Faustine (10 page)

The door closes. I sit still, seeing myself as a pawn, talked of, disposed of, as unwanted children always are.

 *

I couldn’t have been less prepared for what I saw, Jasmine says, after she has gone back to her seat and taken a fat onion from the vegetable rack.

It makes my eyes water, she says, handing it to me, along with a small container of cloves. Stud it with cloves, will you, Ella. I want to make bread sauce.

Not for the first time, I dread the evening meal that
Jasmine
prepares so assiduously. Who is coming? Why are we having all the trimmings, as if this were indeed a Christmas family celebration.

 *

Muriel was standing at the top of the stairs, Jasmine goes on, while I still struggle to summon up the courage to ask if my mother has been invited to come tonight.

– Jas, darling, Muriel calls down to me. How d’you think I look?

Well, Ella – and here, as if determined to make her point as dramatic as possible, Jasmine drops a sharp-bladed knife to the floor and the clatter makes me jump nearly out of my skin.

I can only say that I’ve never seen anyone so changed – and yet, at the same time, completely themself.

I felt as if I were being mesmerized – yes, something like that. Jasmine stoops for the knife and it comes up glinting metallic silver, like a fish tugged out of the water. She was, kind of blinding – it was as if there was some light shining round her. I could sense a gathering of people making their
way towards her – you know, it’s like when you see a famous film-star in the flesh, and you feel the excitement of all those she has bewitched over the years.

And, as you must know by now, Jasmine adds drily, I don’t go in for believing in that kind of thing at all. OK, there’s such a thing as sex appeal, I don’t deny it – and here she looks across at me with, I can only say, a hostile, challenging stare. And my saying that would go very much against the grain with your mother and all her feminist cronies, I can tell you.

I mean, Jasmine goes on, glancing away now as she does every time she seems to recall my own delicate relationship with the people she describes – I mean, the whole point of Anna’s relationship with Harry was that it was ‘rational’, they were friends as well as lovers. In those days, you know, the model was Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband, Godwin, with their separate lives and their clearly defined freedoms. Such things as chance and romance – I mean, the inequality of beauty and so on – just wasn’t on.

 *

Only Mary Wollstonecraft died in childbirth, I think to myself. And my mother didn’t. She lived on, to show herself incapable of loving her child.

 *

Jasmine goes on:

Muriel was wearing an Indian caftan, a cotton thing, and it wasn’t easy to see at first whether she’d lost a lot of weight at Summerfield.

She pulled me along the corridor and into her little room. And I must say, that had undergone a transformation too.

Jasmine laughs, as if plunged suddenly into memories of a time when to be carefree was to be in the swing of things;
when adult responsibilities were despised and seen as no more than symptoms of an outdated, decadent malaise.

It reminded me of how I’d felt twenty years before,
Jasmine
admits, mind-reading in that disconcerting way she has.

Not that dear old London could have provided, when Muriel and I were young, at the end of the war, the kind of exotica she had collected for herself in a matter of days!

There was an inflatable plastic chair with zebra stripes, there were Indian hangings everywhere, and wreaths of dried flowers, and incense burning, and posters, of course – Janis Joplin, I remember, screaming her throat out on that wall of Muriel’s little room that had been so bare.

At first, I just didn’t know where to look. Then Muriel, who was laughing in a delighted sort of a way, said, You see, Jasmine, I’m really going to cheer things up at the
magazine
. I mean, Liddy Wise is such a fuddy-duddy. If we want to attract younger readers, we must understand the new culture, don’t you agree?

For the first time since I left grammar school, I felt at a total loss. I was entering a world that was incomprehensible to me, the new world of the young. And I felt damned old too, if you want to know.

Muriel stretched her hand out to me and I had to look her in the face.

I can’t describe it – she had this youthful kind of power, she seemed so happy and utterly self-confident.

– Supper’s ready, Anna shouted at this point from the little kitchen behind the sitting-room. And – I must say she sounded furious.

– Coming, Muriel yells back, more like a teenager than anything else, I couldn’t help thinking. And – just like one of those maddening young people who don’t give a damn
for all the effort that’s gone into the cooking of a meal, she drew me closer and showed me both her hands again.

– My ring’s not there, you see, Jas, she says. My fingers have grown so much slimmer that it slipped off. I’ve had to send it to be tightened. Isn’t it a laugh?

I just didn’t know what to say. But I felt the full force of the change in her. Muriel dreamed only of herself.

 *

So – where was I? I say. The discarded casing of the red onion lies on the scrubbed table in front of me. Tears spring as sharp as pinpricks to my eyes as I push the spear-ended cloves into the obdurate, stinging flesh.

You? says Jasmine. Oh, you came running in at just the most awkward moment. By which I mean, she says quickly, as I dodge from a spurt of onion juice and she thinks she has hurt me, has made me cry, at the very moment when a distraction was badly needed – to deflect attention from the fight that was about to break out in the flat that evening.

– Fight? I say.

 *

Already I see the cloudy, smoky ring that Muriel had told me came from a mountain that was made entirely of this magical stone, and if you went there you could climb inside and see the city where everyone was blue and mauve.

I see the ring on a slim, elegant finger, clasping the hand of a smiling, besotted man.

 *

By the time Muriel and I had reached the end of the corridor we both knew at once that Muriel’s ex-husband Bert had called round. Clearly he hadn’t taken the trouble to inform his daughter, and at first I thought the almost palpable
irritation
Anna was feeling was more to do with having to do a meal for so many (and it wasn’t something she was used
to, after all. Your grandmother always looked after the meals, in the old days).

Yes, she looked distinctly peevish that evening, your mother. She was back in her denim boiler suit again – which was definitely a bad sign. And she was all shiny in the face – lately she’d been putting on a bit of powder and rouge … well, for God’s sake, why not?

Harry was sitting at the table in what I instantly recognized as a deliberately provocative attitude. He had his legs crossed and he was smoking. Anna was saying something to him and he wasn’t listening. She had to shout it at him – pass the bowl for the salad, or whatever – before he stretched lazily behind him to the dresser and took it. In doing this, he grazed the stomach of the debonair Bert Twyman, who was standing there as if he owned the place, as usual.

– Fuck off, Bert Twyman said.

Then Muriel, with me following behind, walked in. And at that precise moment you woke from some dream or other and started to bellow at the top of your lungs.

 *

There is a silence while Jasmine goes over to the Aga and brings out the tray of meringues. She places them on the table and the sugary sweet smell fills the kitchen.

I couldn’t believe my eyes at first.

Jasmine prods a meringue, the sharp, brittle exterior
snapping
under her thumb. Transformed from the billow of egg white that went into the fire, the thin shapes that float like swans on the tin surface of the cooking tray seem hard and unreal.

– It was the way Muriel behaved, Jasmine says. Her voice is matter-of-fact, even rather bored.

– I just didn’t believe it, as I say. Not at first. Bert Twyman
was eyeing up his ex-wife in a most salacious manner. And Harry didn’t like it at all.

– Get off out of here, he said.

Then Anna had to go down the corridor to fetch you from your bed.

Muriel was just standing there, you see. As if she was utterly oblivious to what she would have regarded as her most sacred duty only a short time before. It was as if she didn’t hear you crying at all.

Oh, I say.

Everyone concentrated really hard on cheering you up – singing songs and telling stories – and the moment passed.

But it was a relief when Bert finally left. He insisted on prising out of Muriel a time for him to come and see her next day in the office.

And I honestly think Anna would have been pleased – I mean, for your parents to come together again is a damn sight better than if they’re deadly enemies – if it hadn’t been for Harry’s obvious interest in your mother.

She told me, you know, years later, poor Anna, that she couldn’t handle the fact of Muriel’s retrieved sexuality at all, at the time. She knew how grateful she was to her mother for all the love and help she’d given her in the past – with you, of course, too – and yet as soon as ‘Ma came back from that health farm’, as she put it, she could only see her as a deadly rival. And that made Anna very upset, of course. It ruined all her theories of female solidarity, and sisterhood, and the like. Jealous of her own mother.

Mind you, Jasmine says, she had every reason to be.

 *

Again a quiet falls on the kitchen, like the all-consuming hush that fell on the forecourt at the station when I arrived. I can see John Neidpath, outside on the cobbles, carrying a
long wooden stave, which he places by the entrance to the green. Then he goes back for another, and another. I have the feeling that we are to be fenced in here, protected from the invading armies on the downs.

 *

– Didn’t you wonder how … how Muriel could have changed so much? I say. I mean, did you think the … that Summerfield made her like that, just on its own?

– It didn’t matter for me, Jasmine snaps. I see the look of resentment and antagonism flash across her features again and then disappear into the no woman’s land of old age. But it did for her. Who knows, she may have been suffering from such an accumulation of stress, over the years …

Caring for me, I think, but do not say. And I see how my presence affected everyone’s life, and how different it would all have turned out if I had never been born.

– She was seeing devils after all, Jasmine says, into that quietness which is broken only by the steps to and fro of the man outside in the yard. And that’s not a good sign. No, she came back – rejuvenated. It was what happened later that I couldn’t forgive … well, again, not at first.

But I know. I remember what happened. And I know my grandmother’s old friend is wrong.

And because I dread to know what came later, because I feel the pressure, the necessity for Jasmine to kill the dream of my childhood, trample on the only secure thing I have, I go to the back door, open it and look out. Jasmine, behind me, in the kitchen that’s two steps down from the cobbles (and why do I remember that too?) bustles to the stove and takes out the chicken to baste. I can see, from the shadows of the old beeches as they fall over the roof of the stable block opposite, that it’s getting late. It will soon be evening.

I make myself think of Muriel, after she came back from
that long abandonment of me. I climb into her arms, kiss her face … I never will be parted from her again.

 *

I remember:

I’m in the park. The wind is blowing the trees about and a man is running hard with me in a pram.

Thunder’s coming on; people are scattering to little white pavilions.

Muriel has come back today. I’m so happy. I don’t mind where we go or what we do so long as we are together.

 *

Of course, says Jasmine’s voice from behind me, from where she stands framed in the ugly, utilitarian colours of the staff side of Lisa Crane’s house, I didn’t see Muriel for quite a time after that … I mean, after she’d run off with Harry Crane.

 *

And I hear my own voice:

I scream like the baby Muriel cruelly thinks I am, and I rock the pram until it tumbles over.

My head gets a cut and the man takes a white handkerchief from the breast pocket of his immaculate dark suit. He mops my head and the white lawn handkerchief is splodged with blood. And still I scream.

Why doesn’t my grandma seem to care? Why, when we leave the park, me trotting along beside her this time, the dark-suited stranger gone off in the opposite direction, does she smile distractedly at me when I babble at her about my important cut on the head?

And a group of students at the park gates, seeing her come out, call and ask her to join them for a drink. Why do they laugh incredulously when Muriel calls back at them that
she has to take her little grandchild home and put her to bed?

Because, as I know now, no one could believe Muriel was old enough to have a grandchild, that’s why.

 *

We are standing in the deepest interstices of the manor, Jasmine and I, in the room where the video of Lisa Crane plays night and day, tapes of her triumphs and successes, dinner and banquets, travels and receptions, succeeding each other unendingly, in a terrible travesty of life.

Jasmine is telling me Greg’s tale, as he related it to her the day after Muriel’s first appearance back at the office, after her ‘holiday’. I stand listening to her, my head bowed. From time to time, when the music changes on the Lisa Channel, I look up – and into the video eyes of Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan – but mostly I stand there with the core of me drained out, as if the fame of Lisa Crane has taken away any picture of myself I might ever have had. That picture, after all, had been given me by Muriel Twyman, my grandmother. And she had long ago been replaced by Lisa Crane.