Hannie Richards Read online

‘That was me,’ Hannie told her. In the quiet room, as the logs hissed and flickered and the light grew darker, she began her story, saying inconsequentially, ‘I’ll always think this really began with a visit to my mother in the nursing home in Streatham.’

  2. The Adventure of the Little Coral Island

  ‘I wish you’d ask them about the heating here. It’s either too stuffy or too chilly. It can’t be healthy,’ said Mrs Edwards. ‘I feel dreadful about complaining all the time and I don’t think they pay any attention when I do. Really,’ she concluded, ‘it’s most unsatisfactory.’

  Hannie Richards looked at her mother, who sat, in her quilted violet robe, in an armchair. The room smelt of violets. She reflected absent-mindedly that you had to be English to show such profound satisfaction while able to declare, ‘This is most unsatisfactory.’ To her mother she said, ‘Of course, I’ll speak to them today.’

  ‘Thank goodness,’ said Mrs Edwards. ‘I’m sure they’ll pay more attention to you. I suppose I should ask your brother to do it really—’ Her voice trailed away.

  Hannie offered her mother some grapes from a blue-patterend plate and thought how much her own living, if not survival, depended on her being able to read, from gestures and intonations and clothing, exactly what people were like and what they were thinking about. How, she wondered, would she interpret her own mother, by just looking at her, if she came across her by chance?

  Mrs Edwards’ small, carefully made-up face was almost unlined, although she was fifty-five years old. The large dark blue eyes with their heavy, fragile lids were slightly drooped as though she were drugged all the time. Her pale brown hair was neatly cut, and her small hands, displaying a number of diamond and sapphire rings, were carefully manicured. Her little feet, shod in violet satin slippers, barely touched the ground. Behind those dazed eyes, Hannie knew, lay a thousand anxieties, and her mother had the pathetic appearance of an Indian child bride, heavily ornamented, made-up and drugged before being placed in a chair to receive the groom. It was probably the sleeping pills, Hannie thought. Her mother had been a user for as long as she could remember. In the suburb where she had grown up it had been regarded as a mark of distinction among the women to be in great need of sleeping pills and nerve pills. It had been a sign of sensitivity. Her mother had unfailingly come out ahead in these competitions: she always had enough prescribed drugs on hand to dope a racehorse.

  ‘I got these shoes to go with the green coat I bought,’ Hannie said brightly, pulling out the shoebox from a carrier bag.

  Her mother looked at them for a few moments. ‘How nice,’ she murmured. ‘They’re just the right shade. But I do wish you’d try a higher heel. It improves the line from calf to ankle so much.’

  Hannie’s eye travelled over the main road on which the clinic stood, where the buses and cars went by on their way from this section of suburbia down to the declining main street of Brixton, with its boarded up shops and ‘To Let’ signs, on to central London and the stores, cinemas, theatres and air of prosperity. Opposite, on the other side of the street, a woman with a shopping bag came out of a supermarket lodged between a tall block of flats and the forecourt of a garage. She said, ‘Big, tall women like me don’t need high heels,’ knowing that the reference to her own height would please her mother. Mrs Edwards loved to feel small and frail. ‘Did they tell you when they’d finally have your old room ready for you again?’ she went on. ‘The view from here isn’t too good.’

  ‘Oh,’ Mrs Edwards sighed. ‘First it was the week before last—then last week—now next week. They say they’re having difficulties with the plumbing. I long to be back in it. You’re right—the view from here is depressing. I’ve always thought views so important.’

  ‘Especially when you can’t get out,’ she agreed.

  Her mother had been unwell for most of Hannie’s childhood. There had been migraines on school sports days, faints before school plays and concerts, and bad backs liable to strike especially cruelly at birthdays and Christmases. Before, or sometimes during family holidays, Mrs Edwards had been able to produce, seemingly at will, a huge variety of symptoms from swollen ankles to laryngitis. Spectacularly, she had once gone blind on the train to Dover at the outset of a holiday in Brittany, so they had spent most of that summer in the environs of Harley Street. The blindness had cleared up by mid-September. All these ailments had been perfectly authentic. If Mrs Edwards said she had a migraine, she really had a migraine. If she began to whisper, any doctor could look down her throat and see that she had laryngitis. Because Hannie’s father, a prosperous restaurant owner and director of a mini-cab firm, could afford extra help in the house, and because his childless sister lived only half a mile from the family, neither Hannie nor her brother and sister suffered in any practical way from their mother’s constant ill health. On the other hand, always feeling sorry for Mother was a strain. And they did notice that the mothers of other children, despite their bad nerves, were usually there to listen to the guitar solos at school concerts or go along to talk to the headmaster when they needed to. Later, of course, came the disillusion, when in adolescence they realized that their mother was not so much an invalid as a sufferer from hysterical illnesses. Once they had coped with that, and the fear that it might be hereditary, Hannie and her brother and sister continued to thrive, although Mrs Edwards’ state might have had something to do with Hannie’s decision to study biology at a university and her brother’s successful career with a pharmaceuticals firm.

  The sad part was that after Hannie’s father’s death, when the children were wondering whether widowhood would alter their mother’s invalid habits, she was apparently struck by a genuine, severe illness, a degeneration of the spine which was likely to leave her bedridden in a few years’ time. It was decided that she would shortly need full-time, professional care, and she had therefore gone into the clinic on Brixton Hill. Almost immediately the complaint had gone into abeyance. She did not seem unhappy, Hannie thought, but it was a pity that she had to be here. On the other hand, perhaps it was where she wanted to be. It was hard not to think sometimes that, faced with widowhood and change, her mother’s mind had rallied for a final campaign and seized permanent control of her body, declaring that henceforth it would be in sole charge and would not tolerate any rebellion.

  Looking for conversation, Hannie asked her mother who else had visited her recently.

  ‘Kerry. Well, Catherine was here earlier, of course,’ replied Mrs Edwards. ‘And Kerry came in a few weeks ago. I asked Kerry to find me a nightdress while she was at Marks and Spencers, but she’s not been back since,’ she confessed bitterly. ‘You’d think she’d pop in more often.’

  ‘She’s pretty busy,’ Hannie said. ‘She may be waiting for the end of term.’

  ‘Kerry’s only got one child,’ replied Mrs Edwards. ‘You’d think she could have managed. She could have posted it.’

  ‘It’s the school,’ Hannie said again. It was a bold remark. Mrs Edwards disliked references to her daughter-in-law’s job. Kerry was deputy headmistress of a large comprehensive school, but Mrs Edwards preferred not to think about it. Talking about Kerry’s school was rather like reading pornography to the vicar—all right so long as you left out the really dirty bits, which could be done by somehow implying that Kerry was in charge of the fingerpaints at an infants’ school.

  It had been Kerry who had said to her, ‘Your mother must be the last of the great Victorian invalids. Those women lying in darkened rooms weren’t just getting out of all the boring things they’d have had to have done otherwise; they were a real status symbol for the family. It proved you could afford to keep someone in idleness. And what a wonderful focal point for love and sympathy—there were people starving to death under bridges, and you could work it all off carrying a tisane up to Aunt Fanny. They performed a real social function. I wonder how your mother got the idea?’

  ‘I should think Robert could bring the nightdress in,’ Hannie said to her mother. ‘After
all, he’s redundant now. He’s got more time during the day than Kerry.’

  Mrs Edwards looked quite faint. ‘But poor Robert’s got so many anxieties. I wouldn’t want to trouble him. And men don’t really like clinics and hospitals, do they?’

  Encouraged not to, thought Hannie.

  While the bad daughter spoke inwardly, the good daughter reached into her bag and produced an envelope. ‘I brought some pictures of the twins on their new ponies. I thought you might like one for your wall when you get back into the old room.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mrs Edwards, opening the envelope. ‘Aren’t they nice. I must get some framed. They’ll be a wonderful addition to my wall.’

  ‘I hoped you’d say that,’ Hannie said, full of mingled maternal pride and secret horror at supplying yet another piece of documentation for what her mother called ‘her wall’, where pictures of the family hung in celebration of close blood ties and middle-class success. Hannie and her brother and sister held tennis rackets and university degrees. There were weddings where the bride wore a white dress and the groom held a top hat; Robert and Kerry sat in a gig in New Orleans, Hannie and Adam held hands by the pram containing their babies, their old house discreetly in the background. Hannie would not have minded the gallery of grins, sunshine and doing-very-nicely-thank-you if it had not been for blood-chilling moments when she almost literally saw the wall of pictures interspersed with big, grainy, blown-up newspaper pictures of her own arrest, trial and conviction—photographs of herself being hauled off between two sweaty policemen in tropical suits, being dragged into court with a newspaper held over her face, even standing against a background of big steel tubs in a prison laundry, wearing a sagging cotton dress and no make-up. The thought of what would happen to her mother if she ever made a mistake and got caught genuinely frightened Hannie. Mrs Edwards had controlled her own reality for so long that a sudden, brutal attack on it might lead to a complete mental or physical breakdown. She sometimes felt that she should make an effort to lead her mother in the direction of certain basic truths but knew she would never succeed. Mrs Edwards’ way with unpleasant realities was ruthless. She would appear not to hear anything she did not wish to hear. And, as a last resort, she would have a dizzy spell or a menacing attack of breathlessness.

  Even so, Hannie worried about the effect on her mother if she got caught. And, almost as bad, it would leave her husband Adam, her brother-in-law, and, now, Kerry, in charge of all the hospital fees. The whole burden would be carried then by son- and daughter-in-laws—not a desirable situation. As she chatted about her children and what was happening in Devon and talked to her mother about the other people in the nursing home, she prayed that she could stay out of trouble. Then she got up to leave. Normally, farewells in hospitals are painful as a fully-clad person, about to rejoin the great world outside, leaves behind someone in her pyjamas. But Hannie had spent the best part of her life leaving her mother in a chair or in bed. And Mother liked it.

  As she got in the car she remembered her mother sitting in a sweet-smelling room full of flowers, a smile on her painted face. The little feet in the violet slippers had been together, with only the tip of her toes touching the floor. The Indian bride, thought Hannie, as she headed for the pub where she had arranged to meet her sister. Cath had been at the clinic earlier on one of her regular trips from Brighton, and the two had secretly agreed to stagger their visits to their mother and meet afterwards for a chat.

  Cath, wearing a purple sweater and skirt, was sitting by herself at a table at the back of the pub. Her white fur jacket was draped over the back of her chair. When she saw Hannie, she jumped up, hugged her and kissed her cheek. ‘Want something to eat?’ she asked. ‘I’m famished.’

  ‘So am I,’ answered Hannie. ‘Let’s see what they’ve got at the bar.’

  As they walked to the bar Hannie said, ‘Oi! What have you done to your hair?’

  ‘Like it?’ Cath asked. ‘I got tired of being mousey so I went blonde. Greg says people’ll think he’s a gangster, with me on his arm.’

  ‘It’s nice,’ Hannie told her, considering. ‘It makes you look more, er, zippy.’ She added mockingly, ‘Where would we women be without our disguises?’

  ‘You mean, where would you be?’ Cath retorted. ‘I’ll have to have the chicken.’

  They ordered and went back to the table. ‘Well,’ Cath said, ‘here’s to Mrs Edwards’ little girls. How do you think she was?’

  ‘All right,’ said Hannie. ‘She’s definitely not getting any worse.’

  ‘If she’s not careful she’ll recover,’ said Cath with a grin.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Hannie said. ‘Surely you’ve got more faith in her than that.’

  As they sipped their wine Cath leaned forward. ‘You’ll laugh when I tell you this,’ she said, ‘but I’m doing my O-levels.’

  Cath had paid no attention to anything at school except the magazines she used to prop on her knees under the desk at the back of the class. She had left at the age of sixteen without passing any examinations and persuaded her reluctant father to get her an apprenticeship in a hairdressing salon. Since Hannie and Robert were both studying for degrees, her parents had not been pleased. Cath then made matters worse by marrying, at the age of eighteen, Greg, a young garage mechanic, and concluded her fall by having three children in five years. It was not until Greg had bought first one garage and then another, and started to make a good deal of money that Cath became a daughter her mother could be proud of. Now that they had a house in Brighton and a swimming pool in the garden, Cath was back in favour.

  ‘It’s not that I’m bored or anything,’ explained Cath. ‘As far as I’m concerned, there can’t be enough coffee mornings and shopping trips to keep me happy—I’m not an intellectual or anything. But what I thought was that this is all very fine, but with one marriage in three ending in divorce these days I could look very silly if there was a bust-up. I couldn’t keep up our standard of living on a third of Greg’s income. So I decided I’d get some nursing qualifications. The south coast’s full of nursing homes. I could pick my own work and my own hours and it wouldn’t be too hard on the children.’ She took another sip of her wine. ‘Greg doesn’t know all this, though. He just thinks I’m bored and want to go to evening classes. I’ve told him I’m doing pottery and batik—they’re on the same night as the maths and biology classes.’

  Hannie took a bite out of a chicken leg and said, ‘Can’t you tell him the truth?’

  ‘Well,’ said Cath. ‘Why worry him? I’m the official nitwit in our family—no exams, doesn’t know who the prime minister is, keeps on thinking about hairstyles. Greg works hard for all of us and he likes it that way, so why should I disturb him? He’ll be quite proud when I get the certificates.’

  Hannie nodded. ‘You’re a good steerer, Cath. I’m proud of you,’ she said. ‘You know how to get your way without pain.’

  Cath smiled. Hannie was right about that. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘how are you? Are the children and Adam well? How’s your career in the SDP?’

  Hannie grinned. ‘All thriving,’ she replied, ‘family and career.’

  Cath sniggered. ‘We always knew, in the family,’ she said, ‘that your big interest in public affairs would lead to a career in politics.’

  The truth was that Hannie, needing an explanation for her departures for two or three weeks at a time, sometimes five times a year, had hit on the idea of suggesting that she was engaged in political research for the Social Democratic Party, a job that might naturally take her away from her home in the country for conferences, research and meetings in London. She had a friend fairly high up in the party who was prepared to vouch for her if necessary. This friend would have been reluctant to provide cover for Hannie’s real activities, so she had been led to believe that Hannie was having an illicit affair. But in fact no one ever asked about her career. Neighbours in the country found the notion of her job acceptable but dull and seldom asked for details. If they ever did, s
he could fall back on the adultery story—people usually believed a lie if it revealed something discreditable about the liar.

  ‘Farm paying, then?’ asked her sister. ‘Job bringing in plenty of money?’

  ‘Never quite enough,’ Hannie said. ‘There’s always something. Cellars flood, tractors go over cliffs, children grow out of their wellingtons—the usual story.’

  Cath regarded her carefully. ‘It would save trouble,’ she said, ‘if you gave up that old country heap. That’s what Greg says.’

  ‘That old heap,’ Hannie told her coldly, ‘is Adam’s family home, and my children’s home. And when I want Greg’s opinion I’ll phone him.’

  Cath spoke on bravely. ‘Greg’s a man,’ she said, ‘and men know more about these things. But I’m your sister, and I’m always worried about you. That’s why Greg told me what he thought. I’m always worried about you, Han.’ She dropped her voice and said, ‘What you do is dangerous and illegal. I’m afraid for you. Supposing you get caught? What happens to Flo and Fran?’

  Hannie said, ‘Adam looks after them, of course. Anyway, as soon as I’ve got it all sorted out, I won’t do it any more. In the meanwhile, what do you expect me to do? Lie on my bed painting my nails and watching the roof fall off and the rain flood into the house? You saw that place when we moved into it after Adam’s father died. It cost £20,000 just to make it habitable. Every room was damp—it was rotten from attic to cellar.’

  ‘It must make Adam very anxious,’ Cath persisted, ‘when he knows what might be happening.’

  ‘Oh, don’t let’s talk about it, Cath,’ Hannie said impatiently. ‘He knows I can take care of myself. And how else could we manage? The farm didn’t make enough profit to keep the place going because it was in the same state as the house when we took over. But I am giving up when I can…’

  ‘You love it,’ insisted Cath. ‘Go on, admit it. You do.’

  Hannie laughed. ‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘Anyone would love it—travel, drama, surprises.’