The Frances Garrood Collection Read online

  THE FRANCES GARROOD BOXSET

  Cassandra’s Secret

  Women Behaving Badly

  Ruth Robinson’s Year of Miracles

  Table of Contents

  BOOK ONE: CASSANDRA’S SECRET

  BOOK TWO: WOMEN BEHAVING BADLY

  BOOK THREE: RUTH ROBINSON’S YEAR OF MIRACLES

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  MORE BOOKS BY FRANCES GARROOD

  BOOK ONE: CASSANDRA’S SECRET

  One

  October 2001

  Outside the hospital window, a maple tree sheds golden leaves into the autumn sunshine.

  ‘We ought to be able to die like that.’ Her eyes follow the leaves as they drift downwards. ‘Beautifully.’ She pauses, her hands whispering over the sheets like small frightened animals. ‘Not like this, all thin and ugly.’

  ‘But Mum, you’re not thin and ugly!’

  ‘I’m not stupid either.’ Bird-like eyes challenge me out of a face which has become gaunt almost beyond recognition. ‘Not stupid, Cass. You can’t fool me.’ She sighs, and the sigh is so slight that it scarcely lifts the crisp white sheet covering her. ‘The cancer may have eaten my body, but it hasn’t got my brain.’ A sudden smile; a glimpse of the old Mum. ‘It wouldn’t dare.’

  I smile back, and take one of her hands in mine. It feels unbelievably tiny and fragile, and I hold it like a small precious thing which I must be careful not to break. All of her is precious now; now that I am about to lose her. Her smile, the blue of her eyes, her sense of humour, her total unselfconsciousness, her incorrigible optimism. I find myself studying her greedily, absorbing every detail, for although she is so changed, I don’t want to forget a single thing about her.

  ‘I wasn’t a very good mother.’ Her voice is pensive. ‘I never really meant to be a mother. I’m not sure — not sure what I meant to be.’

  It may have been true that, at the time, my mother wasn’t sure how she had managed to produce children, but she certainly made up for any ignorance of her own by trying to ensure that the same fate never befell my brother or me. The fact that she furnished us with the information at an age when it was of no use to us whatsoever was neither here nor there; my mother had, in her own words, ‘done her duty’.

  This duty took the form of her (again to use her own words) ‘gathering’ us to her, and telling us the facts of life.

  ‘I believe in being frank,’ she informed us, years later, and with some pride. ‘I think children should know these things as soon as they can understand them.’

  But my brother and I didn’t understand them at all. Bewildered by her inventive use of props (an egg from the larder and a jam jar full of tadpoles) and baffled by her garbled tale of eggs and passages, of body hair and bleeding, poor Lucas had nightmares for weeks, while the whole episode (apart from the tadpoles — how I longed to be allowed to keep those tadpoles!) passed me by completely. It seemed to bear no relevance whatsoever to my own narrow childish life, and so I filed it away at the back of my brain (retrieval later on was to prove tricky) and forgot all about it. Long after my brother had stopped waking in the night, screaming with fear, I was still blissfully ignorant of where I’d come from, nor did I care. I had more important things to think about.

  Two years later, I was to have my first real encounter with, as it were, the facts of life in action.

  Awakened one night by what sounded like cries of pain coming from my mother’s room, I ran into her bedroom to find her apparently writhing around under the bedclothes with her new friend, the (as I realized, years later) aptly named Mr Mountjoy.

  ‘Mum! What’s happening?’ I stood panic-stricken in the bedroom doorway. ‘Are you — are you hurt?’

  My mother, who was rarely lost for words, emerged from under the covers, pink and dishevelled, and came up with an inventive if baffling explanation.

  ‘We were looking for a button.’

  Mr Mountjoy stifled a kind of choking noise, and my mother gave a rather odd little smile and sat up in bed. While she was careful to pull the counterpane up with her, I couldn’t help noticing that she didn’t appear to be wearing any clothes.

  ‘It’s all right, darling. There’s nothing for you to worry about. Mr Mountjoy is ... helping me.’

  Mr Mountjoy, apparently intent on continuing the search, disappeared under the bedclothes again and my mother waved her hand in the direction of the door.

  ‘Go back to bed now, angel. Everything’s going to be fine, I promise you.’

  But I didn’t think that everything seemed fine at all. My brother and I had never known our fathers (we had one each, our mother had told us, as though that were something to be pleased about), and I for one wasn’t used to finding strangers in her bed. Certainly, she had had men-friends, but if she had slept with them (and I must now assume that she had), I had never had any knowledge of it.

  ‘That Mr Mountjoy was in Mum’s bed last night,’ I told Lucas as we walked to school together the following morning. ‘What do you suppose they were doing? She said they were looking for a button, but they weren’t wearing any clothes.’

  ‘Honestly, Cass! What do you think they were doing?’ Lucas, with his full two years of seniority, was apparently better informed than I was.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said crossly. ‘I wouldn’t ask if —’

  ‘OK, OK. I’ll tell you then.’ Lucas paused portentously. ‘They were having sex, of course.’

  ‘Having sex,’ I repeated. ‘I see.’

  But of course, I didn’t see. In fact I remained totally ignorant of all matters sexual until a biology lesson at school several years later, in the course of which the hapless Miss Wilson took us on a whistle-stop tour of reproduction, moving seamlessly from the buttercup, via the rabbit, to sex in human beings.

  ‘You didn’t tell us any of it! Any of it!’ I accused my mother, when I got home from school. ‘Everyone else knew, but me. And all that about buttercups and rabbits — you never mentioned buttercups or rabbits!’

  ‘I don’t know anything about buttercups and rabbits, but I did tell you about people. I told you everything.’ My mother looked bewildered. She had been playing Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto on the ironing board. It was one of her favourites, and the record player was turned up so loud that we could hardly hear each other speak. ‘I told you when you were five,’ she shouted, obviously referring to the gathering together of Lucas and me. ‘I told you all you needed to know.’

  ‘But I didn’t need to know it then. I needed to know it for now,’ I shouted back. ‘So as not to look silly in front of everyone else!’

  ‘You must have forgotten. How was I to know you’d forget something so important?’ Mother’s fingers began to move up and down across the back of one of my school shirts, and she had a dreamy expression on her face.

  ‘And I wish you’d listen,’ I yelled. ‘I wish — I just wish I had a normal mother!’

  This was certainly true. While I loved my mother dearly and was not on the whole a conventional child, I didn’t always appreciate her many eccentricities. She was one of those people who conduct their lives with no apparent reference to the rules of normal behaviour. The piano-playing was only the tip of the iceberg, and in fact apart from when I was trying to talk to her, or when I had friends round, I didn’t mind it too much. But she seemed incapable of editing the thoughts as they floated into her head, and this could lead to fearful misunderstandings. If someone was looking ill, or tired, or, worst of all, just plain ugly, my mother wouldn’t hesitate to tell them so. In shops and cafes, on buses and in the school playground, she was an endless and rich source of embarrassment.

  Conversely, she would pay outrageous compliments to
total strangers, and this could be almost as embarrassing.

  ‘Did you know, you have the most wonderful eyes?’ she once informed a rather forbidding-looking young man on a train. ‘Sort of treacle toffee, with a touch of —’

  But before she could finish her sentence, the young man had got up and moved to another compartment.

  ‘Well!’ said Mum, much annoyed. ‘How rude! Can you imagine why anyone would want to be so rude?’

  Both Lucas and I could well imagine why the young man had found our mother’s company less than congenial, but we wisely kept our counsel.

  And then there was the somewhat eccentric domestic setup in which we passed our childhood. True, the rambling and dilapidated Victorian house (a legacy from a long-dead aunt) was spacious, and the jungle of a garden offered plenty of scope for our imaginations, but the place was a social minefield. There was the Lodger in the basement (always referred to as the Lodger, although the actual individual enjoying this title changed so frequently that we had trouble keeping up with who was supposed to be living there). Up in the attic, there was my mother’s Uncle Rupert, who had been with us for as long as I could remember. He was a rather fey, ineffectual man of wispy appearance and indeterminate age, who lived off the dole and spent his time inventing things. Thinking of things for Uncle Rupert to invent was a regular family pastime, and so he was never short of ideas, but he rarely came up with anything which could be considered even remotely useful.

  Mum, however, wouldn’t hear a word against him.

  ‘Rupert’s so clever,’ she would say, ironing his shirts (between piano concertos). ‘He could have gone a long way, you know.’

  Lucas and I often wished Uncle Rupert would do just that, for his lengthy occupations of the only bathroom, the pacing of his heavy boots across the floorboards above our bedrooms, the smell of his clothes (aniseed balls, stale sweat and tobacco) and, as I approached puberty, his covert appraisal of my developing body (never enough to complain to Mum about, but certainly enough to inspire a healthy revulsion) did nothing to endear him to us.

  ‘Does Uncle Rupert have to live with us?’ I asked once. After all, none of my friends had resident uncles. Theirs were the kind of uncles who were only seen on family occasions, and if they did visit, they came sweet-smelling and wholesome, bearing gifts of toffee, and if you were lucky, money.

  ‘Of course Uncle Rupert has to live with us,’ replied my mother, shocked. ‘You must understand, darling. He has nowhere else to go.’

  Other people who often had nowhere else to go were, variously, my mother’s friend Greta, an exile from her native Switzerland who spoke little English and cried a lot; a tramp called Richard, who played the ukulele outside Woolworths and for whom my mother had a soft spot (‘Not a tramp, Cass,’ she chided me once, ‘Richard’s a Homeless Person.’ ‘But he calls himself a tramp,’ I objected. ‘That’s different,’ said Mum); an actor called Ben, who had fallen on hard times but had once had a walk-on part in Coronation Street; and the nice man from the chemist (Mum’s words) who kept falling out with his landlady. These people didn’t all come to stay at once, of course, but they turned up at regular intervals to spend a few nights on the put-u-up in the living room and join the queue for the bathroom. Whether, like the Lodger, they paid my mother anything towards their keep, Lucas and I never did find out. Nor did we discover whether any of them were into hunting for buttons. But we did resent their regular intrusion into a household which was at best disordered and at worst chaotic, for what our mother seemed to forget was that we, too, had nowhere else to go, and that moreover, this was our home. Quite often it felt more as though we were all living in a hostel.

  What I didn’t realize until years later was that my mother was desperately lonely, and that her greatest dread was to wake up one morning and find that she was no longer surrounded by people. If there was no Lodger, she would visibly droop (I thought at the time that this was due to lack of revenue), and would send Lucas and me several times a day to our corner shop to ask if anyone had enquired about the advertisement she had placed in their window. If the phone was silent, she would fret that it might be out of order (‘nip round to the phone box and give us a quick ring, Cass, there’s a pet’). If no one called round, she immediately assumed she must have done something wrong. Flighty, insecure, by turns manically happy or beset with a sadness bordering on despair, she was not a restful person to live with.

  But it was by no means all bad, and in fact my friends envied me my haphazard upbringing, for I was given the kind of freedom they could only dream of. We climbed trees and constructed tunnels underneath the hay bales in the local farmer’s barn, and our mother turned a blind eye. We stayed up late with her, listening to unsuitable programmes on the wireless, and went trick-or-treating at Halloween long before the custom had caught on this side of the Atlantic. When Lucas remarked once that raw cake mixture tasted so much better than the finished article, and couldn’t he have an uncooked birthday cake, Mum said what a lovely idea, and of course he could. The cake was consumed with spoons out of bowls, and while several of the party were ill that night, all agreed that it had been worth it. Their parents, however, evidently did not think the exercise had been worth it, and at least two of Lucas’s friends were banned from our house for some time afterwards.

  ‘We did have fun, didn’t we?’ It’s as though she is reading my thoughts. ‘Do you remember the time I sent a note to school and we went picking primroses?’

  ‘Oh yes!’

  A blue and white spring day, a dapple of bright new leaves, and the primroses like stars in the chalky soil, their faces turned to the sun. We picked the slender pink stems, sniffing the perfume of the flowers, and filled a basket with them, then sat on our coats on the ground (‘Don’t sit on the wet grass; you’ll get piles.’ ‘Piles of what?’ ‘Never you mind.’) to eat our picnic lunch of crisp rolls and ham and apples. It never occurred to me at the time to question what we were doing. My mother always reasoned that we were her children, and if she wanted us out of school for a day, then that was her right.

  ‘What did you say in the note?’

  ‘What note?’

  ‘The note you wrote to the school on the primrose day.’

  ‘I forget.’ Her eyes start wandering again, then return with a snap. ‘Oh yes! I said you had your period!’

  ‘Mum!’ I was ten years old at the time, my chest as flat as a board, my body smooth and hairless as a plum.

  ‘Well, what did you expect me to say?’ And of course, as usual, there is no answer to that.

  ‘And Deirdre and the cowpat. Do you remember that?’

  Blowing up cowpats with Lucas and his friends in the field behind our house, choosing a nice ripe one (‘crisp on the top, with a squidgy middle,’ advised Lucas, the expert); our excitement, watching the smouldering firework, waiting for the explosion; and the sheer joy when a particularly messy one erupted in a fountain of green sludge, splattering the blonde ringlets and nice clean frock of prissy Deirdre from next door. Oh, Deirdre! If you could see yourself! We rolled in the grass, kicking our heels, convulsed with mirth, while Deirdre, howling and outraged, ran home to tell her mummy what bad, bad children we all were.

  ‘What’ll your mum say?’ one of Lucas’s friends asked anxiously.

  ‘Oh, Mum’ll laugh.’

  Mum laughed. She tried to tell us off, but was so proud of the inventiveness of Lucas, and so entertained at the fate of prissy Deirdre, that she failed utterly. But she promised Deirdre’s mother that we would all be ‘dealt with’.

  ‘Whatever that means,’ said Mum, dishing out chocolate biscuits and orange juice. ‘Poor child. She doesn’t stand a chance, with a mother like that. But I suppose she had it coming to her.’

  ‘I wonder what happened to her?’ she muses now.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Prissy Deirdre.’

  ‘Married, with a nice little semi with net curtains, a Peter-and-Jane family and a husband who washes the car on S
undays.’

  But Mum is no longer listening. She is drifting away from me again, her eyes wandering, her fingers plucking at the sheets.

  Mum rarely, if ever, told us off, and not only appeared to trust us implicitly but often sought our advice. We were always invited to be present when she interviewed prospective Lodgers, and although these meetings were rarely the formal, fact-finding missions she fondly imagined them to be, she always listened to what we had to say. As we grew older, she would even seek our views on her latest man-friend, although in this she tended to disregard our opinions and go her own way.

  ‘Can’t you see he’s just after somewhere to stay?’ Lucas exclaimed on one occasion (the gentleman in question had no job and no visible means of support).

  ‘So that suits us both, doesn’t it?’ Mum cried gaily. ‘He can live here with us!’

  ‘But Mum! He’s just using you!’

  ‘And I, my sweet, am using him.’ She patted Lucas on the head. ‘One day, you’ll understand.’

  Money, or rather, the lack of it, was an ongoing problem, and to this day I’m not sure what we lived on. True, there was the Lodger, and Mum did have a variety of odd jobs, but she quickly became bored with them, and was out of work more often than she was in it. In this as in every other area of her life, there would be sudden bursts of industry, where she would appear to be holding down several jobs at once. Then her maternal conscience (a flighty thing at the best of times) would kick in, and she would be at home for weeks on end, baking amazing cakes from recipes of her own invention and making strange-looking garments on her ancient Singer sewing machine. The cakes were always different and always odd-looking — sometimes burnt round the edges, often flat as pancakes — but they were invariably delicious. The garments — usually made from, and looking exactly like, old curtains — we hid at the backs of drawers and cupboards until she had forgotten about them. Sometimes she worked from home, as on the occasion when she took a job packing bottles of cheap perfume in little boxes. The perfume-packing regularly fell behind schedule, and the whole family, plus the Lodger and sundry hangers-on, would end up helping her out. The smell of that perfume — ‘Gardenia’ — haunted me for years afterwards.