Another Life Altogether (40 page)

“Well, we were thinking May,” Mabel said hesitantly. “I see,” my mother said, still sounding dubious. Then a startling change of expression came across her face. Her furrowed brow lifted
and her lips turned upward in a jubilant smile. “That’s just fantastic!” she declared. “I’m really chuffed for you, Mabel, I am.”

Mabel looked at my mother skeptically. “You are?”

“Of course I am. I’m thrilled. And a wedding—well, weddings are always wonderful. Of course,” she said, striking a sudden sour note, “I wasn’t even told about my own mother’s wedding. Haven’t even got an invitation yet.”

“Well, Ev, I don’t think they’ve set a date, I think—” Mabel started to explain.

My mother cut her off. “Not to worry about that. Mam might be marrying some too-big-for-his-boots furniture salesman in sunny Australia, but we are going to throw you the biggest, most wonderful wedding this family has ever seen. We’ll show that Australian gigolo. And you know what?”

“What?” Mabel and Frank said simultaneously as they cast worried glances at each other.

“We’re going to do it right here.” She pointed out the kitchen window toward the garden. “We’ll rent one of them big marquee tents for the reception, and we can do the ceremony on the lawn, and—”

“What lawn?” Ted asked. After she’d abandoned it in late summer, the garden had become colonized by weeds again. But now, in the middle of February, it was a barren patch of uneven shiny wet mud.

“We’d sort of been planning to get married in church, Evelyn,” Mabel said.

“Oh, you can’t get married in church, not with Frank being divorced—no, that wouldn’t be right. Besides, just think of how lovely it would be to have your wedding here. I’ll take care of everything. I’ll do the food, I’ll get you some lovely flowers, I’ll make the clothes. And I’ll do all that landscaping I’d been planning last year. It’ll be the best wedding you could ever imagine. And you’ll have to invite Mam, won’t you, Mabel? I mean, she’ll have to come home for her oldest daughter’s wedding.”

“Well, I’ll invite her, Ev,” Mabel said, “but it’s a long way and I’m not sure—”

“Oh, don’t be daft, of course she’ll come. It’s an important family event. And Jesse will be your chief bridesmaid.”

“No, I won’t.” I had no interest in being anyone’s bridesmaid, and I certainly wasn’t going to participate in Frank and Mabel’s wedding.

“Oh, yes you will, young lady,” my mother said. “I’ve got this lovely pattern for a bridesmaid’s dress, Mabel. I got it back when I did all that dressmaking a few years ago. Ooh, you should see it, all ruffles and pleats. Even Jesse could manage to look nice in something like that.”

I imagined myself, a big, poufy bundle of satin and chiffon and pastel high heels, stumbling after Mabel, trying to hold her wedding train above the sticky mud of our back garden. After the ceremony, I’d be jostled between men in ill-fitting suits and women in outfits as ridiculous as my own while the photographs were taken. Despite the photographer’s commands to say “cheese,” I wouldn’t smile. Instead, I’d seethe silently in my itchy underwear and tights, the solemn witness that everyone’s eyes went to when they perused the wedding album years later.

“I don’t believe in marriage,” I said. “It makes women into men’s property.” I wanted to tell Mabel all the reasons that she should dislike Frank—about the things he’d said, how he’d cut my hand in the kitchen, how he was probably only marrying her for her little council house and her regular income. But I knew there would be no point. Mabel wouldn’t listen to me. Nobody would listen to me. In the same way that Amanda didn’t see the cruel and bullying Stan Heaphy I saw, no one in my family saw the Frank that I saw. Even Ted, who had just arrived a few minutes ago, seemed to like him. My mother had hated him, but now that he was going to marry Mabel even her opinion had changed. “Maybe you shouldn’t get married, Auntie Mabel,” I said.

“What, and continue living in sin? I don’t think so,” my mother said. “Mabel, you’re doing the right thing getting wed.”

“Yes, but I’m not sure about doing it in your garden, Evelyn. I mean, Ted’s right—it’s a bit bare out there right now.”

“Oh, don’t you worry. I can buy some turf and get a lawn laid in a week.”

“Yes,” Mabel said, “but it would be ever such a lot of trouble and expense. Don’t you think, Frank?”

“Actually, I think it’s a grand idea,” Frank said. “And it might help save us a few bob in the end.” He turned to my mother. “Mabel was wanting to rent out the Snug Room in the Snail and Whippet for the reception. I nearly had a heart attack when I heard how much they charge, and, frankly, I don’t think there’s room for all the guests we want to invite. The bloody church charges an arm and a leg as well. We can’t afford all that. With Evelyn helping us, it’ll make it a bit cheaper. And maybe Ted could help us out with one or two things, he—”

Ted beamed and opened his mouth as if to say something, but Mabel spoke sooner. “He’ll do no such thing,” she snapped. “If I find out he’s had anything to do with supplying so much as the confetti, I’m calling the wedding off.”

“All right,” Frank said. “If you feel that strongly about it—”

“I do. But I suppose if Evelyn wants to help with the wedding then—”

“Great!” My mother clapped her hands together. “I’m going to start right away. While the weather’s still bad, we can work on the dresses. Jesse,” she said, swinging around to look at me, the coat rippling around her. “You can help me get my sewing machine out and we can measure you up for that bridesmaid’s dress.”

“I’m not going to be a bridesmaid,” I said. “You can’t make me.” I felt close to tears. I held them back, but they were hot and stinging behind my eyes. My throat felt dry and my chest constricted. I had a vision of myself ripping that poofy pink dress into shreds.

“Yes, I can. And I will,” she said, waving a furry arm in my direction. “You’ll do as you’re told. And you’ll like it.”

“Oh, come on, lovey,” Frank said. “Don’t be silly. Can’t you do this one thing for your auntie Mabel and uncle Frank?”

“You’re not my bloody uncle. And I’m not going to be in your stupid bloody wedding.”

“Oh, Jesse,” Mabel said, looking hurt. “I know you’re not keen on dressing up as a bridesmaid, love, but there’s no need to—”

As Mabel spoke, my mother stalked across the room. When she reached me, she pushed her face into mine so that only a couple of inches separated us. “If you weren’t so big,” she said, flooding my senses with her hot, slightly sour breath, “I’d put you across my knee and give you a damn good hiding. As it is, I’ve a good mind to get your father to tan your backside. Instead, I’m going to let you apologize to Frank and Mabel.”

I moved my eyes from my mother’s icy glare and swept the room to see all those other adults looking at me: Ted, a cigarette dangling from his mouth as he shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot; my father, his lips pressed together so that his mouth was nothing more than a colorless line above his dimpled chin; Auntie Mabel, her head tilted sideways, her forehead rippled with confusion; and Frank, an angled smile stretching across his satisfied mouth. They were nothing more than a solid wall of incomprehension. None of them knew me. None of them even cared to know.

“I hate you all,” I said, taking them all in with a sweeping look before I turned to storm out of the room.

T
ED, LIKE MY MOTHER WHEN SHE WAS GOING THROUGH HER BAD
patches, had an extraordinary capacity for sleep. During the first several weeks of his stay, he was never up when I left for school in the mornings and on several occasions he was still sleeping when I returned. I knew that he was asleep because I could hear his snores echoing through the walls of the spare bedroom, enormous reverberating snorts that sounded like the nonstop revving of a huge, ill-tuned engine. I wouldn’t have minded this so much except that, while Ted was in bed, my mother insisted that my father and I should tiptoe around the house. “Be quiet! Your uncle Ted is sleeping,” she’d say in hissing whispers if I dropped a shoe in the hallway or stumbled on the stairs.

My father crept around his own house like an unwelcome visitor with surprising patience. Indeed, he seemed so pleased to see my mother up and about that he didn’t even mind that we were still left to make our meals now that she was spending all her time on the plans for Mabel’s wedding. Every morning, by the time I made it down to the kitchen, my mother was already there, sitting at the table studying patterns for wedding dresses or sketching diagrams for landscaping the back garden. Within a week of Ted’s arrival, she had also discovered the mobile library as a resource to help her with her plans.

“Such a lovely woman, that librarian is,” she told me after her first visit to the mobile library. “She talks such a lot of sense. I hope you listen to her, Jesse,” she said, wagging her finger at me. “You could benefit from paying attention to someone as intelligent and educated as she is.” She went on to tell me how, after the two of them had discussed at length the declining cultural standards of contemporary Britain, the librarian had been only too happy to put in a request for a crateload of gardening, dressmaking, and recipe books that my mother retrieved the following week. After that, she borrowed additional volumes on a regular basis and spent hours surrounded by unsteady piles of thick hardback books, leafing through copies of
Landscape Gardening for Beginners, Turf and Lawn Care
, and
Beautiful Blushing Brides
.

When he wasn’t asleep, Ted spent most of his time in the living room, watching television, smoking, and drinking cup after cup of dark, strong tea. He was almost as indiscriminate in his choice of television viewing as my mother was, and I frequently arrived home to find him staring slack-jawed at
Play School
or
Romper Room
. “Fetch us another cuppa, would you, love?” he’d say, waving his empty teacup at me, his eyes focused steadily on the screen. His trips out of the house consisted of runs to the Co-op to buy cigarettes. (I was thrilled at this additional supply of Co-op stamps.) Other than that, he rarely left the house and when he inquired about getting the dole he was delighted to find that, since we lived so far from the dole office in Hull, he wasn’t required to go there after his first appointment and could continue to collect his benefits by signing the card they sent him once a week and returning it in the post.

“By, that’s champion, that is,” he said. “There’s nothing I hate more than standing in them damn queues, having them people at the window treat you like you’re a bit of rubbish, and then ending up with a couple of pounds and some change for your trouble.”

“But won’t they help you get a job, Uncle Ted?” I asked.

“Oh, don’t you worry, love, there’s plenty of time for that.”

While Ted would watch almost anything on television, his favorite
program by far was
Columbo
. He said that when he was in prison he and his fellow inmates never missed an episode. “He’s a bloody riot, that bloke,” he’d say, gesturing toward Peter Falk as he arrested yet another murderer. “To look at him, you’d think he was thick as two short planks, but he’s got it all up here,” he’d add, tapping an index finger to his temple and giving a knowing nod.

My father had never really liked American detective programs. “Bunch of bloody Yank rubbish,” he’d mutter during the episodes of
Cannon
or
Kojak
that my mother sometimes watched. Because of this, the first Saturday night he was at our house Ted had to put up quite a battle to watch
Columbo
, but he managed to persuade my father to at least give it a chance. Much to my surprise, after seeing his first episode my father was hooked. He loved the way the disheveled and rambling detective outsmarted all those wealthy doctors, film stars, and highflying businessmen. “Hah!” my father exclaimed when the villain was caught. “Rich bastard, serves you bloody right!”

Within a month, we’d developed a weekly household ritual to prepare for our viewing of
Columbo
. Early on Saturday evenings, Ted made an excursion to the Midham Co-op, where he’d buy bottles of beer, lemonade, crisps, and salted peanuts. While he was gone, my mother would cut up little cubes of cheese, spear them with toothpicks, and set them out on a plate. By the time the opening sequence came on to show the murder that Columbo would later solve, all four of us would be perched eagerly around the television set, chomping on salt-and-vinegar crisps. These evenings soon became some of my favorite times, and I imagined that if someone walked by our window and looked inside they’d think we looked like just another happy family gathered together on a Saturday night.

I was not very happy, however, several weeks after Ted came to stay, when Mabel and Frank dropped by a couple of hours before
Columbo
was due to start. I always liked to see Mabel, of course, but I hated the idea of Frank intruding on our cherished family ritual.

“Oh, so somebody finally decided to let us in,” Frank said when I
opened the door. “Thought you were going to leave us out here all bloody night.” I’d been upstairs reading a pilfered book from the mobile librarian’s slush pile and had expected someone else to get the door, but my father and Ted were apparently so involved in their television viewing that they hadn’t wanted to leave the room. My mother was in the kitchen working on something related to the wedding plans, and these days she was so singularly focused that it wouldn’t have surprised me if the knock on the door hadn’t even intruded into her consciousness.