Her
For Poppy
HARRIET LANE
Nina
It’s her. I’m almost sure of it.
It’s late afternoon, a Friday towards the end of July. I’ve just left the off-licence with a cold bottle wrapped up in paper, and I’m crossing the square, thinking about the afternoon’s work, whether I’m getting anywhere or whether it’s going to be yet another dead end. The sky, through the shifting canopy of plane leaves, is still saturated with heat, and the golden air is viscous with pollen; but it’s tainted, too, with the disquieting scent of the urban summer: the reek of exhausts and drains and sewers, the faraway stench of the ancient forgotten streams that seep through the rocks and silt deep beneath my feet.
I’m thinking about that exact shade of violet – wondering if I’ve got it quite right against the greens and muddy browns – when I see her. She’s on the other side of the square, stooping a little, reaching out to a toddler. The sensation of it, of finding her there in front of me after all this time, is almost overwhelmingly powerful: like panic, or passion. I feel my hands curl into fists. I’m very conscious now of my lungs filling with air, and then releasing it.
Quickly I change course, walking over to the community noticeboard and standing in front of it, as if I’m taking an interest in yoga workshops and French conversation classes, and all the time, while the scene unfolds right there in front of me, I’m watching her, noting the thin matelot top and the rolled-up jeans, the ugly German toe-post sandals they all wear around here, the hair hooked behind her ears.
I watch as she takes something out of her pocket, a tissue or a cloth, and spits on it and bends over the child, wiping its face. ‘Oh, goodness, Christopher, look at the mess you’re in,’ she says. ‘Ice-cream in your hair! How did you manage that?’ and her voice is still the sort that carries, so I hear how tired she is, the way she finds the words without thinking about them. When she tucks the tissue in her pocket and straightens up, I can see she’s pregnant, maybe four months.
The boy breaks free from her hand and staggers off unevenly; a rolling gait, a sailor’s, or a drunk’s. He’s reeling across the square towards me, and now I feel a moment’s terror: Emma’s heading in my direction, she’ll smile at me in a spirit of ersatz apology as she comes level, expecting me to be charmed by the boy, and maybe she’ll recognise me. Or maybe she won’t.
But then he saves me by falling over, stumbling on the gravel and pitching forward onto it, almost comically, like some creature in a cartoon, and in the dreadful moment of silence that follows this she moves swiftly and strongly towards him.
I walk away across the square, not looking back, as the high scream begins, and I’m thinking:
Emma. It’s you. I’ve found you.
And when I pay for the bread and cheese at the deli, my hands are trembling, just a little.
I go home. Without Sophie and Charles in it, the house feels exotically empty and novel, as if it barely belongs to me; it always takes me a few days to get used to solitude, on the rare occasion when I’m alone. Lenka has been and gone, leaving the scent of detergent and ironing hanging agreeably in the air. I wander through the rooms, opening windows and correcting Lenka’s corrections, switching the flowers back to the side table, removing the drinks coasters she has placed fussily under the candlesticks. In Sophie’s room, I find Henry curled up on the bed. He pushes his head against my hand as I bend over him, then lies back, patiently exposing his throat, allowing me to give him more attention. I oblige, and then I go to the chest of drawers and find the packet of cigarettes Sophie has forgotten about, hidden under her school jerseys.
I take the Cook’s Matches and a glass of the Sancerre out onto the terrace and sit there looking out over the garden, smoking. I haven’t smoked for several years, and the cigarette is stale and dry and burns strongly, with a sort of crackle, making me feel a little giddy and sick. The smoke drifts through the honeysuckle and the white poppies, whose papery petals will soon litter the grass.
Charles rings when I’m on the second glass, and I’m glad to hear his voice, glad of the distraction, so glad that I wonder whether to tell him, to try to put it into words.
He is in an expansive mood, on the verge of excitement: the flight was delayed, but he made the meeting by the skin of his teeth, and the pitch went well, he and Theo were the last team to go before the panel, and the contractor just rang to say they’ve made it on to the shortlist. ‘It’s a great scheme,’ he says, ‘A fantastic site, not far from the opera house. We could really do with landing this job. I’m going to stay out for a few days, speak to a few people, do some drawings. I can’t draw in the office, everyone’s on my case the whole time. Would that be OK with you, if I extended my stay?’
Fine, I say. We’ve nothing planned.
‘How are things with you, did Sophie get off OK?’ he asks, and as I say what is expected I’m wondering how to mention Emma – although I don’t know quite how to explain it; it’s more of a feeling than an anecdote – when he says, ‘Oh, just a minute, I’ll be with you in a minute . . .’ and then he says Theo’s turned up and they’re due somewhere for supper. So I say,
fine, let’s speak tomorrow
, and hang up.
Later, I lie there in bed and go back over the scene under the plane trees, analysing it, looking for clues, trying to remember what else I saw. She had a worn brown satchel on a long strap, which banged against her hip as she hurried after the boy. Her hair was lighter than it used to be: dyed, probably. The matelot top. The rolled-up jeans. The bronze sandals. It doesn’t seem enough.
After that, I’m a little on edge when I’m out in the high street or the park. I’m scared of seeing her, and I’m scared that I’ll never see her again.
Charles comes home. The state schools break up for the holidays; the roads empty. The sound of the neighbours laughing in their gardens keeps us awake at night.
My father calls from the house in the south of France: ‘Why don’t you and Charles fly over for a few days, Clara’s learned to swim.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ calls Delphine, a little way away, ‘Tell Nina we want to see her, don’t we, darling?’ There’s a rustling and scratching on the line, and now I can hear Clara’s breaths, her mouth against the receiver. ‘Is that you?’ I say. ‘Clara, is that you?’ And then my father takes the phone back and says, ‘Well, bear it in mind, you’d be very welcome, either here, or in Paris when we get back.’ I say how lovely, I’ll think about it, but we know this is where we’ll leave the matter. Nothing will come of it.
Sophie sends me duty emails, telling me about the work experience her father has arranged in a midtown art gallery, and throwing in the occasional joke about Trudy’s horror of dairy. Once a week I ring my daughter at the apartment, and if Arnold picks up there’s a little starchy conversation: she’s grown so tall, she has been making cupcakes with the kids, the Crawfords have invited them all to the Hampton Classic so could she stay on for a few days? If I’m especially unlucky I’ll get Trudy, with her up-talk, her noli mi tangere formality, her relentless chirpy competence. I’m afflicted with a hateful shame when I speak to Trudy, when I imagine her imagining me: the Englishwoman, the first wife, the rogue Mrs Setting. A woman who retains Arnold’s surname, ‘for professional purposes, apparently’. Of course, Trudy has kept her maiden name, both for her psychotherapy practice and for the social aspects of the life she shares with Arnold and their rigorously scheduled children, Astrid and Otto, whom Sophie calls the brats – though she finds them tolerable in smallish doses.
‘She paints a little,’ Trudy probably tells her friends. ‘I’m told she’s quite well known, in England.’
The weeks go by, rolling into deep summer. Emma, I imagine, has gone away, like everyone else: maybe to Dorset or Norfolk, maybe to Corsica or Crete. I picture her sitting by a stretch of glittering water in a sunhat and (her bump neat and firm) a practical navy one-piece, while her husband – with freckled shoulders and a few days’ worth of beard – takes a mouthful of beer and gets busy at the barbecue, observing that the charred bits add flavour.
So I stop watching for Emma, and it’s a relief to have the neighbourhood back, the freedom of my familiar haunts. I like London in the lazy grip of August: the empty streets spotted with shade, the grass in the parks turning sparse and yellow, the heat coming in hard shimmering waves off parked cars. I turn down invitations from Kate Farrar and the Sharpes, quite glad to be left alone with my work during the day and spending the evenings at home with Charles, eating supper outside as the dusk brings its cool down over the garden. Making the most of the peace.
During these slow hot weeks, as I walk to and from the studio, my mind has started to fill up with colour and texture: greys and browns and sometimes a startling blue. There’s a softness there, and a roughness too. A coldness. Something has started to happen.
As ever, when I feel this, I try not to think too hard about it, in case it vanishes into nothing. I’ve lost too many possibilities this way and those losses always hurt. I do my best to concentrate on the impulse, rather than its implications. For now, in the studio, the brush feels good in my hand and the canvases collect in the racks: the bands of earth and air and water. One sky after another, low indistinct horizons, the smudged bruised suggestion of the landscape.
Michael from the gallery drops in one morning and goes through the finished pieces, nodding and frowning with what I now recognise as approval. ‘You’re on a roll,’ he says eventually, standing back to look at one of the largest paintings, propped against the wall. ‘They’re very atmospheric. I like the way you’re dealing with the emptiness of the place.’
‘It’s a part of Kent I used to know,’ I say, spooning instant coffee into the mugs, and as I say this I realise it’s true: if it’s anywhere, it’s the marsh. Those broad expanses of scrub, the wind-whipped tussocks and trees shaped by the weather, the dark inlets and drainage ditches and channels pock-marked with birds. And somewhere behind all of this, under all of this, is the sea; and above it is the sky.
Because the work is satisfying, it’s a happy summer. Charles lands the Vienna job, and this fills him with relief and good humour. I doubt he’s conscious of it, but he’s glad Sophie’s out of the way. He does things he doesn’t often do: stopping by the Turkish greengrocer on the way home to pick up wooden boxes of flat white peaches (I prefer the cheaper orange-fleshed ones, though I keep this to myself), ringing me up to say he’s managed to get tickets for the Almeida or the Duchess.
Walking down Dean Street as evening falls, I’m as aware of his vague contentment in being here with me as I am of the sticky residual heat of the pavement beneath my thin-soled sandals. In the old days, he would have kissed me here, near a dark doorway that smells of piss. The realisation almost fills me with melancholy.
The relief of finding a new direction in the studio means my sleep is deep and luxurious. I’m spared the dreams. When I wake up, there’s a point to the day.
I try to put Emma to the back of my mind. But she won’t stay there.
It’s nearly September now. The sun has bleached most of the colour out of the city. At night, I’m woken by the sound of police helicopters wheeling round to the estates at the bottom of the hill. It’s a dangerous time of year: tempers are short. The open windows are an invitation to burglars.
Anything could happen.
I’m in the dry cleaners collecting a silk dress and some of Charles’s suits when I glimpse her through the glass. For a moment, she’s caught unseeingly in my reflection – tall to my slight, rosy to my sallow, bright where I am dark – and then she’s moving past while I stand there in the doorway. We’re so close that I can see the silver bangle on her golden wrist; so close that I can smell her, the freshness of the detergent on her clothes (a green cardigan over a pink linen shift, scuffed white plimsolls). Her hair’s loose this time, rather unkempt-looking, as if she hasn’t had time to brush it.
