Viola escaped to the garden. It wasn’t as neat as it used to be but it still betrayed the fact that her father was anally retentive. Beans grew straight on their canes, roses remained unspotted and uneaten. On her mother’s coffin her father had placed not a florist’s wreath but a bunch of roses from the garden. Viola remembered thinking that her mother deserved something opulent and fancy from a less amateurish hand. Home-made was nicer, her father said. Quite the opposite, Viola thought.
He disliked profligacy, whereas Viola failed to see why it was such a sin. There was no need to throw things out if they were still working. (The Voice of Reason.) You could re-use yoghurt tubs and tin cans for seedlings, make stale bread and cake into puddings, mince leftover scraps of meat. (Who had a mincer any more?) Old woollen jumpers were cut up and used to stuff cushions. Anything that moved was made into jam or chutney. When you left a room you had to turn off the light and close the door. Not that Viola did. She never had paper to draw on as a child but was always given the unused bits of wallpaper rolls. (“Just turn it over, it’s perfectly good.”) Vinegar and newspapers were used to clean windows. Everything else went out to the compost bin or the birds. Her father removed the hair from hairbrushes and combs and put it out for the birds to line their nests with. He was overly preoccupied with garden birds.
He wasn’t mean, she would give him that. The house was always warm—too warm, the central heating cranked up high. And he gave her generous pocket money and let her choose her own clothes. Food was plentiful. She used to despise the fact that nearly everything came from the garden: fruit, eggs, vegetables, honey. Not the chickens, chickens came from the butcher. He couldn’t kill a chicken. He let them die of old age, which was ridiculous because he became overrun with old chickens.
She had spent endless summer hours in the garden like a peasant in the fields, hands sticky from picking redcurrants, blackcurrants, raspberries. Scratched by gooseberry bushes, stung by wasps, bitten by grass mites, disgusted by slugs and worms. Why couldn’t they shop in brightly lit supermarkets, choose colourful packets of ingredients, shiny fruit and vegetables that came from far away and were picked by other people?
Nowadays, if she was honest with herself—which she rarely was, she knew—she missed all those meals she had hated at the time. Her father had commandeered Nancy’s old cookbooks and made Sunday roasts and apple pies, hot-pots and rhubarb crumbles. “Your dad’s fantastic,” everyone used to tell her. Her teachers loved him, partly because they had loved Nancy, but also because of the way he’d taken over the role of mother. She didn’t want him to be her mother, she wanted Nancy to be her mother.
(“We were early adopters of the Green movement. I was brought up in a self-sufficient household, very ecologically minded. We grew our own produce, we recycled everything, we were really ahead of the times when it came to respecting the planet.” Teddy was very surprised to read this in a Sunday-colour-supplement interview not long before he left Fanning Court for the nursing home.)
Her father read Silent Spring when it was first published, just after her mother’s death. A library copy, of course. (Had he ever actually bought a book? “But we should support the public libraries or they’ll cease to exist.”) He used to bore her rigid by reading out passages aloud. That was when he became obsessed with garden birds. There were several of them now on the bird feeder, different kinds. Viola had no idea what any of them were.
She returned to the kitchen—now empty of everyone, thank goodness—and started hauling dishes out of the cupboards and putting them in boxes, dividing things between the boxes destined for Fanning Court and those for the charity shop. (Who needed four covered vegetable dishes or even one soup tureen?)
Everything in the kitchen seemed to bring back memories. The Pyrex dishes reminded her of the cottage pies and rice puddings that had been cooked in them. The horrible tumblers, in a crinkly green glass that had made everything they held look contaminated, had contained the milk she had drunk every night before bed—accompanied by two Rich Tea biscuits, as basic a biscuit as it was possible to devise, when she had craved something more interesting—a Club, a Penguin. Her father’s insistence on an unadorned bedtime biscuit seemed to say everything about his austere morality. (“I’m thinking of your teeth.”) Oh, and that Midwinter-pattern crockery brought on a fit of melancholy. A whole life could be contained in a dinner-service pattern. (A good phrase. She tucked it away.) One day this would all be “vintage” and Viola would be very annoyed that she had packed it off to Oxfam without a backward glance.