Easy Peasy (3 page)

A holiday: the beach, Llandudno, North Wales. I noticed hollows on my father's legs, the fleshy calves, deep hollows big enough to cup an egg in. I put my finger in one of the hollows. I must have been very young. It was warm and smooth inside, purplish like the skin on a newborn mouse, not hairy like the rest of his legs. I wanted to ask him what the holes were but he jumped up and pelted down the beach, ran splashily through the shallows until he reached deep water and then he swam. He swam out and out like always, arm over arm over arm. I was afraid when he swam out like that, out towards the middle of the sea, towards nothing. His dark head grew smaller and smaller, sometimes vanishing altogether. When I could see him no longer and I thought he had drowned, I did not scream or shout or point, I turned over on to my tummy on the beach-towel, fear beating in my veins. I lay still on the beach-towel, eyes shut, the chill of the sand striking up through the towel, shutting out the voices of Mummy and Hazel who were oblivious to the danger, until I felt the sprinkle of cold that meant that he was back. I turned over and looked up at him, towering against the sun above me, all the hairs on his body cradling glittering drops. I got up off the towel to let him use it. I didn't say a thing but I was so relieved that he was safe I needed to pee. I walked down the beach and into the sea until the cold water gripped me by the waist and then I peed blushing as the invisible heat flowed out between my legs into the cold.

‘I can't believe you didn't ask your mum about his dreams,' Foxy frowning at me, an edge of criticism in her tone.

I shrugged. Close as you are to someone, up to your eyes in love, it doesn't mean that they will understand you. No one from outside can really understand a family: it is a culture it takes a lifetime to acquire.

‘If that was part of
my
family history, I'd have to know,' she insisted. Foxy is a historian, her special interest oral history, family histories, the quiet stuff, the detail. She still teaches a little but most of her time and energy are concentrated on writing and research. Her study is piled with boxes of tapes, faint crackly voices recounting memories from the beginning of the century, Victorian and Edwardian voices. She gets quite frantic sometimes when she thinks of the dying resource, the most direct primary evidence. But skewed, I say, for how can a memory not be skewed that is eighty or ninety years old, that has either lain dormant or been continually embroidered for the best part of a century? It's Foxy's turn to shrug at this and talk about intelligent and selective interpretation, about empirical corroboration. I criticise, but I think it's wonderful, what she does. I think she is wonderful, asleep now, awash in the tangle of her hair.

She is so much cleverer than me. Cleverer and more patient. My degree – not a bad one, 2:1 in history and philosophy – has fallen off me like so much dust, all that learning. I prefer the day-to-dayness of my business, selling second-hand and period clothes. Second Hand Rose is the name of my shop, a popular shop in the centre of York. I spend much of the week travelling to markets and auctions collecting stock. I wash and press and mend while listening to the radio most evenings, turned down low so as not to disturb Foxy when she's working at home. I open my shop five days from midday to six. Connie works in the shop and lives in the upstairs flat. My guard-dog she calls herself, giving a big husky bark of laughter. I can't pay her much but she has the flat rent free, a pokey hole, admittedly, and the odd outfit. And I mean odd. When I'm buying I keep Connie in mind. She's in her mid-fifties. ‘Mutton dressed as lamb, I know me duck,' she says cheerfully, though I wouldn't say lamb exactly. She likes spiked heels and patent leather mini-skirts, tight neon-coloured satin blouses. She wears her hair in an orange beehive and her legs are sensational. She has a stream of lovers, thirty years her junior at least, whom she treats kindly – ‘I give them the time of their life, darling' – and then in the nicest possible way discards before they become attached. Her voice is a deep sexy purr and we fight constantly but amicably over the Gauloise she will smoke from a long tortoise-shell holder so that the clothes, when you shake them out, all have a faint reek of France.

My working life is markets and motorways, the shop and Connie and clothes. Image. It is all surface, unlike Foxy's working life which is earnest and burrows beneath the surface. But clothes are important, they are part of it, Foxy says so herself. She likes to get her subjects to talk about their clothes, the fashions, the costs, the difficulties, it is a rich seam to mine, she says. Oh Foxy. She is glamorous – even naked. The clothes she wears are severe, her spectacles too, stern ovals, but her chestnut hair, that is long and slippery. She wears it in a French pleat that will not stay properly in. She is often to be seen, both hands behind her head, her mouth full of hair-grips, recapturing it. She wears too much lipstick and it never quite matches the shape of her lips. It is always bright – vermilion or cherry or scarlet – and always too big, slipping over the edges of her mouth. It is her only design fault and I love it. All our cups and glasses have red grease-marks on the rims, because unless you scrub, it will not come off. Still, I don't mind, I like to drink from the very place where her lips have been. God, I am besotted! No wonder she wants … no! She has not said she wants to go and she is sleeping so sweetly beside me, how could she sleep so sweetly if she was not happy? If she did not want me beside her?

4

My mother has met Foxy, although I did not introduce her as Foxy. That name too pungent and feral to be taken into my family. My friend, I called her, my friend Sybil. It makes me laugh that she is really called that, Sybil – prophetess, fortune-teller, witch. She is none of those things – except in her capacity to bewitch me. She is the most rational and pragmatic of beings. Sybil Fox. It is only me who calls her Foxy, to most of her other friends she is Syb, quite inappropriate: a numb little snippy snub of a name. And she calls me Zelda. She has made me Zelda, a desirable grown-up woman when before I was a child, Griselda, known to my family, and even a lover or two, as Grizzle.

I have never told my mother, in so many words, that Foxy, Sybil, is my lover, but I know she knows. She is not shocked. She has an open, Scandinavian, streak in her. She has visited me, us, three times in this flat. Christmas shopping in York has become a new ritual. We wander round the shops until our feet are aching and then have lunch followed by tea and wicked cakes in Betty's, her treat. It is the most mother-and-daughterish thing we do.

She has seen the bedroom with the double bed, the double wardrobe, the two pairs of slippers on the floor. Foxy's study has a single bed where she sometimes snoozes in the afternoons among her papers so Mummy
might
think she sleeps there, if she wants to think that then she can. But I know she knows we are a couple because last year her Christmas card to us read:
To Griselda and Sybil with love from Mum and Dad
as if we are a married couple.

Mum and Dad
. That is the last time and I did not treasure it. This year the card will read only
love Mum
to her family,
love Astrid
to everyone else. How will she do it after forty-two years? How will she stop her hand writing
and Dad
or
and Ralph
?

I wish I had got through to her tonight. Why was her phone engaged so long? Who was she talking to? She should have been talking to me or Huw or Hazel. I could get up. I could get up quietly and phone her now. At this time? On a night like this?

My father is dead. This is the only day that he will die on. September 9th. No. It is past midnight, the 10th. Yesterday he died. Already it is yesterday, the past. September 9th. Last September 9th he didn't know he only had a year to go. You have a deathday just like you have a birthday, the only difference is you do not know it. It is a secret like so much else.

Daddy never knew about Foxy and me, of course he didn't. I never said to Mum, don't tell him. I couldn't, since it was only tacitly known by her. But as well as that it is implicit in our family code that we don't tell Daddy things he wouldn't like. Didn't tell. Soon the past tense will catch up with him, but, despite midnight, today is still his deathday, he can still be present tense today.

‘What did he tell you about his war?' I asked my mother once, egged on by Foxy. Until I knew Foxy I had never noticed my mother's reluctance to talk or think about my father's past.

She moved her hand in a dismissive gesture. ‘Hardly a thing. He used to try and talk but … oh, I really don't remember. Best not to dredge up the bad memories, best to bury them. Look forward not back. That's what Ralph does. You should respect that, respect his privacy.'

I repeated that to Foxy.

She choked on her coffee. ‘Respect his privacy!'

‘Yes.'

She wrinkled her nose so that her spectacles rose up indignantly. ‘It's like letting gold flow down a drain,' she said. ‘It is treasure, Zelda, it is part of you.'

I wonder if Foxy would feel differently if she knew who she was? She was adopted at the age of six weeks. She tried once to discover the identities of her natural parents, she found only that it was a private adoption; her mother a young girl, her father an American GI. That's all she knows. Her adoptive mother told her on her sixteenth birthday. I thought that must have been traumatic but, ‘No,' she said emphatically, ‘not in the least. I
liked
to know that. I always felt I didn't belong.' I didn't say that nor did I. I didn't feel I belonged to my family either. I am short and solid and dark haired while Mummy and Hazel are tall and slim and blonde. If someone had told me I was adopted I would have been delighted, excited to shed part of my identity.

Even now?

A fantasy: my mother rings me up. She confesses that Daddy wasn't my real, my biological, father, that she had an affair with someone – oh, Paul Newman, say. That used to be my fantasy. How would it make me feel? I don't know. I am so tired. And anyway it's stupid because although I haven't inherited my mother's Scandinavian looks, I
am
like Daddy.

Foxy still loved her parents after they told her the truth although she started, immediately, to call them May and Reg instead of Mum and Dad. May is her best friend. They talk on the phone for ages every Sunday night, gossiping and guffawing with laughter and often meet in London for a drunken lunch followed by a stagger round Harvey Nichols or Harrods, daring each other into ever more extravagant purchases. May knows about Foxy and me, treats me like a daughter-in-law. I am Foxy's third live-in female lover. Third time lucky, I say, and Foxy flicks her eyes to heaven. Even the slightest allusion to superstition gets up her delectable nose. And it
has
lasted longest. Five years almost. I wonder how many women she has made love to? And men too. None of my business.

But, an anomaly: although Foxy is almost obsessive in her plundering of other people's pasts, while she salivates at the combination of a Zimmer frame and a memory, she has not bothered with the background of May or Reg. When I ask why, she bats the question away with her hand and will not say. Why is she not interested in their past when she's fascinated by everyone else's?

I have not told Foxy about the envelope. I don't know why, it's just … I needed to dwell on it alone, let the idea settle. I am afraid of her eagerness, what she will do. I was afraid to let her loose on my dad. Not only because she would have doubtless given the game away, somehow, about the nature of our relationship, but because she would have tried to turn him inside out, upside-down, shake all the memories from the pockets of his mind and … And I feared what would happen to him, then. What would be left.

Foxy has such tenacity, such fierceness – she is more of a hound than a fox when on the scent of the past. I cannot imagine her in the same room as my father. Her energy would suck his out. They are like different species.

Now I exaggerate! The night is getting into my head. How I hate the night. I would like to live in the land of the midnight sun, but all year round, to have no division between night and day, no boundary, never a time when you look out of a window into the dark to see that every door is shut, every pair of curtains drawn, every light extinguished.

‘You could train to be a nurse,' Foxy suggested once, ‘and work nights.'

It made sense, but I could never be a nurse. I'm squeamish and I don't like touching people, except people I choose to touch. And working nights, whatever the job was, would rob me of Foxy for whom night-time is luxury. She is the deepest sleeper I have ever known and the quickest to switch. She is rarely sleepy, either awake or asleep as if there is a very efficient valve in her, no leakage either way.

The envelope. A fortnight ago my mother rang me. ‘I've had a letter,' she said.

‘Well?'

‘Well, since you seem so determined to waken the dogs …'

‘Sorry?'

‘The sleeping dogs. All this pestering about your father's war …' I gasped at the unfairness of this, I had only asked her once or twice. ‘I've had this letter. I don't know what to do with it. Should I send it to you?'

‘What is it?'

‘It's from a Mrs Priest writing to tell me of her husband's – who incidentally I don't know from Adam – death. The Reverend Priest would you believe! He knew your father in the war.'

‘A letter about Daddy?'

‘She's been through his papers and found some things. To do with, you know, the Japs and so on …'

‘Shouldn't you give them to Daddy?'

‘I don't want him all stirred up unnecessarily. Night after night of it I'm getting at the moment. He's worse. I don't want him more upset. And I don't want to open it. Shall I send it to you? You see what you think.'

‘Yes do,' I said. I was touched that she had chosen me, not Hazel, touched that she had taken me seriously when I'd asked about Daddy. I'd thought she only considered it silly, and me a childish nuisance.