Can't Anyone Help Me? (3 page)

I had a brother, but in a way I never knew him. He was in his mid-teens when I was born and already away at university by the time I started school. He arrived home for Christmas and his summer holidays when I was small, but his visits dwindled as he made new friends. Or maybe I had driven him away. I knew my mother thought so. I had heard her say it to my father.

Whatever the reason, by the time I was old enough to file memories away, there was a barrier between my mother and me that was never breached. Maybe she was embarrassed that just when her contemporaries were rinsing the grey out of their hair and enrolling for yoga classes she had to announce that a baby was on the way. One that I learnt at an early age was definitely a mistake.

Certainly the estate where we lived seemed bereft of small children, and my mother’s friends, with teenagers already studying away from home, could not provide me with company of a suitable age. I was therefore totally dependent on the adult world.

Friends called, and I, in a crisp cotton frock if it was summer or a woollen pinafore dress and jumper if it was cold, sat tongue-tied throughout the visit and listened to their chatter. Playing outside and getting dirty was not on my mother’s agenda so, bored and apparently invisible, I would sit without moving until they were so engrossed in their adult conversation that I could slip away unobserved.

My parents, like their nearby neighbours, lived in a fake stone four-bedroomed detached house with a double garage and a beautifully maintained garden. With her eye for decorative detail my mother had supervised the several makeovers the house had had since they had first moved in. By the time I was old enough to appreciate or even notice the décor, a wooden bar with an array of bottles, optics firmly in place, had been built at one end of the long sitting room. Settees covered with a light-coloured subtly patterned fabric, their thick cushions plumped constantly, flanked a large stone fireplace, and against the wall opposite them, a blond oak cabinet housed the television and music centre. The dining room was furnished with more blond wood. The kitchen, with its padded built-in seating and pine table, was decorated with cheerful shades of yellow and trimmed with sparkling white. The floor, where there was never a stain, was one large seamless strip of the same bright shades.

My mother was proud of the house – ‘Tidiness is next to godliness’ was one of her much-repeated sayings, not that she was a frequent churchgoer. From as far back as I can remember, I knew never to leave anything out of place. When visitors arrived, they always found something new to admire – a painting or an elaborate flower arrangement. But beneath their words, a hint of envy often showed.

‘Oh, Dora, how beautiful! You have such good taste,’ or ‘Aren’t you clever!’ they said, when they were shown my mother’s latest acquisition. Her face would light up with pleasure.

The only thing that an observant guest might have wondered was why every bedroom in the house, including mine, was dominated by a very large double bed. In our area it was usual for there to be one twin-bedded room in case an unmarried couple or two friends came to stay. But not in my parents’ house. I never questioned it while I was young, and by the time I was old enough to notice, I had already learnt the reason why.

But even then I was aware that respectability, or the face of it, was important to my parents, and certainly no one who came into contact with them could have thought they were anything but the epitome of it.

My mother, with her discreetly highlighted hair, scorned anything that could be labelled ‘common’, which included the synthetic fabrics for jackets and dresses that were popular during the seventies. Instead, she favoured the natural fibres, such as cotton, linen and wool, that the designers of Jaeger, Max Mara and, for very special occasions, Jean Muir used in their understated clothes. Pearls were worn by day, a single strand around her neck and small studs in her ears, and she never left the house without her hair in place and her makeup on. Appearances mattered – not just to her but to my father as well. He wore the uniforms of the successful businessman and the devoted family man he wanted the world to see: dark pin-striped suits with white shirts and discreet ties from Monday to Friday, cords and tweed jackets at weekends.

I thought my parents’ bedroom was the most beautiful room in the house: pale peach walls and cream curtains without a hint of the masculinity my father might have preferred. A thick silk bedspread in a deeper tone lay on the massive bed, with its piles of carefully positioned pillows. An archway led into their en-suite bathroom, with its large deep white bath and gold taps.

It was a room in which my mother enjoyed spending time alone. She smoothed lotions on to her limbs, restorative creams on her face and neck and took long, leisurely, fragrant baths. I liked to stand there when she was getting ready for a night out or just for the day, inhaling the different perfumes from the many jars that stood around the bath. Not that I ever had a chance to stand there for long: when she saw me hovering, a look of irritation would cross her face. ‘What do you want now, Jackie?’ she would ask. When I was small, fearing her displeasure, I was unable to answer her question. I could not put into words what I wanted, but I longed to hear from her the same words that were uttered by my uncle. I never did.

Instead of putting loving arms around me and saying caring words, she would dismiss me: ‘Well, if you don’t want anything, go and find something to do and let me get on with what I’m doing,’ was one of her abrupt reprimands. If I waited too long to retreat, a well-shaped eyebrow was raised and another regularly used sentence would follow: ‘For heaven’s sake, Jackie! I don’t know why you’re always under my feet when you have everything you could possibly want in your own room.’ She would say this whether she was seated or not, which confused me. How could I be under her feet if she was in the bath or sitting on the bed?

‘Now, you’re old enough to amuse yourself for a few minutes, aren’t you?’ I knew my presence was unwelcome and would walk desolately away to my gold and cream room with its adult furniture.

In there my friends lived. They consisted of the teddy bears and other stuffed animals that had been given to me as presents. There were some that I was told not to play with: they were what my mother called ‘collector’s items’. An antique bear from a manufacturer called Steiff sat out of reach on a high shelf. It was to be admired, she said, but not hugged, and next to it was a beautiful mohair bear with ‘Merrythought’ on his left paw. The latest addition to my collection was Paddington, who wore a brown felt hat and a red duffel coat and shiny blue wellington boots. Like the others, his bright eyes watched my every move. And there was the friend whom nobody but I knew about: Florence, the little girl who had the qualities of her
Magic Roundabout
namesake – kindness and patience. Only there, in the privacy of my room, could she step out of my imagination, join the bears and keep me company. It was to that little group I talked when I sat them in a circle around me and took out the dolls’ tea set. I told them about my mother’s bad temper but I didn’t tell them about my uncle playing ‘the game’. That was a secret, to be kept locked at the back of my mind; a secret that already had started to torment me even when I slept.

I do not know when I learnt the word that described my parents’ weekend activities. I just understood, during those very early years, that they loved entertaining and being entertained. It seemed to me then that every weekend was taken up with preparing for guests or spending time getting ready to visit them. Not wanting a small child in the house and often needing my bedroom for overnight guests, my parents sent me several miles away to the village where my aunt and uncle, who were also my godparents, lived.

‘Not quite in the same class as ours,’ I heard my mother say condescendingly, on more than one occasion, about the area where her brother lived. And when I became old enough to notice the difference, I saw that she was right.

My aunt and uncle lived in an ugly red-brick semi, surrounded by others that looked just the same. Only the gardens lent any individuality to the estate. Some had small square lawns, others were a riot of colour nearly all year round, and a few were whimsical, with plaster gnomes wearing idiotic grins and holding miniature fishing rods on the edge of tiny ponds. In one or two children’s toys were left carelessly out, and a battered family saloon with a ‘baby on board’ sign in the back window was parked on a patch of worn grass.

My aunt and uncle’s house, with two round bushes standing in terracotta urns at either side of the front door, was definitely of the small-green-lawn type. Without the benefit of bay windows, which several of their neighbours had installed, it had an entirely flat façade with white UPVC window-frames and door. Like most of his neighbours, my uncle had to park on the street, for the garage had been turned into an office for him to work from.

Every weekend when my uncle collected me, he stopped at a florist’s to buy roses for his wife – scentless, thornless, brightly coloured buds that had been grown in heated greenhouses, quite unlike the lush scented ones that came from our garden. When we reached the house, the ones he had bought the week before had begun to droop and shed their petals. They were taken out of the vase and placed in the bin outside the back door. Rustling cellophane was removed from the new bunch, and those he arranged carefully in clean water, then placed the vase back on the sideboard.

As soon as my aunt returned from work her eyes would dart in the direction of the flowers. On seeing the expected new arrangement, she would utter the same phrase as she did every week – ‘For me?’ – as though someone else might be the recipient of his generosity.

‘You sit down, dear, take the weight off your feet,’ he would say, as he did every time. On would go the kettle as, with a grateful smile, she settled her ample self on a chair, kicking off her sensible flat leather shoes that were, by this time, pinching her swollen feet.

‘He’s so good to me,’ she would tell everyone, whenever she had the opportunity. ‘Can’t do enough for me.’ Her round face, under its cap of neatly cut mousy brown hair, would glow as she recounted his many kindnesses and her luck at having married such a considerate man.

Unlike my parents’ home, where my mother’s income – from the antiques shop my father had bought for her to oversee – was used for luxuries, my aunt and uncle needed all they earned to live on. I knew that because it was repeatedly mentioned to me.

My uncle worked in the week at something I was never really clear about, while my aunt worked part-time in a shop; she was always needed on their busiest day – Saturday. That was the one day I was always left entirely in his care.

There were only a few weekends when I could not go there on a Saturday, other than when my aunt and uncle took their annual holiday. If my mother heard my uncle or aunt sneeze or they sounded thick with a cold on the telephone, she would announce with a sigh that I must remain at home.

‘Before everything happened’ I would wail with disappointment for I was bored and lonely with either playing on my own in the garden or in my room.

My mother’s routine over those rare weekends when I was at home left her little time to notice me. ‘You’ve got plenty of toys to play with,’ she would say, when I complained that I had nothing to do. And in a way she was right: in my room I had everything that a small child could have wished for – dolls, toys and a wardrobe full of the latest fashions in expensive children’s clothing. But what I really wanted was someone to play with, another child to talk to, or even some attention from my parents. But none of that was forthcoming.

On Saturday mornings my father always played golf. Despite my mother’s protests that she needed someone to keep an eye on me, he would refuse to cancel his game just because I was going to be at home for the weekend.

‘Oh, well, Jackie,’ she would say, with a sigh that told me how inconvenient it was to have me there, ‘you’ll have to come with me. Just mind you’re good.’ I would be armed with a colouring book and a box of wax crayons, and she would drive us into the village centre.

Her routine seldom varied on Saturday morning. First it was the hairdresser, and I would sit in the waiting area swinging my legs as I watched her hair being washed and blow-dried. Her long nails were professionally filed, buffed and painted, and she would flap her hands in the air to dry the varnish. She flicked through magazines and drank coffee, while I was given orange juice and a children’s book I couldn’t read.

On the days that she was entertaining, last-minute shopping had to be done. We would visit the butcher and the greengrocer where she would have an animated conversation about the quality of each item she wanted before she bought anything. Then it was back to the house where, after a hasty lunch of something healthy, such as a small salad and fruit, I was told to stay out of the way and amuse myself in the garden. ‘Don’t get dirty,’ she would warn, as I went outside.

It was on one of those weekends that I learnt a little more about my parents’ weekend interests. I had seen that the beautifully set table’s extra leaves were in use so that it could seat eight people. My mother had covered it with a lace cloth and her best silver cutlery, crystal wine glasses and china. Linen napkins were folded on each side plate and she had arranged flowers in the centre, with tall candles in elaborate antique candlesticks. As I wandered from the garden to the kitchen, I smelt the delicious aromas of the food she was cooking.

‘Who’s coming?’ I asked, even though I knew I would be told very firmly to stay in my room and not leave it.