“But you will have to keep it here, of course, so she doesn’t see it,” said Marion, pouring her a glass of Coca-Cola, then emptying a giant bag of pickled onion flavor Monster Munch into a bowl.
Lydia pushed a Monster Munch into her mouth and crunched. “Love you so much, Em, you’re the best. You’re never too busy to do stuff with me, Mum is always on the phone to clients or going to look at some ugly pictures, she hardly notices me.” Marion swelled with happiness. No one had ever thought her “the best” before.
Once, a year or two later, Lydia arrived in tears after an argument with her mother.
“Mum is such a bitch, she always blames Dad for making her unhappy, but she’s the one that always starts the arguments, he just gets stressed because she’s wasting all his money keeping that stupid art gallery open. She is trying to make him go to counseling meetings with her where they have to talk about why they fight all the time. She wants me to go too. I know why they argue, it’s because she’s such a pain in the ass. She won’t let me watch TV, she says if I am bored, I have to read a book or play my violin, I hate that stupid violin. Why doesn’t she play the damn thing if it’s so much fun?”
Marion wondered if she ought to defend Judith, but she secretly enjoyed hearing Lydia say these things about her mother.
When Duncan moved in with his twenty-five-year-old blond mistress who wore saris and had a pierced tongue, Lydia ran to Marion and clung to her, sobbing.
“I don’t blame Dad for going, I hate her, I hate her, I wish I could leave, I wish I could come here and live with you! Can’t you ask her? Or maybe I could just run away and hide in your spare room, she wouldn’t even know I was here. You could bring me snacks and then at night I could come down and watch telly with you.”
Marion was half tempted to agree to Lydia’s plan; in fact, she had often fantasized that Judith would be killed in a road accident or die of a fatal disease and she would be allowed to adopt Lydia. “How good and generous Marion is to look after that poor young girl,” people would say. There was obviously the problem of Lydia’s father, but in her fantasy he rejected Lydia too, and only Marion could save her from the orphanage. When Lydia was older, they would open a gift shop together called Pleasant Surprises on the seafront that sold pretty things like decorated pillboxes and scented soap.
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AS THE YEARS passed Marion was shocked how quickly Lydia grew from a pretty child into an attractive young woman with a taste for shorts and miniskirts that showed off her long slender legs. There were occasions when John looked at the girl in a manner that made Marion uneasy.
Really, she would think to herself a little angrily, if I were her mother, I would never let her go out dressed like that. How much prettier she would look in a nice long skirt perhaps with a bright floral pattern. But it isn’t my place to say anything to Judith. . . .
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AFTER LYDIA STARTED college at sixteen, she visited less and less. One day Marion saw her on Northport Pier with two other girls. They were standing by one of the kiosks, laughing and joking around. They all wore tiny shorts and long loose T-shirts decorated with delicate sketches of flowers and fairies. A pretty girl with long dark hair put on a huge pair of novelty sunglasses and began walking like a duck while Lydia and a blond girl laughed. Marion caught Lydia’s eye and was about to wave, then Lydia turned away quickly and began looking at a display of postcards. That cold, gray feeling of being ignored reminded Marion of her days at Ladychapel, and she quickly walked away.
She tried telling herself that Lydia was a teenager, and teenagers didn’t want to waste their time with adults. And yet it was around this period that Lydia became much closer to her mother. Judith seemed to relish complaining to Marion about Lydia’s neediness. “She’s getting so possessive,” Judith would moan. “She doesn’t even like me dating men. She wants me to act like some repressed, 1950s housewife. Then we could bake cakes and get our nails done together.”
When Judith spoke about Lydia like this, Marion would ache with envy. How wonderful it would be to have a vibrant young daughter to share pleasant experiences with. She saw the two of them in a sunlit kitchen putting trays of pretty cupcakes into an old-fashioned oven. They wouldn’t even care if they left them in too long and they came out black as coal. Laughing, they would throw them away and start another batch.
LAUNDRY
The little travel alarm by her bedside (why did she have a travel alarm, she never went anywhere?) said 10:15, but the heavy weight of dread that pressed down on Marion stopped her from getting up. It was Monday. Monday was a bad day because of the laundry.
Eventually she gathered the strength to push off the weight and forced herself to get out of bed and go into the bathroom. After washing herself she sat for several minutes on the edge of the bath thinking about what she had to do. I don’t know why you get so worked up about this, she said to herself. All you need to do is gather the dirty laundry from the baskets in your and John’s bedrooms and then stuff it all in the big washing machine. And then when it is done, leave it to dry in the face-wardrobe room. That was the simple part. What filled her with dread was washing the third basket that contained the things belonging to the visitors.
Of course she could have refused to do their laundry, but that would have meant bringing up the matter with John, and if they were never mentioned, it was easier to pretend that they weren’t really there. Sometimes she would even think to herself: How could there possibly be people living in the cellar of our house? John is only going down to meddle around with his tools, to try and fix all those old broken things he brings home. Then laundry day would come along, reminding her that they must indeed exist, and she would be once again overcome with a brittle, cold feeling of fretfulness.