Every Day Is Mother's Day (24 page)

Muriel gaped at her. Isabel took her eyes from Muriel’s face. “What on earth are you doing in that overcoat, Muriel?” she said sharply. “Where did you get that?”

“She had it on when she let me in,” Colin said.

“Take it off,” Isabel said. “Let me have a look at you.”

Obediently, Muriel unfastened the coat, a dark flapping garment of old-fashioned shape and cut. She slipped out of it, held
it in one hand, looked around her, and finally hung it tidily on the hallstand. Isabel ran her eyes over the girl’s body; bare-legged, thick-waisted, her breasts shapeless inside an old stained pinafore.

“What is it?” Colin said. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

Muriel glanced up the stairs and along the hall, rested her eyes on each of them in turn, and spoke, very softly. It sounded like “Victor of the field.” Isabel had so seldom heard Muriel speak that she could not be sure what she had heard, or that there had been anything at all. “What did you say?” Her voice was urgent. She looked up into Muriel’s face and saw there for an instant an expression of extraordinary lucidity and calm. Then Muriel turned, stepped over her mother’s body, and shambled off towards the kitchen. Colin blundered after her. Muriel picked up from the table a piece of bread and jam—which she must have been eating, he thought, when I came to the door—and began to chew at it, laughing quite loudly, and once offering him a bite. Ten minutes later, the ambulance arrived.

The many marks of violence on Evelyn Axon’s body, some recent, some quite old, were carefully enumerated in the postmortem report. Cardiac arrest had killed her; she had been alive when the left side of her face had struck the wall with some force, but dead when the right side of her skull had struck the hall floor. I wonder how they can tell that, Colin said to himself, as he came out into the fresh air. He looked at his watch; twelve-thirty, nice time to get some lunch.

He had needed to take the morning off work for the inquest. There was a reporter from the local paper present. What would Frank O’Dwyer make of it? They were sure to put
HEART ATTACK MOTHER WAS BEATEN, CORONER SAYS
, or
BEATEN MOTHER DIED OF NATURAL CAUSES
. Perhaps he had no gift for headline-writing.

Frank had made no more references to the night of the dinner party. He obviously didn’t remember being hit on the head. If he’d found a lump next day, he’d obviously put that down to natural causes too. Colman had not said anything either, except “bit of a bore.” As if such Charenton junketings were what you got every time you accepted a dinner invitation.
But possibly, Colin thought, it was more his memory that was at fault. Already he could see a tendency in himself to confuse the two incidents, to impose on Frank’s drink-sodden features the expression of astonishment he had seen on Evelyn Axon’s face as she died. Or thought he had seen. Perhaps it had not been there, and perhaps the party had not been as bad as he thought. Perhaps I have a tendency to dramatise things, blow them up out of proportion. He could not ask Sylvia for her reminiscences; she had said it would suit her best if the evening were never referred to again. The loss of his driving licence was breeding much inconvenience for the family. Everything has been out of perspective since last September, he thought, and that dinner party was not the worst of it.

A weak sun was struggling out as Colin and Florence came down the steps.

“You gave your evidence very well,” Florence said. “Very lucidly.”

“Florence, I’d like to have a word with the young social worker. Will you just wait for me?”

“Miss Field? I’d like to speak to her myself. I want to know what will happen to Muriel.”

“Muriel? Why?”

“We
are
neighbours, Colin, after all. Or have been, all those years. I’d like to visit her.”

“She might not know. She’s resigned, after all. I’ll ring them up about it, the Social Services Department. No, you stay there, I won’t be two ticks. I’ll have to dash.”

“All right, Colin,” Florence said, and stood on the steps looking after him uneasily, her stout handbag dangling from her wrist.

He caught up with Isabel in the car park. She heard him behind her, and walked back to meet him.

“It wasn’t too bad, was it?” he said. “It’s all over now.”

He saw a sullen young woman with a pale face and sharp
nose, drably dressed in office clothes, with legs disproportionately thin. Last winter’s ghost burned feebly behind her eyes, almost extinguished.

“Like spring, isn’t it?” she said, making an effort at a smile. “No, it wasn’t too bad. I’m out of it now, anyway.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I’m going to work in a bank. It will suit me, don’t you think?”

“Well, it’ll be less complex. Less wearing, I should think.”

“No emotional upheavals or moral dilemmas.”

“I’m sure you’ll get on. You’re a clever girl.”

“I may not be, you know. I may be most extraordinarily stupid.”

“Forget it. If you made a mistake—”

“Yes, it’s too late. I know it’s no use crying over spilt milk, but it is a very common and understandable thing to do.”

“She was elderly. You couldn’t prevent her having a heart attack, could you?”

“No.” Her eyes searched his face. “I couldn’t help her and I couldn’t really help Muriel, and there was no one else, was there?”

“Well, you could have helped me.”

“Oh, perhaps. How is your wife?”

“Sylvia?”

“Have you another?”

“No, of course not. I was just surprised at you asking after her. She’s fine, thanks.”

“I’m not her enemy, you know.”

“No…of course not. My sister, she’s blaming herself a bit. For not knowing Mrs. Axon was ill. She told me she’d not seen them for months. I didn’t take any notice. Now she’s worried about Muriel.”

“Muriel’s all right.”

“Do you know what’ll happen to her?”

“She’s no danger to anybody.”

“Can’t they—well…examine her? Find out what’s the matter?”

“Yes,” Isabel muttered. “I expect they’ll examine her. But as for what’s the matter—I don’t know.” She turned away and closed her eyes with a tired frown, trying to obliterate once and for all the memory of Muriel’s face in the dark hall, for five seconds, perfectly lucid and perfectly sane. Perhaps a trick of the light, she had said to herself, light or the lack of it.

“Are you all right? Do you feel dizzy?” Colin touched her elbow timidly, as if she were a stranger in the street.

“Yes. I’m all right.” She moved away from him. “Will you be taking any evening classes this year, Colin?”

“Yes. I’m taking Do-It-Yourself. We want to move, you see, we need more room, and our only chance is to get something going cheap that needs a bit of work. I was thinking, actually, Mrs. Axon’s house will have to go up for sale, won’t it? I mean, Muriel won’t be coming back to live by herself, I shouldn’t think, so they’ll have to put the money in trust for her, or whatever they do.”

Isabel stared at him. “You must be mad.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not really thinking of buying that house?”

“Why not?”

“Didn’t you feel the atmosphere?”

“Atmosphere?” He laughed. “There’s no atmosphere. Give it a good clean-up, slap a bit of white paint around, it’ll be completely different.”

“You’ll never clean it up. The smell—”

“It smelled of mould.”

“It smelled of misery.”

“We’ll get rid of that.”

“Oh, you’re planning to be happy, are you?”

He looked away. “That’s perhaps too much to ask.”

“I cannot understand how people can give up on life as you have. You used to talk as if you were looking for the Holy Grail.”

“It was a phase.”

“You got a quick poke in the back of a parked car and you said it had changed your life.”

“I thought it had.”

“Tried and failed, is that it? A lifetime’s excuse for not trying any more. Ultimately, Colin, they’ll find your body and bury you.” She turned away, pulling up her collar and knotting her scarf against the wind. “Anyway—the house. I wouldn’t call myself over-endowed with imagination, and
I
wouldn’t buy it.”

He followed her. “Do you know something about the Axons that you aren’t telling me?”

“I don’t
know
anything.”

“The Axons—you see, if only we had known what their lives were like…”

“Well, there are a lot of things we don’t know, and choose and prefer not to know.” She hesitated. “Goodbye, Colin.” Slouching, his face set, he watched her walk away between the line of parked cars. When she had driven off he turned and went back to Florence; he found her on the steps where he had left her, a glassy tolerance in her eyes, and her handbag on her wrist, like the Queen reviewing a parade.

Many months had passed. It was September again. Colin stood by his new double-glazed french window, the part product of his second mortgage; and stared out over his crepuscular garden, open and breathing like a ploughed field. The scent of autumn earth carried into the house.

He had never known what the police had been looking for, when they turned over the garden, and he was not sure whether they had known themselves. Still, a few timely words from his solicitor had reduced the purchase price still further, and Sylvia had not been sorry, she said, to see the back of some of those evergreens. Sylvia had been extremely sensible about it all, putting her back into weeks of cleaning without a word of complaint. Even Florence, who had not been keen initially, had to admit they’d changed the place out of all recognition; two rooms knocked into one downstairs, the fireplaces pulled out, and all the ceilings painted eau-de-nil.

Sylvia sat behind him, placidly knitting, the picture of domestic contentment.

“Draw the curtains, love,” she said.

From upstairs, Alistair gave an earsplitting yell. The baby
began to cry, and Sylvia thrust her needles into her ball of wool and heaved herself to her feet.

“Just as I’d settled him,” she said. “I don’t know what’s the matter with Alistair. He wants a good slap. I think the devil’s got into that child since we moved house.”

She bustled out, yelling at the child as she clumped up the stairs. Perhaps he’s unhappy at the new school, Colin thought. He heard Sylvia administer the slap, heard Alistair’s wail, the louder shrieking of the baby, and Sylvia’s voice rising over all. The noise, the sheer noise level defeats me, he thought, the classroom all day with the five minutes’ anarchy between every lesson, the traffic rattling the staffroom windows, the pneumatic drills on the bypass, the screaming baby all night. How that child screams, worse than all the others put together, I’ve never heard anything like it.

Just now, when it was going dark, he had been touched by the depression that crept up every day at this time. It was a new kind of gloom, more akin to fright than misery; a tightness round the heart, a tension at the back of the neck. It was not circumstantial, not related to the delinquent children or the size of the mortgage. He had consulted the doctor; free-floating anxiety, the man had called it. Offered him Valium; Valium, he felt, was for women. He took it for a week and found himself bursting into episodes of florid rage; he threw it away. He had little fear of the future now, for he knew what the future held; an infinite series of evenings like this one, the same vague dread touching his heart. It would seem infinite, of course, because he would never be able to look back and say, “That was the last one.” Suicides never realise it, but no one experiences his own death; we only experience in retrospect. Those were the kind of speculations that ran through his mind a lot these days; he was thinking over a lot of things that had never bothered him before. He had begun to wonder whether his blood-pressure was up, and to worry about air-crashes; not that he ever travelled by plane.

Perhaps I need to make some noise of my own, he thought. He went to the radiogram and eased out of the pile of records the one Isabel had given him for Christmas. She had not written on it of course, not even “To Colin with best wishes.” There was no written evidence, and really no evidence at all, of that segment of his life. He put the record on the turntable, and, on impulse, opened the french window and stepped out into the garden. A large waxen moon illuminated the rutted earth and the two apple trees near Florence’s fence, ancient trees bearing tiny acid fruit. They can come down, he thought, before Alistair breaks his leg. He shook himself, under the moon, trying to hustle the dread off his shoulders. His feet sank into the soil and from the house behind him the music bounded out into the twilight, thumping and swooping, wave after wave of
The Washington Post
.