Her Page 4

  I smile in the way I’ve always smiled at my father’s remarks. He can’t help competing with my husband. He tried it with Arnold, too, but Arnold minded more, made more of it, came close to disliking him. Charles finds Paul funny, harmless. My father senses this, and hates it. So he’s always keen to get a poke in, when he can.

  Now he asks how Bridget and I know each other. Naturally, he has forgotten what I told him on the phone. Bridget, who used to paint large disconcerting oils of bus shelters and underpasses and municipal roundabouts, and who was once shortlisted for a prestigious prize, talks sheepishly about her new venture: she’s trying to get a business together, drawing quirky portraits of people’s houses viewed from the street. Fanlights, window boxes, cats on steps, clouds reflected in dark glass. ‘They make a lovely gift when they’re properly framed up,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a few commissions. People at school, mainly. Money’s rubbish, of course, but, well, you have to keep your hand in.’ The embarrassment of this confession makes her anxious to change the subject. ‘But you must be so proud of Nina, really keeping it all going. Did you get to the show?’

  Ah no, he couldn’t make it, sadly, there was a reason, some visitors passing through on their way to Cannes. The usual line: he heard it was a tremendous success.

  ‘I sold quite a few,’ I say, tricked into defensiveness. ‘The gallery was really pleased! A French collector bought a series of three, the three biggest works in fact. Michael didn’t know the buyer, said he was new to the gallery. Walked in, picked out the yews sequence, all very decisive. New apartment in Knightsbridge, by all accounts, near Prince of Wales Gate. Bit of a break, really.’

  My father squeezes his muslin-sheathed lemon over a last scallop. ‘Oh, perhaps that was Pierre Geroux. I sent him in your direction. You remember Pierre?’

  A flare of disappointment, hearing him say it. Dimly, I remember a wet evening in the Place des Vosges, my father’s friend grinding out a cigarette underfoot, tight curls threaded with raindrops, a camel scarf tucked inside a loden collar. ‘Oh yes, I think that was the name. How nice. I hope he enjoys the paintings.’

  ‘Are you still doing those landscapes?’ he asks, fastidiously dabbing his fingers on his napkin, turning to Bridget as she says I’ve still got it, she thinks I’m heading in a new direction which is both beautiful and strange. ‘They feel like paintings from the edge of the world,’ she says, and I’m struck that she has picked up on this, and pleased; and then I remember it was on the print-out which Michael distributed at the opening.

  ‘Quite fabulous, aren’t they?’ my father is agreeing. ‘Great big things.’

  ‘I’ve had a good summer,’ I say. ‘When Sophie was away with Arnold, I just got my head down and it went really well.’ I look him in the eye: ‘You might recognise some of the locations. Do you remember Jassop? For some reason, I’ve been thinking about Jassop recently. Bits of it are in there, I think.’

  ‘Ah,’ he says, restless, not interested. ‘Well, I’d love to see the studio sometime.’

  We talk a little about my mother. He doesn’t always ask about her, especially when Delphine is around – though Delphine plainly couldn’t care less about this ghostly failure, this person who still calls herself Mrs Storey, who lives in the country where she makes jam and bread and pots, and – when she has had too much to drink – becomes morose and spiteful, calling me up to pick over the hand life has dealt her. These things I keep to myself while I tell him (feeling vaguely disloyal) about the pottery class she is teaching at the local institute, the excitement with the chickens. ‘Chickens!’ he says, stirred almost to surprise. ‘And yet of course, I can quite see Helen with chickens.’

  Later, we stand on the pavement outside Marcy’s for a few moments, saying our goodbyes, moving aside as people weave in and out of the heavy doors leaving little incomplete jokes hanging in the air behind them like smoke. I glance in the window, into the room which is full of a buttery low light pricked out with candles and silverware, and see the waiter clearing our table, whisking away the wine glasses and the coffee cups, the plate of petits fours, and lowering on a new white cloth with easy dramatic precision. A couple approaches, fresh from an opening night or a concert; the waiter adjusts a knife and swings to greet them. A swift reinvention, the final movement of someone else’s evening.

  Bridget spots a taxi and hails it, and while she’s leaning over to tell the driver our addresses, I kiss my father goodbye. ‘I’m in town till Thursday,’ he says, ‘So I’ll ring you and we’ll fix a time to meet at the studio. If you’d like that?’

  ‘That would be fun,’ I say, but we’re both aware that something else will come up, or he’ll forget. ‘I’ll look forward to it.’

  ‘He must have been quite a handful when he was younger,’ sighs Bridget as the taxi pulls off. ‘Still is, I’ll bet.’ Hastily, she glances at me, worried she has gone too far, but I wave a hand, dismissing the concern. ‘Oh, relax,’ I say. ‘I’m over all that. He was never like the other fathers.’

  ‘No . . . I can’t imagine him mending anything. Fixing a tap. Oiling a mower.’ She’s a bit pissed.

  ‘He was always hopeless,’ I say. ‘Takes a pride in his hopelessness. Maybe he needed to find people who would deal with all the dull stuff for him. I’ve often wondered if that’s why he wanted to marry my mother.’

  I can see Bridget’s a bit shocked; she’s fond of Helen. When we were at college I took Bridget to Sussex a few times, and even now my mother inquires after her, putting the questions that would never occur to my father. I guess Bridget is thinking of my mother’s wild hair tethered with tortoiseshell combs, the postcards stuck up in the downstairs loo, the milk bottles full of dusty pussy willow. ‘Oh, but she must have been beautiful!’ she says, then, more doubtfully, ‘They must have had something in common.’

  ‘Who knows,’ I say. Perhaps if I had a sibling, we’d be able to make sense of it together, find the connection between the self-absorbed composer with magpie tastes, and the distracted hippy with clay under her fingernails. ‘Whatever it was that initially brought them together – and I’d rather not dwell on that – I can’t imagine how they lasted as long as they did.’

  ‘Do you know what really happened?’ Bridget asks, and I say oh, it’s all a bit foggy, and my mother’s version – which is still aired regularly – is unhelpful, as she deals in a general sense of grievance rather than specifics. They held it together until I was round about seventeen, although by that point even I could tell the interesting parts of my father’s life were happening elsewhere; and then one day, just before the autumn term began, my father left the house in Jassop for an appointment in London and never came back.

  I say I don’t remember him leaving us (that’s a lie), but I’m able to describe for Bridget the sudden change in the atmosphere at home: a sort of desperate gaiety as the house filled up with the people my father had been unable to stand. Penny, who ran the local riding stables; Philip and Malcolm, bridge-playing antique dealers; Gillian, the reflexologist with bad teeth and a nervous laugh, who said ‘et cetera, et cetera’ when she had nothing to say (which was, as my father had noted, often). On her own, my mother slumped; she needed to bolster herself with company, to lose herself in pursuits. Her diary filled with distractions: French classes, am dram, creative writing clubs, volunteer work. For a while, she and Gillian toured the south coast, going to séances and hypnotism shows in tarnished ballrooms that smelled of Jeyes fluid and hopelessness, pretending not to take them seriously.

  Shortly after I went to study in London she sold the house in Jassop and moved to the next county, and I hoped she would leave the story of her great sadness behind. But it didn’t quite work out like that.

  The taxi clicks steadily through the pounds. The Magic Tree swings and twists over the jaywalkers, the Belisha beacons, the people leaving 24-hour stores carrying blue plastic bags. Under the fake scent, the cab smells the usual way: damp, too warm, vaguely metallic, like the inside of a mouth. I l
ean closer to Bridget, the sugary suggestion of face powder. Orange bands of light march steadily across her trench coat.

  ‘How’s Fred?’ I ask, because I really should. A nice enough man, but deathly dull. He’s in compliance, a word which sounded rather evocative – almost suggestive – when I first heard it, but which I now understand, though not from anything Bridget tells me, to be as boring and precarious as anything else in the City. I listen, playing Fred bingo, as Bridget checks off the key words: Singapore, bonus, Emirates season ticket. ‘We must have you round for supper soon,’ she says as the cab pulls up outside her house, a double-fronted Victorian that used to be a dentists’ before Bridget took it on, tearing out the partitions and fire doors, painting the large rooms a very pale grey and filling them with a range cooker the size of a small car, Italian slate flagstones and cornicing as white as icing, figured with oak leaves and acorns.

  Perhaps I’m too hard on Fred, I think, as the taxi bears me away up the hill. He’s a decent enough man. Somewhere along the line, he just stopped being fun. He must have made jokes once; he must have been able to laugh at himself not so very long ago. When do people change? When do their imaginations ossify? I picture him standing on the touchline at Paddy’s rugby matches, shouting encouragement and clapping his leather-gloved palms together as his breath mists the cold blue air and the boys knot around the ball, gathering and dispersing like microbes or sheep; and for a moment my own father leaps in my memory from long ago, arriving at my degree show just as everyone else was starting to leave, accompanied by a new girlfriend, a pretty creature whose name I’ve now forgotten (though I recall a very tight dress and heels that got caught in the steel stairs), and how he couldn’t keep his hands off her, turning her round as if she were an ornament on display, unable to conceal his pleasure.

  Emma

  We can’t agree what to call her.

  ‘She doesn’t look much like a Madeleine,’ Ben whispers.

  ‘Well, suck it up, she doesn’t look much like a Cecily, either,’ I whisper back. ‘She looks like a Norma. Maybe a Belinda or a Pam.’

  We laugh silently, aghast. The baby lies there in the car seat, her face as crumpled and jaundice-yellowed as a windfall apple, asleep and yet still inexorably stirring. I’d forgotten this animatronic stage, when they move in jerks, when they click and whirr and spasm abruptly into terrible tiny piercing alarm-screams that make the sweat pop out in beads along my hairline.

  ‘She’s not so bad, is she?’ Ben breathes. He bends down, examining her in a way one never can when she’s awake. ‘She’s rather lovely. Jesus, those fingernails . . . look, she’s cut herself, look at her cheek.’

  When he says this, I hear the reproach. You should cut her nails before she does herself an injury.

  ‘You could trim them,’ I say. ‘Do it when she wakes up. Or maybe it would be easier to do it now, while she’s asleep. Although it might disturb her nap.’

  ‘Where are the nail scissors?’ he asks, and I know I’ll end up doing it, because it’s easier than telling him what he already knows: they’re in the bathroom cabinet (which he will go and stand in front of, vaguely scanning the jumbled shelves, unable to see them, though they are right there, between the box of Elastoplast and the arnica gel).

  The baby’s sleeping, I think. What on earth am I doing here, wasting time like this, staring at her? I should be washing my hair. I should be sitting down, or lying on the bed with my eyes shut. I should be returning a phone call or doing an internet grocery shop or replying to emails or finding the library books which I never finished but which are now very overdue. I should be spending quality time with Christopher, who is downstairs on the sofa, zombie-eyed in front of Balamory, where he has spent the last few weeks, more or less.

  ‘I’m going to jump in the shower,’ I whisper, starting to move away, and sure enough as I do so the baby’s arms whip out wildly as if she’s falling, the startle reflex kicking in; payback for allowing her to fall asleep unswaddled. As swiftly as a shadow on a hillside, her complexion switches from yellow to maroon. The thin scratchy punishing noise begins.

  ‘Shall I . . .’ says Ben, but we both know this is my job: to sit in an empty room holding this small unhappy thing close to me, allowing it to fasten on to my flesh, my milk pumping in, displacing the toxic silt which is waiting there in the plumbing. Dealing with that will fall to me, too.

  I unbutton my shirt and move to the chair, kicking it so it angles towards the window, aware now of just how much my shoulders and back ache. Ben picks the baby from the harness, lowering her into my lap. She’s hot and damp and firm and squealing, an animated bag of dough smelling of farmyards. The urgency of her hunger makes me feel slightly sick. There’s the usual wailing desperation as she tugs and strains, goldfish mouth flapping, fists flailing, her eyes screwed shut in fury: where is it, where is it, I want it. Then, thankfully, silence, though she’s tense as a tripwire until the let-down.

  It hurts a bit, I’ve still not got the latch quite right, but it’s not as bad as it was. Relax. I make myself sit back, push my head against the chair, cup my hand over her skull, and breathe out. I’m almost not uncomfortable, as long as I don’t move at all.

  ‘I’ll go and start Christopher’s supper,’ Ben says, edging towards the door. ‘Do you want anything?’

  ‘A cup of tea would be great. And a biscuit,’ I say. The moment he leaves the room, I realise that I should have asked him to turn on the radio, which is on the bookshelf, just out of reach. It must be about five thirty, or six. I wouldn’t mind listening to the news. I’ve no idea what is happening out there, in the world, where people go to work and meet friends, and have conversations. I’ll ask him to move the radio when he brings the tea. So for now, I listen to the sound of her swallowing, great greedy gasping gulps, and feel her sigh and relax against me, as if she’s abandoning a grievance.

  Ben’s bedside lamp is on behind me, and when he comes back I’ll ask him to turn it off, because its reflection makes it hard for me to look out of the window. For now I must sit here, trapped by my reflection and the reflection of the room behind me: the rumpled bed with its Welsh blanket tossed over the white duvet, Ben’s box of earplugs and the stack of news magazines on his bedside table, the muslins and tissues and glasses of water on mine. The changing table with its hygienic paraphernalia. The books and, out of reach, the radio.

  Though I can’t quite see them, I can hear the people out there on the dark street, coming and going. I listen to the purposeful or desultory nature of their steps on the pavement, the bicycles and car doors, the jingle of keys. Children’s raised voices. I press my socked feet against the lukewarm radiator, willing the evening boost to start.

  I sit here in the yellow chair, in the room where she was conceived, and I’m aware that I’m wishing my life away. Where the fuck’s that tea? I think. The sound of the television drifts up the stairs. Ben bangs some pots in the kitchen. ‘Fishfingers and peas OK? Or would you rather have pesto pasta?’ he calls. Don’t give him a choice, I think. Christopher, locked into cartoons, doesn’t answer.

  Far below me, low in the ground, there’s the distant hum of the Northern Line, a vibration conducted through the layers of ancient compacted earth – layers of sand and mud and clay studded with bones, oyster shells and fragments of pottery, things that people once held precious – before it shivers up into the matchstick foundations of our house, its joists and floorboards, its window frames and door jambs. Feeling the vibration, I think of the illuminated metal cylinders speeding through the tunnels carved into the dirt, the travellers inside them, pushed up against each other, gently swaying together as the blind tracks curve.

  Ben hates this, when he notices it. I love it. It reminds me we’re still part of something.

  I could shout. I could call for him, and when he came, I could ask him to switch on the radio and turn off the light. I could say, ‘Any chance of that tea?’

  She wriggles a little, flinging out her arm, brushi
ng my jaw with her fingers. I feel the tiny laceration of her nails on my neck.

  Nina

  As the pumpkins and the glass baubles come and go in the shop windows, as we sink deeper into the dark wet winter, I see her in the distance from time to time: toiling behind the double buggy in the drizzle, hood pulled over her hair; being expelled from the park as the gates are locked at dusk. Sometimes I toy with the idea of catching up with her and saying hello, inspecting her at closer range, but I never do. Watching her is enough, for now. I can see how she’s feeling: the tiredness, the loneliness. I almost feel sorry for her.

  Despite the plug-in heater and the fingerless gloves and the paint-spattered kettle, the studio is so cold by mid-afternoon that I’m not very productive. Bright mornings, when the sun falls on this side of the building, are better, more stimulating: dazzling air inside and out. I’m still working on the Jassop paintings. Charles, who comes to the studio every few weeks for a companionable inspection, is very struck by them. ‘So this is Kent, is it?’ he asks one Sunday morning, moving around in front of the canvases, examining them, one by one. ‘The place where you lived in your teens? How odd that you’ve started thinking about it now.’

  ‘Maybe it’s something to do with Sophie,’ I say, easily. ‘When we lived there, I was around the same age as she is now. Maybe that’s why. But it’s only an idea of Jassop, really. A fragment of a memory. I can’t really remember that much about it. We weren’t there for very long.’

  ‘Was that before or after Oxfordshire?’ he asks, and I say after, it was the house my father bought with the proceeds of Crazy Paving, when my mother was on her self-sufficiency jag, when she wanted a garden full of sweetpeas and redcurrant bushes, some space for her looms.