Raking the Ashes (6 page)

‘Smart thinking. If he comes out looking like a prison convict, then you’re to blame.’

But that was what was so strange. Geoff wasn’t into
blame
. I am. I go round tossing accusations out left, right and centre. ‘You left the milk out all night.’ ‘You forgot to pick up the tickets.’ ‘You left Minna’s bike where you might have known I’d trip over it.’ But Geoff was far more generous-spirited. I could forget to lock the door behind me when I came up late at night, and he’d say nothing. I’d promise to bring home some vital ingredient for a special supper, and show up without it. One night, I even forgot that Frances had left a message about her own father being rushed to hospital with a coronary. You can imagine the stick Geoff got for not phoning back about that. And
still
he didn’t bollock me.

‘Mr Perfect’, Ed and I used to call him, and took to playing a sort of game. I’d ring Ed any time I had a new one. ‘Do you know what he said last night? “Tilly, I was brought up never to touch a banister.”’

‘Three points!’

We’d fall about. But in a way it wasn’t funny, because it gradually became obvious that I, too, had been swept up in this extraordinary compulsion of Geoff’s never to make waves. The first time I realized it was happening was when I offered to drive by the school to pick up Minna after a swimming lesson. She was easy enough to spot, one of a row of little girls doing handstands along the wall beside their bright school bags. A second bus drew up just as I took the
last
parking space, and since I was trapped till it pulled away again I stayed in the car, watching the kids spill off.

Thump, thump! Thump, thump! A gang of boys were swinging bags around their heads like lariats, then bashing anyone in reach. Thump! Thump! Most of the children appeared to be keeping their blows within the bounds of a game, but quite a few were being downright vicious.

I got out of the car and spoke to the bus driver. ‘Aren’t you going to stop it?’

He stared at me as if I’d fallen from the moon. ‘They’re always like this. Both ends of the ride. It’s what they do to pass the time, waiting.’

‘Oh, is it?’

I called the worst of the offenders to heel, put Minna in the car, then, without even thinking about it, went into the school and told the woman on reception I wanted to speak to the head teacher.

Nervously, she glanced at a woman walking past. I swung around. ‘Are you the head?’

I told Mrs Dee exactly what I thought. I said if any child of mine were being thumped like that, I’d take the matter further. I said I hoped she’d get the matter sorted out, with proper supervision at both ends of the journey. (I may even have hinted I’d make a point of stopping by to check.) Then I went back to the car and
we
drove home. Harry was jumping about, wild with excitement at having won some special part in his class play. We all went out for supper, and the whole business slid from mind.

The call from Frances came during the week. I heard Geoff’s voice rising defensively in the next room, but I had no idea the quarrel was to do with me till the next day, when a discussion about whether or not Frances would want a clump of my thinned-out lavender ended with Geoff muttering something along the lines of ‘Perhaps in the circumstances it’s not really the moment.’

‘Sorry?’ I looked up from my trowelling. ‘Am I missing something? Is there some problem with Frances?’

‘Not really, no.’

‘No? Or not really?’

‘Well, you know.’

‘No. I don’t know.’

‘Well, weren’t you listening yesterday?’

‘What, to your call? No. As it happens, I wasn’t eavesdropping your call with Frances. I was busy getting on with my own life.’

‘Oh.’ He looked as if he could have kicked himself. ‘Well, it’s just that she’s the tiniest bit sore with you at the moment.’

‘With me? But I assumed you were just squabbling
about
the children’s dates and times, as usual. So what was it all about?’

It took some winkling out, I can tell you. But in the end I managed to piece together Frances’ side of the call. The tell-tale phrases gradually stacked up: ‘take it upon herself’, ‘interfering’, ‘knows next to nothing about children’, ‘embarrassing Minna’, ‘alienating the school’ and, most particularly, of course, ‘mind her own business in future’.

Each time I prised out a nugget, I’d find some different way of asking him ‘So what did you say to that?’ I can’t remember a single one of his slippery, back-pedalling responses. But all of them were definitely along the lines of ‘I promise I’ll have a little word with Tilly.’

‘Can I please get this straight?’ I ended up saying. ‘You and your former wife have had a conversation about my limits of responsibility. She thinks I take too much upon myself.’

‘It wasn’t
like
that, Tilly.’

‘Well, how was it? I need to know, don’t I?’ I affected innocence. ‘I mean, I presume the two of you still find it acceptable for me to look after your children when she’s late picking them up and you have to rush down the printing shop—’

‘Look, please don’t think that either Frances or I is anything other than truly grateful whenever—’

‘But if, for example, I were to turn up at the school and find someone threatening Minna with, say, the sharp end of a compass, I’m not to – what was it? – “take it upon myself” to “interfere”, because I “know nothing about children”. Have I got that right?’

‘Now you’re just being silly.’

‘Oh! So I misunderstood. I
am
allowed to make my own decisions about what’s safe and what’s not.’

‘If you could just bear in mind—’

‘Of course! Minna’s embarrassment! The possible alienation of the school staff!’

He’d had enough now. He was making for the door. I called out after him, ‘But I can still chauffeur Minna around, I hope, for your convenience? That’s still all right, I take it?’

Safe out of the room, he could pretend he hadn’t heard that. Or what I called out after.

‘Well, fuck your ex-wife. And fuck you!’

It was the sheer disloyalty that got to me most. As if my house were good enough for us to live in, but I were some hired help who could be taken on for this particular morning or that rather busy afternoon, and dropped off when the job was done. I felt insulted. That night, I clawed back all the ground I’d lost the first time we’d quarrelled and I had been the one to end up on the sofa. At supper time I gave him the frigid ‘no, I’m not hungry, thanks’ routine, and stayed
at
my desk. At least three times he must have come to hover by my shoulder. ‘Tilly …’

‘Excuse me,’ I said each time with icy courtesy. ‘I must just finish this. I won’t be long.’

I sat there, rooting further and further down the pile of stupid things to do until I realized I was checking specifications passed two weeks before. So I just read the paper until the football he was watching on telly reached a crescendo. During the action replay, I whipped into the bathroom. There, I kept up a steady clattering as I ran water into the tub, knowing he’d judge it best not to knock until I was settled. I never offered him the chance. I slid into the water while the taps were still running, and out again almost at once, so even before he realized what was happening, I was back in the bedroom, and his pyjamas were in a heap outside the door.

I don’t know if I really thought he’d take it lying down. I heard the footsteps, then his knuckles rapping. ‘Tilly? Tilly, open the door, please. Don’t you think we ought to talk?’

He kept it up so long I felt I had to answer.

‘No, honestly,’ I chirruped. ‘Just so long as you’re still talking everything over with Frances, that’s all that matters. Don’t you worry about me.’

‘Tilly, this is ridiculous.’

‘
I’ll
decide what’s ridiculous. And, believe me, the
one
thing that’ll come top of the list of ridiculous things from now on is giving a damn about you or your children.’

‘Look, I know I was tactless—’

‘
Tactless?
’

‘And seemed ungrateful.’

‘
Seemed?
’

‘But, honestly, Tilly, I truly didn’t mean you to be so upset.’

‘I’m sure you didn’t. I’m sure you would have very much preferred I’d had some sort of silent and invisible lobotomy, and was happy to fit in with whatever you and Frances decide between you is most suitable, without having any feelings of my own.’

Men hate it when you hit home. ‘If you’re so keen on having feelings, Til, don’t forget that there’s one you could try having a little more often.’

‘Oh, yes? And what’s that?’

‘A bit of gratitude I don’t share your bad temper.’

‘Oh, well,’ I told him. ‘There you go. Nobody’s perfect.’

STRANGE THINGS RESULT
from anger. Within a day or so of acting cold indifference, I truly think that I began to feel it. Families are creepy things, and other people’s families are even creepier. So, if I’m honest, it was something of a relief to be, not just given permission, but as good as ordered to stay out of the Andersons’ hair. And the following week, something else happened to turn what might have proved a passing sulk into a settled frame of mind.

It was a dark grey afternoon, with icy spitting rain. Geoff thundered up the stairs. ‘Tilly! Come down and look at this! It’s
amazing
!’

It was a parrot perched on the tree opposite, jaunty with colour. I watched for a minute or two, sure it would fly off again almost at once, then went to find the binoculars in the back cupboard.

‘Is it still there?’

‘Yes. Still here. Look at that greeny blue streak all along its belly! It’s as bright as that coloured foil wrapping when you toss it on the fire.’

We stood, his arm round my shoulder, passing the binoculars from one to the other. It just so happened I was the one holding them when Frances’s car drew up outside. In turn, the children leaned forward to kiss their mother before scrambling out. I lowered the glasses in case Frances glanced towards the house and took offence at being watched so closely. Harry and Minna rushed up the path to greet their father. We had a perfectly pleasant afternoon. I raised the topic only over supper.

‘Did your mum notice the parrot?’ I asked Minna.

As usual Geoff didn’t give her space to answer. ‘You didn’t even know it was there till I pointed it out, did you, Minna?’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I thought your mother might have stopped the car a little way up the street, to watch it.’

Both children were staring. ‘No.’

‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘It’s just that neither of you was wearing a seat belt when you arrived.’

Minna stayed silent, of course. But Harry thought he was on solid ground. ‘Oh, no. That wasn’t the parrot. That’s because all the strap buckles are stuck under.’

‘Under the seat? Doesn’t your mother worry?’

He made a ‘never-really-thought-about-it’ face, though I could tell from Geoff’s uneasy shifting that he, at least, was sniffing trouble. But I kept on. ‘It’s a real nuisance, of course, putting those sorts of back seats up and down. The strap buckles always seem to vanish. What were you carrying, anyway?’

‘The Christmas tree,’ Minna remembered. ‘You can still get needles in your legs.’

‘Prickly!’ I sympathized (though I meant ‘Bingo!’). I changed the subject. Geoff’s unease melted away, probably before he even realized he was feeling it. And only when the children were safely gone that evening did I open fire.

‘It’s January the twelfth,’ I reminded Geoffrey. ‘If Frances had her tree up by Christmas Eve—’

He wasn’t thinking. ‘Christmas Eve? You must be joking. Frances is so bloody organized her tree is always up well before that.’

‘Say the eighteenth, then. That makes five weeks, at least.’

‘Five weeks of what?’

‘Of Harry and Minna not wearing safety belts in the car.’

There was such silence, I felt sorry for him. There he’d been, offering me a friendly nugget about his former wife, and, in return, what had I given him? Any way you look at it, trouble.

‘I’ll dig the straps out for her next time she comes.’

‘She’s driving the children down to York tomorrow.’

‘I’ll give her a ring.’

‘Now?’

‘In the morning.’

‘But you don’t know what time she’s leaving.’

‘Then I’ll ring early.’

‘Maybe you ought to ring her now.’

‘Tilly …’

‘Geoff?’

He was looking at me strangely, and seeking something in my face. I turned away, ostensibly to get a fresh drying-up cloth from the drawer, but really to stop him trying to work out what was fuelling my relentless pursuit. His own suspicions sparked off mine. Was it, I asked myself, truly what I’d have answered if he had challenged me? That my entire career revolved around matters like these. The safety standards of over a hundred oilmen lay pretty well in my hands. I’d watched more safety videos than I’d seen washing-powder adverts, and knew the exact force of bodies hurling through the air. Of course I wasn’t going to say, ‘Well, you know best, dear. They’re your children,’ and let the two of them get on with their sloppy and dangerous habits.

Or was it, at root, nothing to do with Harry and Minna? Something a little darker? Perhaps some
predatory
desire, born of sheer irritation, to hound the man who had so recently humiliated me on this same issue of the welfare of children. Perhaps I was simply getting my revenge – taking advantage of the situation to stamp on the shadows behind him and keep him on the run. Because Geoffrey never did make the effort to ring Frances. And I didn’t make him because I didn’t really care. It must be the worst thing on earth to grow to love a child yet have no say in things that happen to it. Either you would go mad with anxiety or you’d bail out. And on that evening after the parrot came, I had to face a quite unpalatable fact about myself. One little setback had stopped me bothering. I look back now and see my only real purpose was to set Geoffrey squirming so I could better see how he unravelled, in exactly the same way I’d try to understand a piece of machinery by taking it apart.