He was always the voice of reason, wasn’t he? Or The Voice of Reason in Viola’s mind, awarding her father the capital letters of the Old Testament. Always nagging at her back. She wilfully failed to recognize it as the apprehensive murmur of her own conscience.
Viola, left alone at the table, now burst into tears. Why did everything always end up like this? And why was it always her fault? No one ever cared about how she felt, did they? No one made her a birthday cake, for example. Not any more anyway. Her father used to, but she hadn’t welcomed his handmade offerings and had lusted after the kind of birthday cakes you saw in the windows of Terry’s or Bettys, cake shops that faced off against each other on two sides of St. Helen’s Square, like a warring couple.
For her fiftieth birthday Viola ordered her own cake from Bettys, Terry’s having long since left the battlefield. “Happy Fiftieth Birthday, Viola” traced delicately in lilac on white, because despite heavy hints Bertie had failed to understand how significant reaching a half-century was. Viola had outlived her mother by more than three years, which was not a competition that she had particularly wanted to win. By then her mother had receded into an ephemeral past from which she couldn’t be recovered. The more Viola forgot her mother, the more she missed her.
She told no one about the fiftieth birthday cake and ate it all herself. It lasted for weeks although it was very stale towards the end. Poor Viola!
She picked all the orange Smarties off Sunny’s cake. They had been made in a factory—all of them, not just the orange ones—on the other side of town. Viola had been on a school tour of Rowntree’s factory and seen the colours being tumbled together in what looked like cement mixers made of shining copper. At the end of the visit they were all given a free box of chocolates. Viola’s were never eaten because when she came home she threw them at her father. She couldn’t remember why now. Because he wasn’t her mother probably.
She took the dirty cake plates through to the kitchen and put them in the sink. Through the window she could see Sunny and Bertie in the garden with their grandfather, who was showing them the daffodils. (“Millions of them!” Sunny said excitedly when he came running in.) Viola gazed at her children, kneeling amongst the flowers, their faces shining with reflected gold. They were laughing and chatting to her father. The sight made her feel incredibly sad. She felt as if she had been on the outside of happiness her whole life.
Hungry!” Sunny bellowed at her. Viola, whose eyes remained on the sea, as intent as a lighthouse keeper looking for a wreck, reached behind into her rucksack and fumbled blindly around in its depths before producing the paper bag that contained the sandwiches left over from earlier—uncompromising things made of dense home-made rye sourdough with a filling of Tartex and limp cucumber. Sunny raged at the reappearance of this unattractive feast. “I don’t want that!” he shouted, throwing the sandwich back at her. His aim was terrible and the sandwich was snatched up and devoured by a pleasantly surprised Labrador that happened to be passing by.
“I’m sorry?” Viola said, in that tone of voice which indicated that she was very far from sorry.
“I want something nice,” Sunny said. “You never give us anything nice.”
“I want never gets,” Viola said. (Not true of the Labrador, Sunny thought.) Prim Nanny had come with them to the beach apparently. She offered the sandwich to Bertie, who was digging a series of holes. Bertie said, “Thank you, Mummy,” because she enjoyed the way her compliance made her mother pleasant to her. “You’re welcome,” Viola said. Sunny growled at this blatant pantomime of manners, performed, he knew, just to make him feel bad. It was like when they played Happy Families (too young for the irony of it) and if you didn’t say “please” and “thank you” every single time you lost Master Mouse or Mrs. Robin, even though you had simply forgotten. “I hate you,” he muttered to Viola. Why was she never nice to him? “Nice” was Sunny’s ideal. One day his utopian vocabulary would be wider but for now he would settle for nice. “I hate you,” he said again, more to himself than his mother.
“La-la-la,” Viola said. “I’m afraid I can’t hear you.”
He took a deep breath and shouted as loud as he could, “I hate you!” People turned to look.
“I think there’s some people out to sea who didn’t hear you,” Viola said in that pretending-to-be-unruffled way she had that made Sunny want to destroy her. The cold weapon of sarcasm was an evil trick perpetrated by his mother against which he had no defence. A tempest brewed in his squally heart. He might explode. That would serve his mother right.