Emma's anxious and manipulative plea, 'Someone listen to me', opens- and closes- this deliciously uncomfortable novel in which Nina Bawden explores myriad emotional disguises with her characteristic acuity. When Emma's father-in-law falls down the stairs to his death, she is convinced she pushed him in an act of wish-fulfilment. To her husband Henry and her close friend Holly, this is unthinkable. Guilt is simply Emma's obsession in a humdrum domestic existence enlivened by romantic fantasy. For Holly, who successfully fields a string of love affairs, sexual pleasures are more easily attainable, whereas Henry, a Divorce lawyer, prides himself on being a realist. Each tells their story in turn, illuminating and distorting their separate versions of the truth. As they do so, an intricate jigsaw of the private deceits with which they shore up everyday life emerges . . .
Release date:
November 3, 2011
Publisher:
Virago
Print pages:
204
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He was fourteen and he got a tumour on the brain. His name was Gordon and he had a sister called Sylvia who was my best friend.
They lived at the bottom of our garden. This was a long time ago.
Their garden was bigger than ours: it had a hard tennis court with weeds pushing up through the cracked surface, and a shrubbery
where we made a camp and cooked on a primus. After Gordon had the first operation and they thought he was cured, we played
together most afternoons. That was a long, hot summer. Once, when Sylvia wasn’t there, he threaded a daisy chain and put it
on my head for a crown, and kissed me. In the winter he went into hospital again and he wrote me letters, first in ink and
later in pencil and his writing got wobblier and in the end he didn’t write at all but on Valentine’s Day he sent me a pink
card with a raised gold heart and inside it said, From One Who Loves You Truly. Even after he had stopped answering I went
on writing to him, beautiful letters with bits of poetry and descriptions of nature that made me cry as I wrote them. I loved
him more than my life and longed to prove it. I had a dream that the surgeon came to me and said, ‘If you will let us have
a piece of your brain we can graft it on to Gordon’s where we took the tumour out, and he will be well again.’ So I went to the hospital and lay in the bed next to his and the surgeon said, ‘You are the bravest girl I have ever known, greater
love hath no man.’ He did the operation and all the time there was organ music playing and we were both conscious and smiling
at each other and the surgeon said, ‘Now you are one flesh.’ Gordon was wearing a white gown. He was the handsomest person
I had ever seen, with dark hair and very dark eyes; not brown, but blue-black, like sloes.
He came out of hospital in the spring and I couldn’t wait to see him. I swallowed my tea so fast that a lump of biscuit stuck
halfway down and gave me a pain. I scrambled through the fence and he was sitting at the back of his house, in the sun. There
was a bandage all round his head and he had got dreadfully fat: his cheeks had swelled up so that his eyes looked like black
buttons, or raisins sunk in white dough. He said, ‘Hallo, Emma,’ and then something else, but his speech was fuzzy and I couldn’t
understand. Sylvia said, ‘He wants you to kiss him, Em.’ She was sorry about that, I could see, but he was her brother and
she didn’t want him to be hurt. So I kissed him, to please her, and he caught hold of me and made me sit beside him. He kept
touching me and trying to stroke my arm.
He could only walk in a lop-sided way, staggering like someone drunk. Sylvia was supposed to look after him when she came
home from school and see he didn’t fall. Their mother was dead: there must have been a nurse or a housekeeper, I suppose,
but perhaps after tea was her time off. We tried playing Happy Families with him but he kept dropping the cards and forgetting what family he was collecting. He didn’t seem to mind whether he won
or not; he had this sloppy grin on his mouth most of the time, but now and again he looked puzzled, as if he didn’t understand
what was happening and it worried him. I was sorry and sad when I thought about him, at school or at night in bed, but when
I was with him he disgusted me. He was always patting and stroking me and I hated that: it was like maggots crawling over my skin. Sylvia said I was stupid to mind, he meant no harm. ‘I let him play with my titties sometimes,’ she said once,
and giggled.
When we got bored with amusing him, we’d play hide and seek, running away to tease him, and he’d shamble after us, calling
and wagging his head from side to side. Sometimes we kept it up too long and he’d cry because he couldn’t find us and then
we’d feel mean and let him sit between us and touch us to make up for it. I felt like a Christian martyr then, but Sylvia
liked it: she’d go red in the face and throw herself about.
One day she was ill and lay in a deckchair. Gordon wanted to play ball, so I threw for him on the lawn. He couldn’t catch
or aim properly and the ball went into the shrubbery. I went to get it and he came after me. I was bending over and he put
his hand on my bottom. I turned round and pushed him in the chest and he fell over backwards. His legs went up in the air
and then he lay still. I ran out of the shrubbery and threw the ball up high, trying to clap my hands ten times before I caught
it again. After a minute or two he came out of the shrubbery looking no worse than usual; my heart slowed down and I said
to Sylvia, ‘Come on, for heaven’s sake, why should I be a bloody nursemaid all the time?’
He died that night, or the next night, I can’t remember exactly. The light clicked on in my room and my mother was there,
holding Sylvia’s hand and saying she had come to sleep with us because poor Gordon was ill. Sylvia had been crying, her face
was puffy and pink, and when my mother had gone she said she was sure Gordon was dead. She had woken up and gone into his
room and her father was there, leaning over the bed. He had sent her to fetch a mirror and he had held it in front of Gordon’s
mouth to see if he was still breathing.
I knew I had killed him. I cried a lot and I couldn’t eat and my mother said it was natural for me to be upset but I must
try to think of myself less and of other people more. Think of poor Sylvia and her father! They had loved Gordon so much,
this was a terrible time for them. I said I had loved him too, I was in love with him, and she said, what nonsense! I was a little girl, only twelve years old. I said, what about Romeo and Juliet,
she hadn’t been much older than me, and my mother said that was a hot climate where girls matured earlier. I read too many
stories, she said, real life was different. I said Northern Italy wasn’t much hotter than England and she told me to fetch
the newspaper and look up the temperature in Turin.
I lost weight at that time and she made me take a tonic. It tasted filthy and I spat it out and smashed the bottle on the
kitchen floor. I knew it was only iron for my blood, but I screamed out that she was trying to poison me; I knew she hated
me and wanted me dead. I tried to cut my hand on the glass to make her sorry, but she stopped me. She took hold of my arms
and made me sit down and drink a glass of water while she cleaned up the mess.
‘Now what was all that about?’ she said a bit later on, but I couldn’t tell her. I never could tell her anything. I quarrelled
with her a great deal at that time, but not about anything real. Sometimes it seemed to me that no one talked about anything
real, ever.
Emma stood on the landing. Though it was two o’clock in the afternoon, the house was dark. Through the lead-paned window over
the stairs, she saw massed clouds, solid as battleships, bare trees black against them.
Below, in the hall, a patch of white glimmered. Emma went down the stairs. The banister was cold under her slippery palm.
She was afraid of falling. The man lay on his face in the dark hall; she knelt beside him and said aloud, histrionically,
‘Father.’ She was afraid to touch him. She said, ‘Oh God, help me.’
He was making a snoring noise. He lay face down, heavy, inert, one arm trapped beneath him. The letters had scattered over the floor. One rested under his free hand, his right hand
with the gold ring on the fourth finger. Emma read her own address, her own handwriting. Dear Lucas, my darling Lucas.
Darling Lucas. Oh my love, help me. . . .
He was breathing harshly, a long, terrible pause between each breath. She couldn’t move him, though when she pushed at his
shoulders the solid flesh seemed to slip under his white silk shirt. She thought – Like when the clouds move and it seems
as if the house is falling.
Joints creaked as she got up. The telephone was on the consul table in the hall, beneath the Italian gilt mirror. Both were
valuable, both belonged to William Rufus Lingard, her husband’s father, now dying on the floor of the house he had built soon
after he married. He had been an antique dealer. Emma thought – Had been. The house had six bedrooms, two bathrooms, a croquet lawn and a two-car garage: this was expensive, tree-lined suburbia.
As good a limbo as any other, Henry had called it, when his father had the first stroke and they moved from Islington to look after him. It will be nice for the boys to have a decent garden, Henry had said, remembering his own boyhood: bicycles and summer afternoons and borrowing Daddy’s car to take his first girl
to the tennis club party.
Emma rang the doctor’s number. It was engaged. She put the receiver down and waited, seeing her ghostly face in the speckled
mirror. She watched her face and saw the mouth move. She dialled again: the number was still busy. There was a ting as she replaced the receiver and then silence. He had stopped breathing.
Emma thought – I know what to do. She ran into the kitchen for her handbag, on the formica work-top beside the dish washer.
She fumbled with huge, stiff fingers: the shopping list fell out. Hairpic, coffee, steaks. She thought – I suppose we shall
have to eat something this evening. She took out the small mirror. She thought – But poor Emma was a child then, not responsible. Carrying the mirror, she went into
the hall and knelt again. His head was heavy as a cannon ball. He had white, silky hair, growing in a fringe round a pink,
monk’s tonsure; it grew long at the back, over his collar.
Emma’s mother always said that Henry’s father reminded her of Lloyd George. Was it because of his hair, Emma wondered now,
and at once rejected this simple explanation: her mother’s judgements were more mysterious than that.
She turned his head sideways on the cold floor and held the mirror to his lips. In profile, the strawberry nose, the mottled
cheeks, the flesh drooping like wattles beneath the jaw bone. She had read somewhere that at the moment of death the blood
rushed from the eyes, but his lids were closed. No breath misted on the mirror.
Emma sat back on her heels. She felt enormously tired. An immense lethargy. She yawned till her jaw cracked and her eyes misted;
then bile rose in her mouth. Rising, she stumbled up the stairs, into the bathroom. She retched into the basin, wiped her
lips and went into the bedroom to ring the doctor from the extension. The house was lighter now. Through the wide, bay window,
the sky stretched above the houses opposite, streaked with yellow in the west, the clouds rolling back like a carpet. The
pavements were wet. The rain had come and gone, while he was dying.
On the other side of the street was a terrace of modern houses, built with featureless good taste in the Georgian style. Holly
and Felix Craven lived in one of them: while Emma watched, Holly came out of her house and slammed the front door. She was
wearing a white, tightly belted raincoat with military flaps on the shoulders. Like a film star.
‘Holly,’ Emma called. She rapped on the glass. Holly halted on the pavement, looking up vaguely. ‘Holly’, Emma shouted, beginning
to cry as she pushed at the window frame which had swollen in the damp weather.
Holly waved and ran across the road, straight hair swinging.
Emma left the bedroom. Halfway down the stairs, she saw the letters her father-in-law had dropped when he fell. Seen through
tears, the white sheets bobbed up and down as did Holly’s silhouette, visible through the frosted glass of the front door.
Emma dived at the letters, crumpling them in her hand. Darling Lucas. . . . She moved the old man’s limp hand with her foot and picked up the letter beneath it. That she could do this, shocked her.
She gave a high-pitched groan to distract herself from her own behaviour, ran into the drawing-room, pulled open the drawer
of the Queen Anne bureau where she kept the household bills, and stuffed the letters inside. As she came back into the hall,
Holly emerged from the kitchen, and Emma fell against her, weeping.
Holly sat her on the stairs and knelt by Henry’s father. Emma closed her eyes. Holly said, ‘Have you called the doctor?’
‘Engaged. I tried twice. . . .’
Holly lifted her, led her into the drawing-room. ‘You need a brandy.’
‘We can’t leave him lying there.’
‘He’s dead. And he must weigh sixteen stone. What time do the twins get back?’ Holly looked at her wrist watch critically,
like a gym mistress starting a race.
‘Three-thirty. No. I forgot. They’re going out to tea. It’s the Jervis boy’s birthday. Half-past six, about.’
Holly nodded. She went to the oak corner cupboard. ‘For Christ’s sake – it’s locked. How Victorian.’
Emma giggled. She pulled her mouth stiff, like a tragic actress. ‘Father would get at the whisky. Of course he wasn’t supposed
to drink.’
‘No. Where’s the key?’
‘In the bureau. Wait – I’ll get it.’ She scrambled clumsily off the sofa and pushed past Holly. The key was in the drawer
under the letters, on a length of red, knotted string. Emma tossed it to Holly and felt herself blushing. ‘You’d never have
found it,’ she said, and laughed, to make this seem less ridiculous.
Holly’s eyebrows lifted in a neat, dark arc. ‘Not much of a hiding place. Had he been at the bottle?’
‘I don’t know.’ Emma sank onto the sofa. Holly gave her a brandy; Emma’s teeth chattered against the glass. ‘I’m c-cold,’
she moaned.
‘I’ll get something.’ Holly went out, closing the door. Emma heard her running up the stairs, saw the chandelier dance as
she trod overhead. Her high heels clacked down the bare, oak stairs. She paused in the hall. When she opened the door, Emma
saw she had covered the body with a sheet.
She said, ‘He f-fell down the stairs,’ The blood was throbbing in her ears. ‘He f-fell backwards and turned a sort of somersault.
It was awful.’
Holly made her lie on the sofa. She tucked her legs up in a blanket and arranged a cushion behind her head. Immediately, Emma
felt stifled. She wanted to get up, walk about the room, wave her arms.
She said, ‘Was it another stroke, do you think? Or just the fall?’
‘Both, perhaps.’ Holly looked at her. ‘It could have happened any time, you know that. But it’s always a shock.’
She must have been a good nurse, Emma thought, surprised. Not unsympathetic, but calm and detached. Somehow she had never
seen this before, envisaging Holly’s nursing career as a sequence from an old war film: the beautiful, breezy nurse, nipping
into bed with the wounded soldiers when Matron’s back was turned. Though of course, Holly would have been too young, during
the war. . . .
Holly said, ‘I’d better go and phone. The doctor, then Henry, then this Jervis woman. Tell her to hang on to the boys. I can
fetch them later. Is she in the book?’
‘The red one, by the phone. It may be under S. I don’t know. S for Susan.’ Emma grinned weakly, apologizing for this inefficient system.
‘Susan Jervis. Droopy tweed skirt and a face like a flannel?’
Emma nodded, feeling disloyal to Susan, whom she liked. But she was afraid to disagree with Holly who was dogmatic in her
opinions and jealous of any woman Emma seemed even temporarily close to. It was not a sexual jealousy but an adolescent one.
For Holly, they had to be ‘best friends’ like schoolgirls, sharing secrets, shutting out the world. Emma thought – Whatever
I do, Holly will stand by me. Water came into her eyes and nose and she yawned suddenly. She thought – After a shock, you
feel sleepy.
She lay back obediently as if someone had spoken aloud, brandy glass clasped to her chest, eyes shut. She had drunk the brandy
like medicine, emptying the glass in two gulps, and now she felt tight. She thought – Drinking on an empty stomach. Though
she had cooked fish for her father-in-law’s lunch, she had eaten nothing herself. The sun had come out and its heat struck
through the window and onto her left hand, holding the empty glass. She thought – Alcohol is a poison. An insult to the brain.
Dylan Thomas. There was a poem by Spender about Icarus falling. He had flown too near the sun. Why should she think about
that? Henry’s father was an old man who had already suffered two strokes and had, this afternoon, fallen down the stairs.
The staircase had come from an old house in Gloucestershire. They would have chopped it up for firewood, William Lingard had
often said. He had bought it for five pounds and designed his own house round it. It had owl heads carved on the newel posts
and wide, shallow, polished stairs, the treads hollow with use and age. She had told Henry they ought to be carpeted, one
of the children might slip. He had said Father would never hear of it. That was like Henry – to put everything off on to someone
else. Grudging the expense, he blamed his father! For a moment, Emma thought indignantly about her husband, forming sentences, flexing her mind for battle. Then she remembered his father was dead. Henry had loved his father.
‘Henry’s out,’ Holly said. ‘His secretary said she’d get him to ring as soon as he came in. I just told her it was important.
Your chum Sue says the boys can stay the night and the doctor is coming. He’ll bring someone to help move him. He’s got a
confinement, he’ll be about half an hour.’
‘Thank you,’ Emma felt submissive and ashamed. Why should Holly do all this? She looked at her, standing in a dusty shaft
of sun in her belted raincoat, a tall woman with dark, straight hair and a healthy colour and eyes that gave an impression
of light. They were pale grey, flecked with brown round the iris, and seemed to reflect colour. Beneath gold-shadowed lids
and in the sunlight, they looked tawny: a lioness’s eyes.
‘Why don’t you take off your raincoat, aren’t you hot?’ Emma said.
Holly unfastened her belt in answer. Beneath the white raincoat she wore only bra’ and pants. Her long, bare stomach quivered
with suppressed laughter. ‘I was going to London and I wanted to wear my green dress – you know, the one with the gold belt – but it’s at the cleaner’s. I thought I’d pick it up on the way to the station and put
it on in the lav.’
She belted her coat again.
Emma said, ‘If you were meeting someone, oughtn’t you to ring? He’ll wonder what’s happened to you.’
Except for Emma, Holly had no women friends. All the same, Emma blushed because she had said ‘he’. It seemed to imply a criticism.
‘Let him wonder. Do him good.’ Then, as i. . .
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