‘Why, of course, please follow me.’ He bows, gesturing, and picking up my bag, I follow him to the back of the restaurant, through double doors, where he shows me down a corridor to what looks like a staffroom.
‘Is tonight a special occasion?’ he asks, as I nestle Bigwig in an empty cardboard box in the corner. His fishing is so obvious he may as well have a rod and bait.
‘Oh, no, just work,’ I reply cheerfully, and then catch myself ostentatiously. ‘I mean . . . not work. My . . . er, sister and I are just catching up. With our . . . elderly grandmother. Who sadly has dementia.’
‘My sympathies. We at The Brycgstow will endeavour to ensure you have a relaxing and enjoyable evening.’ He bows again, and leads me out.
‘Just nipping to the ladies’ room,’ I say, seeing a sign ahead.
‘Please . . .’ He escorts me there, holding open the door. His deference is starting to get on my nerves – hopefully he’s not going to offer to take me into the toilet and help me powder my nose. I may be the sister of an undercover restaurant critic, but I just want to be left alone to do a wee in peace.
‘I’ll be fine,’ I say, dismissing him. With another kowtow he allows the door to close, while I retreat to a cubicle to empty my bladder and rest my forehead against the cool of the crackle glazed wall tiles. Once again, one of the rare moments of quietude I get is in a water closet. At least this one is a little more well-appointed than the Cabot Circus thunderbox. According to the walls, no one’s been here at all.
I think of Sarah Ann, pulling pints in an 1880s equivalent of this gastropub before rushing off to parachute into a mudbank because of a lovers’ tiff. Such a ridiculous, tragic tale. Tragedies can be reduced like that, summed up by a pithy Sun pun when the true story is much darker and thornier and longer. In telly we’re taught not to take anything seriously – you can’t, or else you’d go mad – and eventually I trained myself to make everything punchy and funny, to keep a commissioner’s interest – their attention spans make goldfish look focused. But I think of the lovelorn pint-puller, flailing round in her caked crinoline, and suddenly I want to cry again, like I did in the bar with Maz earlier. Only I think if I started now, I’d never stop, just go on and on until I drowned in my own tears. Sarah’s story deserves to be told properly, with all the details of the wrongs done to her. But I’ve only got my own, and it isn’t finished yet. So I blow my nose on toilet paper, and go out to stare at myself as I wash my hands.
My hair is still pleasingly curly and dishevelled – the ringlets haven’t really dropped, bouncing around my head as I shake tap water off my fingers. The dress is excellent – swishy and flowing – and my expression in the mirror is surprisingly tranquil, considering the turmoil behind it. All in all, I look great, and while looks aren’t everything, they’re certainly a start. Blowing my reflection a kiss, I pick up Barbara Good’s reins and lead her back into the restaurant, to await the arrival of Rose, my elderly grandmother with dementia.
33
We moved out west a decade ago, for many reasons, but the main one was Susie. Robbie was keen to find his Englishman’s castle – some dilapidated old hovel he could turn into an elegant country home. We were both sick of the big smoke – the commutes, the cramped housing, the endless grey backdrop and squeezed skyline. We’d moved to a house in Wood Green by that point, because when the twins came along the flat in Essex Road became too small. Robbie had been enthusiastic about having a new project, and intended to do the work himself, but when he ripped up the swirly eighties carpets there was just concrete underneath; no Victorian tiles, no original floorboards. For all its a hundred and fifty years, the terraced house we’d bought was just a bland, blank slate with nothing behind it – if I’d taken an EMF meter there, it wouldn’t have flickered. The garden was more of a yard, with none of the charm described in the estate agent’s brochure, and the windows were cheap PVC. Basically, we’d been sold a dud, and had only ourselves to blame. So we pointed the finger at London instead.
Robbie started looking for legal firms outside the capital and was offered two jobs: one in Bristol and another in Manchester. I preferred Manchester as it was further from my mother and I had tentative plans to apply for a position at the BBC’s new base in Salford. But then Susie stepped in. She’d moved to a village near Swindon when she joined SOjourn, handy for travelling between London, Somerset and the Cotswolds, where a lot of their homes are based. It was Susie who found Robbie’s hovel of dreams. Driving through the rural market town of Keynsham, just outside Bristol, she spotted a ‘For Sale’ sign and stopped for a look. Susie had spent enough evenings at ours, listening to my husband enthuse about getting his hands dirty, about a garden that was more of a field, about a higgledy-piggledy place with timber beams and a proper history, to know it when she saw it.
Stepping out of the car to view the wonky red-bricked farmhouse fringed with lapped flint, she noted that the lintel above the door had the year 1680 carved into it. The owner was an old lady in her eighties called Dorothy Fletcher who’d lived there for fifty years without doing a thing to it apart from planting a now-huge cedar in the garden, ready for Robbie’s swing. She was moving to a new luxury retirement village, wanted a quick sale and was pleased to accept our asking-price offer. Our featureless box sold like a hot cake because it was near an Outstanding secondary school and our buyers could overlook the home’s lack of character in favour of a local super-head who got results. Everyone was a winner.
Robbie got stuck in straight away, started stripping wallpaper the day we moved in. Unlike the houses featured in Bump in the Night, our new-old home kept offering up delights – a drawing of a cat scratched into the glass of a lattice window, with the words ‘a catte’; beams with apotropaic markings to ward off evil; an original brick floor in the kitchen underneath the threadbare rug that Dorothy left. I went to visit her once, in her beautifully converted apartment, taking some flowers and a tin of homemade biscuits. I worried she might be sentimental about us moving into her family home, but it wasn’t the case. ‘Terrible old place!’ she chortled, scoffing my shortbread. ‘Draughty and uneven. I’ve got central heating here and the doors all close properly.’
But my husband was in his element in our draughty and uneven house, paring back, restoring, finding new wonders every day. He became obsessed with the provenance of the property and would spend hours searching online, or going off to visit libraries. He discovered that it was used as a meeting house, which pleased him greatly, because he has Quakerish tendencies himself. Apart from buying Orla Kiely curtains to keep out icy blasts, I didn’t contribute much to the renovation, being otherwise occupied by five-year-old twins, who considered our Restoration wreck to be a great opportunity to do themselves harm. They were keen to break their necks falling down the winding wooden staircase, desperate to trip over on the irregular stone flooring, eager to impale themselves on
seventeenth-century nails. When Robbie found a well in the garden, I resigned myself to them perishing in it, but thankfully he agreed to close it off. It’s still out there somewhere, lurking underground like the dripping tunnels at the Ecclestone bloodbath vicarage.
For three months after we moved in, I fulfilled my long-held dream of taking a sabbatical from work – a prospect as delightful as the window cat-etching. For years, ever since I left university, I had been dying not to work. To step off the relentless nine-to-five treadmill and simply drift around, being. I imagined that was what I would do on maternity leave, but I didn’t realize I would have twin babies and therefore be a twenty-four-hour slave. Having quit my job at the BBC in West London, I was now ready to stagnate like the ancient well.
Of course, my lovely leave didn’t turn out the way I planned. We couldn’t get the twins into the nearest primary school, which was a five-minute walk away, and instead they got into a school which required a forty-minute bus trip. Because I was off work, it became my job to ferry them back and forth. By the time I got home after dropping them off, had a cup of tea and tidied up, it was nearly time to set off again. The school day is short – frustratingly, agonizingly short, like a commissioner’s attention span. And because I mentioned to one of the mums at the new school that I was on a career break, she immediately suckered me into all sorts of Parents’ Association roles and charitable activities. I found myself bursar for the fundraising committee, the Friends of Rainbow Wood magazine editor, and a regular caterer for the endless bake sales. It was a nightmare, but since I was unable to say no, they just kept loading me with more and more responsibilities. After six weeks of this, I’d drop the kids off and immediately phone the school down the road to see if two places had opened up, before starting all my extra-curricular chores. Eventually the twins got in, and I was able to regretfully resign from all my Rainbow Wood roles. There was a moment when the chairwoman of the FoRW looked like she was about to insist that I stayed on, with my kids in another school, and I knew that if she did, I would end up saying yes, because I can’t say no. I can never say no, that’s my problem. So I told her I’d just had an unfortunate diagnosis and would have a lot of appointments to get to over the next few months. For weeks afterwards, I always went into town with a scarf around my head, just in case. I considered shaving my hair off, just to avoid having to make another fucking
no-nuts cake.
Anyway, the twins got into the school which was five minutes away and then the end of my gardening leave was looming and it was time to get another job before we ran out of money. It turned out there were lots of telly jobs in Bristol, and I took one that would allow me to be home in time for tea. There I was, back at the grindstone.
But in another way, I thought maybe things had changed. Although it was Robbie who wanted the space and the past, I benefitted from it, breathing easier in our field of a garden, while the house’s rich history seemed to erase my own. Out here, I was a new person, turning over a new leaf. From now on, I would be more assertive, learn to say no, start standing up for myself.
I didn’t, of course.
When Rose finally blessed our new home with her presence, she took one look round the dimly lit rooms with their low ceilings and small windows and said ‘Goodness, what a dingy old place! I can’t imagine why anyone would want to live here.’ I said the kitchen was a little brighter, and suggested we go there for a cup of tea, served in our best china, reserved for visiting dignitaries.
When my new boss told me they didn’t have the budget for a casting producer, and asked if I could share those duties with my assistant producer, just for a few weeks of pre-production, I didn’t complain, just knuckled down and did the work. After the show was delivered, they didn’t renew my contract, because the channel said the casting was patchy. I got a short-term contract with a different production company, accepting a pay cut because they were dubious about my last post being so brief. When I finally landed the job at Red Eye, a role I was fully qualified for, I felt absurdly grateful, and never negotiated as hard as I should have.
When the twins’ new primary school asked me to film and edit their nativity play, then moaned because I only used two camera angles, I apologized and promised that the following year I would bring a proper camera operator in to help. The school graciously accepted, and since then I’ve filmed every one of their Christmas shows, even though my kids left five years ago.
It’s not easy making a fuss. Standing up for yourself can be awkward and embarrassing. Causing a scene is mortifying. Saying no is hard.
But I think, finally, I might be getting the hang of it.
34
Rose is late, of course, because she likes making an entrance. It wouldn’t do for her to sit at a table on her own looking like a Billy No-Mates – someone might see her and imagine she was dining solo, which in her book is akin to declaring herself a high-class hooker, inviting an approach. While we wait, Maz and I try the deadly cocktails, which are all named after sexual positions. I order a Butter Churner, and my sister goes for a Three-Legged Dog. When they turn up, both are served in big jam jars, which makes me think of the trip to Ross-on-Wye when Maz fell in the river. I shiver, and we each take a massive slug.
‘Bluergh.’ Maz winces. ‘Tastes like alcoholic pond water.’
‘At least it’s alcoholic.’ Mine tastes of liquorice and liquor. I can’t detect any butter, but it does make my stomach churn.
The maître d’, who by now has introduced himself as Alan, sidles over and presents us with some nibbles. Spiced cashews, arranged on half a broken bowl. I run my finger along the jagged edge, wondering what possessed them to serve nuts like that. My sister the restaurant critic is going to have something to say about it.
‘How nice,’ says Maz, staring in fascination at the shard of china.
I shovel in a handful, suddenly starving after all the booze and bizarreness. Their saltiness clashes with the sweetness of the cocktail, not unpleasantly, and for a while I just sit, watching the other diners, digging nutty nuggets out of the grooves of my teeth with my tongue. I’m starting to feel enjoyably buzzy, tuning in to the low hum of genial chat, ‘Numb’ by Portishead playing in the background, my sister murmuring to Geraldine as she offers her a lick of her dusty fingers.
I remember Christmases before Dad left, walnuts left out on the sideboard with a nutcracker, and he would sit pulverizing the shells, popping the kernels into his mouth as we watched Jim’ll Fix It. Fragments from the husks coated his fingers and the floor, and Rose would make him lift his feet so she could hoover under them. After he went, she didn’t need to hoover as much, but she did it anyway. Cousin Jack hasn’t been back in a while, because of travel restrictions, he says, but we all know he’s happier where he is, with his Spanish wife and soiled floors. Ours are filthy too – we have a cleaner, Lottie, who comes once a week and makes valiant efforts, but for some reason they keep returning to their natural state: seventeenth-century brick layered in cat hairs and cereal crumbs. Does that mean I’ve broken the cycle?
‘What on earth is this place?’
Rose stands before us, resplendent in her Phase Eight finery, highlighted hair in a chignon, ladylike heels, French manicure because coloured nails are common. She won’t sit because she’s a) waiting to be tenderly helped into her chair and b) before that, she must be complimented on her appearance. She does look good for seventy-three, in a kind of Stephanie Beacham way – perhaps with a dash of Sybil Fawlty. I take a deep breath, because I’m about to throw us all off a bridge. I don’t feel good about it, but it has to be done.
‘Ravishing as ever, Rose. A face that could start a Trojan War.’
Obviously, it’s not how I would normally address my mother, but then, nothing about today is normal. My opening parry produces a raised eyebrow from her, designed to cow me into submission, but this time there will be no capitulation, no appeasement. Rose is about to meet New Clover, and it’s safe to say she’s not going to like her. But she didn’t particularly care for Old Clover either. If Rose is Helen, then I’m about to lay siege.
She can at least sit down first, and Alan obliges, hurrying over with a level of obsequiousness that meets even my mother’s requirements.
