Daniel had cast a few showy insults their way. But then they’d be home, and there would be Mother, too, having started cooking dinner, the house bright and tidy. They all had keys, even Tim, but they hadn’t often used them.
That had changed, and now, when they got home, they opened up the house themselves, and it was grey and preserved from the morning, the breakfast things still in the sink, like an abandoned catastrophe. At first they were bewildered, at a loss, then afternoon television, children’s television, rose up like an appalling colour possibility; the telephone, too, which they fought over like rats. And there was, too, the possibility of bickering, always there but never quite bursting out in this way. Bickering: it was mostly tormenting poor Timothy, who nevertheless hardly seemed to suffer, just to accept leadenly the complex feints of Jane and Daniel’s mockery. Too often, even Jane thought, after a few weeks of her mother’s new job, as Katherine returned, towards six, she must have been greeted with three lined-up children, two faces sweetly composed, hands behind their backs, a third’s red and recently washed with a thoroughness surely slightly suspicious.
But if Katherine was suspicious, she did not show it, and her ‘I wish you two would leave Timothy alone’ survived – survived for years, in fact – only in their private exchanges, like a parrot-learnt and comic phrase from a school language that survives fossilized into adulthood when all possibility of expansion into grammatical expression has disappeared. Something decisive had changed when, a few weeks in, their mother came through the door, a little tousled but with a careless glow to her beyond what the weather could bestow, to be greeted with exactly this butter/mouth tableau, and said only, ‘How hilarious.’ A phrase Jane knew to be a possible expression but had never heard from her mother before and, reading its origins correctly, found there were more things to blush over than shame at having given your younger brother a Chinese burn while the elder sat on his chest.
But life was quickly full of such embarrassments. She wondered her father was not touched by it. Jane had learnt a lesson in behaviour from Daniel. That year, there had been a new girl at school. There were Indians in Sheffield, you saw them often in town, but they were poor and lost-looking and Ajanta was not like that.
‘My father,’ she said, on her first morning, ‘is a professor at the university.’ She said that, just going up to them in the playground at the first break, not waiting to be invited or anything. They’d been about to play a round of Witches and Fairies, but the plan evaporated. Anyway, they all felt a bit too old for that.
‘Where are you from?’ Anne, always the quickest to nose, said.
‘Bombay, originally,’ Ajanta said, ‘but we’ve been in America the last three years.’
‘Bombay,’ Anne said. ‘Where’s that when it’s at home?’
‘It’s a city,’ Ajanta had said, not put off, ‘in the south of India. Have you heard of India?’
‘Have you got brothers and sisters?’ Jane found herself asking.
‘Yes,’ Ajanta said. ‘I’ve got a sister. She’s going to Flint – is that what it’s called? And there’s my parents and Meena.’
‘Who’s Meena?’ Anne said deridingly, trying still to recoup some credit.
‘She’s my nurse,’ Ajanta said.
‘Your nurse? Are you ill or summat?’
‘No,’ Ajanta said. ‘You must know the use of the word “nurse”, to mean nursemaid. We say ayah. She’s a sort of family servant.’ Awed, they fell back.
But it hadn’t been long – the other side of an alarming birthday party, full of strange puddingy slices, covered with glitter you didn’t know whether to eat or not, and everything brought in not by Ajanta’s heavy-lidded mother, smoking away on the telephone, but by the tiny Meena who Anne, irretrievably, had mistaken for her – before the subject of Ajanta had taken over Jane’s conversation at home. What she said, what they ate, what Mrs Das had said about the standard of teaching in the West, as she confusingly called Sheffield, the games they had played and what Bombay was like, all a substitute for talking about Ajanta herself. She hadn’t been aware of it; it was only when Daniel and, amazingly, Tim had launched into a derisive chorus of ‘Ajanta says, Ajanta says,’ that she realized she’d been talking about her for days, weeks. It was something you ought to keep to yourself, whatever the something was you were immuring. She knew that now, at the cost of her besotted friendship – because, of course, you couldn’t go on as you had before, even in the playground where Daniel and Tim weren’t watching. The observation followed you even there. Ajanta herself hadn’t seemed all that bothered, or even to have noticed. But it was something you had to discover. You just didn’t talk like that. She’d found that out now.
But her mother, apparently, had never found that out. Here she was, night after night, talking about the flower shop, the day she’d had. It was like an itch in your nose, and you didn’t want to watch someone picking his nose over dinner. It was worst on Saturdays and Sundays when she didn’t work: she kept at it all day.
‘That’s looking nice,’ she said, coming up behind Malcolm, down on the lawn in kneepads. He was tugging at some weeds with a gardening fork, his gardening shirt on. It was a sunny day. Jane was sitting at the table on the patio with a book, the Chalet School; it was getting to an exciting bit, the new girl trapped by a sudden avalanche in a mountain hut with the strict history mistress and nothing but a few dry biscuits to see them through. Her dad had gone out early, and was working round the beds steadily, anti-clockwise, like a battery-powered machine. He’d got to about ten o’clock on the semi-circular dial. She paused, and paid attention.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The hostas, they’re doing well this year. Kept the slugs off for once. That trick with the orange peel seemed to do the trick.’
‘That’s a good job,’ her mother said. ‘It looked terribly untidy, all those bits of peel scattered all over the place. At least it’s serving a useful purpose. That’s lovely, too, isn’t it?’
‘The clematis? Yes, it’s had a good year. You never quite know with clematis.’
Her mother hummed a little tune. She was on the verge of saying something. She ran her fingers through the climbing plant growing over the fence, the foaming purple; she raised it to her nose, and let it drop. There was no scent. Jane knew that.
‘Did we never think of growing lilies?’ her mother said.
‘What’s that?’ her father said. Her mother repeated herself.
‘No,’ he said shortly. His voice was harsh with physical effort; his face, turned down, was flushed. ‘I never did. They come up, and they die off. Not much of a show, unless you’ve a lot of them, and nine-tenths of the year they’re nothing much to look at.’
‘I love them,’ her mother said. ‘Nick does very well with them.’
‘Who does?’
‘Nick,’ her mother said. ‘They’re very popular – they have a lovely scent for the house. Or there are gorgeous ornamental grasses you can grow now. Or honesty – you know what I mean by honesty? Even tulips. I love a big show of tulips.’
‘We have tulips,’ her father said. ‘Over there. Can always put some more in, if you fancy.’
‘I’d forgotten about the tulips,’ her mother said.
‘It’s not the time of year for
