Make Yourself at Home Page 20

  ‘I like to eat all the meringue first,’ said Freddy, poking at it with his spoon.

  ‘I thought I was the only one who liked to eat it that way,’ said Bartholomew. They regarded each other with wary curiosity, then began to eat in perfect synchronicity.

  Patrick arrived with Agnes, both of them removing matching bicycle helmets as they walked into the hall. Olwen gestured them towards the table. ‘Sorry I didn’t get here earlier, Ethel,’ Patrick said, bending down to give her a swift peck on the cheek. ‘Rita messaged me but I didn’t see it until now.’

  ‘My dear boy,’ said Ethel, struggling out of her chair to hug him gently. ‘There was no need to come. I’m making a fuss over nothing, really.’

  Agnes stood beside Patrick. She was tiny and pretty and delicate with short blond hair and brown eyes behind an enormous pair of glasses. When she spoke – which she did once, only to politely refuse a bowl of Baked Alaska – she had a strong Polish accent. She poked Patrick’s arm and pointed at the dance floor. He hung their helmets from the back of Ethel’s chair and took the hand Agnes offered. She led him to the floor and they began to dance with great familiarity as if they danced that dance every day.

  Everybody smiled at them, like they couldn’t help it.

  ‘I must say,’ said Ethel later, as the evening drew to a close, ‘you’ve made this foolish old lady very happy.’

  ‘You’re not one bit foolish,’ Rita told her, flushed and breathing hard from dancing the tango with Hugh. ‘You’re just a human being, looking for a sign. Something to provide some meaning in this ridiculous world. Isn’t that what we’re all doing, at the end of the day?’

  ‘Why, yes,’ said Ethel, ‘I suppose you’re right.’

  ‘And we’ve all had a lovely time,’ said Hugh, sitting down beside Ethel.

  ‘We have,’ shouted Bartholomew and Freddy in tandem.

  Hugh picked up two glasses of the pink lemonade Olwen had sent over to the table earlier. He handed Ethel one of them. ‘I think we should drink a toast,’ he suggested.

  Everybody raised their glasses, stretching their arms into the middle of the table.

  ‘To Ethel and Stanley,’ said Hugh. ‘Happy anniversary.’

  ‘Happy anniversary,’ everybody roared, clinking and drinking. Rita refilled their glasses and stood up. ‘And to love,’ she declared. ‘It’s not always easy but it’s always worth it.’ Everybody stood up, and roared, ‘To love,’ and they clinked again and drank again, and Marianne could feel the bubbles rush up her nose.

  It was a most pleasant sensation.

  ‘And I’m sure there’s a good reason why Stanley didn’t send me a sign this year,’ said Ethel, taking a sip of her pink lemonade. She lowered her glass and was about to set it on the table when she stopped, all of a sudden, like she was frozen in place. Marianne followed her stare. There, on the table, unmissable against the bright red crepe paper, was a single, white feather. Small and delicate and so perfectly intact that it sort of took Marianne’s breath away. Ethel lifted it carefully, placed it gently on her palm, which she held out so they could all see. So there could be no doubt.

  ‘It’s a sign,’ bellowed Rita.

  Bartholomew held his hand up for a high five and instead of leaving him hanging, Freddy obliged, smacking Bartholomew’s hand with the flat of his own so that they both laughed as they rubbed their reddened palms along the legs of their trousers to soothe the sting of them. Agnes gave a small thumbs up and Patrick smiled, and Shirley stood up on a chair and belted out their ‘Get Well Soon’ song, her voice high and pure and sweet.

  They all joined in, even Marianne. In the car park, as they bid each other goodnight and Marianne rummaged in her handbag for the keys of the Jeep, Hugh, standing by his car, called over to her. ‘Marianne, I found this on the beach the other day,’ he said, holding up a waterlogged woolly hat with a sodden bobble on the top. ‘I think it might be yours?’

  She walked towards him. ‘Oh, yes, George made off with it the other morning.’

  ‘Did you think it was a sign?’ said Hugh. ‘The universe telling you to stop hiding your hair under a bushel? Or a hat?’

  ‘I don’t believe in signs,’ said Marianne. She looked at him, lowered her voice. ‘Was that you, by the way?’

  ‘What?’ Hugh looked suspiciously innocent.

  ‘The feather,’ said Marianne. ‘That was you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘So cynical for one so young,’ said Hugh, shaking his head.

  Marianne wrung the hat between her hands, squeezing the water out of it, held it up. ‘Good as new,’ she said.

  ‘You look just like Rita when you smile,’ said Hugh, studying her face.

  ‘That’s why I do it as seldom as possible,’ said Marianne.

  ‘Goodnight,’ he said, bending towards her, kissing her cheek. His mouth was soft against her skin and she could smell him, this close. Something warm and spicy and sweet. Like cinnamon and cloves baked in a pie.

  ‘Time, ladies and gentlemen, please,’ roared Shirley, appearing beside them. ‘Have yiz no homes to go to?’

  Marianne smiled at her. ‘Goodnight then,’ she said to Hugh, who nodded and folded himself into his car.

  ‘Did you correct the maths exam I did the other day?’ said Shirley, as they walked towards the Jeep.

  ‘Yes,’ said Marianne.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I’ll give you the results tomorrow.’

  ‘I want them now,’ demanded Shirley. ‘And a gold star. If I get over eighty per cent.’

  ‘You’ll get a gold star,’ said Marianne.

  ‘So I got over eighty per cent?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait till tomorrow.’

  ‘But you said …’

  ‘You got a hundred per cent.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ screeched Shirley, grabbing Marianne by the hands and twirling her around the car park. Marianne shrieked and Shirley whooped and Marianne laughed then. She couldn’t help it. There was something so joyful about Shirley’s whooping. And the hundred per cent itself. The gold star. She felt a part of it somehow, like she had played a part, however small.

  Chapter 24

  When Marianne awoke in the morning – prompted by George licking her face – she felt … okay.

  No. It was more than that.

  She felt … sort of content.

  Although perhaps she was overstating it.

  Suffice to say, Marianne woke feeling not as dreadful as she usually did. In fact, there was a curiously optimistic bent to her world view.

  For starters, at breakfast Pearl slid the Northside People over to Marianne’s side of the table, pointing to an article she had circled with her ballpoint pen.

  It wasn’t quite an article. It was a paragraph really. Accompanied by a photograph of the Get-Well-Sooners, outside Shirley’s house with their placards and banners, their mouths open as if they were in mid-chant. Marianne, who disliked looking at herself in photographs and never posed for them, had to own that they all looked great. Something vital about them all, with their hands clenched into fists and their arms raised high. The headline read, ‘Mother of Two Takes a Stand Against Eviction Order’. Shirley was front and centre. She looked fierce and beautiful, her long, navy eyes glaring out of the photograph like a challenge.

  Later, Bartholomew was tap-dancing outside his house when Marianne pulled up to collect him.

  He ran to the Jeep, flung open Marianne’s door, then jumped up and down on the spot several times.

  ‘You are not going to believe it,’ he panted. ‘Guess,’ he said. ‘Go on, you’ll never guess.’

  ‘You got the job at the theatre?’ piped up Ethel from the back seat.

  Bartholomew’s face fell. ‘How did you guess?’ he demanded.

  ‘Because I knew you’d get it,’ said Ethel, looking perplexed.

  ‘Free theatre tickets for life,’ shouted Shirley, reaching out to punch Bartholomew’s arm.

  Even Freddy offered his congratulations,
leaning forward to shake Bartholomew’s hand. ‘I knew you’d get it too,’ he said in a quiet voice.

  ‘Did you?’ Bartholomew bent to study Freddy’s face for traces of mockery but all Freddy did was nod solemnly.

  ‘The theatre is getting a bit of a facelift so I’m not starting til May which gives me plenty of time to assemble a new wardrobe,’ said Bartholomew, beaming. ‘And it’s all thanks to this beautiful woman right here,’ he went on, straightening and turning to Marianne, who looked startled.

  ‘No, I only …’ she began, but Bartholomew shook his head and waved her words away with his hands.

  ‘I am going to have to insist that you get out of that death-trap and hug me.’

  ‘Really, Bartholomew, there’s no need for …’ But Bartholomew released Marianne’s seat belt, lifted her hands off the steering wheel and pulled so she had no choice but to clamber out of the Jeep. Bartholomew held his arms wide open and Marianne, who now knew that he would remain in that position until she succumbed, stepped into the circle of his arms and patted his shoulder, then screamed as Bartholomew picked her up and swung her around. Not just once but several times. She shrieked all the while, as if there was nobody else about, which was most certainly not the case. When he finally put her down, the others cheered and the world rushed towards her at a tilt as Marianne staggered across the path, gripping Bartholomew’s arm to steady herself.

  Then there was the incident with Freddy, in the kitchen at Ancaire, where Marianne was making tea.

  Not an incident as such. Just a conversation, really. Freddy joined her, sat heavily on a chair and sighed deeply.

  ‘You okay?’ asked Marianne.

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Freddy, expelling another sigh from the depths of his body.

  Marianne sat beside him. After a while, Freddy shrugged. ‘It’s just … I’m happy for Bartholomew, don’t get me wrong. He’s changing his life and he knows what he wants and he knows who he is. I suppose … it’s hard not to feel a bit, well, a bit left behind.’

  ‘Your turn will come,’ Marianne told him, handing Freddy the last slice of Rita’s butterscotch tart, left over from yesterday.

  ‘You don’t know that,’ said Freddy, absently picking at the crust. ‘Not for sure. Mother says—’

  ‘You need to tell her,’ said Marianne.

  ‘Tell her what?’ said Freddy, but his voice was small and there was no real conviction in it.

  ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ asked Marianne.

  ‘If I tell her I have … only occasionally, mind … found men … not many, hardly any in fact … more, well, attractive than, say, ladies?’ Freddy glanced at Marianne over the rim of his glasses to see how she was taking that. She nodded.

  Freddy slumped in his seat. ‘She’ll disinherit me. Fire me from Razzle Dazzle. Kick me out of the house.’

  ‘And you’ll find a new place to live. And you’ll get a new job. It could be the best thing that ever happened to you, in the end,’ said Marianne.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Freddy, shaking his head nervously. ‘I’m not good at being brave.’

  ‘Neither am I,’ said Marianne, and for some reason that made Freddy smile.

  Rita appeared then to take the Victory Cake she had made for Bartholomew out of the range. Marianne rummaged in the cupboard for the appropriate cups and mugs and arranged them on trays. Freddy pushed the last of the butterscotch tart into his mouth and excused himself.

  ‘They like having you around,’ said Rita, taking plates out of the cupboard.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Get-Well-Sooners,’ said Rita.

  Marianne shrugged. ‘They’re easy to be around,’ she said. A slice of – unevenly cut – cake fell off the blade of the knife as Rita was using. Marianne supposed she couldn’t blame her. She didn’t think she’d ever said that before. About anyone. She stood up and took the knife off her mother. ‘I’ve developed a system,’ she said, rearranging the cake back onto the plate and cutting it lengthways, then widthways. ‘This way, the slices are of equal proportion and everybody gets one of the chocolate icing fist bumps you’ve made, see?’

  ‘Oh, that’s clever,’ said Rita, collecting herself.

  ‘Self-preservation,’ said Marianne shrugging.

  ‘We’re writing letters to Shirley’s local councillors today. We could use your help?’ Rita licked the pad of her finger and used it to collect crumbs that had fallen onto the counter, put her finger in her mouth, sucked noisily. Marianne used to give out to Flo for doing that. ‘It’s unhygienic,’ she told her. The narrow delicacy of Flo’s finger hovering over the toast crumbs. The tiny bed of nail, pale pink, the shape of a teardrop.

  ‘Marianne?’ Rita dried her finger on the skirt of her red satin dress.

  ‘Fine,’ said Marianne, putting the plates of Victory Cake on a tray and moving towards the kitchen door. ‘I’ll help.’ It sounded plausible too, the way she said it. As if she would be able to help. As if perhaps she had been wrong when she told Hugh she was better off alone.

  As if she might, after all, turn out to be the sort of person who manages to rub along adequately, when it came to other people.

  With these and other foolish thoughts, Marianne managed to convince herself that all was well. Maybe not well, exactly. Or even ordinary. But okay. Everything was ticking along somehow. Marianne seemed to have stumbled upon a routine that wasn’t awful. That was sort of all right. Even though it was not what she would have wished for herself. Even though it was unfamiliar and unpredictable.

  Later, she would berate herself for being lulled in that way. When she should have been making plans to extricate herself from Ancaire and all its attendant memories and peculiarities. That had been her plan. She had allowed herself to become distracted. As if a spell had been cast upon her. Perhaps by the sea itself. The ebb and flow of it. The pull and push of it. There was something hypnotic about it.

  * * *

  February had been a freezing month for the most part, dark and wet, the days so short it sometimes seemed to Marianne like they were over before they’d properly begun.

  But then, at the end of the month, the weather changed. The rain stopped and the low, heavy cloud that had plagued the coast since Marianne’s arrival thinned and loosened, came away to reveal a touch of blue around their edges, the blue becoming brighter as the clouds got smaller and fainter until one day, when Marianne arrived at Ancaire after dropping the Get-Well-Sooners home, Rita was in the garden, twirling with her arms spread and her face lifted towards the sun, declaring it spring.

  Aunt Pearl shook her head through the kitchen window at this wanton display of seasonal joy before marching up the stairs, holding a pair of nail clippers aloft like she was going into battle. Marianne did not know how Pearl had been persuaded to clip George’s nails. She did, however, know how George felt about it. When he heard the clip of Pearl’s court shoes along the landing, he bolted into Marianne’s room, hid under the bed.

  For all the good that did him.

  Rita stopped twirling and rummaged in her swim bag on the grass. ‘I got you a swimsuit yesterday,’ she said, holding out a pair of pale pink togs for inspection. ‘Do you like them?’

  ‘I can’t swim,’ said Marianne. ‘You know that.’ Marianne pre-empted Rita’s response with a swift, ‘Please don’t say there’s no such thing as can’t.’

  ‘I should have taught you,’ said Rita instead.

  ‘You offered,’ said Marianne, to give her mother her due. It was just that Marianne had never believed Rita when she told her that she wouldn’t let her go.

  ‘You could paddle,’ said Rita, irrepressible as always.

  ‘The water is too cold,’ said Marianne.

  ‘Not today it isn’t,’ said Rita.

  Marianne had to agree that the day was unseasonably mild. The sunshine spilled through the windows, spinning golden light through the house, camouflaging the ancient ache of the place and lending it an air of spring clean.

/>   ‘So?’ said Rita. ‘What do you say?’

  ‘No,’ said Marianne. Then added a brief, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said Rita, turning and heading for the steps down to the beach.

  ‘Where’s Patrick?’ Marianne asked then.

  ‘It’s not high tide yet,’ said Rita, pausing at the top of the steps.

  ‘So why are you going now?’

  ‘I can’t wait.’ Rita grinned.

  ‘You shouldn’t swim alone,’ Marianne called after her. But Rita had already started down the steps, taking them two at a time as if they weren’t steep and treacherous and slick with moss.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ Marianne mumbled under her breath. She snatched a hoodie from the coat stand in the back kitchen and pulled it over her head. It must have been Patrick’s since it was black, with the words, Welcome to Hell written across it, which Marianne assumed must be the name of some death metal album. Still, the cotton was marshmallow soft and Marianne did not have to struggle too hard to get her head and its oversized cargo of hair out the other side.

  When Marianne reached the beach, Rita was already in the water, her clothes lying in careless mounds at random intervals, as if she had taken them off while running towards the water, hurling them so that they lay where they fell, retaining the shape of her.

  Marianne held her hand over her eyes like an awning, to protect them from the light of the sun, glinting against the edges of the slate-grey waves that rose and fell as if in time to music.

  She was easy to spot, Rita, in her yellow swimsuit the colour of buttercups.

  ‘Do I like butter, Marnie?’

  Marianne closed her eyes, shook her head to dislodge the voice and the image it dragged up, like a wreck from the ocean floor.

  When she opened them, Rita was floating on her back, arms and legs splayed like a starfish, bobbing up and down on the waves and squealing every now and again when the water splashed over her face.