The Keeper of Stories, page 7
“He’s finding it very hard without John. I try my best, but he won’t really talk about it. I did get him to agree to some counselling but he refused to go back after the first session. Said the counsellor was, ‘some dumbnut who believed all the shit he told him’.” Fiona looks up and tries to smile. “I think John … sorry, Adam—” She stops dead. “Jesus, sorry, I keep doing that, calling him John. I don’t suppose that’s helping much.” She shrugs, still trying to smile.
This is breaking Janice’s heart.
“Anyway, he said he had told the counsellor what he wanted to hear and that he was a dummy for believing him. He said his dad would have thought he was a twat.” She shakes her head. She is no longer smiling. “But when you had been over with Decius he was full of it. Told me what were signs of good breeding in a fox terrier. Wanted me to call you to get him over.”
Janice is mortified; it is over a week since she introduced Decius to Adam. “Always call me. I can easily pop over and collect Decius. I’m really the only dog walker he has. Adam can come with me as often as he likes.” She wonders if it would help if Adam was earning some money for this; she could give him part of what Mrs YeahYeahYeah pays her for taking Decius out. Then she decides this is not about money. It is about love. And that can’t be bought.
Fiona is back to studying the full coffee cups. Janice dare not pick hers up, although she would dearly like to.
“The thing is, I don’t want him to be defined by this. I don’t want him, forever, to be the boy whose father killed himself.”
And there it is, out on the table, with the duck-egg-blue coffee cups (from a local potter) and the plate of all-butter hazelnut cookies from Waitrose.
“I keep telling him that,” Fiona repeats. “That this mustn’t be what defines him.”
“What does Adam say?”
“He says it doesn’t work like that. He says you can’t choose your own story.”
What can Janice say? That she fears Adam may be right?
“And you?” Janice asks gently.
“Oh, me.” Fiona sighs. “You know, I think I started this work as a way of punishing myself. Making myself do something so painful – as if that could make up for letting John and Adam down.”
Janice shakes her head as if to contradict her, but Fiona ignores this and continues. “The thing is, it’s strange, but I find working with the bereaved really helps. And I have done some funerals for other people who have killed themselves. My mum can’t understand how I can bear to do that, but it makes it something that is part of life. It makes me feel it doesn’t consign John to the shadows. I can talk about him and people know that I understand their pain.”
Janice can see that Fiona is miles away. She resigns herself to drinking cold coffee. It couldn’t matter less.
Fiona continues. “I think maybe it is easier for me because I saw much more of what John was going through. Knew about the depression, the medication, the days of doubt and hopelessness. We hid that from Adam as much as we could. For me, whilst it was a hideous shock what he did, in some ways I had been expecting it for years.” She looks up at Janice. “Don’t get me wrong, thinking about it is not the same as actually going through it. It can’t really prepare you for how you are going to feel, but afterwards you have some context. I don’t think Adam has that. To him, John was the best dad in the world and he chose to leave him. How on earth is he supposed to get his head around that?”
Janice has no answers, although somewhere inside herself she wonders if Adam really was that ignorant of what his dad was going through. As she herself knows, children notice a lot more than adults think they do.
As she cannot explain this to herself, let alone Fiona, she thinks of two things that she can do. “If it’s okay, I’ll bring Decius over tomorrow after school for a long walk.” Then, ever practical, she adds, “and after that would you like me to defrost your freezer? I saw it was getting so you couldn’t close the door.”
On the way home on the bus that night (no sign of the geography teacher; maybe he only works mornings?) she thinks about Fiona. She can understand how having some purpose through her work would be helping her. She remembers the story of a young woman (a friend of Geordie’s son, John) who, after a number of miscarriages, had eventually given up trying to have children. She and her husband, a zoologist, had moved to Botswana and she is now a woman who makes elephants angry. This is quite an art because she may want to make them slightly annoyed, a little bit pissed off, proper cross or, as Decius might put it, fucking furious. Obviously, all without getting trampled. Her husband is studying how elephants communicate using their ears and apparently anger is one of the easiest emotions to monitor. When she last heard about her from Geordie, he’d told her that she and her husband now have a nine-month-old baby.
Janice tries to be analytical and scientific about her story collecting – like the husband and wife team who study elephants’ ears – but the truth is that she is a sucker for a happy ending. She just isn’t sure she can see how Fiona is ever going to get one for Adam.
Twelve
Every story has a beginning
By her second visit to Mrs B’s, Janice has cleared her hallway of clutter. It had been a relatively easy task. She was right: the college did have storage space that Mrs B could use. Chatting to the porters and university cleaners (a short, middle-aged woman being an easy and non-threatening confidante), she gathers that the college hopes that this will be the first step in Mrs B changing her arrangements and possibly, hopefully, fingers crossed – “because she really is a right pain in the arse” – moving on. She didn’t disabuse them of this notion and kept her comments vague (apart from allowing herself a silent look of understanding at the use of “pain in the arse”). She certainly didn’t suggest that many Roman generals (as she has been reading in Mrs B’s books) often created diversions, when in truth they were fortifying their positions ready for battle. Nonetheless, storage space has been found and Janice had persuaded Mrs B to part with some crumpled £20 notes to pay a couple of students to move her belongings.
The kitchen is taking a bit longer and Janice is still trying to scrape the last bits of solidified food from the counter when Mrs B starts to circle. She moves from chair to chair, each time getting a bit closer. To begin with she limbers up with a rally of what Janice presumes is unusually polite chit-chat for her.
“Janice, do you have to come far?”
“No, we live in a village just outside of Cambridge. I get the bus in.”
“Where is it that you’re from originally?”
“I grew up in Northampton, mainly.”
“Ah, famous for its shoes I believe.”
Janice says nothing, but raises an eyebrow at her.
This is all a warm-up for the main event. Janice has not asked Mrs B about Becky’s story, although she dearly wants to hear it. Nor has Mrs B broached the subject, despite the fact that Janice is pretty certain she wants to tell it. It has become a game of chicken. Mrs B is the first to break, which surprises Janice. But at ninety-two, maybe she feels she hasn’t got time for any more of this shit.
“So, do you want to hear about Becky or not?”
Janice can’t stop herself from beaming at her. “You know I do.” She adds by way of a thank you, “Would you like me to make you a hot chocolate?” She has discovered Mrs B has a fondness for seventy per cent dark chocolate in all its forms. This is too much for Mrs B and it seems that having given in she wants to redress the balance. “No, I do not. Do you think I want to end up with an arse like yours?” She glares at Janice, challenging her to object to her rudeness.
Janice returns to her scraping with a cheery, “Right you are, Mrs B.”
She thinks she hears a small snort from the wife of the life peer, but cannot tell if this is anger or laughter.
Janice takes pity on her and meets her halfway. “So what was Becky lying about?”
“Oh, pretty much all of it. She did grow up in Paris though—”
“When was this?” Janice interrupts.
“The 1890s. Are you going to listen to this story or not?” Mrs B glares at her.
Janice stays quiet, and watches Mrs B settle down more comfortably in her chair. “There was no happy family, at least not for Becky. I think she was a girl who felt like an outsider within her own family. Paris was a beautiful city at this time, just before the dawn of the new century, a city of parks and boulevards, filled with sunlight and fragrance. But of course, like most things in life, it depended on which side of the tracks you were born. And Becky was definitely born on the filthy, smelly, decrepit side of the tracks. Becky’s mother was not a milliner and did not preside over an elegant shop selling exquisite confections, and her father was not a valued member of a prestigious law firm. Her mother was a char woman.” Mrs B cannot resist adding, “Rather like yourself.”
Janice had been thinking of putting the milk on the hob to make Mrs B the hot chocolate despite her protest, but changes her mind.
“Her father,” Mrs B continues, after a pause, “drove a common Hackney cab. There were no gallant elder brothers who would grow up to be soldiers. I believe, later, Becky could move many to tears when she described the death of both of her brothers in the First World War. There was a younger sister of whom she was inordinately jealous – I suspect she fitted in, you see – and a blond-haired baby brother who was as chubby as he was cheerful.
“Do you have brothers and sisters, Janice?” she suddenly asks.
“I have a sister,” Janice finds herself saying before she can stop herself. She continues, more slowly, more carefully, “She lives in Canada now. She is five years younger than me and works as a paediatric nurse; her husband is a doctor.”
“And do you see much of her?”
“Not really. They come to England every couple of years and, of course, I make a point of meeting up with her then, usually in London.” She doesn’t add that her sister has little time for Mike, and so it is better this way. “I went over to stay with her for three weeks a couple of years ago and that was…” She can’t quite finish the sentence and she senses the change in Mrs B. Suddenly the old woman is alert and she thinks of a cat stalking its prey. And it’s no everyday moggy. For all her bony, frail exterior, Janice knows she is dealing with a big cat. Maybe not a lioness, but a stealthy, dangerous predator, like a jaguar.
“You were saying?” Mrs B asks with unusual politeness.
“I was saying the trip was very nice,” Janice concludes and heads off to clean the bathroom.
As she is about to leave, Mrs B takes up her story as if there has been no break in their conversation. By now she is sitting in her usual armchair by the electric fire. “Becky’s baby brother was the pride and joy of his parents. However tired they were from their day’s work, he could not fail to lift their spirits. Some babies are just like that. Their happiness seems to come from an external source, unconnected with their family or physical circumstances. And these children spread joy like a light shone into a dark corner. When her parents were at work, Becky, as the eldest child, had the responsibility of looking after her brother. She was fonder of him than anyone else in her family but by the time he was four the appeal was beginning to wane. She was a girl who wanted to explore the city and create alternative, more exciting worlds for herself in her head. Which is why she was looking out of an upstairs window dreaming of rich dresses and carriages, rather than minding him, when a large delivery van swung into their narrow street and smashed into her brother, throwing him into the gutter.”
Janice has one arm into her jacket. “What happened to him?”
There is no answer from Mrs B and she thinks she hasn’t heard her. “Mrs B, did he die?” There is still no reply, but a gentle snore issues from the armchair. Janice cannot decide if Mrs B is faking it, but she closes the front door quietly after herself, all the same.
On the bus on the way home, for once, she has no time for story collecting. What had happened to Becky’s brother? She is assuming it is not good news, but she would still like to know for certain. Did the parents blame Becky? How old had she been? She recalls this doesn’t really matter when you are a child, as you don’t ever think of yourself as young. You are just you, and will take up guilt and responsibility without noticing that they are far too large for you and that they are really things an adult should be wearing.
But she wasn’t like Becky, was she? She had protected her sister, hadn’t she? She keeps coming back to that thought and something else. It is an incident that happened at the end of her stay in Canada, and, she reflects, it had been a good stay. On the last night, her sister had pulled out an old fountain pen from her desk and had written on a clean white piece of paper so Janice could clearly read it,
I remember what you did.
Then she had put her pen away and got up from the desk and made them both supper.
Thirteen
Every story ends in death
“So, what happened to Becky’s brother, Mrs B?”
Janice is taking off her coat in the hallway after stopping off to collect Mrs B’s post from the Porter’s Lodge. She also picked up a piece of information that she thinks Mrs B will find interesting – but that can wait. First, she wants to know about the little boy. She is not expecting good news.
Mrs B doesn’t say anything and continues scanning yesterday’s Times, which she has open on the table in front of her. Janice has not made a start on the many piles of books around the room but she has cleared the large oak table by the window so Mrs B now has somewhere to sit and eat – and read the paper.
Still nothing but silence from Mrs B.
Janice waits.
Thinking back to her last visit, she is less and less convinced that Mrs B had really been sleeping and is now pretty sure she had heard her previous enquiry about Becky’s brother. She certainly does not think Mrs B is hard of hearing or lacking in understanding.
Still nothing.
Janice is getting irritated; a deal is a deal. “Mrs B, you promised. You promised you would tell me Becky’s story.”
“I did not promise, and please do not talk to me as if you were six; we are not in a playground.” She spits this out and Janice is once more reminded of the woman in purple. “However,” she continues more moderately, “I told you I would tell you about Becky and I will.”
She adds, as if the words are being dragged from her, “I passed an indifferent night and am in some pain from my back and legs. So I shall tell you later when the painkillers have started to take effect.” She looks back down at her paper. “I also had the shits, so you may want to change my bed.” She turns another page of her paper but Janice is not fooled. Mrs B is blushing.
“I’ll get you a hot-water bottle.” Janice had spotted one of these in the airing cupboard. “Then I’ll sort the bed out and get a wash on.”
Mrs B “hmphs” at her without looking up.
Janice quickly creates order in the garret bedroom, where it looks like Mrs B has tried to clear up – although stripping the bed was clearly beyond her. It is very smelly, but she has dealt with worse. She once looked after Geordie when he had a stomach upset. Mrs B hardly eats enough to keep a sparrow alive, whereas Geordie…
After putting the sheets in the washing machine, Janice returns to Mrs B, who is now sitting in her usual armchair, and she offers to make her a cup of camomile tea. Mrs B accepts this with a subdued, “Thank you, Janice.”
Janice is starting to get concerned. She is unsure whether Mrs B is really ill and she should ring for a doctor, or whether she is just embarrassed. When she brings her the tea she decides to try an experiment. “I was in the Porter’s Lodge chatting to Stan and he tells me your son has submitted some plans to the local planning department for converting your house into a multi-media virtual-reality interactive space. I think I have that right,” she says, watching the frail old lady carefully. “I believe it is to, ‘create a symbiosis of old and new learning, preserving the external structure but bringing enlightenment to the inner’. Stan gave me a look at the bursar’s copy of the proposal.”
It is as if Mrs B has been electrified. “He’s done what? I should have drowned him at birth!”
Janice’s obvious shock seems to register with the old lady, who is now sitting bolt upright in her chair.
“It’s a figure of speech, Janice. I would not in any circumstance put my son in a sack with a pile of bricks and throw him in the River Cam.”
From the way she says this, Janice can’t help feeling she is deriving considerable satisfaction from considering the prospect.
“I don’t know what offends me more. The fact he is working behind my back or his use of such atrocious language. Well, that was a few hundred thousand wasted on his education. How can the boy have so little soul? When I think of his father…” Mrs B is silent for some moments. “I shall have to give this some thought. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. Now, I suppose you want to hear about Becky’s brother.”
Janice settles down to tidy a cupboard just beside Mrs B’s chair. Over the years it seems to have been the depository for stray screws, torches, keys, old postcards and every other type of clutter. Janice has a drawer in her kitchen that contains the things that, “might be useful one day”. Mrs B has a whole cupboard of them.
“Of course, he died,” Mrs B declares matter-of-factly.
Janice looks up from her sorting. “I thought he was going to.”
“Yes, every story ends in death. And I’m afraid his story was a very short one.”
“What about Becky?”
Mrs B relaxes once more into her chair and pulls the hot-water bottle around so she is hugging it to her stomach. “I think the question is what about his parents. His father, his mother … the loss of a child is a terrible thing and the loss of one like that … well, it can hardly be imagined. Don’t you agree, Janice?”
