Her Page 9

  ‘Purple?’ he asks. Yes, I say. Purple, if I can find it. I’ll do my best.

  Nina

  It’s after eleven when the phone rings. It can only be my mother. Charles hands me the receiver and goes off to brush his teeth. I put down my book and sit straighter against the pillow, bracing myself.

  ‘I left a message,’ she says. ‘You’re avoiding me.’ Beneath the complaint, I hear the assertiveness of the alcohol. A rustle on the line as she adjusts her grip on the handset. I picture her in the kitchen, elbows on the table, the remains of supper in a pan on the stove, a plate pushed away; less appealing than the glass. Her hands, the silver band and the garnets, the clay half-moons scraped away from under her fingernails. She was always fastidious about that.

  ‘I didn’t check,’ I say, but she isn’t listening, she wants to say things. Just the usual, the stuff that needs to be said every few months. ‘No, of course I know how busy you are,’ she says, with a punchy little laugh. ‘Of course, it’s hard to find the time to fit me in. I know exactly where I come on your list of priorities.’

  ‘Oh, that’s not fair,’ I say, and then I give up. There’s never any point in taking her on when she’s like this, all booze and bitterness, carefully enunciated. I hold the receiver to my ear and let her talk for a while, two minutes, three, now and then saying, ‘Really,’ and, ‘I’m sorry you feel like that,’ while she rolls on, occasionally breaking for what I assume is a mouthful of wine or brandy, getting wilder and wilder in her accusations. I’ve never made the time for her, all the sacrifices she made, who cares if she lives or dies. All the turned backs.

  ‘Look, I’ll come down,’ I say eventually, as Charles moves around the bedroom, putting his shirt and balled-up socks in the laundry hamper, briefly placing a hand on my shoulder. ‘Tomorrow, if you’re free.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ she says, but I can hear she’s running out of steam; she’s prepared, finally, to be mollified. I say I’ll be there just before lunch and we end the conversation almost conventionally, with goodnights and sleep wells. I hand the receiver back to Charles. ‘One of those,’ he says, slotting it back into its cradle. ‘I suppose she was due another.’

  In the dark, I lie there, grateful for the kindly weight of his arm over mine. After a while, the rhythm of his breath slackens and deepens, and he rolls away, towards the ghostly hands of his alarm clock. I wait, I wait, and it’s no good: the boat is sailing, and I’m not on it.

  I don’t want to think about what I’m thinking about, so I find the earphones in my bedside drawer and plug them into the radio, pressing the illuminated buttons until I catch the signal of a phone-in station: crazies and wasters and security guards on nightshifts. Little bursts of animation: humour and prejudice and loneliness in the dark city. At some point, I fall asleep, and my dreams are knotted ones, unrestful, full of mislaid bags and taxis that won’t stop when I hail them. Handwriting that turns into spiders. Rooms full of people who take no notice of me, and when I open my mouth no words come out, just a sort of dry whistle. Or I’m hurrying up that dark twisty staircase, and – as ever – it’s unclear whether I’m chasing someone, or whether I’m the one being chased.

  This last dream is always the one that comes back to me, and I can feel its persistence the next morning, as I buy my ticket and find my seat in the half-empty train to Sussex. The sound of echoing footsteps, the close dim atmosphere of the stairwell. The sense of something closing in, or slipping away, always just out of sight.

  I turn my face to the window as the train starts to move. Charles suggested I take the car, but I prefer this strange elevated route out of town, the rooftop tour of south London as the carriages rattle between spires and old smokestacks and the tips of poplars; the sudden glimpses into school playgrounds and street markets and quiet litter-strewn alleys, narrow avenues of blackened brick. Little by little the city falls away, like something giving up, and then the acoustics of the carriage change, and we’re out in the open: meadows riven with streams, the fast blue shadows of clouds on the hills.

  I drink my coffee and wait for the familiar landmarks: the three trees dotted with crows, the Theobald farm, the scout hut, the roundabout with the fussy municipal planting. The level crossing, bells ringing, lights flashing.

  Two other people leave the train with me: an elderly man and a boy in his late teens or early twenties, who walks moodily over the footbridge, eyes fixed on his phone. Since the sun is trying to come out, I decide not to wait for the bus, but to walk to my mother’s house: I’ll go the long way round as it’s quieter, more bosky. Once I’ve passed the half-hearted industrial estate, with its mail-order party shop and garden centre offering OAP lunch specials, I turn into the bridleway. It’s rutted and muddy after the winter, the steep banks on either side pocked with foxholes and snaking with roots.

  I always like the idea of the bridleway more than the reality, a fact I only remember as I plunge deeper into it. Murder Lane, I think, as I hurry along, slipping and sliding a little in the red mud, suddenly wanting and not wanting to look over my shoulder. I can’t remember what its real name is now. That’s what we always called it, my mother and I. Some awful story about an abduction, a body discovered down here, long ago, while my mother was house-hunting in the area. Probably the story scared off other buyers; perhaps that’s why she could afford it. All places have these legends, I tell myself. Buck up.

  The bridleway broadens into an unmade road and as I pass a barn and some outbuildings and allotments, I feel the sun strong on my back, and the ordeal falls away, although I may be about to walk into another one.

  My mother lives on the edge of the village. When she first moved here from Jassop, it was because she wanted a change, to feel part of something: how handy it would be, to pop out to the butcher, the bakery, the post office and the little tearoom. Over the years, those signs of life have gone, eroded by the retail parks and supermarkets. The general store run by Rajesh, who commutes down from Orpington, clings on; of the three pubs, only The Half Moon survives (laminated A4 menu, too-large portions of freezer food, biker fights in the car park on Saturday night).

  The cottage is long and half-timbered, set back behind a charming garden full of ferns and brick paths and long unruly grasses. The hens are picking their way over the lawn, gathering under the apple trees. Raindrops hang like glass beads on the washing line as I unlatch the gate, unsure of what I’ll find here today. These meetings can go in two directions: ugly and confrontational, her breath still hot with spirits; or amnesiacally pleasant, no one referring to the conversation that prompted the visit.

  She’s at the kitchen window, washing up, watching for me. She waves merrily through the glass and comes to the door wiping her hand on a tea towel. ‘I’m just making some coffee,’ she says as we kiss hello. ‘How lovely to see you.’ OK, so it’s going to be like this, is it? I think, a little wearily, but also relieved, as she shakes ground coffee into a pot. I take one of the rush-bottomed chairs and unlace my boots, which are clotted with mud from the bridleway. ‘Easy journey? How’s Sophie?’

  We sit at the kitchen table drinking out of the glazed aquamarine mugs, the Kilner jars on the shelf above us full of green lentils and split peas and dried cannellini beans, white and curled like embryos. The door is open to the garden and the murmur of the hens, so it’s a little chilly for my liking. My mother never feels the cold. She flings open the windows in early spring, and they stay like that well into autumn. She believes in vests and layers of jerseys, thick socks and bracing walks. When she visits us in London, she gripes about the central heating, like a memsahib incapacitated by the tropics.

  So, lightly, I tell her about Sophie, just the easy fathomable stuff: grades, clubs, the orchestra. I don’t say that my daughter is edging away from me. I don’t share my fear that one big argument might cause her to detach, to float off towards the people in the background, the people with cars and money and places to go late at night. I don’t want my mother to tell me this is ent
irely natural.

  ‘Sophie’s an angel,’ my mother says, in a tone of mild complaint. ‘Now: you at seventeen. That was a handful.’

  ‘Oh, please,’ I say, because we both know I was a good girl, quiet, shy, busy with my sketchbooks and clay sculptures and camera, taking the train up to London at weekends to visit the Tate, sitting for hours in front of the Turners, while Gillian and my newly separated mother went foraging in the hedgerows for elderflower, cobnuts and sloes.

  But my mother, with a laugh, is off: the clouds of hairspray, liquid eyeliner smeared on the towels, the endless whispered phone calls. ‘What do teenage girls find to tell each other?’ she asks, pouring me more coffee, coaxing the beak from a milk carton, and I shrug, mildly. I don’t know, I can’t recall, and I no longer have enough access to any of Sophie’s conversations, real or virtual, to refresh my memory. We sit quietly for a moment: I’m thinking of Sophie through the ages, her hair in pigtails or curling down to round little shoulders, and then leaping up in a blunt line along her jawline; the appearance and disappearances of fringes and freckles; her mouth filling with small pearls and emptying and filling again with Scrabble tiles. The still point: her watchful, solemn eyes.

  Maybe my mother is thinking about me; maybe she’s thinking about herself. Sometimes it’s hard to know where one of us ends and the other ones start.

  ‘And Charles? How is Charles?’ My mother likes my second husband, as most people do, particularly those who were intimidated by spiky impatient Arnold with his ragbag of grudges. She approves of Charles’s creativity, and also his geniality. I tell her about the Austrian job, the interview he has in Newcastle next week. We discuss my painting, some pots she has just sold through a gallery in Brighton. And when we’ve finished our coffee, while she pegs sheets on the line, certain now of the weather, I scrub the cups and leave them in the draining rack, and put the empty milk carton in the recycling box alongside the wine bottles and the bottle of own-brand vodka, the other things I will not mention to her.

  She makes me lunch: soup, a few cheeses on a wooden board, a salad tossed by hand in the way she taught me: sleeves pushed up over her forearms, the square-nailed fingers coated with oil raking through the leaves. We drink water from the tap. The house creaks and settles around us, as it always does: the wood expanding and contracting with the seasons. In high summer, the front door sticks in its frame, warped and misshapen by the heat. ‘Did I tell you, I had a brush with the police last week?’ I say, because I want to try the story out, see how it sounds. Poor woman, she took her eye off her little boy in the park, distracted by the baby, could happen to any of us. Glad I could help.

  ‘Actually, the mother turned out to be someone I sort of knew,’ I add, and for a moment I wonder if I could tell her, if I’d dare. She would remember. I’m sure of that. And then I think of the empty bottles in the big green box, and I say, ‘I’ve bumped into her a few times. She has that desperate look. Don’t really know what came over me, but I asked her over for lunch during half term. I thought I might offer Sophie up for some babysitting.’

  On the washing line, the sheets and nightdress catch the sun like flags, rippling in the breeze. She said it would brighten up, and it looks as if she was right.

  That evening, I make omelettes using the eggs my mother gave me, the orange-yolked eggs from her hens. ‘Oh, she was fine,’ I tell Charles. ‘She was perfectly normal, as if that phone call never happened.’

  ‘What phone call?’ asks Sophie, coming in from the hall. I didn’t know she was at home. It’s a choir night.

  ‘Oh, she was just in a grump about something,’ I improvise. ‘Anyway, she seemed fine today. On good form. She said you’d be very welcome if you wanted to go down and visit next week during half term.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ says Sophie, fibbing back. ‘But I’ve got a stack of revision.’

  ‘Have you got plans for next Wednesday?’ I ask, tilting the pan so the egg hits the hot butter and foams into lace. ‘Someone called Emma’s coming to lunch, she’s after a babysitter, I thought you might be interested.’ Yes, she’ll make sure she’s around. Hastily, she eats an omelette and pulls on her boots and her beanie and goes off to choir, leaving a particular sort of emptiness behind.

  When the day comes, I open the door to Emma, and as usual, she’s incapacitated by motherhood, like a Victorian morality print: Christopher attached to her leg, the burden of the enormous unwieldy buggy. Smilingly, I stand aside and let her lug it all up the steps. Bump, bump, bump. She’s perspiring by the time she backs into the hall. I feel the embarrassment coming off her as she unwinds her jolly candy-striped scarf and gives it to me, along with her waxed jacket and Christopher’s green coat. The ungainliness of her life sharpens for us both in this setting: the high ceilings and pale walls, the heart-lifting scent of freesias. The order.

  I feel a need to touch her, to experience the heat of her humiliation, so I put my hands on her elbows, holding her still for a moment, and press my cheek against hers. I inhale. Sweat and washing powder, apple shampoo, the sweet sour faraway smell of breastmilk. I turn my head to let my hair fall across her face for a moment, and then I step back, saying how lovely it is to see Christopher again. He’s gazing up at me doubtfully, two grey beads of snot on his upper lip. My fingers itch for a tissue, but instead I tell him the cat’s waiting for him in the kitchen. Unsure for a moment, he weighs it all up, but I can see he remembers this house, he had a nice time here, with his milk and his Smarties, and a cat is a cat; and eventually he peels himself from Emma’s leg and cautiously makes his way down the corridor, away from us.

  I’m aware of Emma noticing it all, seeing the little things. I give her a glass of mineral water, and she turns the glass around in her hand, examining it. Her fingers trace the grain of the table. Taking stock, taking comfort. There’s no envy in her: she’s too tired for that. She’s just comforted to be here, surrounded by it.

  And yet she finds Sophie intimidating. I observe Emma tensing up, asking too many questions, reminded of being on the very edge of things. Left out. It’s a good moment to float the idea of Sophie doing some babysitting. Even though Sophie scares her, just a little, I see the flare of hope in Emma’s eyes: an evening out, every so often. Surely she’s entitled to this?

  As she’s putting the baby down for a sleep, while Christopher lies on the floor, talking to the cat and crayoning on a pad of paper, I tell Sophie – lowering my voice – that I’ll give her a fiver if she’ll take him to the park after lunch. ‘Ten,’ she says, experimentally. ‘OK,’ I say, hearing footsteps coming back down the hall.

  For various reasons I’ve been uneasy about introducing them, but I needn’t have worried. As an adolescent, I was short on the confidence which is – miraculously, horrifyingly – Sophie’s defining characteristic. Sophie always deserves to be in the room. And so, despite the other things that might link that distant faraway me to my daughter (colouring, build, the shape of our eyes and necks and hands), the connection passes unnoticed. It’s not so surprising. At seventeen, I lacked – or believed I lacked, which came to the same thing – those qualities that make an impression, the qualities Emma then so amply possessed, and which she now perhaps recognises in me.

  Of course it’s also possible that the moment itself had had no significance for her.

  Over time, I’ve come to see that so much of a personality boils down to confidence: whether you have it, or not. In many cases, it’s really all that counts. All there is. I started with very little, but found it as an adult, through painting, and through Arnold, through motherhood and all those years when Sophie needed me so passionately. I’d guess Emma, having started with plenty of confidence, has gradually lost it. You couldn’t say we complement each other, exactly; but perhaps in some strange way she complements me. It’s a thought which amuses me as I make the salad – mixing it by hand, as my mother does, so the vinaigrette is evenly distributed – and passing her the wooden servers.

  I can
tell Emma is apprehensively anticipating Christopher’s reaction to the dishes I’ve prepared, which are full of spices and herbs, and I’ve resolved, if he objects, to smile brightly and say oh dear, there’s nothing else, would he like some more bread. But as it turns out, he has a sense of adventure, and doesn’t do too badly. We talk briefly about that afternoon in the park and there’s only one threat of awkwardness, when Christopher refers to the loss of his scooter (‘You said to leave it. You put it in the trees’), but I gloss over this quickly, with good humour, conveying my bafflement, and the tension is quickly forgotten, ascribed to a child’s muddle or fancy.

  When he has finished, I catch Sophie’s eye. Park.

  I’m not sure whether Emma will accept my suggestion. These women are so twitchy, so fearful, so superstitious about the threats lurking out there, lying in wait for their children. To be fair, after the park incident, no one could blame Emma for caution. But no, she thinks it’s a wonderful idea. She wants, I can see, to be alone with me. I listen so attentively, so sympathetically. And Sophie’s very enthusiastic, so pleasant.

  Once Sophie has taken Christopher away, I fill Emma’s glass with wine. Go on, be a devil. Where’s the harm. She’s pinking up, flushed with the novelty and intimacy of it all. I picture her eating her usual lunch in her little kitchen: the plastic plates and bibs, the ludicrous cartoon cutlery, peas rolling around on the floor. You really don’t get out much, do you? I think, as I make her tell me about her husband, a freelance TV director, and the touch-and-go nature of their finances since her own career ground to a halt. She doesn’t go into details but I sense real financial anxiety here, so I say what I’m meant to say at this point, hinting at our own difficulties, but I’m fairly sure that she knows it’s just a courtesy: tact, more than anything else.