Her (11 page)

I’m thinking about how wonderful it must feel to make something like that, how satisfying; and to my horror I find my eyes are filling with tears. Partly it’s amazement, I realise, and partly it’s because the landscape seems somehow immediate and familiar, personal in the way that good art can be; but mostly it’s envy. An incredulity that she is free to do this. And that she can.

She comes and stands next to me. ‘It’s quite old,’ she says, ‘I think I painted it five or six years ago—’ and then she sees the expression on my face. ‘Emma,’ she says. ‘Are you OK? What’s wrong?’

‘I’m fine,’ I say, rubbing at my face, incoherent with embarrassment. ‘That’s what happens when you get no sleep and drink wine at lunchtime. But, you know, it just sort of took me by surprise. I love it. The atmosphere. The sense of the weather. I think it’s wonderful. I wish . . .’

But what do I wish? I’m not sure I can put it into words for her. I wish I was as free as she is.

‘Where is it?’ I ask. ‘Or is that a stupid question?’

‘I paint the sea a lot,’ she says. ‘Bits of East Anglia and the south coast. The bleak bits, mainly. Mudflats, estuaries. Sometimes I use old photographs. I don’t like it when the sun comes out.’ She turns from the painting to me. ‘You alright? I remember what we talked about last time. You seemed a little low. You doing OK?’

‘Oh, that,’ I say. ‘I’m fine! Yes, it’s OK. Knackering, of course. But it’s OK.’

There’s a beat of silence, while I wonder what I’m going to say next, and then I hear – with a mixture of relief and disappointment – a wail from down the hall: Cecily, waking up. I look at my watch. Bang on forty-five minutes. My clockwork baby.

As we walk home a little while later – the usual stop/start progress with the buggy, as Christopher hunkers down to inspect ants on the pavement or clambers up onto low walls, trailing yellow crumbs from a going-home cupcake – I say, ‘That was fun, wasn’t it? Lucky you, having Sophie to babysit next week. Did you have a nice time in the park?’

‘I showed her the Hollow Tree,’ he says. ‘And we went to the café for an ice lolly.’

He’s gassing away excitedly – after the swings and the café, they went and had another look for the scooter – but I tune out:
I must order him another one
, I think.
Bound to be on sale somewhere
. The disparity in our heights – his snorkel hood and his habit of directing all his chatter towards the pavement – makes conversation almost impossible, so he talks, I pretend to listen. I’m not missing much. I return to the painting, its subtle insistent presence in the room. I wonder what it would be like to live with it.

Christopher is still going on about the scooter; something about it not being where she said to leave it. It’s all a muddle, as usual. ‘Never mind,’ I say, as we turn off Pakenham Gardens, onto the high street, the trays of rhubarb and oranges set out under the greengrocers’ awning. ‘We’ll see if I can find you another one.’

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

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 entirely 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.’