Her Read online

  While Christopher finds the piano and starts to press the noise out of the keys, Ben and I separate and move on through the rooms, finding hidden doors that lead into pantries or laundry rooms or wet rooms or walk-in wardrobes. I can see what Charles has done here, I can see the way he has eliminated the clutter of everyday by editing it, pushing it out of sight; paring back to this simple, seductive tyranny of space, air and light. Much more than the house in London, this house is a manifesto, an idealised statement of how, properly, with discipline and taste, we should live. It’s a fair brief for a holiday house, I suppose, feeling the needle of jealousy beneath the delight that all this – for a week or so – is going to be ours.

  In the master bedroom, Cecily on my hip, I pop open the cupboards and a few drawers – it would be strange not to be curious – and find pretty much what I expected to find: the stepmother’s capsule summer wardrobe (cotton dresses, some slim-cut, some full-skirted for evening, one in last summer’s particular shade of cobalt; a slippery tangle of bikinis in bold prints); the father’s Lacoste polo shirts in all colours, swimming trunks printed with seahorses from that ludicrous specialist store in the Burlington Arcade.

  ‘What did Nina say her dad did?’ Ben asks, appearing at the door, and I say he’s a composer of some sort. We find his name on a few envelopes collected on the kitchen counter: M. Paul Storey. Ben reaches into his pocket for his phone, but has no reception. He’ll have to google him later. ‘We must be talking big time,’ he says, wandering off outside. Then, a moment later, I hear him call for me.

  He’s found the swimming pool. It stands in its own gated courtyard between banks of dwarf lavender, the purple heads bowing and beginning to turn dusty. Pale grey cushions on the loungers, pale grey sun parasols. The pool – that long unruffled expanse of water – is tiled in grey: but a darker grey, closer to charcoal, nearly black. A dark mirror surrounded by aching light. It’s the most glorious thing I’ve ever seen.

  Christopher’s blond head appears at the gate, his small hand reaching up for the latch. He tries to lift it, but is thwarted by its height and weight. ‘You mustn’t come in here without Mummy or Daddy,’ I tell him as I let him in. ‘That’s very important.’

  He says OK, and then he stares at the pool, the delicious spectacle.

  In the house, we shove Cecily in the high chair with a breadstick and tell Christopher to keep an eye on her, just for a minute. And then we’re rushing back through the hot scented garden to the car, dragging the suitcases and shopping bags out of the boot and lugging them up the hill. The impatience of unpacking, of trying to locate the trunks and swim nappies and rash tops, of inflating Christopher’s armbands. When I’ve got everyone changed and ready, I still have to find my own swimsuit, a tired old khaki thing that gapes a bit at the bust; I meant to buy a new one before we left, but I never got around to it. Our bathroom towels are white; pool towels, left folded at the end of the beds, are slate. I wonder if Charles thought all this out, or if it was the French stepmother, Delphine.

  Ben carries Cecily into the shallow end. She’s rigid with apprehension at first, her limbs stiff and doll-like, and then she’s squealing with pleasure and dancing in his arms, blinking in the spray. Christopher bobs between his orange wings, his hair slicked to his head, ghostly legs spinning beneath him. I hear the water gushing over the lip of the pool: an infinity edge, of course. Beyond it, the hazy indistinct line of the sea against the sky.

  I walk down the stone steps into the blood-warm water and push off, feeling, as it rises over my shoulders, the tension falling away behind me, along with the heat and the anxiety and the irritation of the day. I dip my head under and kick down, swimming five or ten strokes, stretching, eyes blurred, ears full of a silent roar, my mind suddenly empty. When I come up and tread water in the deep end, droplets falling from my hair, it sounds like glockenspiels.

  I flip over and float on my back for a while, considering the sky: the sort of sky where a cloud would be startling, an unexpected novelty. High up, a few birds are patiently riding the thermals in slow lazy spirals, making small adjustments to the angle of their wings while they wait for those tiny giveaways on the hillside: a pebble sent rolling, the twitch of grass, a sudden shadow.

  I’m not sure what they are. Buzzards? Eagles? Ben will know. But I don’t want to ask him, not at this particular moment. There’s lots of time.

  Dimly, through the water, I hear Christopher say, ‘You look like a marmalade, Mama. When your hair does that.’

  Later, when the children are asleep, we sit at the table on the terrace and eat the aubergine dish left for us, watching the light going out of the sky and listening to the dogs barking along the headland. ‘We’ve really fallen on our feet here,’ Ben says. ‘I think the technical term is “jammy buggers”.’

  I murmur agreement as he uncorks the second bottle. The air is full of white flowers and herbs, sweet and savoury; and through all this threads the agreeable scent of the mosquito coil burning at our feet. The wine is very cold in the big glass. When he kisses me, I kiss him back, my hands in his hair.

  I feel, tonight, like someone else, the sort of person who goes on holiday to a house overlooking the sea, a house with curtains the colour of milk and a swimming pool tiled in slate. I used to know this person, I used to understand her; maybe I’ll get to know her again. Now that I’m here, the warmth on my skin and beginning to soften my bones, it seems almost possible.

  As the days pass, the house tolerates our frailties without indulging them. Our damp towels slung over the balustrades. Boxes of cereal and crackers left out on the dining table. Toy trucks in the gravel. Before long, these little things look conspicuously wrong, and we find ourselves tidying up as we go along, as we never quite manage to do at home. And yet it’s an easy house to live in, everything so well-planned, so thought-through: so obvious, in many ways. It’s the sort of house that reminds you, inevitably, of the shortcomings of other houses, of Carmody Street in particular. We find ourselves marvelling at the water pressure and the kitchen drawers that close with soft, muted adhesion, like the doors of expensive cars.

  Even as we fill the house with our noise and clutter, we are steadily succumbing, giving in to it and the way it suggests we live. Without quite realising it, we are being overpowered.

  For the first few days, Ben is all go, reading guide books, consulting maps, working out when things will be open. We should go shopping in the village in the cool of the morning; in the late afternoon, we should visit an art gallery or the fishing port where Picasso had his studio (its harbour now filled with shiny black super-yachts that look like arrowheads of jet). Christopher complains as we buckle him into his car seat, and threatens to be sick as the car twists along the hairpin bends. He doesn’t care much for Picasso.

  But on the third morning Cecily sleeps in until after nine, and so Ben and I wake of our own accord, a novelty that gives him time to reconsider. Perhaps we’ll just hang out for now. See how it goes. It’s in the quiet uneventfulness of the next few days that I begin to sense her – the other me, the person I thought I’d lost – and the flashes of the ease and happiness she took for granted. When Ben has taken the children for the first swim of the day, I make a second pot of coffee and carry a cup around the garden, discovering that one thought can still lead, quite naturally, to another. In the shade, the grass is damp from the sprinkler. As I step into the sun, I can feel the air rising around me, laden with moisture.

  Later, I’m lying on the cushions beneath the arbour as Christopher, not quite believing it’s permitted, picks the purple grapes and drops them into my mouth. The skins, warm and grainy against my teeth, give with a pop. To scandalise him, to make him giggle, I spit the bitter gritty pips into the bushes. ‘Mama,’ he says. ‘That’s not allowed.’

  From time to time – in the hammock or on a lounger, as the sun plays on my eyelids: red and black paisley, a languorous psychedelic swirl – I find myself thinking about home, and it’s always a shock. I t
hink of our house, silent and empty beneath fitful skies, its spaces still imprinted with signs of our hasty departure. The half-drawn curtains, the rumpled beds, the children’s nightclothes lying on the carpet where we dropped them. As if we had warning of some advancing catastrophe.

  Dust falling through the rooms and hallways, falling on the stairs.

  But of course life goes on without us. The daily snap of the letterbox, plastic-wrapped catalogues and library reminders and special offers on barbecue coals sliding over the hall floorboards. I open my eyes, and it’s a relief. The precise line of the poplars over the hill, the sea’s glitter, the boundless clarity of the sky.

  In the heat, I feel myself growing, like a plant. I’m conscious that I’m reclaiming some of my old height. It strikes me that I spend so much of my life stooping. Bent double to pick things up, crouching to listen or inspect or rub or commiserate. I imagine my spine unfurling like a time-lapse fern, the spaces between the vertebrae widening and expanding.

  The shortcomings that we identify in the house and garden say more about us than it. The pool may be safely gated, but the small shallow channels of water circulating so musically through the garden demand a certain vigilance. Christopher falls over and cuts his knee on the gravel. Later, we discover that he has been busy transporting great quantities of it from the path to the lawn beneath the hammock. The sets of children’s crockery are Finnish design classics, so we push them to the back of the kitchen cupboard and buy plastic plates and bowls from the hypermarket, along with ugly pool inflatables and a softball set with a sponge ball.

  Ben says he thinks it’s odd how little personal stuff there is in the house.

  ‘Well, it’s a holiday home,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah, but it’s a home. It’s not as if they rent it out or anything. The only people who use it are Nina’s family, and their friends, right?’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ I say, not liking the way he’s making me feel: aware that I’m bristling slightly.

  ‘It’s strange, isn’t it? Not to have any photographs? No books or objets?’ He says the word with a laugh, gesturing around the living room.

  He’s right. There’s the piano, and the abstract landscape with an arid feel (although the yellows and ochres and hard blues are not the colours I associate with Nina, I assume it’s one of hers) over the dining table, and four bone-coloured slipware vases set out with thoughtful irregularity on a shelf, and that’s pretty much it, apart from a carefully curated collection of guide books and maps; and the toy box, of course, with its rake and sieve, its bean-filled puppy and baby doll, lips puckered for the dummy, and, right at the bottom, neatly packed away in a wicker hamper, the immaculate china tea set.

  Overall, all the spaces are painstakingly neutral: bare, pared-down. Hollow, almost.

  I say that it’s the lack of stuff that makes the house feel so restful.

  ‘Yeah, it’s nice for a change,’ he says, a little doubtfully. ‘I can’t imagine living like this for any length of time, though.’

  ‘Oh, I can,’ I say, a little too forcefully. ‘I love it. It’s giving me all sorts of ideas. When I get home, I’m going to build a gigantic bonfire in the back garden, and chuck everything on it. All the crap, all the clutter. Douse it in petrol, light a match. Ka-boom.’

  He laughs. ‘Yeah, right,’ he says. ‘Because I remember how good you are at donating things to Oxfam. Those little piles of junk which you leave out on the stairs, which we all fall over for a few days, and then the junk just goes back into general circulation. Osmosis.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ I protest, but he’s right, I find it hard to let things go.

  Still, I imagine building a pyre, piling up all the broken toys and picture books with torn or missing pages, the guitar Ben’ll never get around to re-stringing, the wonky-legged stool. Flipping the red beak on the tin and squirting lighter fluid over the blanket the moths got at. The rattle as I open the box of matches. I feel the sudden rush of bright heat on my face and neck, smell the bitter smoke.

  As we help Christopher over the shingle or buy pistachio ice-creams in the little square, Ben and I have the nostalgic conversations about the summers of our childhood – Ben’s in the New Forest; mine at the farm in Kent owned by my grandparents – that we’ve had on other holidays. It’s a relief to be freed from the usual topics: money worries, the creeping stain on the ceiling of Christopher’s bedroom, who’s spiking a temperature.

  Strange, how our children’s present summons up our pasts. The things I remember most clearly aren’t necessarily the things I put into words: afternoons up a tree with a book, sleeping out in a tent, cycling to the beach with Lucy and building a fire and boiling eggs over it in an enamel saucepan filched from Gamma’s cupboard.

  Eventually we grew out of that sort of thing; we no longer yearned for the country, we started to make excuses not to go, and when we did visit we were restless, dissatisfied, conscious that we were missing out on what was happening elsewhere.

  It’s late afternoon and we are in the little playground – shaded by pines, long needles underfoot – not far from the harbour. Cecily is in the swing while Christopher rides a squeaky spring-mounted cartoon motorbike. I look up, through the trees. Sunshine dances and flickers on my face, bursts of light and warmth. I’m telling Ben a story about my grandmother’s half-facetious pursuit of the top prizes in the annual Jassop produce show – how she wouldn’t let us in the kitchen when the cakes were in the oven, how we had to tiptoe around upstairs, remembering not to slam doors – when I’m struck by a stray memory. I’m remembering watching Gamma, in a dun kilt and forest-green jersey, loading her car with precious commodities (the jars of preserves with their neat muslin mobcaps, the tins containing fruit cake and Victoria sponge, the trays of butterfly cakes bound for the WI’s tea stall) while I hold still, barely breathing and yet bursting with suppressed laughter, my hand over my mouth, feeling Lucy shake beside me.

  I haven’t thought of this for years: the hollow heart we discovered in the hedgerow behind the farmhouse, an ancient secret space enclosed by a living wall of leaves and briars, perfect for spying and secrets. When it rained, you stayed dry in there, the rain pattering around you, darkening the driveway and the slates on the roof, but the earth beneath your sandals remained sandy and friable. Did the grown-ups know about it? We assumed not, but perhaps they were only pretending.

  It’s a sensation, not an anecdote. I can’t find a way of expressing it, I can’t see how I could make it into a story, so I fall silent, remembering the rustle and dimness of shouldering my way inside, the scratch of twigs on my arms, the twisted branch that served as a seat. The pleasure of staying hidden as the world carried on with its business, unaware that it was being observed: my grandmother pegging out the washing, the postman’s van and once a week the mobile library, my grandfather dragging bags of sheep nuts into the barn. My parents setting off for a walk, my father idly swinging a borrowed walking stick into the nettles and the foaming banks of cowparsley.

  It was everything to us: cave, priesthole, crow’s nest. We believed it was probably as old as the farmhouse itself, or older. We saved sweets to eat in there, and every year we’d find a few of last summer’s wrappers caught under roots, the glitter eroded by the weather, little fluttering scraps of another August’s happiness.

  Then one visit Lucy lost interest in it; and it wasn’t so much fun on my own. The years between the deaths of my grandparents we forgot about it altogether. Strange, how these things come at you out of the blue, a lifetime of summers later. I wonder if the hedgerow is still there; if shreds of purple and gold foil are still caught in the roots. I wonder what, if anything, Christopher will remember of this holiday.

  The metal creaks and squeals as Christopher throws his weight around, lurching backward and forward on the motorbike, lost in the ferocity of his enjoyment. ‘You’re going awfully fast,’ Ben says, approvingly. The look on Christopher’s face says, not fast enough.

  It
’s not that I’ve forgotten that Nina and Sophie will be arriving on the Thursday; more that I’ve willingly lost track of time. But if I’m honest, I will accept that at some point I stopped looking forward to their arrival. We’ve been happy here on our own, our schedule going to pot, the usual rules warping a little in the sun and saltwater. Against all expectations, we’ve been freed from something.

  ‘A proper lie-in tomorrow,’ I say as we sit at what’s now our regular table at our favourite restaurant, watching old men in shirtsleeves gathering to smoke and chat in the little dusty square. Between the trees the air is strung with coloured bulbs, red, yellow, green, blue: a carnival illumination against the oncoming dusk.

  Christopher glances up quickly from his frites and says, ‘Are there lions here?’

  We explain, and then Ben says, ‘We have to tidy the place up before they arrive. What time does their flight get in?’

  You’re kidding, it can’t be Wednesday already. There’s some truth to my pantomime shock; and beneath that is a sneaking resentment. I’m not looking forward to handing the house over to Nina and Sophie, witness to my bleakest English moments. But it’s unfair of me, I know that.

  ‘Not until the afternoon. There’s not much to do, anyway,’ I say, and it’s true. We’ve given in to the rigorous expectations of the house. Cereal boxes look silly left out. I find myself in the novel position of being unable to tolerate crumbs on the counters. In any case Thérèse (an industrious narrow-faced woman who leaves the house wrinkle-free and smelling of artificial lemon) appears every few days to mop and polish. ‘I hope it’ll be OK, I hope they won’t find us too annoying,’ I say.