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Authors: Margot Livesey

BOOK: Homework
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I was finishing the lintel when Stephen and Jenny returned. Paintbrush in hand, I greeted them. “Hello,” I said to Jenny. “I hear you have a cold.”
She smiled at me. “Not really. I just sneeze a lot.” She was wearing an enormous green sweater, leg warmers, and a scarf. Inside the bulky clothes she looked especially small and pale. I knew as soon as I set eyes on her that I had been wrong; in the ambiguous twilight I had misunderstood her gaze. Tobias appeared, and she bent down to pat him. He rubbed back and forth against her legs and then retreated to his place in front of the living room fire.
Stephen hung their coats in the hall cupboard, and I followed them into the dining room. Jenny surveyed the bare walls. “It was nicer before,” she said. She had been to see the house shortly after Mrs. Menzies moved out and had especially admired the dining-room wallpaper, which depicted
galleons in full sail against a sunset. Our stripping had reduced the glowing fleet to a few solitary vessels.
“That's true,” said Stephen, “but it has to get worse before it gets better. We're going to paint it grey and pink.”
“Pink.” She gave a mock shudder.
“Dusty rose,” I suggested. She still looked disapproving. Stephen ushered her into our blue bedroom, over which we had laboured so hard. I followed. She walked to the window, breathed on the glass, and began to trace something with her finger.
“Do you remember?” Stephen asked. “There was a dirty brown wallpaper covered with flowers.”
“Yes, I remember. Now it's the same colour as Mummy's room.” She wiped the glass clear and turned to face us.
“I thought Helen's bedroom was wallpapered.”
“No. It's like this. Blue is her favourite colour.” Like a chilly draught, her words blew through the room.
“Well,” I said, “you should tell us what your favourite colour is so that we can use it for the spare room. Come and take a look.” I wanted to indicate that Helen was not a delicate subject. I led the way to the spare bedroom.
“This will be your room when you come to stay,” said Stephen.
“Oh,” said Jenny. She glanced around, and I followed her gaze. The floorboards were rough and dirty, for furniture there was a single bed, a small desk, and a chair, the window was bare and the light unshaded.
“It won't look like this,” I said.
“We thought of painting it yellow,” said Stephen.
“Like my room at Granny and Grandpa's?”
“Maybe a little more primrosy. What do you think?”
“Okay.” She folded her arms. “I don't suppose I'll be here much.”
“It will be nice, you'll see,” said Stephen. “Come on, let's go into the living room, where it's warm.”
I went back to my painting. Although the living room door was closed I could hear everything that passed between Stephen and Jenny. After they had drawn a map for her history project and done a jigsaw puzzle of Edinburgh Castle, Jenny announced that she wanted to dress up. “But you don't have any clothes here,” said Stephen.
“Doesn't Celia have some?”
“Of course she does, but not dress-up clothes like you have at home. How about helping me make flapjacks for tea?”
“I don't feel like it.”
“Why don't you stay here and read then.”
“I'm tired of reading,” said Jenny in a small voice. “I'm bored.”
“Jenny,” I called, “if you want to play with my clothes, it's fine with me.”
There was a brief silence, as if my interruption had startled them. Then Stephen repeated my remark to Jenny, and she said, yes, she would like to play with my clothes. They came out into the hall. Stephen gave me a grateful look. My hands were covered in white paint, so I explained to him which dresses he should show to Jenny. “Careful of the paint,” I said.
Jenny walked through the doorway on tiptoe, keeping her elbows pressed tightly to her sides. Stephen followed. Soon he emerged and announced that he was going to make the flapjacks.
From time to time I glanced in on Jenny. Stephen had lifted down a number of dresses for her, and she was examining them with a calculating expression, almost as if she were trying to guess the price. I went off to find a screwdriver to remove the door handle. When I returned I saw that she was wearing the black silk dress which Stephen had bought for me in an antique shop in the Grassmarket. It was not among those which I had authorised him to give to her; she must have seen it in the wardrobe and taken a liking to it. I wanted
to say, “No, not that one,” but it seemed curmudgeonly, especially as the dress was a present from her father.
Jenny had pulled a chair over to the chest of drawers and she was kneeling on it, looking in the mirror. She pushed her face close to the glass and squinted critically at her reflection. Her gestures were those of a grown woman, and I suddenly noticed how much she resembled her mother.
I had seen Helen only once. Shortly before we moved, we had gone to a film at the Assembly Rooms, and as we were leaving, Stephen had pointed her out to me on the far side of the foyer. Even from that brief glimpse I could tell that Helen was everything I was not
—
slim, elegantly dressed, beautiful
—
and she had a job that sounded both high-powered and enviable, working in the international department of the Bank of Scotland. More than all this, there was the incontrovertible fact that Stephen had married her and had a child, and indeed was still married to her. On the way home, I had asked him again why they were not divorced.
“Helen is adamant that she doesn't want to,” he said. “According to Edward I could force her, but it would be a long battle, and meanwhile God knows what would become of Jenny. At least the present situation is fairly stable.”
“But why?” I repeated. “I mean you've been separated for years.”
“I really don't know. Maybe she's punishing me for leaving. She won't even discuss it.”
“When did you last ask her?”
“A couple of years ago. No, maybe three.”
“So she might have changed her mind?”
“I doubt it,” Stephen said sullenly.
We stopped at a zebra crossing, and Stephen turned to me. “I love you, Celia,” he said. “Even though we're not married yet, I feel more married to you than I ever did to Helen.”
Jenny had found my lipstick. I watched with fascination as she stretched her lips tight and drew in the outline of her small
mouth. Then I saw that she in turn was watching me in the mirror. Hastily I stepped back to continue my painting. A few minutes later there was the clip-clop of high heels on the bare wooden floorboards. I looked up and saw Jenny walking unsteadily towards the door.
“You look very nice,” I said. “Be careful of the paint.”
“I'm just going to show Dad.”
I stepped aside, leaving plenty of room for her to pass through the doorway. She did not look up; she was holding the skirt with both hands, concentrating on keeping her feet safely set in my shoes. As she crossed the threshold, she stumbled, slipped, and fell. The whole of her left side grazed the freshly painted white door. For a brief interval she simply looked at me, her lips pressed together in a thin red line, then she burst out crying. I put down the paint and moved to comfort her, but before I could make more than a hesitant gesture, Stephen appeared.
“Jenny, what is it? Did you hurt yourself?”
She did not answer. She let out high-pitched, gulping sobs. He kept asking if she was all right, and I stood there with my paintbrush in my hand.
As she grew calmer, Stephen asked where the mineral spirits were. I went to fetch the bottle from the kitchen. When I came back they were in the bathroom. Jenny had stopped crying and was sitting on the edge of the bath; Stephen knelt beside her. My dress lay on the floor. I handed him the bottle. “Did you bring a rag?” he asked.
“Use a towel,” I said, passing him mine.
Stephen began to scrub Jenny's left arm, where there was a long graze of paint; my dress had protected her T-shirt and jeans. “Don't worry, Jenny,” he said. “We'll have this off in no time. At least you didn't get it on your clothes.” I heard the relief in his voice. Once when Jenny had spilled a milkshake over herself in a restaurant, Stephen had insisted on going
straight home to wash her clothes. “This is the sort of thing that drives Helen into a frenzy,” he had explained.
I touched up the door, then carried the painting things out to the shed in the garden. As I hammered down the lid of the paint tin I recalled an incident with Lewis. We were in my flat, and from the bathroom I had overheard him talking on the phone. “So Tuesday is fine?” he was saying. When I entered the living room, he hung up almost immediately. “I was calling Brian,” he said, “to arrange a game of squash.” A few days later, I asked how the game had gone; he replied that he had lost.
The following weekend we ran into Brian at the National Film Theatre. “I hear you won as usual,” I said cheerfully. “Won?” echoed Brian. “Not as usual,” Lewis exclaimed.
“My game is improving by leaps and bounds. Are you going to the film?” Brian shook his head. “No. I stopped in for a snack.” He started to say something else, then stopped, cleared his throat, and said he must be going. In the queue for tickets I caught Lewis giving me a quick, sly glance, as if waiting for something, but I raised no questions; I was still anxious to turn a blind eye.
What brought this scene to mind was that moment between her fall and her tears, when Jenny had looked at me, almost as if she were checking on my reaction before she decided what to do next. It occurred to me that her fall had not been an accident. Then I took myself to task: I was being absurd. The week before, I had knocked over a tin of paint in the middle of the dining room floor, and an appreciable length of time had passed while I did nothing but watch with appalled fascination as the liquid spread.
A thrush landed on the lawn in front of the shed and began to peck vigorously at the grass. As I moved to put the tin of paint on the shelf, it darted away.
When I opened my eyes and saw the flowery wallpaper, only a few feet away, I had for a moment no idea where I was. Then I remembered that the night before we had moved our bed into the spare room. I rolled over. Stephen was watching me. “Is it late?” I asked.
“No, there's plenty of time. I woke up early.”
I nodded drowsily. Still immersed in the dream I had been having, I got out of bed and went to the bathroom. I had an image of Stephen and me carrying a table, and then I was in my office searching the bookshelves, but I did not know what had been happening in either scene, or how the two were connected. When I returned to the spare room, Stephen was sitting up in bed, a cup of coffee in one hand, the novel he was currently reading in the other. I settled down beside him, and he handed me my coffee. “What are we doing with Jenny today?” I asked.
“I thought we could work around the house. She could help us lay the carpet and whatever else we decide to do. She's going to bring old clothes so we won't have a repetition of last week.” He smiled at me. The dry cleaners had rejected my dress as beyond repair, and Stephen had promised to buy me another, even more ravishing.
“And in the afternoon we can do something fun,” I said.
“We can do something fun now,” said Stephen, putting down his coffee cup.
 
 
After we dressed, there was just enough time to carry the few remaining pieces of furniture out of the bedroom and carry in the roll of carpet before Stephen had to leave. “Promise not to do too much,” he said. “Jenny and I will be back soon, and we can all do it together.”
“I promise. I'll try to get the measuring done. That's really a job for one person.”
He gave me a hasty kiss and hurried away.
I fetched the radio from the dining room and tuned it to the station that I had listened to as a teenager. I was amazed to discover the same disc jockey still compering the show. I found myself laughing at his feeble jokes, and when he played a song I knew, I joined in. I unrolled a couple of yards of the carpet and began to tack down the edge along the straight wall beneath the window. The carpet was a sandy beige colour, “Ideal if you have a family,” the salesman had said with a wink.
I had one edge down and was at work on the second when I realised that Stephen and Jenny were late. Helen's flat was a twenty-minute drive away, and Stephen had left over an hour ago. Perhaps Jenny had needed to go to the library, I thought, or perhaps Helen had wanted to discuss something with him. I continued to hammer in tacks at regular intervals.
The carpet had been treated with chemicals to increase its resistance to fire and dirt, and bending over it, I became conscious of the strange fumes I was inhaling. When I stood up, I felt slightly dizzy. I opened the window and went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. While I waited for the kettle to boil, there came into my mind fully formed, as if it had been lurking there all along, the image of Stephen with his arms around Helen.
It was true that he made only negative comments about her, but at the height of my complaints about Lewis, I had wanted nothing more than to be with him. I tried to recall how I had described that relationship to Stephen: something
vague to the effect that we had not been getting on well for some time before my moving to Edinburgh ended matters. I knew I had not said that Lewis was like a virus in my blood and that only a few days before I met Stephen I had still entertained passionate hopes about him. And if this had been the case for me, how much more likely for Stephen in the face of Helen's beauty. Whatever he might say to the contrary, I had learned from my mother that beauty was a kind of power.
As far back as I could remember I had known that my mother was beautiful, but only gradually had I realised that my features, a mixture of hers and my father's, added up to something different. The first intimations I had of the disparity between us came when I was nine or ten. She had left me in the library while she went to get her hair done. When she returned I was engrossed in a children's version of the story of Theseus. One of the librarians, a plump, cushiony woman, who had interrupted me twice to ask if I was enjoying my book, looked up as my mother joined me. “She's been good as gold,” she said.
My mother thanked the woman for keeping an eye on me. “It was no trouble at all,” the woman replied. Then, lowering her voice to tones of conspiracy, she added, “I would never have guessed she was your daughter.”
“She takes after my husband.” My mother grasped my hand and drew me to my feet.
“Oh, well then,” said the woman. “Still she seems a bright little thing.”
Later I was finishing the story of Theseus at the kitchen table, when my mother told my father what the librarian had said. He laughed and patted my head. “Our poor ugly duckling. You'll be a swan some day, you'll see.”
The kettle rumbled to the boil. I made a mug of tea and returned to work. Whatever I did, I could not make the carpet fit. There were alcoves on either side of the fireplace, which
had to be specially measured, and in addition the room was slightly asymmetrical. I kept tugging and cutting and tacking, only to find, as soon as I got the carpet fitted snugly in one area, that it was creased or too far from the wall in another. I took measurements and the second I laid down the tape forgot the figures.
At school when exam results were imminent I would tell myself that I was undoubtedly twentieth out of the twenty-two girls in my class. When I came second or third, the news seemed as much a reward for my deception as for my hard work. If I stopped waiting, I thought, then Stephen would return. I began to plan the rest of my day as if he did not exist
—
I would go to the pub for lunch, then visit Suzie—but no car stopped outside the house, the telephone remained mute.
He had been gone now for well over two hours. All the reasonable explanations I could imagine foundered on the fact of the telephone. He must be either hurt or making love, else he would phone, I thought. But if he was hurt, someone else would phone. I reminded myself that if Stephen was with Helen, Jenny was there too, but although I knew that her presence would be an insuperable obstacle to his and my making love, I could not convince myself that she would serve as the same kind of deterrent to her parents. Then I thought of the other occasion when Stephen had disappeared, the evening I had come home to find the ceiling of Malcolm's flat leaking, and how it had turned out that he was buying groceries. There was probably some perfectly good reason for his delay.
I went out into the hall. There sat the telephone, black and obstinate as a toad. I lifted the receiver and listened to the tone, but I could not bring myself to dial Helen's number. On the few occasions when I had answered her calls, she had brusquely demanded Stephen. If he was out, she said, “Tell him to call,” and hung up.
At last the phone did ring. I was back hammering down tacks, and I was so startled that for a few seconds I remained on my knees. Then I leapt up. The carpet was across the door, and I had to tug it aside before I could get it open.
“Celia,” said a woman's voice.
Such was my state that I did not recognise Joyce until she identified herself. She had to make an unexpected trip into the city and wondered if she could come to tea. I told her that we would be glad to see her.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “You sound out of breath, or something.”
I blamed the carpet.
“Stephen ought to help you with the heavy jobs,” Joyce scolded. “You shouldn't be struggling alone.”
After I put down the receiver, I felt somewhat better. Stephen could not simply disappear; we were living together, and his parents regarded me as part of the family. History does not have to repeat itself. What had happened between me and Lewis was quite different from what was happening now. Stephen was different.
For a brief interval I was reassured, but when one is waiting, time breaks down into an infinite number of discrete moments, and I was reassured for only a finite number. As I went to search for another box of carpet tacks I thought, but what does Joyce know? My own mother was almost always the last to learn of any important development in my life. Stephen might be different from Lewis, but I was still the same.
As I grew older I had become increasingly aware of the implications of the librarian's remark, and at the age of fifteen the school Christmas dance had clarified her meaning beyond doubt. The dance was a major event because the boys from our companion school would be present. For the entire autumn term we practised waltzes and fox-trots during our gym lessons. There were no boys at these lessons, and I could
not help noticing that week after week the gym mistress would say, “Celia, you be a boy for today.” One Saturday late in November I bicycled over to visit Aunt Ruth, and when she asked about the dance, I voiced the fear that no one would dance with me. Somehow because she was stout, red-faced, and untidy, it was all right to tell her about anxieties I would never have dreamed of mentioning to my mother.
“Nonsense, Celia,” she said. “When I was your age, boys literally ran away from me. I was fat, spotty, and wore big, ugly glasses. You're not a raving beauty, but you've no reason to be afraid of the mirror. You're very pleasant-looking.” As Ruth spoke, she outlined previous fatness, the magnitude of her glasses; I could believe that boys had indeed fled from her, but that in no way eased my own difficulties. She must have sensed my scepticism, and out of the goodness of her heart she offered to make me a dress. “You'll be the belle of the ball,” she promised. “Just wait and see.”
Throughout the next few weeks there were frequent consultations and fittings, and then, the Friday before the dance, I brought the dress home, carefully folded in a brown paper bag. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, peeling Brussels sprouts and listening to carols on the radio. “Away in a Manger” was starting as I came through the back door.
“So let's see the masterpiece,” she said.
I pulled the dress out of the bag and held it by the shoulders. My mother raised her hand to cover her mouth. Her eyebrows arched upwards.
“Do you like it?” I asked.
She laid aside her knife and came over. “Did you choose this material?” she asked, fingering the thin fabric printed with enormous green and pink flowers.
I nodded. “It's very fashionable. Look, I'll show you in my magazine.”
“No, I believe you. Well, let's see it on.”
My room was chilly, and I did not linger to look in the
mirror, but the brief glimpse I caught of my reflection was not encouraging. I hurried back downstairs, where my mother was singing “Once in Royal David's City.” I asked her to do up the zip. Her hands, damp from washing vegetables, grazed my skin, as the zip snagged a few times and then slid safely to the top. Still singing, she turned me around, examining the dress from every angle. The carol ended, and she walked over to the window sill and switched off the radio.
“Celia,” she said, “you're not really planning to wear this tomorrow, are you?”
“Of course I am. Ruth made it specially. You don't like it because it's trendy.”
“No, that's not true. Come upstairs and look in my mirror.”
In my parents' bedroom my mother drew the curtains and turned on the electric fire. Then she came and stood beside me in front of the wardrobe with its mirrored doors. Although Ruth was always making garments for herself and her daughter, practice had not honed her skill. As my mother pointed out, nothing about the dress was quite right: the bosom had an angular quality, the sleeves fitted awkwardly, the waist was too high and tight, and the hem of the short skirt rose and fell around my thighs. Somehow in Ruth's company these defects had been less apparent. In the mirror I could see my mother's reflection, next to mine. She was wearing a heavy white sweater and dark trousers; she had recently had her hair cut short, and in her ears were bright red earrings, the size of half crowns.
She even made me go and put on the dress which she had given me for my birthday. When I returned she said, “You look very nice. I know this dress isn't so trendy, but it's very becoming.”
In Ruth's dress I had scarcely recognised myself, but here was my familiar reflection, and that was the problem: the blue dress, however attractive, left me unchanged, whereas
Ruth's transformed me. I did not have the words to explain this to my mother, but I was stubborn in my insistence that I would wear the new dress. She shrugged and said it was up to me.
The dance was held in the school gym, a room without mercy, bare and brightly lit. Non-dancing girls sat along the walls. As I sat watching, trying to resist the temptation to tug at the front of my dress, even the most graceless of my contemporaries seemed to skim by in the arms of their partners. I realised what I had known for years: that my mother was beautiful and that I was not. Neither fact in isolation would have affected me so deeply as the two together. Oddly, I did not blame the dress; rather I concluded that no dress had the power to save me. Punishing myself was infinitely preferable to admitting that my mother was right; she already had everything: beauty, power, my father's love.

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