Kind of Cruel (24 page)

I need to close my eyes for ten years
. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’ Of course someone would bother me. No one could succeed in remaining alone in a room in Jo’s house for more than thirty seconds. There are too many people wandering around, always. I can hear Quentin, Sabina and William talking in the background, all at the same time. Beneath the voices is an uneven galloping sound I’ve heard many times before: Kirsty running across the upstairs landing with Hilary following close behind.

‘Sure?’ Jo asks.

‘It’s very tempting. I wouldn’t sleep, though, and then I’d feel worse.’

‘Poor you. It must be awful.’

I force a smile, think about the time she asked me impatiently if I’d ever wondered whether maybe I just wasn’t tired enough, wasn’t working hard enough during the day, and that was why I wasn’t able to fall asleep.

This is what I do. When she’s nice to me, I remember all the wounds she has unwittingly inflicted over the years. When she’s chilly and insensitive, her long list of good deeds is what clamours for my attention. I struggle to perceive her in the round and never quite succeed. All I know is that she’s not at all like me. It would be too easy to explain the difference between us by saying that she’s more changeable than I am, or that she doesn’t hold grudges and I do. I know other weirdos – Luke, for example – who are able to forgive, forget and move on, but with Jo it’s as if she’s pressed some kind of internal delete button and anything she doesn’t want to think about, like Little Orchard, is wiped from the record as if it never existed, enabling her to grin at me like an ecstatic idiot who remembers nothing.

‘Earth to Amber, as Barney would say!’

Did she ask me a question? ‘I’m fine, Jo, really.’ It’s too early in our visit for me to start thinking analytically. I haven’t even taken off my coat, and nothing has happened so far that requires analysis.
Act like a normal visitor. Ask for a cup of tea
.

‘You must be gasping for a brew,’ Jo says, on cue. In this house, whatever you want or need is offered before you have the chance to ask for it. It’s strangely disempowering.

God, I’m a petty bitch. How can anyone stand me? Maybe no one can.

Sharon could stand you. The bitchier you were, the more she laughed. That’s why you were so much kinder around her. You knew there was no point bitching – she’d only keep liking you anyway, stubborn cow that she was.

‘Reading your face, I’d say you’ve had a rough day,’ Jo says. ‘Tell you what, you can have one of my new posh teabags – each one individually wrapped in its own packet inside the box. There’s classy for you.’

‘It’s no more than I expect,’ I say mock-grandly, and she laughs on her way back to the kitchen, a room she will not be parted from for longer than five minutes at a time.

Dinah and Nonie have disappeared behind the closed door of the dining room with William and Barney, leaving their puffy air-bed coats on the hall floor. I gather them up, take mine off and try to hang all three on the pegs on the wall. As usual, I fail. Everyone who lives in or near Rawndesley has at some point popped round to Jo’s, hung up a jacket, cagoule, duffel or mac here, left without it, and never returned to collect it. I once stood where I’m standing now and listened as Neil, in a tone of mild surprise, went through the coats one by one. ‘That’s Mrs Boyd’s from across the road, and . . . oh, yeah, this is Sabina’s mum’s, from when she came over from Italy, and I think Jo said this one belongs to someone from Sabina’s Pilates class.’

Jo is a very different sort of homemaker to me – not that I’d ever describe myself in those terms. I organise my home for the benefit of the people who live in it: me, Luke, Dinah and Nonie. Jo runs hers for the greater good of mankind. I still can’t quite believe she let Quentin have William’s bedroom when Pam died. William and Barney now share the tiny box room that’s barely big enough for one child.

I dump our coats on the nearest chair, head for the kitchen and nearly trip over Neil, emerging from the downstairs loo with his phone clamped to his ear. ‘That doesn’t come into it,’ he says. ‘You know how it works: you tender for a job, you quote an all-in price. If it takes you longer than you thought it would, you don’t get to come back and ask for more money. You suck it up.’ He makes rude gestures at his phone for my benefit. There’s a crash from upstairs. We both look up, see the ceiling shake. Neil eyes the door of the downstairs loo as if he’s considering going back in there.

I wasn’t expecting him to be here. I don’t normally see him when I come round on Wednesdays; he usually works late. Isn’t it a bit inconsiderate of him to come home when there’s obviously no room for him in his house? I watch from the narrow hall as he starts to climb the stairs, then, after another thud and a cry of ‘Kirsty!’ from Hilary, thinks better of it and comes back down. He has nowhere to take his argumentative phone call; Jo is in the kitchen, calling out for me to join her, Quentin and Sabina are talking in the lounge, the children are making a racket in the dining room.

I remember asking Neil what he did, when Luke first introduced me to him and Jo. ‘I’ve got my own little company,’ he said affectionately, as if he was talking about a poodle or a hamster. ‘We make window films.’

‘What, like
Rear Window
by Alfred Hitchcock?’ I said. It was a stupid joke.

‘No-o-o,’ said Jo with exaggerated patience, rolling her eyes at Neil conspiratorially. ‘Alfred Hitchcock made
Rear Window
by Alfred Hitchcock. We’ve never heard that one before, have we, Neil?’

When I asked Luke about it later, he admitted he hadn’t noticed Neil’s puzzled expression, the way he’d looked at Jo when she’d said that, his answer to her supposed-to-be-rhetorical question: ‘No, I don’t think we have heard it before. You’re a true original, Amber.’

‘Amber? Do you want this tea or not?’ Jo yells.

‘Coming!’

‘
Ciao
, Amber!’ Sabina calls out.

‘Is that Amber?’ Quentin sounds surprised. Didn’t he hear the doorbell, or Jo inviting us in, or William and Barney demanding to know when we were arriving, as I know they must have at least seventeen times?

‘I don’t think I’ve told Amber about my run-in with Harold Sargent,’ Quentin announces, as if this is good news for us all. ‘I don’t think I’ve told Luke, come to think of it. Course, Harold’s thinking about having one of those stair-lifts installed now, but I said to him, I said, “They only work on some staircases, you know. Might not work on yours.” ’

Oh, God, please someone or something distract him before he comes looking for me, armed with one of his long, pointless anecdotes
. He hasn’t told me about his run-in with Harold Sargent and nor should he, because I have absolutely no idea who Harold Sargent is. Even when I start out knowing who and what Quentin is talking about, within ten seconds I’m lost. His stories are so dull that my mind drifts off, and when I realise I’ve been AWOL and tune back in, the cast of characters has often changed entirely: instead of Margaret Dawson and the railings outside the station, he’s talking about someone called Kevin’s bad attitude, and the dangers of failing to fibre-glass the insides of septic tanks. Quentin and Pam had a septic tank about twenty years ago, when they lived in the middle of nowhere between Combingham and Silsford, and Quentin is still obsessed with the damn things.

‘I think Amber is too tired now to talk,’ I hear Sabina say.
Thank you, thank you
. ‘You know she doesn’t sleep.’

I smile at this. Sabina is well aware that Quentin doesn’t know anything about me, despite my having been attached to his son for nearly a decade, which is why she’s telling him. One of his stranger characteristics is that he can be relied upon to know nothing about the people in close proximity to him at any given time, while simultaneously knowing all the tiny, tedious details of the lives of everyone the people around him have never heard of or met. If he bumped into Harold Sargent on the street, he would find himself suddenly full of information about the minutiae of my life, all the better to bore poor Harold with.

‘Why don’t you tell me instead? I would
love
to hear the story,’ Sabina says convincingly. She’s an angel. ‘Should I make you a cup of tea first?’ Although perfectly able-bodied and afflicted by no disability, Quentin cannot perform even the smallest domestic task, and no one ever suggests that he might. The closest he ever came, one Christmas at my house when everyone but him was helping with the Christmas dinner preparations, was to say, ‘I’m sorry I’m not helping.’ Pam giggled as if it was the silliest idea in the world, and said, ‘That’s all right, darling. No one expects you to.’

She was more frightened for Quentin than for herself when she was dying. ‘He can’t do the simplest things, Amber,’ she whispered to me once. ‘Can’t fend for himself at all, and it’s too late for him to learn now.’
Why?
I wanted to scream.
Boiling an egg is no harder now than it was fifty years ago
. ‘It’s my fault,’ Pam said. ‘I enjoyed looking after him. And he worked so hard . . .’ If she hadn’t been sick, I might have argued with her. Until he retired, Quentin managed the Lighting and Mirrors department at Remmicks; how punishing can it have been? I’m sure I could sell lights and mirrors to people five days a week and still manage to put a slice of bread in the toaster at the weekend.

Raised voices are coming from the dining room. ‘No, listen,’ says William. ‘I’m older than Dinah, Dinah’s older than Nonie, Nonie’s older than Barney, so . . .’

‘Do “more beautiful than”,’ Dinah orders. ‘I’m . . . oh, no, that’s the same, isn’t it? Do “is keeping a secret from”.’

I have no idea what they’re talking about, but I can’t help wondering if Dinah’s thinking about secrets because of me.

Why don’t you just say you’d rather not tell me?

‘Amber? Your posh tea’s going cold!’ Jo bellows as if the hall is miles from the kitchen. Nothing is far enough away from anything else in this house. It’s one of the things I can’t stand about the place, and there are plenty of others. The small square multi-coloured tiles on the kitchen walls give me eye-ache. I’m generally in favour of colour, but here it’s abused. Each room is painted a different cheerful primary, like a nursery, and stuffed full of too-large, too-grand furniture, most of it antique and unsuited to a house that was built in 1995. You can’t take a step without falling over a heavy carved mahogany sideboard or an ornate walnut desk. Occasional tables jut out at odd angles to ensure that nobody can walk in a straight line. The kitchen has an oversized breakfast bar that protrudes into the middle of the room, surrounded by six high stools. Jo always orders me to sit on one, so that I can chat to her while she gets supper ready, and then she has to squeeze around me, muttering, ‘Sorry, if I could just move you slightly to one side . . .’ There is no side of the breakfast bar where I might sit and not need to be moved. If I sit on the window side, I’m in the way of the fridge; at the curved end, I’m blocking the dishwasher; on the hall side, I’m pressed up against the door to the pantry.

Kirsty is still making a racket upstairs. I hear Hilary trying to soothe her, much as I tried to soothe Nonie in the car. ‘Hi, Hilary,’ I call up to her. ‘Need a hand?’

Neil brushes past me on his way to the front door, phone still at his ear. He opens the door and steps out on to the pavement. ‘Right, I can hear you now,’ he says. He might have been furious with the guy he’s speaking to a minute or so ago, but he sounds suddenly upbeat, and I understand why: the restful hum of traffic from the road is a relief.

‘No, ta, we’re fine!’ Hilary calls down the stairs. ‘We’ll be down in a sec.’

Neil pulls the door shut behind him.

I find Jo in the kitchen, leafing through the local paper. She could have brought my tea out to me instead of letting it go cold, but she prefers it if I pay court to her in the place of her choosing.

I’m over-analysing again.

‘Have a high-chair,’ she says. It’s what she calls the breakfast bar stools.
Because she wants to turn everyone into her child.

Oh, give it a rest, for God’s sake.

‘Sabina just saved me from one of Quentin’s interminable narratives,’ I whisper.

‘She’s brilliant with him. She’s more of a nanny to him than to the boys these days.’

I make the agreeing noise I reserve for occasions when I disagree with Jo; it’s very similar to the noise I make when I agree with her, only quieter and less wholehearted. Whether Jo is aware of it or not, Sabina has never been a nanny to the boys, though that has been her job title from the start. As far as I can tell, her role here is indulged-older-daughter-cum-publicist-to-Jo. Jo has always tended to William and Barney’s every need while Sabina watches, awe-struck, and provides moral support, irrespective of the morality of what is being supported. When William hit another boy at playgroup, Sabina agreed with Jo that it was the other boy’s fault for provoking him. She celebrates, vocally, all Jo’s child-rearing decisions, and offers visitors a running commentary on what a wonderful mother Jo is, in between going for runs and massages and to English language lessons, which Jo always couches in terms of poor Sabina desperately needing a break.

Sabina is a skilful handler of both Quentin and Jo because they’re adults; it’s only children that she doesn’t have the first clue what to do with and is slightly afraid of. Luke and I have laughed till we’ve cried about the idea of her deciding to train to be a nanny. Still, the joke’s on us; Sabina must have known what we would never have believed: that there are people out there keen to spend their money on the illusion of childcare.