The Old House on the Corner (22 page)

Rachel’s family was complete. She felt like an actress who had slogged away for years before becoming a star. Now she was putting everything she had into her role as a wife and mother and was happy beyond her wildest dreams.

Frank had felt uneasy, even a touch resentful, that the sale of Rachel’s flat had provided more than half the money for their house. She’d wanted to tell him not to be silly, but had quickly learned that Frank couldn’t stand criticism, at least not from her. ‘Don’t be silly’ was one of the worst things she could say.

‘It means we won’t have a huge mortgage to repay,’ she said gently, and he’d had to accept the fact, albeit grudgingly, that she was bringing more wealth into the marriage than him, when he considered it should be the other way around. He wasn’t quite as good a salesman as he’d claimed the night they’d met: some weeks the commission he earned was quite small and money would be tight.

They’d bought a new semi-detached house in a village called Lydiate, not far from Maghull. They had to pass the cottage where she’d been born to reach it and the first time Rachel had been astonished to see that it had been demolished and a large, detached, Tudor-style house had been built in its place. It had a name on the door, Three Farthings.

‘We’ll live in a house like that one day,’ Frank promised when she pointed it out.

He wouldn’t let her do anything in the new house, apart from watch while he laid carpets, put up tiles in the kitchen and bathroom, began to turn over the black soil
in the garden in readiness for a lawn. Like her, he got an enormous amount of pleasure out of simple things, like seeing the washing blow on the new clothesline for the first time, or admiring a picture that had just been hung on the wall.

Everyone on the new estate was very friendly. Almost every morning, Rachel was invited to a neighbour’s house for coffee or she invited them to hers. They babysat for each other, so Rachel and Frank often managed to see the latest films once they considered the children were old enough to be left.

Frank was the most popular of men, particularly with women. When they were in company, he would single out the most attractive one and flirt with her outrageously, compliment her fulsomely, until he had the woman eating out of his hand. It didn’t bother Rachel. It was
her
who Frank would hold in his arms that night,
her
whom he needed. She was his prop, the mother of the children he adored, the person who had given him the self-confidence to flirt, who was responsible for banishing the hurt, frantic look in his eyes that had been there when they’d met on her thirtieth birthday.

James started school, then Kirsty. Rachel joined the Parent-Teacher Association and helped raise funds for various school causes. She was in her element, organizing fètes, Christmas bazaars, cheese and wine evenings. Grace wrote from Canada and asked if she’d become a cabbage.

Perhaps she
had
become a cabbage. She no longer wanted to read Proust or watch Shakespeare. Frank and the children were enough and she couldn’t think of a single other thing she wanted. Once, she would have been envious of Eileen, but now felt only pity for a woman nearing forty who was still wandering the world, unable to settle, sleeping with married men. If Eileen wasn’t careful, she would soon be too old to have children. As for Grace and Tom getting divorced, words failed her. ‘We just grew apart,’ Grace had said in one of her previous letters.

‘No commitment, that’s what it is,’ Frank said, shaking his head, when she’d shown the letter to him. ‘Not like us, eh?’

The children were growing up so rapidly it scared her. James started comprehensive school – in another few months he would be twelve. Another year, and he would become a teenager. Kirsty was ten, double figures, but already behaving more like an eighteen-year-old with her clumpy shoes, short skirts, and skimpy T-shirts. She was nagging her parents to have her ears pierced, but
Frank put his foot down. ‘Over my dead body, Kirsty,’ he threatened. Rachel found lipstick and mascara hidden in her dressing-table drawer, but didn’t say anything.

She missed having babies, missed their dependency, teaching them to talk and walk, running into her arms when she collected them from school, helping to tie their shoelaces and myriad other things.

Although James and Kirsty could still make her heart turn over: James, for instance, when he’d been presented with two prizes on the final speech day at Junior school, looking incredibly serious and proud when he marched up to the front to take them from the headmistress; Kirsty for just being herself, tall and gawky, atrociously dressed, pretending to swoon during
Top of the Pops
when Take That came on the screen, promising herself that one day she would marry Robbie Williams. ‘Then I won’t have to change my name, will I, Mum?’

‘No, sweetheart,’ Rachel assured her.

The day Kirsty started senior school, Frank telephoned from the showroom. Did she get off OK?’ he asked.

‘She hates the uniform, but we already knew that. I’ve promised to take the skirt up a few inches tonight.’ Rachel sighed. She felt terribly sad.

‘I suppose you don’t know what to do with yourself.’

‘Well, there’s plenty of washing and Kirsty’s room is a tip, but I know what you mean. I wish we’d had more children, Frank.’

‘It’s a bit late in the day to think that, love. We thought two was all we could afford.’

‘I know.’ She sighed again. She was unlikely to conceive again at forty-four. ‘But, Frank,’ she said, ‘it wouldn’t hurt to try. Hang the expense.’

Perhaps God had been eavesdropping, because a few months after her conversation with Frank, Rachel found
herself pregnant. ‘If it’s a girl,’ she said, ‘let’s call her Alice – Alice in Wonderland.’

Some women actually said they felt sorry for her, having a baby at her age. Rachel was aghast. ‘But I’m thrilled to pieces,’ she exclaimed, ‘and so is Frank.’ James and Kirsty pretended to be embarrassed by the growing evidence that their parents, whom they’d thought well past it, had actually engaged in sex, but Rachel could tell they were secretly pleased.

Alice burst into the world on the first day of June after a long and excruciatingly painful delivery that left Rachel too weary to nurse her straight away.

‘She’s a little smasher,’ Frank whispered. He’d been present throughout the birth and his cheeks were streaked with tears. ‘I hope you haven’t been having it off with the milkman, love, because she’s nothing like us or our other two.’

Rachel glanced at the baby in the cot beside her bed, struggling to free herself from the sheet wrapped tightly around her tiny body. ‘It was the chimney sweep,’ she said. Alice’s curly hair was as black as soot. ‘Christopher told me our father had black hair when he was young.’ She gave a dry smile. ‘I can’t imagine my father being young.’

‘I can’t even remember what mine looked like.’ Frank made a face. ‘But we’ve come through, haven’t we, Rach, despite our lousy childhoods?’ He laid his head beside her on the pillow. ‘Our kids have always known how much we wanted them. They’ve never been shown anything but love.’

Within a few months, Alice’s eyes had turned from blue to brown and her black hair had grown into a tangle of waves and curls. She reminded Rachel of a Victorian doll with her tiny snub nose and little pink mouth. She
had the sweetest of natures, never stopped smiling and clearly found the world a delightful place. Even the women who’d felt sorry for Rachel when she was pregnant had to concede she was an exceptionally lovely child. ‘If I’d been in your place,’ one woman said, ‘I’d’ve had an abortion – but just imagine if you’d got rid of Alice! It hardly bears thinking about.’

Rachel shuddered. ‘Such an idea never entered my head.’

James and Kirsty adored her. When Alice caught a mild cold, James walked all the way home from school in his lunch hour to make sure she was all right. Kirsty was her willing slave and brought her friends back home to admire her baby sister. Several times a day, Frank would ring to ask what Alice was up to.

‘She’s just crawled across the room,’ Rachel would tell him or, later, ‘She’s just walked a few steps,’ and, later still, ‘She said “Dada” this morning.’

When Alice was three, Rachel was reluctant to let her go to playgroup, wanting to keep her precious daughter all to herself, but common sense told her it was best for her to mix with other children. The first morning, alone, the house felt unnaturally quiet without Alice’s joyous presence, but she was determined not to mope. At an age when most women’s children were adults, she’d been blessed with a beautiful little girl and it was ridiculous to resent her growing up. One day, her children would get married and have children of their own. Best look forward to that day, not dread it.

Frank telephoned in the afternoon. ‘How did playgroup go?’ he asked anxiously.

‘She loved it. She did a drawing of a teddy bear.’ Rachel giggled. ‘It looks a bit like you. I’ve stuck it on the fridge.’

‘I can’t wait to see it.’

*

That Christmas, Kirsty brought home her first boyfriend – at least, the first her parents knew about. His name was Whiz, he was seventeen, and had a gold stud in his eyebrow. Rachel glanced at Frank’s horrified face. She could tell that, like her, he was praying it wasn’t serious.

‘What’s Whiz short for?’ she asked her daughter when Whiz had gone.

‘Nothing, Mum, it’s just his name.’

‘He wasn’t christened Whiz, surely?’

Kirsty shrugged. ‘It seems a perfectly OK name to me.’

Frank, playing the heavy father, asked what Whiz did for a living.

‘He’s still in the sixth form at school. Next year, he’s going to university. He wants to be a doctor.’

Rachel and Frank looked at each other, stunned, and Frank muttered he wouldn’t have much confidence in a doctor with a stud in his eyebrow.

Whiz was soon replaced by Chas, who was replaced by Ian. From then on, Kirsty seemed to have a new boyfriend every month.

And James, who had seemed such a sensible, respectable young man, always neatly dressed, arrived home one day with his head shaved.

‘Ronnie Bannerman did it with clippers in the lunch hour,’ he said, looking terribly pleased with himself. ‘What d’you think, Mum? If we buy clippers of our own, it’ll save a fortune at the barber’s. Dad could use them too.’

‘You look like a skinhead,’ his appalled mother gasped. ‘Lord knows what your father will say.’

An equally appalled Frank said much the same as his wife. James was hurt. ‘The leader of the Conservative
Party, William Hague, has a haircut like this. I thought you’d be pleased.’

‘I can’t recall doing anything even faintly shocking when I was sixteen,’ Frank said that night when James was upstairs doing his homework.

‘Neither can I,’ Rachel replied. ‘I was incredibly well behaved.’ She smiled. ‘Although I’m glad they feel they can be themselves. I’d rather that than they be a pair of goody-goodies.’

After some consideration, Frank said he felt the same.

James commenced his final year at school on the same day that Alice started her first. On a beautiful September day with a faint hint of autumn in the air, Rachel walked along the towpath of the Liverpool Canal, Alice dancing beside her, a furry haversack on her back in the shape of a panda that held a new pack of felt pens, two pencils, a rubber, and a spare hankie. She wore a blue and white check frock and a navy-blue cardigan and looked terribly self-important. The canal sparkled like a silver ribbon. It was a slightly longer way to school, but made a pleasanter walk than the main Southport road.

‘Can I paddle on the way home?’ Alice asked.

‘No, sweetheart, the water may look nice, but it’s filthy. Not only that, you might drown.’

‘I
am
coming home, aren’t I, Mummy?’ She looked at Rachel nervously with her huge, brown eyes. ‘I’m not going to stay at school for ever?’

‘Of course not.’ Rachel laughed. ‘You’ll have lunch there, then I’ll collect you in the afternoon and we’ll be home well in time for tea.’

‘Will I like the lunch, Mummy? Will I have to eat carrots?’

‘I’ll tell the teacher you hate carrots and, if you don’t like the lunch, tomorrow I’ll make you sandwiches.’

‘Thank you, Mummy,’ Alice said gravely. ‘You’re very kind.’

‘And you, Alice Williams, are the funniest little girl in the whole world. Come here and let me give you a kiss.’

Unlike James, who’d always claimed to find school boring, and Kirsty, who continued to hate every minute because she couldn’t stand people telling her what to do, Alice quickly settled into the routine of lessons. She really enjoyed being taught how to read and write. Rachel made a set of cards with a three-letter word written on each:
CAT, MAT, BIG, DOG
… James and Kirsty fought over who would give Alice her reading lesson that night.

Rachel, who’d already started knitting for the Christmas Bazaar the school was having on the Saturday before Christmas, sat in a chair in front of the fire, watching and listening, thinking what loving, perfectly adorable children she had. In a few months, the new millennium would arrive. In the past, she’d often wondered where she would be, whom she would be with on the eve of the twenty-first century and had never dreamed she would spend it in such perfect company.

On the final day of the autumn term, Rachel woke up with a throbbing headache. She didn’t mention it to Frank or the children, but after she’d taken Alice to school, she took two tablets and lay on the settee, mentally ticking off the things she still had to do.