Free Let's Dance by Frances Fyfield Page A

weepy, even before Mother spat out the food. Then there was a phone call from Robert. Mother answered, with that articulacy of hers which came with evening. No one could see theharridan of the market stalls. Isabel did not want people to see that. She did not really want anyone to know what her mother could be like. She listened to her mother complaining to Robert about the bump on her head, poor darling. Found herself too listless to respond to his scolding: how could she be so careless? Come and see, she told him with her new mildness; come and see for yourself. Was she such a failure that she had grown to this age purely to be so comprehensively blamed?
    Bedtime. Peace for the wicked. Go first, Mother. Please go first and leave me alone. Shouting at her, none of this cooing nonsense for a nasty, naughty, wilful little girl, the brat that she was.
    â€˜Go away, you silly old woman! Go to bed!’
    Simply orders. And then the final act in the day’s drama. Going upstairs past her mother’s door, with no desire to kiss and make friends, hearing the sound of hopeless sobbing. It rose and fell, this muffled sound of grief, a cadence of sublime misery like the cat at half throttle stuck somewhere inside a cupboard, screaming for release. The sound paused, coughed into silence, continued quavering and helpless.
    The heavy door of her mother’s room was shut, yielded to a shove. The tester bed which Andrew Cornell had valued with his eyes and admired with well-disguised soul, stood rumpled and unoccupied. Serena resented any interference with her room: she kept it clean herself. The draught slammed the door shut behind her daughter: the sound continued, deafening tothe conscience, in reality subdued. There was a row of dolls and teddy bears over the bed, which Isabel would swear she had never seen before until she recognized some of them as her own.
    Serena stood by the open window, plump, forlorn, clad in her embroidered nightdress, curlers in her hair, sobbing as if the world had ended. Her body beneath Isabel’s spontaneous embrace glowed like a furnace; only the extremities were cold.
    The words were blurred at first, then clear. ‘I want to die, Issy. I want to die. I don’t want to be like this. I want to die. I want to die and set everyone free.’
    â€˜Of course you don’t. Shhh. You’ll get cold.’
    â€˜Cold, dead. What does it matter? I should be dead.’
    â€˜I never left you, Mumsy. I shan’t leave you now. Don’t fret. Come to bed.’
    â€˜I’m sorry, love. I’m sorry. I can’t help what I do. I go crazy when I’m frightened. So frightened …’
    â€˜I know, I know.’
    She did not know, but she understood grief. Serena succumbed, put her thumb in her mouth and allowed herself to be rocked to sleep. The lump on her forehead was pale and shiny. Her size seemed unutterably pathetic: so did the curlers in her hair. Her face was still slack with tears: her daughter’s, puffed with love.
    My mother loves me. Everything is worthwhile. She keeps my old teddy bears in her room. We truly love each other.
    Isabel went downstairs again, carrying the cat dragged from under the bed. You go outside, cat, shetold it, feeling slightly cheerful in an odd kind of way. She had made her mother better: there was no anger any more, only sorrow; there was nothing to forgive, simply love in buckets . She shook the cat. I thought you were out already, I put the milk out for you, I remember now. Isabel was feeling capable, fiercely protective, wise, even peaceful. There was no such thing as perfect peace. Peace was for the brave. Neither she nor the cat had done enough to deserve an easy life. They had to reconcile themselves to difficulties.
    She could not tell at first what the thing outside the door was. It was russet in colour, lighter than her own hair and she saw it through the opaque glass of the back door, lapping at the saucer of milk she