The Poets' Wives (36 page)

‘Making wedding dresses – that’s a nice job,’ Gillian said.

‘But in no rush to wear one, neither of them,’ she said, making the joke then wondered if she should have.

‘Sure there’s no rush any more. They say women are all getting married later now and better to decide at leisure than repent in haste,’ Gillian said, adding, ‘isn’t that right, girls?’

‘That’s right,’ Anna said. ‘But you’d think we’d be able to find Mr Right in a place as big as London.’

‘You’d think someone would like a nice Irish girl,’ Francesca suggested, playing along with her sister.

‘Their loss, their loss,’ John said in what she suspected was a genuine offer of consolation. And then after silence had settled again, ‘I suppose you’ve come over to spend some time in the cottage.’

Her two daughters looked at her, giving her the time to say, ‘Yes and to help me tidy everything up, sort out Don’s things.’

‘A right lot of books and papers,’ he said, looking around the room and at the packed boxes. Somehow he managed not to see the urn or if he did perhaps mistook it for something else. ‘I don’t know how one person could read so many books.’

‘John’s not a great reader. But I like a good book.’

‘So what do you read?’ Anna asked.

‘I’m sure you’d think it was rubbish but it keeps me entertained. I get books out of the mobile library – the girl knows what I like and always keeps me something.’

‘And did you ever read any of our father’s poetry?’

‘A bit beyond us, I’m afraid,’ John said as his wife nodded in agreement. ‘But it must have been right good stuff if even half of what those other poets said at the funeral was true. And it would never have been in books if it wasn’t best quality.’

Before Anna could ask any more questions she quickly turned the conversation back to the weather and the latest news in the village and nodded as she listened to a long, slow litany of births and deaths, weddings and builders gone bankrupt. When the news had been exhausted they sat in silence for a few seconds until John stood up and announced that they wouldn’t trouble them any more and as she took his cup and saucer from him he offered as his final requiem, ‘The place won’t seem the same without him,’ then formally shook hands with them all before assuring her that he was happy to go on looking after the grass for as long as she needed.

She thought Anna was going to say something about her intention to sell the cottage but her fear was misplaced and after their visitors had departed both daughters stood smiling at her.

‘A good soul,’ she said before any of them could speak and then turned her attention to the fire, kneeling down at the hearth.

‘I’ll do that, Mum,’ Francesca offered, placing her hand on her shoulder.

She shivered at her daughter’s touch and when Francesca asked, ‘Someone walk on your grave?’ she nodded then concentrated on getting the fire going. She felt weary again and without turning her head told them that she was feeling a little tired and if they didn’t mind she was going to have a lie-down before tea. They could call her when things were ready and after making sure they knew where everything was in the kitchen she excused herself and climbed the stairs to the back room. She pushed the door lightly closed after her and shut the wardrobe door that had been left open. Now it gave back her reflection and she turned her eyes away almost at once because it seemed to offer too sharp a scrutiny and she was no longer sure if any of the things she had done were right. She wondered why she couldn’t remember the faces of the young women in the riad – it was as if their full formation in her consciousness had been softened and rendered vague and indistinct. Yet there were so many other things that seemed to press their sharp reality into her memory, some of which she was glad to have, others that she wished could be removed but over which she found herself unable to exercise any control.

Not then married, it was the bed in which she had first secretly slept with Don. Down below she could hear the clang of cooking pots and the laughter of her daughters and the girls’ whispered voices in the riad, see again their ghost-like movements when they glided in and out of rooms or appeared suddenly in doorways, framed only by the light behind them. What ghosts now hovered over the bed with its creaking mahogany frame and ancient mattress? She had been young, but not so young that she hadn’t known what she was doing or what it meant, and if the rawness of desire had been tenderised by the spill of words then she was grateful for all of it. The sun, the moon and the stars. She couldn’t remember exactly but they had probably been present in the moment. Or perhaps it was the sea and maybe even the universe itself where love reached through the dark oceans of space to the very edge of time. So the act of love was leavened with so many words, sifting through her senses like some impossibly warm fall of snow, and if she had taken her pleasure in them then it was as a listener with no words of her own. Even then right at the start no words of her own. Perhaps she wasn’t capable of her own. Then his words had come to a sudden and permanent halt. There was the arrival of children of course and the inevitable silencing of passion but whispered words in the darkness where had they gone? Then there was only the inarticulacy of need, the years of taking whatever was required for self. Had she been a fool? She didn’t think so because what she had once felt was as real as anything she had ever known and if with the passage of time she had come to feel something entirely different it didn’t lessen the truth of that earlier experience.

She felt cold and hugged the duvet tighter. Even when everything else might have gone it was what she missed the most – the simple shared warmth of a bed. Perhaps she would be foolish to shut the door to that possibility, however slim, in the future. She felt confused about everything and above all what still had to be done. Too late now to go back but even that knowledge failed to renew her sense of resolution. So in the morning when the light was bright and young she would go to the end of the pier and slip the ashes in the sea. And she would be watched over by her two daughters who even now were making her a meal – she couldn’t remember the last time such a thing had happened. Perhaps as far back as when they were teenagers and it was Mother’s Day. What did they think of her? What did they really think in those moments when they were able to set aside what they were expected to think under the bind of filial obligations? As she listened to the low murmur of their voices, unable to distinguish the words, she felt once more that she had failed them but in ways to which she could no longer give a simple name.

The ghosts of their childhood were in the cottage too. Their fall-outs and their laughter. Huddled at the fireside around their father as he read the Narnia books, urging him to read on when he pretended he wanted to stop. It wasn’t just a way of postponing bed – she could see it in their widening eyes, flecked with the fire of imagination, that they were desperate to follow the story’s steps ever further. And once when Rory, exhausted by the day’s activity, had drifted into sleep, his father had carried him in his arms up the stairs and gently slipped him into bed the way he might slip a letter into an envelope. She too had been a child in this place. She tried to remember the life that child had dreamt for herself but nothing would come. Perhaps she never dreamt; perhaps that was the seed of her failure, always just being prepared to accept whatever happened. She thought of the sea dreams of the poetry and slipped a page out of her pocket and read the poem about Rory again. She had read it many times already but it had not lessened her confusion or understanding about what it really meant. She looked across at the pillow where her husband’s head had once rested and wanted to ask him if his poem was true, if the words were real and not just images that were momentarily infused with whatever fleeting meaning coloured them. Was the poem a true offering to his dead son or just another tribute to some divinity he hoped would benignly bless his words and disperse them like holy seed? Just another way of ensuring the propagation of his own life? If it were true why the need to put it in a book? Why the need to give it to anyone other than his son?

She had first slept with Don in this bed that seemed now to be cavernous and patched with coldness. So it was here in this very place that she had thought love held out to her the possibility of something that could endure in the face of life’s transience and here she first came to believe that words were strong enough to bear you up above the reach of whatever it was in time’s grip that deadened and rendered all else meaningless. But what were words now without love? She tried to tell herself that words alone had no special claim over life, that it was the heart that spoke truest always, but even in the same moment her conviction faltered because she knew that throughout her life she had believed words were holy things that should be reverenced. Always she had bowed her head to them and so it felt strange even then to fold the page again and replace it in her pocket as if it was entirely at the mercy of her control.

She would sleep now and when she woke share whatever her daughters had made for her. She found it difficult at first and wondered if a glass of wine would have helped but then her body somehow generated enough heat to smother the coldness nipping at her and freezing so many of her memories into what seemed like an icy permanence. She looked at the wardrobe with its shut door, its frosted mirror with the mottled glass. Had any of her children ever tried to hide themselves in it or intoxicated by the stories thought it might be the portal to some magical world? She thought again of Jiao stumbling out of the back of a lorry, momentarily blinded by the light and then opening her eyes to what she thought would be a better place. Rory far from his home, mysteriously taking a narrow night path under the stars; his fallen body looking as if it was only sleeping. Everything drifted hazily through her and then a sea was ebbing slowly out and gradually she released her weariness to it and let herself slip into the solace of sleep.

When she woke she was confused for a second about where she was or how long she had slept. The bedroom window was a dull square of grey and then she was conscious of the smell of cooking and everything came tumbling back. The door was bevelled by a thin strip of yellow light. She knew she had to get up but it felt as if even the greatest act of will couldn’t lift her head from the bed so she closed her eyes again and tried to ease herself slowly into waking. She was frightened she had slept too long, that she had spoilt her daughters’ meal. And then there were footsteps on the stairs, light as a child’s, a knock on the door and Francesca’s voice asking if she was OK and telling her that the meal would be ready in about twenty minutes. She didn’t want her daughter to come in and see her so sleep-muddled and was glad when at her reply the footsteps went away.

She smoothed some of the creases out of her clothes and in the bathroom splashed her face. In the mirror it looked blotched and she tried to conceal and restore it with make-up and a brush of her hair. When she was satisfied that she had made the best of herself she sprayed a little perfume on her wrists and then, after lightly touching the mirror with the tip of one finger as if in her own private leave-taking, she closed the door and holding on to the handrail went carefully down the stairs.

It was not what she expected to find. They had cleared Don’s desk and moved it into the middle of the room, covered it with a cloth that she had forgotten was in the back of a drawer and formally set the makeshift table with the best plates and glasses that could be found in the kitchen cupboards. Only the blazing fire and candles on the table that were pressed into saucers or jam jars now lighted the room. In the middle of the setting were the white chrysanthemums arranged in a blue glass vase that she recognised as a wedding present from a lifetime ago. Suddenly she remembered the urn and looked around the room desperate to see it.

‘The urn?’

‘Over there on the bookcase,’ Anna said. ‘Don’t panic – we haven’t got rid of it.’

It nestled inconspicuously on one of the shelves she had cleared of books. She nodded and looked again at the table. They were using four chairs out of the kitchen.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘What made you do it?’

‘Just as a small thank you and I suppose as a farewell to the Don,’ Anna said as she opened a bottle of wine. ‘A kind of last supper.’

‘Is that why there are four chairs?’

‘No, we’re not setting a place for the Don – it just looked unbalanced with three,’ Francesca said.

‘Can it be for Rory?’ she asked before she could stop herself and then observing the glance that passed between her daughters knew she shouldn’t have said it.

‘It can be for Rory,’ Francesca said and she was grateful for the kindness. ‘Sit here, Mum, where you can see the fire.’

Her daughters looking after her like this made her feel old and then she realised that sometime in the future they would return once more together to take care of everything that had to be done. She knew that she would make it straightforward for them, have all her affairs settled and easily accessible. There would be no list of requirements except a desire for as simple and speedy a conclusion as possible. She looked at their faces and even in the softened light saw their sharp excitement, their childlike desire to play at making everything perfect, and for the first time she felt both the pleasure and the inexpressible sadness of having children.

‘There’s nothing matches,’ Francesca said. ‘Everything’s a bit hotchpotch.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.