“Happy?” Maud said, though the word was barely comprehensible through the suffocating mouthful.
Then, without waiting for an answer, she turned on her heel and left, slamming the dining room door behind her so that the china rattled on the table.
I bent my head over my plate, and trying not to let my shaking hands show, I speared a potato on my fork and put it into my mouth, my eyes blurring.
Don’t look at me, I thought desperately, knowing how my aunt’s white-cold anger could redirect onto whoever was unlucky enough to catch her attention. Don’t look at me.
But she didn’t. Instead I heard the screech of her chair legs on the parquet, and the slam of the door on the other side of the room, and when I looked up I was blessedly, entirely alone.
? ? ?
It was much later that Maud came to my room. I was sitting in bed in my dressing gown, a hot-water bottle at my feet, sorting my cards. I heard feet on the stairs, and at first my stomach clenched, not sure who it was, but then there came a tap on the wooden door, and I knew.
“Maud?”
“Yes, it’s me.” Her voice was low, and I could tell she didn’t want anyone to hear. “Can I come in?”
“Yes,” I whispered back, and the handle turned, and she came into the room, ducking her head beneath the low attic doorway. She was wrapped in a huge cardigan, and her feet were bare. “God, aren’t you freezing?” I asked, and she nodded, her teeth chattering. Without speaking I pushed over in the narrow bed and patted the pillow beside me, and she climbed in, her feet like ice as she slid them down past my legs.
“I hate her,” was all she said. “I hate her so much. How can you stand to be here?”
I have no other choice, was what I thought, but I knew that I had as many choices as Maud, maybe more.
“She acts like it’s the 1950s,” Maud said bitterly. “No TV, you and me shut up here like fucking nuns, Mrs Warren toiling away in the kitchen—does she realise people don’t live like this any more? Other people our age are out there going to gigs, getting drunk, screwing each other—don’t you care that we’re shut up here in Mother’s post-war fantasyland?”
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell her that I had never wanted to get drunk or go to gigs. That I never had—even when I had the chance.
“Maybe I fit in with it better than you,” I said at last. “Mum always said I was an old-fashioned little thing.”
“Tell me about your mum,” she said quietly, and I felt a lump rise in my throat—thinking of Mum as she always is in my mind’s eye—digging in the garden, with Dad alongside her, humming along to Paul Simon, hoeing the onions or planting bulbs. I tried not to think of those last nightmare months—Mum gasping her last on a ventilator, and Dad’s heart attack a few weeks later.
“What’s to tell?” I said, trying not to sound as bitter as I felt. “She’s dead. They’re both dead. End of.”
The unfairness of it still makes me gasp—but there’s a kind of rightness in it too, that’s what I’ve realised. I was the child of two people completely in love. They were meant to be together—in life, and in death. I just wish that that death hadn’t come so soon.
“I want to understand . . .” Maud said, her voice very low. “I want to understand what it must be like not . . . not to hate your mother.”
This time, it wasn’t the chill of her feet, but the venom in her voice that made me shiver.
My aunt isn’t an easy woman—I know that—I knew that before I even came to live here. The fact that she had managed to fight with my father told me everything I needed to know. He was the most mild-mannered man you can imagine. But nothing had prepared me for the reality of what I found here.
“I wish I could get away,” she spoke with quiet venom, into her knees. “She let him go.”
She didn’t say who—she didn’t have to say. We both knew who she was talking about. Ezra, away at boarding school. He had escaped.
“Is it the boy thing, do you think?” I asked.
Maud shrugged, trying to look unconcerned, but I wasn’t fooled. Her cheeks were wet where she had cried after supper.
“Girls aren’t worth educating,” she said, with a bitter little laugh. “Or not worth paying to educate, anyway. But whatever she thinks, I’ve got twice his brains. I’ll be at Oxford while he’s still sitting retakes at some shitty crammer in Surrey. I’m going to show her, this summer. Those exams are my ticket out of here.”
I didn’t say what I was thinking. Which was—what about me? If Maud leaves, what will I do? Will I be imprisoned here, alone, with her?
“I used to hate this room,” Maud said softly. “She used to lock us in here as children, for punishment. But now . . . I don’t know. It feels like an escape from the rest of the house.”
There was a long silence. I tried to imagine it—tried to imagine having a mother who would do that—and what it would do to you as a child to suffer through that—and my imagination failed.
“Can I sleep here tonight?” she asked, and I nodded.
She rolled over, and I switched out the light and turned on my side, my back to her, and we lay in the darkness, feeling the warmth of each other at our spines, and the shift and creak of the mattress whenever the other moved.
I was almost asleep when she spoke, her voice a whisper so soft I wasn’t sure at first if she was speaking, or sighing in her sleep.
“Maggie, what are you going to do?”
I didn’t answer. I just lay there, staring into the blackness, feeling my heart beating hard in my chest at her words.
She knows.
CHAPTER 13
* * *
The next half hour was a blur of questions and evasions, harder than Hal had ever imagined, but strangely exhilarating at the same time.
As she stumbled through the conversation, desperately trying to remember what she had said to whom, she found herself abandoning the chess analogy and returning to the image of herself as a boxer, strapping up her knuckles before clambering into the ring to dodge punches, sidestep questions, and turn awkward inquiries back onto the person opposite her.
And yet, this was no one-to-one sparring match. A single opponent would have been a setup much more within her comfort zone. She was used to that—although this was very far from the controlled environment of her little kiosk. But this confused melee was something entirely different: jumbled voices, cutting across each other, prodding her for answers before she had finished responding to another speaker, butting in with anecdotes and reminiscences. It was so unlike what she was accustomed to that she felt almost punch-drunk, pummeled by the sound.
All her life family had meant one thing—her and her mother. The two of them, bound together, self-sufficient. Growing up, Hal had never felt that there was anything missing, but she had sometimes yearned for the big family holidays of other children at school, the endless ranks of brothers and sisters and cousins to play with, and piles of presents at Christmas and birthdays that came from a large tribe of relatives.
Now—as they crowded around her, talking over each other in jangling voices, asking her about her upbringing, her schooling, her current situation—she found herself wondering how she could ever have envied the other children their uncles and aunts.
Harding was the most difficult—direct question after direct question, barked in that rather sergeant-major voice, like an interrogation. Abel’s style was very different, lighter, friendlier; time and again when Hal ran up against something she couldn’t answer, he broke in with a chuckle and an anecdote of his own. Ezra said nothing, but Hal felt his eyes upon her, watching.
It was Mitzi who interrupted at last with a laugh that Hal would have found grating under other circumstances.
“Good heavens, boys!” She pushed into the circle of dark suits, swatting Abel on the shoulder and taking Hal’s hand. “Leave the poor girl alone for a few minutes! Look at her—she’s quite overwhelmed. Can I offer you some tea, Hal?”