leaned back in his chair, his face flushed with the effort he had made. I wanted to say so much, but I could see how tired he was. So I just said, ‘Thanks, Daddy, I’ll remember that.’ Then I offered to go and make the coffee, thinking he might well doze off in his chair.
He nodded gratefully and I was just putting my warm feet back into my shoes when the telephone rang loudly in the hall. I heard my mother’s step on the stairs. Her voice was as clear from the hallway as if she was standing in the room beside us.
It was Harvey, we gathered, honouring Rathmore Drive with one of his infrequent family visits for Sunday lunch. My mother was positively purring after the first few exchanges. There were a number of nauseating references to her favourite grandchild, Peter, the usual inquiries about Mavis and the two girls, and then, to my horror, I heard her assuring Harvey that I would be there too, that she was just about to ask me.
The call ended. I heard the heavy tread of her footsteps, the rattle of wooden rings as she pulled the velvet curtains behind the front door. The sitting-room curtains would come next. If she were going to come in, she would come in then. And as likely as not she would behave as if nothing whatever had happened.
My father was leaning back in his chair, listening to the pattern of the evening ritual. We exchanged glances and grinned ruefully at each other.
The door opened. She marched across to the fireplace, a smirk on her face. ‘My goodness,’ she exclaimed, ‘you’re sitting here all in the dark. Harvey rang a little while ago. They’re coming for Sunday lunch. Isn’t that nice? And Susie was asking for you, Jenny, so I said I was sure you’d be able to come, as Colin is away. Harvey will pick you up while I’m getting the lunch. I thought we’d have a leg of lamb for a change. What do you think, George?’
I pushed the front door closed with my elbow, stepped over a pile of envelopes and dropped briefcase and basket on the seat in the telephone alcove. ‘Thank God to be home,’ I said aloud.
There was an icy chill in the hall and a pervasive, unpleasant smell hanging in the air. It felt as if I’d been gone for a month. I kept my coat on and went into the kitchen. It was exactly as I had left it at a quarter to seven this morning when Colin suddenly announced that we had to leave an hour earlier than usual, because he had to pick up his father on the Antrim Road for their nine o’clock flight.
Earlier, I was surprised and delighted when he wakened me with a mug of tea. Sitting up in bed, listening to him cooking his breakfast, I drank it gratefully and hoped it was a peace offering after the awful row we’d had the previous evening. Relaxed and easy as it was still so early, I went down in my dressing gown and to my surprise found my fruit juice and cornflakes sitting ready for me.
Now, I scraped the soggy residue of the cornflakes into the polythene box where I keep scraps for the birds and put it back in the fridge. I’d been halfway through them when he told me. That gave me precisely fifteen minutes to shower, make up, dress, organise the papers I’d abandoned in my study the previous evening and be ready to leave. The alternative was to leave on foot, twenty minutes after Colin, and spend an hour and a half travelling, three buses and a train.
I shivered miserably and tried to put it out of mind as I studied the control panel for the central heating boiler. It looked perfectly all right. On: morning, six till eight. Heat and water. Back on: Five. For getting home, early evening. Off, ten thirty. By which time we were usually in bed. I looked at my watch. It was only ten fifteen so why was it off?
‘Oh, not one more bloody thing,’ I said crossly as I tramped round the kitchen in frustration. The air was still full of the smell of Colin’s bacon and egg. I prodded the switch on the extractor fan. To my amazement, it began to whir. It hadn’t worked for weeks. I almost managed to laugh at my bad temper, but then I caught sight of Colin’s eggy plate. The very thought of the relaxed way he’d announced the change of plan made me furious again.
‘Come on, Jenny, concentrate. It was working this morning,’ I said firmly.
Among the many delights of Loughview Heights, as advertised in the colour brochure from any McKinstry Brothers agent and free to all would-be customers, was a range of modern conveniences ‘guaranteed to impress your visitors’. What the brochure didn’t say was that they also broke down at the slightest provocation. There’d been such a crop of failures recently I was ready to exchange them for reliable Stone Age technology like paraffin lamps and water from a well.
I stared at the control panel again. Somewhere at the back of my weary mind a thought formed. I was missing something blindingly obvious. I peered at the minute figures on the dial. Then the penny dropped. Slightly to the right of the control box was a large switch. It said ‘OFF’.
‘Off?’ I exclaimed incredulously. ‘Who’s bloody OFF? I’m not OFF, I’m here and I’m freezing.’
I pushed it down. The loud click echoed through the dark, empty house. A red light flowered. There was a woosh and a shower of tiny ticks, like rain splattering a window. I shivered, cleared and stacked the breakfast things, and went through to the lounge and found an even worse mess.
I stepped round the ironing board and drew the curtains across the black hole that echoed the chaos around me. I switched on the table lamps and turned off the top light. Even with softer lighting, the walls looked almost as grubby as they did under the glare of the overhead fitment. I pushed a pile of Colin’s papers, magazines and instruction sheets off an armchair and sat down.
I’d had plans for those walls this weekend. Tuscan. A rich, earthy colour that might even bring out some quality in the hideous, mustardy velvet curtains. The tins of emulsion had been sitting in the garage since the summer. But it looked as if my mother had put paid to that little scheme. I sized up the walls again. Allowed for the mass of the stone fireplace and the picture window. Calculated how long it might take me to remove the adjustable shelving and all the books and objects by myself. Shook my head sadly. Bitter experience had taught me things always take longer than you think. The tin says ‘one coat’. But when I did my study, the same dirty white had grinned through one coat. Some bits had ended up needing three coats.
If I didn’t have to go to Rathmore Drive for Sunday lunch, perhaps I could have just managed it. But there it was. I did. One more weekend, to follow all the others. Something on. Not something we wanted to do, but one more ‘must do’ among all the many ‘must dos’ that had come to dominate our life.
I tried to remember when we last had a weekend when we could just be together, sit over breakfast, talk, drink cups of coffee, or pull on boots and walk down to the loughshore. We had had so little time together recently it wasn’t surprising, really; Colin could be so thoughtless and I could get so anxious and agitated about things never getting done.
The room was beginning to warm up slightly, but the hot air pouring through the vents was blowing Colin’s scattered papers all over the place. Wearily, I got up and gathered them together. Half were specifications for the new factory in Antrim, now his special project. I’d seen them so often, I knew them by heart. Then I found the instructions for making the homebrew. A pile of photocopies – Which reports on new cars. And down at the bottom of the pile still on the sofa I found an overflowing ashtray full of Neville’s cigarette stubs and ash from Colin’s cigar. At least that accounted for the peculiar, stale smell in the room. Accounting for the furious row we had when Neville finally left would not be so easy.
Neville had appeared from next door before we’d finished supper. He was laden with packets and boxes which he deposited all round the kitchen wherever there was a space. The weekly shop still hadn’t been put away, nor the supper dishes stacked, when he breezed in, but Colin shooed me away. Not to worry, he said, he’d sort things out while they were getting the brew going. No problem.
I retreated to my study and tried to read essays. Not exactly what I had planned, when Colin was going to be away all weekend. But I couldn’t concentrate. From downstairs, great bursts of laughter rose at regular intervals, together with an unpleasant smell which made me think