Three Dont Tango 21

The afternoon sun is high in the sky. Edwin's car is in the driveway. He is going swimming in the lake with Annabel.
The sun is in a tangle amongst the beach trees. The speckled shade shimmers across a bright face and fumbles around the fair hair of the happy girl. There is a grey stone wall covered with tumbling tresses of ivy, thick, glossy, dry as parchment. Further on is a norman arch in the stone-work. The wooden door is off a hinge and leans into the leaves.
The picture is like some sepia photograph of an Edwardian country house landscape. He is carrying a towel; she is carrying a towel; the sun is shining across the top of the picture. The stone wall adds a rustic charm, with its arch, dangling ivy, and classical ruins. It is the perfect Pre-Raphaelite setting; a folly of the mind.
They slip under the arch into a magic folly. Beyond the arch is a world of make-believe where the sun always shines, and the boys are strong and handsome, and the girls are soft and sexy. There is a rustle of blackbirds scratching behind the rhododendrons. Time is held like an abstraction, like the dust in a sun-beam. Here is the gate into childhood where we can scamper down to the lake with our towels in our hands.
And they walk, kicking the leaves like noisy blackbirds. Annabel with her towel crumpled under her arm is holding hands with Edwin. Here is a jutting log; a fallen tree, with two gnarled arms lifting to the sky like some pontificating abstraction in a Dali painting..
Edwin's clothes are now on the trunk of the fallen tree. He is swimming, breaking up the reflections of the trees across the lake. Sitting on the log is the mermaid Annabel, her blue skirt close to the water, her hair dangling down to the bright surface. She is reclining on one arm.
Across the lake, through the reeds you can glimpse the oval stone structures of the grottoes where the water from a small brook trickles off the fields into a large dark pool, whirls slowly, and brims to tip down the rock into a long tubular canal. Statues in the gloom hide in stone portals.
Beyond the shrubbery is a wall hidden behind dense undergrowth. A large border stands like a sentinel where the pathway turns. Alongside is another, and between the two a small path goes apparently to another boulder and stops. But if you know the secret you can squeeze past and duck under a big rock, and into the secret garden. This is a forgotten corner of a once busy Edwardian garden where now only a boy and girl sport in and out of the rampant shrubbery.
Edwin stands by a tree, his towel across his back. Behind him is a ruined folly. In front is a modern girl in blue, stroking him, licking, kissing. The blackbirds are still scratching in the leaves, unconcerned. The sunbeams are still falling like silent waterfalls through the trees, but falling nowhere. The dust of motes dance in the light like midges and gnats. Edwin is stroking her hair. She is grasping his buttocks.


Meanwhile, the afternoon sun is high in the sky, and I am mixing cement at the edge of the driveway, by Edwin's car. There is a mound of quarry dust outside the gate, bags of cement on the drive-way, and an opened bag in the boot of the car. There is a soggy pile of pug on the driveway in front of the garage. I shovel this into a bucket which I carry over to the wall.
The house is gradually growing. I am up to the roof now. We have been over to Bath and bought the tiles from off an old school. They are old farmhouse red, Bridgewater tiles, made from proper clay; none of this pre-cast concrete stuff. Over they came in the Bayliss truck, and another pile of them blocks the driveway. I have to carry them up the ladder, across the roof, six at a time, and then lay them in neat rows from the gutter up to the ridge, working my way gradually across the whole roof.
Inside, the rooms have taken shape as I put up internal partitions. But now I am rendering the outside walls, covering up the grey ugly concrete blocks.
I empty the bucket onto the board, then scrape a large dollop onto my hawk, carry hawk and trowel up the ladder, lean against the wall, and swipe the cement onto the blocks, smoothing it to a level sheen, then rub the surface with a rolled up cloth as the rendering dries, to produce a rough texture.
The afternoon sun is turning the corner. Below me Cephren is playing with his bicycle on the drive. Mini is out of sight, round the other side of the house helping grandma.
Hubby is doing his DIY, supporting the family seat; kids on the driveway; grandma pottering; little girl watering wet flowers, pushing a blue wheelbarrow containing a weed or two. It is late-century suburban reality, which is often confused with the suburban dream. The dream is there glinting on the surface, hiding the wheels and dirty cogs beneath, hiding the cynical undertow of puzzled and worried awareness.
The sun is shining, there is a thrush on the top branch of the pine tree, and I am listening to the sharp voice of apparent exultation. There is a ring from the bicycle bell, a scratching sound as the bike slews round at the edge of my pile of soggy cement, and then from the distance, echoing off the high garden wall, comes the bleat of an unhappy child. I finish my hawk-full of cement and come down the ladder. The wail of discontent has grown louder, and Mini rushes round the corner. She is covered in blood. She has fallen, cut her hand, and cut the side of her face, rather high up so the blood is running down her, and she looks a terrible mess. Cephren comes up on his bike to see what all the fuss is about, takes one look at her face and he begins to wail. He is frightened by the sight of all that blood.
I hug Mini. "It's all right, don't worry. Let's get you cleaned up. Hush, hush."
I am filthy dirty. My shirt and trousers are covered with dry gritty cement, and my hands are covered in wet cement, grained into my nails, and the wrinkles of my palms. The skin is puckering. I cannot do anything to her face in this state.
"Cephren, for heaven's sake, what are you crying about? You're alright aren't you?"
He just points to his sister's face, and starts crying some more. "But it's alright." I try to hug him as well. Cement is covering everybody's clothes now, and we are getting nowhere. There is blood across one hand, and that is now on Cephren's shirt, and the blood is going down Mini's clothes. I bellow for Ann, but there is no reply. She is in an Edwardian snapshot by the grottoes. Mother comes up. "For god's sake get Ann will you, she's round the lake somewhere with Edwin."
My cement is going hard, and I still have a long way to render along the wall, and I must finish it all in the one day, meanwhile the blood is still dripping. I go indoors, blood and cement on the floor, on the carpet. I wash my hands. Cephren and Mini are quieter now. I wash Mini's face and as I clean away the blood she becomes a little less frightening. Cephren rushes off after grandma to find mummy. I sit at the table in the kitchen cuddling a little girl.
I do some addition in my head which is full of resentment. I am rendering the wall; looking after both children; there is still a long day ahead of me; I am also not well, struggling with diarrhoea. I am weak and tired, and not enjoying myself. My arms ache with doing the rendering. My feet hurt where I have been standing on the rungs of a ladder all day, and my back aches with shovelling, with mixing cement, with walking up and down a ladder clutching a tray of cement. Annabel is sitting in a sunshine world full of charm and kisses, and butterflies, and swimming towels, and she is happy, and she is not tired, dirty, or aching all over.


Later that evening the children are in bed. Everything is quiet. I am sitting at the table.
Annabel is cooking a meal. "There's no point in going on and on about it."
"There never is, is there?"
"You're being childish."
"Any complaint I ever make is always found to be childish."
There is no reply. She shrugs her shoulders, and goes on stirring a pan.
"The fact is I do all the work and sweat my guts out all day over the building. I shouldn't have to look after the kids as well."
"You don't look after the kids."
"Well, you didn't today, did you?"
"Look Johnny, how was I to know Mini was going to cut herself?"
"Well, how was I to know? It's the same for me. You went off and left me to cope."
"Your mother was here wasn't she?"
"That's not the point. You should be looking after them. She only starts moaning at me about you leaving them so she has to look after them. After a hard day's work I can do without all the aggro of her moaning on at me."
"Now you're blaming me for your mother. I'm not responsible for her you know."
"Look, it's nothing to do with mother. The real problem is that I feel I'm putting in all the effort, and you are just wandering off with Edwin, playing around."
"You don't have to work every day you know. We aren't all masochists like you. I'll have you know I do a lot of work here. I do more work for the home than most women would. I do all the gardening. I help you carrying tiles, and concrete blocks, and I do all the painting, and I'm busy making curtains for the drawing room. You never think of all that, do you?"
I have to answer back. I am irritated that what she says is true. She does work hard, but I work harder. I have this compulsion to work work work. I get up at seven in the morning and start straight in, and I go at it like a manic idiot. The more I get behind in my schedule the faster I drive myself till I am doing the job at a run, and all the while this dark resentment is growing inside me. It is almost as if the resentment itself is the fuel driving me along. I am winding myself up, and I can feel the tension rise and tauten. I resent the fact that I cant sit down and just do nothing, and I resent the futility of my feelings. I am aware of my stupidity, or my crass unreasonableness towards myself.
"If you go on like this you'll kill yourself. What are you getting all these things done for?"
"For me, for you, for the family. We'll all live in the house wont we? And someone has to do the work. We don't have the money to pay anyone else."
"Yes, but you don't have to finish the job next week, do you?"
"No, but I don't want it going on for ever. I want to get the job finished."
"Why don't you behave reasonably and do it a bit at a time, and take days off?"
"Because I cant have a day off lazing around knowing I have to come back tomorrow and start in all over again."
"That's stupid."
"Yes, everything I say is stupid, and everything you say is reasonable."
We are both going to start being petty because we think the other is being petty. I don't mention her going round the lake with Edwin. I don't want to bring it into the equation. It will give her levers I don't want her to pull. She will say I'm being jealous. And of course I am being jealous. I'm jealous of his time, of his lackadaisical attitude to life, of his seeming satisfaction with the way things are. I am sitting here squirming with dissatisfaction, yet I am kidding myself  I am doing all these things to get satisfaction. I know everything is twisted; it's all going horribly wrong.
The building is taking all my time. It is stealing my life from me. I am not doing anything else, and my life is passing relentlessly away. There is a sense of panic deep inside me. I am clutching wildly at time. I must do something. I must achieve something. Another day is going by and I haven't done anything really worth while. On all fronts the real me, whatever that may be, is being crowded out, squeezed into a smaller and smaller space. The building is taking my time. Eating, drinking, and sleeping steal my time. Waiting for buses, and waiting in shops, collecting wood and sawing it up. Everything I do seems so senseless. I can do other things. I should not be doing these things. They are wasting my talent, and they are squeezing time out of me. I have become a servant. I am being roped in by petty boring things and I cant escape.
Upstairs Annabel is also hemmed in. She is working in her new room. She is resenting the way I feel, and the amount of work she has to do. We could survive, everything would be fine if the outside world would stop threatening us. The hassle of having no money, and having to do so many things we aren't able to do properly, is warping our relationship.
Edwin is Annabel's escape. He is a breath of fresh air. He has no problems about building, and lack of time to do things. He isn't always rushing about like a maniac. He isn't always busy and covered in dust and cement and paint. He isn't always dissatisfied, and forever moaning about how bad things are. It is lovely going over to see Edwin where she can relax in a calm atmosphere, and imagine being in love again.
Something is happening. Annabel is alone in her room, and I am alone in my room. We are no longer only in the same story. We are rarely in the same story. The script is falling to pieces. The stupid thing is that I can see it happening but still insist on telling myself I can do nothing to alter the situation.

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