chapter eighty-eight
The night of the barbeque
Pam and Martin pulled up in front of Erika and Oliver’s neat-looking little bungalow.
‘Holly might be asleep by now,’ said Pam to her husband. It was nearly nine o’clock.
‘Might be,’ said Martin. ‘Might not be.’
‘That must be where it happened,’ said Pam. She pointed at the big house next door with dislike. All those turrets and curlicues and spires. She’d always thought it was a fussy, show-offy sort of house.
‘Where what happened?’ said Martin blankly.
Sometimes she could swear he had early onset dementia.
‘Where the accident happened,’ said Pam. ‘They were at the neighbours’ house. They don’t even know them that well, apparently.’
‘Oh,’ said Martin. He looked away from the house and undid his seatbelt. ‘Right.’
They got out of the car and walked up the paved pathway with its neatly trimmed edges.
‘How do you feel?’ she said to Martin.
‘What? Me? I feel fine.’
‘I’m just making sure you don’t have chest pains or anything, because it’s times like this that people our age unexpectedly drop dead.’
‘I don’t have chest pains,’ said Martin. ‘Do you have chest pains? You’re a person of our age too.’
‘I play tennis three times a week,’ said Pam primly.
‘I’m more worried about our son-in-law dropping dead of a heart attack,’ said Martin, shoving his hands in his pockets. ‘He looked terrible.’
He was right, Sam had looked absolutely terrible at the hospital. It didn’t seem possible that one event could have such a profound physical effect on a person. They’d seen Sam just yesterday, when he’d dropped by to help Martin move out their old washing machine, and he’d been in great form, chatting about Clementine’s audition, some plan he had to help her get over her nerves, excited about his new job, but tonight he’d looked like he’d been rescued from somewhere, like those people you saw on the news wrapped in silver blankets, with red-rimmed eyes and a ghost-white pallor. He was in terrible shock, of course.
‘You were very rough on Clementine,’ said Martin mildly as Pam pressed the doorbell and they heard its distant chime.
‘She should have been watching Ruby,’ said Pam.
‘For Christ’s sake, it could have happened to anyone,’ said Martin.
Not me, thought Pam.
‘And they both should have been watching,’ said Martin. ‘They made a mistake and they very nearly paid a terrible price. People make mistakes.’
‘Well, I know that.’ But in Pam’s eyes it was Clementine’s mistake. That’s why she was battling this terrible, unmotherly sense of rage towards her beloved daughter. She knew it would eventually recede, she sure hoped it would, and that she’d probably feel just awful about the way she’d spoken to her at the hospital, but for now she still felt very, very angry. It was the mother’s job to watch her child. Forget feminism. Forget all that. Pam would scream about equal pay from the rooftops, but every woman knew you couldn’t rely on a man to watch the children in a social situation. It was scientifically proven they couldn’t do two things at the same time!
Clementine had always been too prepared to rely on Sam, but just because she was a musician, a creative person, an ‘artist’, didn’t give her the right to relinquish her responsibilities as a mother. Her job as a mother came first.
Sometimes Clementine got the identical distracted, dreamy expression on her face as Pam’s dad used to get at the dinner table while Pam was trying to tell him something, and she wouldn’t even have finished the sentence before he’d wandered off. He might have been Ernest bloody Hemingway for all Pam cared. All that time he’d spent writing that novel no one would ever read, ignoring his children, locking himself away in his study, when he could have been living. ‘It could have been a masterpiece,’ Clementine always said, as if it was a tragedy, as if that was the point, when it wasn’t the point: the point was that Pam never got a father and Pam would have quite liked a father. Just every now and then.
What good did it do Ruby if her mother was the best cellist in the world? Clementine should have been watching. She should have been listening. She should have been concentrating on her child.
Of course, Clementine’s music had nothing to do with what happened today. She did know that.
If Ruby didn’t make it through the night, if she suffered some sort of long-term damage to her health, Pam didn’t know what she’d do with all this anger. She’d have to find the strength to put it aside to be there for Clementine. Pam put her hand to her chest. Ruby was stable, she reminded herself. That rosy little plump-cheeked face. Those wicked slanting cat-like eyes.
‘Pam?’ said Martin.
‘What?’ she snapped. He was studying her closely.
‘You look like you’re having a heart attack.’
‘Well, I’m not, thank you very much, I’m perfectly –’ The door swung open and Oliver stood there, wearing tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt.
‘Hello, Oliver.’ Pam hadn’t seen him in casual clothes before. Normally he wore a nice checked shirt tucked into trousers. Pam had met him on so many occasions over the years, but she’d never really got to know him that well. He was always so complimentary about Pam’s signature dish, her carrot and walnut cake. (He seemed to have got it into his head that the cake was sugar-free, which was not the case, but she didn’t bother to correct him; he was so skinny, a bit of sugar wouldn’t hurt him.)
‘Holly is just through here watching a movie,’ said Oliver. ‘She would have been very welcome to stay the night with us, of course.’ He said this sadly.
‘Oh, she would have loved that, Oliver,’ said Pam. ‘But we were all fighting over her, you see, it’s a distraction from our worry over Ruby.’
‘I understand you were the hero of the day,’ said Martin, and he held out his hand to Oliver.
Oliver went to take Martin’s hand. ‘I don’t know about –’ But to Pam’s surprise her husband changed his mind about shaking hands at the last moment and instead threw his arms around Oliver in an awkward hug, thumping him on the back, probably much too hard.
Pam rubbed Oliver’s arm gently to make up for Martin’s thumping. ‘You are a hero,’ she said, her voice full of emotion. ‘You and Erika are heroes. Once Ruby is home and feeling better we’ll have you over for a special dinner. A dinner fit for heroes! I’ll make that carrot cake I know you like.’
‘Oh, delicious, wow, that’s very kind of you,’ said Oliver, stepping back and ducking his head like he was fourteen.
‘Where is Erika?’ said Pam.
‘She’s asleep actually,’ said Oliver. ‘She wasn’t feeling … quite right.’
‘Probably the shock,’ said Pam. ‘Everyone is feeling – well, look who’s here! Hello, darling. Look at those fairy wings!’
Holly headed straight to her and buried her face in Pam’s stomach.
‘Hello, Grandma,’ she said. ‘I am “exhausted”.’ She lifted her fingers in quotation marks. Her funny little habit.
‘Right,’ said Oliver. ‘I’ll grab your rock collection, Holly.’
‘No. I don’t want it,’ said Holly almost belligerently. ‘I told you I don’t want it. You keep it.’
‘Well, I’ll take care of it for you,’ said Oliver. ‘If you change your mind you can have it back.’
‘Come to Grandpa, Holly.’ Martin held out his arms to Holly and she leaped up, her legs wrapped around his waist, her head on his shoulder. No point telling Martin not to carry her after his knee operation. He needed to carry her.
Holly fell asleep in the car and didn’t wake when Martin carried her in, or even when Pam changed her into a spare pair of pyjamas she kept in the house. Martin didn’t see the need to change her but Pam knew you were always so much comfier in pyjamas.
But as Pam leaned in to kiss her good night, Holly’s eyes sprang open.
‘Is Ruby dead?’ she said. She was lying on her front, her head turned sideways on the pillow, a tangle of hair obscuring her face.
‘No, darling,’ said Pam. She lifted the hair off Holly’s face and smoothed it back from her forehead. ‘She’s at the hospital. The doctors are looking after her. She’s going to be fine. You go back to sleep.’
Holly closed her eyes, and Pam rubbed her back.
‘Grandma,’ whispered Holly.
‘Yes, darling?’ Pam was feeling tired herself now.
Holly whispered something Pam couldn’t hear.
‘What’s that?’ Pam leaned forward to listen.
‘Are Mummy and Daddy very, very angry with me?’ whispered Holly.
‘Of course not!’ said Pam. ‘Why would they be angry with you?’
‘Because I pushed her.’
Pam froze.
‘I pushed Ruby,’ said Holly again, louder.
Pam’s hand lay flat and still on Holly’s back, and for a moment she didn’t recognise it; it looked too old and wrinkled to belong to her.
‘She took my bag of rocks,’ said Holly. ‘She was standing on the side of the fountain with my bag and she wouldn’t let me have it, and it’s mine, and I was trying to get it off her, and then I got it, and I pushed her because I felt really, really angry.’
‘Oh, Holly.’
‘I didn’t mean for her to be drowned. I thought she would chase after me. Will she go to heaven? I don’t want her to go to heaven.’
‘Did you tell anyone?’ asked Pam.
‘Oliver,’ mumbled Holly into the pillow, as if she were worried that was also a transgression. ‘I told Oliver.’
‘What did Oliver say?’ said Pam.
‘He said when I see Ruby at the hospital I should whisper “sorry” very quietly in her ear and that I should never, ever push her again.’
‘Ah,’ said Pam.
‘He said it was our secret and he would never tell anyone in the whole world ever,’ said Holly.
He was a lovely man, Oliver. A good man. Trying to do the right thing.
But what if Holly never got that chance to whisper ‘sorry’ in Ruby’s ear? Ruby was stable. Ruby would not die in the night.
But if she did die, Pam refused to have her beautiful innocent granddaughter pay the price for Clementine’s inattention.
‘You know what, I don’t think she fell in when you pushed her,’ she said firmly. ‘That probably happened later. After you ran away. She probably slipped. I think she slipped. I know she slipped. She fell, darling. You did not push her. I know you didn’t. You were having a little argument over the bag by the fountain and poor Ruby fell in. It was just an accident. You go to sleep now.’
Holly’s breathing slowed.
‘You just put it right out of your mind,’ she said. ‘It was an accident. A terrible accident. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t really anyone’s fault.’
She kept rubbing Holly’s back, in ever-increasing circles, like the endless ripples created by a tiny pebble thrown in still water, and as she did she talked, she talked and talked, making the memory disappear, just like the ripples, and the funny thing was that she could feel her anger towards Clementine ebbing away as if she’d never felt it in the first place.