Old Dogs, New Tricks. Linda Phillips
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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.’
With the entire contents of their home somewhere between London and Bristol, Philip and Marjorie checked into a hotel for the night. Falling into what purported to be a four-poster bed – well, it did have four rough posts meagrely swathed in cheap curtaining – they groaned with exhaustion.
‘Soon be there,’ Philip said in the awful hearty tone he’d adopted ever since Marjorie’s last bastions of defence had crumbled.
She had resisted this disruption in their lives with all her strength. Childishly she had at first adopted the attitude that if she ignored Phil’s plans they would go away, but of course they hadn’t. He’d continued to be as determined to move as she’d been to stay put. The arguments they’d had over the weeks! None of which had done any good.
She had had to leave everything in the end, because what alternative did she have? Break up the marriage and leave Phil – or bow to his judgement as per usual? But of course leaving him was unthinkable. She had loved him