Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,131
mind to get your father to tan your backside. Instead, I’m going to let you apologize to Frank and Mabel.”
I moved my eyes from my mother’s icy glare and swept the room to see all those other adults looking at me: Ted, a cigarette dangling from his mouth as he shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot; my father, his lips pressed together so that his mouth was nothing more than a colorless line above his dimpled chin; Auntie Mabel, her head tilted sideways, her forehead rippled with confusion; and Frank, an angled smile stretching across his satisfied mouth. They were nothing more than a solid wall of incomprehension. None of them knew me. None of them even cared to know.
“I hate you all,” I said, taking them all in with a sweeping look before I turned to storm out of the room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
TED, LIKE MY MOTHER WHEN SHE WAS GOING THROUGH HER BAD patches, had an extraordinary capacity for sleep. During the first several weeks of his stay, he was never up when I left for school in the mornings and on several occasions he was still sleeping when I returned. I knew that he was asleep because I could hear his snores echoing through the walls of the spare bedroom, enormous reverberating snorts that sounded like the nonstop revving of a huge, ill-tuned engine. I wouldn’t have minded this so much except that, while Ted was in bed, my mother insisted that my father and I should tiptoe around the house. “Be quiet! Your uncle Ted is sleeping,” she’d say in hissing whispers if I dropped a shoe in the hallway or stumbled on the stairs.
My father crept around his own house like an unwelcome visitor with surprising patience. Indeed, he seemed so pleased to see my mother up and about that he didn’t even mind that we were still left to make our meals now that she was spending all her time on the plans for Mabel’s wedding. Every morning, by the time I made it down to the kitchen, my mother was already there, sitting at the table studying patterns for wedding dresses or sketching diagrams for landscaping the back garden. Within a week of Ted’s arrival, she had also discovered the mobile library as a resource to help her with her plans.
“Such a lovely woman, that librarian is,” she told me after her first visit to the mobile library. “She talks such a lot of sense. I hope you listen to her, Jesse,” she said, wagging her finger at me. “You could benefit from paying attention to someone as intelligent and educated as she is.” She went on to tell me how, after the two of them had discussed at length the declining cultural standards of contemporary Britain, the librarian had been only too happy to put in a request for a crateload of gardening, dressmaking, and recipe books that my mother retrieved the following week. After that, she borrowed additional volumes on a regular basis and spent hours surrounded by unsteady piles of thick hardback books, leafing through copies of Landscape Gardening for Beginners, Turf and Lawn Care, and Beautiful Blushing Brides.
When he wasn’t asleep, Ted spent most of his time in the living room, watching television, smoking, and drinking cup after cup of dark, strong tea. He was almost as indiscriminate in his choice of television viewing as my mother was, and I frequently arrived home to find him staring slack-jawed at Play School or Romper Room. “Fetch us another cuppa, would you, love?” he’d say, waving his empty teacup at me, his eyes focused steadily on the screen. His trips out of the house consisted of runs to the Co-op to buy cigarettes. (I was thrilled at this additional supply of Co-op stamps.) Other than that, he rarely left the house and when he inquired about getting the dole he was delighted to find that, since we lived so far from the dole office in Hull, he wasn’t required to go there after his first appointment and could continue to collect his benefits by signing the card they sent him once a week and returning it in the post.
“By, that’s champion, that is,” he said. “There’s nothing I hate more than standing in them damn queues, having them people at the window treat you like you’re a bit of rubbish, and then ending up with a couple of pounds and some change for your trouble.”