No More Ms Inbetween

The hall is quiet, but with that not quite quiet that is less serene that silence. There are little noises, little rustles, little intakes of breath, and, intermittently, sometimes in quick succession, sometimes after what seems like an agonising wait, those noises of movement and shifting that people are never quite sure if they hear or imagine they hear. It is calm, or you might think it is, but there are ripples and overtones and undertones. 

     Carole Richards is tense and quiet, too, but she is happy. It is almost as if she has come home, or as if she has slipped back into a favourite dress

     And I have kept my New Year’s Resolution, she thinks. Possibly for the first time in my life, I have kept a resolution!

     Before this year is out, she had determined, I will be at a ranking chess tournament. It would have been so easy to give herself a get-out clause on the lines of “I will do my best” but she decided there were to be no half-measures. She would succeed or fail, would keep it or break it. No more Ms Inbetween! 

     The trouble was, when it came to chess, she HAD been Ms Inbetween for years – decades even. False modesty was something she had no time for, in herself or others, and she knew she was a good player, or at any rate, a considerably above average player. She had beaten most people, most times (though not every time) at her school chess club, at her university chess club, and at the town chess club. But she had never taken the next step – or made the next move! She was resigned to the fact that she was no Nigella Short, but there was still this dissatisfied, nagging and niggling feeling, that if she made the effort, if she practised and applied herself, she could go further. Not averse to watching a bit of shopping TV now and then, she had thought one of the presenters a bit pretentious, but could also see his point when he said he would have liked to take part in a national televised cookery contest, but after sending in the application form had been told he was too famous, yet on attempting to enter the celebrity version, been told he was not famous enough. 

     She supposed it was the big fish, small sea syndrome. 

     So she made her resolution, and though she did not write it down, and though she did not tell anyone, at least directly, she took it seriously. Or she had every intention of taking it seriously. 

     Now, in the hall that is not quite quiet, the hall that has not quite managed to stop looking like a prosaic part of a local Leisure Centre, but is making a spirited effort, she almost lets her concentration drop as she remembers her conflict of emotions back in March.

     She had always been close to her cousin Samantha, Sammy, as everyone called her, and for once the timeworn phrase about them being more like sisters was almost true. Carole was the younger of the two, by just over a year, which really isn’t enough to matter when you grow into adulthood, but often felt like the older – the more studious, the more conventional, and wasn’t entirely sure she liked it. Technically speaking, she wasn’t godmother to Sammy’s son Ethan, as Sammy didn’t have much time for organised religion and its rites of passage, but she always felt as if she was, and that was a pragmatic arrangement that suited everyone. He had been brought up to call his mother Sammy, rather than Mum or Mummy, and Carole wasn’t particularly shocked or scandalised by that, and Ethan, who was, for the most part, an entirely amenable and agreeable child, didn’t intend letting it bother him either way.

     It was this very general amiability that made Carole especially worried when she could tell that Ethan, now ten years old, wasn’t himself at all. He was, by nature, quite dreamy, but didn’t tend to get entirely lost in his own little world, and though, to Carole’s relief, he didn’t go about with a perpetual grin, he generally looked contented enough in his own slightly quizzical way, but now he sometimes had an expression that Carole, though she wasn’t sentimental about childhood, would have preferred not to see on any child’s face, let alone the face of a child she dearly loved. It all came out in a rush one day when they were indulging in the time-honoured practice she was glad that Ethan, though mature for his years in some ways hadn’t outgrown, and were feeding the ducks in the local park.

     “I’m worried about Sammy,” he admitted, crumbling a slice of bread into pieces so small they would be more suited to ants than ducks. “Since Marcus left – she’s been – odd.” For someone who didn’t tend to do long-term relationships (though she was still fairly good, if long-distance friends with Ethan’s father, Lewis) the one with Marcus, being of two years standing, had not quite broken the record, but was coming close. Carole had never taken to Marcus, though they were always civil when they met. She was wary of saying so. She knew that Sammy, who was usually very easy-going, tended to be protective and partisan when it came to the men in her life, as long as they were the men in her life, and she would possibly, quite possibly, say that Carole had only taken against him because he had a pony-tail and wasn’t in regular work. In fact, the truth was nothing of the sort. Carole found a pony-tail on a man rather attractive, and had had a spell being out of work herself. Like most of us, she had her petty prejudices, but they weren’t among them. But, perhaps for the first time, she understood what her friend Bernadette meant when she described a man she didn’t trust as “slidey”. There was definitely something “slidey” about Marcus. He had a way of seeming to hang on your every word, but his eyes betraying that he was doing nothing of the sort, and she had once overheard him say of Sammy’s parents that, “They’re a pain in the backside, but have their uses.” She did not entirely disagree with the first part, at times, but didn’t like either hypocrisy or the thought that folk who, for all their little ways, were decent enough and doted on their daughter, being exploited and despised. She knew better than to say she was pleased when the item-hood of Marcus and Sammy came to an end, but the fact remained, she was.

     “How do you mean –odd?” she prompted, gently.

     “Well – you know, Carole, I’m used to her not being quite like other Mums, and that’s fine. It can be – a bit awkward at times, but she’s great fun and I wouldn’t swap her for anyone in the world. Now – she doesn’t get up until after lunchtime, and sometimes, on schooldays, she’s still in bed when I get home from school. She cries a lot, too.”

     “People – do get weary and emotional when they’ve broken up,” she said, but was aware her own words were unconvincing. She had never asked Ethan, in so many words, for his opinion of Marcus, but had the general impression that as long as he made Sammy happy, he was happy too. Sammy generally tended to be a bouncer-backer after the end of a relationship. Suddenly Carole felt guilty and worried. She had been so wrapped up in her own intentions and her resolution that she hadn’t paid as much attention as she should.

     One evening when Marcus was at choir practice, Carole made a point of going round to Sammy’s house. She expected it to be untidy. That was normal, and she wasn’t the world’s tidiest person herself. But there was such a thing as extremes, and she suspected that any dusting or vacuuming or washing up that had been done was down to Ethan, bless him. But far more than the state of the house, she was shocked by the state of Sammy. If she had used her not inconsiderable vocabulary of profanities to describe Marcus, if she had been a vituperative, or defensive, or defiant, or the like, she wouldn’t have been so worried. But she was like a hollow shell, like a pile of crumpled clothes without flesh and blood in them. Even her weeping had a defeated, dreary, diminished quality to it. That was not like Sammy. She was, by her own admission, a bit of a drama queen.

     Carole felt desperately sorry for her, and her guilt at her own neglect intensified, but still couldn’t help being more concerned about Ethan. She also realised this wasn’t something she could cope with alone. A family council of war was called, and they decided that Sammy must have an urgent talk with her GP. If she had protested, it might almost have convinced them that it wasn’t necessary. Sammy was a dedicated doctor-dodger. But she went along with it, and agreed to have therapy, and seemed just like a puppet having her strings pulled by other people. Freed, at least in part, of the premature responsibility he had borne so bravely, but whispered to Carole that he had hated, Ethan seemed more like a child again, and he turned to Carole, who was, of course, more than glad to help him all she could, even though at times she couldn’t help thinking ……

     I’m only human, Carole thinks now, and I’m not ashamed of it. But I know I couldn’t live with myself if I had left him in the lurch, resolution or no resolution.

     They had always got on splendidly, and it soon turned out that they had even more in common than they thought. One thing, in particular, gladdened Carole’s heart.

     He was an absolute natural. It was almost uncanny. She knew herself that though she did her best, she wasn’t really a particularly marvellous teacher, but at times he hardly seemed to need any teaching. 

     It has been a difficult year, thinks Carole, and we all had to face the fact that though Marcus was a sod, Sammy had problems quite apart from him. But they have come through it, and it will not be long before another year begins. And, though now perhaps she recognises it is not the most important thing in life, it is certainly important, and she has kept her resolution.

     She is at the finals of the East Coast under-16s chess tournament, and although he is one of the youngest players, Ethan is doing very nicely!