Raking the Ashes (3 page)

‘They seem all right to me.’

He was their father, of course. But I was still reminded of one of my tutors at university pressing upon us the vital importance of never drawing conclusions from how things looked. ‘Take Galileo,’ he told us. ‘When he said the earth moved round the sun, everyone scoffed. “Oh, come on, Galileo! You only have to
look
to see what happens. The sun moves round the earth.” And what did Galileo say? “Maybe it does look like that. But what would it look like if the earth moved round the sun?”’

Exactly the same, of course.

I was in Aberdeen the following week, but on the Wednesday after that I finally got to meet Frances properly. All afternoon the staff in Geoff’s printing shop had been phoning to get him to come in and explain some complicated collating job. In the end, with Mrs Mackie twiddling her thumbs on overtime, and Frances already twenty minutes late to pick up the children, Geoff had to crack. ‘You stay and watch them till she hoots.’

I put on some really noisy music to stop Harry and Minna hearing the car horn. (Damned if I’d stand for being parped at in my own home.) I kept an eye on the
street
. It wasn’t long before I saw her car pull up outside, but I heard nothing.

Progress! I thought, and kept watching.

Frances didn’t budge and, for a while, neither did I. But minutes passed, and in the end I shut the door on the children, who were still prancing about noisily in the hall, and slid out of the back door and round to the short front path.

‘Hello,’ I said to her. ‘Geoff’s just this minute had to rush down to the shop to sort out some collating. But I’m Tilly.’

For all the notice she took, I might as well have been a street sign. She was rattling her keys in the ignition. ‘This bloody car’s gone dead. It was playing up all the way over here. I noticed the clock was funny, then the radio went, along with the indicators.’ She hammered, to no purpose, on the horn. ‘Now
nothing
bloody works.’

‘It’ll be your alternator.’ I was about to break it to her that it was a tow job, when I was checked by her ‘and-how-the-hell-would-you-know?’ look. Then she remembered. ‘Oh, yes. Geoff told me that you studied engineering.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And now I’m an engineer.’

I don’t think she took my point. She was too busy fighting the starter. ‘Oh, God! Now I suppose I’m going to have to sit here till they send a man.’

It was clear what Geoff meant about thinking in stereotypes. ‘Well,’ I advised, ‘if you should find they send a woman by mistake, don’t be too quick to dismiss her. She might know something.’

And I stalked off. The minute I got in the house, I felt guilty. I switched off the thumping music and told Harry and Minna, ‘Your mother’s out there. I think her alternator’s had it.’ I waited for one of them to ask, ‘Is that terrible?’ or ‘Will they be able to fix it?’ so I could get the bad news through to Frances. But Harry just snatched up his precious furry seal and his school reading book, and ran for the door, and Minna followed, trailing the little pink rucksack in which she had packed her blankie and hairbrush, and the leaf collage she’d done in nursery. I went into the kitchen to make a pot of peace-keeping tea and, when I looked out again, Harry and Minna were already in the back of the car, strapped in and waiting, and Frances had actually been rude enough to go to my next-door neighbour’s house, rather than mine, to make her phone call.

I tipped the tea straight down the sink and went back to writing the report that I’d been working on peaceably till Geoff left. Let them get on with it, I was thinking. But the little room I was using as a study had a view of the street, and after a while I noticed that Harry, at least, had had the courage to unstrap himself
and
open the car door again on the kerb side. I was so grateful to him for being the only one of the three not to keep treating my house as if it were giving off noxious fumes that I went down to the kitchen and cut two giant slabs of chocolate cake as a reward. I put them on a tinfoil plate inside the basket of his new two-wheeler, and pushed the bike down the path as if I’d been about to put it away in the garage, then had a sudden thought and changed direction to walk over.

Seeing me coming, Frances let down her window just a crack.

‘Sure that you wouldn’t like to wait inside?’ I asked her pleasantly.

‘No, no.’ She twisted in her seat to assure the children. ‘We’re fine here, aren’t we? They say it won’t be long.’

I left the bike propped temptingly on its support strut right beside the car, and went back to my desk. Within a minute Harry was out, and riding up and down, wobbling a little as he stuffed in a mouthful of cake each time he had his back to his mother. Curious to see what he did with the second slice, I carried on watching. First, he tried tempting his sister out of the car by wheedling so loudly even I could hear. ‘Minna, I
need
you. I need your help for a
trick
.’

She stayed hunched in the back seat.

Harry reached in to try to drag her out, and I
watched
him being told off by his mother. Then there was quite a bit of surreptitious huddling, outside the car and in. I rather think he must have scooped the second slice of cake up under his jumper and taken it over to Minna, because at one point she was shaking her head so hard her bunches swiped her face, and recoiling even further in the back seat. So Harry gave up. He climbed out of the car and took off with the bike again, up and down the pavement, stuffing in more cake, but without enthusiasm, more as if he were disposing of evidence than wanting to eat it. And then, at last, the RAC man finally arrived. I watched as he copied down her membership details and let Frances explain. But I could see from the way he started shaking his head almost at once (and from the look of irritation she flashed the house) that he’d said the word ‘alternator’ and really annoyed her.

Interesting, all of it. So you could say that it was really Harry taking such care to eat only on the up-rides, and Minna trying to make herself as good as invisible, that started me reading. For weeks I read nothing but stuff about children and families. And what an eye-opener it was! Small wonder my brother had been fussing. As far as I could make out from my haphazard researches, the British had to be about the worst parents on the planet, all too willing to demand from their children the lion’s share of any
self
-discipline going, and conveniently attributing to their offspring the feelings that they had themselves: ‘Oh, yes, Mandy was upset when Alan left. But since Sam came to live with us, she’s been much happier.’ ‘No, honestly, I know the two of them used to be very fond of each other. But now I don’t think Angus gives his dad much of a thought.’

It gave me the shivers to think I might be part of one of these great towering constructions of self-deception. I was quite glad to get on a schedule of work trips that took me well away during Harry and Minna’s next few weekends. When we did meet, I stuck with doing my best through meal times, then leaving the three of them to it. It was quite nice to stay ahead with all my paperwork, and in brief moments of guilt I could console myself that one thing my reading had made clear was that the principal virtues of a step-parent are unfailing kindness and a level of detachment.

And I’ve always been brilliant – just brilliant – at detachment.

IT WAS A
quality that came in useful not long afterwards, when Frances suddenly announced she was off to Savannah. I earwigged Geoff’s side of the call. ‘Savannah,
Georgia
? For five
months
? What about
my
time? How will
I
see the kids?’

She must have come up with something conciliatory in the way of offers of bed and board, because Geoffrey calmed down and started pushing for details. Who was she going with? (Terence, of course, on one of his lucrative medical contracts.) Why not stay here? (Long-winded but obvious.) The call went on for hours. I’d picked up enough about the two of them to know that if Frances suddenly felt the urge to take herself and her children off as camp followers to her new (and highly ambitious) American doctor boyfriend, Geoff had a snowball’s chance in hell of
stopping
her. And, if I’m honest, I quite liked the idea of seeing Savannah. So when he finally put down the phone, I tried to cheer him. ‘It could work out well. After all, I can get leave to go out at almost any time after the inspections. And you’re your own boss.’

But it didn’t turn out like that. Oh, we blocked out three separate periods on the calendar, intending to go at least twice. But Geoff’s biggest client booked in such a huge run of work through the first that we had to scrub that one. By the time my second chunk of booked leave came round, my mother was acting very strangely indeed, and her neighbours were worried. ‘You go without me,’ I told Geoff. ‘It’s you the children want to see, not me.’ But he just countered with, ‘It would be nice to go together,’ and nothing was settled. (We even lost the deposits.) The third time, just as he was fixing up the flights, in came a message from Frances that she was changing her plans (trouble with Terence?) and she and the children would be home any day now.

There was a three-week gap while Frances stayed with some old friend from school. (Her house was still rented out up here, and Torquay is enchanting in September.) And by the time the children came to us again, they might have been strangers. Harry prowled round with that disquietingly watchful look you see in adverts for the NSPCC, and Minna was even
more
shy than before. She thawed (at least with Geoff ) within a visit or two, but it must have been a month before Geoff managed to win Harry round again. The breakthrough came when he taught Harry how to do the bloodied-finger-in-the-matchbox trick. (I played my part, putting aside my unfailingly calm instincts in the face of gore to offer up a satisfactorily convincing screech.)

That night, with the three of them finally curled up together on the sofa, young Harry summoned the courage to come out with it.

‘
Why
didn’t you visit us in America, Dad?’

Geoff spun him over on the cushions and gnashed his teeth, making great alligator jaws with his arms. ‘Because I was frightened of crocodiles!’ They ended up laughing. But that night, as I was dropping my nightie over my head, I dared to say it. ‘You realize he really wanted to know.’

‘Know what?’

‘Why you never went out to see them. Harry wanted an answer.’

‘He was just asking, that’s all.’

‘No. If he’d just been asking, he would have said, “Why didn’t you
come
?” But he said, “
Why
didn’t you come?”’

‘Not sure what you’re trying to say, Til.’

That weasel way of trying to block discussion has
always
irritated me. ‘Perfectly clear, I’d have thought. The first way of saying it implies it’s a casual question. The second makes it pretty clear it’s been an issue.’

Geoff gave me one of those ‘You-are-unhinged, Tilly’ headshakes.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ I said. ‘I’m telling you something important. This business has clearly been on his mind.’

Now here’s the difference. Bill would have said, ‘What are you thinking, Tilly? That he thinks I don’t care enough to bother? Or that his mother’s been poisoning his mind against me, or something?’ And we’d have discussed it like grown-ups. I might have persuaded him that Harry’s way of asking the question was significant. He might have persuaded me it wasn’t. We might even have come to some agreement in the middle, whereby we made a deal to fish about a bit for further evidence before deciding which of us, if either, was closer to the truth of the matter.

And what did I get?

‘Tilly, I think I probably know my own child a little better than you do.’

‘Suit yourself,’ I snapped. (I have a very low tolerance for being patronized.) ‘It’s just I think, if he were my son, I’d do him the honour of telling him the
truth
, not fobbing him off with some joke about crocodiles.’

‘The truth is,’ Geoffrey as good as snapped back, ‘that I was too busy earning money to pay the bills, and helping you look after your mother.’

You can imagine how that quarrel ended. I spent the night on the sofa. And perhaps it was sharing the cushions with Dilly the Dinosaur and Barney the Beaver that put me so firmly on the children’s side, and made me vow I wouldn’t ever josh them out of things when they’d had the guts to ask a real question.

And I would begin by setting Harry straight on this matter of the visit.

I wasn’t quite sure how you start a conversation with a child. But early that morning, while Geoff was in the bathroom singing some silly song to Minna to try to distract her as he washed her hair, I picked up the fiendish puzzle and said to Harry, ‘If you had left this here when you went off to America, I might have learned how to do it by now.’

He didn’t muck about. ‘You could have come and fetched it.’

We sat on the bed and I told him, ‘Your father and I worked out three separate times to come and visit you. If you look at the calendar, you can still see the yellow felt pen lines we squiggled across to keep the weeks free. But the technical college sent your dad a huge
load
of copying, and since a shop like his only keeps going because of big orders, he felt he had to stay. He didn’t want not to be able to give your mother his share of the money she needs for you.’

He sat there quietly, twisting the puzzle round and round.

‘Then when it came to the next squiggled-out bit, my mother was ill. I said I’d have to stay. He should have gone to see you alone. He probably knows that now. But he was being wet. He didn’t want to have to hang around near you and your mother all by himself.’

‘They’re divorced, you see,’ Harry explained to me.

‘That would be it, then,’ I assured him gravely. ‘And, as for the third and last time, just as we were about to buy the flights your mum rang up and told us she was coming home.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’