by Rosie Chard
Me. I wasn’t prepared for this. For so long I had conjured up this scene from the sidelines. I was the one who watched, who recorded the events, I never imagined for a moment I would actually be there.
“And my father?” I said, picking a morsel off the side of my bun.
Harold looked awkward. “He wasn’t really there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, how to put it? His body was there, the shirt ironed, and his hair combed, but he. . . his spirit was somewhere else.”
“So I was alone?”
He wiped a spot of grease off the corner of his mouth and tried to smile. “Yes, I suppose you were.”
Page thirty-seven felt thicker than page thirty-eight. And it was loose. So loose that it escaped its binding and slipped onto my lap when I turned it over. But it was not a page at all. It was a note.
Darling Wilf.
I love you,
Miriam.
I clamped my hand across my mouth just in time to catch the spoonful of tears running down my cheeks. I ripped off the top half of the note and threw it on the floor, then I slipped the bottom half into my pocket and rushed upstairs. A ruler of moonlight fell onto my sheets when I sat on my bed with the note on my knee. With a shaky hand I picked up a pencil and wrote a new first line.
Darling Edith.
40
My father was back. Two weeks had passed since he had approached me in the garden, two whole weeks free of pauses, free of long, lingering looks, but now he was back, hovering awkwardly in my part of the garden, his shadow lying on top of my hands as I weeded the soil. The oak tree framed his head when I turned to look up; a branch seemed to grow out of his ear. “Is there something —?”
“No.”
To be suddenly so immobilized was hard. I watched an ant rush across the soil. Then I sensed movement; my father’s shoulder brushed mine and he knelt down beside me, picked up the trowel and rammed it into the earth. He had a deft touch. First he slid a dandelion out of the ground and shook the roots naked and then he smoothed the hole away as if it had never been. I glanced at his face, his eyebrows apart, cheeks relaxed and saw what could be mistaken for a smile on his lips.
I did not hear Vivian coming at first. A puff of dust registering in corner of my eye was the only sign that someone had entered the garden. It could have been the wind. My father and I turned to look at her together; the branch now seemed to be sprouting from my aunt’s cheek. “Wilf. . . what are you doing?”
My father dropped the trowel as if it was hot. “Nothing,” A classic denial, a small boy’s word.
“Looks like you were helping her.”
I looked away. A massive pair of knickers shimmied on the washing line behind him, twisted by invisible hips into a display of wind-blown spite.
My father got to his feet and looked at his sister, his face empty of expression.
“Looks like you were helping her,” Vivian said again.
I forced my attention back to the line; a pair of trousers batted the knickers. Then I looked at Vivian, whose lips were horribly pursed. “I don’t like what’s happening in this garden,” she said. “It takes up too much of her time. And where do all these plants come from?”
“Archie,” I said.
“Why am I not surprised?” She edged round the dead dandelions before stepping onto a patch of newly planted perennials. I watched, silent on the outside, as she moved across the ground, crushing a plant beneath her feet. Then she pulled a tissue from her pocket, gently, almost too gently, reached to the ground and wiped mud from the back of her heel.
I gazed at my father. It must be possible to speak without speaking. But he turned away without meeting my eye. Then, crushing the head of a bedraggled survivor with the tip of his shoe, he walked towards the back door.
That night, I tried to see what my smile looked like in the bathroom mirror. My lips curved obediently up, my front teeth emerged but the shape of my face remained the same. Then I tried out a laugh, but my throat only gurgled and the edges of my eyes screwed up like creases in a handkerchief that has been in a pocket too long.
I studied the parts of my face: the tight cheeks, the grey mole to the right of my nose and noticed an eyelash that was bent inwards. I moved closer to the mirror to straighten it. My mother’s face was there somewhere. The downward slant at the corner of my eye must be hers. The straightness of my hair: inherited from my mother, it had to be. And the way my lips parted when my face muscles relaxed was what had made my mother so distinct, I was sure of that. I moved closer. What had made my father fall in love with my mother? I shivered. My father was incapable of love.
41
A slow, dripping dread preceded outings with Vivian. Originating deep in the pit of my stomach, it would start the moment I woke up, continue over breakfast and reach a peak as I pulled my jacket off its hanger. My aunt spurned the greetings of passers-by whenever we walked down the street, responding to the nodding heads of neighbours with a clipped smile and to the raised hats of elderly gentlemen with a well-glazed stare. We rarely walked together. My attempts to remain beside her were always thwarted by her abrupt surges of speed, yet if I slowed down I’d be instantly scolded. The entire event was guaranteed to be miserable from start to finish and on a nippy day in May, as I rushed to keep up, I felt relieved, yet concerned, to spot a diversion ahead.
Nancy Pit was striding towards us with an air of unmitigated purpose hanging about her shoulders. Vivian registered her presence with an almost imperceptible hiss that whistled through gritted teeth. She walked faster but Nancy sped up too and I grew anxious, seeing pictures in my head, nails breaking, handbags in mud.
The two women came to a halt at the same moment, a total of four feet settling into the same piece of pavement.
“Nancy,” said Vivian, cold as a slab.
Nancy Pit attempted a smile. “Vivian. I was coming to see you.”
“I’m in a hurry,” retorted my aunt, her nostrils suddenly conspicuous.
“It won’t take long.”
“I’m in a hurry.” Same words, but the ‘h’ was heavier, weighed down with spite.
“Do you really want us to have this conversation in front of your niece?” Nancy Pit glanced in my direction.
“Are you threatening me?” said Vivian. Her collar tightened, pushing out a fold of neck that hovered like a blob of custard on the edge of a saucepan. Then something seemed to radiate from my aunt’s body, something invisible yet so vile it was palpable. Even as a silent onlooker my heart raced. Nancy Pit stepped aside, into the adjacent paving slab.
“No, Vivian, I’m not threatening you.” She tightened her hold on the strap of her handbag. “I just want to talk.”
“We have nothing to talk about.”
Nancy Pit looked at me: I couldn’t read her expression, then she turned around and walked back down the road, not slow, not fast.
Normal circumstances might have prompted an explanation. A passing reference to the incident perhaps, a small acknowledgement sent via shrugged shoulders, but Vivian just strode on, pushing a stray hair behind her ear and maintaining her six-foot lead as if nothing had happened.
“Archie?”
“Mmm?”
“Do you know a woman called Nancy Pit?”
He sat back on his heels. We were crouched in his garden pulling toadflax out from his carrot seedlings. “I most certainly do. She’s worked at McIntyres’ for donkeys’ years. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, I just wondered.” I swallowed. “Archie?”
“Yes?”
“Have you ever seen him?”
The trowel paused. “You mean Edward?”
Edward. Standing alone, the name verged on friendliness.
“Yes. . . Edward Black.”
He hesitated, firmed his lips then let them go. “Not for a very long time. It must be years since I last saw him. He keeps himself to himself. Probably doesn’t care for people anymore.”
“Anymore?”
I stared at the pile of pulled weeds, already dry on the edges. “Why am I part of this, Archie?”
“You must ask your father,” he repeated, arching his back as he bent to dig the soil.
Ask your father. Didn’t Archie know me at all?
Edward. Capital E, six letters, two syllables. Stripped of his surname, my neighbour seemed younger. Edward without Black seemed less frightening. I even managed to speak his name when I was alone in my room. And speaking his name pulled my lips upwards at the corners. The same muscles that created a smile.
42
Two days after the encounter with Nancy Pit, I heard an unfamiliar sound in the garden. I threw a shirt over the clothesline, leaving it pegless and helpless, and then I followed the sound of laughter that was coming over the low wall. Archie and Dotty were just visible, crouched in the vegetable patch examining a withered lettuce. They looked up together and smiled. I heaved myself up onto the wall and jumped down onto Archie’s side. They grinned like a pair of proud parents as I walked towards them. Dotty patted the patch of grass close to her knee and I sat down beside her. “I was hoping to see you,” she said, one eye on the back of my house.
“They’re out,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“Remember the day we went to the plant fair?” she began. “After you had gone home Archie offered me another cup of tea. I have something for you, but I wasn’t sure how to give it to you.”
“What is it?”
“Not it. Them. They’re in the shed. Come, I’ll show you.”
A group of bags were lined up beneath the window of the garden shed. They had a dejected look, damp where they touched the floor and crumpled at the point where they leaned against the wall.
“What’s inside those bags?” I said.
“I’ll show you.”
“More perennials,” she said. “But I have a confession to make, the flowers aren’t all blue.”
“What colour are they?”
“Orange.”
“Oh. . .”
“And yellow.”
“That’ll look nice next to the. . .”
“And red.”
I looked into her face. “Dotty.”
“Yes, darling?”
“Archie says blue is the colour of dreams.”
“I suppose it is.”
“So, what is red the colour of?”
“Passion!” she cried, turning a circle and planting a kiss on my cheek. “You knew I’d say that.”
“Dotty, they’re lovely, but how am I going to explain these to my father?”
“Say I gave them to you,” said Archie, appearing in the doorway. “I’ll keep them for you until you’re ready — Edie, you look tired.”
“Oh, Vivian wants the house to be perfect, all of the time.”
Dotty took my hand. “Edith, would you like to come to my house?”
“To live?”
“Oh, darling, no. I meant for a visit.”
“I’d love that, but I’m not sure it’s possible. . . the way things are. . .”
“What about this evening, late?”
I pictured this evening, every evening. “It would have to be very late.”
“Any time. Just come if you can. Twenty-seven Beaverbrook.”
It was eleven o’clock before I heard the snoring: a distinct sound, more exhausted dog than human. Normally it was the sign to get my plant encyclopedia out. That night it was the signal to get dressed and leave the house. It had been a few hours since Dotty had invited me to her house and I was stiff from waiting.
I switched on my bedside lamp. Its paltry twenty-five watts struggled to throw light beyond the end of my bed and it took a while to find my skirt at the back of the wardrobe. Shivering, I pulled a shirt over my head, stifling the urge to stamp my feet as a draught circled my ankles.
The street lamp outside my house had blown its bulb and a swath of extra-velvety darkness hung over the street. I eased open the garden gate, willing it not to squeak, and concentrated on the kerb as I started walking up the hill. I’d only advanced a few steps when I noticed a light in the house next door. I couldn’t help but stare at the yellow square that punctured the dark but as I gazed up, another light came on and I stepped back, briefly mesmerized by the curtains that were glowing with borrowed light. Then the silhouette of a person appeared at the window. I stood there, paralyzed by a single thought. The high wall — built with bricks and stones and mortar and aching backs — had been replaced by a veil of cotton. Mere threads stood between us.
I turned up the street and ran.
“Darling! What happened?”
Dotty wore a suit. Half past eleven at night and she still wore a pale green two-piece, buttoned up to her throat. The sight of it relaxed me as she ushered me into her living room and led me to the sofa where she pressed a cushion into the small of my back and sat down beside me.
“I saw him.” I said.
“Who?”
“Edward Black.”
“Where?”
“At the window.”
“What window?”
“His bedroom window.”
Dotty leaned towards me, “Did he see you?”
“I don’t think so.”
She flicked a crumb off the front of her jacket. “What did he look like?”
“I don’t know. He was behind the curtain.”
“How do you know it was him?”
“I don’t.” I paused. “Dotty. . . he didn’t stand in the way I thought he would.”
“What do you mean stand?”
“His posture, it wasn’t how I’d imagined it.”
She nodded, but said nothing.
“Dotty, why do I never see him in the street?”
“Do you want to see him?”
“No — but I have to be on my guard, my father says.”
“It is odd that you never see him, though.” Dotty had found another crumb, on the corner of her lip. “How old is he?”
I was getting an odd taste in my mouth, metallic. “I think he’s my father’s age but I don’t know how I know that.”
“Does he live alone?”
“I. . . yes.”
“And you’ve never seen anyone leave the house?”
“Never.”
“Edith, what’s the matter?”
“I don’t know.”
“We need a drink. I’ll be back in a second.”
Left alone on the sofa, I noticed my surroundings for the first time. A lone plate sat on the coffee table and a single pair of tights draped the radiator, yet the room had a comforting, lived-in look to it. Not threadbare and worn like my own home but comfortable in a freshly ironed sheet sort of way. I lay my hand on the imprint Dotty had left on the sofa. Still warm.
“Whiskey alright?” Dotty was back in the room, holding a tray in her hands.
“Alcoholic whiskey?”
She smiled. “I made you a small one.”
I sniffed my glass.
“Would you prefer juice?”
I sniffed again. “No, this is fine.”
Velvet fumes drifted round us as we sipped our drinks. I let my head rest on the back of the sofa; I gazed at the blank television. Two people were reflected in the grey screen, arms, legs and heads symmetrical.
“Do you watch much TV?” Dotty asked.
“We don’t have a television.”
“What do you do in the evenings?” she asked, looking appalled.
“My father likes the crossword.”
“What do you like, Edith?”
No one had asked me that question before. “I listen to the radio and there’s. . . my garden.”
“Ah, yes. How are those ugly salvias doing?”
“Growing,” I replied, smiling.
“I would love a closer look one day.”
/> I froze. “Closer?” I turned towards her. “You saw it. The wall, you’ve seen it already, haven’t you?”
She oozed guilt. “Yes, I saw it. It was that first day we went to Archie’s.” She looked down at her hands. “I didn’t want to say anything.”
I felt queasy. “I forgot it was there. Dotty, can you believe I forgot it was even there?”
“We didn’t need an introduction.” She smiled faintly.
I looked at the floor. “No.”
“So,” she said, putting her feet up on the coffee table, “how do you like my lounge?”
“It’s lovely.”
And it was. The carpet was so thick I had left footprints in it. I could see them coming towards me from the door. Everything exuded comfort: puffed-up cushions sat on every chair, a blanket straddled the back of the sofa and a pair of slippers was parked up in front of the radiator, which clicked like the keys of a typewriter. There was something luxurious about having the heating still on so late at night and I walked over to the radiator and ran my hands over the hot metal. From there I noticed a photograph sitting on a writing desk in the corner of the room. It depicted a man’s face up close, just eyes. Something drew me over to the desk. Something about the eyes.
“Dotty, who’s the man in this photograph?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s Victor,” she replied with a wave of her hand.
“Is he —?”
“My lover? Yes.” She re-organized the crumbs on her plate, pressing them into straight lines with the blade of her knife.
“Does he live round here?”
“Oh no, Australia.”
“Australia?”
“Yes, down under.”
I looked back at the photograph. “I don’t understand. When do you see him?”
“I don’t.”
“But Dotty, I still don’t understand, how can he be your. . . lover?”
“Good question.” She shoved the cushion further down her back and folded her feet beneath her bottom. “We met as pen friends. . .”
