Julia chapter 2 part one

Chapter 2      Valerie

 ‘Are we taking a little off the back this time?’

The hairdresser lifts Valerie’s hair slightly with a comb to indicate the proposed length. Valerie defers to the hairdressers suggestion, but as soon as she has agreed to the cut she wonders whether she really does want her hair any shorter.

‘How did your trip to your mother go?’  As she talks, the hairdresser places her equipment on the kitchen table and Valerie tries not to look at it as it is never neat or orderly as she needs it to be.

‘It was a disaster actually.’ The hairdresser’s eyes flicker with interest. The usual throw away line suddenly has the potential for a more interesting conversation.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that, what happened?’  She roughs up the back of Valeries hair as if it is something unsavory and wrinkles her nose.

‘Well I told you my sister was coming down didn’t I?’

‘The artist from Cirencester?’

‘That’s right.  Well of course she didn’t know anything about my mother and Brian getting married.’

‘She didn’t?’

‘No’

‘They didn’t tell her then?’ the hairdresser expresses her surprise.

‘No they didn’t.’ 

‘You went though didn’t you?’ The question is more of an accusation. Valeries head tilts forward slightly as if she is experiencing a moment of confession.

‘Yes, I was the maid of honor for my mother.’

‘That’s right I remember you telling me.  They had this lovely beach ceremony in ….er’    

‘Tenerife’ says Valerie  The hairdresser lifts Valeries head.

‘That’s better Valerie you’d moved a bit there.

‘Sorry.’ Valerie continues.  ‘So she arrived before I could warn her.’

‘What, about the wedding?’

‘About everything’ said Valerie with a slightly tense voice.

‘Oh?’ The hairdresser fumbles in her bag for some unknown object and Valerie wishes that she would pull herself together and sort her things out before she arrived.  Every time it was the same, chaos.  The hairdresser huffs. 

‘Sorry, but I was sure I’d put some spearmint in my bag. Anyway, please go on.’  At this point Valerie realizes she doesn’t really want to talk too much about the situation but has opened a door and the unexpected guest is already in the room.

‘Mother didn’t tell her anything about Brian, the wedding, me attending it, the house..’

‘The house?’  The scissors snick as the hairdresser stares into the mirror inviting further revelations.

‘Brian bought mother out of the house soon after they first met. It was in a terrible state and mother never had the money or inclination to do anything with it. So he bought it. He paid less than it was actually worth but insisted that was on the basis that he would pay for it to be totally refurbished.’

‘And did he refurbish it?’ Valerie acknowledged that it had been refurbished but fell short of confirming Brian had paid for it, but she added,

‘It looks very tasteful now.’

‘So she doesn’t own anything then?’ Valerie’s eyes glazed slightly as she spent a moment thinking.

‘Well, technically no, but they are married so she is protected.’  Her words express her concern and the hairdresser smiles again but it is a fixed smile as though she is posing for a photograph.

‘Well that’s the main thing isn’t it, I mean once you are married everything is signed and sealed so to speak.’ 

‘We did worry about it, Geoffrey and I. What with Geoffrey being in the legal world; it was a thing we talked about.  I mean you do worry about people coming into your family, about whether they are, how can I say it, legitimate.’

‘Oh that’s right, you hear so many stories of older people being conned, its terrible. You know Mrs Stratton?’ Valerie nods.

‘Well this is between us of course’ said the hairdresser almost in a whisper. ‘Her sister met a man who showed an interest in her and he got her to buy a time share in the Algarve.  As soon as the ink was dry he was off.  All her savings gone, and apparently she was heartbroken.’ 

‘Well luckily Brian is a civil servant at the Foreign Office’ countered Valerie ‘and they are married so Geoffrey and I can sleep at night.’  For a moment or two the hairdresser snips at Valerie’s hair and Valerie’s mind drifts.

 ‘I like your new kitchen by the way’ says the hairdresser who does not seem able to stand a moments silence.

‘You’ve got an Island, I’ve always wanted an Island.  My kitchen isn’t big enough for one.’ 

The kitchen is ice white with a real black marble work surface that sparkles under the numerous downlighters. The walls are beige and the floor tiles grey.  The odd piece of equipment that doesn’t fit into the cupboards such as the toaster and the expensive coffee maker are polished stainless steel and everything is perfect.  The room could be an operating theatre it is so sterile.

‘Has your sister seen it?’ Valerie is jerked back to reality by the question.

‘No she hasn’t.  We don’t see much of one another what with her living in Cirencester and working in London.’  Valerie knows that had Julia seen her spanking new kitchen she would have been disgusted by it. 

‘Julia is a Bohemian’ she says.

‘Oh so she wasn’t born in this country?’  Valerie’s face reveals a moment of confusion before she quickly manages to disguise it.

‘No, I mean she has different taste to me, she goes for distressed furniture and wall hangings, lots of pots and pans hanging from butchers hooks, that sort of thing.  Everything that would invite spiders and moths.’ 

‘Oh, I don’t think I would like that’ says the hairdresser distastefully.

‘What you have here is just up my street.’ It is Valerie’s turn to smile. What has just been said however is a double edged sword, for whilst she wishes her kitchen to be admired she is not sure she wants to share the same taste as her hairdresser. 

 ‘Your mother was very lucky to find her new man wasn’t she? I mean I heard a statistic the other day that 65% of women over sixty are single. That’s shocking isn’t it?’  Valerie agrees that it is.

‘Where did she meet him? 

‘Oh, well that’s a funny thing really.  Brian just knocked on her door. He was looking for an old colleague who lived at Cove Cottage prior to my mother and father purchasing it. It seems they lost contact years ago and Brian came looking for him.’

‘Well that was fortunate wasn’t it?’ 

‘Yes, they hit it off together straight away. Mother phoned me the same night and said she had met him.’

‘She didn’t tell your sister then?’  Valerie looked at the perfectly grey floor.

‘No she didn’t. I think she knew Julia would warn her off. Unfortunately Julia is a very blunt.’

‘So how did your sister react when she found out?’  Valerie did not really want to reveal any more of the family secrets, but at the same time needed to release some of the pressure building up inside.  She wanted someone other than Geoffrey to say she was right to behave the way she had.  Geoffrey in his inimitable way had just shrugged his shoulders and said ‘well what did you expect from Julia’ which didn’t really help.

‘Julia blew her top’ said Valerie, ‘she said a few very direct things and then left.  I think it has finally broken our relationship for good.’

‘Oh dear’ said the hairdresser.  

‘We haven’t really got on for years’ continued Valerie ‘she sees things differently to everybody else. She was always at mothers throat.  Well they were at each others actually.’

‘Perhaps it is for the best then?’

‘Yes, I think possibly it is.  I just wish I could have told her about Brian, but I was sworn to secrecy.’ 

‘Oh that must have put you into a terrible position.’  Valerie at last felt a flake of support and confirmed that it had.

‘I wanted to tell my sister but I couldn’t ruin the wedding.’

‘Of course not’ sympathized the hairdresser ‘weddings are so important aren’t they.’

Her words should have been consoling but instead Valerie found then painfully ironic.

‘Weddings are so important’ more important than relationships, more important than honesty, more important than love for your older sister, she thought?

‘And you had a lovely time I remember you saying.’ The hairdresser was piling on the guilt without even knowing it, and Valerie was beginning to feel extremely uncomfortable. All of a sudden she had to admit to herself that her ‘lovely time’ was at the expense of Julia.  It was not what she wanted to feel.

‘Do you have any siblings?’ Valerie asked.

‘Yes I‘ve got a brother and two sisters.’ 

‘Do you get on alright?’ 

‘Not always, we tend to do our own thing, Darryl is a car dealer and could talk the back legs off a Donkey.  Hanna is a beautician and Francis runs a Fish and Chip shop. So I’m alright if I want a face make over, a cheap unreliable car, or a bag of chips!’ She laughs at which Valerie smiles and tries to join in the joke.

‘I don’t know any of my clients who do get on with their families. It’s nature isn’t it, I mean we are supposed to fly the nest and get on with our own lives, not rely on one another.’   Valerie thought about the statement for a moment.  On the one hand she agreed that nature did intend everyone to go their own way, but she wasn’t sure about the second part. Surely family members were supposed to rely on one another, weren’t they? 

 She thought back over the years to try to capture a sense of the family dynamic, but it was so complicated.  She had always known that their father had doted on Julia until she started going off the rails in her teens. Up until that point in time she had felt second place.  She was the second child after all and maintained that position throughout. Mother had always been demanding of everyone but had struggled to get to grips with Julia from early on which Valerie felt was one of the reasons for the conflict between her mother and father.  He protected her until it became impossible to do so, when she began to take part in things that even he could not defend.  As for herself, well she had towed the line, tried not to make waves. Somehow she knew that if she kept quiet Julia would keep her parents occupied.  It was not done deliberately, not thought out, after all she was a child and children aren’t sufficiently aware of themselves, but there was not doubt looking back that that was what had happened. It must have been instinct. 

‘Do you use your coffee machine?’  The words cut through her thoughts and a moment of panic set in.

‘I’m sorry?’ she uttered.

‘Do you use your coffee machine?  We’ve talked about getting one but I just don’t know whether we would get the use out of it.  We bought a bread maker last year and lived on bread for a while but now it hardly gets used.’

Valerie gathered her thoughts together enough to reply.

‘Geoffrey loves his fresh coffee in the mornings, so yes we do.’  Her mind went on to finish the sentence in silence ‘if he doesn’t get his fresh coffee he is unbearable.’

‘Are they expensive to run?’ Valerie had no idea how much the fresh coffee modules cost but told the hairdresser the machine itself cost £500. From the look on the hairdressers face it was fortunate she had stopped cutting or Valerie might have lost an ear.  She thought it strange that something Geoffrey had purchased on a whim should have such an impact on the hairdresser.  She had always had money, from the moment she chose herself a wealthy husband, and from that point on had lost sight of the fact that other people didn’t.  It was something Julia regularly pointed out to her when they were still talking.

‘Well there we are Mrs Mitchell, all done.’  She held a mirror up to show the back of Valerie’s hair. Much too short.  She said nothing. The annoying articles loitering on the table were collected up and stuffed into an already crammed bag. A small battery powered vacuum cleaner was produced from a second bag as the hairdresser pretended to remove any lasting trace of her visit. It was a waste of time because Valerie would go over the whole room once she had left and clean it top to bottom.

Financial transaction done, the woman departed, and Valerie was alone again, as she was everyday, left to face the pristine house and garden and her doubts.

 It is a Tuesday.  The waste collection lorry crawls the street.  One of Geoffrey’s tasks as man of the house is to pull the green waste bins out of their neat wooden housing before he leaves for the station to catch the 7.30 train. They both have their allotted tasks, it is part of the arrangement. He has the bins, cutting the grass, taking the Mercedes to the car wash, paying the standing orders and on a Sunday making the roast dinner wearing his Head Chef apron. She had looking after the children when they were young, cleaning the house once the cleaner has cleaned it, tending the garden once the gardener has left, cooking the meals, and dare she add sex? Despite her reluctance to think it, sex, like the bins, is rolled out once a week for collection. Life runs like clockwork and she by default is a clockwork wife.   They all rewind their springs by going on three family holidays a year.  Once in Austria skiing, once on the Isle of Wight (Cowes week), and once in a more exotic location which varies each year, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Rome, all over the world in fact.  For all of this Valerie was grateful (apart from the sex which also unfortunately managed to run like clockwork, Geoffrey starting off fast and then slowing as his sexual spring unwound just before his personal ‘alarm’ went off.) Geoffrey’s orgasms were like someone stubbing their toe, a brief yell, a moment of realization and then an expression of regret that he hadn’t seen it coming.

 She heard the trundle of the bins and the lorry, the hydraulic moan of its lifting gear like an old person whose every move is accompanied by some vocal outpouring.  She looked at the clock, ten thirty, time for coffee she thought.  Valerie did not use the coffee machine.  It took too long to fiddle about with the sachets of ground coffee, the filters and the drip, drip, drip, of the thick brown syrup, let alone the cleaning afterwards.  Stainless steel never came up right, it always retained water marks and finger prints and other blemishes.  Instead she went to a jar of instant coffee and measured out a healthy spoonful into her cup before flicking the switch on the kettle.

It was ten thirty and there was nothing left for the day to offer. No one would call, nothing would happen. To her shame she realized the hairdresser was the highlight of the day.  What had she become? Rich and empty.  Even to the point of having no sister any more. Julia might have been a Bohemian wild child who had never grown up, but at least she was alive. At least she did things, said things, provoked movement in the otherwise stagnant life of the family.  Not telling her about their mother was wrong, she should have at least given her a hint, a warning. It must have been awful to arrive like that and find out of the blue everything had changed. She realized that she had been vindictive and worse still had been a coward. Right the way through from school she would take the easy option, blame the other child, avoid anything that would show her up, hide the truth if meant she could look good. What a lesson to confront her so late in life.  What a mess.

 It was jealousy of course. Deep down inside she knew she wanted a flavour of Julia’s life.  As a teenager she had wanted to run with the wild boys, taste forbidden fruit, throw caution to the wind, wake up in the morning and wonder where her knickers were.  But of course she never could.  Somehow Julia had been given her share of the reckless gene and she had been allocated Julia’s share of propriety.  She suddenly thought to herself what an old fashioned word to spring into her head like that.  But that is what she was, Valerie was ‘old fashioned’ through and through.  Geoffrey had married her because of it.  He knew that she could be trusted to present the right image at the annual solicitors ball, to give birth to and bring his children up in a way that would enable him to present them in public, to lay and think of England (and the cleaning) once a week until he had stubbed his toe. She looked around the kitchen.  She realized she was beige, grey and stainless steel just like the fittings, whereas Julia was oriental carpets, wicker baskets, postcards from Amnesty International, wild climbing plants and exotic herbs.