Till We Meet Again (4 page)

‘We shouldn’t be so cheerful,’ her mother had said reprovingly at one point, although she too smiled as she said it. ‘She couldn’t help the way she became.’

Susan could picture that afternoon as clearly as if she were looking at a photograph. Margaret, her mother, was short and plump, with grey hair. She wasn’t exactly lined, but her skin was going soft, like an apple that had been kept too long. She was wearing navy-blue slacks and a hand-knitted Arran sweater with a blue and white spotted scarf around her neck. Susan had remarked in the morning how nice her mother looked without the overall she always used to wear. Margaret had laughed and said no one would ever get her back into one of those again, and she might even get her hair permed too now she had some time to herself.

Charles, Susan’s father, was very distinguished-looking, six feet tall, slender, with keen dark eyes and bushy black eyebrows, his hair still thick and dark even though he was fifty-eight. He had a boyish look that day, eagerly poking at the bonfire, soaking the old clothes in paraffin before hurling them on.

It was often said by relatives that Susan was a replica of her mother at the same age. Susan could see it for herself when she looked at the girl in the wedding photograph standing on the sideboard. She had long dark hair, girlish dimples and plump lips then. But as Margaret had been forty when Susan was born, and was already greying and plump, it was hard for Susan to equate that pretty girl with her mother.

Her parents had married at the start of the war in 1939, Charles dashing in his Army Captain’s uniform. Martin was born early in 1941. Susan had often wondered about the ten-year gap between her and her brother’s birth. But she never asked about it.

All through that spring and early summer of 1967, everything was wonderful. She could remember writing to Beth and asking her to come and stay with them at their house instead of at her aunt’s, and how great it was not to have to creep around for fear of waking Granny, and that they were able to go out to the pictures and for walks as a family.

But she never told Beth about the transformation of their lives. How Mother would turn the wireless up loud to hear
Round the Horn
on Sundays, and how the house would resound with Father’s laughter. Or how sometimes Mother would tickle him and they’d chase each other down the garden like children. She thought Beth wouldn’t be able to understand that, not when she didn’t know how grim it had been before.

Everything was topsy-turvy for a while because her mother wanted to spring-clean and redecorate. Furniture was piled up on the landing and the smell of disinfectant, polish and paint permeated the whole house. Father brought fish and chips home for supper, and they often ate it while watching television, something they’d never done before.

It was during those months that Susan began to notice how attractive their house was, or maybe it was just because Mother kept saying jokingly that she was going to restore it ‘to its previous elegance’. Of course Susan had always known it was very old and must have been built for someone grand, by the carved oak staircase and the wooden panelling in the hall. But she had always wished they lived in one of the pretty Tudor thatched cottages in the village, or even in one of the modern bungalows and houses on the road into Luddington, for people often said The Rookery was creepy, because of the way it was hidden behind trees.

Suddenly she found herself looking at it then with new eyes, admiring the mellow red brick, the lattice windows, the tall chimneys. It was great to be able to run down the garden and watch boats coming through the lock, to see early-morning mist rising over the weir. She could hardly wait for Beth to come and stay because she had a feeling she would find it all magical.

The house had never seemed that big while Granny was alive, for all the four main bedrooms were in use, and the two attic rooms were full of junk. But now, as the wheelchair, old trunks and pieces of furniture Granny had brought to the house with her were disposed of, suddenly there was space and airiness.

‘I never wanted all her clutter here,’ Mother said one day as she added a couple of ugly chairs to an already large pile of furniture in the front garden which was due to be collected for a jumble sale. ‘But she insisted, even though they were all worthless. My goodness, it’s good to see the back of it all.’

Downstairs there were three reception rooms, plus the kitchen. The drawing room had French windows opening out on to the garden which sloped down to the river Avon and the lock. Susan had always loved the garden, the many fruit trees and flowering shrubs, the winding paths she played hopscotch on, the little pond always full of frogs.

She could see the drawing room so clearly in her mind’s eye as it was on sunny afternoons: flowery chintz-covered settees and armchairs, the pink and green patterned carpet with a cream fringe which had to be brushed straight. Her mother’s collection of Worcester porcelain figurines was displayed in the glass cabinet, and an embroidered screen stood in front of the empty fireplace during the summer.

They seldom used the dining room, and the furniture there had come from Father’s family. Susan used to run her fingers along the lovely rosewood table, examine the pie-crust effect around its edge, admire the vast china cabinet and the graceful chairs, and wonder at their value because Father said they were antique.

The third room was Father’s study. It was lined with books and there was a huge oak desk under the window. Susan did her homework in there until they had central heating installed in 1964. Her mother used to light a fire in the big stone fireplace just before she got home from school, as she always said it was a nice quiet place where Susan could concentrate on her work. What her mother never realized was that Susan mostly just sat in Father’s leather armchair and stared into the fire, glad to be in warm isolation, well away from Granny.

Susan found herself smiling. It was so long ago now, and so much had happened since, but that was a good memory. Like all the ones in the four months after Granny’s death.

It seemed to her, looking back, that that was when she broke out of the gloom she’d been wrapped in for so long, looked around her and saw how much she had. Not only did she live in a lovely home in a pretty village, but her parents were good to her and shared things. Suddenly her mind was alight with possibilities. During the last summer she and Beth had spent together they’d talked of sharing a flat in London one day. That seemed possible now. Susan was going to go to secretarial college, learn to dance, find a boyfriend. She would overcome her shyness, she would be somebody.

A year earlier, when things were very bad at home with Granny, Susan had overheard a conversation between two teachers, and realized to her horror that the girl they spoke of as being ‘plain, lumpy and dull as ditchwater’ was in fact her. Yet after Granny’s death, the jollity and sense of liberation at home gave her new hope. Her parents often spoke of the dark cloud they’d been under, and how they all needed to make radical changes, so Susan made up her mind she was never going to be labelled as ‘dull as ditchwater’ ever again.

Then they went on holiday in June. Susan had just sat her GCE’s, and her parents let her take a week off school. Fortunately Martin couldn’t come too – he was twenty-six then, with a job and a flat in London. Even leaving home hadn’t made him any nicer to Susan. But of course in those days she thought all brothers were like that to their sisters.

They stayed in a hotel right on the sea front in Lyme Regis, with sea-view rooms. The weather was cold, windy and wet, but that didn’t spoil it: the hotel was warm and comfortable, and they’d put on their rain coats and go for long walks, despite the weather.

Mother did complain about the rain one day, and Father laughed at her. ‘It could be very much worse,’ he said, giving her a cuddle. ‘We could have Granny with us.’

Then, on the last day, the sun came out and they spent all day on the beach. Father went searching for fossils along the cliffs, Mother lay down on some towels and fell asleep, Susan just splashed in the sea.

She could still feel the glow of that day even now – her arms and legs prickly with sunburn, the icy cold of the water, the sharpness of the stones under her bare feet. It had seemed then that their family had walked through a gateway into a whole new realm where they could laugh, enjoy themselves, go where they wanted, when they wanted. The restrictions they’d lived under for so long were now gone for ever.

Susan sat up sharply. She didn’t want to think about what happened after that, for it was so cruel and unfair that it didn’t work out as she’d expected.

On the very night they got home from holiday, two days before Susan’s sixteenth birthday, Mother had a stroke.

She said she felt strange as they went into the house. Susan went to make her a cup of tea, and when she got back Mother was slumped over on the settee in the drawing room, and Father was phoning for an ambulance.

The details of the months her mother spent in hospital were hazy to Susan now. A blur of rows of white-faced, sick old ladies in hospital beds, shiny floors, flowers and unpleasant smells reminiscent of Granny, that was all she could recall. She remembered how she hated to go in there, yet she did go, almost every afternoon on the bus, praying to herself that today Mother would be better.

She had to write and tell Beth she couldn’t stay at the house after all. But Beth didn’t come to Stratford anyway, she wrote back saying she’d got a summer job in a shoe shop in Hastings. In the back of her mind, Susan thought that meant Beth had found new and more exciting friends back home, and had been glad of an excuse to back out of the holiday.

Mother didn’t get any better, she just lay there with her face twisted up in a grimace, unable to speak or move. Father kept on saying that she could see and hear and her mind was as active as always. He said she would get better, they just had to be patient.

He went to see her every night after he’d come home from the office, and he noticed even the slightest improvements. He seemed to understand what her grunts meant, he could get her to respond to his questions by blinking. His belief gave Susan hope.

He explained to Susan what he thought had caused the stroke. ‘It was because of the sudden release of pressure when Granny died,’ he said. ‘All those years of looking after her, the endless washing, feeding, worrying about her. It took its toll, like a pressure cooker building up steam. The lid had to blow.’

Susan couldn’t understand that explanation then. Granny had been dead for four months, the house was lovely again, Mother’s worries were all over. Yet it did make sense to her now after all these years. Her own lid had blown. She’d shot those two people to relieve the unbearable pressure inside her.

Looking back to 1967, she could see now how simple it would have been then to divert her life from the channel it was beginning to run into, if she’d only been a little less willing. Martin didn’t allow their mother’s stroke to interfere with his career and ambitions. Even her father hung on to his job, his home and his hobbies of shooting and golf.

If Susan had been a couple of years older she would already have had a job; if she’d been a couple of years younger, she would have had to go to school. But she was in limbo at that time, having sat her final exams, and her only career plan was a tentative one about going to college in Stratford-upon-Avon in September. She had nothing to excuse her from housekeeping duties.

She got what might be called the thin end of the wedge. But of course at sixteen she wasn’t able to predict, or even guess, what might be on the fatter end, or that once the wedge was driven in, there was no escape. She loved both her parents, she was devastated by her mother’s illness, she was only too anxious to do whatever was best for everyone. And of course she had no real ambition then beyond hoping for marriage and children of her own.

Loneliness was what Susan could remember most about that summer. She would think back to all the fun she and Beth had had in previous years, and end up in tears. Sometimes she would stand in the garden watching the pleasure boats in the lock, and the sound of people’s chatter and laughter made her feel even more lonely.

During August she got the results of her GCEs. To her shame she’d failed everything but Domestic Science and Geography, and that made her feel even more despondent and useless. The holidays ended, and the days seemed even longer then with no school to go to. The only callers at the house were the odd neighbour dropping off some fruit or flowers for her mother. Sometimes, going home on the bus from the hospital, she’d see a couple of girls from her old class, yet much as she longed to go and sit next to them, and explain what had happened and ask them round, she didn’t feel able to.

So she filled the days with jobs – cleaning, dusting, washing and ironing, cutting the grass – striving to do them as well as her mother would have. She undertook the bottling of plums and blackberry and apple for the same reason. She had been helping her mother do it for years; the fruit trees in the garden always had a good yield and it was an annual ritual they’d both enjoyed, like Father digging the trenches for runner beans in the spring. That year it seemed even more imperative to do it alone, to show how adult she was.

Susan could remember going out into the garden early each morning, picking up the fruit that had fallen before the wasps and other insects could get to it. She’d shake the tree to loosen more ripe fruit, and start on the bottling almost as soon as Father went out. There was a bumper crop that year, especially plums, and there was something incredibly satisfying about filling the larder shelves with the full bottles.

By that time Mother was getting a little better. She could move her right arm slowly, and her hand was just strong enough to hold a pencil and write down a few questions. Susan had never felt more proud than when she visited and could announce she’d just bottled another twenty jars of plums and ten of blackberry and apple. ‘Such a good girl,’ Mother wrote one day, and Susan floated home on a cloud of pride, forgetting about being lonely.