Pat Barker: Another World

‘It’s better inside,’ he says.

She gets out, and stands on the gravel looking lost while he hauls her suitcase out of the boot. It’s suddenly very quiet. Even the cawing of rooks from the copse behind the house seems to drop away.

A climbing rose covers the front of the building, though the white blooms are fading to brown, seeming to be not so much decayed as melted on their stems. It hasn’t been pruned for years. At some stage a honeysuckle’s been trained over the lower branches, but now it’s died back to form a huge ball of dead wood and leaves, defended by the sharp thorns of the rose.

Yesterday Nick had spent the whole morning snipping away with the secateurs, hauling out dead twigs by the handful, tearing the skin on his arms till he looked as if he had some horrible disease. Once, thrusting his hand deep into the mass, he pulled out a blackbird’s nest, full of dead fledglings. ‘Gollies’, they used to call them when he was a child. He looked at them, at the black spines of feathers pricking through the purplish skin, the sealed, bulbous eyes, the yellow wavy rim around the beaks, and then, with a spasm of revulsion, he threw the nest on to the wheelbarrow. But at least he’d managed to expose the lintel with its carved name and date. He looks up at the house now and points it out to Miranda.

FANSHAWE 1898

‘Like Wuthering Heights,’ she says.

Nick catches a movement behind one of the upstairs windows, a flash of light. Gareth’s staring down at them, the sunlight glinting on his glasses. He doesn’t smile or wave.

‘Right, then,’ Nick says, picking up the suitcase and putting his other arm around Miranda’s shoulders. Together they go in.

Fran lifts saucepan lids, prods vegetables, each blast of steam leaving her hotter, stickier, more harassed than before. The potatoes have boiled dry; not disastrously, but they’re going to taste ‘caught’. There’s something you can do about that. Mash them? She reaches for the Cheat’s Cookbook . Yes, transfer them to a clean saucepan, mash them with full-cream milk and a knob of butter — she has neither, they’re bad for Nick’s heart — and cover lightly with ‘an aromatic cloud of freshly grated nutmeg and a sprinkling of freshly chopped parsley’.

She can’t help thinking anybody who could lay that on at a moment’s notice had probably managed not to burn the potatoes in the first place. What she has is half a packet of mixed herbs, grey with age. The nutmeg’s at the bottom of a packing case and the pots of fresh herbs got left behind in the flat. ‘Shurrup, you,’ she says to Jasper, ruffling his hair, amazed by the warmth of his scalp under her fingers. He’s sitting on the floor at her feet, going ‘broom broom’ as he drives a dinky car up her leg. You wouldn’t think he’d been awake half the night. Normally she’d have gone to bed with him, when he had his afternoon nap, but today she couldn’t because of having to get bloody Miranda’s bloody room ready.

Though she ought to be grateful there’s a room to get ready. In the flat Miranda had slept on a camp bed in the living room. It was odd, that in the first days after the move, even though she had all this extra space, Fran tended to confine herself to a few rooms: the kitchen, the bedroom, the living room. Like a prisoner who takes one look at the sky and shelters in a shop doorway. She’s getting more used to it now. The final months in that flat had almost broken her. It had been all right when Jasper was a baby because he didn’t cry much, but as soon as he became a toddler the trouble started. The woman in the flat downstairs — nicknamed The Grum — was always banging on the ceiling. Fran went down and tried to talk about it, but she wasn’t having any of that. Miss Hardcastle, her name was. She’d taken to tranquillizers in a big way after her mother died, and then, against her doctor’s advice, had gone cold turkey on them. And poor woman, she was to be pitied, she was climbing up the wall. The slightest noise had her shouting and screaming and hammering on the ceiling and complaining to the landlord. On wet days, when Jasper had a cold, Fran would run a bath and sit in it with him, singing songs and reading stories and playing with boats. For hours, sometimes, because it was the only way to avoid another row. Once Nick came in from work to find her sitting in tepid water with tears streaming down her face. That was all behind her now, though. In this house Jasper can make any amount of noise. He can run about and trundle his car up and down the corridors to his heart’s content. OK, it’s a mess, there’s a lot to do, and not much money to do it with, but they’d been right to move. Even when all the dashing about had sent her blood pressure sky high, she’d never doubted that. And they’d get through the decorating gradually, and at least in a house this size Miranda and Gareth won’t be continually bickering. No, it’s going to be good. She’s looking forward to it.

Voices in the hall. ‘Come on,’ she says, picking Jasper up. ‘Let’s see your sister.’

They’re in the living room, looking out into the garden.

‘Hello, Miranda.’

There’s a moment when Miranda clearly contemplates the hypocrisy of a kiss and rejects it. ‘Hello, Fran. How are you?’

God, she’s cool. Fran always thinks she remembers how cool Miranda is, and yet obviously she doesn’t, because every time it comes as a shock. ‘Not so bad. Glad the move’s over.’

Miranda holds out her hand to Jasper, who pulls away from her, hiding his face in Fran’s neck.

‘He’s tired,’ Nick says quickly, to cover the slight awkwardness.

‘Well,’ says Fran. ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s a lovely big room.’

‘Of course we haven’t started yet.’ She nods at the wallpaper. ‘That’s the first job. I mean, can you imagine living with that? Enough to drive you —’

She stops abruptly, obviously remembering that Miranda’s mother has just gone into a mental hospital, and Miranda, who wouldn’t have dreamt of resenting the casual remark, notices her confusion and hates her for it.

Recovering quickly, Fran says, ‘I wish I could make myself like it, because it’s the original paper.’

A short pause. Miranda tries to think of something else to say and fails. Dad’s gasping for a fag, she can tell, but Fran won’t let him smoke in the house. ‘Stupid little cow,’ Mum said, when Miranda told her. ‘That won’t last.’ And to show what she thought of Fran she’d lit one herself, and coughed.

Normally Miranda’s good at smoothing things over. Good at hiding her feelings.

‘Tea’s just about ready,’ Fran says. ‘Nick, will you give Gareth a shout?’

Gareth’s died three times in the past hour.

He can’t see any way of getting through the enemy’s shields without taking at least one direct hit and draining his reserves. Though if it wasn’t for a certain stupid bitch who should remain nameless — look at all that sunshine and you cooped up in here have you done your homework why don’t you try reading a book for a change blah-de-blah-de-bloody blah — he’d’ve wiped the buggers out long ago.

Nick puts his head round the door.

‘Don’t you ever knock?’ Gareth asks, not taking his eyes off the screen. He has to nerve himself to say it, because Nick’s sheer size sometimes frightens him. He’s never hit Gareth and he never will — Mum’d go ballistic, for one thing — and yet the fear’s still there. Ver-y in-ter-est-ing.

‘I did, you didn’t hear me. Tea’s ready.’

‘I don’t —’

‘Yes, you do. Come on, switch it off.’

‘Just till the end of the game.’