back somewhere, and maybe the Neidpaths are curators of that too – and Jasmine pushes a pile of them over to me. I slit my thumb along the pod, and draw the beans that look as small as a child’s milk teeth from their cotton-wool setting.
Jasmine begins to speak.
*
– I was very worried about Muriel, as I said, at that time. So I decided to take her to a health farm I’d read about – nottoo expensive, you understand – it was called Summer … well, it’s so long ago, something like Summerfield Farm.
At first it was all a big joke. Muriel still thought it was funny to start minding, at our advanced age, about our appearance – her word, she was always laughing about the vanity of the women she worked with on the magazine, especially the editor, a tartar of the old school by the sounds of her. But we went on all the machines in the gym just for the hell of it.
I remember, we even got ourselves buried up to the neck in mud in some sort of rejuvenation treatment, and came out a few hours later looking, well, muddy.
It was so obvious that we weren’t going to change into beauties overnight – and I was hungry too, I must admit; I used to smuggle in biscuits and the like – that I decided to quit after a week. Muriel was annoyed at first, because she said she’d be lonely. Then she told me to go, and to watch out for the results she’d be showing after another couple of weeks in the place.
‘Suit yourself,’ I said. (Truth to tell, I was very cheered up by Muriel’s attitude to the whole thing. I thought – I have to admit I was wrong not to look deeper – I simply thought the poor woman had had too much work and too little play recently. That was all there was to it. What Muriel needed was a holiday. And, even if it meant a health farm with a woman friend, she’d got one.)
True, there was one night – after we’d got used to the orange juice and found we could talk freely without the usual intake of gin or wine – when Muriel started harping on about your mother and Harry again. How Anna didn’t understand him. How she took him for granted, that kind of thing.
‘Oh belt up, Muriel,’ I said. ‘He’s happy – anyone can see that.’
‘That’s the trouble,’ Muriel said.
*
And those, says Jasmine, rising with a colander of beans and putting them to one side, laying out a row of new potatoes that need scraping and already smell of the wild mint she gathered this morning from the riverbank – those were the last words Muriel spoke to me.
As her old self, I mean.
*
– I remember the dress. I find I have spoken suddenly, when a silence has fallen on the kitchen and Jasmine is washing earth from a bunch of baby carrots, immersed in the present, as if the past and Muriel’s election to put back the clock to an impossible, artificial present could never really have taken place.
But I do remember the dress. I saw it earlier, in a flash of those bright psychedelic colours of the time, when Jasmine spoke of Anna putting on dresses at last, discarding the jeans and dungarees so as to look more attractive for her lover, Harry.
*
The dress is lying on the floor.
Something terrible has happened. There has been a fight or a scene – like an animal, I smell trouble, but alas, like a child, I run in the big flat with its shadows from the light on the water outside for my grandmother, for Muriel.
But that, it turns out, is the trouble. My mother wants Muriel too.
*
– Yes, Jasmine says. Your grandmother came back in the middle of the day from the health farm and went straight tothe flat. There was no point in going to the office, you see; it was afternoon already.
She found a note asking her to babysit you that evening.
I only heard this much later, you understand, when I talked to her on the telephone and tried to get her to make sense. I was frightened by then – very frightened. I didn’t know who to turn to, you see.
*
– But she didn’t come back in time for them to
Jasmine begins to speak.
*
– I was very worried about Muriel, as I said, at that time. So I decided to take her to a health farm I’d read about – nottoo expensive, you understand – it was called Summer … well, it’s so long ago, something like Summerfield Farm.
At first it was all a big joke. Muriel still thought it was funny to start minding, at our advanced age, about our appearance – her word, she was always laughing about the vanity of the women she worked with on the magazine, especially the editor, a tartar of the old school by the sounds of her. But we went on all the machines in the gym just for the hell of it.
I remember, we even got ourselves buried up to the neck in mud in some sort of rejuvenation treatment, and came out a few hours later looking, well, muddy.
It was so obvious that we weren’t going to change into beauties overnight – and I was hungry too, I must admit; I used to smuggle in biscuits and the like – that I decided to quit after a week. Muriel was annoyed at first, because she said she’d be lonely. Then she told me to go, and to watch out for the results she’d be showing after another couple of weeks in the place.
‘Suit yourself,’ I said. (Truth to tell, I was very cheered up by Muriel’s attitude to the whole thing. I thought – I have to admit I was wrong not to look deeper – I simply thought the poor woman had had too much work and too little play recently. That was all there was to it. What Muriel needed was a holiday. And, even if it meant a health farm with a woman friend, she’d got one.)
True, there was one night – after we’d got used to the orange juice and found we could talk freely without the usual intake of gin or wine – when Muriel started harping on about your mother and Harry again. How Anna didn’t understand him. How she took him for granted, that kind of thing.
‘Oh belt up, Muriel,’ I said. ‘He’s happy – anyone can see that.’
‘That’s the trouble,’ Muriel said.
*
And those, says Jasmine, rising with a colander of beans and putting them to one side, laying out a row of new potatoes that need scraping and already smell of the wild mint she gathered this morning from the riverbank – those were the last words Muriel spoke to me.
As her old self, I mean.
*
– I remember the dress. I find I have spoken suddenly, when a silence has fallen on the kitchen and Jasmine is washing earth from a bunch of baby carrots, immersed in the present, as if the past and Muriel’s election to put back the clock to an impossible, artificial present could never really have taken place.
But I do remember the dress. I saw it earlier, in a flash of those bright psychedelic colours of the time, when Jasmine spoke of Anna putting on dresses at last, discarding the jeans and dungarees so as to look more attractive for her lover, Harry.
*
The dress is lying on the floor.
Something terrible has happened. There has been a fight or a scene – like an animal, I smell trouble, but alas, like a child, I run in the big flat with its shadows from the light on the water outside for my grandmother, for Muriel.
But that, it turns out, is the trouble. My mother wants Muriel too.
*
– Yes, Jasmine says. Your grandmother came back in the middle of the day from the health farm and went straight tothe flat. There was no point in going to the office, you see; it was afternoon already.
She found a note asking her to babysit you that evening.
I only heard this much later, you understand, when I talked to her on the telephone and tried to get her to make sense. I was frightened by then – very frightened. I didn’t know who to turn to, you see.
*
– But she didn’t come back in time for them to
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