Sugar and Other Stories Read online

  The house, now her house, was still full of her mother’s presence. Little sounds, scratchings and rattles, were automatically translated by Joanna as her mother putting down teacups on the Russian metal tray, or rearranging the tooth mugs in the bathroom. She went into her own bedroom, the bedroom of her early days at the Survey, of her father’s precipitate and still unexplained retirement from the Ministry of Defence. Her own eyes met her steadily from the mirror. A handsome, tall, thin woman in white-spotted navy-blue pleated silk, her well-cut hair heavily flecked with silver. The room was north-facing, and outside was the road. Her parents’ bedroom, and her mother’s later downstairs room, once the breakfast room, faced south onto the garden for which the house had been bought. I shall sell this house, she thought, safely inside this admittedly chilly room. I shall start again. Not precipitately: I need to think things out. The room had no character, and dark green silk hangings. Stairs creaked under no foot. Joanna went out and toured all the empty rooms. They were instinct with her mother’s presence and absence in about equal proportions. The presence was worst inside the wardrobe — some of the small pastel crimplene dresses still held Molly’s increasingly angular shape. In a dark depth she saw her father’s burberry and his gardening jacket. He had been dead twelve years. A tweed hat of his, pale-blue herringbone, gathered dust on a shelf. She herself, over the years, had given away most things, driving down to the Salvation Army with dark suits folded into black plastic binliners. Dark suits were particularly useful to the Salvation Army. They rendered the unemployed respectable for interviews for jobs. They gave them a chance. Joanna had never understood the indifference with which Molly had accepted Donald’s persisting presence, in the shape of his things, after he was gone. She had never even moved his empty twin bed out from beside her own: she lay there at night, under her fringed, clip-on reading lamp, receiving her Benger’s Food from Joanna, sometimes carping, sometimes gracious, and beyond her in the shadows was the square outline of his mattress, naked under a shotsilk counterpane, and an identical reading-lamp, dangling its egg-shaped switch, extinguished.

  Both these beds were now empty: so was Molly’s more recent downstairs bed, in the most pleasant room, with its bay overlooking the lawn, and hung with wisteria and summer jasmine. Her dressing-gown was still across the foot of this bed: her alarm clock still ticked beside it. Joanna, moved by grief and a ferocious need to clear all this away, dropped both of them into the woven cane linen-basket, pale green, braid-trimmed. She heard the clock cluck in protest, and felt an absence of outrage, in which she felt herself expand, as though she could skip in this room, or shout, or whirl around, and no one would hear to condemn. She added the hairbrush. There was something terrible and pathetic in the last shining white hairs in its thick, real bristles. She listened to the empty silence. Outside on the lawn, a thrush churred. She stood in the bay and looked at the bird, strutting busily, staring arrogantly about it. The lawn was white with daisies and pink with fallen petals from the rose pergola. The garden was at its loveliest, in the summer sun. Her father’s ashes had been scattered at the feet of these climbing roses; she and Molly had done it together, in silence and disaccord. Molly objected to the pergola which she called “your father’s folly”. She was right that it was too large and obtrusive for the space it occupied. But he had loved it, had loved Albertine, and Madame Alfred Carrière and Mme Grégoire Staechelin. Joanna liked to think that he now, perhaps, was indissolubly part of these vegetable beauties, climbing and tumbling and breathing over the wooden arch. She had not known him very well and had not understood him at all: he was mediated for her by Molly’s disappointment, disapproval, wrath and disgust. Now in Molly’s empty room she looked out at his pergola and thought of him in peace.

  She made herself a sort of supper on a tray, intending to sit down with a good book, not to watch the television — Molly’s last years, and perforce her own, had been increasingly dominated by long serial dramas Molly had initially condemned as vulgar, and had later, contradictory and unapologetic, become obsessed by. Dallas, Dynasty, Wimbledon. The World Cup, Eastenders, Embassy Snooker, The Edge of Darkness. Not now dear, it’s time for my serial. Always “my”, as though the television companies planned with Molly’s interests foremost in their mind. The opaque, grey, lightless screen was the sharpest reminder yet of Molly’s absolute absence: reflected in it Joanna saw her parents’ drawing-room furniture, bulging slightly, and the colour of a photograph from her childhood. I shall sell the house, she said to herself, tapping her egg. As soon as possible, but not without some sort of sensible thought about how I want to live now. Nothing precipitate and silly. The screen reflected Molly’s knitting bag, a tapestry sack on wooden handles. It had pathos. Joanna rose in the middle of her egg to close it into a bureau drawer before sitting down again. What do I do with one and a half sides of a manically complicated fair-isle pullover?

  She became aware of two quite different aspects of her sense of her mother who was not here. The first was an expectation of her imminent arrival, querulous or ready with a piece of witty self-deprecation, to take up her seat in her chair and ask for this and that to be fetched or taken away. This almost comfortable expectation was uncanny only because Molly would never come again; it was usual, and would not be switched off to order, or for reason’s sake. The second was not expectation, but reminiscence and later came to constitute itself in Joanna’s thought as “the jigsaw”. She had had such a jigsaw during the long and tedious years at boarding school — a set of images, strip-cartoon pictures, patches of colour, she seemed to snip out with mental scissors and fit together awkwardly and with overlaps or gaps, labelling this for reference “my mother”, an entity which had little or nothing to do with the living, slippered creature who would not again patter between Cliff Thorburn and the toaster, or take up the knitting-needles and count stitches. “My mother” in Joanna’s schooldays had, like most people’s mothers, worn embarrassing and strident hats. She was frozen forever in Joanna’s playroom doorway like an avenging angel crying out against powder paint on the carpet fifty-four years ago. A comforting corner of the jigsaw held a kitchen mother with a wooden spoon, dripping cochineal into birthday icing: she was good at cakes, and enjoyed Joanna’s pleasure. Joanna turned the finished jigsaw in her mind like a kaleidoscope; there were things now, that constituted sharp corners and jagged edges, that she had never brought out to look at in those long flickering evenings in case Molly overlooked or overheard her thoughts. Many of these pieces were to do with her vanished father, who had begun to vanish long before he had in fact choked gently to death, who had begun to vanish at precisely the moment when he had become perpetually present, when his premature retirement, or whatever it had been, had confined him to Molly’s territory and its margins, the far reaches of the garden, the bonfire, the compost heap, the battle with ground elder from next door. Molly had been a great requirer: she had expected much from life, and had not had it, and had made her disappointment vociferous. Joanna was not, and now never would be, quite sure what she had wanted — it was not particularly to do anything, but to be something, the wife of an influential and successful man. (Joanna’s own life, a career devoted to useful work for underdeveloped societies, had been conceived in direct opposition to this want.) Joanna sometimes suspected that her mother had married her father simply because he represented the nearest thing she knew to this vicarious influence and success. He had been clever, shy, and formal, a step up the social scale for the daughter of a sub-postmistress. He might have become an Under-Secretary or even better. He never talked about his work, and then, suddenly, there was trouble — “the silly mess your father got into” — Joanna would never know what — and it was at an end.

  He had become ill, almost immediately, within a year at most. A wasting disease had attacked him. Joanna had heard him say once, in the conservatory, “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me,” but he had been saying it into the trumpets of his lilies, not to her. He said nothing to Mol
ly, who said a great deal to him, and Joanna had always bitterly felt that he saw Joanna herself as an extension of his wife. He had had fine, cobwebby grey hair, that when he worked he sleeked, briefly, with water. As he wasted away he became all grey; his face grew thinner, and ashen, and developed long fine downwards pleats and incisions, and then a crazy criss-cross of cracks as he diminished steadily. His eyes had always been a pale, smoky grey. He wandered among the smoke of his bonfires in a grey V-necked pullover, carrying increasingly small forkfuls of twigs and dried weeds, ghost-grey. Joanna had been very startled that the ashes which she sifted onto the roots of Madame Alfred Carrière, at the last, had been creamy-white.

  The stages of his slow decline were marked on the whole by jigsaw pieces depicting, not him, but Molly’s dealings with him. Molly declaring, after the fateful interview with the specialist, “There’s nothing really wrong with him: he just needs to pull himself together, you’ll see.” Molly’s distaste for his bodily presence and all his activities. He had tried, in the early days, to have a glass of beer in the early evenings. Molly had taken exception to this. The smell, she said, disgusted her. Beer was a sickening smell. (The fact that Joanna also disliked its smell had rendered her icily neutral in this dispute.) Molly had pounced on his beer glass the moment it was emptied, when the air still lingered in the fringe of froth at its brim, and had washed and washed it, her mouth set. Later, she had commented to Joanna on every small eructation. Your father’s tummy grumbles all the time. He makes awful belching noises. It’s the beer. It’s disgusting. Towards the end, when the discreet belches were an inevitable function of his failing body, she had not even waited for his absence to comment. He appeared not to hear. He gave up the beer. The plant dispute had been harder and longer. The plants were his great love, and he was good with them. The conservatory was ranged with brave and brilliant exotics. If he could have had his way, every windowsill would have been fringed with leafage, every table scented with its own perfume. He brought things in from the conservatory, tentatively, in ones and twos, and Molly, decisively, swiftly, returned these intruders to where, she seemed to believe, they belonged, often balancing them dangerously on the edge of shelves, or breaking off delicate new growth in the process. “Earth is poisonous,” she would say. “You know that. Things have their proper places.” The windowsills were airless inside the double glazing. Joanna’s jigsaw Mother brandished a pot in her hand, her face blazing. But she was an ambiguous figure. After his death, though with no hint, before it, of this extraordinary turnabout, she had tended the plants herself, clumsily and diligently, keeping alive what she could, practising propagation by layering and leaf-cuttings. Donald’s pride had been a collection of Christmas cactuses, which flower in the dark days, brief and brilliant at the end of their fleshy segments. He had bred a new variety of this plant, and had asked Molly whether it should be called “Molly Hope” or “Mrs Donald Hope”. Molly had replied that this was a matter of indifference to her. The plant, called in the event “Joanna Hope”, a deep salmonpink bloom when it came, now occupied, in various exemplars, many windowsills and whatnots about the place. Even in Molly’s own room.

  Joanna’s jigsaw-mother was densest at the points of medical crisis. It was during Joanna’s last African tour that her father had become finally bed-ridden. Molly had been wonderful about this for just long enough, a prop and a stay admired and trusted by her GPs and neighbours, coping brilliantly, turning to. On Joanna’s return, her own spectacular collapse had set in. The blood pressure — “I just sensed it was unnatural, dear, but I was really shocked when Dr Highet told me just how high it was, and when I was doing so much for your unfortunate father, which really can’t have done it any good, now can it?” The palpitations, the blue lips, the partially paralysed shoulder muscles, the unstable legs, culminating in a collapse into unconsciousness at Joanna’s feet when the daughter had been preparing to announce that she was setting off on a road-feasibility study in Burma. We shall not be with you long, now, Molly had declared on that occasion, twenty years ago, putting out a tremulous hand from under a crocheted bed-jacket. It’s a lot to ask, but it won’t be for long, and then you will be free as the wind. The illnesses were real: Joanna had asked. They gave serenity and dignity to Molly Hope. Pain was an occupation. They won’t want to employ me any longer, Joanna had said, the terms of my contract don’t allow it. But they had been so generous. So accommodating. This was civilized society: a series of accommodations to need and helplessness. After Donald’s death, Molly had recovered a little, enough to take holidays with her daughter in the Trossachs and once in Paris. On that occasion Molly had had her handbag snatched by a crowd of vehement dancing gipsy children, who had flapped at her face with sheets of newspaper and irregular slabs of cardboard, keeping up a shrill mesmeric cry. Joanna saw her now as she had been then, bewildered, turning her little face from side to side, all tremulous, weeping slow tears of impotent rage. At home, a woolly chrysalis between sheets, she was threatening. Out there she had been pathetic, little and lost, and Joanna’s own feelings unbearable. Oh I am sorry, Joanna had cried, as though it was all her fault, and her mother had recovered her look of disapproval and her vitality.

  Joanna noticed that she had toothache. Psychosomatic, she told herself briskly, thinking of Molly’s endlessly discriminated neuralgias and fibrositis. She was a little rattled by the image of her mother in the dusty Paris street, mocked by the wild children. She felt cruel. She turned on the television, a final concession to the silence. A Red Indian chief was talking, fully feathered, black and white, his ancient face lined and thoughtfully set. “My people”, he said, “can hear the voices of the creatures; we love the earth, which you white men tear up with your railroads and level for your agriculture. We can hear the spirit-voices of our ancestors, close to us, not gone away, in the grass and trees and stones we know and love. You send your ancestors away in closed boxes to your faraway Heaven. We leave our people in the spirit hunting-grounds, open to the air we know. We do not go very far away. You may not notice, as you hunt amongst our trees with your cracking guns, but behind you press a whole company of our people, invisible but present, inhabiting our land.” He was, the credits informed Joanna, a real chief, filmed in 1934, a lasting, mouthing, echoing, mobile ghost-face of a defeated alien, long crumbled. Ghosts too of trembling trees and chuckling icy water flickered in Joanna’s drawing-room; a white hunter penetrated silence, crunching twigs, and behind him crowded a greater silence. Joanna did not like this, though foreign faces and unravaged lands were her desire and hope. In black Africa, spirits came to drink blood and strangle children; in South America they were propitiated, at cross-roads, in building-sites, with bunches of bloody feathers and ears of corn. In a home counties drawing room, what buzzed was the electric circuit, what tapped at the casement the long tendrils of the creeper, looking for a place to adhere to. Where had her mother gone, particles and smoke? The twinge in her jaw became a gimlet-boring, intermittent enough to be shocking every time it began again.

  The toothache was no better at the Survey the next day. Joanna’s colleagues confused its effects with those of grief, and tried to persuade her that she should have stayed at home and looked after herself, that they could easily have managed without her, which was what she feared. “I’m not upset, I have toothache,” she told Mike, at the end of the morning. Mike spent much less time in England than on tour; it might have been seen as Joanna’s luck that he was here, at the time of Molly’s death, for three months. Mike, her only lover, and now for many years her limited but real and only friend, might be relied on to see that she meant exactly what she said. “Then you must go to the dentist,” he said. “Though you can’t expect not to be upset at all, Joanna.” Joanna wanted to speak to him in a rush, about her limited but important future, about the possibility of other work, of seeing other parts of the world, but was inhibited by the presence of his latest assistant, Bridget Connolly, dark and pretty and just back from a course in Japan. She
said, for Bridget’s benefit, “Of course I miss Mother. It hasn’t yet at all sunk in that she isn’t there. I hear her rummaging in the cupboards and moving things in the conservatory, you know, things like that. But I did what I could, I consider, and now it’s all over, there is some relief, I must admit. That part of my life is finished, now. I shall sell the house. When I’ve thought what to do next.”