“Just put me on anyway.”
If Viola could start again—there are no second chances, life’s not a rehearsal, blah, blah, blah—yes, but if she could, if she could retake the journey that wasn’t really a journey, what would she do? She would learn how to love. Learning to Love, a painful but ultimately redemptive journey, displaying warmth and compassion as the author learns how to overcome loneliness and despair. The steps she takes to mend her relationship with her children are particularly rewarding. (Half the members of the jury had nodded off by now.) She had tried, she really had. She had worked on herself. Years of therapy and fresh starts, although nothing that really required an effort on her part. She wanted someone else to effect change in her. It seemed a shame you couldn’t just get an injection that would suddenly make everything all right. (“Try heroin,” Bertie said.) She hadn’t turned to the Church yet, but now that she had voted Tory (tactical!), Anglicanism would probably be next. But it didn’t seem to matter how many new beginnings she had, Viola always somehow found herself in the same place, and no matter how hard she tried, the earliest template of herself always seemed to trump later versions. So why bother? Really?
“Pointless,” she said again as she tried to open the window further, but it had a lock that prevented it moving more than a couple of inches, as if the powers-that-be were trying to prevent elves falling out rather than normal-sized, if slightly shrunken, old people. They were on the first floor and the view was of the huge industrial bins that contained God knows what kind of unpalatable refuse.
Her father must miss having fresh air, he had always been so into the outdoors. He loved nature. She felt a sudden spark of sympathy for him and stamped on it.
When she was a child, they drove out to the country nearly every weekend and walked for miles while he battered her with information about flowers and animals and trees. Oh God, how she had hated those nature walks. He wrote a column for years for some obscure rural magazine. Of course, if she had listened to him she might have learned some useful stuff, but she didn’t listen on principle because there was nothing he could ever say about anything that would make up for his losing her mother. I want my mother. The desperate cry of a child in the night. (“Oh, for God’s sake, get over it,” Bertie said. Unnecessarily harsh, in Viola’s opinion.)
“You used the word ‘wary’ earlier, in the context of your father,” Gregory said. He was yet another incarnation of The Voice of Reason, of course, a voice that had been pursuing her all her life.
“Wary?” he prompted her.
“Did I use that word?”
“Yes.”
She supposed he was trying to truffle out abuse or something equally traumatic and dramatic. But it was her father’s provident character that had made her want to keep her distance from him. His stoicism (yes, that much-overused word), his cheerful frugality—the bees, the chickens, the home-grown vegetables. Chores had to be done (“I’ll wash if you dry”). Leftovers had to be used up (“Well, let’s see, there’s a bit of ham and some cold potatoes in the fridge, why don’t you pop outside and see if our feathered friends have given us any eggs?”). And his persistent patience with her as if she were a mulish dog. (“Come on, now, Viola, if you come and sit down and do your homework, we’ll see if we can’t find you a treat afterwards.”)
“He sounds sensible, Viola.”
“You’re supposed to be on my side.” (Sensible! What a horrid word.)
“Am I?” Gregory said mildly.
Was there no one who would ever sympathize with her tales of woe? Even people that she paid a fortune to precisely for that task? “And he cut my hair off after my mother died.”
“Himself?”
“No, he took me to a hairdresser.” Nancy used to take her to Swallow and Barry in Stonegate and then they would go to Bettys and eat meringues filled with cream. She had ordered a meringue in Bettys last night. It was very good but it was not the meringue perdu of her childhood.