Ate Well

The Sofa Bed

The bus from Bolton set me down at the top of Underley Terrace and nobody was waiting. Number 12 sat mid-terrace with its step scrubbed white, which was Pauline’s doing; the whole of Marleigh knew the Greenwood house was well kept. My father came out when I knocked, looked at my suitcase as though it had followed me there of its own accord, and said the room situation was temporary.

Two rooms up, two down, a pantry off the kitchen the width of a coffin, and a box room off the landing where my Uncle Billy slept. Gran had the back bedroom. I had the sofa bed in the front room, and the rules came from Pauline that first night, delivered the way she delivered everything, like a prescription. Tray up at six. Knock twice. Don’t wait; come straight down. Gran kept her own hours. Gran didn’t care for company. Gran was comfortable.

Comfortable was my father’s word. He used it about the coal, about the weather, about my mother, who was in a place outside Abergavenny getting well, which he said the way you’d read a train time off a board.

I was fifteen. What I wanted was small and ordinary: to still be there at Easter, and then to still be there after Easter, to be somebody the house had room for. The alternative had a name on it — Aunt Christine’s spare room in Cardiff, lodger’s bed, lodger’s towel.

Pauline carried the tray up at six and Billy brought it down at half seven, and the plate came down clean. It came down warm, too. I know because the washing up was mine. Broth, bread and butter, beef tea on a Sunday, and the fire lit nowhere but the front room, so the cold came up through the lino on the landing while the plate in my hands at half past seven held its warmth like a cat that had decided to be picked up.

Eight Seconds

Billy went up every night at ten to see Gran. From the yard, where the coal bunker was, the landing window showed as a grey square in the dark. The bulb came on when he started up the stairs and went off when he was at the bottom again. I counted it, because I was fifteen and counted things. Eight seconds. A door opening on that landing would have showed itself as a swing of light, and there was none, and no voice, and nobody said good night to anybody. Eight seconds was the stairs twice and nothing else.

I put it to my father once at the yard door, over his cigarette: when had he last been in to her. He looked at the coal bunker a long while.

“When the will’s read, this house is sold,” he said. “Your Aunty Christine has her half coming, and there’s a man from Fairhurst’s been asking after the number plate for two year.” He tapped ash into the yard. “You like having a bed, our Lesley.”

Sundays at six the phone rang and it was Cardiff. How’s Mother keeping was most of it, but the call ran twenty minutes, because Christine had her shopping and her lumbago and her views on the Welsh water rates, and at the end she always said, “Tell Mother I rang.” One March she said a different thing. “If Mother had passed, somebody would have had to tell me. Nobody’s told me.” Said like a receipt. Pauline, on her half of the conversation, agreed that nobody had.

Fridays, the pension book lived in Pauline’s drawer with the insurance cards, and the house ran on it: coal, the gas meter, her order at Mount’s the chemist, and the quarter’s item she sent in to the parish magazine, which was her standing in Marleigh and she knew it.

Mrs. Annie Greenwood is keeping well at 12 Underley Terrace and thanks the congregation for their kind remembrances.

Every word of it true in every particular. That was the trick of the house. Nothing in it was a lie, exactly.

The Meal Book

In April the tray passed to me, and with it a shilling exercise book, soft with grease at the corners, that hung on a string on the pantry door. “Write what was given and how it went,” Pauline said. “Your writing’s neater than Billy’s.”

Columns. Date, given, how it went. I wrote out my first week, and then, because I was fifteen and counted things, I turned back.

12 June 1981. Sandwiches, tea. Ate little.
13 June 1981. Broth, bread. Ate well.
14 June 1981. Beef tea, toast. Ate well.

The twelfth of June 1981 was the day they buried my grandad. Gran went to bed that week and the door-trays started that same week, and from the Sunday on the entries did not stop. Not for a funeral, not for a winter, not once in five years. Pauline’s school copper for most of it, my father’s capitals on Sundays, Billy’s backward lean whenever it suited him, and Christine’s hand in the first two Easters and never again — and after Christine’s hand stopped, the entries just carried on without it. Three hands, taking turns at one line a day.

Five years of ate well in three hands, and the hands had never once been compared. Comparing meant asking who’d been in the room, and nobody asked who’d been in the room, because every one of them already knew what the answer was worth. My father’s roof. Pauline’s pension and her item in the magazine. Billy’s allowance and his box room, for eight seconds a night. Christine in Cardiff, untold. The book hid nothing. It was the only honest thing in the house: every day it said that somebody ate.

From Easter, Pauline laid Gran’s place at the head of the table. Full plate, the good fork, gravy over all. Nobody remarked on it. Nothing in that house was ever new; everything had always been done.

One Sunday in June I was in the kitchen for the peas and the rest of them were at the table through the serving hatch — my father carving, Billy reaching, Pauline supervising the salt like it owed her money. Above the ceiling, because the back bedroom sits over the kitchen, a bedspring took weight. Took it again. Then a spoon went round a plate, unhurried, all the way round, and set down. Through the hatch the gravy was going round too. I stood with the pan until the sound above me finished, and then I brought the peas through, and we ate.

Billy’s Room

In July, Billy’s arrears came up from Blackpool in the shape of two men in a blue Cortina, and he left the same night with a carpet bag. On the doorstep he said, “Tell her I said night,” and he didn’t say it facing anybody, and he went.

“You can have Billy’s room,” my father said at the yard door, “if you’re a sensible girl.” Sensible, in that house, was as good as grown-up. Pauline put the book in my hand along with the tray. “Sensible girls get rooms,” she said. My mother was not ready by summer. Nobody mentioned Cardiff again. In August Christine said over the phone, “Pauline tells me you’ve settled, that’s nice,” and it was, and I said so.

At six I took the tray up, knocked twice, came straight down. Half seven, and the plate was on the mat outside her door, clean, warm through, holding the warmth of a meal somebody had had.

In the dark, in Billy’s old bed, with the wall between me and Gran’s room thin as a wardrobe, the bedsprings took weight. The spoon rang china, unhurried, and went round, and set down. Below me the front-room telly laughed at something, and stopped, and the house settled the way it always settled, every nail of it fed.

In the morning I came down before the rest. I washed the plate and hung the book off its string and wrote the day’s line in my own hand.

20 July. Broth, bread and butter. Ate well.