of her recent way of thinking, so as soon as he came back to the house she would try to explain. Would it make any difference to his plans, though? Could she get him to change his mind? He’d seemed so adamant that they had to go to Bristol, but even now she could hardly believe he was serious. They had lived in London all their lives.
To be honest, their suburb was no longer the place it had been – in fact it had changed almost beyond recognition like most of suburbia had done – but it had always been their home. How could Phil think of moving away? The matter of the shops aside, how could he expect her to leave Becky when she was about to have her first baby? How could he expect her to abandon this house with its comforting familiarity, their relatives and friends. Moreover how could he take her from her much-loved garden? If nothing else occurred to him, surely he must realise how much that meant to her?
Why, only that afternoon, inspired by Sheila’s gardener and urged on by the glorious sunshine she had hurried home to give the grass its third cut of the season. There would just be time, she’d surmised, to fit it in before her in-laws arrived. Their meal had already been taken care of: she had one of her home-baked pork pies lined up in the fridge, and the pastry had turned out deliciously golden and buttery – exactly as Philip liked it. With a salad prepared and new potatoes waiting to be boiled there had been practically nothing left to do. She’d only hoped that the subject they would be discussing would not spoil everyone’s enjoyment of it.
Marjorie turned back two pages, wondering how many words her eyes had travelled over without her brain making any sense of them. Pork pie, indeed! If she’d only had the success of the meal to worry about!
Although the garden had slipped into shadow and was rapidly cooling to a chill, the sky remained light and high. A peacefulness lay over everything, save the odd bird flapping from tree to tree and chattering to its mate. She would have loved to carry on pottering about on what promised to be a heavenly evening, but Philip was due home any minute.
She’d opened the garage door in readiness for him, hurried into the house, and checked that his slippers were by the back door – this last duty being performed with a guilty glance over her shoulder, as though her daughters were in hiding, watching.
‘Mum!’ they would have chorused had they been there, raising their eyes at each other. They agreed on very little, being opposites in character, but on one thing they did concur: their mother was a hopeless case.
‘This has nothing whatever to do with feminism,’ Marjorie had vainly tried to advise them whenever they bemoaned the way she lavished attention on her man. ‘It’s simply a matter of common courtesy.’ At which the girls would giggle behind their hands until their mother went on to remind them that she had carried out much the same little acts of loving kindness for them as well throughout their childhood, and didn’t they intend to do the same for their families when they had them? She sincerely hoped they would.
Marjorie had often fretted after these exchanges, wondering what selfish little monsters she had brought into the world. Had she failed in her duty as a parent?
But, back in the kitchen and arranging the salad in a bowl, she’d consoled herself that the girls seemed to have turned out well enough after all: Becky had found herself a husband, in spite of her dreadful bossiness – a trait that she had unfortunately inherited from her grandfather. And Em, eighteen months her junior, had astonished them all by plumping for a ‘caring’ profession. She whose favourite back-chat throughout her teens had been ‘see if I care’, had suddenly decided to do precisely that. She was now in her final year at nursing college.
Marjorie crushed a sliver of garlic and whisked up a vinaigrette dressing, her thoughts suddenly changing track. Why hadn’t Philip told her about Spittal’s closing? She was sure he must have known before the local media got hold of it. Why had he kept it to himself?
Well, all right, she had kept her little secret from him, as Sheila had reminded her, but she didn’t think him capable of doing the same. How well, though, could you ever know someone – even someone you had lived with for nearly twenty-five years? It was a disconcerting thought. She was still frowning when Philip’s car swooped on to the drive.
It was soon apparent, by his slackened tie and the whiff of rotten apples on his breath, that he was guilty of something he rarely did: he’d been drinking on the way home.
‘When did you find time to do that?’ she asked, nodding toward the wrought iron clock above the kitchen table. The clock was in the shape of a sunburst and had jerked out the seconds for them with its distinctive throaty rasp since the day they’d moved in. Like the contents of the rest of the house it had a dated look about it, Phil’s early distaste for materialism having stayed with him. Nothing was ever replaced in this house unless it fell apart – and even then Phil thought twice about it.
Marjorie had never much cared about the state of the house. As long as her garden was in immaculate order she was happy. Let one of the girls gouge a groove in the dining table and she would hardly turn a hair; let one of them drop a doll in her display of daffodils and she would turn purple.
‘Find time to do what?’ Philip was gazing up at the clock, not seeing any connection.
‘Find time for drinks in the pub on your way home. You’re only a few minutes later than usual.’
‘Oh … there wasn’t much going on at the office today, so I left a little early.’ He shrugged off his jacket, hung it on the back of a chair and stood looking down at it. He slipped off his tie and coiled it. When he glanced up he had a lost look about him. It seemed he had something to say and had no idea where to begin.
Suddenly remorseful, because she’d been so busy thinking about herself that she hadn’t realised quite what his firm’s closure would mean to him, she went over and put her hands on his shoulders. ‘Oh, Philip! Don’t worry about how to tell me the news. I know about Spittal’s already. I heard it on the radio. And I’m so sorry that it’s had to happen to you; I know it must be a shock, but –’
‘You know?’ Alarm was plain in his eyes. ‘Good grief … I suppose it was bound to get around. Honestly, love, I meant to tell you all about it myself. I wanted to break the news gently.’
‘Well, now you’ve nothing to break. And your parents know about it as well. I went round and told your mother, and she’ll have explained everything to your father. And they’ll be here any minute, as it happens. I’ve asked them to come round so we can all have a talk about it.’
Philip pushed back his hair. It was thick, even if it was grey, and was unruly. Normally it didn’t trouble him, unless he was ill at ease. Then he would rake it with his fingers or try to smooth it down. ‘Talk?’ he repeated slowly. ‘About what?’
‘About your redundancy, of course, and what you’re going to do now that Spittal’s is closing. And about what we’ve all been thinking …’
Her voice trailed away at the sight of his grim expression. She put down the dish of coleslaw she’d been giving a quick stir, dropping the spoon with a clatter; suddenly it no longer seemed to matter that the mayonnaise dressing had collected at the bottom of the bowl.
‘Spittal’s isn’t closing,’ he said, his lips set hard in a line.
‘Yes it is, Phil. I told you, I heard it on the radio.’
‘No, Marjorie, no. It isn’t, strictly speaking, closing.’ Then he’d uttered the words that had sent a chill crawling up her spine. ‘It’s moving its premises to Bristol.’
Marjorie
