Poppy's Return Read online

  When she got in and found Susanna had already gone to bed, she wished she had rung before she left the hospital, until Susanna called out as she passed the bedroom door.

  ‘Turn the light on, dear.’ Susanna’s eyes were red. ‘Sit down for a minute, bring that chair over.’ Poppy told her about George being settled for the night and asked if she would like to come to the hospital in the morning.

  ‘No, thank you dear for asking.’ Tears welled. ‘I’m not heartless, I do care for George, but it’s the pain, for three years and more the pain, everywhere, all my joints, always the pain and it’s got me so I can’t think much about anything else, I get right narky with it.’ She was pleading with Poppy to understand.

  ‘What about – do you take – .’

  ‘You name it, I’ve had it. Steroids now, they help a bit.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You can’t be helping it. I just,’ the older woman hesitated, ‘I just don’t want you to think ill of me, is all.’

  ‘I don’t.’ Which was more true now than it had been earlier. ‘I’m glad you told me. It must be awful.’

  ‘Yes dear, it is, and we box on, what else is there, eh?’ and she patted Poppy’s hand and told her that she’d got that Jock and his lads organised for tomorrow afternoon and he’d agreed for twenty pounds extra. Then she added almost smiling, ‘You sure set Glory off, with your offering him fifty pounds, said she’d do it herself if it came to that. With her back!’ They said their goodnights on a friendly note. No phone in here, Poppy noted to herself, another thing to arrange, and went off to add to the list in her notebook and ring Jane.

  A few minutes into the phone call it was obvious to Poppy that they both wanted to talk about their day more than they wanted to listen to the other’s. When she hung up twenty minutes later, she felt edgy and alone, then rang Katrina, who insisted on ringing her back to take advantage of a special tolls deal from New Zealand. Her mother’s practical briskness was a relief and her commendation of Poppy for how she was handling things very welcome.

  ‘Of course I’ll ring your brother, you sound exhausted and need to get some sleep,’ Katrina had said and Poppy had not felt at all patronised. Sleep, however, was a long time coming, fitful and full of dire dreams when it did, so she was up early, dragging furniture in the the centre of the living room so Mrs Madge could clean around the edges and Susanna would be satisfied.

  She was determined that by the time George came home he would be able to go straight to his new room and lie down. When the cleaning and shifting was finished, his bed had been set up with an armchair on either side and with two other easily-moved chairs in the room. The television set was angled for the bed and Poppy found, on a shopping expedition, a frame to hold up his pillows to make sitting up to watch it easier. There was also a tray on wheeled legs that went over the bed, and a lamp. Susanna had helped decide how the room would be arranged.

  George’s farewell at the museum had been cancelled; Poppy thought she probably minded that more than he did, but he was pleased when the chairman of the board came by with the present they had bought him, an elegant mantle clock.

  ‘To watch the hours tick off,’ George joked when the chairman had gone and seemed genuinely amused. Being in hospital, though, had been an ordeal he told Poppy and would she please shoot him rather than let him be taken back there.

  Over the next days they did settle into a routine. The doctor came as she had promised, every second day; she would decide when nurses were needed. George could still get up and use the downstairs toilet and shower and even go for an occasional short drive. People dropped by, colleagues from the museum, people he and Susanna had socialised with over the years. George did not seem at all fazed to be in bed receiving visitors.

  ‘It’s a bit like holding court,’ he said when one couple had left. ‘I lie here and people come with offerings.’ There were certainly many flowers in the room, and a regular supply of baked goods ‘in case you need them,’ from people to whom others’ contributions were offered with the inevitable cups of tea. They’d set up a tea-making table in George’s room – at Susanna’s suggestion – so she, rather than Poppy, could make tea without having to carry it in. All Poppy had to do was fill the kettle as Susanna’s hands were too weak to carry it full in from the kitchen, and Poppy was relieved to be able to avoid some of the tea and chat. The affection between her father and Susanna became apparent as she spent large parts of the day sitting by his bed, chatting, watching television with him. Sometimes they simply sat, hands touching on the bed-pane, one or both of them reading.

  Poppy ran the household, did the washing, most of the shopping, talked to the doctor, and the nurses as they started coming in, sat with George who increasingly wanted to reminisce with her about the past, and tried to get time with Jane. They talked on the phone most days and saw each other when they could. Being away from the house overnight became easier for Poppy once she had managed to get telephones in both Susanna’s and George’s rooms. She did it by buying lengths of cord and taping it around doorways from existing phone jacks in the walls after spending a frustrating day on the phone trying to get the telephone company to come. So now there were three phones, two downstairs, and one and the computer modem connections upstairs. Then Poppy realised she could also have a phone in her room, dual-plugging from the end of the cord from the dual plug in the hallway that also led to Susanna’s room. Susanna was doubtful, then amused, then delighted at the arrangement when she saw that it worked.

  ‘George used to be like that,’ she said to Poppy, ‘wouldn’t give up until he’d figure’d out how to make something happen. I liked that.’ Once George could use the quick-dial option on his receiver for Jane’s phone number Poppy started spending a night every few days at the Billingham house.

  ‘I rearranged all the furniture in the bedroom and the living room,’ Jane said the first time she was there, ‘so it would be different.’ Once they had a meal at Rachel’s but otherwise they hardly ever went out together. Jane would call at George’s house and visit with them all every few days and Poppy would want to touch her, and be touched; some days it was a hunger, an almost desperate need for skin contact. So they would go upstairs to Poppy’s room and close the door, and it felt so teenage to Poppy, on her single bed, hands under each others’ clothes. Sometimes they got the giggles and that was all right. Other times Poppy was overcome by a crushing embarrassment that she couldn’t explain and Jane didn’t understand; after a while they stopped going upstairs.

  Evenings at Jane’s house in Billingham, occasional weekend afternoons, these were the times they made love. If either of them was tired – which would result in ‘headache’ jokes – they would hold each other, skin to skin, without covers; there were hot days that June. Poppy tried not to talk too much about George and illness and losing a parent, she did after all have other people to talk to about that, even if they were on the other side of the world. She appreciated Jane’s efforts to limit herself to summaries of Héloise’s outrageous demands (‘That I should pay all the mortgage and the rates and pay her rent!!’) and cheered at the news that Jane had been to a lawyer.

  ‘I wish you’d stay.’ Poppy had arrived early in the evening, crying as she came in the door. This was the first day that George had not got up and dressed, a nurse had come to wash him and Poppy had seen his thin, thin legs and bloated, distorted belly.

  ‘Shhh, darling, shh, it’s all right…’ Jane held her.

  ‘No it’s not!’ came, muffled from her shoulder. Poppy stepped back. ‘He knows he’s dying, he knows it can only get worse, why does it have to go on?’

  Jane held out her hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  ‘That’s what it’s like,’ Poppy mirrored the gesture, ‘I run around and do what I can for him – for both of them really – and in the end it’s useless.’ She was pacing. Jane sat down on a kitchen chair and watched her silently.

  ‘Except I want to – you know – do everything
I can. And I know he likes it, and likes me there and that makes it better – a little bit –for him. Oh shit, I’m sorry, you don’t need to hear all this, it’s just that it’s bloody hard. Bloody hard. If he was a cat it would be humane – huh!! – to have him put down.’ Stunned at what she had just said she fell silent with a sharp intake of breath, hands over her mouth.

  ‘But he’s not…’ Jane’s shock was in her voice.

  ‘A cat, I know, that was an awful thing to say, it’s watching him suffer – and he isn’t really suffering that much, he’s – he’s – diminishing – becoming less than himself, turning inwards, oh hell, it’s just hellish!’

  ‘Yes, yes, it is.’ Jane did not say that for her watching a parent die slowly, much more slowly than George, reminded her of her mother’s bitterness and her own resentment and grudging involvement. There had been none of the warmth that was between George and Poppy, none of the generosity, no concern for each other, no shared enjoyment at small things. And she couldn’t tell Poppy any more about that, not just now.

  Poppy looked across the table, wondering at the unhappiness on Jane’s face, interpreting it as impatience, but really she couldn’t just step out of the house and leave those feelings behind, she was living this every day and night, she had only one chance to do it right, or at least as right as she could manage.

  Finally Jane spoke. ‘Bad memories,’ she said. ‘Sorry, they took me away for a bit.’ Poppy nodded, she knew a little of how Jane had hated her mother’s lingering emphysema, how trapped she had felt. So different from her own wanting; wanting to do her best, wanting to ease things for George, and sometimes wanting desperately for it to be over for him. And over for her, but not because she wanted to be doing anything other than looking after him, rather because he should have, he deserved, the best he could have and that was, surely, an end to discomfort and pain and the intimate attentions of strangers. And yet he wasn’t minding, so far, that she could tell, so why was she thinking like this? And here she was with Jane, in some of their rare time alone, sitting miserably at opposite sides of a kitchen table. She stretched her hand across and Jane’s came out to meet it. ‘Come on,’ she said, and stood, pulling Jane up with her and taking them both to the sofa at the lounge end of the room, where they sat, still silent, but at least with their arms around each other.

  ‘What are we?’ Jane asked eventually. ‘Lovers? Partners? Girlfriends?’

  ‘Not partners,’ came out more abruptly than Poppy wanted, ‘not yet, anyway,’ she added hastily, ‘not enough shared lives, you know, friends, things we do together – except the obvious of course – that stuff.’

  ‘Oh. I see, I think. Lovers or girlfriends then?’

  ‘Dunno. Which do you fancy?’

  ‘It’s you I fancy, lover-girl.’ Fingers around her ears and eyes and through her hair, a hand creeping under her t-shirt reminded Poppy who she fancied – a lot.

  ‘I wonder,’ Jane drew back her head, ‘how we would be together if we didn’t have our separate encumbrances?’ Stiffening at George being turned into an encumbrance, desire stone dead, Poppy looked into Jane’s eyes. They were shining, and tensed around the edges. Her smile came slightly too fast, too forced, too bright. She’s trying really hard, Poppy realised, and the realisation softened her so she asked how Jane’s ‘encumbrance’ was going.

  They were now reduced to communicating through their lawyers, she learnt, and Jane’s, a woman called Trudy, had suggested she change the locks on the house, at which Jane was shocked but Trudy had said that as she was paying all the expenses she was entitled to do this, as long as she let Héloise come at arranged times to collect anything that they agreed was hers. And Trudy thought they should put the house on the market right away, while it was still summer; Billingham was not the easiest place to sell at any time, not unless there was expansion going on at one of the chemical plants and right now there wasn’t.

  ‘So I could be homeless, any time. And jobless, I don’t know how much longer I can stand the Cleveland, or at least the squabbling and stupidity.’ The stupidity, Poppy gathered, continued to be that, after a flurry of interest about the material Jane had brought back from New Zealand, her ideas were increasingly marginalised as people fought for position and territory. By the time Jane wound down Poppy could barely keep her eyes open, she managed a final ‘you poor thing, that’s dreadful,’ and pleaded to go to bed. ‘And sleep,’ she added apologetically. Jane was immediately contrite and made cocoa, bringing it to the bed and feeding the two soft soggy marshmallows on the top into Poppy’s mouth with her fingers, rewarded with an appreciative and noisy suck. ‘Yum. G’night.’

  Poppy woke spooned against Jane’s back, excited quickenings pulsing in her, guiding her fingers into swirling strokes on her lover’s stomach. A slow langorous response heightened her desire so that by the time Jane turned to her she was grasping and gasping at her touch, and responded to the other with soaring intensity. Jane’s final moan came from deep in her. Poppy’s echo very soon after had them laughing, entwined, crying, nuzzling, kissing.

  ‘Oh, golly-gosh.’ Jane collapsed on top, their breasts squashing between them. ‘Now that’s a way to start the day,’ and she blew in Poppy’s ear and kissed her closed eyelids, ‘and the best reason I know for being late for work.’ She sat up, astride Poppy’s stomach, trailing fingertips between her breasts. ‘More, darling, more?’ The other woman shook her head and opened her eyes.

  ‘Enough, already.’ She wanted her smile to be loving. ‘To work, woman.’ Jane hesitated for a moment, then slid down the bed, kissing an inside thigh as she went. Poppy heard the shower.

  Driving away from the house she wondered at the feeling, the momentary feeling, of something like desperation, that had come over her at the height of their lovemaking, a second when she had absolutely wanted to be there and be a thousand miles away, both at the same moment.

  Chapter Ten

  The first time Sylvia came by the house, ostensibly to see George, Poppy saw Susanna making an effort. They were all sitting around in George’s room and he asked Sylvia if she still saw the twins, to which she replied she hadn’t heard from either of them in the past year or more; she thought one was in Australia and the other working in London, and had thought about contacting her ex-husband, their father, for news of them. ‘They didn’t need another mother,’ she went on to explain to Poppy, ‘but while Graham and I were married the children and I did get fond of each other.’

  Susanna looked briefly as if she would make a comment, an unpleasant one by the expression on her face Poppy thought, then watched her stop herself, and say, ‘They’re nice boys.’ Mother and daughter were stiffly polite with each other for the rest of the visit, and George told Poppy later, she’d ‘done a good job there.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, I didn’t do anything,’ she said.

  ‘What you did, my dear,’ her father insisted, ‘was be extremely kind to Susanna from the beginning, and then not take any notice of her nonsense about Sylvia. And, of course, I don’t know what you said to Sylvia.’ His look was enquiring. Nosy old bugger she thought, and pointed out that she herself had said nothing about Susanna other than ask her daughter why she didn’t visit. At this George smiled knowingly and Poppy let the subject drop while she was only slightly irritated.

  Since that first visit Sylvia had begun to drop in at weekends and occasionally on her way home after work. She’d visit with George and, if Susanna was in the room, both of them. Poppy saw the beginnings of a spat when Susanna responded to something her daughter said about her work with, ‘Clerking that is, nowt but clerking, nothing to give yourself airs about after that expensive education.’

  ‘No, it’s a lot more than that,’ Sylvia replied, ‘if you’d ever taken the…’ then stopped herself with a short laugh. ‘Okay, it’ll always be clerking to you, but it suits me very well.’

  She offered to show Poppy a local walk and while they were striding along a path by a tiny stream told her th
at she had made a decision to ‘have another go’ with her mother and do some things differently.

  ‘Do you feel like telling me why?’ Poppy was tentative.

  ‘You and George actually.’ Oh dear, Poppy thought, she thinks I’m digging for compliments.

  ‘George getting sick, you coming over, and your brother and his wife, no fuss, no points to score, just doing it. And being decent to my mother. And you meeting up with me in spite of what my mother probably said. Get over it I thought, get over being the resentful one, you’ve got a life and she is my mother. That sort of thing. Don’t snap back at her I told myself.’ Then she turned and smiled at her companion, ‘Well, actually my therapist told me to, you know, the “you can’t change her but you can change the way you respond to her” line,’ and waited for a response.

  ‘Oh. I went to a therapist for a while, after something awful happened.’

  ‘I know. When your partner died. I remember you that Christmas, pale and extremely wan. You hardly spoke. George was beside himself about you.’

  ‘Was he?’ They were still walking at a brisk pace. ‘I didn’t notice I suppose, except I did get irritated with him a bit.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it!’ They came to a bench and Poppy sat on it.

  ‘Whew! You set a fair pace. What do you mean you’re glad to hear it?’

  Sylvia joined her on the bench. ‘Just that a perfect parent-child relationship would be too much, I guess.’ She pointed at a bird on a nearby tree. ‘A robin, see the colours, a male.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me – of course – but, well, what made you go to a therapist?’

  ‘Breaking up with Graham.’ She shrugged. ‘The end of another rotten relationship, depressed at being on my own, depressed at the prospect of making another mess of a relationship, that sort of thing. Then she – the therapist – got me talking about my mother.’ Sylvia had picked up a longish stick and was scratching in the ground with it. Poppy watched the stick. ‘I resisted like mad for a while.’ Sylvia tossed the stick aside and stood up, ‘Shall we go on, this path doesn’t go much further?’