Gretta comes into the kitchen to find the kettle lying on its side on the draining-board, minus its lid. The cups are apparently still in the press. Aoife is staring at the shelf, a tea towel wrapped around her arm.
She’ll say nothing. Gretta seizes the kettle, fills it, places it on the hob. She reaches out and unwinds the cloth from Aoife’s arm.
‘You’ve moved the breakfast tin,’ Aoife says.
‘What?’
‘The breakfast blend.’ Aoife points at the tea shelf. ‘It always used to be to the right of the afternoon blend.’
‘Did it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh. Well, move it back if you want.’
Michael Francis follows them into the kitchen. He doesn’t seem to want to leave Aoife for long, he realises, as if he’s afraid she’ll fly out of an open window, like those children in Peter Pan.
‘Would you like the loan of a hairbrush?’ his mother is asking.
Aoife spins around. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I just thought . . .’ Gretta shrugs as she sits down at the kitchen table.
‘You just thought what?’
‘That you might need one.’
‘Are you saying there’s something wrong with my hair?’
And they’re off, he thinks. Why is it Aoife and Gretta can’t spend more than twenty minutes in each other’s company without falling into a conversation like this one? Gretta calmly handing out remarks like sweets, but with a subtle lacing of poison, and Aoife hurling them back at her. Aoife is now saying she never brushes her hair, never ever, and Gretta is saying she can well believe it and aren’t there such things as hairdressers in New York? He wants to say, Aoife, let her off, just this once, think of what she’s going through.
He strains his voice to speak over them: ‘So, listen, what’s the plan for today?’
His mother and sister turn to look at him and he sees, in the widening of their remarkably similar eyes, that they are both afraid, that they are just killing time, filling in airspace, that their hairbrush wrangle is just their way of putting things off.
Eighty miles or so north-west of the kitchen, Monica is lifting the nineteenth-century lace of the bathroom curtain and peering through the blurry glass into the garden. She thinks of how she once read somewhere that gradually, after years and years, panes of glass become thicker at the bottom, that glass, while appearing solid and dependable, is subject to a slow, invisible downward creep.
She puts her palm to the glass, as if she might feel a treacle-like dropping. But there’s nothing. Just an inanimate cool.
Out in the garden, Peter is digging a hole near the apple trees. She’d whispered, ‘Make it deep,’ to him, before realising that she’d heard those words before, in similar circumstances. Always strange, to catch yourself echoing your parents’ words, to find experiences coming round again. The same yet different. Two wailing children this time. Neither of them hers.
Peter’s put on his work overalls for the job. Peter, her husband. She would never tell anyone this but she still finds it strange to call him that, even after three years. The word ‘husband’ is, for her, irrevocably linked with another man. Will it always be like that? A woman in a shop recently asked her if that was her husband waiting outside and Monica had turned and was searching the window for Joe’s face, Joe’s figure, Joe’s waiting pose – slouched, hands in pockets – before her eye lit upon Peter. It took her a moment to compose herself, to wave back. Stupid, really, because what on earth would Joe be doing in a village in Gloucestershire?
People told her, again and again, how lucky she was to be leaving London, to be moving to the country. Bit of fresh air, they said. Out of all this hustle and bustle, they said. She’d love it, they said.
The truth is, she doesn’t. The truth is, the countryside scares her. The truth is, she hates this house, hates its uneven floorboards, its historical bloody integrity, its cast-iron range, its rickety doorways, its eternal signs of Jenny, the wronged martyr. She hates her weekends as a stepmother, hates the constant weekly reminder that she has failed, hates the way they twine themselves round their father, the way the three of them sit interlocked on the sofa to watch TV while she must take the chair opposite, all the while pretending she doesn’t mind. She hates the garden, full of slugs and flies and wasps and parched flowers and apples that have fallen off the trees too soon and plants whose tendrils hook into her tights. She hates the dark that descends every night, the awful silence, fretted by the yaps and twitches and hootings of creatures out there, beyond the garden’s fences. She hates the terrible green screen of trees that press close to the house, their leaves turning and trembling. She hates that there is nowhere to go, no café round the corner, no shops to wander among, to soak up an hour or two, that the bus passes the end of the lane only twice a day. She hates that she can’t go anywhere except the twenty-five-minute walk through fields and over stiles to the village where Jenny lives, where she might bump into her, where people look at her, then away, where no one smiles at her, where the woman in the post office takes her money, then slams down the change on the counter, where she is made to feel like a bad person, an interloper, a husband-snatcher. Peter says it’s all in her head, that they don’t think like that round here, but she knows that they do. I’m not a husband-snatcher, she wanted to say the last time she was there. How can I be when they weren’t even married? But she didn’t. If she wants to go anywhere, these days, she waits for the bus to Chipping Norton, where there is a row of nice shops and a tearoom, where no one knows her or, if they do, no one cares.
She misses London. She misses it the way she missed Joe. A strange, cramped pain that leaves her almost unable to speak. She has never lived anywhere else until now. She hadn’t really known that people lived anywhere else, or would want to. There are days when she can hardly bear it, when she walks across the landing of the house, again and again, her arms crossed over her middle, her mind over-filled with images of descending an escalator into the Piccadilly Line on a wet, darkened evening, everyone’s umbrellas slicked with rain, of the ten-minute walk between her old flat and her mother’s house, of Highbury Fields on a misty day, of the view over the city from Primrose Hill. Homesick: she’s found that it really does make you feel sick, ill, maddened by longing. But by evening, she is always ready, her grief behind her, hidden, like a deformity she must cover up. Hair up. Make-up on. Supper on the range. She will make this work; she will not go back; she will not let on to anyone; she will not show them that she’s been beaten again. Monica with her failed nursing degree, her childlessness, her husband who left her: she won’t be that person. She will live here in this house with its shaky roof, its skirting-boards that scuttle at night, its moth-eaten furniture, its hostile neighbours. She will live here and she will say nothing.
Gretta is sitting at the table with her tea, and she is saying, in a barely audible voice, that she doesn’t know where he could have gone, that she’s been racking her brains, why would he do such a thing? What kind of a person just walks out on his wife on a summer morning and doesn’t tell her where he’s going? She’s asked the neighbours and no one saw him, no one at all, which is decidedly odd, wouldn’t they say?
To Aoife, this is a sight almost beyond bearing: her mother, seeming so small and shrunken there at the kitchen table, brought so low. How strange it is when she’s always made such a fuss and a scene about minor things. Melodrama is her speciality, like the time Aoife returned home from school to discover her mother had been to visit a funeral parlour after finding a lump in her throat. She knew she was dying, she knew this was it, she could feel it in her bones, and she wanted a ‘good send-off’ at the ‘right sort’ of funeral home, with plenty of early afternoon slots, so that there was time for a Mass to be said beforehand and time for the wake back at the house afterwards. It was the least she could do for them all. Aoife requested to see the lump, examined the place beside her mother’s collarbone and told her it was an insect bite. Nothing m
ore. Odd, Aoife thinks, that the first time Gretta has a proper crisis to grapple with, she seems to shrink in the face of it, to abandon all of her usual tricks.
Michael Francis is thinking how Gretta has said these things to him, in these exact words, yesterday – ‘decidedly odd’, ‘his wife on a summer morning’, ‘racking her brains’. Every time she speaks these lines, she gives the impression that she’s never spoken them before, that the words are coming to her spontaneously, as if she’s just thought of them. ‘Never in a million years expected this of him,’ she is saying, and there’s another one. She’s either a good actress or extremely forgetful. But what a strangely selective memory – to be able to remember the exact words but forget that you’ve said them before. If she says the thing about him being so much happier since he retired, he may have to throw something at the wall.
‘The thing is,’ Gretta says, putting down her teacup and fixing her eyes on Aoife, ‘he’s been so much happier since he retired.’
Aoife isn’t sure what to say to this because she has been away, she missed the whole retirement thing, but she opens her mouth, hoping that something apt will come out. Beside her, Michael Francis is shoving back his chair and leaving the room.
‘Where are you going?’ Gretta calls after him.
‘For a slash.’
‘I wish he wouldn’t say things like that,’ Gretta complains. ‘The whole world doesn’t need to know.’
‘You did ask.’
Gretta makes a small noise of disgust and gestures as if wafting away a bad smell. ‘Oh, you two.’
‘You two what?’
‘It’s always the same, isn’t it?’
‘What’s always the same?’
‘Always taking the other one’s side. No matter if they’re in the wrong.’
‘He isn’t in the wrong! He’s going for a slash. That’s allowed, isn’t it?’
Gretta shakes her head as if she’s suddenly decided the quarrel is beneath her. ‘Always taking each other’s side,’ she mutters to the air.
‘Well, somebody has to,’ Aoife retorts.
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
Michael Francis looks at a sliver of his face in the tiny, plastic-rimmed mirror over the toilet. His father stands here, on this very spot, every day to shave. He fills a bowl at the kitchen sink then carries it in here, to the toilet under the stairs. ‘Away from all the bother,’ is what he said when Michael Francis once asked him why he didn’t use the bathroom upstairs. The shaving things are still there: his razor, his badger-bristle brush, his dish of shaving soap, worn hollow in the middle, a tan-coloured stain on the cistern to mark where the enamel bowl stands.
He stares at this stain. Odd to find it here. He can see how the rim of the absent bowl would fit it exactly; it’s like a ghost of the thing. Did his father shave on the morning he left or not? He touches his finger to the bristles of the brush. Was it used or did his father walk out with a day’s growth on his face?
His mother and sister’s voices seesaw back and forth beyond the wall.
It occurs to him that his father must have taught him to shave, must have guided him through the ritual he performs every morning of his life, but Michael Francis has no memory of this. It would have been upstairs: there isn’t enough room for both of them in here. Did his father stand behind him as he picked up the razor? Did he instruct him to dip it into the water, to stretch his skin tight? Did their faces appear in the mirror together as he took his first, rasping stroke? He grew tall, taller than his father at around the age of fourteen; Robert had told him once, in an unguarded moment, that Michael Francis got his height from his uncle, the one who had died in the Troubles. It was never mentioned again but afterwards Michael Francis always had the sense that his height made his father uncomfortable in ways he could never understand. But they must have stood upstairs, on a day in his early teens, together, at the washbasin. He strains for a recollection, an image, anything, but nothing comes. One day, he supposes, he will have to teach Hughie. What a thought.
So much happier since his retirement. Michael Francis lets out a bark of laughter but he hasn’t taken into account the extreme smallness of the room because the sound hits the wall in front of him and bounces back to slap him in the face.
‘All I’m saying,’ his mother shouts from the kitchen.
Robert had not been happier since his retirement; if you ask Michael Francis, he’d been engulfed with pointlessness. If you ask Michael Francis, Robert’s retirement is the worst thing that has ever happened to him. His job had provided an unswervable routine for his life, a reason to rise from bed in the morning, a place to spend the day, tasks to fill his time, and then a place from which to return in the evening. Without it, he is like a boat untethered from its dock, drifting and bumping aimlessly about.
He has no real sense of how his father has been spending his days since he left the bank. A typical conversation between them lately might go like this:
‘Hello, Dad, how are you?’
‘Well. How are you?’
‘What have you been up to?’
‘Not much. Yourself?’
Michael Francis suspects that Robert has been reduced to trailing about in Gretta’s wake which, on reflection, his father probably doesn’t mind too much. Robert has always adored Gretta, always deferred to her judgements, her whims (of which there are many), her wishes, much more so than Michael Francis’s friends’ fathers, who tend to take the more patriarchal line. He recalls, when they were children, his father being utterly focused on his mother. If she left the house, which she often did, being of a restless and sociable nature, to visit neighbours or to go to Mass or to collar the priest for a chat or just for a jaunt to the shops for a pint of milk, his father would pace the front room, saying, where’s your mother, where’s she gone, did she say when she’d be back? His anxiety would transfer itself, like a virus, to Monica, who took to standing in the bay window, her hands clasped, watching for Gretta, who would always come back, often with her apron still on, rolling up the street and through the door, humming to herself and saying, what’s everybody standing about for, are you all waiting for a bus?
As a child he often wondered how his father managed at work, without Gretta to speak for him, to make decisions for him, to rally him along. It was unimaginable, his father spending all those hours without the enlivening force of his mother. He must have been about nine or so when he slipped out of school one lunchtime and, without really deciding to go there, went to the bank where his father worked. He knew where it was because Gretta had taken them there in the summer holidays, for a visit. He and Monica had been allowed to see the vault where people’s money was kept, to twirl round and round on a chair, to see the button under the counter that the tellers could press if a robber came. His father worked in a bank. He was the assistant manager. Michael Francis knew this. But he’d still been surprised by people queuing to speak to the people at the counter, by the secretaries clacking away on their typewriters, by the desk with his father’s name on it.
So he went there himself, walking along Holloway Road. It was after Aoife had been born so he must have been nine or ten. He went in through the bank doors, walked between the looped velvet ropes until he found the row of red chairs that he remembered from the summer and sat himself down on one. And when his father’s door opened and his father said, ‘Come in,’ in he went. He sat down on the chair opposite his father’s and he was tempted to swizzle round and round in it again, like he had last summer, but he couldn’t because his father hadn’t said, what in God’s name are you doing here, which was what he’d expected him to say. His father hadn’t said anything at all. He was reading something in a file, which he snapped shut so fast it made Michael Francis jump. ‘Let’s see now,’ his father said, and crossed over to a filing cabinet and wrenched open a drawer. Michael Francis could hear his own heart going dub-a-dub, dub-a-dub, his father’s back so close to him, his eyes directed down into the depths of the drawer,
which contained sheaves and sheaves of paper. He hardly dared breathe and he tried to grab at the sensations to file them away to consider later: the delicious cold of the chair arms, the pencils with impeccable pink erasers at their tips, the proximity of his father, bent in concentration next to him.
Then his father turned and reared back, dropping the file to the floor, and he said, ‘It’s you,’ and his voice was thin with shock – Michael Francis has never forgotten the sound of those two words – and then suddenly it was all over and Michael Francis was being marched back to school by a secretary. When he got home that afternoon his Meccano was up in a high cupboard and wasn’t coming down for a week.
He brushes the tips of the badger bristles against his own chin, watching himself in the sliver of mirror. His father minus his mother is an unsolvable equation. His silence is leavened by her loquaciousness, his order and impassivity the counterpoint to her chaos and drama. Robert unanimated by Gretta is something none of them has ever seen. Michael Francis has never been able to picture his father in the years before he found Gretta. How had he survived? How had he conducted his life without her? Michael Francis knows precisely three things about his father from that strange hinter-life before his marriage: that he was born in Ireland, that he had a brother who died, that during the war he was there when the British Army got stranded at Dunkirk. That is all. The latter he discovered one night while doing his homework at the kitchen table, his textbooks open before him, his hand moving his pen across the page, when an arm shot suddenly over his shoulder and flicked his textbook shut. Don’t let your father see that, his mother had said, darting a look over her shoulder at the door. He’d taken the book to his bedroom and looked at photographs of fishermen hauling soldiers out of the sea and into their boats, at the map showing the positions of the different troops, and how the Allies were surrounded, pushed back towards the water. He thought about what his mother had told him, that his father had been among the last men to be evacuated and that he’d thought he wouldn’t make it, that he’d be left behind, the sea in front of him, the enemy behind him. Michael Francis thought about this story and then, because he was seventeen and about to sit his exams and after that go to university, he shut the book and didn’t think about it again for a long while.