Page 26 of Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

After Gary left – actually, she needs to stop thinking of it like that, because technically she kicked him out, as her mother keeps reminding her – Anna realised that while she rarely saw him at home, he had still occupied a large part of her brain space.

She had to run the household and do all the things he needed in order to go to his job, like wash and iron his clothes, take his suits to the dry cleaner, make food for him to take to work, keep the house clean and everything that went along with that so that he didn’t have to even think about it; and she also had to do all the thinking about their home and family.

All the worrying. All the remembering: bills to pay and birthday cards to send and dinner-party invitations to turn down because he could never guarantee he’d make them.

But mostly the worrying, about the kids and their schooling and the future and her mother and his parents and his sister and her family …

The housework is tiring but the worrying is exhausting.

It’s not as if she could turn it off either, because if she didn’t do it, who would?

Their children needed her to worry about them.

It’s part of the mum job description. But it shouldn’t be part of the wife job description.

Her husband should make it easy to be with him, not hard.

She had never expected to be one of those wives who complained about hubby-this and hubby-that, yet she’d find herself at school pick-up doing so.

It wasn’t likeable, to her or anyone else.

She resented Gary for putting her in that position.

So with him gone she’s cut out the worrying and the whingeing, and lo and behold she has more time and energy for other things.

Which is why she finds herself at jazz ballet with Ingrid on a Thursday morning.

The other class time was Monday morning, but as that’s the start of the school week she didn’t feel like she could organise herself to do it on a Monday, so Thursday it is.

Before taking the kids to school she got herself into tights and a leotard – something she hasn’t donned since childhood ballet classes, and she’s not sure if anyone even wears that sort of gear to dance classes any more – and put flats on her feet.

The teacher told her she could go barefoot today and then, if she wants to come back, there are special shoes to buy.

That sounds like quite a commitment, and she’s a little anti-commitment at the moment, but she’ll try to keep an open mind.

‘Hi, Mama,’ she says as Ingrid gets into the car.

A while ago Anna tried going to Ingrid’s door to pick her up for the salon and Ingrid snapped, ‘I’m not decrepit!

’ so since then she’s waited in the car at the appointed time.

Presumably her mother will tell her when she feels she’s decrepit enough for social niceties to take place.

In the meantime Anna gives her a peck on the cheek to say hello, then they’re off.

Ingrid looks as lithe in tights as she did when Anna was a child; Ingrid did ballet classes then.

‘Never too late to look your best, darling,’ she would say as she pinched the non-existent fat on her thigh.

As a teenager Anna thought this was a ridiculous attitude – that was the 1960s, after all, when the social conventions of previous decades were being chucked out – but now she tends to think that looking one’s best is more an act of rebellion than letting it all hang out.

‘A ponytail today, I see?’ Ingrid says.

‘I don’t want my neck getting sweaty.’ Anna self-consciously touches her hair. Whenever her mother remarks on her appearance she feels like she’s failed some kind of test.

‘Don’t worry, darling – the fitter you get, the less you’ll sweat.’

That’s something else Ingrid has been saying for years.

It didn’t help that Anna’s childhood ballet teacher used to admiringly say that Ingrid had legs like Cyd Charisse, hinting that Anna could have them too if she just persevered with the ballet.

Genetics didn’t help her out in that instance, though, because Ingrid is several centimetres taller than her daughter.

‘Sure,’ Anna says, because agreeing is easiest. Then she stays quiet for a few seconds; there’s something else she wants to discuss with her mother and she’s working out how to start the conversation.

Her mother is direct – when she wants to criticise Anna, that is.

At other times she can circle around a subject.

But they don’t have time for circling today, because the jazz ballet studio is only a fifteen-minute drive.

‘Did you ever want to leave Papa?’ she asks.

She hears a sharp intake of breath.

‘Why would you ask me that?’ Ingrid says sternly.

But that’s not a ‘no’, Anna thinks.

‘Why do you think?’

‘Don’t be impertinent!’

‘Don’t be obtuse.’

‘That’s a big word for you.’

The barb lands as Ingrid no doubt intended it to, and Anna didn’t deflect it in time.

You’d think she’d have had enough practice, except she always wants to give her mother the benefit of the doubt.

Ingrid’s own mother verged on the tyrannical and Anna long ago acknowledged that Ingrid had to make a serious effort in order to not be the same.

Just as Anna has to work at not slipping into default critique mode with her children.

It’s hard, because you have to keep working at it, but if you love your kids you do all you can.

Anyway, Anna was never that good at English at school and Ingrid knows it, so she would think obtuse to be too big a word. Except she hasn’t noticed that Anna has recently taken up crosswords, partly to improve her vocabulary, and she has an Oxford Dictionary as a regular companion at home.

There’s no point going through all that now, though. Time is ticking away along with the kilometres.

‘Maybe,’ Anna concedes. Then she waits. Ingrid’s temper tends to flare and die in the space of seconds. Again, an improvement from her grandmother’s, which would flare and rage for days.

‘It wasn’t easy after your father …’ Ingrid starts. She doesn’t need to say the rest, because they lived it.

‘No.’

‘The easiest thing would have been to leave,’ Ingrid goes on. ‘My mother told me to.’

No surprises there: Anna’s grandmother didn’t like inconvenience and Ingrid’s disabled husband would definitely have fit that category.

‘But he was still my husband,’ Ingrid says quietly. ‘He was still your father. It was harder, yes. There were times …’ Her sigh is deep and long. ‘Of course I thought of leaving,’ she murmurs. ‘I’m not a saint.’

Anna is so surprised at her mother’s candour she decides to go for some of her own. ‘First I’ve heard of it,’ she says. Then she risks a sideways glance and sees Ingrid’s raised eyebrows. Then the beginning of a smile.

‘Don’t be impertinent,’ Ingrid says again but it’s soft this time. Almost loving.

‘Sometimes I can’t help it.’

The studio’s street is coming up and Anna puts on her right blinker.

‘I know it was hard for you, in particular,’ Ingrid says. ‘I relied on you so much.’

This is the biggest admission she has ever made and Anna feels something lurch inside her.

Ingrid sniffs. ‘But I needed you. I couldn’t have managed without you. You …’

Anna pulls into a parking spot and turns toward her mother with the engine still running. They stare at each other and Anna knows what her mother wants to say.

You kept me in the marriage. I couldn’t have done it without you.

She knows it because it’s what she would say to Renee in the same situation, and she and Ingrid are not so different that she has to struggle to understand.

‘I know, Mum,’ she says.

It’s the sort of moment where, in a movie, they might hug. They’re not huggers, though. Not with each other.

‘Let’s do some jazz ballet,’ Anna says instead.

Ingrid peers across Anna to the studio building. ‘I don’t like the look of it.’

It’s so in character of Ingrid to criticise something before she experiences it that Anna laughs.

‘Maybe it will live up to your expectations,’ she says, then she switches off the engine and heaves open the car door, waiting for Ingrid to arrive beside her before they walk up the path.