Raking the Ashes (16 page)

He always had.

And me? A different story. Here came the moment when he’d lost his children’s mother, his savings, even his job. To cap it all, his grieving son had stuffed enough drugs down his neck to float full-blown psychosis. And what was I doing? After years and
years
of eating the meals he’d cooked, driving the car he’d washed and sleeping in beds he’d changed, I was lifting my travel bags, to get away.

I put my head in my hands, defeated yet again. This man was dashing out into the night because he loved his son. Maybe it was a stupid way to spend his energies, slamming stable doors after horses had bolted. But that was Geoff. And everyone else loved him all the more dearly for it. The mother of his children accepted his well-meant help right to the end. His daughter’s eyes filled with tears at the mere thought of him. Even his son’s first concern in paranoia appeared to be the safety of his father.

They were all round me now, shaking their fingers. I could see them. Harry and Minna. Ed and my mother. Donald and guys from the rigs. I could as good as hear their voices, stern and implacable. And every one of them was saying the same thing. ‘Shame on you, Tilly Foster. Shame on you. Unpack that bag at once.’

And so I did.

I was still in the most chastened of moods when, early next morning, Minna came round from the other house. ‘Where is Dad?’

Unable to face the fuss I knew would follow if I admitted he was at the hospital, talking to doctors, I stalled. ‘Oh, just off out.’

I thought at first she might have come to look for her brother. But clearly his absence overnight was nothing to remark on – at least not to me – because she made herself a cup of herbal tea and spent a good couple of minutes fiddling with pieces of starter motor laid out on the table before taking a deep breath and saying, ‘Tilly, I’m pregnant. I just did one of those tests and the blue line came up at once. What shall I
do
?’

I felt too weak after a sleepless night to offer anything much. ‘What do you
feel
like doing?’

Unthinkingly, she slid her arms around her belly, making the answer pretty obvious, and so I said, ‘If you’re in doubt, Minna, you should certainly think about keeping it.’

This clearly wasn’t what she was expecting from me. ‘Really? Is that what you’d do?’

‘No,’ I admitted.

‘But you think
I
should?’

‘I can’t say, can I, sweetheart? It’s your decision. You’re eighteen.’

‘
Nine
teen. But what about Dad?’

I shrugged. ‘This is a matter between you and Josh.’

She made a face. ‘Josh says he wants to get married. He says he’s wanted to get married right along.’ She sighed. ‘But I’m not sure. I mean, what happens when he tells his mum? She’s going to
kill
us.’

It must be odd to be so young that you can let such
huge
decisions spin on such foolish things. Maybe it was because her brother had insisted I was ‘dangerous’ that I was determined not to let a single destructive comment escape my lips. ‘His mum will do the same as every other mother – give him a right royal bollocking, scowl at the two of you for several months, then fall in love with the baby.’

Minna looked thrilled. ‘You think so?’

‘I do.’ I had another poke around the part of the motor that was proving most tricky. ‘And look at it this way, if she doesn’t soften, you can always console yourself that she wouldn’t have been any great loss to your new family.’

‘New family …’ Yet again, the tell-tale arms slid round her stomach. ‘Weird idea!’

‘Well,’ I warned, ‘don’t get too taken up with it before giving a tiny bit of thought to the other.’

‘The other?’

‘Getting rid of it.’

‘Oh, no! I couldn’t.’ She appeared quite shocked.

So that was that. The baby’s fate was settled in the length of time it takes a girl to drink one Apple Passion. Minna went straight to the hospital to tell her father. (‘He
cried
, Til. He burst into tears and said, if we were pleased, then he’d be
mad
not to be pleased for us.’) Next day, she went again, to visit her brother. (‘It’s
awful
, Tilly. He’s laid out like a zombie with his
face
all stiff. And he smells funny.’) Then she was gone, down with the marriage-minded Josh to face his family in Cornwall. No worries there, it seemed. They took to her right from the start. Grandma Elise in particular, Josh reported when they came back, was taken with her sweet nature and let it be known that there would always be a home for the young family in one of the ‘barns’ that stood on her ancient farm. Brushing the compliment aside, Minna took up the story. ‘You should
see
it, Tilly. Call it a barn? It’s
fabulous
. It has these great black beams, and pretty rooms with tiny pointy windows, and you can see the sea. Oh, and the kitchen’s a huge wide space with lovely blue tiling and a massive old cooking range that Elise moved from the big house. And in the garden there are apple trees and dog roses all over. And—’

I watched Geoff’s face as it fell, and took it upon myself to interrupt Minna’s parade of bliss. ‘So you are tempted, then?’

She suddenly realized how it must have sounded. ‘We-ell,’ she said with a shy glance at Josh, ‘not while poor Harry’s so ill. I wouldn’t like to be so far away from him that I couldn’t visit.’

But that didn’t last for long. And fair enough. After all, sitting for hours with a brother who barely speaks to you can swiftly pall. ‘I can’t keep going there, Dad. Not if he’s going to smoke at me all the time.’

‘He’s not smoking
at
you, sweetie. It’s just that smoking’s all that any of them in there can do to pass the time, and so they do it.’

‘He could read. Or play his guitar, or something.’

‘Minna, his concentration’s shot to hell. And have you looked at his hands? They’re shaking.’

After the next visit, she was even more incensed. ‘Dad, he won’t even
compromise
. It took me ages to get there, it’s so out of the way. And then Harry couldn’t even be bothered to come down with me in the lift so we could be outside while he was smoking, so I just spent most of the time outside in the corridor. What’s the point of that?’

‘That’s just the way your brother is at the moment, Minna. He will get better, honestly.’

‘Perhaps he will. But we have to think of our
baby
.’

And Josh was right behind her. I could tell from the bland expression on his face that this conversation had been planned. I turned to Geoff. His hair was sticking up on end from running his hands through, and I saw his eyes fall on the whisky bottle on the sideboard.

Things seemed quite desperate, so I made a family decision. ‘Why don’t you take a break?’ I said to Minna and Josh. ‘We can cope here. Why don’t you two go and spend a bit of time with Josh’s family. It’ll do you good, and you can stop worrying about the baby.’

Could she have sounded more hopeful? ‘What, like a few weeks, even?’

Geoff looked a bit startled, but I said, ‘Why not? Your brother’s so inside himself, he doesn’t get much joy from anyone’s visits. Perhaps you should save your energies for when they’ll do more good.’

‘Really?’ She looked as if she could have hugged me. Then she turned to her father. ‘Dad? Is that all right with you? You don’t mind if we go down to Torbury Bay and live in the barn for a while?’

He’d reached that stage when he would have sold his soul to anyone for one stiff drink. ‘No, really. Tilly’s right. You’re probably better off away from the whole bloody boiling for a while. It’s best you think of the baby. You go down to Cornwall. We can manage here.’

Her arms were round him. ‘Thank you, Dad! Thank you.’

Clearly, she’d got her heart’s desire. And who can blame her for not wanting to spoil her growing happiness by hanging round a hospital ward? The sheer disabling misery of the place chewed its way even into Geoff, who set off each day hoping to see some small improvement in his son, and came home detailing endless attempts to talk in private to impatient, seen-it-all staff, and trying to put out of his mind Harry’s demented diatribes and extraordinary claims about
insects
crawling under his skin, and men watching from rooftops.

‘At least you’re not the only enemy,’ Geoff used to tell me, dropping his coat on the hall chair and making straight for the bottle standing waiting on the sideboard.

‘Oh, ho,’ I said. ‘The man with the spyglass today again, was it?’

‘Mostly.’ He took a slug. (There was no other way of describing it. Half the glass went in one go.) Geoff refilled the tumbler before he even bothered to turn round. ‘But not before we’d had another of those fugues on the Tilly people.’

That’s what we called them. Harry had formed the view (just like my mother) that there were two of me. But whereas my mother had only ever felt a mild shade of resentment for the ‘stand-offish’ one who parked herself on the windowseat to skim through the papers, Harry kept coming back to the full-blown belief that there were actually two separate people who lived with his father: Good Tilly and Bad Tilly. ‘It makes me sound like something out of a children’s book,’ I complained to Geoff. ‘Bad Tilly breaking all the toys and Good Tilly trying to stop her.’ He’d only wince. The grim reality of dealing with the mad wipes out that part of you that’s open even to registering a light-hearted comment, let alone responding in kind.
At
first, I’d offered to do a share of the visiting; but since my presence only seemed to fire up Harry, I soon fell back on being useful boning up on side-effects, and the tiresome legalities surrounding those who firmly believe the medication offered them is some new poison smuggled in by men who are watching its debilitating effects through binoculars from rooftops.

And getting away – to the shore office, to the rigs, even to Mother, now grey and soundless in her own hospital bed. Anything was preferable to being at home. So it was purely by chance that, on the morning Minna rang, I was the only one there.

It was the old, unthinking greeting. ‘Oh. Hi, Tilly. I thought you’d be away in Aberdeen.’

‘I take it you want Geoff.’

My chilly briskness threw her only for a moment. She pressed on hurriedly. ‘Is he about?’

‘I’m afraid he’s already left for the hospital.’

‘Damn!’ Her frustration obvious, she did the best job she could of switching to sisterly concern. ‘So how
is
Harry?’

‘Not so brilliant.’ I would have carried on and told her more, but clearly she couldn’t resist the chance to twist the conversation as fast as she could back to her own concerns. ‘Well, that’s really what I wanted to know. Because everyone down here thinks that, what
with
the baby on the way and all that, it might be better all round if …’

‘If …?’

‘If Josh and I got married.’

What can you say? ‘I’m quite delighted for you, Minna. And so will your dad be, I’m sure.’

‘Ye-es.’ She sounded uneasy. ‘Well, the thing is, Tilly, everyone down here thinks it might be nice to do it quite soon.’

‘Quite soon?’

‘Well, as soon as possible, really.’

Before she could no longer fit in the dress of her dreams, presumably. Before it was too late to be able to trail the words ‘The baby was rather premature’ in front of the neighbours later.

I wasn’t going to help her out. ‘I’m not sure, Minna. You see, what with things as they are’ – I swear I put only the slightest tinge of mockery into the next two words – ‘“up here” at the moment—’

She pounced so eagerly I knew that ‘everyone down there’ must already have things planned. ‘Well, that’s the point, really, Tilly. You see, Natalie and Caspar, and Elise – and Josh’s sisters – and Josh as well, of course—’

‘Pretty well everyone “down there”, in fact.’

Did she even notice the mimicry? I don’t believe she did.

‘Yes. Everyone down here thinks that it might be easier if …’

She did at least have the grace to hesitate. And since I wanted to be able to make it clear to Geoff that there had been no possibility of his daughter having misunderstood the way things were ‘up here’, I made a point of interrupting to voice plain facts. ‘The thing is, Minna, your brother certainly isn’t well enough to travel. And, given the state Harry’s in, your father certainly won’t want to leave him.’

Again that eagerness. ‘Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? Everyone down here thinks it might be best for me and Josh to have the simplest of weddings now, even without my side of the family, and then maybe another celebration up there when everyone’s feeling more up to it.’

‘You realize that could be quite a while?’

Her relief was evident. ‘Oh, well. Never mind. We don’t have to worry about that now, do we?’

I lost my patience. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘so long as everyone
down there
is perfectly happy.’ And then, to stop her saying anything else that might annoy me, I said down the phone, ‘Hello? Hello? Oh, damn this telephone! It’s always cutting out.’

And I hung up.

But day by day, things with Harry did improve a bit.
Each
drug they tried took hold in less upsetting ways. The worst of the battiness passed. (And certainly, if Good and Bad Tilly were still in the forefront of Harry’s mind, his father said much less about them.) Soon Harry was allowed the privilege of visits home, and Geoff would fetch him on the days I was away. The closeness of the timings – me barely out of the house before Harry was in it – could scarcely fail to irritate me with their reminder of the end of my marriage; but it was still a while before real resentment crept in. One night, instead of reaching forward as usual to take my coat as I walked into the house, Geoff stepped outside, forcing me into retreat, and pulled the door closed behind him. ‘You told me sevenish,’ he said, almost accusingly. ‘Or even later.’

I was cold, I was tired, and in no mood to indulge Geoff and his family. ‘So?’

‘So Harry’s still here.’

I shot him an evil look. ‘This is my house, you know.’

‘I know. It’s just …’

‘Just …?’

Defeated, he stepped back and let me pass. I dropped my bag in the hall. Was this the moment to explain the only reason we were still together was Harry’s illness and the sheer impossibility of throwing the pair of them out in the storm? But just then Harry
appeared
in the kitchen doorway and even managed a slightly sheepish ‘Oh, hello there, Tilly,’ before his father swept him safely away. I vanished up the stairs, forcibly reminding myself that Geoff was trapped inside this nightmare, while I, at least, did have the sheer relief of getting away. And get away I did, the very next morning with Donald’s help, sandwiching someone else’s unwanted trip to a troublesome semi-submersible between a trip to Mother in the hospital and a refresher course for safety skills I hadn’t yet had time to lose. So it was scarcely surprising that, when a few wedding photos finally arrived from Minna, Geoff asked so tentatively, ‘Shall I post them up to Aberdeen?’