Action Man.
Later Isabel could only remember that she tried to follow Jon into the water. She had to speak to Mark before Jon did. She would remember that Gina had held on to her and that they had struggled violently in the shallow end as Jon kept bobbing to the surface gasping. Again and again he dived down to the car in a futile effort to pull his father-in-law free and to save his life.
Isabel had no words to explain that she had had to know that Mark had battled frantically to get himself out from the submerged car. She needed to believe he had wanted to stay with her but had got trapped behind the wheel. There was no way of saying any of this because she knew it wasn’t true.
Gina had been right; her mother’s shrill howl had signalled the end.
After the arrival of the emergency services, the violent attempts to resuscitate Mark on the slippery paving amidst a gaggle of garden furniture and sodden paraphernalia, the eventual removal of his body and the stolid arrival of Lucian from London, demanding the return of his father to life, someone had complained that a huge cardboard box had been dumped right by the front door entirely blocking the porch.
It was Isabel’s long-awaited luxury lounger.
Twelve
Alice traced the pattern on the lace curtain, as if trying to find a Braille message assuring her she wasn’t alone. She sank back into her chair, the message was prosaic: the lace was in need of a wash. In mounting despair, she looked around the room seeing other things that needed a good scrub, a thorough polish. Her despondency increased, for really the whole flat should be spring-cleaned, but spring had passed, it was a sweltering hot Monday afternoon in June, too hot to move, too hot to think.
Alice’s view through the greying curtain was much the same as James Stewart’s in Rear Window. Rows of windows, mostly like her own screened from prying eyes by net curtains or blinds, filled the frame. But there were still many tenants who were oblivious or unworried about creating a tableau of their lives for all to see. Their windows were flung wide and after dark were brightly lit. For these Alice was grateful. She watched the young mother, who had yesterday had her long black hair cut short, tend her window boxes or pace around the room pacifying her baby. Three windows along and one up was the woman with the iron-grey pudding bowl haircut who Chris said worked in the supermarket on the main road. When she was at home she sat motionless at her desk in the far corner of the room in a pool of angle-poise light working late into the night. Alice had to be careful not to be seen by her, as she would jump up without warning and come to the window where she would stand utterly still for a long time just staring out. Below was a wide concrete yard closed in on opposite sides by the two six-storey Victorian flats in the middle of which stood the new estate office. The other flats cut out most of the traffic noise from the Old Kent Road beyond, but also shut out the evening sunlight and curtailed her view. To her left was a twenty-foot brick wall topped with spikes upon which on her bad days Alice would impale the heads of her enemies. This wall segregated the estate from the Baptist church next door. Now, as on many days, Alice could hear the sound of a packed congregation singing.
‘…This is the day the Lord has made, that all may see his love displayed…’
To her right was The World Turned Upside Down from whose juke box Manchester United’s song ‘Lift It High’ mingled discordantly with the strains of the church choir.
Alice was forty, but today she felt eighty.
The lace curtains had soaked up London’s grime, the pattern of usually fluffy birds perched in repetition on twisty branches down its length – a design she had chosen more for company than appearance – had wind blown feathers. They too looked tired and old. Alice was an empty barn, with patches of her roof missing. Ravens flapped back and forth, wings smacking against the creaking rafters of her ribs. If she were ill, who would care? But if the ravens abandoned her, would that spell doom?
The obvious answer to the first question was Alice’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Chris. Nevertheless the cloud of self pity conjured up by this scenario enveloped Alice in deeper gloom.
On her bad days Alice would picture herself working through the tasks she had set herself in advance of doing them. She would sit as now, in her armchair looking out through the lace at the concrete quadrangle below, and plan her chores and activities, anticipating potential problems and contemplating how to overcome them. So detailed were Alice’s mental campaigns that when she came to do the tasks, she performed them perfectly with no extraneous elements or movement. This ruthless efficiency made her impatient when Chris made one small mistake. As a mistake could be that Chris had chosen a different way to achieve the same end, this meant Alice was frequently annoyed with her daughter. Their relationship was fraught with mutual frustration.
Sometimes Alice imagined completed tasks so vividly, she was bewildered to discover the washing basket full or, as in this case, the curtains dirty. Then her sense of control would slip and jerk through clenched fists. Alice had to breathe in and out, in and out until the panic passed, then struggle to her bedroom, brushing the walls for balance and reassurance and tapping the door frame an ever increasing number of set times before she could lie still and regain her composure. That morning she had told Chris she would have to go to the launderette after supper. Chris had been sulky, so that it was almost not worth asking. Except they both knew that Chris had no choice.
‘No one understands what it’s like not being able to nip down the shops for a pint of milk.’
‘No one believes I’m ill because I have a natural bloom to my skin.’
Everyone adored Chris. Chattering voices down the telephone, scribbled school reports and holiday postcards – Wish you had been able to come – told Alice how Chris was kind and always smiling. They all marvelled at how lucky Alice was to have such a clever, thoughtful daughter. Those who came into the flat, the doctor, the woman about agoraphobia, the community dentist, all of them said Chris was like her mother. Alice knew Chris was the spit image of herself so that much was true. She liked the notion that they could be sisters. The doctor had said Alice couldn’t be old enough to have such a grownup daughter. Although she had appreciated the comment, she had been anxious in case he was flirting or worse, judging. Alice wished she looked how she felt, because then people might be more sympathetic. She had no respect for the agoraphobic specialist because she had failed to spot the truth about Alice and must therefore be a fake too. Compliments about her wonderful complexion, or the lustre in her hair annoyed Alice because they meant people didn’t appreciate how it was for her.
But then Alice went to great pains to ensure they did not.
She imagined people beyond the archway of the flats leading to the Old Kent Road – the extent of her world – admiring Chris for caring for her sick mother. On good days Alice basked in the dreams where they praised her too, disbelieving that she coped with a chronic illness while running a home, being a mother and an expert at invisible mending.
Alice invented faces for the invisible people in her daughter’s life most of whom she had never met: teachers, bus conductors, friends and their parents who seldom rang now that Chris was older. There was one mother she had liked who if things had been different might even have been a friend. She was usually smoking when she called which would normally have revolted Alice, but the mellifluous speech punctuated by sucking and puffing was warm and caressing. Alice would see smoke rings rising around the woman’s head as she talked, the phone propped on her shoulder, a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. When she had reluctantly to end a conversation with this woman, Alice would briefly be content, then filled with anguish at her fettered state. This was some years ago and now she couldn’t think of her name and anyway the woman didn’t telephone any more. It was the busy, fussy lady who wanted to take her daughter to France one half term who had riled Alice the most.