It’s quite normal to visit a house you’re going to live in. People want to see how the light falls, morning and evening. What noise there is, what the parking is like. But you didn’t reveal a single flaw.
Edward kept in close touch. He knew we had a buyer for our flat in London, and the mortgage for the balance was arranged. My solicitor’s letter was slow in arriving, but that didn’t matter. Everything was going forward.
And then the blow fell. It was Edward, on my mobile.
‘Hello?’ I sang. I was still so happy, you see. Every day and in every way.
‘It’s Edward,’ said Edward.
I knew straight away that something was wrong. I started to gabble about the weather, which I never do. He was unresponsive. It’s happened, I thought. He knows.
Edward cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Howard. I’m afraid something’s come up with regard to the house.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘I’m awfully sorry.’ But he said it smoothly, professionally. He wasn’t sorry – why should he be? ‘But I’m afraid we’ve had a cash offer on the house. And of course we are obliged to pass on such an offer to the vendor. And I’m afraid, naturally …’
‘He’s accepted it,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘How much?’
‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss the detail—’ Yes, he actually dared to say that. Not at liberty, in the drawing room with the brass candlestick.
‘I’ll match it,’ I said. ‘Whatever he’s offered, I’ll match it.’
‘Mrs Howard, I’ll be frank with you. His offer is only very slightly higher than yours. But it is a genuine cash offer, the purchaser was able to give us documentary proof of that.’
I held my mobile away from me for a few seconds, and stared at the tiny hole from which Edward’s voice quacked. Words boiled in my mouth but I wasn’t going to let any of them out. It wouldn’t do any of us any good.
‘I see,’ I said at last, nearly as smoothly as Edward. ‘I understand. It’s very …’
‘Disappointing.’
‘Yes. My husband will be—’ But for once, I couldn’t go on with it. Edward heard it in my voice.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Howard. We’ll keep in touch. There are a lot of properties coming on to the market.’
You’re mad, I thought. I said goodbye politely, and ended the call. People know nothing. They don’t understand reality. The house was mine.
I don’t usually wait around after a disappointment. There are other cities, other conservation areas, other houses. But not this time. No, this time I stayed. I was going to be faithful. I kept on visiting you. Not so often, not in the daytime. But often enough. The owners came back from Italy and packed up their wretched possessions. They got careless, left the shutters open and the lights on so I could see everything. They didn’t feel it was their house any more. They stopped looking after it. And they were right. It wasn’t theirs now. No. It had passed to someone else.
The day the vans came was hard. I hired a car, wore dark glasses and a headscarf. I drove past the house a few times, and saw it all. A huge van slid into place just after midday, then a Mercedes estate. Out they all jumped. Mother, father, two little girls. My God, the woman couldn’t have been more than thirty. Fair hair, tiny body, little piping voice. I parked down the road for a while and watched, and listened.
Inheritance, that’s what it was. They’d never earned all that money themselves. They stretched out their hands and grabbed my house. That silly, high, piping voice.
‘Lettie, sweetheart, why don’t you and Cincie go and explore the garden?’
They left the shutters open, too, and lights blazed until late at night. I saw them going from room to room, taking possession.
But even with all that inheritance, the husband still had to go to work. Bye bye, darling, remember I’ll be home late tonight! And the little girls had to go to school. Back she came in the Mercedes estate. Just her. I was tucked in at the end of the road. After a while, I walked briskly down the pavement and knocked on the door. I had a bunch of keys in my hand.
‘Good morning, I’m from Gibbet and Glyde. We like to call round for a chat after a move, just to check everything’s gone smoothly. If you could spare a few minutes?’
Of course she could. Would I like a cup of coffee? Terribly sorry, everything’s such a tip, but the house is wonderful – and she actually invited me into my own kitchen.
‘Coffee would be lovely,’ I said, ‘but first of all, my colleague forgot to hand over the cellar keys. Could we just check that these are the right ones?’
Of course we could. She’d lead the way. Careful, these stairs are rather steep, she said, as if I didn’t know my own house.
I love my drawing room. It’s not really a pretentious word, when a room is so beautiful. And so peaceful, in the middle of the city. All you can hear are the birds.
But if you listen carefully, you might hear something else. A scuffling noise, far away, very faint. Perhaps a tiny cry. It’s the boys, back from boarding school, playing in the basement. I listen with a smile. They’re having a wonderful time; there’s no need to worry about them at all. In a minute I’ll make myself another cup of coffee, bring it back in here and close the doors. I don’t want any distractions now. My house is waiting for me.
DUTY-FREE
THEY WERE THE cleanest airport floors I’ve ever seen. Even so, a man was buffing up sparkles in a corner of the duty-free, beside a display of pixies and lucky charms. I was not quite the only customer in the half-acre of perfumes, whisky and cosmetics. Two or three of us drifted, desultory, fingering but failing to buy. The goods that shone inside the cabinets seemed to have nothing to do with us. A sound system played music that broke on our ears as waves break on the shore. The staff were so attentive, so knowledgeably eager to carry out the tasks which could not be completed without the absent passengers. Even as you quaked for their jobs, you couldn’t help warming to their unfounded optimism.
Friendly were the security staff, gassing to one another about a football match. No one mentioned the result. Perhaps they’d all stopped watching at the same moment, to keep up the suspense for yet another working day. Warm and tasty drifted the smells of chilli con carne and mushroom lasagne in the restaurant. I ordered a cup of coffee.
‘Will there be anything to eat with that?’ sang the young man behind the counter, and I had to fight not to ask for the whole sweep of it, piping hot, just so that his face would light up. But he flourished the coffee on to the counter before me and smiled as if mine were just the order he’d been hoping for.
The silicate-glitter of the floors was getting to me. I’m easily disorientated, and on my way back through duty-free I was busy counting the small airport tasks that I had yet to carry out: buying a bottle of water and the newspaper if they had it, checking my email and the price of Chanel No 5 … So I organise even my empty hours. There was a recycling bin handy, and there I sorted and threw away the papers from the conference I’d just attended. I held on to the timetable for a moment. It was marked out with notes, and the couple of sessions I’d presented were highlighted in green, the colour of a knot in the stomach. Strange how things could be so important, and then not important at all.
When I looked up, the desert had flowered. The duty-free was packed. Scores of soldiers, men and women both, a hundred of them, no, many more than a hundred, milled purposefully around the displays or lined up in front of the tills. They had big boots and pale sandy uniforms. They were large, eager, polite, weary. You could see their health and youth in their springing hair and quick, observant glance. Their skins, however, were poor.
They all wanted to buy something in the short time that they had. Packed into bulky trousers, women soldiers compared lipsticks. Men queued for cologne. Names were murmured like prayers: L’Oréal, Shiseido, Versace, Prada, Paco Rabanne …
The assistants had risen to great heights and were changing dollars into euros
in their heads as they advised on a set of headphones while clicking up a fragrance purchase. Politeness flowed over us all, ample as a river.
‘This one is seventy-three euro, or would you prefer the larger size?’
We were at home again, in the kingdom of our preferences. The cabinets opened and disclosed their contents to eager hands. White glossy packages were fetched down from the highest shelves. Pixies tinkled against one another. I fell into the swing of it and began to search among the lipsticks for number 719, the one I always wear. A young woman soldier alongside me waved a perfume tester strip under her nostrils. She had stains of fatigue under her eyes. Maybe this one wasn’t right for her, she said. All she could smell was aeroplane.
‘You can’t go wrong with Chanel No 5. It’s a classic,’ I said, as I say to my daughter.
The soldier’s face lightened. ‘I guess it is, but I don’t know that it works on me,’ she said. She sprayed again, on her wrist this time, and turned it this way and that. She had a Southern voice. Her skin was pitted, not beautiful.
‘Where are you all going?’ I asked her.
‘Afghanistan.’
‘I think it works on you,’ I said, breathing in the wrist she held out to me. There was her body smell under the perfume. It was dry, powdery and somewhat metallic. She was correct. She smelled of aeroplane.
Theirs was a short stopover, for refuelling. I thought that these soldiers must be the lifeblood of the duty-free. They would have spent thousands of dollars in their short time off the plane. After they’d made their purchases, they sat quietly on banks of plastic seats in the hall outside the duty-free, waiting for the tannoy. The bulk of their uniforms made them sprawl somewhat, legs apart, but not as students sprawl, ostentatiously at leisure, infantry of the gap-year dream that other travellers can only envy. These soldiers rested. The group beside me talked about mobile phones, as if there were nothing else in the world.
How vast the airport was, and how bare of purpose. The life in it, for which it had been built, had sunk down to barely a murmur. Cafés, departure gates, transit lounges and scanners were becalmed. A coffee machine hissed to itself. Only, everywhere, as far as the eye could see, there were these soldiers.
Afghanistan. They were not even born in the days when the boldest of my generation took the Magic Bus to Kabul in search of Afghan gold. Here they sat, composed, under orders, touching Irish soil; or, at least, their boots touched silicate particles in the flooring that caught the light as far as the eye could see. They were not unhandsome, some of the men. The girls, too, rested utterly, closing their eyes so that the harsh overhead light exposed the pure cut of the lids, and every blackhead on their overworked skins. All the same, they were not unbeautiful.
There was one low-key call for their flight. Immediately, they were on the move, down the long hall, through an exit which had nothing to do with the civilian airport. There was no gathering of hand luggage, mustering of children, wheelchairs, pushchairs. The soldiers were there one minute, filling the lounge, and then they were gone through a flap that had appeared somewhere in the wall of the airport, revealing it to be no more than a transit shed which had served its purpose. On my left the duty-free still glittered. Now there came four or five stragglers who had just succeeded in making their purchases. They loped past me, and for the first time I saw that they were fit and fast for all their heaviness. They quickened almost to a canter, laughing for the first time, then they too disappeared. The tin shed turned back into an airport. The soldiers’ big-bellied plane was already receiving them into itself.
An incident, I thought. A notable moment, equal to the sighting of rare passerines. But I was mistaken, because at that time they came in almost daily. A quarter of a million US military personnel, it seems, went through that airport in one year alone.
Backwards and forwards the planes go, settling briefly on this small space of Irish soil, releasing, briefly, their uniformed passengers. The duty-free must live for them, now that the Celtic Tiger is dead and the acres of car park around the airport stand empty. The US military has come to its aid for sure.
They go up slowly, those big-bellied planes. They are far from new, and they labour sometimes under the weight of what they carry. The youth inside them, packed into flesh, packed into uniform, and then filling the metal skin of the DC-10. The youth that comes once, and doesn’t come again.
As your plane rises you see the land, the water, and then the wing tilts and the sky is there instead, reeling away from you, all that greyness thickening to muffle your eyes, your ears, your lips. You will never see earth again. You say goodbye to it without emotion, among the whiteness, as if this is the death you have always expected; but as it happens this time the plane keeps climbing, and you punch through the clouds and out into the blue.
CHOCOLATE FOR LATER
‘WILL THERE BE port wine with the cheese, Mrs Marion?’
I’ve never tasted port. I consider. There are five cheeses, a slice of quince paste, a branch of raisins. I’m not hungry, but Aimée is so sweet, so eager.
‘They are very good, the cheeses, Mrs Marion!’
Her eyes are soft and dark, and she is graceful. There was a tiny misfortune as she removed the empty dish which had held my mango fool: slices of fresh, glistening mango, flakes of coconut, luscious cream with a thread of mango coulis running through it. The descriptions on the menu are so appetising. It makes you appreciate things even more. So, Aimée lifted the dish and began carefully to place the cheese plate on the thick white cloth in front of me. But something caught as she lowered it. The knife clattered, and fell. She was mortified, bless her.
‘Oh, Mrs Marion, I am so sorry. It did not touch you?’
The raisins are plump, and they fan out from their stalks like fresh grapes. I pick one off, and put it in my mouth with a corner of artisan sheep’s cheese from the Wallambura Hills.
‘Just a taste, please, Aimée,’ I say, and she pours a careful inch of port into my glass. I lift it, and smile at her.
‘What do you think, Mrs Marion?’
‘Delicious. Thank you, dear.’
She moves off to attend to another passenger, and I press the button to adjust my seat just a little. I never lie flat while food is being served. It seems disrespectful. After they’ve finished serving coffee and have taken away the trays, the big white napkins and the tablecloths, I’ll have a little nap. It’s important to arrive fresh.
I’m used to this journey. I make it three times a year. Not at Christmas or Easter, or the big holiday times: they are too expensive. You have to plan these things carefully. I explained that to Aimée when she came round with the hot towels, before dinner.
‘You are going on holiday, Mrs Marion? Or you are visiting family?’
The hot towel is such a good idea. I find myself thinking that perhaps I should do this at home. Damp a towel and put it in the oven, perhaps – would that work? It is so soothing, so refreshing. All your worries disappear and you’re ready to enjoy the journey. There is a glass of champagne in front of me, and a dish of warm nuts. Aimée makes quite a point of these nuts being warm, and she entirely understands why I only take half a glass of champagne. She approves of it.
‘I’m going out to see my son and his family. My grandchildren.’
‘How old are they?’
‘Jess is seven, Rory is four and the baby – Clara – she’s eight weeks. It’ll be the first time I’ve seen the baby – apart from on Skype, of course.’
‘What a happy time it will be,’ says Aimée, and she smiles with gentle, sympathetic excitement for me.
‘Yes,’ I say. I am entirely happy as I smile up at her, my mind full of Jess, Rory and Clara. Champagne bubbles break on my tongue. I won’t drink much; I never do. Otherwise, I might fall asleep and miss the whole experience.
There’s a woman at the front of the cabin with a little baby. Four months old, I heard her say. She is well off, you can tell. Smooth tanned skin, casual, lovely clothes, co
nfidence. As I walked past I heard her say to Aimée, ‘I shan’t bother with dinner. He’ll sleep, and I’ll sleep. Heaven.’
She just wants to get there. Her husband will be waiting. They’ll settle the baby into his car seat and whirl off to their own life.
Aimée stood by the woman’s seat, holding the baby. She held him so tenderly, her sweet, gentle face bent over him so that her cheek almost touched his downy head. I wanted to press my bell. I wanted to bring Aimée back to me.
This cheese is delicious. I wish I hadn’t eaten so much of the mango fool. The beef dish was unusual, too. I’d like to know how they made it. Of course you need top-quality beef to get the flavour. Not undercooked or overcooked: just perfect. The menu said that it was an oyster mushroom sauce. I wish I had more of these raisins. We used to buy raisins in triangular boxes, at Christmas time. You peeled off the cellophane and there they were, still on their branch. They were called Muscatel raisins, but they weren’t as nice as these. These are so fresh.
I don’t want dinner to end. Everyone will go to sleep then, while the plane bumps its way through the dark. There’s always turbulence over Australia. I suppose it’s because of the desert. I like it when I hear all the cabin staff stirring again behind their curtain, getting ready with the breakfast. But they’ll come in the night if you want them. They’re very good like that.
I wasn’t sure which to choose, between the soup and the meze. The soup was a fragrant Thai seafood broth, which I’ve never had. In the end I chose the meze. One of the dishes was covered with fresh chopped coriander. That’s something I could do.
I doze and dream. Aimée has made up my bed for me, and brought me an extra pillow. She wants to make sure that I am comfortable. In her culture, I think older people are respected. She brings me a fresh bottle of water, and pours it into my glass.
Girl, Balancing & Other Stories Page 14
