Homecoming (20 page)

‘Yes, and it smells funny.’

‘Right, well, you need checking,’ Lauren says, brisk and kind, with her glasses back on like a schoolmistress. ‘And you need rest. Why is Max not taking care of ye?’

‘He seems to be mostly taking care of his bar bill. He’s at the Fox all the time. Rolls in at 2 a.m. reeking. We’ve barely said a word to each other since it happened. I think he hates me, Lauren. For losing it.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ says Lauren, uncertainly. ‘Men don’t deal with their feelings so well. Why have you not had it out with him?’

‘Dunno,’ says Primrose. ‘I’ve not felt up to it.’

‘Too upset yourself?’ Lauren says, and Primrose nods.

‘Did ye not want to go home to your mam when it happened?’

‘She’d not have me.’

Lauren was right. She did need a D&C. And she’d sat alongside Primrose on those plastic chairs that are welded together. Waited for her. Carried her home in her warm car. Now they are back in Lauren’s spangly kitchen. It is dusk outside.

‘Well, you’re stopping with me for now,’ Lauren is saying, still with her coat on and putting the kettle on to boil again. ‘Doctor says you’re to rest and rest and rest. And then we’ll get you that prescription in the morning, for the extra antibiotics. D’ye want me to ring Max now?’

It’s the third time she’s asked.

‘No, you’re alright. I’ll ring him meself later,’ Primrose says.

‘Right,’ says Lauren. ‘I’ll take you up to Sylvie’s old room. Bed’s made up. And I’ll get you a guest towel.’ She looks at her watch. ‘Oh god, I’ve got the parochial committee meeting in half an hour. Will you be alright here by yourself? Eric’s in Scarborough today, so he’ll not be in until dinner. You can rest in bed, which is what you need. Are you’ll sure you’ll be alright? I can call the vicar – cancel.’

‘I’ll be alright,’ says Primrose. ‘I’ve got my Household Electrics book. It’s in my bicycle pannier.’

Ann sits on a bench at the far end of the churchyard. The warmth is still swirling in the air like some sub-Saharan current, even in the gathering dusk. A watery blue light washes over the grasses and bare trees. The cemetery is all greys and blues and silvery sages. She can smell the last of the mahonia on the air, heady and sweet. She’s amazed to be sitting on a bench at dusk and not to be stinging with the cold.

She stares ahead at the church where she sees the door open and members of some committee or other emerge. She can see Lauren’s smart cream coat with the funnel collar, the one that brings out the shine in her pearl studs. Expensive, from Browns in York. Lauren was always beautifully turned out. She is milling in the group as they stop to chat in the church porch, thirty-odd yards away. Then Lauren’s face turns towards her and Ann returns her gaze. And then, after that moment of staring at each other across the churchyard, Lauren returns to the group, shakes the hand of the vicar, then drifts away with the others down the path. Ann hears distant car doors slam and engines rumble into life.

So that’s that then, she thinks. She’s not speaking to me. It’s only confirmation of what she knows already. Lauren is bruised by the talk, because of that stupid tiff in the chemist, which set Karen Marshall off (it didn’t take much). It’s not even that anyone believed any of the gossip, about her and Eric. But Ann knows Lauren, knows her better than anyone. She’s a proud
woman
, proud and elegant. She likes things just so. She’ll not want to talk about it, not want to dignify it with comment. But she’s stopped offering Ann lifts to things. Barely returns her calls – just the stiff pleasantries, all from the surface.

She can see the trail of it now. Karen would’ve put her head together with Fat Mo Dorkin, the two of them chewing on it like some bit of gristle on a lamb chop. Karen would’ve exaggerated – ‘A right ding-dong it was. Ann Hartle and Eric Blakely, more ’an friends!’ And Mo’s eyes would have shined bright with a tale so tall (and her so short), across the counter of the newsagents to Maureen Pettiford. And so it goes on and on. It was the very worst thing about living in a small place – the way every little thing got blown up, all your dirty washing aired for all to see.

She stays there in the lost dark. It’s like everything’s falling apart – all the bad things about her on view. Shaming it is. Her whole family on its uppers, and being talked about with grimacing mouths, false with pity. She and Joe – it’s as if they’re surrounded with failure, a couple born to incompetence, life’s D-team. She has a capacity for this: lining themselves up alongside others so they came off worse, her own particular form of self-harm. End of their lives and nothing to show for it. Even her lump of a daughter-in-law refuses to see her. She’s called and called but Primrose keeps putting her off. ‘I just need to rest,’ she keeps saying. ‘I’ll stop at home. Work’ve been fine about it.’

She is hurt by it, Prim not wanting to see her, as if all the things she’d told herself about her strange daughter-in-law, and all the doubt being on Ann’s side but her being tolerant of Primrose, that pudding of a girl, well it wasn’t the full picture. The feelings were mutual. In her hour of need, and even in the absence of her own mother, Primrose didn’t want her.

She’d not talked about the baby with Max – that wasn’t his scene, talking. Drowning himself in the drink instead and never mind who sees. And Bartholomew, he was his usual wall of silence. But worst of all was this – that the woman she most wanted to talk to about all of it – her best friend, had shaken her off like a bad lot.

‘Uterine infection?’ Karen Marshall whispers, over-mouthing the words with her head to one side and Primrose’s prescription in one hand. She wrinkles her nose, as if she’s actually holding Primrose’s sanitary towel and sniffing it. Primrose has the urge to smack Karen in the face, but it’s the day after the D&C and she’s feeling weak. She clutches onto the counter and Karen says, ‘There’s a chair in the corner if you’d like to have a sit down. That was my idea – customer care.’

Karen hands the prescription up to the chemist in a booth above her head.

Primrose only just makes it to the plastic chair and is relieved to sit, though it’s too close to the towers of nappies and baby wipes.

‘Poor you,’ says Karen. ‘Max alright is he?’

Primrose nods, feeling too heavy for the chair.

‘He’s been down the Fox, drowning his sorrows, ha’n’t he? That’s what men are like I suppose.’ Karen has come out in front of the counter and is unpacking a box of Yardley talcum powder: purple and green bottles with gold lettering.

The door of the chemist opens and Primrose peers above the shelves and sees Claire coming in. She walks around the end of the nappy aisle to where Primrose is sitting.

‘Hello you,’ Claire says. She stands beside her, stroking her shoulder and saying ‘Feeling alright? You don’t look too good,’ but in a gentle way, without Primrose having to explain anything. She’s always liked Claire. In fact, now she thinks on it, Claire is the one person who seems to talk
to
Primrose and not over her head, or with some double meaning that’s intended for someone else in the room.

‘I’m just waiting for my prescription,’ Primrose says. She hasn’t the energy to look upwards. Feels like she’s eighty years old, sitting there. She can feel Claire above her, one hand on her shoulder, ever so kind.

‘Missed you at work,’ Claire says and then says quickly, ‘I don’t mean that in a naggy way – we’re managing alright. Well, Tracy moans like anything, of course. But I mean it’s dead boring without you.’

Primrose smiles up into the air with a cricked neck.

‘I was just saying to Primrose,’ Karen says, ‘that Max has been in the Fox a lot. You must be worried about him.’ And she crinkles her nose as if she’s adorable, with her head to one side.

Claire doesn’t say anything but Primrose can feel her hand moving on her shoulder, as if something might be taking place on Claire’s face, in the direction of Karen.

Claire stoops and says, ‘D’you want to come to mine for tea tomorrow Prim? I’ll be home about six. I’m just off the high street. Literally, round the corner.’

As Primrose looks up to reply, Karen says, ‘Yes, Jake said he’s there most nights, like it’s a second home.’

‘Shut your mouth, Karen,’ Claire says sharply.

‘Do you know Sheryl?’ says Karen. ‘You must know Sheryl.’

‘Yes, I know her,’ Primrose says.

‘Max and Sheryl. Funny friends!’ Karen is saying. ‘I wouldn’t like it myself – if it were my fella. But you’re very much your own person, aren’t you Primrose? With your wiring an’ everything. I’ve always admired that about you.’

‘
What’s going on in your house
?
’ asks the heading in bold type. Beneath it is a diagram showing a simple ring circuit with double and single sockets leading to a central fuse box.

Primrose reads under a cone of light, which shines down on the kitchen table. It is 4 a.m. She’s back in her dressing gown, which carries the beddy smell of illness in it, and her furry heart slippers. A cold snap has shoved the warm spell away and laced the night with frost. Such a change from the last two days in Lauren’s spongy, overheated home. Back here, the draughts blow under the back door and a chill sits resolutely in the stairwell and the floors are hard. She is reading Chapter Three of
Home Electrics
by Julian Bridgewater.

‘
In the average house there are usually three basic electrical systems
.’ Primrose knows all this of course. It is elementary. But she is looking for comfort and she reads it like a child returning to a familiar bedtime story. ‘
The power circuit, the lighting circuit and the dedicated circuit
.’

Lauren had pressed her to stay – had been waiting for her in her car outside the chemist. ‘Stop another night with us, love. You still look awful pale.’ But Primrose asked her to drive her home. She told her she needed to get back to her own bed, her own things. She wanted to spread out again into privacy. Dismantle things.

On the table in front of her is a fragmented lamp – a small blue ceramic base and next to it a dented shade. She has cut a length of new flex from the cardboard wheel at the far end of the table; undone the screws in the terminal inside the lamp and eased the old flex out. She has stripped back the lengths of insulation from both the plug end and the appliance end of her new flex and fitted the rubber grommet. Now she’s ready to jimmy the new flex into the lamp’s terminal but her fingers are
so
cold. She puts the lamp to one side. She thought it would warm her, like a soothing bath, but it’s not doing its job.

Max had not been in the house when she’d put her key in the door, ever so quietly, and found the kitchen strewn with breakfast bowls and egg-smeared plates. The milk left out. And he wasn’t there when she’d woken just now, alert and with a pounding heart. She doesn’t know where he is or what he’s doing, only that her existence from now on depends upon their paths not crossing. She pulls the book nearer again, turning away from the lamp.

‘
Repairing appliances requires working through a process of elimination to pinpoint the exact nature of the problem. After all, most devices are extremely complicated and have hundreds of working parts
.’ She bites her lip and pulls the flex towards her again, trying to jimmy the wires while reading at the same time. She is pushing and pulling at the three cores, yellow-green, blue and brown, but her fingers are too thick and too cold and too tired.

‘
Look carefully at the cost of replacement and consider whether the appliance is economic to repair
.’ She drops the flex as an inaudible growl spreads through her temples, heating up behind her eyes, and she sets her teeth, taking the lamp, the flex, and shade and hurling the lot against the wall where it clatters rather inconsequentially to the ground and lies beside the grubby skirting. The gentle hum of the house resumes.

Primrose sees a hammer lying on the counter on the other side of the kitchen table. She walks over to it, lifts it and bounces its weight a few times in her hand. Then Primrose raises the hammer above her head, bringing it down on all that’s littering the table top – on the fuses, the twisting wires, on Julian Bridgewater and his stupid diagrams, where it only creases the page, on the side plate from which she’d eaten some toast, on her mug of tea. Primrose lets them have it: tea splatters the floor and chairs, shards of crockery fly towards the cooker; the table top begins to splinter. She growls and hisses. When there is nothing more to smash, Primrose stands, her mind feeling its way like hands in a dark hallway, over all the things she might destroy.

The following evening, she walks into Claire’s bright living room, where there is a neat sofa and coffee table. There is a hatch through to the kitchen where Claire is making them tea. Primrose can hardly believe it. All this space to yourself and no one coming in unannounced and all your things, just where you left them. She thinks of the things left out in her kitchen – the shards and splatters from her hammer attack. But that kind of not putting things away, between her and Max, is different to this. Theirs was something like leaving dereliction out on the kitchen table for the other to see. This, this was being yourself, free and spread out.

Underneath Claire’s kitchen hatch is a dining table and on it a half-finished puzzle. It shows a fragmented picture of an old steam train. The black metal of the train itself, from skirt to blast pipe, is all filled in but there are gaps where the steam billows up and meets with a white sky. Beside the puzzle is a jumble of pieces and to the other side, the lid of the box showing the finished photograph – a 1940s scene in 1970s colour.

‘I’m addicted to puzzles,’ says Claire through the hatch. ‘Take your coat off, just throw it on the settee.’

She comes through, carrying their tea. ‘That steam is a devil to fill in.’

Primrose takes a sip and looks around the room. ‘This is a right nice place,’ she says. ‘What happened to your flatmate?’

‘Moved out. Blessed relief actually. She was always humping her boyfriend really loudly, morning, noon and night. Was like living in a knocking shop. It’s lovely being here by myself. Bit expensive though. Here, I’ve never been to your place. Is it big? Lots of animals?’