‘Hullo,’ a middle-aged man said, smiling at her from a sandy face. His short hair was sandy also. He wore a greenish suit. ‘Are you Helena?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’m your uncle. One of your mother’s brothers. Did you know you had uncles and an aunt?’
She shook her head. He laughed.
‘I was the one who made up the games we used to play. Different games for different parts of the garden. Aren’t you going to let me in?’
‘I’m sorry.’
He stepped into the hall, that awful, fusty hall she hated so, its grim brown curtains looping in the archway at the bottom of the stairs, its grim hallstand, the four mezzotints of Australian landscape, the stained ceiling.
She led him into the sitting-room, which was awful also, cluttered with tawdry furniture her mother didn’t notice had grown ugly with wear and time, the glass-fronted cabinets full of forgotten objects, the dreary books drearily filling bookcase after bookcase.
‘I heard about your father’s death, Helena. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s ages ago now. Seven years actually. He died on my birthday.’
‘I only met your father once.’ He paused. ‘We’ve often wondered about you, you know.’
‘Wondered?’
‘The family have. We’ve known of course that your mother wouldn’t be short, but even so.’
He smiled his easy smile at her. It was her mother who had supplied the money there had been, Helena intuitively realized. Something about the way he had mentioned the family and had said her mother wouldn’t be short had given this clear impression. Not just obsessive in his scholarship, her father had been needy also.
‘I thought I’d call,’ he said. ‘I’ve written of course, but even so I just thought I’d call one of these days.’
She left him and went to knock on the study door, as her mother liked her to do. There was no reply, and when she knocked a second time her mother called out in irritation.
‘An uncle has come,’ Helena said.
‘Who?’
‘Your brother.’
‘Is here, you mean?’ Her mother, wearing reading-glasses on a chain, which she had recently taken to, had a finger marking the point on a page at which she had been interrupted. She was seated at the desk, papers and books all around her, the desk light turned on even though it was the middle of the afternoon.
‘He’s downstairs.’
Her mother said nothing, nor did she display further surprise, or emotion. She stared at Helena, her scrutiny suggesting that Helena was somehow to blame for the presence of this person, which in a sense Helena was, having opened the hall door to him and permitted his entrance. Her mother drew a piece of paper towards her, at the same time releasing her finger from the place it marked. She picked up a fountain pen and then opened a drawer and found an envelope.
‘Give him this,’ she said, and returned to her books.
Helena carried the missive to the sitting-room. The man had pulled back an edge of the grubby lace curtain and was gazing out into the empty street. He took the envelope from Helena and opened it.
‘Well, there you are,’ he said when he had read the message, and sighed. He left the note behind when he went. Her mother had simply ordered him to go away. Please me by not returning to this house, her mother had added, signing her full name.
In the dormitory called the Upper Nightingale Helena retailed the excesses of her mother. How the elderly couple in the house next door had been written to and requested to make less noise. How Mrs Archingford had been snubbed. How Judy Smeeth had been forbidden the house, how her mother’s sandy-faced brother had been summarily dismissed. She told how her mother had never visited the grinning little grandparents, and how they had never come to the house. She described the house – the Australian mezzotints, the fustiness, the dim lights and curtained windows, the dirtiness that was beginning to gather. In their beds, each with a pink lover, other girls of Upper Ni|htingale listened with delight. None of them had a mother whose tongue was like a whip. None feared a mother’s sarcasm. None dreaded going home.
When she closed her eyes after lights-out Helena saw her mother in the dark study, listing words and derivations, finding new words or words no longer used, all in loving memory. ‘Oh God,’ pleaded Helena in those moments given up to private prayer at the beginning and end of church. ‘Oh God, please make her different.’
Her mother supplied her with money so that at the end of each term she could make her way from the school by train and then across London in a taxi-cab. It was not her mother’s way to stand waiting at a railway station; nor, indeed, when Helena did arrive, to answer the doorbell until it had been rung twice or three times. It was not her way to embrace Helena, but instead to frown a little as if she had forgotten that her advent was due on a particular day. ‘Ah, Helena,’ she would say eventually.
These holiday periods were spent by Helena in reading, cleaning the kitchen, cooking and walking about the avenues and crescents of the neighbourhood. When she painted the shelves in her bedroom, her mother objected to the smell of paint, causing Helena to lose her temper. In awkward, adolescent rage, unreasonably passionate, she shouted at her mother. The matter was petty, she was being made petty herself, yet she could not, as she stood there on the landing, bear for a second longer her mother’s pretence that the smell of paint could not possibly be coming from within the house since no workman had been employed to paint anything. There was astonishment in her mother’s face when Helena said she had been painting her shelves.
‘I went out and bought paint,’ she cried, red-faced and furious. ‘Is there something sinful in that? I went into a shop and bought paint.’
‘Of course there’s nothing sinful, Helena.’
‘Then why are you blaming me? What harm is there in painting the shelves in my bedroom? I’m seventeen. Surely I don’t have to ask permission for every single action I take?’
‘I merely wondered about the smell, child.’
‘You didn’t wonder. You knew about the smell.’
‘I do not care for that, Helena.’
‘Why do you hate me?’
‘Now, Helena, please don’t be tiresome. Naturally I do not hate you.’
‘Everyone knows you hate me. Everyone at school, even Mrs Archingford.’
‘Mrs Archingford? What on earth has Mrs Archingford to do with it?’
‘She is a human being, that’s all.’
‘No one denies that Mrs Archingford is a human being.’
‘You never think of her like that.’
‘You are in a tiresome mood, Helena.’
Her mother turned and went away, descending the stairs to the study. Without a show of emotion, she closed the door behind her, quietly, as if there had not been an angry scene, or as if no importance could possibly attach to anything that had been said.
In her bedroom, that afternoon, Helena wept. She lay on her bed and pressed her face into her pillow, not caring how ugly she was making herself, for who was there to see? In waves of fury that came and calmed, and then came on again, she struck at her thighs with her fists until the repeated impact hurt and she guessed there would be black and blue marks. She wished she had reached out and struck her mother as she stood at the top of the stairs. She wished she had heard the snap of her mother’s neck and had seen her body lifeless, empty of venom in the hall.
Twilight was gathering when she got up and washed her face in the bathroom. She held a sponge to each puffed-up eye in turn, and then immersed her whole face in a basin of cold water, holding it there for as long as she could. Her hair was bedraggled as a result, clinging to her damp face. She looked awful, she thought, her mouth pulled down with wretchedness, but she didn’t care.