She lifted a fork. ‘I don’t know why you wanted Italian,’ she said. ‘Every time you have your lunch nowadays you’ve got to decide which country you’re going to.’
Esther looked at her mother and chewed her food a few times more than was necessary. ‘There’s certainly a lot more choice nowadays,’ she said.
‘You call it choice. I call it harassment,’ Maureen said. ‘It’s like the bloody Olympic Games in that Tesco’s. Italian. Chinese.
They’ve got a whole bloody aisle of Polish stuff.’
‘Well, there’s a lot of them living here,’ Ian said.
‘Too many,’ replied Maureen.
‘I don’t know where we’d be without them. Half the building sites would be lying empty for a start. And taxi drivers. You couldn’t get a British guy to get out of his bed on a Saturday morning if the town was on fire. These Eastern Europeans will work all night.’
‘Taking jobs,’ Maureen said. ‘And bringing their giant jars of vegetables over here. And biscuits. It’s not even biscuits they eat. Those things are like bars of soap. You’d get bubbles in your mouth if you sat down to eat one with a cup of tea.’
Over the years, Ian had come to accept her complaints as a kind of sickness, a complete resistance to the idea of forward movement, and he only blew up when it seemed directly to affect his own child. Esther, on the other hand, had an obvious pact with Scott and Jack, to be themselves no matter what Maureen said or did, but Esther could get nervous. She knew, for instance, that her mother would find it difficult when she began a story about the cocktails they had every weekend at tea time.
‘Cocktails,’ Maureen said. ‘You all think you’re film stars and this is Scotland, not bloody New York.’
‘Dad made me a mojito,’ Jack said.
‘A mosquito?’ said Maureen.
‘There was hardly anything in it,’ Esther said.
‘Well, if you want to get them started on drink that early, it’s up to you. I’m just telling you it’s the slippery slope.’
‘It was just a bit of fun, Mum.’
‘That’s how it started with your brother.’
‘Let’s not go there,’ Ian said.
‘Take it from me,’ Maureen said. ‘Giving drink to young men is not a wise move. Alexander was at it far too young. And your father, the great man, was giving him pints of lager when the boy was about fifteen years old. Somebody saw him down the street the other day with a bottle of vodka in a plastic bag. The middle of the afternoon when all the men are at their work. Vodka! I was mortified.’
Esther looked at Ian. She knew it was going to be like this. She knew she would be sharing looks with her brother, rolling her eyes at the dawning of impossibility over the lunch table. She sipped her fizzy water and saw that her mother would never change and that the healthiest prospect was just to love her as she was. And that’s how she played it. She mustn’t be brutalised by her mother’s frustrations and she counselled herself always to seek new ways to think well of her. Love is hard work and you don’t get anywhere just by feeding your resentments. She thought she could steal a little goodness back just by stopping to remember how lovely her mother had been to the woman next door. She once read a paper that said if you love someone then you’re always ready to let them start again.
Maybe they’d like the ice-cream, thought Maureen. People always cheer up when it comes to the sweet. ‘I’m sorry I’m not very good at these things,’ she said suddenly to them all at the table. Ian and Esther smiled and said everything was great and both of them seemed relieved to see her relax enough to say what she’d said. Sometimes you just have to accept that the people you care about are different from you, thought Maureen, but walking to the kitchen she realised she had a tear in her eye. The visit wouldn’t last for ever and neither would her nice memories of Stanley, but there it was. As she opened the fridge she knew she’d
never have chosen anyone else, even as the chill of the icebox softly caressed her hand.
ARIEL
Luke walked from the car and skipped over a puddle and smiled for no reason at the windows of the building. He looked along the seafront to where the prom disappeared into the thick of Ardrossan and took out a cigarette. The car ferry was halfway out and the seagulls wafted it on, before banking away like bombers and heading up to Largs. In the morning the coast always looked as if it was drying out, as if each town was in recovery from the bad weather and the night’s racket. Feeling for his lighter he found his wallet and took out the picture of 5 Platoon up against a wall at the barracks in Salisbury. The major’s eyes seemed fixed on something miles away.
It was the second time Luke had discovered Anne in the laundry room and this time she sat facing the machine with the suds splashing up on the glass. He stood at the door watching her and noticed a smile, the smile she had developed long ago, an expression that he couldn’t read. After a moment, she sighed. ‘I like to wash and iron a man’s shirt,’ she said.
‘That’s not very feminist,’ he joked.
She looked up. ‘I had a job in New York.’
Luke went over and put his hand on her shoulder. She held a box of Ariel washing capsules in her lap and something in her attitude suggested she understood how to cope around a washing machine. She took a tissue from her sleeve and rubbed her nose with it, then she turned it over and used the clean side to
wipe her eyes. Luke watched her and thought only an old person would do that. He would know he was getting old when he used both sides of a tissue. ‘You used to come here before the war,’ she said.
He paused.
‘I did. It’s your grandson, Luke.’
‘I know who you are. You’re the one with the flat in Glasgow and the uniform.’
‘You’re doing your washing.’
She inclined her head to look at him. ‘You’re the one with the imagination,’ she said. ‘A boy and a half. And why shouldn’t we take pictures of a pile of old dishes if that’s what we want to do?’
‘No reason,’ he said.
‘Exactly. There’s beauty in it …’
‘Yes.’
‘Art.’
‘I agree. There’s an art to telling the truth.’
‘That’s what the boys used to say — Harry and the boys. That was the style, I don’t mind telling you. Get out of the studio!’
‘Test your theories outside.’
‘I’ve met you before,’ she said. ‘And you’re quite right. No doubt about it. Go outside and see the people who have their hands in the sink.’
‘You’re talking about photography?’
‘Everyday things,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll tell you something,’ she said, tapping the box in her lap and sniffing. ‘When I lived up in Glasgow there was heaps of washing to be done. Heaps. I think there were a hundred rooms in that house and a hundred chests of drawers in every room. It was
a very big house. And I was quite young to be carrying all that washing up the stairs.’
‘You came from America.’
‘I came from Canada. Then America. Then Glasgow.’
‘Glasgow must have been some place in those days,’ he said. ‘Remember those Annan pictures we saw of the tenements?’