The Robber Bride (22 page)

Secretly Tony continued to write left-handed; but she felt guilty about it. She knew there must be something shameful about her left
hand or it would not have been humiliated like that. It was the hand she loved best, all the same.

It’s November, and the afternoon is already darkening. Earlier there was a dusting of snow, but now it’s drizzling. The drizzle runs down the living-room windows in icy, sinuous trickles; a few brown leaves are stuck to the outside of the glass like leather tongues.

Tony kneels on the chesterfield with her nose pressed against the window, making fog patches with her breath. When the patch is big enough she writes on it, squeakily, with her index finger. Then she rubs out the words.
Kcuf
, she writes. This is a word too bad even for her diary.
Tihs
. She writes these words with fear and awe, but also with a superstitious relish. They are Tnomerf Ynot words. They make her feel powerful, in charge of something.

She breathes and writes and rubs out, breathes and writes. The air is unfresh, filled with the dry, burnt smell of the chintz curtains. All the time she’s writing, she’s listening to the silence of the house behind her. She’s used to silences: she can distinguish between full silences and empty ones, between those that come before and those that come after. Just because there’s a silence it doesn’t mean that nothing is going on.

Tony kneels at the window as long as she dares. At last she sees her mother walking quickly along the street from the corner, head down against the drizzle, her fur collar turned up, her face hidden by her maroon hat. She’s carrying a wrapped package.

Probably it’s a dress, because clothes are a solace for Anthea; when she’s feeling “blue,” as she calls it, she goes shopping. Tony has been dragged downtown on these expeditions many times, when Anthea couldn’t figure out where else to stash her. She’s waited outside change rooms, sweating in her winter coat, while Anthea has tried things on and then more things, and has come out in her
stocking feet and done a pirouette in front of the full-length mirror, smoothing the cloth down over her hips. Anthea doesn’t often buy clothes for Tony; she says she could dress Tony in a potato sack and Tony wouldn’t notice. But Tony does notice, she notices a great deal. She just doesn’t think it would make any difference whether she wore a potato sack or not. Any difference to Anthea, that is.

Tony gets up from the chesterfield and begins her piano practice. Playing the piano is supposed to strengthen her right hand, though everyone including Tony knows that Tony isn’t musical and that these lessons will lead nowhere. How could they? Tony, with her little rodent paws, can’t even span an octave.

Tony practises doggedly, trying to keep time to the ticking metronome, and squinting at the music because she’s forgotten to turn on the piano lamp, and because, without realizing it, she’s becoming near-sighted. The piece she’s playing is called “Gavotte.”
Ettovag
. It’s a good word; she will think of a use for it, later. The piano reeks of lemon oil. Ethel, who comes in to clean, has been told not to polish the keys with it – she’s only supposed to use a damp cloth – but she pays no attention, and Tony’s fingers will smell of lemon oil for hours. It’s a formal smell, an adult smell, ominous. It comes before parties.

She hears the front door open and close, and feels the cold draft from it on her legs. After a few minutes her mother walks into the living room. Tony can hear the high heels, tapping on the hardwood floor, then muffled by the carpet. She plays on, banging the keys down to show her mother how studious she is.

“That’s enough for today, don’t you think, Tony?” her mother says gaily. Tony is puzzled: usually Anthea wants her to practise as long as possible. She wants her safely occupied, somewhere out of the way.

Tony stops playing and turns to look at her. She’s taken off her coat, but she still has her hat on, and, oddly, her matching maroon
gloves. The hat has a spotted half-veil that comes down over her eyes and part of her nose. Below the veil is her mouth, slightly blurred around the edges, as if her lipstick has run because of the rain. She puts her hands up behind her head, to unpin her hat.

“I haven’t done a half-hour yet,” says Tony. She still believes that the dutiful completion of pre-set tasks will cause her to be loved, although in some dim corner of herself she knows this hasn’t worked yet and most likely never will.

Anthea takes down her hands, leaving her hat in place. “Don’t you think you deserve a little holiday today?” she says, smiling at Tony. Her teeth are very white in the dim room.

“Why?” says Tony. She can see nothing special about this day. It isn’t her birthday.

Anthea sits down beside her on the piano bench and slides her left arm with its leather-gloved hand around Tony’s shoulders. She gives a little squeeze. “You poor thing,” she says. She puts the fingers of her other hand under Tony’s chin and turns her face up. The leather hand is lifeless and cool, like the hand of a doll.

“I want you to know,” she says, “that Mother truly, truly loves you.”

Tony pulls back within herself. Anthea has said this before. When she says it her breath smells the way it does now, of smoke and of the empty glasses left on the kitchen counter in the mornings after parties, and on other mornings as well. Glasses with damp cigarette butts in them, and broken glasses, on the floor.

She never says “I truly, truly love you.” It’s always
Mother
, as if Mother is someone else.

Rehtom
, thinks Tony.
Evol
. The metronome ticks on.

Anthea gazes down at her, holding onto her with her two gloved hands. In the semi-dark her eyes behind the spots of her veil are sooty black, bottomless; her mouth is tremulous. She bends over and presses her cheek to Tony’s, and Tony feels the rasp of the veil
and the damp, creamy skin under it, and smells her, a smell of violet perfume and underarms mixed with dress cloth, and a salty, eggy smell, like strange mayonnaise. She doesn’t know why Anthea is acting like this, and she’s embarrassed. All Anthea does normally is kiss her goodnight, a little peck; she’s shaking all over, and for a moment Tony thinks – hopes – it’s with laughter.

Then she lets go of Tony and gets up and moves to the window, and stands with her back turned, unpinning her hat really this time. She takes it off and throws it down on the sofa, and fluffs out her dark hair at the back. After a moment she kneels and looks out. “Who’s been making all these smudges?” she says, in a higher, tighter voice. It’s the voice she uses for mimicking happiness, when she’s angry with Tony’s father and wants to show him she doesn’t care. She knows the smudges are Tony’s. Ordinarily she’d be irritated, she’d make some remark about how much it costs to have Ethel clean the windows, but this time she laughs, breathlessly, as if she’s been running.

“Nose marks, just like a dog. Guppy, you are such a funny child.”

Guppy
is a name from long ago. Anthea’s story is that she called Tony that right after she was born, because of her time in the incubator. Anthea would come and look at Tony through the glass, and Tony’s mouth would be opening and closing but there wouldn’t be any sound. Or Anthea said she couldn’t hear any. She kept the name because later, when Tony was out of danger and she’d taken her home, Tony scarcely cried; she just opened and closed her mouth. Anthea tells this story as if it’s funny.

This nickname – enclosed by quotation marks – is pencilled in below Tony’s baby pictures, in Anthea’s white leather
My Baby
photo album: “ ‘Guppy,’ 18 months”; “ ‘Guppy’ and Me”; “ ‘Guppy’ and her Dad.” After a while Anthea must have stopped taking these pictures, or stopped sticking them in, because there are just blank pages.

Tony feels a rush of longing for whatever it was that existed once between herself and her mother, in the photo album; but she feels
annoyance as well, because the name itself is a trick. She used to think a guppy was something warm and soft, like a puppy, and she was hurt and insulted when she discovered it was a fish.

So she doesn’t answer her mother. She sits on the piano bench, waiting to see what Anthea will do next.

“Is he here?” she says. She must know the answer: Tony’s father wouldn’t have left Tony in the house alone.

“Yes,” says Tony. Her father is in his study at the back of the house. He’s been there all along. He must have heard the silence, when Tony wasn’t playing. He doesn’t care whether Tony practises the piano or not. The piano, he says, is her mother’s bright idea.

22

T
ony’s mother cooks supper as usual. She doesn’t take off her good bridge club dress, but puts her apron over it, her best apron, the white one with ruffles over the shoulders. She has re-done her lipstick: her mouth shines like a waxed apple. Tony sits on the kitchen stool, watching her, until Anthea tells her to stop goggling: if she wants to be useful she can set the table. Then she can go and dig up her father. Anthea often puts it this way:
dig up
, as if he’s a potato. Sometimes she says
root out
.

Tony has no particular desire to be useful, but she’s relieved that her mother is acting more normally. She deals out the plates and then the forks, knives, and spoons, a left right right, a left right right, and then she goes into her father’s study, knocking first, and sits down cross-legged on the floor. She can always go in there as long as she keeps quiet.

Her father is working at his desk. He has his desk lamp on, with its green shade, so his face has a greenish tinge. He’s a large man with small neat handwriting that looks as if it’s been done by fastidious mice. Beside it, Tony’s own writing is that of a three-fingered
giant. His long arrow nose is pointing straight down at the papers he’s working on; his yellowy-grey hair is combed back, and the nose and the hair together make him seem as if he’s flying through a strong headwind, hurtling down towards the target of his paper. He’s frowning, as if braced for the impact. Tony is dimly aware that he isn’t happy; but happiness isn’t something she expects, in men. He never complains about not having it; unlike her mother.

His yellow pencil twiddles. He has a jarful of these pencils on his desk, kept very sharp. Sometimes he asks Tony to sharpen them for him; she turns them one by one in the businesslike sharpener clamped to the windowsill, feeling that she’s preparing his arrows. What he does with these pencils is beyond her, but she knows that it’s something of the utmost importance. More important – for instance – than she is.

Her father’s name is Griff, but she doesn’t think of him as
Griff
, the way she thinks of her mother as
Anthea
. He’s somewhat more like the other fathers, whereas Anthea isn’t very much like the other mothers, although occasionally she tries to be. (Griff is not her Dad, though. Griff is not a
Dad.)

Griff was in the war. Anthea says that although he may have been in it, he didn’t go
through
it, the way she did. Her parents’ house in London was destroyed by a bomb during the Blitz and her parents were both killed. She’d come home – where had she been? She has never said – to find nothing but a crater, one standing wall, and a pile of rubble; and her own mother’s shoe, with a foot in it.

But Griff missed all that. He only got into it at D-Day.
(It
meaning the danger, the killing; not the training, the waiting, the fooling around.) He was there for the landing, the advance, the easy bit, says Anthea. The winning.

Tony likes to think of him like that – winning – like someone winning a race. Victorious. He has not been noticeably victorious
lately. But Anthea says
the easy bit
in front of people, in front of their friends when they come over for drinks and Tony watches from doorways. Anthea says
the easy bit
, looking straight at Griff with her chin up, and he turns red.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says.

“He never does,” says Anthea with mock despair, lifting her shoulders. It’s the same gesture she makes when Tony refuses to play the piano for the bridge club.

“At the end it was just children,” says Griff. “Children, in men’s uniforms. We were killing children.”

“Lucky you,” says Anthea lightly. “That must have made it smoother for you.”

“It didn’t,” says Tony’s father. They stare at each other as if no one else is in the room: tense and measuring.

“He liberated a gun,” says Anthea. “Didn’t you, darling? He’s got it in his study. I wonder if the gun feels
liberated.”
She gives a dismissive laugh, and turns away. A silence eddies behind her.

That was how Anthea and Griff met – during the war, when he was in England.
Stationed
in England, Anthea would say; so Tony pictures the two of them in a train station, waiting to depart. It would have been a winter train station; they had on their overcoats and her mother was wearing a hat, and their breath was turning to white fog as it came out of their mouths. Were they kissing, as in pictures? It’s not clear. Perhaps they were going on the train together, perhaps not. They had a lot of suitcases. There are always a lot of suitcases in the story of Tony’s parents.

“I was a war bride,” Anthea says; she gives a self-deprecating smile, and then a sigh. She says
war bride
as if she’s making fun of it – minor-key, rueful fun. What does she mean to imply? That she has
fallen prey to an old trick, an old confidence trick, and knows it now and deplores it? That Tony’s father took advantage of her in some way? That it was the fault of the war?

The
raw. A raw bride
, thinks Tony. Uncooked. Or, more like it:
rubbed raw
, like her own wrists by the frozen cuffs of her snowsuit.

“I was a war husband,” her father says; or used to say, back when he still made jokes. He also said that he’d picked Anthea up in a dance hall. Anthea didn’t like that.

“Griff, don’t be vulgar,” she would say.

“Men were scarce,” he would add, to the audience. (There was usually an audience for these exchanges. They rarely said such things when they were alone.) “She had to grab what she could get.”