affairs and beach stones

13th October 1957

SUNDAY, A DAY I've always hated for its quiet respectability, seems to be the fitting time for a family visit. And so today I took the train to Godstone to see Mother. Every time I go, she is quieter. She is not, I often remind myself, alone. She has Nina, who does everything for her. Always has and always will. She has Aunt Cicely and Uncle Bertram, who visit often.

But it is – must be – three years since she's left the house. The place is as clean, as bright, as ever, but there is a deadness, a staleness, inside those walls. Which is what, amongst other things, makes me stay away more than I ought.

It was lunchtime when I made my way up the long brick drive, past the perfectly shaped privet and along the gravel path where I once pissed up the side of the house because I knew Father had kissed our neighbour, Mrs Drewitt, at that very spot, under the high kitchen window. He'd kissed her right there and Mother knew about it but was silent, as she always was on the subject of his betrayals. Mrs Drewitt came to our house every Christmas for mince pies and Nina's rum punch, and every Christmas my mother passed her a napkin and enquired after the health of her two appalling sons whose only interests were rugger and the stock market. It was after witnessing one of those conversations that I chose to decorate the wall of our house with an intricate pattern of my own urine.

Mother's house is stuffed with furniture. Since the old man died, she's been ordering it from Heal's. It's all modern, too – pale ash sideboards with pull-down doors, steel-legged coffee tables with smoked-glass tops, standard lamps with enormous white globes for shades. None of it blends with the house, which is pure mock-Tudor, a ghastly thirties creation,

complete with leaded panes in the windows. I've tried to persuade Mother to move into somewhere more manageable, even (God forbid this should actually happen) a flat near me. She could easily afford Lewes Crescent, although Brunswick Terrace might be a safer distance away.

I let myself into the kitchen, where Nina had some cheese on toast under the grill and the radio on loud. Stealing up behind her, I pinched her lower arm and she jumped in the air.

'It's you!'

'How are you, Nina?'

'You gave me such a fright ...' She blinked at me a few times, catching her breath, then turned down the radio's blare. Nina must be in her fifties herself by now. Still wears her hair in the same short bob, dyed coal black, as she did when I was a boy. Still has the same startled grey eyes and wary smile.

'Your mother's a bit distant today.'

'Have you tried electro-shock therapy? I've heard it can do wonders.'

She laughed. 'You always were too clever by half. Shall I do you some toast?'

'Is that all we're having?'

'I didn't know you were coming – she never said.'

'I didn't tell her.'

There was a pause. Nina looked at the clock. 'Bacon and egg?'

'Topping.' I always revert to schoolboy phrases with Nina.

I helped myself to a banana from the fruit basket on the dresser and sat at the kitchen table to watch Nina perform her fry-up. Bacon and egg doesn't mean just bacon and egg with Nina. It means grilled Harryatoes, fried bread, possibly a devilled kidney.

'Aren't you going in to see her?'

'In a bit. What did you mean, distant?'

'You know. Not herself.'

'Is she ill?'

Nina laid three slices of bacon ever so gently in a pan. 'You should come more often. She misses you.'