Chestnut Street (45 page)

Mother talked endlessly of people who were coming in later this evening. The “girls,” she called them. She listed names that Gina had never heard before. And then went to get her nice stole so that she would look well when they came.

“Who are they, Father?” Gina asked fearfully when she left.

“They’re the girls she worked with in the bank fifty years ago; she thinks that’s where she is now, you see. She can’t quite place
me
at times,” he said and he looked like a bloodhound, his face was so sad.

They went to bed and Gina sat alone in the kitchen. She made the list of foods she would buy and stock for Mrs. Cloud, of what arguments to present to Mrs. Cloud so that she would agree to ignore her dismissal and come back and hold the fort. She would have to persuade David and James to take a more active part. And they hadn’t forgotten Mother and Father in their hearts, surely? The beautiful, elegant Laura in Scotland would not prevent David from helping. Surely? The eager, hardworking Kate in London wouldn’t stop James from coming to help in the decision. Surely?

Her mother came into the kitchen.

“Are we having a midnight feast?” she asked in a girlish tone.

“Sure, Mother.”

Gina got them some milk and shortbread. They ate companionably.

“I hope I get married,” her mother said.

“We all hope to get married sometime,” Gina agreed, knowing that her mother’s mind had wiped out three decades of a happy marriage.

“You know the way I feel about it,” her mother confided. “You can have all the fun and all the infatuations you like, but when it comes to it, you know. You can see clearly that it’s wrong for you, like a big, clear light.”

“And did you see things clearly?” Gina asked.

“Well, I think that I did.” Her mother spoke as if she were talking to an equal, not to her own daughter. There was a girlish sense of confiding about it all.

“I used to love the assistant manager, you know, but you were right, all of you, my friends—he didn’t really love me at all.”

“Did he love someone else?” Gina asked gently.

“No, I don’t think he did.” Her mother was matter-of-fact. “It was just that all of a sudden I realized that I was no part of his life.”

“So what will you do now? Now that you know this?” Gina whispered.

“I won’t rush into anything, that’s for sure.”

“No, no,” Gina agreed.

“It’s very feeble to think that you only exist if you have some slavish relationship with a man.”

“No, I agree entirely.” Gina had never had a conversation with her mother like this before in her whole life.

“So I’m going to consider myself free from now on. I’m going to regard the end of this obsession as a liberation, and if I do see other people I might like, I’m free to look at them.”

“And is there anyone out there that you might like … do you think?”

“There
is
a nice man—I don’t think you’ve met him. He’s called George, very quiet, doesn’t push himself forward like the assistant manager, but he’s very interesting to talk to. Now that I
see things more clearly I’ll have time to talk to him properly, you see.”

Gina smiled with tears in her eyes as her mother’s seventy-three-year-old face smiled coquettishly. But mainly Gina smiled because Father’s name was George.

Gina was up early in the morning. She begged Mrs. Cloud to hold the fort.

“I’ll be back then—I’ll get things sorted,” she said. Then she went to the supermarket to buy what was needed for her parents. She also bought a very expensive pie. It was lamb and apricot—it would take forty minutes to heat.

Matthew Kane was there. “Do you
live
here?” they asked each other at the same time and laughed. They examined each other’s trolleys.

“An awful lot of creamed rice,” she said, mystified.

“Four very weak little puppy dogs turned up at my door. They can’t eat anything else just now,” he explained.

“I see. Good luck with them,” she said.

“Very up-market pie,” he observed, looking into her trolley.

“I’m going to pretend to some American hotshot and his druggy girlfriend that I made it myself.”

“I see—good luck with them,” Matthew said.

Somehow she got back to London and placed roses on the dining table. She was showered and ready when Will brought them home after many cocktails in a trendy new club.

“It was so great, we just didn’t want to leave,” Bret said.

Bret’s girlfriend, Amy, looked either drunk or stoned and very uncoordinated.

“Can I see your bathroom?” she asked as a greeting.

Gina was about to show her when Bret interrupted.

“Not here, honey, no need. We’re with family here,” he said.

Gina left them and went to the kitchen. She looked back and saw Bret and Amy leaning over the coffee table in the sitting
room. There were two lines of white powder there. People were doing drugs here in their apartment. Will was beside her.

“Please, Gee, don’t be all heavy now, not now, of all times, I beg you.”

“Who’s heavy?” she asked.

He gave her that smile that always worked.

She carried the dish in.

“Here we are, lovely homemade lamb-and-apricot pie.”

“You don’t think for a moment that just because you made it that I’m actually going to eat that pastry, do you?” Amy asked.

“No, I didn’t expect you would,” Gina said pleasantly.

They all looked at her with surprise.

“No, I see from your lovely, slim figure you probably never ate pastry in your life.” Gina looked at her admiringly. “Still, the others might like it. Will here can eat anything and he never puts on an ounce—I’m sure it’s the same with you, Bret?”

Will looked at her, delighted. Gina realized for the first time in five years that it was actually very easy to keep people like Will happy. All you did was tell lies and flatter them all the time and pretend that there was nothing else in your life.

Amy didn’t form a major part of the night’s conversation but Gina did. She talked on and on about how talented Will was, how good with people, how much he was loved by the talent, how celebrities always asked for him when they went back on the talk show. Bret wondered if it would all cross the Atlantic.

“If Will wants it to, then it will,” she said confidently.

Bret was impressed. Will came back into the kitchen, triumphant.

“It went really great—he likes me,” he said.

“What’s not to like?” she said gently.

“I’m meeting him tomorrow morning; imagine—a Saturday!” Will crowed with pleasure.

“Good. I have to go back home—will you call me and tell me how you get on?”

“Not again?” He was annoyed.

“Yes, but you have your meeting—you might go to a club or something afterwards.”

This weekend there would be a lot to do, brothers to ring, hospitals to contact, day centers to inspect. She might ask an architect to come in and see about altering the house in Chestnut Street, she might inquire at her old school if there were any vacancies. There were puppies to be visited, poor little puppies who ate only creamed rice. She would sit at the kitchen table and would make decisions. Big decisions. And because she could see things clearly now, none of them had anything to do with going to California.

Ivy wished that people would write letters as they did in the old days. It used to be lovely hearing envelopes fall through the letter box. Nowadays there was nothing but bills and free offers and people telling you that you had won a cruise when it turned out you hadn’t won anything of the sort.

For a while Ivy wrote her own letters to nephews and nieces. She wrote to people she used to work with when she had been in the flower shop. But it was always the same. They wrote guilty notes scribbled on the back of Christmas cards; they were so sorry, they should have replied, of course, but, really, life was so rushed, and what a pity that Ivy didn’t text or use e-mail.

Ivy thought she might as well try to fly to the moon as learn anything like that.

So she sighed and said that it had all been a turn for the worse. She wasn’t lonely or anything; she had had many offers in her time but she had never really concentrated on them. Somehow she had made a mess of relationships. It was just that she liked to keep in touch with people, to know what was going on in their lives.

She would like to tell them that she had won a prize in a
pastry-cooking competition, or how her small dog could now go to the newsagent to pick up the paper all on his own. Or maybe a bit about the holiday she had taken in the Scottish Highlands, or the art-history lectures in the local museum. She could have written about how she ran an informal book club, which met in her house every week; they had snacks and wine and sometimes they had even read the book!

Not earthshaking stuff, but it was comforting to people to know that a woman of nearly sixty still had a good lifestyle. She had even taken to entering competitions where they asked you to write slogans, and it turned out that Ivy was quite good at this. She had already won a set of suitcases, a garden shed and a year’s supply of breakfast cereal. And now today she had heard she had won a major prize in another competition.

She would know this afternoon what it was. It was being given by a store down in the shopping mall. Ivy hoped it might be a voucher. She would buy some new cookware and a very upmarket food processor.… She dressed up smartly to receive the gift in case there might be a photographer from the local press.

Everyone except Ivy gasped at the generosity of the prize. It was the last word in laptop computers, plus a mobile phone, which was so magical, apparently, that it accepted and sent e-mails, whatever exactly they were.

Ivy, who had been brought up to be very polite, thanked everyone and said it was a wonderful gift that she would treasure.

“Maybe you could exchange it,” one of her friends said helpfully. But Ivy thought that might look very rude, as if she hadn’t liked it.

“Maybe you could raffle it later?” another friend suggested.

“But suppose they heard about it?” Ivy was such a kindly person she couldn’t take the risk.

So she brought the package home and looked at it glumly. Ivy was not technical.

She couldn’t set the video. She had great trouble in getting
money out of the hole in the wall. She didn’t have a telephone answering mechanism. There was no way she could get to grips with this machine.

It was a pity because if only she could, then she could contact her favorite nephew, who was in South America; she could keep in touch with some of those nice women she had once worked with who now seemed to have turned into semi-machines and couldn’t communicate without technology.

Ivy told herself that she wasn’t stupid. Suppose she did learn how to use it? But twenty minutes at the manual showed her that it was another planet.

Suppose she got lessons?

Everyone said that classes were hit or miss. Either they all streaked ahead of you or they were so slow you fell asleep. What you needed was one-to-one tutoring. But that was expensive and Ivy didn’t have money to throw away.

If only there were a way.

Next week at the local supermarket she studied their community notice board. People were offering babysitting, removal of garden rubbish, shiatsu massage or newspaper deliveries. Nobody was offering cut-price one-to-one lessons in making you computer-literate.

Other people were seeking help with ironing, someone to do home hairdressing or anyone who would like to take an unexpected litter of beautiful kittens. It didn’t look promising.

But then Ivy got an idea.

And very soon her advertisement was on the board.

She waited with interest. And then there were three replies. Two people were entirely unsuitable. One of them said there was
nothing to computing—you just plugged in and away you go. The second said she was only interested in cooking with yeast, and unless that was on offer, she would not share her computer skills.