‘Raymond!’ his mother said. ‘You might have put the milk into a jug, for heaven’s sake! We’ve got a guest!’
‘It’s only Eleanor, Mum,’ he said, then looked at me. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I always use the carton at home too. It’s merely a vessel from which to convey the liquid into the cup; in fact, it’s probably more hygienic than using an uncovered jug, I would have thought.’
I reached forward for a Wagon Wheel. Raymond was already chewing on his. The pair of them chatted about inconsequential matters and I settled into the sofa. Neither of them had particularly strident voices, and I listened to the carriage clock on the mantelpiece tick loudly. It was warm, just on the right side of oppressively hot. One of the cats, lying on its side in front of the fire, stretched out to its full length with a shudder, and then went back to sleep. There was a photograph next to the clock, the colours muted with age. A man, obviously Raymond’s father, grinned broadly at the camera, holding up a champagne flute in a toast.
‘That’s Raymond’s dad,’ his mother said, noticing. She smiled. ‘That was taken the day Raymond got his exam results.’ She looked at him with obvious pride. ‘Our Raymond was the first one in the family to go to university,’ she said. ‘His dad was pleased as Punch. I only wish he could have been there for your graduation. What a day that was, eh, Raymond son?’ Raymond smiled, nodded.
‘He had a heart attack not long after I started uni,’ he explained to me.
‘Never got to enjoy his retirement,’ his mother said. ‘It often happens that way.’ They both sat quietly for a moment.
‘What did he do for a living?’ I asked. I wasn’t interested, but I felt it was appropriate.
‘Gas engineer,’ Raymond said.
His mother nodded. ‘He worked hard all his days,’ she said, ‘and we never wanted for anything, did we, Raymond? We had a holiday every year, and a nice wee car. At least he got to see our Denise married, anyway – that’s something.’
I must have looked puzzled.
‘My sister,’ Raymond explained.
‘Och, for goodness’ sake, Raymond. Too busy talking about football and computers, no doubt, and I don’t suppose she wants to hear about that sort of thing anyway. Boys, eh, Eleanor?’ She shook her head at me, smiling.
This was puzzling. How on earth could you forget that you had a sister? He hadn’t forgotten, I supposed – he’d simply taken his sibling for granted; an unchanging, unremarkable fact of life, not even worthy of mention. It was impossible for me to imagine such a scenario, alone as I was. Only Mummy and I inhabit the Oliphant world.
His mother was still talking. ‘Denise was eleven when Raymond came along – a wee surprise and a blessing, so he was.’
She looked at him with so much love that I had to turn away. At least I know what love looks like, I told myself. That’s something. No one had ever looked at me like that, but I’d be able to recognize it if they ever did.
‘Here, son, get the album out. I’ll show Eleanor those photos of that first holiday in Alicante, the summer before you started school. He got stuck in a revolving door at the airport,’ she said, sotto voce, leaning towards me confidentially.
I laughed out loud at the look of utter horror on Raymond’s face.
‘Mum, Eleanor doesn’t want to be bored to death looking at our old photos,’ he said, blushing in a way that I supposed some people might consider charming. I thought for a moment about insisting that I’d love to see them, but he looked so miserable that I couldn’t do it. Conveniently, my stomach gave a loud rumble. I’d only had the Wagon Wheel since my lunchtime repast of spaghetti hoops on toast. She coughed politely.
‘You’ll stay for your tea, won’t you, Eleanor? It’s nothing fancy, but you’re very welcome.’
I looked at my watch. It was only five thirty – an odd time to eat, but I was hungry, and it would still allow me time to go to Tesco on the way home.
‘I’d be delighted, Mrs Gibbons,’ I said.
We sat around the small table in the kitchen. The soup was delicious; she said she’d used a pork knuckle to make stock, and then shredded the meat through the soup, which was also full of vegetables from the garden. There was bread and butter and cheese, and afterwards we had a cup of tea and a cream cake. All the while, Mrs Gibbons regaled us with tales of her neighbours’ various eccentricities and illnesses, along with updates on the activities of their extended family, which seemed to be of as little relevance to Raymond as they were to me, judging by his expression. He teased his mother frequently and affectionately, and she responded with mock annoyance, gently slapping him on the arm or chiding him for his rudeness. I was warm and full and comfortable in a way I couldn’t remember feeling before.
Raymond’s mother heaved herself to her feet and reached for her walking frame. She had crippling arthritis in her knees and hips, Raymond told me, while she hobbled upstairs to the bathroom. The house wasn’t really suitable for someone with limited mobility, but she refused to move, he said, because she’d lived all her adult life there and it was the place where she’d brought up her family.
‘Now then,’ she said, returning from upstairs, ‘I’ll wash these few dishes and then we can settle down and watch a bit of telly.’ Raymond got straight to his feet.
‘Sit down, Mum, let me do it – it won’t take a minute. Eleanor will help me, won’t you, Eleanor?’
I stood up and began gathering up the plates. Mrs Gibbons protested vehemently, but eventually sat back down in her chair, slow and awkward, and I heard a tiny sigh of pain.
Raymond washed and I dried. This was his suggestion – somehow, he’d noticed my red, sore hands, although he didn’t make a hullaballoo about it. He’d merely nudged me away from the sink and thrust a tea towel – a rather jaunty one with a Scottie dog sporting a tartan bow tie – into my damaged fingers.
The tea towel was soft and fibrous, as though it had been washed many times over, and had been ironed carefully into a neatly pressed square. I cast an eye over the plates before stacking them on the table for Raymond to put away. The crockery was old but good quality, painted with blowsy roses and edged in faded gilt. Mrs Gibbons saw me looking at it. There was certainly nothing wrong with her powers of observation.
‘That was my wedding china, Eleanor,’ she said. ‘Imagine – still going strong almost fifty years later!’
‘You, or the china?’ Raymond said, and she tutted and shook her head, smiling. There was a comfortable silence as we worked on our respective tasks.
‘Tell me, are you courting at the moment, Eleanor?’ she asked.
How tedious.
‘Not presently,’ I said, ‘but I have my eye on someone. It’s only a matter of time.’ There was a crash from the sink as Raymond dropped the ladle onto the draining board with a clatter.
‘Raymond!’ his mum said. ‘Butterfingers!’
I’d been keeping track of the musician online, of course, but he’d been rather quiet, virtually speaking. A couple of Instagram snaps of some meals he’d had, a few tweets, uninteresting Facebook updates about other people’s music. I didn’t mind. It was merely a matter of biding my time. If I knew one thing about romance, it was that the perfect moment for us to meet and fall in love would arrive when I least expected it, and in the most charming set of circumstances. That said, if it didn’t happen soon, I’d need to take matters into my own hands.
‘And what about your family?’ she said. ‘Do they live close by? Any brothers or sisters?’
‘No, unfortunately,’ I said. ‘I would have loved to have had siblings to grow up with.’ I thought about this. ‘It’s actually one of the greatest sources of sadness in my life,’ I heard myself say. I had never uttered such a sentence before, and, indeed, hadn’t even fully formed the thought until this very moment. I surprised myself. And whose fault is that, then? A voice, whispering in my ear, cold and sharp. Angry. Mummy. I closed my eyes, trying to be rid of her.