‘It’s just like digging out our fort, Aunt Mabs. That’s slow work, slow. You spend a morning and an afternoon on your knees, brushing away a half millimetre of dirt at a time, and if you strike lucky you find a chip of charred timber. I’ve been meaning to ask—what’s “ponsy”, Aunt Mabs?’
She didn’t seem to find the explanation silly or unacceptably snobbish, merely a detail of the behaviour of our tribe and interesting for that reason.
‘You got to listen hard,’ she went on. ‘Sure she gets things wrong and she doesn’t know what she’s saying part of the time, but you’ve got to take it all on board and run it through a kind of sieve, the way we did at the fort, and then you pick through what’s left and sometimes there’s a wee bit that isn’t a pebble and isn’t a clod and you turn it over and over and suddenly you see it might have been part of the handle of a jug. And then you find a few more bits and you begin to guess what kind of a jug, and then it gets easier because you know what you’re looking for now. I’ve been taking up some of the old account books and reading through and asking her about things. Gee, they’re fascinating. Mostly she doesn’t remember but suddenly she’ll come out with something about Mr Wheatstone trying to give notice or having the Americans in the Park—that must have been in the Hitler war, I guess—and I’ve got another piece of my jug.’
‘I think you’re a wonder. I’d never have the patience.’
‘Mom warned me you and Granny didn’t hit it off, uh?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘It’s because you’re so like her—much more than Mom is.’
‘Be careful what you say, darling. It may be true, but you’re on dangerous ground.’
‘Right.’
I was confused in my own reactions to this growing relationship. Of course it was a great practical convenience. My mother became far easier to cope with. She was happier, whined and wept hardly at all, slept all night, seemed less feeble, made fewer demands on my time and emotions. I had to insist on doing my share of the nursing or Fiona would have taken it all on herself. And Fiona clearly got satisfaction from the relationship, so I was glad for her.
But there was no denying that I was also jealous. At a surface level I was simply jealous of Fiona’s openly expressed fondness for my mother. I do not mean that I too wanted to be kissed at each meeting, or would have permitted it. With me she was open, friendly, interested, as she would have been with almost anyone; but for my mother she seemed to feel something particular, and I’m afraid I minded. Browning has long been my favourite poet, and the husband in My Last Duchess seemed to me, in these moods, marginally less of a monster.
At a different level I was also jealous of Fiona, of her ability to love my mother. For thirty years I have more than fulfilled my duty as a daughter. After my mother’s stroke Mark tried to persuade me to put her in a home; from this disagreement, and from the extra demands on me which resulted from keeping her at Cheadle, I date the decline of our marriage, though given Mark’s character and mine he was probably destined to turn to a Julia-figure around now—but there’s no point, in talking about what might have happened. I can fairly claim that in the world’s eyes I have been an admirable daughter—but all without love, and what is the good of that? Irrational feelings of guilt I know are the lot of many women my age; I am lucky to have so much to take my mind off them. But to my disgust I became aware of a growing impatience with Fiona’s ability to think of my mother as a worthwhile person and not, as she was in my eyes, an embarrassing and useless wreck, a monument to all my defeats in our long war, crumbling but still erect where it had always stood, in the heartland of my life. Once recognised I could control the impatience, but not get rid of it.
One evening about a fortnight after her arrival we gathered before supper. It had been a heavy but satisfactory day for me, a flood of summer visitors safely handled, a further step in the negotiations with the film company about The Gamekeeper’s Daughter, a meeting—myself, Fiona, Simon and two men from Burroughs—at which the accountants had finally seemed to realise that we were going to computerise the accounts to suit our own needs and that if they didn’t co-operate I would take the business elsewhere; and before all that, before anyone else was awake, a fulfilling couple of hours in which what had promised to be a no more than a linking scene between plot and sub-plot had, in that mysterious manner I suppose all writers are used to, become an episode of real interest with a life of its own, and with the prospect of sending unexpected currents of that life through scenes yet to come. I was tired but cheerful. An extra source of satisfaction had been the way in which Simon had coped with the accountants. Their computer man, though only a few years older than him, had started to patronise him as an amateur and Simon, for the first time ever in my presence, had, so to speak, made his true weight known. It gave me hope that he might indeed be able, as he had said, to get by on his own.
‘It’s been a good day,’ I said. ‘I thought we’d have some champagne.’
‘Any excuse, Fiona,’ said Simon. ‘It’s her Achilles heel. Good days we celebrate, and bad days we need cheering up.’
‘It happens about once a month,’ I said. ‘Even with Ronnie’s gadget. I think I’ve been fantastically abstemious.’
‘Is there another glass?’ said Fiona. ‘So I can take some to Granny?’
‘I’ve only put one bottle to chill.’
‘Just a mouthful, Aunt Mabs.’
‘Oh, all right.’
When she came back she said, ‘There’s something I wanted to ask you, Aunt Mabs. I don’t get it. I was reading one of the old account books, 1952, all about repairing the roof on the Banqueting Hall. Gee, they did things cheap those days.’
‘I was paid four pounds a week for my first job,’ I said.
‘On a joke mag,’ explained Simon.
‘No, I got ten pounds for that. This was selling lampshades for a frightful old harridan in Beauchamp Place. I haven’t thought of her for years, thank heavens. What about the roof ?’
‘Where did the money come from?’
The question ambushed me.
‘How much?’ said Terry.
‘Round a hundred and forty thousand pounds,’ said Fiona. ‘All it says in the book is “Cheque”.’
‘Christ!’ said Simon. ‘That wasn’t cheap! That was money those days! We must have sold some Canalettos.’
‘It would say in the books,’ said Fiona. ‘It doesn’t.’
‘Are you OK, Mums?’ said Simon.
‘Nose trick,’ I said. ‘Always worse with champagne. No, for God’s sake don’t slap me—I can’t stand that. I’ll be all right.’
I prolonged my recovery while Fiona prattled on about her search through the account books. I had in fact no idea what transactions had taken place between B and my mother. I had got the necklace out of the bank and given it, to him. A few days later he had presented me with a cheque for a hundred and forty-eight thousand pounds, signed by a man I had never heard of. I had paid this into my account—oh, blessed days before the Tax Inspectors thought my statements worth inspecting—and written B a cheque for the same amount. He had said nothing at all and I’d had no wish to talk or think about it. I had bought my freedom, or so I believed. Until I found the necklace in the jigsaw box I assumed that he had paid the money to my mother. Afterwards I deliberately refused to brood on any of the events surrounding his death. I wrote down what I knew and put it in a drawer. Since nothing could bring him back, nothing that had happened to take him away mattered any more. I put it out of my life. My mother never mentioned it either. It was evident that he had kept the necklace, perhaps always intending to give it back to me when the affair was over. It had, so I thought, cost him nothing, and he may merely have wished to gratify me by letting me believe I had made the sacrifice for him, and gratified himself by the knowledge that I had thought it worth it. He had presumably decided that my mother was not after all in a position to do him any damage, and it was certainly unlike him to allow himself to be blackmailed.