by Sarah Moss
Charlotte is still elfin, although now she accessorises her fine blond hair and bird-like legs with layers of makeup and an attitude you wouldn’t want to meet down a dark alley.
‘Hiya, Adam. How are you?’
‘Come in,’ I said. ‘Fine. Mim’s on the sofa, she’s taken up knitting, of all things. See if you can make her stop.’
Charlotte came in, slipped off her shoes, left them at the bottom of the stairs where people would fall over them, and went to hug Miriam, who held the knitting out of the way in one hand.
‘Hiya, girl. It’s been so long! You OK now?’
‘Totally fine. It was only that day, and then they kept me in for another two weeks for no reason.’
I peered into the oven. It was not only that day.
‘Poor baby. Hey, what’s with the Madame Defarge?’
The cake wasn’t ready yet. I straightened up. ‘Have you read A Tale of Two Cities, Charlotte?’
‘Yeah. Last year. ’Cause Miss Smith said it was unreadable so I kind of had to go and read it. Was all right once it got going.’
Mimi looked up from her knitting. ‘Unreadable to Miss Smith. She’d be fine as a TA.’
I gave thanks that I am not a secondary school teacher.
‘I usually find that Dickens is hard work at the beginning and then I get sucked in,’ I said. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
Mimi frowned at me. I was embarrassing her again, being too matey or too paternal, talking like a teacher. I was failing to forget that I’d taught Charlotte to ride a bike when I looked after her every day of the summer holidays between Reception and Year 1, and also carried her past the dogs in the park and cleaned up after she was sick from too much ice-cream at a party. I was not being mindful of my own imminent redundancy.
‘If you two can keep an eye on the cake, I’ll go get on with some work. Take it out when it’s done, OK?’
Mimi picked up her knitting again. ‘How do we know when it’s done?’
Charlotte sighed. ‘Because it looks like a cake you eat rather than like cake mixture and when you press on the top, it’s firm like cake not wet like cake mixture, yeah?’
‘She’s got it,’ I said. ‘Call me if you need anything.’
I sat on the bed with my laptop again. I hoped Dad and Rose were taking so long because they were having a good time rather than because he was too busy doing CPR and dialling 999 to send a text. I hoped the silence was not because the emergency services had called Emma, had called Mum, instead of me.
transmuted
The architect had a vision in mathematics. He saw the algebra of his unbuilt form, an interlocking and repeating pattern of pillars and tracery. He saw a geometry that never needed to be explicit, but once he had seen it he knew what to do.
We all live in patterns we do not see. We are all following magic ravens, even when we are lost. Otherwise, there would be no story.
He saw an ark of British arts and crafts, a treasure chest holding the best and most beautiful things of its age, sending into the future the work of hands that had known war and were now building for justice and for peace. He saw a tradition not ruptured but forged by Auschwitz and Hiroshima. He, who had first seen the stripped bones of churches in French villages in the war, still saw sunlight transmuted by bright glass, saw a robed bishop on a canopied throne, heard boys’ voices rising from carved choir stalls to a vaulted roof. But his pillars were steel, tapering to such a fine point as they neared the marble floor that they seemed more like anchors than supports for a ceiling faceted like a precious stone. His windows, not needing the support of stone, were interventions in the air. His walls rose like cliffs, like bulwarks. His tapestry, Christ in Glory, stood the full height of the building, its solid colours and softness a counterpoint to the brilliance of stained glass, gazing down the length of the nave at the ruins behind.
He fainted, and in a dream saw the windows of the nave not as he had planned them, as bays in curved niches, but set into zigzag walls, invisible until you are half-way towards the altar and then overwhelming. He saw their jewelled light reaching across the floor towards Christ in Glory, colours subdued by cloud and lapping at your feet by sunlight.
When the first design was finished, he did not want to send it in to the competition. It was too much his own, too much part of his mind, to expose it to judgement and perhaps for profit. Don’t be an ass, his wife said. He wrote the report required to accompany each submission and, having left it too late to rely on the post, travelled to London to hand it in himself. He was not entirely surprised to find many of his competitors doing the same thing.
every time you ice a fairy cake
Charlotte’s dad came to collect her on his way home from work. He’d never done the school runs, despite his wife’s work had stayed firmly in the role of the breadwinner orbiting the world of cake sales, sports days and dinosaur/Ancient Egyptian costumes demanded at short notice, and he doesn’t know what to say to a stay-at-home dad. He would of course appear just as I was turning out the cake. Come in, I said, would you like a cup of tea, you know she’s welcome to stay to dinner if she wants, I can drop her back later. No, he said, not to worry, don’t want to put you out, not at a time like this. It would be no trouble, I said, we’re getting back to normal now, but I’ll call the girls, they’re upstairs.
He came to lean on the kitchen counter, watched me run a spatula round the springform cake tin and then open its hinge. His suit gave off an air of car air-freshener and meetings in carpeted rooms, almost visible in our room full of books and old furniture.
‘Looks as if you really know what you’re doing. I don’t get much beyond a ready meal myself. Well, apart from the barbecue in the summer.’
I slid the palette knife between the cake and its metal base and then eased it onto one of the plates from the Chipping Campden pottery.
He shifted his feet, as if his balls were too big for him to stand straight. I never know what I’m supposed to say to remarks like his. Ooh, look, someone who has mastered both peeing standing up and cleaning a sink. Don’t you find, mate, that your dick shrinks every time you ice a fairy cake?
‘They’re not keeping you too busy up at the University, then?’
But you haven’t actually chopped it off, have you?
‘Oh, I’m very part-time there. Just teaching once a week.’ Just to get me out of the house, I didn’t say, to make a change from Pilates and getting my hair done; look, mate, it’s a job, the making of cakes and the washing of sheets, the co-ordination of laundry with PE lessons, the handling of the Christmas shopping and the girls’ dental appointments, and the fact that your wife does it on top of her paid work without you noticing does not make you clever.
I heard the girls on the stairs and at the same time, at last, it having been dark for some time, my father and Rose came back. He’d been showing her the stars, she said, but there was a lot of light pollution and when could we go to Cornwall so she could see them properly; sorry, he said, I should have thought you might be worried, I’m sorry, Adam; bye, said Charlotte, come back soon, yeah, we miss you, and she and Miriam hugged again while Dave tried to exchange a comradely and misogynist glance with me: girls! Wash your hands, I said to Rose, do you have homework, it’s nearly dinner time.
At nine o’clock, Emma still wasn’t home. Rose was reading in bed, having asked politely to keep her light on until Mummy came back, Miriam was knitting again and my father and I were watching her while I did the ironing and he, for no particular reason beyond a need to be useful, polished a pile of shoes. Look after them properly and they last longer, he said in response to Mimi’s incredulity, it’s better for the environment and shows more respect to the people who made them and the cows who died for them. Yeah, she said, but Grandpa, Rose and I outgrow them way before they wear out anyway, well, mostly. Then they’ll be more use to someone else, he said, when you pass them on, and I frowned at her not to say that we recycle them, that children need properly fitted shoes for t
heir own feet and not cast-offs moulded by someone else’s walks and games. I smoothed the iron over Emma’s white shirt, easing out the tension in the shoulders and across the back, bothering also with the tail which is always tucked in.
My father turned the left one of Rose’s favourite green shoes in his hand, smiling a little as he worked polish into its scuffed toe. ‘Emma’s late. She’ll be very tired.’
‘She’s on her way. She sent a text.’
Mimi didn’t look up. ‘She always sends a text. But she’s always late.’
‘Mim, you know what it’s like. They’re down two doctors and the patient list just gets longer—’
‘And the government thinks GPs should be able to see patients all day and all night at the same time as doing more administration and taking more responsibilities for more complex conditions and the whole system is now running on the last dregs of the goodwill of burnt-out doctors. I know. But do you honestly believe they’re all working the same hours as Mum?’
‘That’s not fair, Mim. She’s doing her best for her patients and her best for us.’
No. Honestly, I don’t. Honestly, I think she’s proving something, probably to her father but partly to me, about hard work. Honestly, I think she finds it easier to be at work than at home. Easier to do the next thing and then the next thing from an endlessly regenerating pile than to sit in a room and talk with her husband and her daughters.
‘I didn’t say she wasn’t doing her best. I just suggested that other people might be doing their best in less time.’
I shook my head.
Dad picked up the other green shoe. ‘What’s your current career plan, Mimi?’
She held up her knitting. The scarf, if that’s what it was, was a record of her progress, uneven and lumpy at the beginning and then smooth and now developing some kind of lace pattern. ‘Human rights lawyer.’
‘I’m going to put the ironing away,’ I said.
‘Have fun,’ said Mimi, but as I gathered the clothes we heard Emma’s key in the door.
She dropped her briefcase as she came through the door and sat on the bottom step with her head in her hands.
‘I’m so tired. I didn’t stop once.’
She’d been out of the house fourteen hours. By ‘stop’, she means ‘pee’ and ‘eat half a sandwich’.
‘Poor love. There’s the baked chicken thing with potatoes and salad.’
She lay back on the stairs, her hair spreading across the carpet. ‘Maybe later. I ought to have some water. Is Rose still awake?’
We heard Rose’s bed creak and then her footsteps. ‘Mummy, I got a star for my spellings.’
Emma lay another moment and then I saw her pull herself together, haul herself up by the banisters and push her work shoes off her feet. ‘Well done, sweetie. I’ll come up and you can tell me about it.’
In the kitchen, I tried to arrange an overcooked chicken breast and some slightly wilted salad to look appetising. I would not want the girls treated by a doctor as tired and hungry as Emma.
My father looked up from his shoes. ‘You’re a good husband, Adam. A good husband and a good dad.’
‘There’s room for improvement,’ said Mimi. ‘He’s not, for example, as good at cooking as he thinks he is, it’s mostly the same things every ten days and they’re perfectly all right but they’re not amazing or anything. And he talks too much. But he does all right. Considering.’
an effect realised
He worried, of course, after he’d sent in his design. He thought maybe the Non-Conformists who were meant to share the Chapel of Unity wouldn’t want to be able to see all the bells and smells of an Anglican altar. He thought maybe the font was in the wrong place. He knew exactly the effect he wanted from his stained glass, hidden at first and revealing itself only as you progress towards the altar, the pools of jewelled light seen on the floor before the windows are visible, but he’d never seen such an effect realised, didn’t know if it would work or if the judges would be able to imagine it working. Anyway, every serious architect in England and many from beyond had sent in plans. He was competing with his entire profession. Of course he wouldn’t win. Maybe he might come third. It would be crazy to think of winning.
He thought of winning. He knew everyone else was also thinking of winning. He knew that what a person thinks about between submitting an application and learning the result has no effect whatsoever on the outcome, that he might as well settle down and imagine himself triumphant and his cathedral drawing visitors from across the world in five hundred years’ time, when probably people would travel using technology no-one had yet imagined and eat foods presently undiscovered.
Of course he wouldn’t win.
He went to London for a meeting. The phone on his client’s desk rang. It was for him.
He had won.
He left the meeting and went and sat alone under the dome in St Paul’s for an hour.
Then there were press conferences, drinks receptions – there was champagne again, by 1950, although rationing was still in force – hate mail. Strangers sent death threats, obscene suggestions, proposals of marriage, and some of them, he reported in horror, did not even use a stamp. His design, poorly reprinted in newspapers, was too revolutionary. It was hideously modern. It was an insult to the Church, to the nation, to the fallen, to God. It was a concrete monstrosity. Letters to the Editor boiled across the national press.
He and his wife packed their car and drove across England and France and Spain to the Costa Brava.
Albi Cathedral, a fourteenth-century brick cliff whose great porch gave him ideas.
Gaudí in Barcelona, uninhibited stone.
The steps at the west front of the cathedral in Girona.
He almost telegraphed the committee to say he wanted a raised porch, a sweeping flight of stairs, a figure of St Michael raised high on the right of the approach.
Wait. Wait and think.
everyone to be buried
I woke in the night. The small hours. There were long pauses between the cars on the main road towards the motorway, irregular as the gaps between the last few breaths of a quiet death. On the far side of the bed, Emma lay so still that I reached to make sure her back was warm. A mattress creaked on the floor above – Rose – and something slid to the floor. A book, probably, but there was something wrong, some gap in the silence, something out of place. I remembered an internet story about a mother who had woken in the night, followed her instinct and hurried to the bedside of a child whose heart was in the act – or in the surrender – of arrest, a mother who had been able to start CPR and get an ambulance on the way before it was too late because of this sleeping intuition. Careful to leave the duvet wrapped around Emma’s shoulders, I slid out of bed and trod quietly up the stairs.
I could hear Rose’s breathing from the landing, saw her turn over and pull her toy owl close to her chest. Her room exhaled the chamomile air of small children at bedtime, a smell I was going to miss. Miriam’s door was closed but I slowly lowered the handle and pushed, hearing the sigh of wood on carpet. Shh. She was crying.
‘Dad? What are you doing?’
Creeping into your room at night to listen to your breathing, that’s what I’m doing.
‘Sweetie. What’s wrong?’
A long, jerky breath ended in a sniff. I sat on her bed and passed her the box of tissues from the desk under the window, where a pile of books had cascaded into an array of papers, mostly the photocopied sheets issued by schools that no longer aspire to buy books.
‘What do you fucking think is wrong?’
OK, fine. ‘Don’t speak to me like that. Death?’
She wept. I stroked her shoulder. I can’t help, I thought, I can’t solve it, I can’t call your teacher and have a little chat or advise you to be calm but assertive with your classmates or even make a doctor’s appointment for you.
‘Dad. If I’d died what would you have done with all my stuff?’
I heard my own intake of b
reath. ‘Yeah. I thought about that. I suppose after a while we’d have gone through it and decided what to keep and what to pass on. It would have been painful.’
We would, I did not say, probably have moved house, to get away from the emptiness of your bedroom, or maybe been unable ever to move away from the place where you had lived. We would have had to go away, to take a year or six months and run away from all the places where you had been, and at the same time would have needed to stay where your feet had walked and your hands had touched, where your skin was only gradually departing from the dust and the marks of your grubby fingers were still imprinted on the paint under the light switch.
She was controlling her crying. ‘Would you have buried or burnt me?’
