Family and Friends. Emma Page
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always looking out for a comfortable berth.
‘Where did she come from?’ Zena asked. ‘And what happened to her husband?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know what happened to him,’ Emily said crossly. ‘He’s dead, that’s all I know. I’m off,’ she added abruptly and banged her way out of the room. At the head of the stairs she paused for breath. I’m getting old, she told herself in ritual lamentation. All this rush and bustle is a bit too much for me these days. I’m going to have to slacken off a bit, start taking it easy.
She went heavy-footed down into the hall and along to the kitchen quarters to find her coat. Then she cocked a questioning ear towards the stairs. All serene. From the bread-bin she took, as she always did, the stale rolls and ends of loaves. ‘Just a few crumbs for me birds,’ she said aloud, righteously. A body had to love something and birds were a good deal more satisfactory than most human beings.
She eased open the door of the fridge and smiled with pleasure at the contents. One or two little odds and ends of food and drink left over from the festive season that would slip nicely into her hold-all and never a soul the wiser.
Outside the back door she heard a plaintive mew. ‘All right, me beauty, Emily’s coming,’ she said soothingly. She poured a saucer of milk and took it out, setting it down by the step; the cat pushed its head against her fingers. ‘Go on,’ she said urgently, ‘get that inside you, and quick about it.’ The cat rubbed against her legs, so pleased at a friendly contact that in spite of its hunger it couldn’t at once give attention to the milk. ‘You’ll lose me me job,’ Emily said with affectionate fierceness. ‘Get a move on.’
At last the cat crouched over the saucer, purring loudly. A lean black stray, an abandoned pet most likely; some people had no heart. Mrs Yorke had caught her feeding it only the other day, couldn’t abide cats, Mrs Yorke, always a bad sign, Emily had observed that more than once in her long life. ‘Don’t encourage that filthy beast!’ Mrs Yorke had cried, ever so nasty. ‘If you want a cat, why don’t you keep one yourself?’ As if she hadn’t explained a thousand times why she couldn’t keep a cat. On account of her birds, it stood to reason. You could keep a cat or you could feed wild birds, you couldn’t do both, any fool would know that.
‘Finished, have you, me lovely?’ She stooped and retrieved the saucer. ‘Go on, scarper.’ With her foot she gently pushed the stray back from the door, went inside and washed the saucer, put it away. ‘Now then,’ she said briskly. ‘Better get going if I’m going to get me bus.’
As soon as Emily was safely out of the room Zena heaved herself half-way out of her nest and fumbled about under the bed like a sea-lion baffled by a new trick. Her fingers encountered the squared edges of a box. She smiled in triumph and hauled herself up again, clutching at her booty.
She tore away the Cellophane wrapping, snatched off the lid and sat upright with her hands clasped, gazing down with anticipation at the elegant rows of petit-fours. But there was no time to sit and gloat; at any moment her husband’s car might sweep into the drive. She began to stuff the sweetmeats into her mouth, giving herself barely time to taste them, but experiencing all the same the intense pleasure of satisfying an overpowering greed.
In four minutes’ flat she had put paid to most of the top layer. She raised her head and glanced at the clock on the mantelshelf. Not quite half past six. No sign of Owen yet. Surely now she had time for just one quick sip?
Yes! Of course she had! She stuffed the box back under the bed and tried to contort herself into a position in which she could wrench open the door of the bedside cabinet. She groaned and tugged but it was impossible; she was compelled at last actually to flop out from between the sheets on to the carpet and in a cross-legged posture she sank a tot of neat brandy. By the time she had drained her glass for the second time she had ceased to bother about Owen’s car.
A terrible sense of sorrow and the harsh injustice of life welled up inside her. Some sentinel fragment of her brain insisted that it was never meant to be like this–how had Daddy’s little golden-haired princess come to be slouched on the floor of Daddy and Mummy’s bedroom, fat and ailing and unlovely, a little drunk and more than a little nauseated?
She silenced the disturbing voice in the only way she knew–she filled her glass again and lifted it to her lips. But she couldn’t finish the drink. After a few sips she began to feel so unwell that fright restored her temporarily to sobriety. She levered herself up and went over to the basin, where she emptied the glass into the sink and ran a tap to wash away the traces.
She splashed her face with cold water and dabbed it partly dry. Ah! That was better! She got back across the room and pushed the brandy bottle into a corner of the cabinet.
Twenty minutes to seven and Owen still not home. Brandy-inspired anger began to mount in her brain. I could die here all alone, she thought with savage resentment, and he wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Resentment suddenly gave way to near-panic as this habitual expression of self-pity all at once translated itself into a terrifying possibility. I could actually die! The words leapt before her eyes in characters of fire. I am ill! Desperately ill! It isn’t just a game I’ve been playing.
Up to this moment she’d always cherished the illusion that she could stop whenever she chose, pull herself together, like a child saying, ‘I’m going to be good now, for ever and ever,’ as if the debilitating years could be dissolved in a single flash of resolution and she could wake up next morning slender and beautiful, radiantly healthy and gloriously young again.
For one piercing moment she saw the skeleton face of reality rise up from the pit. She shut her eyes tight, forcing the image away, down, out of perception and consciousness. She slid back, lying full-length on the satin spread, and dropped at once into a doze that lasted barely a minute.
When she opened her eyes again she had the impression that she had been asleep for a long time. The brandy had resumed its interrupted work; she felt relaxed and dulled. The terror had vanished, leaving behind only a hazy notion that she ought to ring her doctor. She raised herself up and went with a kind of floating motion into the dressing room that linked–or, more accurately, separated–her room from that of her husband’s.
The phone stood on a small table at the other side of the room. She wove her way towards it, sat down and dialled the number. The engaged signal sounded in her ear. Not at all put out, she replaced the receiver and leaned back in her chair, ready to try again in a couple of minutes. It never occurred to her to wonder whether fifteen minutes before the start of evening surgery might not be an ideal time to phone a busy doctor.
Owen Yorke turned his large black saloon car into the narrow road–little more than a lane, really–that led to the secluded house where he lived with Zena. He had never been able to think of The Sycamores as home although he had inhabited it for half of his fifty years.
His speed dropped until he was barely keeping the car in motion. He hadn’t consciously slackened the pressure of his foot on the accelerator, it was just that he was finding it more and more difficult every evening to propel himself towards the house at all.
A couple of weeks back his eye had fallen on a paragraph in the paper, some man who’d been missing from home for more than a month, a prosperous professional man with a family life that seemed ordinary enough; he’d turned up, unkempt, half-starving, in a bleak little mining town in the north, hundreds of miles away from his comfortable base. Discovered by a policeman late at night, sitting all alone on a stone bench outside the post office in the middle of a snowstorm. He hadn’t been able to offer any explanation.
The item had stuck in Owen’s mind. It was the kind of trivial news story which didn’t merit a follow-up. One never knew how it ended or indeed, why it had begun. The thought of that man would spring into Owen’s brain quite often now as he opened the door of his car in the evenings and a prickle of fear was beginning to accompany the thought.
All his life he had relied on the exercise of his will to channel his energies and discipline his emotions and desires so that the whole of his conscious effort kept him unswervingly directed towards the goal he saw so clearly.