by Zoë Jenny
When Claire entered the living room they had settled with drinks on the anthracite-coloured sofa, looking through the floor-to-ceiling windows and out into the garden.
“Get yourself a glass of wine,” Karl pointed to the bottle on the counter of the open-plan kitchen. Claire liked the sleek design, the slate tiles marking a border line between the kitchen and the living room with its floor dark maple. Everything was so carefully thought out. The cupboard doors in the white handleless space opened with the slightest pressure and closed silently. It was so much cleaner then her old wooden kitchen in London, with the knobs that got grubby in no time.
Leaning over the counter, a glass of Chardonnay in her hand, she followed their conversation. They were talking about Iraq. Karl held a strong opinion – he has always been against Bush but wasn’t one of those who had joined the peace protests in Berlin.
“A lot of the demonstrators were just indulging in outright, dumb anti-Americanism. They are all wearing jeans, drinking Coca Cola and eating at McDonald’s, blissfully unaware of how American and spoilt they actually are. What do they know about what life is like in a dictatorship? Nothing. It’s easy to walk around Berlin or London shouting for peace, because you don’t have to pay for it. In Iraq you would have ended up being tortured.”
Anne intervened, but Claire could tell that she was just repeating something she had said before and wasn’t really engaged or interested in the subject. She was simply too tired to get excited about politics or anything that went on beyond the walls of her house.
“I really don’t think all 500,000 of those people who gathered in Berlin in the name of peace were halfbaked students who just fancied a big party. Some of my friends went, too, and they actually had very good reasons.” After her statement, Anne sank back, curling up on the sofa, putting a cushion behind her neck. Anne had that owl-like expression when she was going into sleeping mode.
“But Germany is in a special position anyway,” Anthony said. “With their past they couldn’t possibly be part of this war, or any war for that matter.”
Claire walked over from the counter to the glass door, looking out to the rectangular pool. Anne had switched the garden light on.
“But Karl has a point,” Claire said, looking at the perfectly still water in the pool, wondering why it wasn’t moving. “Europe is awash with anti-American sentiment and there is something very phony about it.”
Suddenly Karl laughed. “Why is it that Anne and Anthony stick together and Claire and I have the same opinion; it somehow doesn’t seem right.”
“I always suspected Claire had a crush on you,” Anthony joked.
She looked at her husband and smiled. It was true that they often agreed on things. Karl’s parents were diplomats, moving every four years, and Karl had spent his childhood in New York and all over Europe. Anne always said Karl was more European then German. Claire could relate to that. Apart from Anthony, they all shared a sense of rootlessness. Growing up in Berlin but born in Stockholm, Claire and Anne regarded themselves as neither German nor Swedish; they were European like Karl.
Anne, however, had always been very clear about one thing – she would have hated to be born German and had no reservation admitting it.
“What about Margarethe? She will be German, with that name anyway,” Anthony said in response, looking at Claire with a squished smile.
“For Margarethe it will be fine because she is a new generation. She won’t have that guilt complex.”
“No, much worse, the poor thing will be living in a world overrun by terrorism. Besides, I don’t have a guilt complex,” Karl said, staring in his half-empty glass.
“That is because you didn’t actually grow up here; you don’t relate to the history that much. It also helps that you don’t have any relatives who were Nazis.”
Karl looked up. “You have a point there. A friend from work told me recently over lunch that he’d found out his great-grandfather was an SS officer in Bergen Belsen, responsible for hundreds of death. He’s absolutely crushed.”
“Well,” Anthony added, leaning back on the sofa, “my ancestors were probably involved in the crusades back in medieval times, killing innocents in the name of God. I’m sure somewhere down the line we are all related to some pretty grim people with blood on their hands.”
Claire walked over to the bookshelves that covered the whole length of the wall. The upper shelves contained complete editions of Thomas Mann, Goethe, Hermann Hesse and history books. It was Karl’s territory; Anne was more into art. She had a taste for expensively made art books with high-resolution prints. There was also a significant number of books about architecture she used for work. Claire recognised some of them, like the book about Palladio and his Italian villas that she had given her once for Christmas. On the bottom shelf were a range of home magazines and also a few copies of the magazine that featured Anne’s house. It was presented over five pages as an example of a modern eco-home. They highlighted the fact that the whole house was powered by solar panels on the roof. The magazine had been circulated around the family and every member owned several copies. Everyone was proud of her. Anne, the brilliant architect. In their parents’ house, the magazine was still on top of the coffee table.
Just when Claire wanted to turn away, she noticed something familiar: Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytales. It used to be in their parents’ house in the living room cabinet and she recognised the book immediately. The cover, with its ancient engraved letters, was worn from rereading, the cloth binding slightly loose. It was an old edition and as children they were not allowed to touch it. When Mother came into their room at night to read from it, sitting on the edge of the bed, there was always a special, almost ceremonial atmosphere. Maybe this was because the book was unreachable for them and its mysterious content full of adventures and hidden secrets. It was a fond childhood treasure, and it gave Claire a strange pang that this book was now here, in Anne’s possession.
“Mum gave it to me so I can read it to Margarethe. If you have kids, I’ll pass it on.”
Claire turned her head. “Of course,” she said, immediately ashamed of her feelings of jealousy.
She emptied the glass and slumped into the Charles Eames chair. Anne was watching her on the swivel armchair, turning around as though she were on a carousel.
“You know this is the only piece of furniture I still have from Berlin?”
“Of course I remember. We were living off pasta for weeks because of it.”
Anne had spent a whole month’s wages on it. The chair became the centrepiece of their living room. When they had shared their flat in Charlottenburg it was Anne who was in charge of the decoration. One of her favourite subjects was talking about creating a whole range of furniture on wheels that would reflect the new mobile and flexible way of living. The walls were white, and Anne forbade her to hang anything up. For her there was nothing more anachronistic than hammering a nail into a wall. “As long as we can’t afford Mark Rothko, we will leave the white wall as it is. Why put up a crappy poster? A white wall is perfectly beautiful,” was one of Anne’s typical arguments and Claire never objected. After all, Anne did make the flat look special. She even had a way of arranging lemons on the kitchen table to make them look like an objet d’art. Right back then, Claire knew Anne would one day build her own house. She started spending her spare time building prototypes. The floor of her room was always scattered with perfectly built little cardboard houses. And here she was, in her own nest. Everything exactly the way she wanted it.
Claire stopped turning around on the swivel chair. Maybe it was the wine that had suddenly made her feel unpleasantly off-balance. She looked at her sister and realised how accomplished she was, that she had carefully planned this all along. Just like the flat they had once shared, the house was perfect. There was nothing obtrusive or too much. Everything had its place and purpose, without being overly minimalistic – even the concrete ceiling didn’t seem cold. As she had dreamt in her student
years, everything was mobile and neat. The coffee table was on wheels, even Karl’s Brompton bike in the hallway could be folded together and carried under one arm.
Anne was now talking about her plan to start her own architecture firm. As soon as Margarethe was old enough to go into a nursery she would start drawing up a business plan. Karl was clearly proud of her intentions. “She is just not made to be an employee,” he said to Anthony, lovingly rubbing Anne’s arm. “She is too talented and thrives on stress.”
Karl himself was quite happy to work for a company. As team leader of the web development department at a big publishing house, he had a very good job. Claire could see that he loved Anne and, more, he was proud of her. Was Anthony proud of her? She wasn’t sure. It confused Claire that her sister seemed so complete and accomplished. When she got up from the chair she was still a little dizzy, blaming herself for drinking the wine too quickly.
“Are you alright?” Anne asked. At that moment Margarethe started to cry and, almost instantly, as if mother and baby were somehow invisibly wired, Anne hurried into her room. When they said goodbye, Anne holding Margarethe on her hips and Karl behind them, forming a perfect triangle, Claire embraced them dewy-eyed.
It was in the taxi on the way to the airport that Claire realised it would never be the same again, that with the baby came a distance that, no matter how happy she was for Anne, made her inevitably that little bit lonelier.
“Relax,” Anthony said, moving closer on the backseat and caressing her as if he could sense her worries. “We will soon have our own little family.”
It was this scene in the taxi that Claire remembered two years later, while digging holes in the earth. How convinced he had sounded, she thought. He couldn’t then have anticipated how difficult it would be for them. She pushed the shovel harder into the ground, removing chunks of earth. It hadn’t rained for over a week and the earth in the flowerbed between the patio and the brick wall was dry. They were having a barbecue and Claire had gone to the garden centre; now that people were coming over she had an incentive to do the garden. The flowerbed was only about a metre wide and she realised she had bought far too many plants and a complete mismatch of colours.
Overwhelmed by the enormous range on offer, she had just loaded up the trolley with whatever took her fancy. She went for strong colours as well as for names she was fascinated by, like freesia, ranunculus, salvia. In the centre they had looked promising, but in her patio they just looked displaced. Taking them out of their plastic pots, the bare roots dangling in the air, she felt a certain satisfaction putting them back into the earth, pressing the compost down and then watering it.
The year before, she had tried to grow flowers from seeds and bulbs. A complete failure. Not a single sunflower had grown from the seeds. There had been the odd cranky tulip but that was it. “Just don’t take it personally,” was Anthony’s consoling phrase, though Claire couldn’t help but feel that nature was somehow turning against her. Her body didn’t work as it should and she wondered, as she looked at the dazzling display of colours before her, how long those plants would look like that before they started to fade away.
Anthony’s face appeared behind the kitchen window. He waved at her; he always did that, even when he came out a second later.
“Sadie just called; she’s coming a bit earlier,” he said, embracing her from behind. “She wants to help me with the sangria.”
“Sure, what do you think of the garden?”
“Very colourful,” he said, holding her tight. The narrow border was so cramped with vivid yellows, blues and reds, a sea of colour, that it actually looked quite striking. She was sweating, covered in soil, her hands black from the earth. She said she was desperate for a shower.
“You can shower later,” he said, pressing his crotch against her, teasing her earlobes with his teeth, giving her goosebumps.
“Sadie could ring the doorbell any minute,” she said, knowing what he was up to but realising, if any- thing, it only made it more exciting. He pushed her forwards into the kitchen. She couldn’t see his face but felt his fingers skillfully opening her trousers and undoing the hooks of her bra. Her body smelt of damp earth and salt. Looking down she could see the white skin of her breasts. The hard, warm flesh of his penis entering her from behind, she held on to the kitchen counter and listened to his moaning.
She welcomed this sudden outburst of passion. It hadn’t happened very often lately. The whole babymaking business was quite a turn-off, especially as it didn’t work. It was neither making love nor fucking; it was a third category altogether. An awkward mechanical meeting of two bodies for a very unsexy purpose. The hypnosis teacher had told her to visualise the sperm swimming up the uterus into the fallopian tubes. Claire couldn’t think of anything less erotic. Miss Zelda had warned them it could take the fun out of it. In hindsight Claire thought that was putting it mildly. She should have been honest and told them that on the way to getting pregnant they might just get bored to death.
This time Claire didn’t think anything and didn’t care whether his sperm was swimming somewhere or just dripping out. Normally she would lie down on the bed for half-an-hour afterwards, a pillow propped up under her bum. On finishing, they didn’t even look at each other; he just gave her a pat on her buttock and Claire hurried up to the bathroom to finally take her shower.
When she came down 20 minutes later, her hair still wet, Sadie and Anthony were cutting up fruit. Sadie was standing at the kitchen counter, right where they had just sex; Claire wondered whether she had any inkling of that. Anthony certainly looked the part with his tousled hair and half of his shirt hanging out of his jeans. It was also the wide grin on Sadie’s face that made her wonder.
“Hi gorgeous. So nice of you to have everyone over for a barbecue,” she said, giving her a kiss on the cheek.
“It’s called a window of opportunity. From next week it will probably be raining for the rest of the year,” Claire said, popping a slice of orange into her mouth. Sangria. It was Sadie’s idea. Since she’d been in Jerez on holiday she was raving about Spanish food. She had brought them sherry vinegar and chorizo that was still in the fridge.
“Where is Paolo?” Claire asked while pouring red wine into a big plastic bowl.
“Still teaching. He might come later. Why, do you fancy him?”
“Of course. Who doesn’t.”
Sadie always asked her whether she fancied her new boyfriends, and Claire always gave the same answer. It was one of their little rituals. Claire watched her cut- ting an apple into slices. Outlined against the evening sun, her shoulder-length auburn hair was glowing. A delicately crafted dragonfly charm was sitting in the little triangle on top of her cleavage. Sadie only wore jewellery from her own vintage shop. She was telling them about this actress who’d came in with a pug puppy and how everyone went “ahh” and “ooh, how cute” until the puppy lifted its leg, peeing on a 700 quid dress. Of course the actress paid the 700 quid, Sadie added, smiling. She’d had a good day. Since her shop appeared in fashion magazines she had a colourful clientele, from models to rock stars, and her shop had turned into a little goldmine.
Sam and Christine arrived. Claire could hear them parking their bike in front of the house. Peering through the lattice window to the street, she saw their feet on the pavement.
Anthony went upstairs to let them in while Claire rushed into the garden to arrange the folding chairs around the table; it would be light until late. She liked this time of the year around midsummer, when the daylight didn’t give way but swallowed the evening hours. The windows and doors of houses were wide open; she could hear the voices of the neighbours. Everyone was out in their gardens and backyards. Soon their barbecue would be ready and the smell of coal and burnt meat would fill the air.
Behind the wall the neighbour’s two little boys were playing football. The soles of their trainers were squeaking on the paving, the ball smacking against the wall. Their mother was shouting something from inside. Laughte
r. Claire wondered what it was like being that mother, seeing her own boys running around, sweaty and red-faced. Their endless energy around her like something electric, something supercharged, something that made her shout and her voice sound out of breath even though she was probably just standing at the kitchen sink. A door shut and it suddenly went quiet behind the wall, as if a light switch had been turned off.
As she turned back to her own garden, they came, one after another. Sam and Christine were inspecting the area. “It’s bigger then ours,” Christine said.
“No, it’s not; it’s exactly the same size,” Sam insisted. This was the kind of conversation Claire didn’t know until she came to London, where every inch of property could be the subject of hour-long discussions. Questions like, ‘How many bedrooms do you have?’ were asked with the greatest interest and concern.
“Whatever, it’s tiny,” Claire said. “In Berlin you could have a mansion and your own cook for that kind of money.” They both looked at her startled, like she had just snatched away a great opportunity from in front of their noses.
Anthony appeared, armed with a pair of tongs to tackle the barbecue, and he had a concentrated expression on his face. It was as if they were still cave dwellers and he had just come back from a hunt, offering meat to his wife.
Sam gave some advice on how to cook the meat so it was still rare the way he and Anthony liked it.
“Must be a male thing,” Sadie commented. “I never came across a woman who liked blood on her plate.” She was pouring sangria into round glasses with a ladle. Maybe it was the ladle in her hand that made her look so wholesome and together, like someone who had everything she could wish for.
Claire wondered where it came from, that complacency. She had this strange feeling that Sadie was somehow carrying a secret. And it suddenly occurred to her, while she was fishing out an apple slice from her glass, that she actually didn’t know these people all that well. All they really had in common was the fact that they were all in their thirties and forties and childless – maybe that’s why they were all together there. Apparently like-minded people seek each other out, so they feel less alone. People were in fact just like sheep, gathering to keep each other warm. If they had children they would hang out with people who had children too, or not hang out at all, like their neighbours.
