‘Yes, yes,’ I said in bored tones.
‘I’ve never met such a tribe of madwomen in my life.’
‘Look, darling. Just because you’re the exciting one among your goody-good swot gang from school – the obvious shining star among a load of dullards. They don’t deserve you.’
‘But they’re my old friends,’ said Lelia, as she always did in this particular discussion. ‘I actually like them.’
‘Fine. But let’s not invite a new twitching academic into our midst.’
‘Oh, she’s not like that. She’s just a bit shy. Anyway, didn’t you nearly invite her over too, you hypocrite?’ she said, grabbing my shoulders and widening her eyes to bring them up close to mine. ‘Didn’t you?’ We kissed, banging our lips together on purpose.
‘Did I?’ I said, frowning. ‘Oh yes. I felt sorry for her. Yes, well, she can be as shy – boring – as she wants, because we’ve got other company on Friday.’
‘What?’
‘The Fearons. Da-der! They’re all trolling up from home. All of them except Rachel.’
‘Oh, my God.’
‘Let’s invite MacDara to disperse things a bit.’
‘OK, but please don’t get all upset by your family. I can’t bear it.’
‘Yes, yes. At least they’ll save us all from crashing boredom, thanks.’
My slacker siblings operated as a squabbling gang. Only Rachel was absent: the less obviously loved, oldest girl, who had always perplexed my mother with her solemn, plodding ways, had escaped to Edinburgh, as driven as I was. I felt protective towards her, and empathetically hurt for her, and I had always kept in touch with her. Our parents had separated when I was in my late teens, and I always felt that my mother, having spent years balancing my self-employed architect father’s wildly fluctuating income through the rural shambles that was our childhood, deserved an easy coast into old age. But now, touchingly, hopelessly maternal as she was, she had shouldered the responsibility of three lumbering adult offspring.
Those three arrived at Mecklenburgh Square in a van on Friday afternoon, never considering that I might have work to do, and were amazed and flustered by having to pay for a parking voucher. And I, as I had dully anticipated while restless in the night, was required to throw pound coins on to the pavement below because nobody possessed enough change.
‘Fuckers,’ I growled at Lelia.
By the time MacDara arrived to buffer me from irritation, while Lelia warded off ancient family wounds, the air was thick with Old Holborn, and tea bags sat in pools of tannin on the stove, and various urgent calls had been made, interspersed by indignant crises about the parking which I was supposed to solve, and trips to the van to fetch acceptable music, our own CDs rifled through, dismissed and restacked in a sliding topple. Finally, the combination of wine and falling light and the right Brazilian music had made them happy, and when Sylvie arrived, they were stretched out and mellow beside the Christmas tree, the girls laughing with their dirty cackles. Clodagh, Bethan and Dan. The three youngest Fearon siblings, drifting on the back of their exquisite misbehaviour into adulthood, shored up by various benefits and dodges. Alien creatures to me, some years younger, many times less responsible, yet familiar as my own breath, my own blood.
‘Save me,’ I muttered to Lelia, who was dressed in some brightly patterned skirt she said was new and the high heels in which I always fancied her. I made her giggle by pretending to grab her fanny while the others weren’t looking.
Sylvie disappeared, re-emerged to help Lelia, and became invisible once more, or I forgot about her; MacDara took a long phone call from some American bank in my study, and I was left cooking for the Fearon slackers, and began to revel in their demanding company and my own age-old affection for them. What an uptight bastard I was, after all, with my mortgage and books and petty concerns. They, in contrast, had all the freedom in the world, living as they did in cheap outbuildings and barns near our family home; taking odd jobs, signing on, stinging our poor mother, who had to take in lodgers to support her own kindness, for funds. A louche, afternoon existence of dressing-gowns and Rizlas and smoked salmon despite poverty, and the meandering cordless phone calls of the depressive. A new world, a new language, of goats and blims, of pink diesel, festivals, barn roofs, bidis, CD burners, eBay purchases, bailiff avoidance and infra-red detection. They told me local gossip involving various monosyllabic farmers, the WI, inbred neighbours, and it was as though my childhood ran before me on a cinema screen. I drank wine and laughed at their excesses, goading them to reveal more. MacDara had joined in, putting on what he thought was a Cornish accent, interrupting and bellowing out indignant questions as he sat, his large bear’s body crumpled into a cross-legged position beside the others on the floor. We lobbed tangerines across the room to one another. Sylvie was in the room, and I had introduced her, but she remained invisible, even quieter than before. I forgot about her, noticing her only in pauses between drinks and cartoon images of Bodmin Moor. Lelia, animated, sweetly included her, but otherwise she was silent.
I glanced at them together: flesh and air; a woman and a ghost.
Lelia talked, cutting bread, bending differently over the table because of her heels, and angling glances at me: the subtlest arrows, loaded with irony that only we understood; promises of hilarity later in bed about the ways of the slackers. When contentious subjects nudged into the air – money, mine and theirs; the inequalities of the Fearon household; ancient favouritisms – she caught my eye again, instantly prepared to do battle on my behalf. Though we squabbled frequently about my siblings, we were now united in the face of them. My everyday love welled up and filled me. I stretched the length of the table, its edge pressing into my ribs, and felt her hand. I loved her social ease; I loved her kindness.
‘Chuck the bread, Dick,’ called MacDara in an excruciating yokel’s accent.
When I next noticed Sylvie, she was in the shadows, pretending to examine our books on shelves. My head slurped more drunkenness as I moved, and I looked at her narrow back, her dark V-neck, her nothing of a skirt over legs which, in shadow, seemed a good shape beneath thick black tights, as she skimmed books to hide her social reticence, and I wondered, does she ever shag anyone, that sketch of a woman? Has she ever been laid? It seemed unlikely – an unsavoury concept in such a strange and self-contained person, as though even thinking about it was an encroachment upon her cool primness – yet you could never tell. I recalled that a handful of the dullest girls in college – bespectacled grinds from the Midlands; timorous Barnet Catholics – were reported, via girls I knew, to enjoy frequent and even kinky bouts of lovemaking. The notion was as repulsive as it was oddly pleasing: one never knew, one couldn’t guess. Life held its secrets.
My head banged with wine. I cleared the plates, and went to my study to search for a Carl Larsson book that Clodagh claimed I had stolen from her some two decades before and she was demanding back.
It was cooler in there, the leaf shadows from Mecklenburgh Square diffusing the street light. I stood by the window. I pressed my forehead against the glass. Sylvie wandered through from the hall, slight as a child in the gloom. ‘Hello,’ I said. We looked down on the street together. She had been silent; I was drunk: there was no need for conversation. Bethan’s van was a dark hulk on the square, like a ship. Further along, the floodlit tennis courts on Brunswick Square formed a grotto of artificial brightness.
‘How are you?’ she said eventually.
‘Pissed,’ I said.
‘Do your family drive you to that?’
‘God, yes. Don’t yours?’
‘Oh. Families do,’ she said in her quiet, cloudy voice. ‘The source of true madness. I like yours, though.’
‘Piss artists. Scroungers. I don’t know. Con artists.’
She smiled. ‘They’re inspiring too. They know how to live–’
‘Well, that’s true.’
‘I think you should relax too, then, instead of being jealous of them,’ she sai
d, surprisingly.
I paused. ‘Jealous? You think I’m uptight?’ I said, sounding grumpy.
‘Well, probably. Aren’t we all – people like us – you, me and Lelia? I’m so tightly strung, I think, I sometimes exhaust myself. I can see that in you too.’ She glanced at me.
‘Yes,’ I grunted. My half-sentences were truncated by wine so that I could hardly speak. I could tell that she hadn’t been drinking. I leaned closer to the window so the glass cooled my forehead.
‘It’s like a green graveyard out there, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘No one lives here – except us. Perhaps that’s why I like it.’
‘Why?’
‘For those reasons.’ Her voice was sweet, calm, low. Her hair hung loosely in a kind of bob, like a little Alice Liddell’s, a scrappy Victorian girl’s. That was what she looked like, I realised: a Victorian doll, but no plump-cheeked beauty; rather, a more earnest, susceptible creature, a small thing hidden in a cupboard instead of displayed on a shelf.
I felt united with her, watching the scene together from that enclosed space. Thoughts moved slowly; my brain wouldn’t work properly.
‘If you lived in Soho or Camden,’ she said, ‘wouldn’t you feel as though there was a party going on to which you hadn’t been invited? Here, it’s all greenness, and silence. All those academics, completely cloistered. That’s what I like, because then I can make my own life out of it, and find excitement in that.’
‘No media pimps, running about with their elephantine great portfolios, you mean? I suppose all that stuff does make one feel pretty crap. It’s like–’ I threw open the window, wine warm and queasy inside me. ‘Jesus,’ I said, inhaling a breath of damp earth beyond the stain of traffic, ‘I’ve never really said it, even to myself, but it’s the same as – I hate the first fucking crocuses. I want to curl up and kill myself or something, dive back into winter.’
‘Oh, so do I,’ she said passionately. ‘Just what you said. Just that. Even the snowdrops in late January make me want to freeze time there, so there are no sounds of summer, no radios in the street or children in playgrounds, and then I can stay indoors, and in my head. And read and read books. Sit by the fire. Lie in beds.’
‘Beds?’
She said nothing.
‘Plural?’
I turned and looked at her. I felt at ease, the mechanisms of my body fluent, as though they would enable me to do or say anything I desired.
She laughed a little into the cold night. She stood beside me, the window raised. A breeze shifted her dull-girl hair.
‘Maybe,’ she said finally.
Of course, I thought. This is a woman, not a plain child. I could suddenly detect the subtlest thread of sexual confidence beneath her reserve.
‘I didn’t always have – my own,’ she said.
‘Your own? Your own what?’
‘Well – I–’
‘Bed. Home, you mean.’
‘Yes, well.’
‘The kindness of strangers?’ I said.
She smiled without looking at me, and her eyes were impenetrable behind their shadows in the night.
‘You’ve been very kind,’ she said.
‘Have I?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m afraid that I haven’t.’
‘You invited me here – twice.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry. We haven’t really talked, have we?’
‘You ignored me, because you thought I wasn’t interesting to you. Why should I be of any interest? I’m – well, I’m hopeless when I first meet people. You’re quite the opposite. Amazing. You’re all life. You talk, and make people laugh, but it’s not trivial small-talk. I feel when you talk to me as if I know you.’
‘I–’
‘Whereas I just go into my head if anyone ignores me. But we’re talking now.’
‘Yes. God, I’m so sorry. I’m such a rude prick. I forget sometimes. I get caught up in my own strange concerns. Lelia’s so much better than me.’
She was silent. She looked thin, leaning out of the window, the angle dangerous, as though she might blow out, her legs slenderly awry as she balanced herself. She gazed at the trees, her eyes wandering to the rooftops. The sound of three Fearons laughing, talking and moving drifted in from next door, interspersed by barks of laughter from MacDara; and from time to time I heard Lelia’s voice. And then, one day, a baby might live here, perpetuating the evidence of human life, adding to existing presences, visited by my parents and Lelia’s mother and my siblings’ future children. Whereas there was this girl, who lived alone in Bloomsbury, who seemed untethered to family or past and who seemed to observe the world with the clarity of an outsider. I wanted to cut through her pride and protect her, to put my arms around that slight body in its plain schoolgirl’s jersey and share my fortune, while shielding her from any pain that her own might bring.
‘Come to my office, then,’ I said. ‘You can choose some books. To read by a fire.’
‘Thank you. When I have time,’ she said, and I felt stung.
‘That would be very lovely.’
‘Whenever you want,’ I said.
She turned from the window and smiled at me. Spontaneously, I hugged her, and, briefly hesitating, she leaned against me as though I were her father, and when I brushed my hand against my chest later, I felt what must have been her tears there, wetting the wool.
Six
Lelia
I woke just before the dustbin vans arrived. My heart was racing. The front of my nightie was damp against my chest, as though I had sweated off a fever. Richard was snoring beside me like a Cornish hog, and in the silence between his breaths, the clang of metal rang up from the street.
I jumped.
‘Sweetheart,’ he murmured, turning. His breath snagged in a final snort. We embraced. I was safe there, in a dark and sweaty hollow. At times like that I thought life was simple: that having a person of your own, holding you, was the very best thing in the world.
‘What is it?’ he said.
‘It was a nightmare,’ I said.
He grunted. He stroked my head.
‘The one I’ve had before.’
‘The Finals one? Oh, my bluestocking.’
‘Not that. No,’ I said.
The Finals dream – examination halls slipping from their known location; coursework neglected, its very existence forgotten about and recalled in panic – had, to my amazement, revealed itself to be a common curse that wormed its way through the nights of even long-retired academics. The other recurring dream appeared less frequently and was less definable.
It had to do with sex. I had dreamt it before and woken disturbed with fear, yet wet with desire. It had to do with when I was a child. The dream was about children, and the children were rubbing each other, mounting and murmuring and rustling in another room, far away from me. But sometimes the focus changed with a fish-eye swivel and the dream-screen came closer so that I was one of those children, and there was another child moving on top of me. The child took on a sexless appearance, like a doll with its nub of a plastic crotch, mechanically rubbing as the heat grew inside me. I knew who it was. I could barely think about it. I wanted to be safe. I wanted to be pregnant and safe from myself.
I tried to pull my nightie up, to feel for proof without Richard noticing it. ‘Hands off!’ he said, and snatched my fingers and smelled them, then kissed the tips. ‘My territory.’
I pressed harder against him. The desire was heavy with guilt.
‘Well, something’s given you the hots. Come on. You’re only allowed to be unfaithful in your dreams if you tell me. What did you think about in your lovely lunatic’s head?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’
Because I couldn’t tell him. That recurring nightmare was rooted in France, where I had started to understand desire, but its sexual edge was repulsive to me because the time was linked with death. My father had just died. I could never talk about him, even in adulthood. I loved him more than anything
in my life. There were things I didn’t want to remember because of him, because of the grief, but they came to me in the night, and now perhaps they were returning to my life as well. I found, as the years went by, that I withheld as much from myself as I withheld from Richard or my mother, burrowing further from the truth in fear.
‘Talk to me,’ said Richard.
I buried my face in his neck, and my mouth opened against his skin, wet and hopeless.
‘Cleopatra,’ he said, urging me in his characteristically irreverent manner to talk. One of his favourite lumbering jokes was to call me Cleopatra, Queen of De Nile.
My childhood was uneventful until I went to France, or at least innocent, innocent of sex, of death, of knowledge beyond the North London suburbs and the hidden little-good-girl existence that I led out there. I must have been an exemplary daughter once, working hard to make my parents proud, and loving them with a ferocious love squeezed from the terror of their future deaths or divorce or disappointment in me, but I hadn’t realised it. We were a unit, with me as their difficult and affectionate cement.
‘I’ll look after you,’ said Richard. ‘You know I will. Mad bad loveling.’
I winced. ‘Am I bad?’ I said into his neck.
Richard laughed. He pulled my head away and looked at me and kissed me. ‘You’re so good,’ he said, seriously. ‘So good I can never hope to match up to you.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You are, my love. Except when you fart and pretend it’s not you.’
‘You hypocrite.’
I had gone to France – French exchange, Easter, Clemenceau-sur-Loire – in a state of sorrow. It was two and a half weeks after my father had died. My mother shouldn’t have let me go: she should have kept me at home and arranged bereavement counselling for me and noticed that her adolescent daughter was poisoned with grief, but she would never have done so, and would never have known.
I had scrubbed myself a little harder there: there were no Indian girls in the Loire Valley. Up in the metal tubby bath in the house on the edge of Clemenceau-sur-Loire, I rubbed my skin red with soap as I read Pagnol, Colette, Sagan, all those authors of adolescence, and smelled the bad plumbing, and watched my lust tangle with sorrow until it felt as though it would strangle me. There were not even quarter-Indians there: quadroons, I thought. There were pale women with spectacles; asses; prostitute-looking teenagers in market clothes; Algerian undesirables on the route to Paris. I could peer through the gaps in my curlicue shutters, and believe that with soap and loofah I could make myself a little paler by scratching yellow lines into my arms and chest and neck. Two children made love in a room close by at the top of the house.
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