part of something rather low and irresponsible, as if Geoff and I had simply gone ahead and done what suited us, assuming the kids didn’t mind. Since they weren’t there to listen, I tackled Geoff straight away on the subject – though, not wanting to queer the pitch between him and my brother before they’d even had a chance to meet, I didn’t quote Ed directly. I simply asked Geoff, as though snatching the idea out of the air, ‘Do you ever worry we might be moving things along too fast?’

  ‘Why? Don’t you want me here?’

  I made an effort not to roll my eyes. ‘That isn’t what I said. I just thought things might possibly be changing a little too quickly for Harry and Minna.’

  ‘They seem all right to me.’

  He was their father, of course. But I was still reminded of one of my tutors at university pressing upon us the vital importance of never drawing conclusions from how things looked. ‘Take Galileo,’ he told us. ‘When he said the earth moved round the sun, everyone scoffed. “Oh, come on, Galileo! You only have to look to see what happens. The sun moves round the earth.” And what did Galileo say? “Maybe it does look like that. But what would it look like if the earth moved round the sun?”’

  Exactly the same, of course.

  I was in Aberdeen the following week, but on the Wednesday after that I finally got to meet Frances properly. All afternoon the staff in Geoff’s printing shop had been phoning to get him to come in and explain some complicated collating job. In the end, with Mrs Mackie twiddling her thumbs on overtime, and Frances already twenty minutes late to pick up the children, Geoff had to crack. ‘You stay and watch them till she hoots.’

  I put on some really noisy music to stop Harry and Minna hearing the car horn. (Damned if I’d stand for being parped at in my own home.) I kept an eye on the street. It wasn’t long before I saw her car pull up outside, but I heard nothing.

  Progress! I thought, and kept watching.

  Frances didn’t budge and, for a while, neither did I. But minutes passed, and in the end I shut the door on the children, who were still prancing about noisily in the hall, and slid out of the back door and round to the short front path.

  ‘Hello,’ I said to her. ‘Geoff’s just this minute had to rush down to the shop to sort out some collating. But I’m Tilly.’

  For all the notice she took, I might as well have been a street sign. She was rattling her keys in the ignition. ‘This bloody car’s gone dead. It was playing up all the way over here. I noticed the clock was funny, then the radio went, along with the indicators.’ She hammered, to no purpose, on the horn. ‘Now nothing bloody works.’

  ‘It’ll be your alternator.’ I was about to break it to her that it was a tow job, when I was checked by her ‘and-how-the-hell-would-you-know?’ look. Then she remembered. ‘Oh, yes. Geoff told me that you studied engineering.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And now I’m an engineer.’

  I don’t think she took my point. She was too busy fighting the starter. ‘Oh, God! Now I suppose I’m going to have to sit here till they send a man.’

  It was clear what Geoff meant about thinking in stereotypes. ‘Well,’ I advised, ‘if you should find they send a woman by mistake, don’t be too quick to dismiss her. She might know something.’

  And I stalked off. The minute I got in the house, I felt guilty. I switched off the thumping music and told Harry and Minna, ‘Your mother’s out there. I think her alternator’s had it.’ I waited for one of them to ask, ‘Is that terrible?’ or ‘Will they be able to fix it?’ so I could get the bad news through to Frances. But Harry just snatched up his precious furry seal and his school reading book, and ran for the door, and Minna followed, trailing the little pink rucksack in which she had packed her blankie and hairbrush, and the leaf collage she’d done in nursery. I went into the kitchen to make a pot of peace-keeping tea and, when I looked out again, Harry and Minna were already in the back of the car, strapped in and waiting, and Frances had actually been rude enough to go to my next-door neighbour’s house, rather than mine, to make her phone call.

  I tipped the tea straight down the sink and went back to writing the report that I’d been working on peaceably till Geoff left. Let them get on with it, I was thinking. But the little room I was using as a study had a view of the street, and after a while I noticed that Harry, at least, had had the courage to unstrap himself and open the car door again on the kerb side. I was so grateful to him for being the only one of the three not to keep treating my house as if it were giving off noxious fumes that I went down to the kitchen and cut two giant slabs of chocolate cake as a reward. I put them on a tinfoil plate inside the basket of his new two-wheeler, and pushed the bike down the path as if I’d been about to put it away in the garage, then had a sudden thought and changed direction to walk over.

  Seeing me coming, Frances let down her window just a crack.

  ‘Sure that you wouldn’t like to wait inside?’ I asked her pleasantly.

  ‘No, no.’ She twisted in her seat to assure the children. ‘We’re fine here, aren’t we? They say it won’t be long.’

  I left the bike propped temptingly on its support strut right beside the car, and went back to my desk. Within a minute Harry was out, and riding up and down, wobbling a little as he stuffed in a mouthful of cake each time he had his back to his mother. Curious to see what he did with the second slice, I carried on watching. First, he tried tempting his sister out of the car by wheedling so loudly even I could hear. ‘Minna, I need you. I need your help for a trick.’

  She stayed hunched in the back seat.

  Harry reached in to try to drag her out, and I watched him being told off by his mother. Then there was quite a bit of surreptitious huddling, outside the car and in. I rather think he must have scooped the second slice of cake up under his jumper and taken it over to Minna, because at one point she was shaking her head so hard her bunches swiped her face, and recoiling even further in the back seat. So Harry gave up. He climbed out of the car and took off with the bike again, up and down the pavement, stuffing in more cake, but without enthusiasm, more as if he were disposing of evidence than wanting to eat it. And then, at last, the RAC man finally arrived. I watched as he copied down her membership details and let Frances explain. But I could see from the way he started shaking his head almost at once (and from the look of irritation she flashed the house) that he’d said the word ‘alternator’ and really annoyed her.

  Interesting, all of it. So you could say that it was really Harry taking such care to eat only on the up-rides, and Minna trying to make herself as good as invisible, that started me reading. For weeks I read nothing but stuff about children and families. And what an eye-opener it was! Small wonder my brother had been fussing. As far as I could make out from my haphazard researches, the British had to be about the worst parents on the planet, all too willing to demand from their children the lion’s share of any self-discipline going, and conveniently attributing to their offspring the feelings that they had themselves: ‘Oh, yes, Mandy was upset when Alan left. But since Sam came to live with us, she’s been much happier.’ ‘No, honestly, I know the two of them used to be very fond of each other. But now I don’t think Angus gives his dad much of a thought.’

  It gave me the shiv
ers to think I might be part of one of these great towering constructions of self-deception. I was quite glad to get on a schedule of work trips that took me well away during Harry and Minna’s next few weekends. When we did meet, I stuck with doing my best through meal times, then leaving the three of them to it. It was quite nice to stay ahead with all my paperwork, and in brief moments of guilt I could console myself that one thing my reading had made clear was that the principal virtues of a step-parent are unfailing kindness and a level of detachment.

  And I’ve always been brilliant – just brilliant – at detachment.

  3

  IT WAS A quality that came in useful not long afterwards, when Frances suddenly announced she was off to Savannah. I earwigged Geoff’s side of the call. ‘Savannah, Georgia? For five months? What about my time? How will I see the kids?’

  She must have come up with something conciliatory in the way of offers of bed and board, because Geoffrey calmed down and started pushing for details. Who was she going with? (Terence, of course, on one of his lucrative medical contracts.) Why not stay here? (Long-winded but obvious.) The call went on for hours. I’d picked up enough about the two of them to know that if Frances suddenly felt the urge to take herself and her children off as camp followers to her new (and highly ambitious) American doctor boyfriend, Geoff had a snowball’s chance in hell of stopping her. And, if I’m honest, I quite liked the idea of seeing Savannah. So when he finally put down the phone, I tried to cheer him. ‘It could work out well. After all, I can get leave to go out at almost any time after the inspections. And you’re your own boss.’

  But it didn’t turn out like that. Oh, we blocked out three separate periods on the calendar, intending to go at least twice. But Geoff’s biggest client booked in such a huge run of work through the first that we had to scrub that one. By the time my second chunk of booked leave came round, my mother was acting very strangely indeed, and her neighbours were worried. ‘You go without me,’ I told Geoff. ‘It’s you the children want to see, not me.’ But he just countered with, ‘It would be nice to go together,’ and nothing was settled. (We even lost the deposits.) The third time, just as he was fixing up the flights, in came a message from Frances that she was changing her plans (trouble with Terence?) and she and the children would be home any day now.