Читать книгу Old Dogs, New Tricks - Linda Phillips - Страница 7

Marjorie sat up in bed trying to read her library book while waiting for Philip to return from taking his parents home. What a ghastly evening it had been. Normally she would have been halfway through her latest thriller by now, but with the day’s events blotting everything out she was stuck on page three and had no idea of the plot. She kept staring up at the wallpaper, not seeing it. But all she could think of was Bristol.

Bristol? Oh, no, no, no. Not now. Not when she was on the verge of an exciting new challenge in her life – one that she needed with increasing desperation the more she thought about it all.

After years of looking after Phil and the girls – enjoyable though that had been – she yearned to exercise her brain, to use her skills, and to achieve, in doing so, a degree of personal satisfaction. More than that: she had a deep-down need to assert herself and prove to Phil that she wasn’t as dependent on him as he’d always seemed to think, that she was an equal partner in the marriage with independent ideas and a life of her own to be lived.

But of course he knew nothing of her recent way of thinking, so as soon as he came back to the house she would try to explain. Would it make any difference to his plans, though? Could she get him to change his mind? He’d seemed so adamant that they had to go to Bristol, but even now she could hardly believe he was serious. They had lived in London all their lives.

To be honest, their suburb was no longer the place it had been – in fact it had changed almost beyond recognition like most of suburbia had done – but it had always been their home. How could Phil think of moving away? The matter of the shops aside, how could he expect her to leave Becky when she was about to have her first baby? How could he expect her to abandon this house with its comforting familiarity, their relatives and friends. Moreover how could he take her from her much-loved garden? If nothing else occurred to him, surely he must realise how much that meant to her?

Why, only that afternoon, inspired by Sheila’s gardener and urged on by the glorious sunshine she had hurried home to give the grass its third cut of the season. There would just be time, she’d surmised, to fit it in before her in-laws arrived. Their meal had already been taken care of: she had one of her home-baked pork pies lined up in the fridge, and the pastry had turned out deliciously golden and buttery – exactly as Philip liked it. With a salad prepared and new potatoes waiting to be boiled there had been practically nothing left to do. She’d only hoped that the subject they would be discussing would not spoil everyone’s enjoyment of it.

Marjorie turned back two pages, wondering how many words her eyes had travelled over without her brain making any sense of them. Pork pie, indeed! If she’d only had the success of the meal to worry about!

Although the garden had slipped into shadow and was rapidly cooling to a chill, the sky remained light and high. A peacefulness lay over everything, save the odd bird flapping from tree to tree and chattering to its mate. She would have loved to carry on pottering about on what promised to be a heavenly evening, but Philip was due home any minute.

She’d opened the garage door in readiness for him, hurried into the house, and checked that his slippers were by the back door – this last duty being performed with a guilty glance over her shoulder, as though her daughters were in hiding, watching.

‘Mum!’ they would have chorused had they been there, raising their eyes at each other. They agreed on very little, being opposites in character, but on one thing they did concur: their mother was a hopeless case.

‘This has nothing whatever to do with feminism,’ Marjorie had vainly tried to advise them whenever they bemoaned the way she lavished attention on her man. ‘It’s simply a matter of common courtesy.’ At which the girls would giggle behind their hands until their mother went on to remind them that she had carried out much the same little acts of loving kindness for them as well throughout their childhood, and didn’t they intend to do the same for their families when they had them? She sincerely hoped they would.

Marjorie had often fretted after these exchanges, wondering what selfish little monsters she had brought into the world. Had she failed in her duty as a parent?

But, back in the kitchen and arranging the salad in a bowl, she’d consoled herself that the girls seemed to have turned out well enough after all: Becky had found herself a husband, in spite of her dreadful bossiness – a trait that she had unfortunately inherited from her grandfather. And Em, eighteen months her junior, had astonished them all by plumping for a ‘caring’ profession. She whose favourite back-chat throughout her teens had been ‘see if I care’, had suddenly decided to do precisely that. She was now in her final year at nursing college.

Marjorie crushed a sliver of garlic and whisked up a vinaigrette dressing, her thoughts suddenly changing track. Why hadn’t Philip told her about Spittal’s closing? She was sure he must have known before the local media got hold of it. Why had he kept it to himself?

Well, all right, she had kept her little secret from him, as Sheila had reminded her, but she didn’t think him capable of doing the same. How well, though, could you ever know someone – even someone you had lived with for nearly twenty-five years? It was a disconcerting thought. She was still frowning when Philip’s car swooped on to the drive.

It was soon apparent, by his slackened tie and the whiff of rotten apples on his breath, that he was guilty of something he rarely did: he’d been drinking on the way home.

‘When did you find time to do that?’ she asked, nodding toward the wrought iron clock above the kitchen table. The clock was in the shape of a sunburst and had jerked out the seconds for them with its distinctive throaty rasp since the day they’d moved in. Like the contents of the rest of the house it had a dated look about it, Phil’s early distaste for materialism having stayed with him. Nothing was ever replaced in this house unless it fell apart – and even then Phil thought twice about it.

Marjorie had never much cared about the state of the house. As long as her garden was in immaculate order she was happy. Let one of the girls gouge a groove in the dining table and she would hardly turn a hair; let one of them drop a doll in her display of daffodils and she would turn purple.

‘Find time to do what?’ Philip was gazing up at the clock, not seeing any connection.

‘Find time for drinks in the pub on your way home. You’re only a few minutes later than usual.’

‘Oh … there wasn’t much going on at the office today, so I left a little early.’ He shrugged off his jacket, hung it on the back of a chair and stood looking down at it. He slipped off his tie and coiled it. When he glanced up he had a lost look about him. It seemed he had something to say and had no idea where to begin.

Suddenly remorseful, because she’d been so busy thinking about herself that she hadn’t realised quite what his firm’s closure would mean to him, she went over and put her hands on his shoulders. ‘Oh, Philip! Don’t worry about how to tell me the news. I know about Spittal’s already. I heard it on the radio. And I’m so sorry that it’s had to happen to you; I know it must be a shock, but –’

‘You know?’ Alarm was plain in his eyes. ‘Good grief … I suppose it was bound to get around. Honestly, love, I meant to tell you all about it myself. I wanted to break the news gently.’

‘Well, now you’ve nothing to break. And your parents know about it as well. I went round and told your mother, and she’ll have explained everything to your father. And they’ll be here any minute, as it happens. I’ve asked them to come round so we can all have a talk about it.’

Philip pushed back his hair. It was thick, even if it was grey, and was unruly. Normally it didn’t trouble him, unless he was ill at ease. Then he would rake it with his fingers or try to smooth it down. ‘Talk?’ he repeated slowly. ‘About what?’

‘About your redundancy, of course, and what you’re going to do now that Spittal’s is closing. And about what we’ve all been thinking …’

Her voice trailed away at the sight of his grim expression. She put down the dish of coleslaw she’d been giving a quick stir, dropping the spoon with a clatter; suddenly it no longer seemed to matter that the mayonnaise dressing had collected at the bottom of the bowl.

‘Spittal’s isn’t closing,’ he said, his lips set hard in a line.

‘Yes it is, Phil. I told you, I heard it on the radio.’

‘No, Marjorie, no. It isn’t, strictly speaking, closing.’ Then he’d uttered the words that had sent a chill crawling up her spine. ‘It’s moving its premises to Bristol.’

Marjorie closed her library book and let it drop to her lap. All hell had broken loose a minute later when Eric and Sheila arrived for their meal. Phil had been horrified and angry at what they’d all been planning for him behind his back. Everything had come spilling out, even before they sat themselves down at the table – about how helpful Marjorie had been in the shops and how they’d decided she should take them over now that Eric wanted to retire – it was all laid bare.

Phil had turned an unpleasant shade of red, and had made it clear in no uncertain terms that it simply wasn’t on. Neither he nor Marjorie would be able to take over the shops, he’d told them; he had to go to Bristol in accordance with his employers’ wishes, and that was that. Redundancy? Not for him, and he couldn’t have afforded to take it anyway.

The pie was cut but no one enjoyed it. Marjorie had sat stony faced, Sheila pink and embarrassed, while Eric expressed his feelings at length and grew so agitated that he drank his wife’s glass of wine by mistake as well as his own, and then helped himself to more. In the end Phil had to run them home in his own car because his mother’s health prevented her from walking even the two blocks back to their house, and his father’s swimming head prevented him from driving them himself.

Marjorie snatched up her book once more, Phil’s return being heralded by the dull thud of a loose paving stone beneath the bedroom window. Propping the book open against her knees she tried to focus on the print. Perhaps, if she took no notice of him, he’d give the matter a rest. She’d made it clear that his plans didn’t suit her; he just needed time for the fact to sink in.

But he couldn’t leave the subject alone. He came into the room, walked round to her side of the bed and sat by her legs. She could no longer ignore him because she had to shift her balance on the mattress.

‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me?’ he asked after a while.

‘Tell you what?’

‘About working for Dad all this time.’ He gave an incredulous gasp as though he still couldn’t take it in. ‘What did you think you were doing?’

‘What do you think I was doing? Helping out, of course.’

‘I didn’t mean that. I meant, what did you think you were up to, not telling me about it? I realised you helped my mother a lot, but I had no idea you were working practically full-time for my father too. You’ve made me look such a fool.’

Marjorie bunched up a piece of frill on the edge of the duvet cover, her hands beginning to tremble with suppressed anger. Could he think of nobody but himself? And couldn’t he at least give her credit for the way she’d managed to pack so much in to each day? She’d obviously succeeded in making him feel as pampered and cosseted as he always had been – not an easy task on top of doing everything else – otherwise he’d have noticed something amiss.

‘I always meant to tell you. I would have done … but it’s your own fault, really. If you’d been more reasonable, where your father’s concerned … And anyway I was bored with being at home all day. Couldn’t you see that?’

‘You never said you were bored.’ He sounded miffed; insulted that being his wife hadn’t been fulfilment enough for her.

‘What would you have done if I had? Suggested I join the Women’s Institute? I already belonged to that. And the Housewives’ Register. And the PTA when the girls were still at school.’ She gave an impatient shake of her head. ‘These things are all very well, Phil … Oh, I suppose I just outgrew them. I never meant to work for your father. It just sort of happened one day when he needed some help with his VAT.’

A weary sigh whined from him. ‘It’s made everything so much worse!’

Getting up from the bed he walked over to the window and looked out. Marjorie had been loath to close the curtains against the setting sun, but the huge orange ball had dropped behind the houses opposite some time ago and it was dark. Nevertheless, Phil still stood looking out.

‘Fancy coming up with this crazy idea of taking over the shops! Don’t you think you should have consulted me before putting impossible notions in Dad’s head?’

‘What’s crazy about it?’ She thumped her fists into the duvet. ‘And why should it be impossible?’

‘Well –’

‘You’re surely not implying that I’m incapable.’

‘I didn’t say that, now did I?’

‘You didn’t need to. It’s what you were thinking, though, wasn’t it?’

‘I hadn’t actually got that far. What I’m saying is … well … that you can’t.’

‘Well, of course I won’t be able to now. Not if you insist on taking me to Bristol. But I wasn’t to know about your plans beforehand, was I?’

‘I didn’t mean that, and you know it.’

‘No?’ Marjorie was lost. ‘Well, what do you mean, then? I don’t get it.’

But as she glared into his face she saw, to her astonishment, that he’d adopted the taut, pitying expression that she recognised all too well. It was the one that came upon him only rarely, at such times as he could not avoid the usually unmentioned subject of her parents’ demise.

Marjorie’s mother and father had died from carbon monoxide poisoning fifteen years previously. A faulty water heater had been responsible, although Marjorie had never been able to look at it that way. She saw it as largely her fault and constantly blamed herself for not being in the right place at the right time.

To add to the horror of it all it had been Marjorie’s misfortune to discover them. She had called round to see them one Saturday morning with some school photographs of Becky and Em. Fortunately the girls had not been with her – they were out doing ‘ballet and tap’.

Certain that her parents would be at home she hadn’t even taken a key. She had knocked and rung with no result and eventually spotted them through a window at the side of the house. The tableau was one that would for ever be printed on her mind: the pattern the sun was making on the black and white tiled floor, the day’s post half-opened on one of the work-tops, two untouched cups of coffee on a wooden-handled tray, and the horribly familiar clothes that the two inert figures were wearing as they slumped together by the back door.

Later it was realised that the key had been removed from the keyhole, probably for safety reasons following a spate of burglaries in the area, and hidden under the biscuit tin. If Marjorie’s parents had ever been conscious of their possible fate, the locked door and the missing key had effectively sealed it.

But, Marjorie now wondered, if this is what Phil was thinking about, what had it to do with her ability to run the shops? Unless … was he alluding to the fact that she had had a breakdown after the event? A perfectly understandable breakdown, surely, under the circumstances? And if so did he really think it had any bearing on her present-day capabilities?

It proved to be the case as his next remarks showed.

‘The responsibility. The stress. The long hours …’ he was saying.

‘But I’ve been doing most of the work for months!’ Oh, how exasperating he could be at times! He stifled her with his over-protectiveness. It was like being a child not allowed to grow up. A prisoner driven mad for escape. ‘Phil, I really don’t need molly-coddling like this. That was fifteen years ago. Just because I cracked up a little then, doesn’t mean I can’t handle a bit of stress. A certain amount of stress is essential in life. It keeps you on your toes and functioning. I know I can manage those shops.’

‘Well, I’m afraid you won’t get the chance to prove what you can do, one way or the other.’ He drew the curtains across the window. ‘And I won’t be doing it either.’

‘Phil!’ She growled his name through clenched teeth. Her dream was slipping from her grasp. The shops had been her escape route – in fact, her only means of escape. Because what could possibly replace them? No one else on this earth would put her in charge of three shops. No one else would put her in charge of anything. She had no formal qualifications. No CV. She would never get past the first post.

Clutching at straws, she found herself willing to compromise where only hours before the idea had been abhorrent.

‘Look,’ she said putting one finger and a thumb to her temples where a muzziness signalled the start of a headache, ‘O?, so you haven’t been made redundant, but couldn’t you resign from Spittal’s instead of going down to Bristol? Then you’d be free to take over the shops and we could both run them together.’

‘Oh really?’ he scoffed. ‘And live on what, may I ask? They don’t bring in that much profit, you know – and there’d be four of us to support. Anyway, even if it were possible I could never take over from Dad. He simply wouldn’t let me, and you know it.’

‘But of course he –’

‘He wouldn’t. Not in reality. Oh, he’d willingly hand over the reins, I know that, but he’d still be there, breathing down my neck, telling me what to do. He would, you know he would.’ Arms gesticulating he paced the room. ‘You’ve no doubt experienced it for yourself. He can’t keep out of it, can be? Can’t trust anyone but himself. As soon as he’s set you to carry out a task, he starts forcing himself in on the act.’

Marjorie’s silence, her compressed lips, told him he was right. Working for Eric could be frustrating.

‘You see, I do know what goes on in Dad’s little empire; he made me work there in my holidays, remember? Even as a young lad I could see that staff turned over at an astonishing rate, and that managers came and went. I don’t suppose anything’s changed. Many’s a time when you would have had to bite your tongue in front of him, Marjie, and try to smooth people out behind his back. Tell me if I’m wrong.’

But Marjorie couldn’t do that. ‘What you say is true,’ she agreed, ‘but I’m sure he’d stay out of the way now. He isn’t a young man any more and he’ll need to take things easy.’

Phil came back to the bed and fished under his side of the duvet for pyjamas. Finding none there he went to a drawer for a clean pair and began to undress.

It isn’t fair, Marjorie thought morosely as his lean legs were stripped bare. Phil could eat what he liked – and he liked all the ‘wrong’ things – and still not put on any weight. He had much the same slim figure that he’d had the day they married, which was more than could be said about her. She slipped down on the pillows pulling the duvet up to her chin.

‘No,’ Phil went on, ferreting in the wardrobe for a trouser-hanger, ‘what Dad should do is sell up and get out. Think about it intelligently: the shops are all too small and they’re in the wrong places. “Little shops round the corner” are a thing of the past. People would rather drive out to a superstore any day. Get more choice and pay less.’

Marjorie sank further down the bed. What he was saying had a ring of truth. Each year was proving more of a struggle than the last, but only because Eric refused to get up to date. She felt sure there was room for a lot of improvement. But all Phil seemed to want to do was to go on banging nails into the coffin containing her dreams.

‘And when he’s sold them off – though who would want them now heaven only knows – he should invest whatever they bring in. If he’s careful he should have enough money to buy professional care for the two of them for the rest of their lives.’

‘So that you can wash your hands of them?’ Marjorie was open-mouthed. To think that Phil could be so mean. Was it right that his parents should have to pay for care? Shouldn’t it be provided freely by their children? But of course, the world wasn’t like that any more, although she had thought Phil, being of the old school, would have seen things differently. Increasingly she had the feeling she no longer knew the man she had married.

She watched him screw up his underwear and toss it on to the heap in the bottom of the only built-in cupboard that the room possessed. In spite of his words she thought she could see him struggling with his conscience.

‘I have no intention of washing my hands of anyone,’ he said. ‘I’ll help them to find someone reliable to manage the shops so that Dad can retire if he really wants to, though I don’t believe for a minute that he will, and we’ll get someone to help Mum as well. OK? I shall always be around for them when there’s a crisis.’ He paused before shutting the cupboard door. ‘Bristol isn’t so very far away, you know.’