Mum. You’re not listening. Mum.
Raif sends a message that evening. Thinking of you. Hope you’re alright. When it arrives Iris is arguing with Lou and doesn’t hear her phone.
When the girls come down to say goodnight she is out in the garden, smoking. For a second she sees them as their actual selves. Lou’s body is preparing to stretch and round. She looks watery and shadowed. Not even thirteen, Iris thinks.
You need new pyjamas, she says as she walks back into the house.
Lou has taken to looking at the floor when she speaks, as if her head has become too heavy.
I like these ones.
Her voice is heavy with something too.
The trousers come halfway down Lou’s shins and she’s wearing a T-shirt under the jacket as she can no longer do it up. How could Iris not have noticed?
You’ve grown.
I haven’t.
We won’t, adds Kate.
Iris will buy new pyjamas – for them both so as to be fair – and they’ll say thank you, put them in a drawer and wear the old ones. She can no longer make them do otherwise.
At midnight Iris finds her phone. She writes four different responses to Raif’s message before sending the one that says Fine, thank you. You? Raif adjusts himself. He waits a day before writing again and so she waits two. A week passes in which they are barely in touch. Iris wonders when he actually finished with Helen. Raif is wondering this too.
In the morning Lou beckons Kate over to the cupboard.
I’ve got something else for the museum.
Lou holds out the gold-and-topaz tiepin.
It’s David’s.
How do you know it’s David’s?
It was pinned to the lining of one of his jackets.
Why would you pin something on the inside of your jacket?
Perhaps he didn’t want anyone to know he was wearing it.
How come you found it?
I was looking for something. Nothing. I dunno. Dad.
Kate doesn’t ask Lou to explain. She’s a steady child who has a strong sense of what she doesn’t want to know. Her reaction to all this upheaval has been to move as firmly through each day as she can. Lou has noticed this and admires it in her.
the wonder box
The first time Iris took the girls to the museum, she showed them the wonder box. They were only little and it was, after all, a kind of toy. But it was behind glass and they couldn’t understand why they weren’t allowed to play with it, why they were supposed to just stand there and look.
The wonder box was invented in the 1920s by the pioneering child psychologist Margaret Lowenfeld. It contains thirty-two toys including a polar bear, a palm tree, soldiers, a snowman, a nurse and pram, a well, and a horse and cart. The box itself is more of a tray, half-filled with sand. Children who couldn’t find the words to convey what they needed to were able to invent a world and therefore a story that reflected their own.
These we arrange and rearrange in various ways … making a world of them. In doing so we have found out all sorts of pleasant facts, and also many undesirable possibilities.
It might seem more useful to offer children paper, crayons or clay so that they could build a world out of whatever came to mind. Why impose a pram and a polar bear? Perhaps because the details of specific objects offer something ready made. The child is not alone in empty space with their story. There’s something already there, things that they can play with and perhaps have a conversation with too.
We then dress our islands, objecting strongly to too close a scrutiny of our proceedings until we have done.
The toys make no sense as a group and so the child is free to invent the laws of this other world. It is on their scale and within their control. They can take their time in building it and be sure that it’s strong enough for what they need it to demonstrate and contain.
what if she falls?
Ashley is driving Raif from the station to his mother’s house. When he got off the train she almost didn’t recognise him. He stood out.
What’s happened to you, then? she asks as soon as they get into the car.
Raif has all the freshness of feeling that we take for being in love but he cannot trust it.
I’m worried, he says.
About your mother? I’m not surprised.
He hasn’t visited for three weeks.
You’re making me even more worried.
You should be.
She sounds fine whenever we speak.
Of course she does. She thinks she is.
Raif has always been close to his mother and has found her easy to love, so why won’t he face this? Perhaps because he feels as helpless as he did standing beside his father’s body or watching Liis die. All he can do is refuse what’s happening. He can’t protect his mother any other way.
What he finds is that Bridget has started to empty space in herself. She has a fixed expression of benign wonder and moves in a slow dance from room to room.
What if you fall? he asks and she laughs.
She spends her days wandering the lands of her own home, startled by a picture or transfixed by a bowl, the pattern in the carpet, dust in the air. The less she remembers, the brighter it all becomes.
Raif is there today to meet a social worker who wants to reassess Bridget’s needs.
You want a heat sensor above the cooker. Alarms on the front and back doors. Weren’t you supposed to have those put in already? Rails in the bathroom and an emergency cord. Why isn’t she wearing her personal alarm?
She takes it off, says Raif.
Lucky there are no stairs. Unusual windows. Very large. Is that safety glass? The carer will come in a second time each day. But you need to organise the shopping. Does your mother have any savings?
What if she falls? Raif asks.
Is your mother an owner-occupier?
I think you should leave, Bridget says.
Raif leaps to apologise.
I’m sorry, she doesn’t mean to—
You, his mother says, pointing at Raif. I think you should leave.
But I’m—
Who are you?
She turns to the social worker.
I want him to leave.
And she starts to shout.
Make him go away!
Raif waits in the kitchen. The social worker suggests that he stays elsewhere tonight. She is organising someone to come by that evening to settle Bridget and give her a meal. Sometimes family members become the focus of irrational fears. It means nothing.
All three triplets come to pick him up. Emily drives, and Ashley and Jessica surround him.
She doesn’t mean it but you should try to respect her wishes.
Stay with us and go back in the morning.
Have you got power of attorney?
They take him to their parents’ house, where everyone crowds round the kitchen table. The house isn’t big enough for three children, let alone three grown-up daughters, but they flow round one another as they do in conversation, while their parents sit happily in the middle of it all. Neil, too, is struck by some difference in Raif.
So who’s turned the lights on?
Raif doesn’t realise that Neil is talking to him. Sorcha nudges her husband.
Leave the boy alone!
The boy? one or two of the triplets say.
He’s right, though.
Whoever she is, says Neil, I hope she’s not so—
Not like—
She isn’t, is she?
Raif hesitates. Do they mean Liis or Helen? The triplets make a point of never mentioning Helen. He says nothing, knowing that the conversation will move on.
He sleeps in one of the two rooms the triplets use, which is a swirl of clothes, books, earrings, tampons, phones, hair straighteners, photos, birthday cards, credit cards, exam papers. It’s as if they neither throw anything away nor make any effort to keep it. They share everything. If nothing is precious or private, you can always find what you
need.
*
In the morning Sorcha announces that she’s going to drive to the downs for a walk and invites Raif to come along. As they arrive, a car pulls up beside them and a man gets out. He looks a little like Neil but he’s taller, more elegant, more silvery, and he has an extreme, unfading smile.
This is my friend Alan, Sorcha says. And this is my nephew, Raif.
I’ve heard all about you, says Alan. What a beautiful day!
It is damp and dull. Alan leads them up a path on which two but not three can comfortably walk side by side. Sorcha falls in with Raif and asks him how he thinks his mother is.
Look! shouts Alan. Bird’s-foot trefoil!
Sorcha hurries over, intoning the name, and takes out her phone to photograph a clump of yellow flowers. They walk on and a few minutes later Alan stops abruptly and whispers that he can see a butterfly.
It looks like a green hairstreak!
A green hairstreak, Sorcha murmurs, and photographs the sprig of leaves at which Alan is pointing.
Raif’s phone rings. It’s his mother. He says that he’s on a walk with Sorcha and will be over soon and not to make any lunch, he will do that. While he’s talking, Sorcha and Alan walk on ahead. She has taken his arm. (What if she falls?) Raif makes sure that he lags a little behind, thinking it only polite. They continue on, Alan pointing out a flower, a herb, a feather, and Sorcha photographing whatever he names.
It’s sweet, isn’t it? This friendship or whatever it is. Sorcha has found something she’s been missing and it does no harm. Raif doesn’t realise that this is exactly what her husband has been telling himself for years: they’re friends, they go for walks, it’s nothing.
They come to the top. Raif has known this view all his life and still finds it exhilarating to see the downs rippling into the distance. The sun breaks through and splashes across the fields and he turns to his aunt, about to shout Look! but she’s trying to hear what Alan has just heard.
Shh, listen – a corn bunting, perhaps?
*
Jessica drives him back to his mother’s house.
How was your walk?
Great, says Raif. We saw a green hairstreak. At least, Alan did.
Alan.
She says the name with a finalising laugh and Raif makes a note not to mention Alan again. When they pull up outside Bridget’s house, Jessica has something she wants to say.
You know, I never liked Liis.
Raif is startled. No one has ever criticised Liis.
You didn’t know her, he says.
I mean, I didn’t like how she was. With you. How you felt.
How do you know what I felt?
It was obvious. You felt small.
I am small. Besides which, you were a child when we got married.
You still looked small.
He had felt small, it was true, in his life with Liis. He’d had so little effect.
Is Jessica’s dislike of Liis insight or hindsight? Either way, Raif has been given permission to feel differently about his dead wife. When his aunt comes by that afternoon, Raif asks what she thought of Liis, honestly.
Honestly? I found her a bit boring.
Liis has always had only powerful traits – absoluteness, detachment, reticence – which he fashioned out of her opacity. Perhaps she had been quite ordinary.
where certainty lies
On the train home Raif decides that he’s drifting. He’s been carried towards Iris, away and now back. They could have passed each other by, only now they’ve been brought to the start of something and they need to act. Their night out was a turning point but they are close to drifting again. He has to act.
When he contemplates her body, it’s the moment of dancing in the corridor that comes to mind rather than the afternoon in bed when they started to undress and didn’t know what to do. Iris was remarkable in the way she took charge but there’s been nothing of that Iris in her messages since.
*
Helen is sitting at the kitchen table packing crockery. He wonders if they had an arrangement that he’s forgotten. He bends to kiss her but she turns away so that he kisses the top of her head, breathing in a scent that brings back the slow trail of her hair across his skin, her definite way of moving when naked, her definite hands and definite mouth. As he fusses with the kettle and repeatedly offers biscuits, he’s arguing with his body, which is recalling things about this woman that his mind doesn’t want to allow. Perhaps she’d only gone away for a few days and has now come home. But she’s sitting there wrapping plates.
I knew you’d probably be at your mother’s, she says, so I thought it would be a good time to collect my things.
So they have split up. He calms down.
You didn’t let me know you were coming, he says, trying to sound unperturbed.
No, I didn’t. You look better.
I don’t know that I am but yes, maybe.
Since they met, Helen has been flowing towards him. Now she is quite still. He’s beginning to understand that he has not treated her well.
She gets up and walks into the bedroom. Raif follows because he doesn’t know what else to do and watches as she pulls down her suitcase from the top of the wardrobe and starts throwing in clothes. Shoes, books, cosmetics, tools, a radio – she bundles them all into the case as if she can’t wait to get out of there.
Do you want to talk? he asks, although the idea horrifies him.
Helen starts to talk.
The thing is, your broken heart made you interesting.
It’s not broken any more.
Maybe not but this is. Or you are.
She moves past him and on to the bathroom, where she shoves jars, brushes and compacts from a shelf into a bag. He’d emptied the cabinet of pills and the drawers of Liis’s clothes when he got back from Estonia but he hadn’t invited Helen to use the space.
Raif watches as she clears the place of herself with great sweeps of her hands. How tall she is, how elegant and resilient! How confusing.
It won’t work, he blurts.
It’s the line he’s been rehearsing for weeks and has only managed to say now that it’s no longer required.
Helen laughs as if it hurts her to do so.
It never did. I had to be us – if there ever was an us – on my own.
She’s finished packing. He’s shocked by how quickly all trace of her is gone. He’s going to be on his own again with the beige surfaces. But Helen is still there, leaning against the wall. His eyes are drawn to the push of her gorgeous hips.
When you offered me a place to stay, you behaved like I’d moved in on you for life.
You didn’t mean to stay?
She had hoped she might.
We were hardly ready for that, she says, and anyway it was like being around a ghost.
Of my wife?
No. You. You were the ghost.
He’s about to offer to help her with her boxes but there’s more.
I met someone, she says, and they reminded me.
Reminded you of what?
He feels obliged to ask but is not at all sure he wants to know. She doesn’t reply.
Someone sat down beside her and, like Raif and Iris walking through the doorway at the museum, Helen and this person said yes. She’d gone out into the city and found where certainty lies – in the moment when the yes is said. Nothing is as sure. In the enchantment that will follow, she will become another version of herself. Just as Raif is more present with Iris and Iris is more open with him, Helen will be more powerful this time. Her next lover will flow towards her.
The next version of ourselves is not necessarily an improvement. Raif became detached, Helen tentative, David lied and Iris built walls. But we proceed in the hope that it can be. We look to love as a way of transforming ourselves and so blame our lover if we don’t like who we become.
Helen is still talking.
I’d forgotten that it’s possible to be certain. Not that it’ll become something but t
hat it’s there. And that it’s to do with me, who I am, me in particular. Not just what the other person needs.
(What else is love but convincing someone that it can only be them?)
Helen has been redirected. Although she’s looking at Raif, she’s making no attempt to take him in. He might be a passing cloud in which she can’t be bothered to look for a shape.
You seem surprised, she says.
No. Just a bit. Yes.
The first thing I was taught to do as an actor was to give up my dignity. It’s dangerous. But it makes so much possible.
Why are you telling me this?
She could be about to explain him to himself, the Raif she has known, but she’s no longer that interested.
I don’t know, she says.
She’ll come back to collect the rest of her things another day and will be in touch. She offers him his key but he tells her to keep it for now.
A few days later Helen sends a message.
I was the ladder out of your grief.
In which case she brought him back to the surface and there was Iris waiting to greet him. Raif should feel bad about this but he doesn’t because what has arisen with Iris seems to have no connection to anything else. As yet there is nothing about it that seems either familiar or repeated. And he is able to be there when he’s with Iris – properly there. Why, he has no idea. He replies to Helen, thanking her for her insight. He tries to agree with what she says but feels that the reason for their failure is more opaque. Or that there isn’t one.
the shape it takes
Iris, too, is wondering at herself. She actually said that she wanted to fuck. She managed to translate her fear into courage and she decides that Raif made this possible. Otherwise she is the more cautious one, partly because of how love surrounds her. The circle that Adam drew around her and then stepped into. How long it took for the idea of stepping out of it to occur. Adam had been a difficult, and therefore a great, love. This is her version and has become her memory. How he smashed his way into her life cannot be held in words and so lies behind a wall.
In the City of Love's Sleep Page 20
