The Other Woman’s House (18 page)

I start to tell Sam Kombothekra about the first row Kit and I ever had. It was about Cambridge. We'd been together for nearly a month.

Kit didn't mean to start a fight; he was trying to pay me a compliment. Technically I was probably the one who started the row, though it didn't feel that way at the time. We were walking back from Thorrold House to Kit's rented two-bedroom flat in Rawndesley; we'd been to Mum and Dad's for lunch. It was about the fifth or sixth time Kit had met my family. It took him nine years to pluck up the courage to ask if he might sometimes be excused from the several visits a week that he could see were required of me.

My father, wanting to impress Kit, had suggested opening a particular bottle of wine that had been given to him two years previously by a grateful Monk & Sons customer. I know nothing about wine, and neither does Dad, but the customer had led him to believe that there was something special about this bottle – it was either very old or very valuable or both. Neither of my parents could recall the precise details, but whatever the customer had told them had been sufficient to impress on them the foolhardiness of opening the wine and drinking it, so instead they had consigned it to a safe place – so safe that when Dad decided that the arrival of a well-spoken
Oxbridge-educated potential son-in-law at his dinner table was an occasion that merited the unleashing of the antique wine's magic powers, neither he nor Mum could remember where they'd put it. Kit tried to tell them it didn't matter, that he'd prefer water or apple juice, as he was driving, but Dad insisted that the special bottle must be found, which meant that Mum had to leave her food to go cold while she ransacked first the cellar and then the house. The rest of us followed Dad's lead and carried on eating. ‘If you don't tuck in while it's piping hot, Val'll have your guts for garters,' Dad told Kit, who felt uncomfortable starting without Mum. Fran, Anton and I were used to it. Dad often decides he needs Mum to go and get something for him just as she's about to sit down to eat. I think he looks at the food on her plate, panics slightly about how long it's going to be before she's next available to attend to him, and decides he might as well get his most pressing requests in early.

As we ate, we heard loud panting and a series of small groans coming from beyond the kitchen; Mum wanted us to know exactly what it was costing her to search for the sacred plonk. I could see that Kit was tense, feeling responsible even though he wasn't. Then Mum called out, ‘Oh, for heaven's sake! Cotton-wool brain strikes again. I know where I put it.' We listened as a door creaked open. It was a creak Fran and I knew as well as we knew each other; it had been part of Thorrold House's soundtrack since we were children. Dad laughed and said to Kit, ‘The cupboard under the stairs – I don't know why she didn't look there straight away. That's where I'd have started. It's the obvious place.'

‘Pity you didn't share that insight with Mum,' Fran said pointedly. ‘You'd have saved her about half an hour of her life
– her
only
life.' I remember wondering if she was angry because Dad was fawning over Kit and ignoring Anton, who wasn't Oxbridge-educated, whose parents lived in a static caravan on the outskirts of Combingham.

A few seconds later, there was a thud and a stifled scream. The special wine wasn't all Mum had found in the cupboard under the stairs. We all rushed out into the hall. She was on her hands and knees, leaning over a cardboard box. Inside was a lumpy black mess, part solid but mainly liquid. The smell was overpowering; it made me gag. ‘What's that when it's at home?' Dad asked, bending to pick up the hallowed bottle, which, in her shock, Mum had dropped.

‘I think it must have been a cabbage,' she said. ‘I remember putting a cabbage in there ages ago, in a box…'

‘Well, it's not a cabbage any more,' said Dad, elbowing Kit in the ribs as if to say, ‘Another hilarious episode in the life of the Monk family!'

‘I'll get rid of it for you, Val,' said Anton. He moved my mother to one side like a bomb-disposal expert preparing to secure the scene.

‘Anton to the rescue,' said Dad for Kit's benefit, as if Kit might not understand what was going on; subtitles might be required. ‘There's no one better in a crisis.'

‘Yup,' Fran muttered. ‘When it comes to disposing of decaying vegetables, no one can touch him.'

I looked at Kit, dreading the disgust I was sure I'd see on his face. He grinned at me and widened his eyes in a secret signal, as if to say, ‘We'll talk about this later.' I smiled at him, grateful because he'd made me feel like a fellow outsider, not part of the Thorrold House madness. Not implicated.

We all watched as Anton opened the front door and carried
the box containing the former cabbage outside. ‘Right.' Dad clapped his hands together. ‘Back to what matters: food and wine.'

We ate our cold lasagne – which Dad kept insisting was still ‘piping hot' and Mum kept threatening to heat up in the microwave – drank the wine, which was nice but nothing spectacular, then drank some ordinary wine when the over-hyped stuff had run out. Dad carped at Mum for dropping the bottle on the carpet, rotten cabbage or no rotten cabbage, because ‘it could easily have smashed', even though it hadn't. Kit tried not to let Dad fill his glass again and again, Dad bored me and Fran and shocked Kit with his views on drinking and driving: ‘As far as I'm concerned, if you can't drive responsibly when you've had a few, you're not fit to drive at all. A good driver's a good driver, tipsy or sober.'

Then, apropos nothing, Mum burst into tears and ran from the room. Taken aback, we listened to her weeping as she ran upstairs. Dad turned to Fran. ‘What's the matter with her? Too much vino, do you think?'

‘Dunno,' said Fran. ‘Why don't you make her drive up and down the A1 for a few hours? If she crashes, she's pissed. If she doesn't, she isn't. Or is it the other way round, according to you?'

‘Go and check on her,' said Dad. ‘One of you. Connie?'

I stared down at my plate, resolutely ignoring him. Fran sighed and went off in search of Mum.

Dad said, ‘We'll have a nice cup of tea in a minute, and pudding – apple and rhubarb crumble, I think it is.' He meant that we would have both when Mum came downstairs. I bit back the urge to say to Kit, ‘My dad might suck up to you and force his best wine down you, but he will never, ever make you
a cup of tea, no matter how many years you spend sitting at his kitchen table, no matter how thirsty you are.'

At that moment, it struck me as a form of cruelty: to know and supposedly love someone – your own daughter – and yet never to have offered them a cup of tea or coffee in thirty-four years, unless it was with the certainty that someone else would make it.

Fran reappeared, looking annoyed. ‘She says she'll be down in a minute. She's upset about the cabbage.'

‘Why, for goodness' sake?' Dad was impatient.

Fran shrugged. ‘I couldn't get much out of her. You want more information, ask her yourself.'

A few minutes later, Mum swept into the kitchen wearing newly applied make-up and started talking with manic cheeriness about crumble and custard. The rotten cabbage wasn't mentioned again.

Two hours later, after pudding and tea, we were able to escape. As diplomatically as possible, Kit fielded Dad's attempts to insist that he drive home despite having had four large glasses of wine. He left his car outside Thorrold House – he completely agreed with Dad about drink-driving, of course he did, but there was the fuddy-duddy traffic police to consider – and we walked back to Rawndesley, which took an hour and a half. We hardly noticed; we were busy discussing my family.

‘Fran kept savaging your dad, and he didn't respond at all,' said Kit, animated and full of life now that we were free. ‘He didn't even notice. It was hilarious. She's like a Culver Valley Dorothy Parker. If I spoke to my dad like that, even once, he'd cut me out of his will.' Kit was still on reasonable terms with his parents at that point.

‘Who's Dorothy Parker?' I asked.

Kit laughed; he obviously assumed I was joking.

‘No, really,' I said. ‘Who is she?'

‘A famous funny person,' said Kit. ‘“When it comes to disposing of decaying vegetables, no one can touch him.” Those are the very words Dorothy Parker would have used, I reckon. Your dad didn't get it at all – that Fran was taking the piss out of him for damning Anton with the faintest of faint praise: “There's no one better in a crisis.” True, as long as all that's needed to resolve the crisis is for someone to carry some decomposing food to the bin. That was the only time your dad acknowledged Anton's existence all afternoon, he was so busy ingratiating himself with me. No wonder Fran was pissed off.'

‘I'm sorry about the smelly cabbage,' I said solemnly, and we both burst into yelps of laughter. It was a cold February day – getting on for night – and it had started to rain, which made us laugh even more: thanks to Dad and his special wine, we were going to get soaked.

‘It's obvious why your mum got so upset about the artist formerly known as cabbage,' said Kit, trying to keep a straight face.

‘She can't stand any kind of waste,' I told him. ‘That's twenty pence she could have saved last year.'

‘She was mortified that it had happened in front of me. If only she'd said so, I could have reassured her that I couldn't care less. Far be it from me to think badly of someone who keeps rancid liquefied vegetable matter in a…' He couldn't say any more; he was laughing too much.

Once we'd composed ourselves, I said, ‘It's not that, what you said. Yes, she'll have been embarrassed, but that wasn't why she had that weird meltdown. Appearances are important to Mum, but control is her God. She works so hard to be in
control of every aspect of her life and world, and most of the time she succeeds. Time stands still for her, the world shrinks to the size of Thorrold House's kitchen, the universe's energy flow stops in its tracks – it knows better than to argue with Val Monk. And then she finds a cabbage that's been there for months if not years – that's been, unbeknownst to her, turning all squelchy and stinky and black, and she had no idea. And then it makes an unscheduled appearance one afternoon when she's got guests. She tries to move on and pretend it hasn't bothered her, but she can't get past it. The cabbage is evidence she can't ignore – evidence that she's not in charge. The forces of death and decay are on the march, they're the ones running the show. They're inside the building, and not even my sensible organised mother, with her “recipes for the week” notebook and her meticulously filled-in birthdays calendar, can keep them at bay.'

Kit was staring at me. He wasn't laughing any more.

‘Sorry,' I said. ‘When I drink too much, I talk too much.'

‘I could listen to you talking for the rest of my life,' he said.

‘Really? In that case, you're wrong about Fran too.'

‘She's not the Culver Valley's answer to Dorothy Parker?'

‘She wasn't having a go at Dad, though she'd probably pretend she was if I asked her about it.
She
was the one damning Anton with faint praise. She loves him, don't get me wrong, but I think sometimes she wishes he…I don't know, had a bit more to him.'

‘Why didn't you go to university?' Kit asked me.

The sudden change of subject surprised me. ‘I told you: none of my friends were going, and Mum and Dad had offered me a well-paid job at the shop.'

‘You're incredibly bright and perceptive, Connie. You could
be a lot more than your parents' book-keeper if you wanted to. You could go far – really far. Further than Little Holling, Silsford.' He stopped walking and made me stop too. It struck me as wonderfully romantic that he'd bring us to a standstill in the rain in order to tell me I was brilliant and full of potential.

‘My teachers at school almost got down on their knees and begged me to think about university, but…I was suspicious of it, I suppose. Still am. Why spend three years being ordered to read certain books by people who think they know more than you do, when you can choose for yourself what you want to read and educate yourself without anyone's help – and without paying for it?'

Kit brushed a droplet of rain off my face. ‘That's exactly the sort of philistine thinking I'd expect from someone whose education was prematurely curtailed at the age of eighteen.'

‘Sixteen,' I told him. ‘I didn't do A-levels either.'

‘Bloody hell,' he said. ‘Next you'll tell me you were raised by wolves.'

‘Do you know how many books I read last year? A hundred and two. I write them all down in a little notebook—'

‘You should go to university,' Kit talked over me. ‘Now, as a mature student. Connie, you'd love it, I know you would. Cambridge was the best thing that ever happened to me – without a shadow of a doubt, the best three years of my life. I…' He stopped.

‘What? Kit?'

I noticed that he wasn't looking at me any more. He was looking past me, or through me, seeing another time and another place. He turned away from me, as if he didn't want my presence to interfere with whatever he was remembering. Then he must have realised what he'd done, because he made
a concerted effort to bring himself back. I saw that look in his eyes, the same one I saw ten years later, in January, when I asked him why 11 Bentley Grove was programmed into his SatNav as his home address: guilt, fear, shame. He'd been caught out. He tried to make a joke of it. ‘The second best thing that ever happened to me,' he said quickly, reddening. ‘You're the best thing, Con.'

‘Who was she?' I asked.

‘No one. That wasn't…No one.'