The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton - Catherine Alliott [42]
‘Oh, now I don't think Barbara was going to do that,’ soothed Felicity, seeing anxiety, always so close to the surface with Mum – not far behind her skippy enthusiasm – shadow her face, her grey eyes widening in alarm.
‘Of course she wasn't,’ said Anna, staunchly, shooting me a look that said, Lay off, Mum. ‘You're just practising, as in, having a go, aren't you, Granny? For when the time comes to get some proper patients?’
‘That's it, dear,’ said Mum, brightening quickly, equilibrium restored – ever susceptible to flattery, I thought bitterly. ‘And do you know, if I keep it up this time, in only another six months I'll be there. D'you want to see my room, Anna love? Ooh, thank you, Ant, that's just what I need. Bring it down, would you? We're in the basement.’
She wrapped her cardigan around her and turned to descend the little outside wrought-iron staircase that led to the basement. The others clattered obediently after her, Mum fishing out a key and chattering on about how marvellous it was for the surgery – surgery! – to have its own entrance. Anna turned at the bottom and shot me another warning glance up the stairwell: Don't be mean. Oh, right, so we were supposed to encourage her in this, were we? Pander to the fiction? Just as we'd all knocked back the Bach Flower Remedies and said, ‘Oh, yes, so much better, Barbara’? I breathed deeply and forced myself to follow them down.
Mum proudly unlocked the door at the bottom trilling ‘Ta-dah!’ as she swung it back. We followed her inside. What had been her basement junk room, full of wicker chairs, old hair-dryers and general female detritus, had been transformed into a pink parlour. Womb music warbled low and candles glowed on every conceivable surface: all along the windowledge, on top of a filing cabinet – lit in our honour, no doubt – some just sitting in their own wax. A driftwood collage, which I recognized as one of Mum's early works, covered one wall, and on another, an Athena poster of Japanese homilies had been Blu-Tacked up. In a corner on the floor, what looked like a baby bath was full of pebbles, water trickling over them by way of a sort of Heath Robinson pump, a few ferns stuck here and there. Despite the lavender candles, which were horribly strong and put one in mind of one of the cheaper brands of lavatory cleaner, there was no disguising the whiff of damp. A blow heater going at full blast didn't do much to dispel it either. I picked up a little leaflet on the side, which told me that Metaphysical Therapy and Self-Development Counselling was also available at this establishment. I could feel myself getting crosser and crosser as the others wandered around, exclaiming and marvelling, touching the stones, reading the soothsaying, simultaneously hating myself. ‘It's harmless,’ Ant would say later. ‘Let her be.’
‘Just here, Barbara?’ he was saying now, as he and Anna unfolded the bed in the middle of the room on some sort of plinth she'd knocked up from concrete breeze blocks painted pink, under a fringed lamp. Much kinder than me, I thought miserably, watching them assemble it. But then she wasn't their mother, was she? Wasn't such an accurate reflection of themselves. But surely if Felicity and Ant, both professors, could manage not to scoff, I could too?
‘Looks super, Mum,’ I smiled, coming across. I bent down to pat the swirly seventies print of the ancient Z-bed mattress. ‘But maybe it needs a cover or something?’
‘Oh, I've got one!’ She instantly nipped over to collect a couple of pink towels from a pile on a chair and spread them out, detecting a hint of enthusiasm in my voice and pouncing on it pathetically, like a dog a scrap.
‘Shotgun be the first patient!’ announced Anna, quickly sitting on the bed. She stretched out on her back, grinning. ‘Come on Granny, heal me! Reiki style!’
My mother was instantly all puffed-up importance and twiddling beads. ‘Well, I'll have to have absolute quiet, obviously,’ she said gravely. ‘And the lights dimmed. And no audience. Go on, off you go!’
She fluttered