“To make it work, we must all contribute,” Dorothy said. Must we, Viola thought wearily? She was hugely pregnant with Bertie and was still lugging Sunny around in her arms.
Lacking any special skills, she was assigned to general tasks—cooking, cleaning, baking bread, working in the garden, milking the goat “and so on.” “Housework, basically,” Viola said. She had marched in a Wages for Housework protest when she was at university, even though she had never done any, and she wasn’t very happy about doing any now. Or doing things for other people instead of doing them for herself, which seemed to be what living in a commune meant. There were also “light gardening duties,” which meant digging over the heavy red soil that was full of thistles in the borders around the lawn at the back. She was spared “the agricultural work,” as Dorothy termed the growing of puny root vegetables and worm-eaten cabbages. The Diggers, she thought miserably when she was out in the rain, trying to slice her way through the mud with a wonky spade. She had become a Digger, if not the Digger, as no one else ever seemed to be involved in this particular, not inconsequential task—the borders were enormous.
And they were in the middle of nowhere. Viola had never liked the countryside, it was a cold, muddy place, full of endless discomforts. When she was little they had lived in an old farmhouse too, in the middle of nothing but landscape, and she could remember her father continually nagging her to go outside and “get some fresh air,” to accompany him on walks to look for birds, trees, nests, “rock formations.” Why would anyone want to look for a rock formation? She remembered how pleased she’d been to move to York, to a semi-detached house with central heating and fitted carpets. A short-lived pleasure, of course, for what was a house without a mother?
The commune ran a stall at a monthly market in town where they sold stuff they had made—heavy loaves of bread that looked like missiles you could have hurled from catapults. Then there were the multicoloured candles that smelt rank and melted in distasteful puddles. And the pottery, of course. Wilhelm had a kiln which was the source of the thick mugs and plates that they used. There were also the wicker baskets that they all took a hand at weaving. Like blind people, Viola thought when asked to learn. It was the life of an unpaid eighteenth-century servant, she thought, with basket-making thrown in. And she had to look after the children because, despite all the talk about shared tasks, none of them were keen on Sunny, for which she could hardly blame them. Money was held in common, in a kitty, and she couldn’t remove a penny without having to justify the expenditure. One day, Viola thought, she was going to run away and take the kitty with her and spend it on Coca-Cola, chocolates, disposable nappies and all the other things that were condemned by the commune.
Dorothy herself seemed to spend a lot of time “balancing her chakras” (all right for some, Viola thought) and having her Tarot read by Jeanette. She did precious little basket-weaving and Viola had never once seen her milk the goat, a curmudgeonly Toggenburg that despised Viola as much as Viola despised it.
The only time she got any peace at Adam’s Acre was when she went out pretending to look for eggs. The chickens laid anywhere they wanted, it was ridiculous. Her father kept chickens, but they were disciplined birds, laying in their nests. Even on a fruitless egg forage she wasn’t safe from Dorothy swooping in (she came from nowhere, she was like a bat). “You’re Viola Todd, aren’t you?” she said rather accusingly to her one day, appearing on the path in front of her like Miss Jessel. Bertie was asleep in her Maclaren buggy, an item far too flimsy for this kind of rutted terrain (the wheels were always coming off). She had left Sunny with his father, an act that was tantamount to child neglect.
Bertie stirred in her sleep and raised a hand as if to ward off the unwelcome apparition of Dorothy. Viola, who had been wandering along the hedgerows in the midst of a potent fantasy that involved both piles of hot buttered toast and Captain Wentworth from Persuasion, was horribly startled.
“Yes, I’m Viola Todd,” Viola said cautiously. She had been living beneath the same roof as Dorothy for over a year and Dorothy didn’t know her name? “Guilty as charged.”
“Your mother is called Nancy? Nancy Shawcross?”
“Maybe,” Viola said even more cautiously. She didn’t like her mother’s name being on Dorothy’s lips. Her mother was sacred.
“Well, she is or she isn’t,” Dorothy said.
“Is,” Viola said, reluctant to hand over the conversational gift of her mother in the past tense.
“She’s one of the Shawcross sisters?”
“She is.” Plus it was nice to be talking about her mother as if she were still alive.
“I knew it!” Dorothy exclaimed theatrically. “I knew her sister—Millie. We trod the boards together when we were both ingénues. Been out of touch for years. How is your dear aunt?”