First Aid (6 page)

Dilys seemed to gather her thoughts to say something more conciliatory. A look of unaccustomed sophistication crossed her face.

‘We can't all choose right the first time,' she said.

‘I'll clear away,' Jo said.

‘No, you stay there. You're on holiday. You're to have a good rest. Besides, we're not finished. I've got the pie to bring in.'

Jo sat there. The apparent reasonableness of her grandmother's wisesaw was shocking. The burden of choosing bore down on her, not just the first, but the next and the next. As if potential lovers and husbands appeared in a kind of identity parade and when you messed it up they lined up again. God, not him again. Did anyone get better at it?

‘You fetch in the pie, Dilys. I'll clear away,' Geoff said.

Jo heard them moving about, the clatter of plates, the oven door opening and shutting. They came back to the table. Dilys put the dish down and the pie breathed out hot fruity vapours.

‘I forgot the cream,' Dilys said.

Jo watched her go back to the kitchen. There was one step down between the two rooms and Dilys stopped on the edge, as if contemplating a precipice. Soon, she'll be afraid of the stairs, Jo thought. Then what will happen?

They were all sitting down again. Dilys looked happier. It had offended her that they had had to eat different things. Choice for pudding was acceptable, though, in this case, there wasn't any, because she hadn't had warning.

‘You'll have some pie?' she said.

‘Just a small piece. No, smaller than that,' Jo said.

‘Rob?'

‘No.' It came out too loud. ‘Thanks.'

‘Well, you can change your mind if you want to. Cream?'

‘No, thanks, Gran,' Jo said.

‘It doesn't harm you, you know, darling.'

‘No, I know that.'

‘You have a bit, Rob, in the middle of the dish.'

‘No, Gran.'

‘Please yourself. I'm not forcing you.'

Geoff lifted the jug of cream in the approximate gesture of a toast.

‘It's lovely to have you all here. Under one roof.'

‘No Ella, though,' said Dilys. ‘It's not the same without Ella.'

There was a pause while they all thought of her. She was almost conjured up. She would have glared at them and disappeared behind her hair. Rob looked across at his mother, but she avoided his eye.

‘Where did you say she was?' asked Dilys.

I didn't, Jo thought, and aloud she said, ‘She wanted to stay behind with her friends.'

‘As long as she's all right,' said Geoff.

‘She's got some nice friends, has she?' asked Dilys.

‘Just normal kids. You know.'

‘She helps out at Lois Lucas's too, you were saying,' Dilys said.

‘Every now and then.'

‘She seems young to be working,' Dilys said.

‘It's only informal, a bit of pocket money. Nothing to get excited about. It gives me a lie-in at the weekend.'

Jo pushed back her chair. She had left most of the pie.

‘Rob and I'll do the washing up,' she said.

‘No,' said Geoff, ‘That's my job. You sit and talk to your grandma. She doesn't often see you. Rob will give me a hand.'

Dilys smiled and patted Jo's arm. ‘That will be nice. We'll go and sit in the other room.'

‘I'm fine here. Really. Let's not move,' Jo said.

The idea of relocating and stimulating a new, more vigorous line of questioning appalled her. More of the same seemed simpler and, with any luck, shorter. She knew where her grandmother's edginess came from. Dilys had a nose for ruin.
She
would rather have been dead, than sit on a train looking wretched. The grubby child on the floor, the bag-lady luggage, the fresh scar down the face, the attitude so detached that a girl – one of her great grandchildren – had jumped out between stations. Even recalling the scene seemed dangerous, as if Dilys would get a glimpse of the train compartment through the back of her head.

Jo thought, what has happened to me would never have happened to her.
She
would have known, for a fact, that behaving as I started to behave six months earlier – and behave would be exactly the word she'd have used – would lead to being stared at by a stranger on the train. Dilys didn't acknowledge there was Anyone There, but she abided by the rules set by those who thought there had been. They had all moved on to a less personal billing arrangement. No one called to check the numbers, but they had to pay just the same, she believed that.

Rob and Geoff began to sort out the dishes.

‘Don't use the tea cloth for the pans, Rob,' Dilys called out. ‘There's an old towel for that.'

She settled herself into her chair as if she meant to stay there. ‘So how is the shop, then?' she said.

‘Just about ticking over,' Jo said.

‘Got some nice things, has he?'

‘Not really. The good stock was Lois's and that's mostly gone. Trevor doesn't seem to bother. He doesn't go looking properly.'

‘Needs a bomb under him,' said Dilys. ‘I expect you do your best. I'd like to meet him one of these days. You've never mentioned a wife.' She looked sharply at her granddaughter. ‘Or is he not the marrying kind?'

‘Not particularly,' Jo said. ‘Though probably not in the way you meant.'

‘You get on with him though?'

‘Yes,' Jo said.

‘Do
you
ever think about it?'

‘What?'

‘Marrying again.'

‘No.'

‘I expect you get some interesting types come into the shop.'

‘Not many.'

‘It only takes one.'

‘One what?'

‘One interesting one.'

‘The interesting ones are women,' Jo said.

She looked with longing into the kitchen. Rob and Geoff were free to restore order, walk to and fro, crash the pans, disappear into the steam. She couldn't sit there any longer.

‘They've nearly finished,' she said. ‘I'll go up and see if Annie's asleep, before Rob goes to bed.'

‘You'd hear her,' said Dilys.

‘I'll go and make sure.'

‘Let sleeping dogs lie, was always my motto.'

Jo got up.

‘She was very quiet, our baby girl,' Dilys said. ‘I don't think we heard her voice once.'

‘You will,' Jo said.

‘She wouldn't let you out of her sight. I thought she'd grown out of that,' Dilys said.

‘She was tired. She'll get used to you.'

‘I should think so, darling. She'll be different in the morning. Funny little thing,' Dilys said.

Jo went upstairs into the small back bedroom. A triangle of light from the landing extended through the open door. Beyond it, Annie was tucked up in a sheet, one hand loose beside her face, where it must have fallen when her thumb dropped out of her mouth. Jo touched her cheek. Her face was the same as last night and the night before – untroubled. Maybe she had already forgotten what she had seen that afternoon. Jo drew the curtains slowly so as not to make a noise and turned down the cover on Rob's bed.

She went out on to the landing and listened. She heard the burble of voices on television and her grandparents putting things away in the kitchen. She closed the bedroom door carefully.

‘I'll make a cup of tea,' said Geoff.

‘Don't make one for me,' Jo said.

‘I'll go and shake the cloth then,' he said.

Dilys was folding up the day's newspaper and putting it in the bin.

‘Look, I'll finish off tidying up, as I'm sleeping down here,' Jo said.

‘It's all done,' said Dilys. ‘Geoff only needs to lock up.'

‘I'll do that,' Jo said.

‘No need,' he said.

‘I wouldn't mind some fresh air,' she said.

‘Fresh air,' said Dilys, turning round and looking at her granddaughter. ‘If you want to use the phone, dear, you're welcome to. We've got a perfectly good one here.'

‘That's not what I said. I didn't mean go out like that. You can lock up the front. I'll walk round the garden.'

‘That won't take long,' Dilys said.

‘You won't see what's out,' Geoff said.

‘You can show me tomorrow,' Jo said.

‘It hasn't been a bad year,' he said. ‘All that rain we had in the spring. It was good for the roses.'

Dilys gathered up her bag and her cardigan to take upstairs.

‘Rob's watching the TV. Turf him out when you're ready for bed,' she said.

‘He's all right for a while,' Geoff said.

‘I hope you'll be comfortable. I wish you'd let him sleep down here. Boys his age can get to sleep anywhere,' Dilys said.

‘I'll be fine,' Jo said.

‘If I'd had a bit more notice I'd have got myself organised,' Dilys said.

‘I know,' Jo said.

‘We're just glad to see you. Don't forget to put the bolt across, love,' Geoff said.

Jo waited until her grandparents had gone upstairs, then she opened the back door and went out. The air was still warm, and in spite of the murky London sky, the stars were visible. She stood looking at the dark backs of the houses, the even pattern of jutting out and bitten into of the terrace, which meant house to her more than anything plainly symmetrical. A few windows were without curtains. They lit up the deep outdoor passages formed by the back extensions. By day they had always been gloomy places for the frightening parts of made-up games. She could remember feeling brave and cold, venturing down there, and the relief of rushing back into the light. She envied her earlier self the knack of shedding an unwanted state of mind in an instant. The mechanism had clogged up along the way. She remembered how it had been but she couldn't do it.

She was worn out, though not in quite the same way as before. She had had to rouse herself to cope with the talking. She couldn't sit there, dumb, with her head on the table. The questions family asked were of a different weight from other people's – loaded, even the random ones. She needed, mentally, to keep her arms whirling round so that they landed beyond her. Even avoidance took effort.

She glanced up at the back windows. Rob would go to bed soon. He was tired too. She hoped Annie would sleep until morning. She walked back to the house and looked through the window. The kitchen looked strange, as rooms do when seen from the outside. The fittings were old, not as clean as they used to be. Her grandparents couldn't see as well these days, and some of their elbow power had gone. The things on the shelves were familiar, but had lost the significance they had had when she was young. The dish in the shape of a lettuce leaf, which needed scrubbing in the crinkles. The fruit bowl with blue dragons chasing round it, which she used to make wishes on. Now, they weren't so different from the chipped china and glass in the under-a-pound box in Trevor's shop. The most recent object was a picture she had painted at school – cooking apples piled in a dish. Dilys had taken a fancy to it and had it framed. Jo had given up art soon afterwards – when she left school, in fact. She hadn't even thought about picking up a pencil until she began working at Lois Lucas & Son. Then, something about sitting there, without much to do, reminded her. The peace and disorder of the school art room came back to her. There was no shortage of still life in the shop and the dust was a challenge; it blurred the edges. The new drawings were tentative to begin with, of wispy thinness; less bold than the cooking apples. Then they grew darker. It was as if she were gouging out lines and shapes on a block. She took a chance, identified the light, but didn't know how the shadows would fall. It was only when she finished that the blackness remaining made sense.

She went back indoors, shivering slightly. She felt for the key and turned it, then shot the bolt into place.

ELLA PUT HER
shoes back on and carried on walking – along the shore, past the golf links and the bungalows, until she was within sight of the beacon at the mouth of the River Stour and the gasometer on the far bank. She walked for the moment without feeling troubled, or, at least, her troubles flowed in and out without getting clumped into knots. It wasn't too bad, the cut on her mother's face, more like a deep scratch, really, though it stayed in Ella's mind like a sliver of moon in the sky. She came this way most evenings when she wasn't out with friends. She didn't like being at home. Even when she stayed in her room she heard Jo and Felpo through the door talking and laughing in the kitchen – and the gaps when they went silent. She hated the gaps. Her mum always used to eat with them but then Felpo started to cook and the two of them always ate late. He said the cooking was for all of them but she didn't like the smell or the way he tipped everything in the pan together. She lit candles in her room and sprinkled scented oil on them but the cooking smells came under the door. If she was out of the flat she didn't know what they were doing. When they ate or when they went to bed, when they used the bathroom. Time passed and she didn't have to think about them.

She turned round and headed back south along the beach. She stayed calm, not minding that the sun had set and that the air was finally cooling. Things looked different in darkness. The colours changed. The glow from a tropical fish tank in one of the windows was bluer and brighter. The sea was like dirty copper.

Her courage left her when she was back on the stretch of beach closest to home. She was tired and her arms were beginning to feel cold without a jumper. She rubbed them to get rid of the gooseflesh. The pebbles had used up the heat from the day: cold water seeped from them. The damp came through her shoes. She spent about ten minutes beside the water's edge trying to guess the sea's movements. She thought that she would choose a pitch and settle down for the night once she had worked out where the high tidemark was likely to be. Though, since she had no blanket or newspaper – nothing to put between her and the pebbles – settling down just meant lying on the ground.