by Anna Hope
I’ve got a bonfire needs tending. What are you doing right now?
Cate lifts her head to the window, sees the thin sun, calls back.
The allotment is surprisingly close, just on the other side of the river. There are a couple of other figures dotted there, bent to the cold earth, but she sees Dea immediately, standing alone on a plot halfway down. A small fire going, a pile of bracken and leaves beside it.
‘Wow,’ says Dea as Cate approaches. ‘You look terrible.’
Dea is dressed in faded canvas dungarees, a parka, her beanie on her head, and a large mug in her hands.
‘Thanks.’
‘Is this still the aftermath of the other night?’
Cate shrugs. A couple of old camp chairs sit around the fire. At the back of the plot stands a rickety-looking shed with potted marigolds in front of the door.
‘This is nice.’
‘Yeah, well, I like to keep my end up.’ Dea looks down at herself. ‘Lesbian allotment-holder. Dungarees. I’m ticking a lot of boxes right now.’
Cate raises the ghost of a smile. ‘Where’s Nora?’
‘With Zoe. Her family are over already for Christmas. They’re great, but they’re loud. And the house is small. Where’s Tom?’
‘With Alice.’
‘Well,’ says Dea, raising her mug. ‘It was a great dinner party. Thanks.’
‘Please.’
‘No, really, it’s the most excitement I’ve had for a while. I particularly liked the line about the breaking soldiers.’ Dea raises her mug. ‘And that guy Mark. I liked seeing you stick it to him.’
‘I’m glad you had a good time.’
‘You want a tea?’
‘Sure.’
‘Chuck some brambles on the fire,’ Dea calls as she heads to the shed. ‘They’re extremely satisfying to burn.’
Cate eyes the pile, then goes and lifts a prickly armful, throws them on the flames, watching them twist and buckle in the heat. Dea comes back out with a mug of tea. ‘Lemon balm,’ she says, handing it over.
‘Thanks.’
‘The food was great, though. He’s a talented man, your husband. You were right.’
‘Can we stop talking about it now?’
‘Sure.’
Cate sips her tea, which is green and gently fragrant, and stares into the flames. There is the sweet smell of woodsmoke. Gulls calling in the high thin sky.
‘I went up to the Senate building today,’ says Dea. ‘To check in on the students. They’ve turned off the heating in there. The university authorities.’ She shakes her head. ‘It’s barbaric. I took them a couple of blankets. They’re asking for more.’
‘They should come out,’ says Cate sullenly.
‘Oh?’ says Dea. ‘Why’s that?’
‘What are they going to change? What does anyone ever change?’
Dea looks at her.
‘You know how it is.’ Cate shrugs. ‘Young people become older people. They’ll compromise. That’s what we do. We stop fighting. We capitulate. We become part of the problem.’
‘Right.’
‘The vote’s over. The Tories have won. If the students are cold, they should go home. See their parents. Have Christmas. Get warm. Don’t you think?’
‘No,’ says Dea. ‘I’m not sure I do. I’m not sure you do either.’
She goes over to the pile of bracken, taking an armful of brambles and feeding them to the fire, regarding Cate through the flames.
‘Have you compromised then?’ she says. ‘Is that what’s going on?’
When Cate does not reply, Dea crouches to poke the fire with a stick, rearranging it, raking the burning embers. ‘I meant to tell you,’ she says, after a while. ‘There’s a job going. At the university. It’s just maternity cover, but I thought of you.’
‘What sort of job?’
‘Outreach – all over Kent. Going into schools, helping kids get into higher education. We’ve got some of the poorest areas in Britain on our doorstep – Sheppey, Medway. I’m sure it would suit you. It could be quite creative, if you gave it some thought.’
‘Right. So poor kids can go to university and be thousands of pounds in debt when they finish?’
‘What would you rather? That they didn’t go at all?’
Cate is silent.
‘Anyway, they’re interviewing early in the New Year – they want someone to start in the spring.’
Cate turns back to the fire. ‘Who are you? My careers advisor?’
‘No,’ says Dea, throwing a stick into the flames. ‘Just a friend.’
Hannah
In the car on the way to Jim and Hayley’s, she sits in the back seat, behind her mother, her head leaning against the window as the edges of the city give way to villages and then the villages to moorland, to dry-stone walls, all of it with a thick covering of snow. Every so often, her father brakes for a grouse or a sheep in the road.
Her dad sings tunelessly, happily, to the radio, banging the steering wheel to the beat, while her mother chuckles and tuts and shakes her head. They are excited, on their way to visit their son, their granddaughter: grandparents at last.
She always used to sit on this side, on family holidays – Jim to the right of her, this exact view of the back of her father’s head. Often they would bicker. Once, she remembers, on the way to a campsite in Wales, her dad finally lost his temper and stopped the car, ordering them both out on to the grass verge. He pulled away and left them, and they were silent, horrified, for a full five minutes until he drove back around. Now her little brother is a father. Soon he will be driving on family holidays of his own.
They pull up outside a stone cottage on the edge of a village; it has thick walls and small windows. As they climb from the car Jim appears in the driveway to meet them. He is bigger than Hannah remembers – has put on weight – but it looks well on him. Somehow he manages to be everywhere at once – opening the door for their mum, carrying on a conversation with their father about Christmas traffic and the weather and enveloping Hannah in a hug. ‘How are you doing, sis?’
His vowels. She always forgets how northern he is. She would like to shelter here, in his arms, in his vowels for a while. ‘OK,’ she says into his shoulder. ‘I’m OK.’
He leads the way inside, carrying their luggage into a narrow hall, a Christmas tree in the corner. ‘The bedrooms are all up there. You and Mum are first on the right,’ he says to their father, ‘and you’re at the end, Han. But Hayley’s up there napping with the baby.’ He claps his hands together. ‘Right then. Who’s for a drink before they wake up?’
He serves them all – gin and tonic for their mum, a glass of wine for Hannah, and ale for their dad, and she sees how proud he is, her brother, how proud to be witnessed by them: householder, father, host.
Later, when they have been through the tour of the house, they sit in the living room, where peanuts and crackers wait in small bowls on the tables and a picture of Jim and Hayley’s wedding hangs above the fireplace. Hannah and her parents sit, slightly stilted, slightly hushed, perched on the edge of sofas – an audience waiting for the main actor to take to the stage. There is the creak of the stairs and there she is, Hayley, standing in the doorway, plump with sleep, creamy-cheeked, a tiny parcel of humanity held in her arms. For a moment, no one moves; the tableau is too perfect: the soft-faced Madonna and child. Then: ‘Oh.’ Hannah’s mother gets to her feet. Hannah watches as she sweeps the baby up from Hayley’s arms, her face beatific, transformed. ‘Rosie,’ she breathes. ‘My lovely little Rosie!’
Hannah stands, makes her way over to the group, and sees James’s features on a tiny old woman’s face peering out from beneath layers of blanket. ‘Oh.’ She stretches the tip of her finger to touch the baby’s cheek. ‘She’s so lovely, Jim. She looks just like you.’
Soon the baby starts to cry, and Jim gets to his feet. ‘You sit down, love,’ he says to Hayley. ‘I’ll do the feed.’
He comes back from the kitchen with a tiny
bottle for his tiny daughter. Hannah watches him take her, the care with which he lifts her, the love and absorption on his face as Rosie takes the bottle and feeds. They are all silent, watching, listening to the sounds of suckling.
‘Never did that in my day,’ says Hannah’s father.
‘Don’t know what you’re missing.’ Jim looks up with a grin. ‘The oxytocin. It’s incredible.’
‘Oxy what-what?’ Their father beams.
She goes to bed when her parents do, at ten o’clock. On Christmas morning she wakes early, stands at the window and looks out at the snow-covered fields. The rise of the moor beyond. The baby is lovely. The house is lovely. Jim and Hayley are lovely. It is exhausting, how lovely they all are. She can feel their compassion, their concern whether this is all right for her: Hayley’s gentle, almost apologetic movements with her daughter. Their eyes on her when she takes the baby for a cuddle. Their collective in-breath, hoping Rosie won’t cry in her aunty’s arms. No one has asked her about Nathan. Have they decided amongst themselves that they will not?
This house, with its thick stone walls, its low lintels, its view of the fields and the moor and the steel-grey sky, its family sleeping in the room next door, oppresses her. She does not want to be here. She imagines walking out, through the garden, on to the high, snow-flecked moor. The air would be pure and clean and scouring. She wants to be scoured.
But she would need boots and waterproofs – she has not packed the right clothes.
She wonders how quickly she can get away – whether she can take the train back to London on Boxing Day. She checks the services, but they are scant and expensive, and she already has a ticket for the twenty-seventh. Two more days then, two more days to bear.
She thinks of the books she read as a child – all those maiden aunts, the illustrations showing the glasses and whiskers and good humour and cheer. Always in chairs. Always in the corner. She used to be in the centre of things. She is an edge dweller now.
She is aware that there are different, competing Hannahs within her: the polite Hannah, the good Hannah, Aunty Hannah! who is happy with the invitations to stay, who smiles and sits quietly, and parcels up her pain. And the bad Hannah, who is capable of poison, of madness – the one who wants to stand up, to upend the table, to take the baby and run away with her, to claim what should have been hers. To scream, It should have been me.
It should have been me!
It should have fucking been me.
Lissa
The front door is hung with a homemade wreath; woven willow studded with mistletoe and holly, taken from the bush in the garden. Lissa lifts the knocker and lets it fall. Sarah answers the door in her apron and takes Lissa’s face in hands that smell of turpentine and spices. ‘Happy Christmas, darling.’
‘And to you.’
Lissa has brought gifts: a mug, speckled with a brown glaze like freckles, two beautiful new pencils and a vase to keep them in. Sarah coos and smiles and is pleased. Lissa opens her gift from her mother: a scarf, hand-knitted in fine green wool. ‘It’s beautiful, Mum,’ she says. And it is.
Sarah has made food – seasonal but not traditional, something she excels at, that she invests with an almost moral purpose. When Lissa was small, she used to feel hard done by for the lack of tree – a Victorian invention – the absence of chocolate, of all the tinselly baubley nonsense her friends’ homes were filled with. But now the times have caught up with Sarah, and each corner of the house contains something beautiful: leaves salvaged from walks on the Heath, a table decoration made from raffia and twine. Small glass bulbs are suspended over the table. Candles stand ready to be lit.
Lissa sits in the low armchair; Ruby pads over towards her and she lifts her on to her lap. They drink wine mulled with cloves and cinnamon and star anise. ‘So tell me, any more meetings?’ says Sarah from the stove.
‘One. For Salisbury.’
‘Oh darling, that’s great. Any joy?’
‘No.’ Her agent had called her, apologetic. You’re just not quite what they were looking for.
In truth, she had known the part was not hers as soon as she read the script: a blowsy blonde in an Ayckbourn comedy.
‘I don’t mind,’ she says, stroking the cat. ‘After Vanya it’s hard to imagine doing something like that.’
Sarah brings over the soup, which is a vibrant orangey yellow – there are toasted cumin seeds and yoghurt to spoon on top. ‘Squashes from the garden,’ says Sarah.
They eat in companionable silence, until Sarah puts down her spoon. ‘I wanted to say, darling. You were really wonderful in Vanya. I haven’t seen you be better. There’s a quality you have. A radiance. It’s rare.’ Her mother sounds surprised, as though it has occurred to her for the first time.
‘Really?’ Lissa looks up. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why now?’
Sarah’s brow creases. ‘Because it occurred to me. Because it’s true.’
‘Oh.’
‘Darling, I’m trying to be nice.’
‘Trying?’
‘Oh God, Lissa.’ Sarah puts down her spoon. ‘Don’t.’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t turn a compliment into its opposite.’
‘I just think it’s strange you choose to be complimentary about my choice of career now.’
‘What do you mean? What’s different about now?’
Lissa looks at the clock – she has been here for an hour. There is no one else: no brother, no sister, no father, no child. Only she and her mother, grinding away together like an unoiled axle.
‘I’m seeing someone,’ she says quietly, curling her spoon around the last of her soup.
‘Oh?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Someone lovely.’
‘Oh, darling. Oh. But that’s wonderful.’ Sarah leans forward. ‘Who is he?’
‘He’s a … friend.’
‘Anyone I know?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Already she regrets speaking. Already she is somewhere dangerous. She did not mean to say this – she is a fool. ‘He’s someone I met … online.’
‘Oh. Well, everyone meets there now, don’t they? The internet.’ Sarah waves her hand. She makes it sound like the village green. ‘It would be stranger if you hadn’t, in a way. So.’ Sarah’s face is hawk-like, hungry. ‘Can’t you tell me anything? Does he have a job? A name?’
‘He’s called – Daniel.’
‘And what does he do?’
‘He’s an academic.’
Sarah’s hands come together in an involuntary clap. ‘Well. Well. You must bring him around,’ she says, reaching over and gripping Lissa’s hand. ‘Bring him over for supper soon.’
‘Yes,’ says Lissa, as her mother stands and clears the plates. It has grown dark outside, and when Sarah comes back with plum pudding, she lights the candles on the table. They reflect the room through the dark, gleaming surface of the window, and Lissa sits there, in her borrowed robes, and she shines.
He comes to her flat on Boxing Day. It is sunny, and the snow has started to thaw. They undress quickly and do not speak. She pulls herself on top of him and makes him stay still, watching him, moving very slowly. When she comes she cries out. And when he comes she leans down and takes his lip in hers and sucks it, feeling him judder and fall still.
‘Melissa,’ he says to her afterwards, his hand tracing the curve of her hip, ‘of the Melissae. The guardians of the honey.’
She leans in and kisses him and it is true – with him her core is molten and sweet.
When the evening comes she finds she is ravenous, and he stays in the flat while she goes out to the Turkish shop and buys food: noodles and vegetables and beer.
She cooks for him – she is hungry: for food, for sex, for life, and this hunger is beautiful, voluptuous. They eat noodles and drink the cold beer and she watches him eat, loving to watch this man eating this food she has prepared for him, listening to the low, resonant hum o
f his voice. She reaches across for his wrist, catches it, kisses him there.
‘Are you happy?’ he asks her.
‘Do you mean now? Or generally?’
‘Both. Now.’
‘Now, yes.’
‘And generally?’
She shrugs. ‘Is anyone? Are you?’
He looks at her. ‘How come you don’t have a lover?’ he says.
‘I do,’ she says, watching the complexity of the emotions on his face.
‘I mean – you know what I mean.’
‘I don’t know.’ She pushes her plate away. Outside it is dark already. ‘It’s harder than it looks, finding a good man. So many are so disappointing.’
‘That’s sad.’
‘It’s true.’
‘I always hated Declan,’ he says.
‘Yeah,’ she sighs. ‘He was a bastard. You were right.’
‘I’ve boycotted his films on principle.’
She laughs.
‘I’m loyal,’ he says. And the way he says it makes her stomach contract.
‘Thank you,’ she says, although she knows he is not. For if he were, he wouldn’t be here at all.
‘You never wanted kids?’ he says softly.
She looks up at the ceiling. ‘Not with him.’ She levels her gaze with his and she feels it – loosened, filling the room, leaving space for nothing else. If they were to go back to bed now, she knows, if they did not use protection, she knows in her body that she would conceive – that this is how children are made, this desire, this drenched desire.
‘You could stay the night,’ she says. ‘No one would know.’ She watches his face, sees the struggle there.
‘It’s worse,’ he says.
‘What do you mean?’
‘For Hannah. Me staying. It feels – worse somehow.’
‘Really?’ she says. ‘Worse than us fucking?’
He flinches.
‘Hannah doesn’t know,’ she says softly. ‘Hannah doesn’t have to know.’
