Swallow and Barry had a little counter downstairs where they sold jewelled tortoiseshell combs and clips and it smelt of some lovely grown-up perfume, and upstairs the hairdresser always said how nice her long hair was and then he trimmed the ends neatly so it would be “even nicer.” It was a place of luxury and indulgence where people told her she was pretty and everyone loved Nancy, but after she died her father said he couldn’t do her plaits every morning and she needed something more “manageable,” so he took her to a horrible little salon near where they lived. It was painted lilac, the sort of place that nowadays would be called “A Cut Above” or “Curlz” but then was called “Jennifer’s,” and she clearly remembered that it was cold and the mauve paint was peeling.
She left with an awful short style that didn’t suit her, made her look like a plain pudding, her lost hair abandoned on the cracked lino of Jennifer’s. No meringues in Bettys, only lemon barley water and chocolate bourbons at home. She had wept and wept and—
“Couldn’t you brush your own hair?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Couldn’t you brush your own hair?”
“I was nine years old. So, no. Not properly.” Nancy had brushed her hair attentively, every morning and every evening before bed. It had been a lovely communion that they shared.
Bertie had long hair when she was small. By default really as Viola had never taken her to a hairdresser. Viola remembered rushing to get her children off to school in the mornings, always an appalling hour of chaos with Bertie being slow and Sunny being obnoxious. (“Why don’t you get up a bit earlier?” her father suggested. Right, as if she got enough sleep as it was.) Bertie hated the ritual tug-of-war with the little Mason Pearson, a brush that wasn’t really up to the task. She fidgeted endlessly and yowled when the brush snagged so she usually went off to school with it sticking out all over the place. It was a Steiner school, all the children arrived looking vaguely unkempt so it didn’t seem to matter that much.
Viola winced at a long-forgotten memory that resurfaced unexpectedly—yelling at Bertie, “Well brush it yourself if you’re not prepared to stand still!” before throwing the brush across the room. How old was Bertie then? Six? Seven?
Oh, Viola.
This memory, coming out of the blue, was another little jab to Viola’s heart, already severely damaged by the previous evening’s revels. (“Was I really such a terrible mother?” she asked Bertie. “Why the past tense?” Bertie said. Sow and reap.) Another jab. The fissure in Viola’s ossified heart widened into a crevasse. Jab, jab. Of course, it wasn’t that people didn’t love her (although it certainly felt as if they didn’t), she hadn’t been exiled from love, she had exiled herself. She wasn’t stupid, she knew that. What was the next step then, The Voice of Reason asked? Was it perhaps to begin—
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” Viola said wearily.
When Bertie went to stay with Viola’s father (“I lived with him, I didn’t stay with him”), true to precedent, he took her to a hairdresser and she returned with an old-fashioned bob held back with a plastic hair slide. She loved it, she reported, but Viola suspected that she only said that to annoy her. “She can look after it herself now,” her father said. He was obsessed with self-sufficiency, of course, with people being responsible for themselves.
He started to snore.
“I’m still interested in the word ‘wary’?” Gregory said.
Viola sighed. “Maybe it was the wrong word.”
Everyone liked her father. He was good. He was kind. She had watched him kill her mother.
“Do you want to talk about that, Viola?”
The insubstantial pageant started to drizzle limply to an end and a pair of carers came into the room and said, “Ready for bed, Ted?” like a children’s rhyme. “He’s already in bed,” Viola pointed out and the carers laughed as if she’d said something funny. They were both Filipino (“Tagalog spoken here”) and laughed no matter what you said. Were the Philippines really such a happy place or were the carers just happy not to be there? Or did they not understand a word she said? It was only six o’clock—even his bedtime was that of a little boy. One of them was carrying an adult nappy and they waited silently for her to leave the room. (“Preserving the dignity of our residents is of paramount importance.”)
Once her father had been cleaned up and tucked in, Viola went back to say goodbye. “I won’t be here next week,” she said, although it seemed pointless to talk to him about anything that involved the future, pointless to talk to him about anything really. “I’m not going home,” she added, “I’m going to a literary festival in Singapore.”
He said something, it could have been “Sunny.”
“Yes, it will be hot,” she said, even though she knew that wasn’t what he meant. Sun, son, Sunny. It was just “a hop and a skip” from Singapore to Bali, Bertie said. If she was already going that far, why wasn’t Viola going to see her “only son”? (And Bertie called her a passive aggressive!) It was four hours actually, but it wasn’t the time or the distance unless you thought of those things as metaphorical. Which Viola did.