‘Or on your feet? Eyes on your feet would be useful, wouldn’t they, because—’
‘What about my bath? Who’ll give me a bath?’
‘Daddy, of course,’ Claire gives Hughie a quick squeeze, ‘but you can’t have a bath anyway because of the water ban. Remember?’
‘What time, roughly? You must know.’
‘I don’t. I might stay on or—’
‘Or on your hands. Then you could see the thing you want to pick up, you could see it as you pick it up, a small human to eat, maybe, or a—’
As Claire exits the door, Hughie is handing him a triangle of toast.
‘’Bye, darlings,’ Claire calls from the hall.
‘I can’t eat this,’ Hughie is saying. ‘It’s got sauce along the crust.’
‘Daddy, you’re not listening. Where are your eyes?’
The phone starts to ring. Vita is talking louder and louder; Hughie is removing bits of food from his plate, saying he can’t eat this either, or this, and Claire is shouting something from the hall.
‘What?’ he says, darting up, through the living room and to the hall, where his wife is poised on the doorstep. ‘I can’t hear you.’
She is framed in the doorway, the sunlight illuminating the stuff of her blouse, her hair aflame around her small, freckled face. His heart hurts with the sight of her. Stay, he wants to say, don’t go. Stay with me.
‘I said,’ she says, ‘that’s probably your mother. She’s been calling and calling all afternoon.’
‘Oh,’ he says.
‘She’s lost a key or something.’
‘Right.’
Behind him, he hears the ringing telephone stop abruptly and Hughie say, ‘Hello?’
‘Claire?’
‘Yes?’ She has one hand on the door, a foot out on the step.
‘Don’t go.’
‘What?’
‘Please.’ He takes hold of her wrist, where the gathered bones of her hands meet with the long bones of her arm.
‘Michael—’
‘Just tonight. Just stay here tonight. Don’t go to this thing. I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the Industrial Revolution. Stay with us. Please.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You can.’
‘I can’t. I promised them—’
‘Fuck them.’
A mistake. Her face contorts in anger. She stares at him. Behind him, he hears Hughie telling his grandmother that Daddy can’t come to the phone because he’s shouting at Mummy on the doorstep. Claire looks at him as if she will speak but then she bows her head, she shifts her other foot out on to the path, she closes the door after her.
It takes him a moment to comprehend that she’s gone. He stares at the door, the tarnished brass of the lock, the way the glass fits so neatly into the wood. Then he realises Hughie is next to him.
‘Daddy! Daddy!’ he is shouting.
‘What?’ he says, looking down at him, this miniature version of his wife who has just left, has stepped out of the door, away from them all.
‘Granny’s on the phone. She says—’
He moves through to the sitting room and picks up the receiver. ‘Mum? Sorry I was—’
Disconcertingly, his mother is in the middle of a sentence, a paragraph or possibly something even longer. ‘. . . and I said to the man, well, I don’t need any pop today, you’ll just have to come back on Thursday, and do you know what he said to me? He said—’
‘Mum,’ he says again. ‘It’s me.’
‘– not as if he had that much in his van anyway and—’
‘Mum!’
There is a pause down the line. ‘Is that you, Michael Francis?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh. I thought I was talking to Vita.’
‘No. It was Hughie.’
‘Oh. Well. I was telling Claire this afternoon – and she sounded so busy, I can’t tell you – that the problem is that he’s got the key to the shed and—’
‘Who?’
‘And I told him that breakfast was ready but you know what he’s like with the paper—’
‘What paper?’
‘The thing is that the freezer’s in the shed, as you know.’
He puts a hand to his brow. Conversations with his mother can be confusing meanders through a forest of meaning in which nobody has a name and characters drop in and out without warning. You needed to get a toehold, just a slight grasp on your orientation, ascertain the identity of one dramatis persona and then, with any luck, the rest would fall into place.
‘. . . she said she didn’t have time today but—’
‘Who? Who didn’t have time?’
‘I know she’s always so busy. She’s got a lot on.’
This is a definite clue. There is only one person for whom his mother uses this phrase. ‘Monica? Do you mean Monica?’
‘Yes.’ His mother sounds injured. ‘Of course. She doesn’t have time today because of the cat and so I was wondering whether you—’
‘Me?’ He feels the floodgates of his temper open and it is a glorious relief, a wonderful, raging release. ‘Let me get this straight. You’re asking me, who has a family and a full-time job, to come and help you with a lost shed key. You’re not asking my sister, who has no children to look after and no job, because she’s got a lot on?’
How he loathes that phrase. He and Aoife use it to each other sometimes, as a joke. But, really, their mother’s partiality for her middle child, her endless sympathy with her, her ability to forgive Monica anything isn’t a joke. It’s annoying. It’s ridiculous. It’s really time it stopped.
He hears his mother inhale sharply. There is a silence between them for a moment. Which way will she jump? Will she shout back? She can always give as good as she gets, they both know that. ‘Well,’ she says, in a quavery voice, and he sees that she’s opted for hurt and just a tiny bit brave, ‘I just thought you might be able to help. I just thought I could ring you in my hour of n—’
‘Mum—’
‘I mean, he’s been gone for eleven hours now so I’m just not sure what to do and—’
He frowns and holds the receiver closer to his ear. This is the other thing that can happen in conversations with his mother. She has an odd inability to sift important information from irrelevant information. Everything is crucial to her: misplaced shed keys and an absent husband take equal precedence.
‘Dad’s been gone for eleven hours?’
‘– it’s not as if he’s gone off like this before and I wasn’t sure who to turn to and Monica’s so busy so I thought—’
‘Wait, wait, did you tell Monica that Dad’s disappeared?’
There is a pause. ‘Yes,’ his mother says uncertainly. ‘I’m sure I did.’
‘Or did you just tell her you don’t know where the shed key is?’
‘Michael Francis, I don’t think you’re listening to me. I do know where the shed key is. It’s on your father’s key-ring but if he’s gone, then so has the key and—’
‘OK.’ He decides to take control of the situation. ‘This is what’s going to happen. You’re going to wait by the phone. I’m going to call Monica and speak to her and then I’ll call you back, in ten minutes or so. OK?’
‘All right, darling. I’ll wait for you, then.’
‘Yes. You wait there.’
Gloucestershire
For Monica, it began with the cat. For years afterwards, her father’s disappearance would forever be associated with its death.
She didn’t even like the cat – never had. Peter’s daughters loved it, though, and had grown up with it. When the girls arrived on Friday evenings, after Peter had collected them from their mother’s, they would streak up the path, through the front door and, without stopping to remove their coats, run about in a loud, shrieking clatter, searching for the animal. When they found it, curled on the sofa or stretched out by the range, they would hurl themselves upon it, burying their faces in its flank, crooning its name
, playing with the soft triangles of its ears.
They conducted long conversations with it; they made it elaborate houses out of newspaper; they wanted it to sleep on their beds at night, and Peter allowed this. They carried it about like a furry handbag; they dressed it up in dolls’ clothes and pushed it about the garden in an old, squeaking pram they extracted from the barn. Monica hadn’t even known the pram was there (she avoided the barn, a dark, spidery place full of twisted, rusty shapes) but the girls had. She had watched through the kitchen window as they dragged it out through the barn door, as if they had done this many times. It gave her a peculiar, tense feeling, the notion that these two girls, practically strangers to her, knew her home better than she did.
She had remarked on this, airily, she thought, laughingly, when they were making biscuits together at the kitchen table (or was it that she was frantically cutting out biscuit dough with the cat-shape she’d bought a few days previously, trying to ignore the fact that the girls sat with their arms crossed, glaring at her?). Monica hadn’t been able to find a clean oven glove (because she had burnt through yet another one on that blasted range) and the elder girl, Jessica, had slid from her chair, gone to a drawer in the dresser, pulled out a clean one and handed it to her without a word.
‘You know your way around this place better than I do, don’t you?’ Monica had said, forcing a smile.
Jessica had fixed her with a long, steady look. ‘We’ve lived here all our lives,’ she’d said. ‘Florence was born right there,’ she pointed to her left, ‘on the floor. Mummy swore a lot. Daddy was allowed to cut the cord.’
Monica was frozen, a limp dough-cat spread out over her fingers, unable to look away from the floorboards by the window. She hadn’t been able to tread on them since.
She tried with Peter’s daughters. She tried very hard. The weekdays – which they spent with their mother – took on a distinct rhythm for her. Monday, the day of their departure, was consumed by shock, her head enveloped in a black cloud of panic and uselessness, Tuesday in recuperation, Wednesday in gloom and despair: Florence and Jessica hated her. They hated her, no matter what Peter said. She could see it in their eyes, in the way they wheeled away from her if she happened to come near, like startled horses. The whole situation was untenable, a disaster, she would never make an adequate stepmother, let alone a good one. Thursday, she woke early and gave herself a talking-to: she was good with children, she’d practically raised Aoife and she wasn’t exactly what you’d call easy – how hard could it be to win over Peter’s two? Friday was spent in elaborate preparation: Monica bought colouring books, paintboxes, French-knitting dolls, soft balls of yarn. She put a vase of flowers on each of their bedside tables. She laid out flower-presses, nature books, comics, glue, modelling clay, bright embroidery threads on the coffee-table: she could teach them to embroider, to sew! They would make Christmas presents together – glasses’ cases, shoe-shiners, pyjama bags, monogrammed handkerchiefs. She pictured Peter finding the three of them huddled together on the sofa, sewing a surprise tobacco-tin cover for him. How happy it would make him, to know she had triumphed, she had won them round.
Then Friday evening rolled around and she’d be confronted by the sight of two children in those matching corduroy smocks from mail-order kits, the hems of which were always slightly uneven – how Monica longed to unpick the seams and resew them properly; it would be the work of minutes – streaming through the house, looking for the pet they loved.
Jenny, their mother, had been quick to ensure Peter took custody of the cat when they separated, insisting the creature remained in residence with him. And it didn’t take Monica long to work out why. The animal simply had no sense of what it could and couldn’t eat: it would consume bits of paper, elastic bands, lengths of string, the labels in clothing. She had never known anything like it. If foxes slit open the rubbish bags in the lane, the cat would snack on old bones, half-rotted fishheads, mouldy crusts, chewed shards of yogurt pots, old shoelaces. And then it would come inside, yowling, deafeningly, at the back door, until Monica gave in, and regurgitate the ill-thought contents of its stomach on the carpet, the newly polished floorboards, the kilim in the hall, the kitchen table.
As Monica had told Peter the other day, if she had to scrub cat vomit off the furniture one more time, she would scream.
Today was the day for its grooming – Monday, the day she liked to clean the house, to erase all traces of the girls, to put things to rights, to remove all bits of leaves and grit from the cat’s pelt. But the odd thing was that she couldn’t find it. She called its name, at the bottom of the stairs, at the back door, at the mouth of the old rotting barn. She rattled the box of its rank-smelling food. She opened and shut the fridge door, with ostentatious volume. But nothing.
Monica clicked her tongue with irritation. She had on the apron she reserved specially for this task. And the rubber gloves. She had the metal-toothed cat comb all ready, soaking in Dettol. Where was the creature?
She called a few times more then gave up, took off the special apron and gloves and began to attack the mantelpiece with a duster.
But later, as she was taking out the rubbish, a dark shape in the flowerbed startled her. At first, she thought one of the children had dropped something, or someone in the lane had thrown something over their wall – a hat, a shoe, perhaps. She shaded her eyes against the sun and realised it was the cat, hunched oddly, awkwardly, at the base of the yellowing jasmine plant.
‘There you are,’ said Monica, but her voice was faltering.
A filmy glaze over the cat’s eyes, the chest expanding and contracting with a rapid, fevered in–out, its head bowed low. Monica bent her knees into a crouch and saw, on its hind leg, skin torn like fabric, a clotted mass of red, a patch of something white. She let out a small shriek and staggered back on to the path. She looked up and down the lane, as if seeking help, then ran into the house, hands working at the cloth of her apron.
The phone was ringing as she burst into the hall and she snatched up the receiver.
‘Hello, Camberden three eight three—’
Her mother’s voice was mid-sentence: ‘. . . and so I was wondering if you had any idea of where he might have gone because—’
‘Mammy, I can’t talk now. Oh, it’s terrible and—’
‘What’s happened?’ Her mother snapped into the situation instantly, scenting danger near her child. ‘What is it? Is it Peter?’
‘No. The cat.’
‘What about the cat?’
‘Its leg. It’s all mangled and bleeding. It’s sitting out there now, hunched up and strange and I don’t know what to do.’
‘Ah, the poor thing. Hit by a car, maybe. Alive, is he?’
‘Yes. It’s breathing, anyway. I don’t know what to do,’ Monica said again.
‘Well, you’ll need to bring him to the vet.’
‘The vet?’
‘Yes. They’ll be able to help him. Poor thing,’ Gretta said again. Her mother’s soft heart, when it came to small mammals, preferably helpless ones, always took Monica by surprise.
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘I can’t pick it up. Not like that.’
‘You’ll have to, darling. Drape a towel round him, if you really can’t touch him. Just put him in a cardboard box and take him along.’
‘A cardboard box?’
‘Yes, pet. Do you have one?’
‘Probably. I don’t know.’
‘You’ll be fine. Do you remember when Aoife found that kitten? And she—’
‘Mammy, I can’t talk now. I have to—’
‘Before you go, I just need to ask you something. It’s about the shed key. You see, your father—’
‘I have to go! I’ll ring you back.’ Monica put the phone down and pulled open the door to the cellar. She was going to rescue the cat, she was, nobody else: it was to be her triumph. She felt a righteous excitement flooding through her veins. She could tell the story to
the girls at the weekend and they would listen gratefully and perhaps a little bit tearfully. They would see the cat; it would have a bandage on by then and would be sitting docilely by the range, and they would know that she, Monica, had saved it.
She scrambled down the cellar steps, into the damp dark. She was sure she had a cardboard box down there, left over from Christmas.
Monica couldn’t understand what the vet was saying. He didn’t seem to want to help her, not at all. She’d got herself and the cat there, in one piece, in this unbearable, white heat. She’d got it into a box, she’d got herself and the box to the bus stop; she’d sat on the bus, looking straight ahead, despite the fact that the cat had been making a nerve-jangling noise throughout. And now to be told something about spinal cords was too much.
‘What?’
‘We need to end his suffering,’ the vet was talking in a specially gentle voice that Monica did not like.
‘End his . . .?’
The vet hesitated, seemed to look at her carefully. ‘We need to put him down.’
‘Down?’ Monica couldn’t assemble the words in a comprehensible form. The vet was saying things about sleep and pain and letting go. It seemed to be even hotter in here than it was outside. Sweat was collecting in her hairline, across her upper lip, around the waistband of her skirt. She was terrified that if she raised her arms the vet, a man of about her age, not unattractive, would see the dark patches spreading there. The cat was a pool of clumped fur on the table between them.
‘The cat, Mrs Proctor,’ the vet was saying, ‘is seriously injured and—’
Monica stopped dabbing at her forehead with a hankie, aghast. ‘You mean kill it? But you have to make it better, you have to . . . My stepdaughters, they’ll . . . You have to fix this cat. Please.’
‘Um . . .’ The vet floundered, diverted from his usual script. Then he rallied himself. ‘It’s a very quick, very peaceful procedure,’ he said uncertainly. ‘Well. Some people like to stay with the animal while it happens.’
Monica looked down at the cat, which was making a terrible scrabbling motion with its front paws, trying to crawl back inside the cardboard box. It had taken her a good ten minutes to get it into the box – it hadn’t wanted to go in, not at all, had fought and struggled with desperate, frog-like movements. And now, here, all it wanted was to get back inside. Did it somehow know? Did it realise they were discussing its imminent death? No, it seemed to be saying, not now, not yet, there are many more things I need to do. Monica thought suddenly of Aoife. How she’d cried and cried when that kitten died. Her knees raw above her school socks as she stood in the garden. The tiny form, wrapped up in an old towel, cradled in her arms. Their father digging a hole in the earth. Make it deep, now, Robert, won’t you, their mother had whispered, then pressed Aoife to her pinny. It was the kitten’s time, she’d said to her, that’s what it was. But Aoife cried, couldn’t stop. A sickly thing, the kitten had been, right from the start, but she had cried and cried.