Chapter 14
Stephen was at home when she got in, watching the news. He turned around briefly and gave her the slightest nod to acknowledge her presence. She didn’t expect an apology for what had happened that morning because she knew that in Stephen’s mind, it was her fault it had happened. He was never wrong. His mother, the formidable Alma Brookland, had made him that way. She’d brought him up with the right to claim papal infallibility.
‘The Shadow Foreign Secretary has resigned,’ he said, adding with a sniff, ‘not before time.’
Bonnie had nothing to say to that. Politics, as a subject of interest for her, was right up there with tin-mining and calculus. She slipped off her coat and got on with making the tea. There was some fish that needed using up which Stephen had taken out of the freezer. Bonnie wasn’t really in the mood for it but she’d eat it for the sake of ease. She didn’t seem to have much of an appetite these days, as if slowly bit by bit she was fading to nothing.
Bonnie drizzled the lemon sauce over the fish, careful not to let it touch the fine green beans on Stephen’s plate. He was very particular about the components of his meal not encroaching on the space of any of the others. It was one of many of his little ways that she’d found odd but slightly endearing in the early days of their relationship; now she just found them odd. His father was the same, Alma once told her. He couldn’t read a newspaper which had been opened by anyone else first, had an abhorrence for cleaning sponges and had to throw away his toothbrush on the last day of the month.
Bonnie remembered standing at the oven, cooking this same fish dish, feeling Alma’s eyes boring holes of hatred into her back and knowing that she was about to be ripped to shreds. The sauce was too lemony, the fish too dry, the vegetables hadn’t been cooked enough or too much. ‘She’s a perfectionist,’ so Stephen explained his mother’s rudeness away. Bonnie took it on the chin because her dad had always told her to answer rudeness with a smile, be the bigger person. He was full of sayings was her dad, his favourite being: our family was born on the back side of the rainbow. Luck had never been theirs, he said. The Shermans came from the side without the colours, only grey and shadows. Over the years, she’d come to think he might have been right.
‘I take it you haven’t phoned Mr Grimshaw?’ Stephen asked, when they were seated at the table. He nudged a potato disapprovingly away from the lemon sauce.
‘No I have not,’ replied Bonnie.
Stephen took a large breath in through his nose and let it go the same way. ‘Well don’t say I didn’t warn you when you find out that this . . . Lewis Harley person doesn’t know what he’s doing and you’re out of a job with nowhere to go. What then, eh?’
Throw me out on the streets, Bonnie was tempted to say. Maybe if he pushed where she didn’t have the nerve to jump, she would have to learn how to survive.
‘He seems reliable enough, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken the job,’ she said instead.
‘ “Seems” and “is” are very different things,’ said Stephen, wagging his finger at her as if she were a child. ‘Mr Grimshaw described him as a flash in the pan.’
And Ken Grimshaw is the fount of all knowledge, thought Bonnie. She wondered what else he and her husband had discussed, no doubt finding common ground in how ungrateful she was. She pressed down on the inner growl that his patronising tone was inspiring within her, though her clipped tone indicated with bells on that she hadn’t forgotten what had happened between them that morning.
‘Well, we’ll just have to hope for the best then, won’t we?’
He either didn’t notice it or did and ignored it, because he then started to tell her an ‘amusing story’ about the previous day, which she knew would be anything but. He’d had to give a verbal warning to someone who’d told him to ‘go away’ in slightly more colourful terms after he’d told them to stay behind at lunch to finish off an account that refused to be balanced. Bonnie had often thought he might be the sort of boss that encouraged quite a few ‘go away’s under the workforce’s breath.
As Stephen chewed each mouthful of his meal a customary minimum of twenty times, Bonnie tried to suppress thoughts of living in the little white house in Dodley. She always bought a Saturday lottery ticket but couldn’t remember the last time she had won anything. Lottery wins were things that happened to other people, along with children and happy marriages and love.
It would have been Alma’s eighty-seventh birthday on Monday, she suddenly remembered. She’d died five years short of it. Making the lemon sauce had stirred up thoughts about her mother-in-law, bringing them to the top again.
‘Are you taking some flowers up to your mother’s grave next week?’ Bonnie asked Stephen as he placed his empty plate in the sink for his wife to wash.
‘I don’t think that’s necessary, do you?’ he replied. ‘We’ve observed the anniversary of her birthday for long enough. Any more would be unnecessary and mawkish.’
He was letting his mother go then. Did that mean he might release her also?