Often she dreams about suckling a child. Sometimes it is Sophie but sometimes another baby, unknown but familiar. Sometimes it is a tiny swaddled Simon. Once she woke sweating and trembling from a dream in which she realised that the baby she was suckling was a crow, its tiny wet rosebud lips protruding from its beak. Her breasts smart when she wakes from these dreams and she lies on her front to squash them against the mattress, squash away the sensation.
Nadia’s feet have carried her to Celia’s street, a row of red-brick terraces most of which have peeling paintwork and radical posters in their windows. She hesitates outside Celia’s, noticing things: the constellation of dandelions amongst the grass, the milkbottles by the front door, clean and wet and bubbly. Celia or Dan must just have put them out. The garden is a mess but this house is painted more smartly than the others in the street and there are tulips in a vase on the windowsill.
How smug she must be feeling in there, how pleased, brewing up the child, filling the house with flowers. Nadia has been here before, been before and looked, not stood and gawped but walked past, shot oblique glances, but now she hesitates outside. There is something she wants to know. Dan might be there, of course, as well as, or instead of, Celia, which would be more awkward. More awkward!
The wrought-iron gate grates on the concrete as she pushes it open. She rings the bell and waits, but the house is settled and empty. No Celia or Dan, no sense of any stirring within. Nadia starts to go but turns back. She is fired up now. She wants to get in. Better if the house is empty. It makes it all the easier if she can only get in. She is not entirely sure what it is she needs to know. But it is something contained in Celia’s house, some clue that she needs in order to continue: to know how to continue. She tries the front door but of course it is locked. She goes down the passage to the back of the house. Here, a yellow nylon tracksuit – Celia’s? Dan’s? – sways on the washing line above the small weedy lawn. Someone has been halfheartedly gardening. There is a turned-over strip and a seed packet stuck on a twig. The back door is locked, but the key is in the most obvious of places, under a plant pot beside the door.
She has never broken into a house before. But this is not breaking in. Breaking in suggests something smashed, a window, a lock. But it is trespass. It is even criminal. And it is thrilling. She could desecrate the place. What is it they do, the breakers and enterers? Shit on the carpet, smear obscenities on the walls. But, of course, she won’t do that. She will only snoop. The key sticks in the lock. She has to pull the door towards her to make it turn. And then she is in.
It is not quiet. Washing sloshes sudsily in the machine, the refrigerator hums. There is a strong smell of paint. The kitchen is very clean. There is masses of fruit arranged in a wide china bowl, polished apples, bananas snuggled in a yellow bunch, fat white grapes. So much fruit for two people, and so perfect it looks plastic. Nadia opens the fridge. There is juice, milk, wine, cheese, salad stuff, half a chicken carcass covered in foil. She picks off a shred and chews it. It tastes of nothing. She sucks the grease off her fingers and closes the door. There is no clue.
The dining room and sitting room both have a stiff, newly decorated air. The smell of paint and new carpets is overwhelming. A flowering azalea competes with flowery curtains, and the tulips she noticed from outside stretch their snouts disdainfully upwards. On the sofa is a heap of green and blue wool, needles and a knitting pattern for a baby’s hat. There are only a few rows on one needle and the wool is wiggly as if it has been much knitted and unravelled. Nadia is pleased to find that Celia is not as good at knitting as she is at everything else.
She goes upstairs. She looks in the bathroom at Celia’s hypoallergenic cleansers and moisturisers, Dan’s shaving cream, ointment for a skin condition, the two newish toothbrushes, their heads resting companionably together. There is no grime. Even the towels are folded. The toilet paper matches the blind. There is a dish of pot-pourri on top of the cistern. Nadia catches sight of her frowning face in the mirror, the unfamiliar red cloud of her hair. She hears a noise downstairs and freezes, her face a comic grimace.
Crazily, she’s hardly considered being caught. What on earth could she say? She strains her ears for further sounds, footsteps, doors, voices, but there is nothing. The washing machine begins to spin, a high-pitched whirligig sound. She goes to the top of the stairs and looks down. There is no movement. No sense that anyone is in the house. It was only the washing machine shifting cycles. And anyway, she has rights of sorts. She has the advantage of having been wronged.
Nevertheless she hurries. It is the bedroom that is the important place, and she goes there now. The bed with its wicker headboard is huge and flat, made tidily with a white lace bedspread over the quilt. There are lace curtains at the windows. A pretty room, calm. She approaches the bed, touches the pillows, then pulls back the quilt. The linen is all pale blue and smooth and cool, quite clean except for one long pale Celia hair. On a cupboard on one side of the bed are a clock-radio, a lamp and a pile of motoring magazines. On the other is a glass of water with dust floating on the top, a bottle of vitamin pills and a pile of books – P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Margery Allingham. She picks up the top one, which has a shopping list stuck into it as a bookmark. She pulls it out and reads: deodorant, courgettes, basil, bog cleaner, whipping cream. She sticks it back, deliberately in the wrong place. She lies down on Celia’s side of the bed. This is where Simon’s child was conceived.
There’s a round glass lampshade on the ceiling. Did they have the light on or off? The bed is firm, she bounces herself a bit. The wicker headboard creaks. That was the sound they will have heard while they were doing it. She opens her legs. Did they do it like this? she wonders. That is what Celia implied, the most efficient, medical sort of position. But who knows? And afterwards Celia lay with her knees up waiting for Dan to come in and fuck her. Reclaim her. And what was Nadia doing at the time, so unaware? She waits for the anger, clenches herself against it, but it fails to hit her, or pokes her only gently, a frayed old fish now, brushing her with its ragged fins. She catches sight of herself in the wardrobe mirror and gets up quickly, feeling absurd. She straightens the bed.
On top of a large chest of drawers there are more books, two about pregnancy and some pamphlets about nutrition. Nadia recognises these, she has some at home – followed their advice during her five-month pregnancy, for all the good it did her. There are also two old toys, a bald eyeless bear and a one-eared rabbit, its pink stuffing leaking from its worn-out paws. The rabbit’s eyes are bright glass, round and scoffing. She looks away.
The top drawer is full of underwear, Celia’s and Dan’s together. So utterly intimate. Celia’s underwear is surprising, all white cotton, childish: bras with wide straps, waist-high knickers. All white – true white, like something from an advertisement for washing powder – nothing grey, and all ironed by the look of it. Nadia grimaces, thinking of her own scraggy tumble of colours and shapes, all mended straps and tatty lace. And then there are Dan’s boxer shorts, pale blue and dark blue, ironed and folded, nestling against Celia’s knickers. So companionable. So, somehow, trusting.
Nadia is moved and repelled. There is a card on top of the chest of drawers, a picture of a koala bear and its cub. Inside is written To both of you, with all my love for ever. Nadia winces, at the purity, the naïvety, the nakedness of love and hope. All my love for ever, she mouths. For ever. And yes, looking round at the order, the evidence of love, care, co-operation and of anticipation, Nadia can almost believe it. She is an intruder, a violator, a rat in a doll’s house: ruiner of order. But no, for there is no ruin. There is only a leaching of secrecy and of privacy, and that will never be known. She looks away from the rabbit to the soft blank eyesockets of the bear. One is Celia’s and one Dan’s, she guesses, grey snuggling relics of their childhood. She looks again at the bed where Simon came one night when she was unaware and then came home to her. It is only a flat white bed, a slab of upholstery. She leaves the room, looks back. Ther
e is nothing of herself here but a smudged reflection, and that she effaces with the closing of the door.
She stops half-way down the stairs, convinced that someone is in the kitchen: someone, Celia or Dan. Or even a burglar, a bona fide burglar. The stair she stands on creaks. She clenches her fists and bites her knuckles, tasting the saltiness of her skin, waiting. But the sounds are only the sounds of a house going about its electrical business. The fridge switches itself off, the washing machine lurches into silence, there is a gurgle in a distant pipe. There is no other movement, no shadows moving on the shiny wooden floor. Nadia dares herself to go down. And there is no one there.
She leaves the house quickly, her fingers clumsy and slippery, fumbling with the key. She stoops to replace it under the flower pot and then straightens and hurries off. The sun is hot on her face and the backs of her legs. As she walks down the street she senses the twitch of curtains, a stir of curiosity and outrage, but when she looks round there is nothing and no one, just the dusty gleam of windows. Truly, there is no one looking. She is just a small woman scurrying and no one is the least bit interested, or cares. And no one will ever know what she has done. How can they know? She has left no trace of her intrusion, but will there be a sense of uneasiness in the air? Surely Celia will feel it when she arrives home, surely she will sense a jarring, a not-quite-rightness? But nothing can be proved. And there is no harm.
Nadia slows her pace, relaxes her shoulders which have been hunched almost up to her ears, lets a slow breath down into her lungs. There is no harm. In fact, perhaps there is even good. Perhaps among all that evidence of love there is the clue she needed. All my love. For ever. Both of you. For ever. She stops to stroke a cat that melts like a spoonful of marmalade on a sunny wall. It presses its triangular face against her hand, purring deliriously. Yes. Good has been done. Nadia tickles the cat’s ears. Dan and Celia are together. No evidence of any rift. No scrap of Simon to be seen. And the baby effectively Dan’s. To both of you. For ever. Nadia is comforted by those words, which have never been spoken to her. Which are actually nonsense, for what is ‘ever’? And who can promise it? But it is the promising that is crucial. Simon would never say that to her. For the foreseeable future is more like it. Now, perhaps he would, perhaps he has changed enough to say that. But does she want him, changed? She strokes the cat from the top of its head, down the hot fur of its back to the tip of its tail and then walks on.
On the way home, she stops at the supermarket to buy Simon some strawberry yoghurt, bananas and custard tarts, all the sweet babyish things he craves as he lies on the sofa all day, watching schools broadcasts on the television. Standing in a queue at the check-out, she is amazed at herself, at how she had the nerve to do what she did. She feels dirty, as if there are smuts on her face; her hands are grimy and hot. But as far as it is possible to see, there is no danger of Celia wanting Simon. That is good. A sort of relief. She fidgets behind a woman who fumbles with her chequebook, drops her pen, tries to chat to the dazed-looking assistant. Somewhere behind her a baby wails, a thin and desperate sound. She looks round and meets the eyes of the child, a solid baby with fat red cheeks, a white plume of hair and a demonic expression. But does she want Simon? Or doesn’t she?
In order to please and surprise Nadia, Simon prepares lunch. Eggs Florentine and new potatoes. In the illustration in the cookery book, the eggs nestle in their spinach nest, glistening and buttery. There is a bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge. He wants it to be all ready when she gets home. If they had a garden he would lay a cloth on the lawn, a red and white checked cloth. If they had such a cloth. But still, it will surprise Nadia, this initiative, it might open her up to him again.
He can’t take it for much longer. Her eyes have turned to stone. If he puts his finger under her chin to tilt her face up to his, if he looks into her eyes, he sees polished granite. He cannot look deep into her eyes, beyond the shiny flecks, for there are no depths, there is only light reflected back, the tiny slivers of his own twin reflections. And the stone eyes gaze past him these days, always past him at the door. Her way out.
He turns on the cold tap and tips the potatoes into the sink. They are tiny new potatoes, prised early from a heavy soil, caked with red clay. He scrubs the potatoes with a brush but the clay is hard. He picks at the scabs of it with his fingers until it softens and comes away. The potatoes slip in his fingers and the water clouds with the dissolved mud. His hands are cold in the water. The floating mud leaves a reddish tide-mark round his wrists.
No use trying to peel these potatoes. He scrapes away at the tender skin, which sticks like wet tissue-paper to his fingers. He scrubs the potatoes hard until they are pale, glistening and bare; pokes out the tiny specks of eyes; and drops them in a pan. He tips the water out of the bowl and watches it flow sluggishly away, the plughole clogged by the wad of muddy skin.
He goes to the window, waiting, wondering whether to begin cooking yet. It is still early for lunch. If he begins cooking now, he might have to keep things warm; the potatoes, the eggs. But if he leaves it, Nadia might return before it is ready and he wants it to be ready. He wants to surprise Nadia with a well-timed, a perfect meal. To prove that he is better. Prove that he is capable, at least, of this gesture.
But what if she doesn’t return? What if he is left with the embarrassment of a wasted lunch? Eggs congealed on stiff lumps of spinach, potatoes sad and cold. She might be lunching with a friend. She might be doing anything. There is no reason why she should return.
The sunshine is golden, even the green of the leaves in the park is a golden green, as if everything has been blessed. The trees stir, not as if there is a breeze, but as if they are luxuriating in the weather, stretching their leaves like fingers, wriggling with pleasure.
‘Go out,’ Nadia said. ‘You can’t stay in on such a lovely day.’ He is nervous, but she is right. Nadia is always bloody right. Experimentally, he takes his car keys from the hook where they have dangled for weeks. There is a letter he has to post. He could have asked Nadia to post it, but she would have asked questions. It is a letter he wrote weeks ago, when he came to a point of resolve, though not a deep enough resolve to go out and post it. Now he has made the decision. The car keys feel friendly, familiar in his hand. Yes, he has. He’ll do that, post the letter and then tell Nadia its content. He cannot guess her reaction. And if it is over between them, which is the message he gets from her stony eyes, if it is over, then it is none of her business.
The sun sparkles on the rich green of the rhododendrons in the valley and between them is the shimmering clash of brilliant grass and bluebells. The air above the road far ahead shivers in the heat and the cars wobble out of it on the road before him. The windows of the car are open and Simon’s hair is blown back by the rush of hot polleny air. It is strange to be out in this real technicolour world, everything is so wantonly bright and fat and lush. The road spins towards him like a rope someone is letting down to free him. Or like a video game: he is the driver and he has to steer, no matter how fast the road furls up at him he has to steer, and veer, in order to win another life. Where is he going? Wherever it is, he is going too fast. His foot presses down as if it is not real, all this metal and rubber and hot tar road, not real but a simulation. But suddenly another car is there in front of him. He is overtaking another car on a bend and suddenly it is there, this real car, this metal box which holds a real driver. He swerves, avoids collision, almost plunges off the road, wrestles with the steering wheel, pumps his foot on the brake and the car grates to an ugly squealing stop. His heart trampolines in his chest. He stops by the edge of the road on the gravel and leans forward on the steering wheel, his face in his hands.
What he saw was a glimpse of terror on the face in the car he almost hit, man’s face, woman’s face, he doesn’t know. He recognised only the terror.
His heart, which almost let him down, patters and thumps. Eventually it slows so that he can no longer feel it, only imagine it like the regular tail-wag
of a faithful dog. His heart will be all right, they told him, no need to worry, carry on as normal, but what the fucking hell is normal, that’s what Simon would like to know.
He has stopped near a pub – The Hawk. He gets out of the car and looks up. The sky is a nonchalant blue. That means nothing, it would be just as blue, flaunting its wispy clouds like so much frilly underwear, if he was dead and buried, if he was mangled in a ton of steel. His face is wet, he wipes away whatever it is, the sweat or the tears, and feels the roughness of his cheeks. He could have shaved. Nadia told him to shave. And now here he is, what is he doing here with the sky so open and the heat shimmer on the road and the hot smell of tar mingled with the lacy scent of some white flower that grows along the roadside? What is he doing here? What is he doing out at all?
And there is sound everywhere now that the engine has stopped, bird song, insect buzz, whispering leaves and, as he shifts his weight, the sound of his own feet on gravel. A motor bike snarls past, its noise a shock that sets his heart bounding again. He needs to go in. He needs a roof over his head.
The landlady is big and blonde and brittle. Her voice grates as she greets him, but he is comforted by her familiar type. The beer is good, he has not drunk bitter for weeks. Nadia brought some cans of lager home but he could not swallow it, it was like drinking liquid tin. This beer tastes entirely brown and runs down his throat so easily he has to hold himself back from swallowing it all at once. There is a baby’s rattle on the bar, and a photograph of a plain, sallow baby in a fancy bonnet pinned on the wall among the darts fixtures.
Nadia has never spoken about Celia’s baby, not again. It is there, a small squalling bundle between them, it is always there, in the air, and there it will stay. Nadia dreams about babies, he has heard her muttering. But what can he do? What can he possibly ever say? If there was a way of going back … He licks a rim of froth from his lips. But the past is set now like a swarm of flies in amber and there is no way of freeing it. He has blown it with Nadia and there is not a bloody thing he can do about it. Eggs Florentine!
Limestone and Clay Page 18
