‘But you’ve already had bacon for breakfast. About two hours ago,’ Jean said, in a rather ringing voice. ‘That’s all that’s left now.’
‘I know,’ Steph said, turning flat eyes to Jean’s. ‘Isn’t it awful. I’m that hungry. I’ll get huge. Must be the feeding, I’m just really hungry the whole time.’ She smiled lazily. Jean watched in silence as Steph slid the tray of bacon that was meant to be tomorrow’s breakfast into the top of the Aga. She tried to expel, in a long sigh, the resentment she felt at the commandeering of her oven. Her oven, her kitchen, her baking tray (the wrong one for bacon).
Steph was nosing in the bread bin now. ‘Bread’s finished as well, once I’ve had this,’ she said, taking out the end of a loaf. She sniffed it. ‘Needs using anyway.’
‘Steph-.’ There were no more than two or three loaves of bread left in the freezer now. Jean hesitated. She was in danger of saying something tight and mother-in-lawish. There was flour in the kitchen cupboards, after all, and dried yeast. They would be all right for a while.
‘Know what I was thinking?’ Steph was saying, as she went about sawing the bread into slabs. ‘I was thinking Miranda’s room could do with-’ She glanced at Jean apologetically. ‘I mean it’s lovely and everything- but it’s, like, kind of serious? A bit old-fashioned? What with the panelling, it’s kind of dark, you know?’ When Jean did not answer she went on, ‘I mean it’s lovely, as panelling. But I’ve always wanted to do a baby’s mural, you know, paint things on the wall. A cartoon character, maybe. Life size, and like in a kind of setting that you paint them in, maybe a castle or a forest or on a mountain or whatever.’ She waved her hands in the air. She did not seem to notice that Jean was not filling the silence with an enthusiastic response. ‘Saw an Aladdin one in a magazine once. I’d only need a bit of paint in maybe eight, ten colours, and the brushes. I could do a really nice job. I mean I’m not professional but I’m not rubbish, I could do it really nice. Is there any paint, sort of, around anywhere?’
She wandered along the row of wall cupboards, opening them until she found tomato ketchup, which Jean considered a ruination of good bacon. The plastic bottle wheezed two long red worms of the stuff onto the slices of bread. Then Steph set the bottle down so hard that a bead of ketchup still hanging from the top flew off and spattered on the worktop, which Jean had lately wiped clean.
‘Though it doesn’t matter if there isn’t because it doesn’t cost much, paint. I mean if I could get it myself I would, only I’m not exactly earning anything at the moment, am I? I mean soon as I was I’d pay you back and everything.’
Dear God. Paint in eight colours, brushes, nursery murals featuring cartoon characters? Jean opened her mouth but could not trust herself to speak. Was Steph blind? Could she not see that she, Jean, was standing in front of her holding six frozen sausages that were making her fingers numb, wondering if she could spin them out with rice or something and call it supper? Jean put the sausages in the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table. What could she say to Steph, round-eyed and trusting, no more aware than a child, who was calmly eating anything that wasn’t nailed down and asking her to find the money for paint? She would have to face up to a few things.
But what Jean actually heard herself saying was, ‘Oh yes, how lovely. I can just picture it. I wonder what Miranda would think- she’d be thrilled, wouldn’t she?’ She knew no way to point out that buying paint was out of the question, to tell her that there was hardly any money even to buy more food; to suggest that actually, they might all have to learn to manage with less to eat. Nor could she mention that even if they had the money, it would have to be Steph or Michael who would have to get up the courage to go shopping, because Jean herself could not.
But she could not point any of this out because to do so would amount to saying that life could not be lived in this way. And how could she suggest that when life together here was now, for them all, a simple necessity? Jean was protecting them all by saying nothing. Things would sort themselves out. In the meantime it was still true (in a way) that whether or not they could buy the paint Steph’s mural sounded lovely. And since it would never happen, Jean would not have to say anything heavy-handed about not touching the seventeenth century oak panelling. It could not matter, then, that she said again, ‘She’d be thrilled, wouldn’t she?’
Steph was now laying out flabby bacon slices over the bread, murmuring that she thought they’d be a bit crisper than that after this long in the top oven but she was too hungry to wait. Jean rested her elbows on the table and tried to think seriously about what else she might give them with the sausages that evening, knowing that by luxuriating in this immediate but comparatively small problem she was displacing temporarily the huge, intractable one. They could not live forever on the contents of the freezers, but in the meantime, until she absolutely had to decide what to do about it, there were a couple of onions and a tin of tomatoes. Jean brightened. And she would see if Michael could find anything more in the garden. He had already found some potatoes in the large walled garden that Jean had never explored properly. She would ask him to dig it over again, there were always a few more. Everything would be all right.
Steph was finishing her sandwich and Jean was sifting through a collection of jars of dried herbs when Michael came in, bringing a blast of outdoor air with him. He strode over to the Aga, crouched over the temperature gauge and groaned. ‘Thought as much,’ he said, straightening up and turning to them. ‘I’ve just been out and checked the tank and it’s practically empty. We’re out of oil.’
Just then there was a wail from over their heads. ‘That sounds like a hungry cry,’ Steph said informatively. Her desperation over her daughter’s feeding had vanished, and in its place was a kind of contented weariness which was easier on them all. But she was wrong, Jean was thinking, about the cry. Miranda cried very little and was never hungry. It was not a hungry cry, but a cry of bewilderment and despair, and it grew louder. It was then that Jean burst into tears, sank her head into her hands and sobbed almost hard enough to drown Miranda’s yells.
I had almost put my desire for a tree to one side, knowing that there simply was no money for such things, but when Steph announced that she was after paint for a mural, I found myself thinking that I did want my tree, and why shouldn’t I have it? I wanted a magnolia to plant in the spot where I’d buried the afterbirth, but I had contented myself with just the wanting of it and had not hankered much after the getting. Old habit. But why shouldn’t I get, too? I really wanted that tree. Still I didn’t say so, because on that very same day we had the business of the oil to deal with. It put other things out of my mind. Things rather came to a head, and I had to face the fact that even here, life can only go on with a certain amount of involvement from the outside. The oil was a shock to me, I admit.
Michael was wonderful. He sent Steph up to feed Miranda and then sat quietly with me until I was able to speak. He got it out of me at last that I wasn’t quite the owner of the house, a thing I had never really spelled out. I don’t think he was altogether surprised. But we both felt such distaste for this fact that, without having to say so, I think we both resolved to get the practical difficulties of the oil and the money situation dealt with without delay, and ever afterwards to refer to such things only when absolutely necessary. I told him what the owners’ notes had said, which was that the tank was full and wouldn’t need refilling. But Michael pointed out at once, being good at these things, that there would have been enough if I had been here alone because then I wouldn’t have been heating the whole house day in day out since January. It was obvious, of course, and not the sort of thing that I would ordinarily miss.