The Water's Lovely (3 page)

For some time now he had been standing up to her. Long before he met Heather he went home for a meal with his friend, the hospice palliative care doctor, Ian Dell, and saw Ian with his own mother. He had never imagined that his strong-minded decisive friend could be so enfeebled and conciliatory, and under the rule of a parent, as Ian was. Mrs Dell was a little old crone (as Edmund put it unkindly to himself) quite unlike Irene Litton, but their dictatorial manner was similar. It seemed to him that Ian yielded in almost everything to Mrs Dell, even apologising to Edmund afterwards for having refused – very gently – to take a day off from
the hospice next day to drive her to see her sister in Rickmansworth.

‘I expect you think I should have taken her,' he said. ‘I do have time off owing to me and we aren't that busy at the moment, are we? But I suppose I felt, rather selfishly, that it might be the thin end of the wedge. I'll make it up to her. I'll take her for a day out somewhere at the weekend.'

In Ian Edmund had seen himself mirrored. He must change. If he failed to take a stand now when he was only a little over thirty, it would be too late. Although he and Heather had never discussed his mother, somehow it was Heather's presence in his life that helped him. Gave him confidence and cheered his heart. So when Irene told him – told, not asked him – to come with her to his aunt and uncle in Ealing on the first free Saturday he'd had for a month, he took a deep breath and said no, he'd be busy. The ensuing argument became acrimonious and culminated in his mother having a panic attack. But it is the first step that counts, as Edmund kept telling himself, and after that things gradually got easier. He would be able to tell her about the planned weekend and its purpose and, he thought, screwing up his nerve, she would just have to get on with it.

When he first asked Heather out for a drink with him he had hardly thought of their relationship as coming to much. A few weeks, he gave it, and no sex because there never was. Besides, Heather hadn't really had much attraction for him. She was a better prospect than white-faced, skinny, crimson-haired Marion, but almost anyone would have been. Now, though, they had been out for drinks, three meals, two cinemas, one theatre and to a food-through-the-ages exhibition she had been keen on, and he looked at her with new eyes.

One evening she said to him, ‘I'm a silent person. I talk to my sister but not much to others. I can talk to you.'

He was enormously touched. ‘I'm glad.'

‘It's easy with you because you don't say stupid things. It's nice.'

He saw her home to Clapham. When he didn't leave her at Embankment but came the whole way, she said, ‘You're so kind to me. I don't much like walking home from the station on my own.'

‘Of course I'm coming with you,' he said and when they began to walk along the edge of the Common, he took her hand.

It was a warm hand with a strong clasp. He looked into her face under the lamplight and saw her eyes fixed on him, large blue eyes, opaque and cloudy as the glaze on pottery. Then there were the other markers, more obvious to any man, her full breasts and rounded hips, her plump lips and that hair, that glossy, dense, radiant hair whose colour varied from flaxen through cornfield to eighteen-carat gold. She never wasted words but when she did speak her voice was soft and low, and her rare smiles lit her face and made her pretty.

The house where she lived was much bigger than he expected, a detached house in a row of others like it but the only one with a glazed-in walkway from the gates to the steps and with stone pineapples on the gateposts. Lights were on upstairs and down.

‘My sister Ismay and I have the ground floor, and my mother and her sister the top.' She stopped at the foot of the steps, keeping hold of his hand. ‘Ismay and her boyfriend', she said softly, ‘will be away next weekend.'

‘Can I take you out on Friday?'

She lifted her face and in the gleaming half-dark he thought he had never seen anyone look so trusting. He
brought his mouth to hers and kissed her the way he'd been kissing her these past few weeks but something new in her response made him ardent, passionate, breathless when their faces parted. She held him tightly.

‘Heather,' he said. ‘Darling Heather.'

‘Come for the weekend.'

He nodded. ‘I'll look forward to it so much.'

Edmund said to his mother, ‘I shall be away for the weekend, back on Sunday.'

They had just sat down to eat. Irene lifted her first forkful, set it down again. ‘You never go away for the weekend.'

‘No, it's time I started.'

‘Where are you going?'

‘To Clapham.'

‘You don't have to go away to go to Clapham. Clapham's in London. Whatever you're doing in Clapham you can do it in the daytime and come back here to sleep.'

Strength came to him from somewhere. From Heather? ‘I am going to spend the weekend in Heather's flat.'

Edmund continued to eat. His mother had stopped. She shook her head infinitesimally from side to side, said, ‘Oh, Edmund, Edmund, I didn't think you were that sort of man.'

He was still wary of her, but he contrasted how he now was and how he had been. There was a world of difference. His efforts had paid off and there was no doubt that now he sometimes got amusement out of their confrontations. ‘What sort of man, Mother?'

‘Don't pretend you don't know what I mean.'

‘I am going away for the weekend with my girlfriend, Mother. I don't suppose you want me to go into details.'
It was the first time he had referred to Heather as his girlfriend. Doing so now seemed to bring him closer to her. ‘And now I'd like to finish my dinner.'

‘I'm afraid I can't eat any more,' Irene said, leaning back in her chair and taking deep breaths. ‘I feel rather unwell. It is probably the start of a migraine.'

Edmund wanted to say something on the lines of, ‘You always do feel ill when I say anything to cross you,' or even, ‘It couldn't be psychosomatic, could it?' But he stayed silent, unwilling to argue further with her or defend himself (God forbid). Of course she would revert to the matter again – and again.

She did so at the moment he laid his knife and fork diagonally across his empty plate. ‘I shall be all alone in this house.'

‘Unless you can get Marion to stay.'

‘It's hard when you're my age and not strong.'

‘Mother,' he said, ‘you have a good neighbour in Mr Fenix next door and good neighbours opposite. You have a landline and a mobile phone. You are only sixty-two and there is nothing wrong with you.' Even six months ago he couldn't have summoned the strength to say that.

‘Nothing wrong with me!' The words were repeated on a note of ironic laughter. ‘It is extraordinary how one's good little children can grow up so callous. When you were first put into my arms, a tiny child, after all I went through to give you life, I never dreamed you would repay my suffering with this kind of treatment, never.'

‘I'll get Marion on the phone for you, shall I, and you can ask her?'

‘Oh, no, no. I can't become dependent on strangers. I shall have to bear it alone. Please God I won't be ill.'

In the event, Edmund left for Clapham on Friday but only after more battles. Irene ‘went down' with a
cold the evening before. It was a real cold. Unlike acid indigestion, which needs only one's word for it, sneezes and a running nose cannot be faked. Irene pointed out that it was only three weeks since she had had her last cold. It was a well-known fact that ‘cold upon cold' was the precursor of pneumonia. She had had it as a child as the result of a series of colds,
double
pneumonia.

‘You aren't going to get pneumonia, Mother,' said Edmund, the nurse.

Discouraging whisky toddies, he made her a honey-and-lemon drink and advised aspirin every four hours. ‘You're not a doctor,' she said, as she so often did. ‘I ought to be having antibiotics.'

‘A cold is a virus and antibiotics don't work against viruses.'

‘It will be a virus all right when I get viral pneumonia.'

Irene Litton was a tall, well-built woman, having much the same sort of figure as Heather Sealand. Edmund had noticed this and refused to draw the psychologist's conclusion, that he was attracted by women who looked like his mother. In any case, the resemblance ended there for Irene's hair was dark, barely yet touched with grey, and though English through and through, she had much the same features as Maria Callas: large, aquiline, striking. She was aware of this herself and had been heard to say that she might have had the same operatic success if she had only been able to have her voice trained. She dressed in draped or trailing clothes in strong jewel colours, wine-red, sapphire, deep-green or purple, mostly with fringes, hung with strings of beads she made herself, and she moved slowly, straight-backed, head held high. Her usual good health suited her type and she was at her worst when red-nosed and sniffing.

Marion noticed at once and poured out sympathy. She had arrived just before Edmund left for the weekend – timed her arrival, he thought, for he was sure that his mother had invited her, in spite of her avowals that she had not. That she knew where he was going and with whom he was also pretty sure of, for while they were alone together in the hall, before she danced in to see Irene, she gave him a look of deep reproach, half smiling, yet sad. ‘I brought some of my own-make fairy cakes,' she said. ‘Fairy cakes have come right back into fashion, you know. They're such comforting food and she'll need comfort.'

When he had walked down the path and let himself out of the garden gate, he looked back to see them both watching him from the bay window. Those women were sure to make him the principal subject of their conversation, thoughtless, immoral, unfilial, callous and not a doctor. His ears ought to be burning all the evening. He was determined not to let thinking of it blight his weekend and it didn't.

Letting fall the beige damask curtain and returning to the fireside – a realistic-looking gas fire of smouldering yet everlasting coals and logs with flickering flames – Marion bustled about, feeling Irene's forehead, refilling her water carafe, fetching echinacea drops and cough lozenges, and finally thrusting a thermometer into her mouth.

‘You'd have thought Edmund would have done all this,' said Marion.

‘Hmm-mm-hmm-hmm.'

‘After all, he is a nurse.'

‘Mm-hmm-hmm,' more vehemently.

The thermometer reading was normal.

‘It can't be!'

‘Maybe there's something wrong with it. I'll try again later, shall I? Or shall I run out and see if I can get
another one from the all-night pharmacist? Or I could run home and fetch mine.'

‘Would you, Marion? You're so good to me. I'm beginning to think of you as my daughter, you know. Or – dare I say it? – my might-have-been daughter-in-law.'

Marion ran to the station, changed her mind and ran home through the winding streets to the Finchley Road. She ran everywhere, just as she talked all the time. Though she had made an attempt at courting him, Edmund's defection hadn't troubled her as much as Irene believed. What she wanted was not a young man's desire but the devotion and admiration of elderly people with money. As well as Irene, she had old Mr Hussein and old Mrs Reinhardt, her sights on a couple of others and she had had old Mrs Pringle, only old Mrs Pringle had died last year. If she hadn't bequeathed her enormous house in Fitzjohn's Avenue to Marion, she had left her a large sum of money and some very nice jewellery. This had enabled Marion to buy the ground floor and basement flat of the house in Lithos Road she now entered to find a thermometer. Since she was obsessively neat – a place for everything and everything in its place – she found it at once in the bathroom cabinet on the shelf next to the brown bottle of morphine sulphate, and she skipped back to get the tube this time, one stop to West Hampstead and Irene.

Heather would be shy and perhaps nervous, Edmund had believed. She might even be a virgin. As he made his way by Jubilee Line and Northern Line to Clapham, the joyful anticipation he had felt earlier in the week began to fade and he wondered if she was so inexperienced that he would have to – no, surely not, teach her. The idea was enough to chill him in highly undesirable ways. For one thing, he was sure he was
incapable of educating a woman in the art of love and for another, suppose she was unresponsive and frightened. He told himself, as the train came in to Clapham South, that he wasn't in love with her – maybe it would be easier if he were – and that if this split them up rather than consolidating their relationship, it wouldn't be the end of the world. There were other women to be found. Marion wasn't the only alternative.

But as he climbed the steps under the glass canopy he remembered the kiss she had given him and that look of utter trust when she took his hand. Here at the top the lower doorbell said, I. and H. Sealand, the upper one, Sealand and Viner. He pressed the bell and as he waited found quite suddenly that he was longing to see her, that when she answered the door he would take her in his arms.

Things were very different from what he expected while in the train. Once he was over his amazement, he found himself with a passionate partner, enthusiastic and uninhibited. Not silent and calm as she was when they were out together or she was busy in the kitchens of the hospice, but yielding yet active, sweetly tireless and delightfully greedy, promising an inventiveness to come. If education were needful, she was the teacher, not he.

‘The first time is never good,' she said at some satiated moment. ‘Or that's what they say. But ours was, very good.'

From thinking of her as the ‘blocking tackle' that defended him from Marion, a girl with a good figure and not much to say for herself, he had come to be enchanted by her. Leaving her on Sunday afternoon with passionate embraces – he had no wish to meet the sister and her boyfriend – he found himself making a date for the Monday evening and the Tuesday. Both
made faces in mock despair over having nowhere to go, then laughed at their own absurdity.