Blaming (Virago Modern Classics) (7 page)

An old magnolia grandiflora was dropping leaves with quite a clatter onto the pathway. Windows glinted – for Ernie was houseproud. She sat for a long while in the warm sun, and presently Ernie came out and began to polish the brass door-knocker, which was a slender ringed hand, clasping a ball.

“Sunning yourself?” he asked over a shoulder, seeming now to be in a relaxed mood.

The little girls on Campden Hill were called Dora and Isobel, because the names seemed to set a fashion of fashionable quaintness, and had importance for Maggie, Amy had realised, feeling smug that lots of little babies were now given her own name. “Every other child seems to be Dora these days,” Maggie said, glancing through the
Daily Telegraph
Births. “What copy cats!” She looked over the top of the newspaper and made a humorous-seeming grimace at Amy, who knew that she was not really amused. Her own name was not Maggie, of course, but Margaret, and even, though few people knew, Margaret Rose at that. “We thought of Emma for Dora, if you remember. Scarcely escaped it, really.”

They were sitting over breakfast in the basement kitchen. James had gone off to work at Sothebys, and Dora to the Lycée Francais to vie with Amabels and Sebastians, not to mention the Armands and Francoises. She was a docile child. Isobel, left at home with
her mother and grandmother, was not. In her
Railway Children
clothes, her black stockings and winged pinafore she set up very hell. Already, at nine o’clock in the morning, Amy’s head was aching; for Isobel had to be, at that instant, doing her sewing. She would not wait for anything. First, the needle was threaded by her despairing mother, and then had to be rethreaded, and the cotton knotted by her disapproving grandmother. Dots of blood on the handkerchief she was hemming drew such shrieks as made passers-by pause and look down into the area, wondering if they should do something.

Amy got up and began to clear the table, and at once Isobel wanted to make pastry.

“I’m going to mix some later to make a pie. You shall have some then,” Maggie promised.

“I want to mix it myself. Now.”

“Why don’t you help me dry up?” Amy suggested.

But that gave Isobel another idea – that she would wash up. So she stood at the sink on a stool, with an apron tied over her pinafore and slowly took smeared plates, and forks with eggy tines out of the water and handed them to Amy to dry. All the morning, every thing had to be done twice over and the second time in secret. Silver was caked with powder, beds made, then unmade and made again, apples were wasted because she could not manage to peel them, and, later, grey pieces of pastry were graciously handed round. Maggie ate hers, or what she could not palm, and Amy considered her cowardly. “Even if the Queen of England herself had made it, I could not,” she said firmly.

And so the day wore on. In the afternoon, Amy
said she would go for a walk on her own – a great disappointment to Maggie who had hoped to do that very thing herself or, at the very worst, have someone to share a walk with Isobel.

At about half-past six, when Amy, Maggie and Dora were trying to get Isobel out of the bath, James returned from Sotheby’s. Maggie had already put on a long dress, for friends were expected – to take Amy’s mind off things, James had thought. Keeping away from the bathroom, he began to uncork bottles of red wine and stand them about on the kitchen table, where there were already plates laid out, cutlery and candle-sticks,
taramasalata
and rough bread. A crock of
boeuf Strogonov
from the freezer was thawing on the Aga.

Maggie, looking battered, came down to the sitting-room and tried to dry her dress before a radiator. Soon, Amy was able to join her. She had flicked through a Beatrix Potter, thankful – and not for the first time in her life – for the brief pages; but wearing other people out all day had at last worn Isobel out. Her eyelids had wavered, drooped, her thumb found its way into her mouth. With a look of great serenity and innocence, she had succumbed. Dora, who preferred to read to herself, still sat bolt upright in her bed, her lips moving, her head going slowly from side to side as her eyes followed the print.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Amy asked for the dozenth time, as she came into the sitting-room. But it was all done – most of it weeks ago. Maggie gave her a drink, and then went back to steam faintly before the radiator. James came up from the kitchen and joined them, and Amy wished that the
rest of the evening could be the same –just peacefully recuperating from Isobel.

The guests were all youngish married London couples. The men wore flowered shirts or silk sweaters, the women caftans with jewellery or ornaments collected on holidays abroad – Berber beadwork, strings of seeds, hands of Fatma, tasselied worry beads.

After drinks in the sitting-room, they went down the creaking stairs to the kitchen. In the candlelight, and after the
taramasalata
had been praised and exclaimed about, Maggie ladled
boeuf Strogonov
onto the same used plates. Fuss she scorned and went to some trouble to make none. All meals, in her house, were eaten in the kitchen, which meant a lot of tidying up beforehand. Food was never dished up, but went from stove to plate. The dining-room on the ground floor was full of dolls’ prams and tricycles, but the children never played there. Ernie would be horrified, Amy thought. He had never been in this house, but he had asked many questions about it, as he had about Gareth’s, and Amy had answered in a vague way. “You can’t
make
wine, madam,” he had once protested, when she had been trying to describe a party there. But James did make wine, and it was now being sniffed at, and held to the light by other wine-makers. (Of course, that “Madam” of Ernie’s Maggie despised as much as fuss. “I can’t stop him,” Amy had said.)

People were kind to her at this party. They spoke to her of her loss with brief sympathy, and would have gone on longer if she had desired. The death could not have been ignored, she knew; as she was for a time in a special case. But that subject having been
opened, having been closed, they led her to talk of other things. Like an elderly person, she stayed in one place, sitting on the edge of a clapped-out sofa, forking up rice, or reaching precariously for her precarious wine. The young people came in turns to tower over her, or squat at her feet. They were all so articulate, and being married, having children, going to work, was not enough for them. They also put in hours at family-planning clinics, sat on benches, fought pollution, visited prisons or were marriage-guidance councellors. Amy, who had never done anything but look after Nick and one child, and was now herself looked after, felt old stirrings of inadequacy.

Hoping to help, she took some empty dishes out to the little scullery. Dora’s paintings were stuck upon the white-washed walls, and a Chagall print, which Amy thought like another of Dora’s paintings, and a drawing of Nick’s of a little girl playing the piano, with feet dangling above the ground. It was a favourite of hers and, although they had had the sense to glaze it and frame it, she considered a scullery an off-hand place to hang it.

Stacking up plates, putting forks into a jug of water – and all as quietly as she could, for Maggie had said she must not help – she suddenly heard Isobel yelling in the back bedroom two flights up. She slipped away quietly, through the kitchen, where they were now eating cheesecake from the delicatessen. James was still hovering with a bottle and conversation was louder. She hurried up the two flights of stairs, half wondering why she was fleeing from one strain to another. The children’s room was almost dark. The
nightlight was at its last flicker in its saucer of water. Isobel sat up, sobbing, but with a pause every now and then to sniff and listen.

Dora lay propped on one elbow, waiting to see who would come, hoping for some sort of behaviour. “I shall never be fit for school tomorrow,” she said in her father’s manner. “I do think that white blouse suits you, Grandma. It doesn’t show the dandruff.”

At once, Amy’s scalp began to itch, and she felt gooseflesh over her body. It was an added affliction to grief – a little shame she had tried to hide, even from Gareth.

Isobel, having been quite interested in the dandruff, now wished for attention. She rubbed her fists about her face, and yawned and whimpered.

“What is wrong, Isobel?” Amy asked.

At that, Isobel began to scream for all her worth. “I have a splitting headache,” she cried.

“She’ll only make it worse that way,” said Dora sensibly, “and give me one, too. And I have a really long day ahead of me.”

“Would you like a sip of water?” Amy asked Isobel.

“She’ll only wet the bed,” said Dora. “And if she does that again, I shall tell that Michael.”

“Who is that Michael?”

“My husband,” Dora said with casual dignity.

“Water! Water!” shrieked Isobel, as if she were the Ancient Mariner finally gone off his head.

Amy held the mug to her lips and Isobel gulped and sobbed alternately.

“Do you want to go to the lavatory?”

“No,” said Isobel, pushing away the mug, firmly
snuggling down in bed. Amy said, “If I tell you a little story, will you promise to go to sleep, afterwards, or at least lie quietly?”

“Only if it’s true,” Dora said.

Amy sat down on the end of lsobel’s bed, her hands clasped in her lap so that she did not scratch her scalp. “When I was a little girl,” she began, in what she hoped was a lulling voice, “I had a doll called Gwendoline.”

“It doesn’t sound very exciting,” Dora sighed, and lay down flat and resigned herself to sleep. Amy whispered on, about Gwendoline’s golden hair and moving eyelids, and soon, most relievedly, heard Isobel sucking her thumb. She continued talking monotonous nonsense for a little longer, knowing from old experience that to stop too soon, might bring on a sudden, protesting reawakening, with the job to be done all over again. At last, she ventured to creep away, although dreading a sound of stirring from the now darkened room. She crossed the landing but, instead of going downstairs, she went into her bedroom for a little respite. It was after ten o’clock. Cheesecake must be finished by now and coffee being drunk below in the sitting-room. The sound of voices had drifted one flight up. Quite soon, perhaps, the guests would go home because of their work and their good works tomorrow. They would have a long day ahead of them, like Dora. Yes, it must be nearly over, Amy decided, and she sat on the edge of her bed and went into what Nick had called ‘one of her trances’ – simply staring ahead like a half-wit, eyes slightly unfocused, and her hands in her lap as still as stones. She was letting time flow over her; she was hardly there. Minute after minute, she felt
sliding by, as if a dock were ticking in her head, and
that
the only sign of life. Lately, she had often sat like this, sinking onto the arm of a chair, spellbound and armoured by her own stillness. Now, all she was conscious of – and that dimly – was of having soon to move, and she did not want to, and put it off.

A tap on the door shattered her. She sprang from the bed, and when James came in, was standing as if caught red-handed in the middle of the room.

“Are you all right, Mother?”

“Yes, dear, perfectly. I heard Isobel crying and came up to her. Just came in here to tidy my face.”

Though not believing her, he accepted her explanation thankfully.

“Lovely party,” she added, and went to the glass and began to push her hair about carefully, then, brushing her shoulders, despite the white blouse, she glimpsed his worried face. She felt that she could never be his mother again, except as a liability.

“You should have told Maggie or me about Isobel. I won’t have her tyrannising you.”

She turned from the glass, and smiled at him. “I can look after myself,” she said, though it was obvious to everyone that she could not. Then so could any child of five, he thought. He said, “And, moreover, you’ve been clearing up in the scullery, Maggie said.
Verboten.
You are a guest.”

“In my son’s house?”

“Yes,” he said, and bravely added, “for the present, you are someone we want to look after, spoil a bit Now come down and have some coffee.”

He is really very nice, she thought, as if she had just
met him for the first time, and felt she might grow to like him. Meekly, she followed him downstairs. How the hell can I get out of this, and go home tomorrow? she was wondering.

When she arrived to stay for a day or two, Martha was wearing the same old raincoat in which she had faced the cool weather in Istanbul.

Although she had written of having so much interest in Laurel House, she did not look about her or seem to notice anything. Even when taken to the window and shown the river, she seemed to find it a mere stream. Once reconciled to the fact that, despite delays and excuses, Martha must eventually be invited, Amy had done her best, had bought flowers, which she did not do nowadays, and arranged them carefully, had tried to see her faded, but pretty house through the eyes of a foreign stranger, had felt that she could approve it.

Ernie had opened the door to Martha, and she had shaken hands with him. Both shocked and excited by this, he had turned her over to Amy, who had tried to get to the hall first. There was always a rush for that front door. He went down to the kitchen, a little cheered up. He had been depressed lately. There was trouble now with his permanent false teeth. When he had returned from the dentist’s wearing them, he had seemed radiant. “Oh, madam, what a relief to be able to give you a nice white smile again. All the wasted years I didn’t smile.” He had given her a skeleton’s grin, and had seen her lower her eyes.