Once she’d cleaned the floor and taken the bucket back to the kitchen, her appetite was gone. It was perhaps as well, for it was time to go back to the cells.
Once there, she lay down on her bunk and picked up her book. But she was only pretending to read, she couldn’t see well enough and it occurred to her she needed glasses.
It seemed very strange to her that she kept becoming aware of things which hadn’t affected her outside. Her eyesight was one of them. Of course, she hadn’t tried to read anything for a very long time, so her vision may have been impaired for some while. She hadn’t noticed smells outside either, yet here it was so airless she was aware all the time of odours of stale food, toilets, sweat and feet. There was her own appearance too. She had no sooner got here than she saw how awful she looked; her hair was a mess and her face was so red that it stunned her that she’d got like that without ever noticing.
But she realized now that she had been in a kind of stupor ever since she got the idea of avenging Annabel’s death.
She had never given any thought to what would happen to her after she had achieved her objective. It hadn’t mattered to her. But if she had considered it, she certainly wouldn’t have expected that her mind would suddenly become sharper, or that she would find herself thinking about how she had once looked, the meals she used to cook, the pleasure she took in country walks or gardening. And now that her mind turned to these things, she missed them terribly.
The first weekend in here hadn’t been so bad, for the other women on her wing were quite welcoming. They had already found out what she’d done and seemed in awe of her. Julie had been a hairdresser once, and she had insisted on washing and cutting Susan’s hair for her. Another woman, Sandra, had offered her some makeup, and Frankie, a real tough nut who looked like a man, had set to work to tell her which screws and other prisoners she should be careful with and advised her to ask for work so she got some money every week.
But sympathy and awe soon faded once they realized she wasn’t tough or cunning. They began to snigger at the way she spoke, her shyness and her naivety, and by the end of her first week all the women on the wing were openly ridiculing her, calling her a ‘muppet’, their word for someone mad or simple-minded.
Susan couldn’t fight back in any way. She had neither the physical strength nor the verbal skills to knock anyone down. So she did what had always served her best in the past, tried to be as inconspicuous as possible and voiced no opinions.
But as she lay there in her cell, looking at a book she couldn’t actually read, she felt angry with herself. She had always allowed people to walk all over her, and if she hadn’t, her life might have been very different. Her mind slipped back to the day when her mother came home from hospital, seeing it as clearly as if it were yesterday, not twenty-eight years ago.
It was in early December, and as Susan ran to open the front door when she heard her father’s car pull into the drive, she wished it could have been better weather for her mother. A bitterly cold north wind was swirling the last of the fallen leaves into the air. Apart from the holly bush by the gate which was covered in berries, everything else looked as drab as the sullen grey sky.
Grabbing the wheelchair her father had just bought, she ran out eagerly, full of excitement because she had been dying to show Mother all the changes that had been made downstairs. Father’s old study next to the dining room was now Mother’s new bedroom, and the old downstairs cloakroom had been converted into a bathroom. Susan had worked like a slave to get things ready. It was she who humped pile after pile of books upstairs, cleaned up after the builders, painted, cleaned and arranged the furniture.
‘It’s so good to have you home again, Mummy,’ she exclaimed as she opened the passenger door where her mother was sitting. ‘You’re going to be as right as nine-pence once you get inside.’ She folded down the side of the wheelchair and pushed it right up to the car seat the way a nurse had shown her. Her mother had lost a lot of weight and regained the use of her left arm, so it wasn’t too difficult to get her into the wheelchair.
‘Good girl,’ Mother said. She could speak a little by then, only the words were slurred, almost as though she was drunk, so she didn’t speak unless it was important. She brought up her left hand and caressed Susan’s cheek. ‘It’s good to be home.’
‘Not too much excitement all at once,’ Father said warningly as Susan pushed the chair back indoors and he followed on with Mother’s suitcase. ‘You’ll have to curb that desire to show her everything the first day, Suzie. She needs rest and quiet still.’
It was wonderful to see her mother’s face light up at the converted study, to see the way her good hand reached out to touch the pretty quilt on the bed and precious little ornaments Susan had brought down from upstairs. The fire was blazing away, a couple of lamps were on to banish the cold grey weather outside, and when Susan carried in a tea tray laid with the best bone china and a plate of butterfly cakes she’d made, a tear of emotion rolled down Mother’s cheek.
Susan sighed at the memory of that day. She had been so sure then that her mother would make a full recovery once she was settled in at home. She felt so important, dynamic, and so tender towards her. She had rosy visions of cosy chats by the fire in the winter, of sharing little chores, neighbours calling and the house ringing with laughter, and of taking her mother out visiting in the wheelchair when the weather was fine.
But it wasn’t like that at all. A few people called at first, but they didn’t come again when they saw how difficult it was for Mother to speak. There was no further recovery. Her speech didn’t improve, she never managed to walk again, and as the months went by and she found her disabilities more frustrating, she became tetchy and demanding.
She developed an irritating habit of tapping her wedding ring on the spokes of the wheelchair whenever she wanted to draw Susan’s attention to something. It could be anything, usually trivial, a cobweb in a corner, an unwashed glass, a smear on the window, and she wanted Susan to deal with it at once. Often a pot on the stove would boil over while she was called away, making even more work for her.
Susan felt guilty at being irritated with her mother, so she’d tried even harder to anticipate anything she might find to complain about. It left her in a state of exhaustion from which there was no respite.
The weeks, months and years became an arduous circle of washing, cooking, cleaning and waiting on both her parents. Father never helped out with anything, he took the view that as he was paying Susan a wage, that relinquished him from any responsibility. He didn’t even keep his promise that she could have Saturdays off. More often than not he would pretend he was going into the office to catch up with some work, when in fact he was going shooting or playing golf.
A nurse came in twice a week to give Mother a bath, and a physiotherapist came for an exercise session for one afternoon. But everything else fell to Susan – getting her mother up and dressed in the mornings, taking her to the lavatory countless times during the day, cutting up her food, giving her medicine and helping her do the exercises the physiotherapist recommended.
As well as tapping on the wheelchair, Mother would also ring her little bell if Susan left her for more than half an hour on her own. She liked to be wheeled into the kitchen or sitting room or wherever Susan was working. It was painful to listen to her mother trying to ask questions, but even more annoying was the criticism, for although she knew she couldn’t do anything much for herself, she was determined Susan should do everything her way.
If she could just have gone out on her bike now and then lain on her bed to read a book, or sat in the sun in the garden, maybe she wouldn’t have felt so weary. But she never got the chance. She hated herself for resenting the hard work and the responsibility, for having no friends and day-dreaming of going out to work in an office, or going off to a dance or the cinema in the evenings.
She hardly even had time to read the newspaper or a magazine, and when she did it made her lot in life seem even
worse. England was in the grip of Flower Power, and it seemed to Susan that every other young person in the country was going to rock concerts, love-ins and wild parties, but the nearest she got to feeling like a hippy was buying an embroidered cheesecloth smock in Stratford and singing along with ‘The Marrakech Express’ on the radio.
She remembered the dejection she felt when Beth wrote in the summer of ’69 and said she was going to university in London to study law in October. Somehow Susan just knew that would be the last letter. Beth even prepared her for it by saying she wouldn’t have time to write so often and she didn’t know where she’d be living in London. But then her suspicions that Beth had found new friends when she said she couldn’t come to Stratford two years earlier had grown even stronger in the past few months when a sudden chill had come into her letters.
All the humour was gone and there were none of Beth’s usual accounts of what went on in the shoe shop where she worked on Saturdays and in the holidays. She didn’t bother to report on boys she fancied, the way she used to, or clothes she’d bought and films she’d seen. It was as though she’d long since grown out of her old friend, and now found writing at all a tedious chore.
It was particularly hurtful to Susan when she re-read letters Beth had sent less than a year before. In those she had been full of concern for Susan, advising her to stand up to her father and make him get a nurse or housekeeper for her mother, so she could be free to have a career. She had even suggested that they could still share a flat in London.
There was no further mention of sharing a flat in that last letter, no more pleading with her to tackle her father. Beth didn’t actually say goodbye, yet it was there, invisibly, in every word. She was moving on.
At that time the newspapers and television made much of ‘Free Love’. According to them, every single person under twenty-five was sleeping with anyone they fancied, the fear of pregnancy now removed by the contraceptive pill. Yet Susan’s sexual experience was limited to kissing the boy who had walked her home from the dance in Stratford when she last saw Beth. She knew she wasn’t going to gain any more experience either, she never had a chance to meet any boys.
It was just before Christmas of that same year that she realized that with or without Beth, she was trapped at home for good. That afternoon she had battled through the crowds of Christmas shoppers in Stratford just to get some new lights for the tree, as the old ones were broken.
Mother was distraught when she got back. She’d wanted to go to the lavatory, but the door handle which Father had promised to fix had jammed again, and she wet herself sitting in her wheelchair. She made it quite clear, even if her speech was laboured, that Susan was responsible, because she’d been gone for so long.
As Susan hadn’t so much as stopped for a cup of coffee, let alone chat for a minute with anyone or even look in the shops, she was very hurt. She couldn’t help thinking as she mopped up the urine and changed her mother, that before long this might be a regular thing, the way it had been with Granny.
Father didn’t come home that night until after nine, yet again, and used the same old excuse that he’d been working. But as she put his warmed-up dinner in front of him on the kitchen table and smelled whisky on his breath, she knew he’d been in the pub.
After he’d left the kitchen, she began to cry at the unfairness of it all. Her day began at seven in the morning when she got her mother up and cooked breakfast. Every minute of the day was accounted for, and it was now after ten and she still had to help her mother into bed before she could sit down and put her feet up.
It wasn’t right. Father might at least come home straight from work and share a meal with them, sit and talk to Mother in the evenings. He should have fixed that door handle and it should have been him that got the Christmas tree lights. It wasn’t right that he left everything to her.
‘What’s the matter?’ her father asked from the doorway. He must have come back to the kitchen to get something.
Susan looked up at him, but there was no concern in his once kindly eyes, only irritation.
‘I’m fed up,’ she sobbed. ‘I don’t have any life or friends. I can’t go on like this, it isn’t fair. I want to leave and get a job in London like Martin.’
‘What sort of job could you get?’ he said scornfully. ‘GCEs in Domestic Science and Geography won’t get you far.’
At the time when she got her disappointing results Father had only laughed and said it didn’t matter about maths or science, and she would still make a first-class secretary anyway. Now it seemed he was taking Martin’s view, that she was stupid. ‘I could go to secretarial college like I always wanted to,’ she sobbed out.
‘And who do you imagine would pay for that?’ he said curtly. ‘I’m working every hour God sends just to keep a roof over our heads.’
‘I could get any job then,’ she said wildly. ‘I could be a waitress or a filing clerk.’
‘You’d see your mother put in a nursing home just to be a waitress?’ he said, his bushy dark eyebrows rising in shock. ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this.’
‘Get someone else in here to look after her, then,’ Susan cried. ‘I can’t do it any more.’
‘I can’t afford it, nursing care doesn’t come cheap,’ he said bluntly. ‘I’ll tell you how it is. If you insist on leaving your mother, then she’ll have to go into a nursing home. Can you imagine what that would do to her? Not only stuck in a home filled with sick old ladies whose minds have gone, but knowing that her only daughter was so selfish she preferred waiting on tables to taking care of her.’
‘You don’t expect Martin to give up his life,’ she bleated out plaintively.
Martin had always been a thorn in her side. The ten-year difference in their ages meant they had never been playmates. In fact by the time Susan was five or six she had learned to keep well away from him. He was cruel, delighting in hiding or breaking her favourite toys, slapping her for no reason, and hissing abuse at her out of their parents’ hearing.
She had been overjoyed when he went off to university, and that was the same year Father began teaching her to shoot. She was too young to realize then that that made Martin even more jealous of her. She was receiving the attention and admiration from their father that he felt he should be getting. She couldn’t ever forget that day in winter when Martin crept up behind her as she was standing looking at the river, and pushed her in. She almost died of shock and cold, and she knew that was what he intended, for he ran off back indoors. Unknown to him she could swim a few strokes, and she managed to get out, but she was smacked for telling lies and saying her brother pushed her. Her mother never believed anything bad of Martin.
From then on, he never let up. Each time he came home on a visit he was nastier, belittling her, suggesting she was too dim to get a real job. He said she was fat, ugly and a parasite. He joined Father in making her wait on him hand and foot. But her father never noticed.
‘Martin has an important job in the city,’ Father said now, and he gave her a steely look which meant that if she dared say anything detrimental about his son, she would be sorry. ‘He’s worked hard for his position. Now, stop being so stupid and get your mother ready for bed. If she was to hear what you are saying she might very well have another stroke.’
Looking back, Susan saw that she should have realized her father was trying to blackmail her and called his bluff. He did have the money for a nurse, but not only did he not want to spend it on his wife, he didn’t like what a nurse meant. She’d insist on regular hours, she wouldn’t do the cleaning, cooking and everything else. He’d have to do that, or pay another person too, and he wouldn’t be able to go off to the pub, play golf and go shooting.
But at the time Susan was too naive and trusting to see all that.
It was 1973 before she lost any trust she’d had in her father when she discovered he had a mistress. She had seen lipstick marks on his shirt collars several times while she was washing them, but she refused to think it wa
s anything more than him giving one of the women in his office a hug, until she found a note from Gerda in his jacket pocket.
Gerda was the typist Father had taken on when Mother first had her stroke. Susan had met her once when she called at her father’s office to get a lift home. She was about forty, red-haired and quite attractive in a common, busty sort of way.
The note was brief but very telling, as it was an apology for Gerda being grumpy with her father the previous evening. She said she couldn’t help it because she was afraid the time would never come when they’d be together for always. But she did love him and she was prepared to wait.
‘You bastard,’ Susan said aloud, forgetting that Julie was up on the top bunk.
‘Who’s a bastard?’ Julie asked. Susan looked up to see the other woman’s face upside down, she was leaning over the edge of the top bunk looking at her.
Julie was thirty-five, a hard-faced bleached blonde who had been in prison dozens of times for both prostitution and theft. She had three children who were living with her mother while she awaited her trial for robbing one of her customers. While she didn’t seem to be as nasty as some of the women on the wing, Susan still thought she’d better explain herself.
‘I was thinking out loud,’ she said. ‘About my father. Sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you.’
‘What did he do to you?’ Julie asked.
‘Nothing much to me, but he got himself a mistress after my mother had a stroke,’ Susan explained. She wasn’t going to go any further and admit her feelings for her father turned to hatred after that. Just the thought that he was carrying on with another woman, waiting for his wife to die so he could be with her, killed all the love she once had for him.
‘All men are bastards,’ Julie retorted, but her tone was friendly, and she climbed down from her bunk and sat down beside her, moving Susan’s legs over on the bunk. ‘Did you do him for it?’