It was warmer outside.
CHAPTER THREE
Always colder by the sea.
The wind was howling round the door, tugging at it. Henrietta could not imagine how her mother had found the strength to pull it closed so quietly in order to plod alone head down, up to the beachfront as she herself did now in cold pursuit. She remembered that Ellen Joyce was strong; wind and rain were her favourite hazards. It was her father who stayed indoors and refused to follow. When she found her mother this time, Henrietta was likely to kill her.
She could hear someone screaming.
Saturday afternoon, cold and gusty, children drawn to the playground of the beach, standing at the edge of the thundering sea with a dog that barked in tune with their shrieking. They were screaming for the sake of it, adding to an orchestra of sound. Then they ran away. Maybe her mother had heard them and gone out to watch; maybe she was simply being perverse in wanting to sit in the cold until it froze her. It would be the third time in a long week that Hen had embarked to find her. Dragged her back with gentleness no longer quite genuine while all she felt was impatience with the nagging edge of fury and compassion, and anger at the dead. Perhaps better to let her mother die in whatever way she wished, but then her father would be helpless, and she herself would be trapped in a worse vortex of conscience. Her own life had been on hold for a year and she wanted it back. It was too soon for this. Her parents were hardly ancient and yet they had grown older than the hills.
Striding against the wind, Hen thought that there was a great temperamental difference between her father and mother and herself. She, Hen Joyce, believed in the creative power of anger, which was not something either of them understood. That was half the problem. Mother was wallowing in grief the way she had always wallowed in worry, instead of being like the eldest of her daughters, devoted to action rather than reaction, interference rather than reticence; damn her, where was she? Mrs Ellen Joyce always said everything would turn out all right, and it didn’t. She had always told Angel that it was all right to be plump and insecure as long as you were loved, because that alone was enough to make you beautiful. Rubbish; you were what you made yourself. Even when you were crippled by your name. Hen and Angel, I ask you. How could they do that to us?
What a day. Squalls of wind, little interludes of deceptive calm, bolts of sunlight and flurries of rain, as if to say, got you, just when you thought you were safe. The sea was broiling along the promenade, prowling against concrete, laughing and threatening, growling and roaring like an old bear, then scuttling back with a snarl. No children to watch now. Four o’clock, darkness coming down with a bitter, gusting chill. Hen pulled her coat around her and wondered if Mother had bothered to cover herself at all. The instinct to shout at her increased with the cold, and then died in her mouth. Her mother had grown so thin.
Ellen was in the furthest bus shelter along the seafront, the smelliest, most miserable sheltering place on the whole promenade, sitting upright in the corner with her handbag clutched to her waist, leaning over it as if it was warm. She looked fully in command of all she surveyed, serene in the face of hypothermia with her small feet in her damp slippers. Henrietta knelt at her feet among crushed glass, beer cans and litter brought in by the wind, took hold of her mother’s cold ankles and began to knead them warmer. Mother stared out to sea. It was her refusal to look anyone in the eye that had always infuriated.
‘Come home, Mother, there’s a dear. It’s getting dark.’
Ellen Joyce inclined her head in an approximation of agreement, nodded, then shook her head and held her handbag tighter.
‘But it’s so nice out here,’ she said.
This could only have been spoken by someone with a neurotic love of the sea and Hen ignored it. It was foul out here. Dismal, bleak and ugly. Everyone else was quite right to avoid it. Ellen was surely crazy, but the gaze she turned upon her daughter’s hands was merely confused, as if she had woken from sleep. She shook herself and stood up, awkwardly, stumbling into Hen’s arms, and then pushing her away almost in the same movement. Hen let her lead the way slowly out of the bus shelter and begin the walk home. They did not link arms, Hen measuring her steps to keep pace with her mother’s slow progress, all the time wanting to break into a run. Darkness descended like a blanket as they turned the windswept corner into Alpha Street and saw the lights of the house on the corner shining a mocking welcome with the Christmas tree still in the window. No one had the energy to take it down. Ellen held on to the wall, wanting to say something before they went in.
‘I’m not mad, you know, Hen. Really I’m not, but coming out here and sitting in the midst of it, well, it’s the only way of feeling alive. I have to get very cold so that I can feel the warmth, if you see what I mean.’
Hen did not see. She saw an awkward woman with an infectious grief she refused to relinquish. She said nothing, pushed open the door and watched with some satisfaction as her mother was propelled over the step by a gust of wind. The stairs to the second floor faced the entrance to the house. Ellen clutched the banister as if shaking hands with a long-lost friend and went straight up. Soon there would be the sound of running water, the prelude to a deep, hot bath in which she would stay so long that Hen would begin to worry about her all over again. She went into the living room on the left, where her father still sat by the fire, apparently absorbed by the television and entirely unperturbed. Hen could have throttled him, too. She decided to ignore the fact that he was entitled to relax after a morning in the storage warehouse, which was his business and his pride and joy. The worker of the house was entitled to the fire.
‘All right?’ He asked, smiling.
‘She is, yes. I suppose so. Would you have gone after her if I hadn’t?’
‘Eventually. Maybe, maybe not. Why don’t you sit down? You never sit down, you’re always standing or leaning. You’re so restless, Hen.’
‘You would have left her, wouldn’t you?’
Hen realised she was shouting and moderated her voice. It made less of a strident sound in this room, what with the shifting crackle of the fire in the grate and the sound of the old plumbing filling a bath.
‘Sit down!’ he said quietly as if he was training a dog. It made her feel like a disobedient thirty-one-year-old bitch. Called Hen. She sat.
‘I need to talk to you.’
‘I’ve been trying to talk to you for days.’
‘It’s not always the best thing, Hen. Not always appropriate. I don’t go after your mother when she goes for a walk because I think she knows what she’s doing. She’s only trying to get some sensation into her bones.’
‘By freezing herself to death and then boiling herself alive?’
He sighed.
‘It’s probably as good a cure as any. Like having a sauna and running out into the snow, only in reverse. Look, Hen darling, I think you ought to go.’
She sat, stunned. Her father was telling her to go. Fetch. Come. Sit. Go. Her utterly dependable father: the man who could bore for Britain on the subject of removals and self-storage. The man who never dismissed anyone.
‘Go?’ she echoed stupidly. ‘Go?’
He nodded. ‘Go. As in leave this house. Go. To your own home and your own life.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you simply aren’t helping here. You’re making it worse. Oh, I know it’s with the best intentions, but that’s what you’re doing. Making it worse. We can neither of us rest with you around.’