Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,10
added to my mother’s off-kilter aura. “I’m happy where I am,” she added, wiping crumbs from her mouth with the back of her hand and running her tongue over her chapped lips.
“You could have fooled me. If this is your version of happy, then …” My father faltered and took a gasping sip of his tea. “Look, Evelyn,” he said after he’d swirled the liquid around his mouth then swallowed it down. “I think we all need a change of scene. I do. And Jesse’s schoolwork’s been suffering.”
“No, it hasn’t,” I countered. It was true that my marks had slipped when I was doing all that letter writing. But the day my mother had arrived home—her face a pale moon, her arms loose and thin as sticks beneath a saggy pullover—the idea of a glamorous world-traveling mother sunning herself on the deck of a cruise ship had suddenly seemed as absurd to me as it had to my schoolmates. I’d stopped writing my letters and tried to focus on my lessons again.
“See,” my mother said. “Jesse doesn’t want to move, either.”
This was not true. I was longing to move. Longing to go anywhere. I was tired of the teasing at school, tired of Mrs. Thompson gazing over her desk at me as if I were a sickly, abandoned waif, tired of the curtains that twitched every time I walked down our street, and tired of Mrs. Brockett peering over our backyard wall to press me for information. I was so tired of everything that I didn’t even balk at the idea of moving to some country village. Perhaps, if I was lucky, my father would purchase one of those houses perched at the edge of an eroding cliff and within months we’d find ourselves pitched into the sea.
“We need a new start,” my father said, letting his teacup clatter down onto its saucer. “You need a new start. And, quite frankly, I’d like to be somewhere that the whole bloody street isn’t sticking their noses in our bloody business.”
“Oh, right, that’s it,” my mother said, nodding sagely, as if everything had become clear. “That’s going to suit you down to the ground.” She chewed as she spoke, and I could see globs of peanut butter stuck to the roof of her mouth. “You’ll put me out there in the middle of nowhere hoping everyone will forget about me. I’ll be like that woman … what’s her name, Jesse? That one in the film we saw the other day, the one they stuck in the attic until she set it on fire?”
“Mrs. Rochester,” I answered.
“Yes, that’s right. Mrs. Rochester,” she said, wagging a finger at my father. “The mad woman in the attic, that’ll be me.”
We had watched Jane Eyre on the television the previous Sunday afternoon, and I felt ashamed to remember now that I had, in fact, imagined my mother as the first Mrs. Rochester, burning down the house and herself to make way for a sensible, Jane Eyre–like stepmother for me.
“Don’t say such things in front of Jesse.” My father shook his head, making the narrow shaft of sunlight that shone through the curtained window move like a spotlight above his balding head.
“Oh, come on,” my mother said. “You’d be happier without me.”
My father let out a heavy sigh. “Oh, for God’s sake, Evelyn, don’t be so stupid.”
She swallowed a mouthful of sandwich. “Oh, no, don’t go calling me stupid. I know you wish I’d done a better job of this.” She thrust her arms out from under the puffy-sleeved dressing gown, and for the first time I saw the bold red scars across her wrists.
DESPITE MY MOTHER’S PROTESTATIONS, it became clear that we were moving, with my father exhibiting a level of determination that I hadn’t quite realized he was capable of. It took him a few weeks, but finally he announced that he’d found “the perfect house” outside Midham, a village about fifteen miles northeast of Hull. He told us cheerily that it was still within driving distance of his job, adding later, when my mother was out of hearing, that his journey to work would give him “a bit of much needed peace.”
The week after that, Auntie Mabel came round to help us pack. My mother’s older sister, she always arrived in a cloud of cigarette smoke and thick, flowery perfume—smells that lingered in the house long after she left. Mabel was an Avon lady, and she carried one of the catalogs with her wherever