Romany and Tom (36 page)

I walked behind it and tipped some of the ashes on the ground, like flour from a jar, and then made a circle around it. It left a grey trail. Clearly visible. It made me think of
The Railway Children
and the boy with the bag over his shoulder who leaves the paper trail through the fields for the runners and then injures his leg in the tunnel. I began to walk away from the bench and along a path to a fence and the edge of the wood, attracted by the light from the field beyond. I kept pouring. When people said ‘scattering ashes’ I’d envisaged a handful, not this, not a huge jar full of them. Tiny pieces of bone tumbled out too, and the wind blew ash on to my trousers as I walked, and I involuntarily brushed it away before realising what I was brushing. I half leapt back, a little spooked, and some of the ashes slopped out, but I kept going until I got to the fence.

I looked back. It was as though I’d laid a trail of gunpowder. I questioned if I was even in the right spot. Perhaps he’d hated this part of the woods. It was too late now. The urn was half empty. Along the edge of the fence ran a bridleway, muddier with the imprint of horses’ hooves. I walked a short way along the fence line, emptying the remaining ashes before reaching another bench, this time just an ordinary wooden municipal bench, the kind seen in parks in every town. I stopped and sat on it. Right in the middle. It felt right. Simple. The field was empty but for a lone grazing horse.

To my left, at the end of the field where the bridleway stopped, I could see the slatted gate close to where I’d parked. Another car had pulled up facing the field. Inside I could see a middle-aged couple looking out. The man – who was sitting in the driving seat – was pouring something hot from a thermos into his cup. The woman in the passenger seat was eating a sandwich. Under the damp matt grey light everything seemed silent and remote. All I could think of was the mess I had left through the woods, and I worried that people would come across it later and wonder what it was. I wondered if my dad had experienced this view – like this – the hushed wind in the woods behind, this stillness, this silence, this matt sky, these uneventful minutes. And then as I stood up to go, the empty urn under my arm, I saw the horse move into the centre of the field and raise its head, framed by the sunless clouds behind, and it looked majestic and proud.

Chapter 36

‘He still visits me, you know,’ my mum said, her pallid eyes turned to the window.

It was September 2006, almost four months since my dad had died.

I sat close to her on the footstool beside her chair. ‘Does he?’ I said.

‘Oh, yes. Quite often lately.’ She ran the tips of her fingers gently back and forth on the velour of the armrest.

‘How does he arrive?’

Her fingers stopped. I saw the answer appear in her face before a faint wrinkle of doubt flashed across her brow, and she seemed to question what she was about to say. Then she dismissed it and said quite plainly, ‘Through the curtains. Just there.’ She gestured to the long curtains by the locked and alarmed double-glazed PVC door and window at the end of the room.

It was a narrow single room on the ground floor, perhaps fifteen feet long and about nine feet wide, the door and window in the end wall overlooking the car park, and the kitchen staff on their smoke breaks and the fields beyond. She’d been moved in not long after the funeral. A single bed and the last few pieces of her furniture stood along the walls: a tall narrow bookcase of scrapbooks and photo albums near the window; a small red metal office chest of drawers; two armchairs (the green leather one of my dad’s she never used); the large square footstool in a dark William Morris floral print on which I was sitting; the TV that she never turned on; and a slim sixties side table topped with ceramic tiles depicting musical instruments, which I knew from Barnes and brought to mind my dad’s blue
Senior Service Satisfy
ashtray, flecks of ash, his retractable Sheaffer ballpoint pen and a copy of
The Times
folded into quarters to show the crossword puzzle. A teak dresser that I didn’t recognise full of photos and a few ornaments took up most of the space inside the door; maybe it belonged to the previous occupant and they couldn’t get it out. Roly had hung some pictures of caravans and one of my dad’s Centre 42 jazz posters on the pale apricot walls papered in woodchip. An adjustable-height invalid table on wheels with a lip around the edge to stop things sliding off was parked near her chair in the middle of the room.

‘Through the curtains?’ I said.

‘Yes. It sounds strange when you say it, but he just slips in.’

‘What’s he wearing?’

‘One of his suits, I think. Very smart. Always.’

‘Does he speak?’

‘Oh yes. He could always do
that
. A gift.’

‘And what do you say to him?’

‘I usually just lie there in the bed listening.’

‘And what does he say?’

‘Oh, this and that. He’s getting married again, you know. To another woman. I hope he’s told her about the drinking.’ She was now speaking the way she had always spoken, head turned away, as if addressing the middle distance. Her tone was slightly detached, as though she had tumbled the ideas for hours around her own head, rinsing them of any detectable feeling until they could be voiced like simple yet vaguely baffling facts to get used to.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, she ought to know beforehand, don’t you think? I mean, it’s not right, is it? It’s just so unfair to spoil someone else’s life like that.’

I heard muffled voices out in the car park. A greenfinch was at the bird-feeder outside the window, then it was gone.

She turned her face to me. ‘I would have liked some looking after myself, you know. Someone who took me for who I was.’

There was a knock at the door, which was half held open with a rope attached to the radiator. I looked up. It was one of the carers.

‘Just brought you your laundry, Romany,’ she said loudly, already half into the room, the corners of the words curled and whorled by the West Country accent. ‘Shall I pop them in your drawer for you?’

‘Yes,’ said my mum, half over her shoulder, stretching the word a little patronisingly to make it sound like
as usual
.

The woman zipped into the room and slipped a couple of things in the chest of drawers. ‘Nice of Ben to pop in and see you, isn’t it?’ she said, still loudly.

‘Don’t. Shout,’ said my mum, clipping each word short, putting a full stop between them.

The woman shot her a smile, then winked at me. ‘Lunch’ll be along in a moment,’ she said, already almost out of the door.

‘How
thrilling
,’ my mum said, pulling a face just for me.

I waited for the footsteps to disappear, then said, ‘You were saying about Dad . . .’

‘Who?’

‘Tom.’

She rummaged around in her head. ‘Was I?’

‘About his visits.’

She sat still for a moment. ‘A handsome man.’

I watched her face. I could picture a carousel of images in her head, coming and going, in and out of focus, faces on a fairground waltzer, random in time and space, and every now and then she was able to slow the movement down and bring something into focus and freeze the frame before it floated away again like a paper fire lantern.

‘Can you remember when you first met?’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘Tom.’

‘Not really.’

‘It was at Brian and Elspet’s party. New Year’s Day 1957. Only a few nights after Tom had started at Quaglino’s. Ring a bell?’

Her eyes widened. ‘I think you’re right.’

It had been a sketchy fact I’d known growing up, one my dad had bragged about. ‘Why did you kiss her?’ I would ask him. ‘I couldn’t
stop
her,’ was his stock reply.

‘Can you bring it to mind, Mum?’

She closed her eyes and wrinkled her brow as though I’d asked her the name of a South American capital city. ‘He was at the end of the room,’ she said after a moment. ‘And I thought, Who is that man making everyone laugh with the lonely face?’

‘And you kissed him that night?’

‘I must have.’

‘Although Ken was there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did you kiss him?’

She shrugged. ‘People do.’

She and Ken had married a little over eight years earlier in 1948. He was on the staff at the left-wing weekly magazine
Tribune
as their theatre critic, and had spotted her acting in London not long after she left the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

‘He took such a shine to me,’ she said to me one evening as we walked by the river in Oxford. ‘He began following me everywhere. He even travelled down to Devon to see me in a tiny church hall. I was in rep. It must have taken hours. He had to walk across the front of the stage to get to his seat after the curtain went up. Clump, clump, clump. I was so embarrassed.’

The ceremony took place at 11 a.m. at the Hinde Street Methodist Church in central London on 2 October with the reception at the Mandeville Hotel. Her brother Glyn gave her away, her father having died five years earlier. She wore a white satin Victoria gown with a bustle and short train, the Swedish lace veil was bound round the brow with a gold circlet studded with pearls, and she carried a posy of crimson roses; the bridesmaids wore Wedgwood-blue gowns and coronets of fresh white flowers, and carried bouquets of white carnations and gladioli.

Eunice, her mother, kept a meticulous list of attendees and no-shows, and their respective wedding presents. The list is a brilliantly comprehensive vision of forties domesticity:

dinner wagon and kitchen scales

coffee percolator

toast rack and napkin rings

canteen of cutlery

cheque for £5

bread fork

biscuit box

book of poems

tea knives

cheque for £2

recipe book and doily

Victorian bon-bon dish

Daleware mixer

fireside companion set

Shetland rug

Staybrite tray

wool tea cosy

fish knives and forks

biscuit barrel

cheque for £3.30

waste-paper basket

whisky decanter

Pyrex set

two soup ladles

pair of double sheets

The list went on. And yet if my mum was to be left in no doubt that she was preparing for domestic life, it was clear she was also unwilling to sacrifice everything.

In April 1951 she was asked to write a talk for one of the clutch of new afternoon programmes on the BBC aimed at women in the immediate post-war years. Wartime broadcasting for women may have been typified by programmes such as
The Kitchen in Wartime
and
The Factory Front
, but 1946 had seen a new emphasis on the home with the advent of
Housewives’ Choice
and
Woman’s Hour
. Writing for the newly launched
Mainly for Women
, she defended the right to seek work and look after the home at the same time. In an essay entitled ‘Housewife at Stratford’ she wrote about the months immediately following her wedding:

When I got married, just over two years ago, most of my friends thought I should give up the stage. My relatives and in-laws took it for granted; my actress friends sighed, rather smugly I thought . . . But my husband and I had other plans. He is a theatre critic, so he understood my love of the stage. We decided when we were engaged that it would be foolish to waste my two-year training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and my two years’ experience in repertory, and that if any jobs turned up I was certainly to take them.

At first, overwhelmed by setting up home with Ken in a small mews cottage in west London, she found it hard to do both, only acting in ‘one or two Sunday night shows’ and ‘a few odd weeks of repertory in the suburbs’, but in the spring of 1949, after six months of nest-building, she began looking in earnest. She ‘pestered all the agents and wrote an average of ten letters a week’. Every management company she could think of was contacted, but it was tough going; work was scarce. After three months of dispiriting rejections, and more in hope than expectation, she aimed high and travelled to the Globe Theatre in London on a summer morning in August to audition for the director Anthony Quayle, who was preparing for the following summer’s season of Shakespeare plays at the Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. She nervously delivered speeches by Hermia and Cleopatra, was thanked, eagerly agreed to accept walk-ons or understudies or small parts if required, but left disheartened. The following week, much to her astonishment, a nine-month contract to act with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company alongside John Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft arrived in the post. When she’d first started looking for work she’d imagined small repertory tours in the provinces lasting two or three weeks; leaving home for nine months had never crossed her mind. Newly married, she was torn, but she also knew it was a huge chance. It took several days to make up her mind, but with encouragement from everyone, she accepted. She went on to write excitedly: