Every time Judith turned over something she’d retrieved from the past life Sean had lived in the house and its overgrown garden, it slipped and changed, as certain flowers under sodium street lamps turn sulphurous, an elegant pale yellow becoming dirty dishwater, and crimson blossom reddish-brown scuzz.
One afternoon, when Judith had let herself in to the house and was walking through into the garden, Meriel was sitting at the kitchen table warming her hands on the teapot. Judith could not mistake her, in the velour hat she’d seen from one of Sean’s photograph, with her curling dark ‘pre-Raphaelite hair’ spilling out under it: she looked as she must have looked when they were together, thought Judith. An aroma of citrus and vanilla emanated from her pale skin and large, sad, ringed eyes.
She began talking about Sean to Judith without a pause, warmly, kindly, like a big sister who has learned that the youngest in the family has found a boyfriend for the first time.
‘Don’t you find yourself feeling sorry for him? Because he seems so cast down by life? I know I do. Still, after all these years.
‘I hope he’s paying you properly. He can be very vague about that kind of thing, and when you’re sleeping with him, it’s sometimes a bit sensitive to ask for money.’ (At this she giggled.) ‘It’s not his way, that, not at all. He may be hopelessly, chronically, congenitally unable to be faithful to one woman, but he would feel utterly defeated if he had to shell out for it.’
She took a sip of tea and looked up at Judith, her soft eyes moist with mischief:
‘Has he peed in front of you yet? He loves that. Just a little boy at heart.’ She laughed. ‘With a big whoosh. Oh, intimacy with Sean is a game, just a game.’ She pushed a cup towards Judith and began pouring.
‘And has he twisted you round yet when you’re having sex? So you’re upside down on top of him? He thinks that’s awfully clever.’
Later, making her way downstairs, she saw the door to the side of the main bedroom was ajar. It led to a kind of glory hole, where Sean tossed things he didn’t want to throw away. She pushed it open and looked inside. Flung on the chair was a skirt, a good, shapely skirt, made of some kind of soft wool in a deep maroon brown. She was magnetised by it, plucked it from its place; it was warm to the touch, and wafted a scent of something alive as she lifted it. The skirt filled as she held it up to the shape of the hips and limbs of the wearer.
Judith began writing Sean a letter. It went through several drafts, many of them blotted with tears and thrown away; these were all far more impassioned, even hysterical than the one she sent:
Dear Sean,
I am afraid that my eyes were bigger than my stomach, as the saying goes, and you were right, the work on your garden has proved too much for me in the end. I’ve made a good start, I hope you’ll agree, and I hope you’ll be able to take it from there to your satisfaction.
I wish you well,
Judith
PS Do keep putting down eggshells to deter slugs and snails, and if it’s dry, please remember to water, as drought will kill the new plantings very quickly.
On the phone the evening he had her note, Sean sounded shocked; he did not understand what had happened.
‘There hasn’t been anybody here,’ he said.
When he came round to find her at her house later that evening, he appeared so genuinely baffled, she told him.
‘Even if Meriel really did come to see me, I didn’t see her,’ he said. ‘Besides, I didn’t invite her, and I know nothing about it. Also, it’s quite possible for her to come round and for us to have a drink together, surely?’
She wanted to cry out, from the most boring depths of her hurt, ‘But how did she get in?’
‘And I promise you,’ Sean went on, ‘you have nothing to fear from her. She has shown no sign of returning, now, or at any time. Nor has Daisy, nor has Sylvie. And not for want of my trying to persuade them.’
Judith flinched.
‘Not now, silly. Then.’ He paused. ‘You have a past, too. You have … Iain.’ He looked out of her window on to the garden, which lay in darkness now. ‘There are always others. We’re old enough to have lives around us. We’ve travelled old tracks, gone to earth more than once.’ He turned back to her. ‘Don’t be angry about this.’
The groundwork on Sean’s garden was done, and so they moved into a different phase, for there was no obvious pretext for their meetings. She had to own up to herself that she wanted to be with him, that he wasn’t casually profiting from her employment. Sometimes, she even talked to him unguardedly: unaccustomed new feelings sprang at her, like the flash of a pair of night-seeing eyes from the canal bank when she cycled to and from Sean’s, or the brush of her vixen, bushier now from all that peanut butter laid out by Judith (and by neighbours too, no doubt) and flaring for an instant in the long evening light as she swivelled into her earth.
When autumn closed in towards winter, Judith bought some mastic and squeezed out a fillet round the windowpanes of the garden shed to improve the insulation; she found a plant rack and some shelving and installed them, regardless of any possible occupant. There she began potting and layering, bringing on slips and cuttings for the planting she was planning for the spring. She imagined that garden as it would be: her head was moving with pictures from the future, and the past was jostling for attention at the back of the class, sticking up its hands and messing about, calling out ‘Miss, gotta go to the toilet’. She was quelling it with her crossest look, but it was disruptive, it wasn’t going to cooperate.
In the shed one morning, a woolly hat appeared, a rich rust colour, with a furry trim, tossed into a basket next to a good make of secateurs. Judith did not remember seeing either of them before, any more than Sylvie’s skirt (it was Sylvie’s, Sean confirmed). She plucked the hat out of the basket and pulled it on, then checked herself in the pane, which against the dark glossy foliage of the new camellia she’d planted beside the shed, acted as a mirror. It suited her: she looked as if she was up to something, something not to be anticipated or understood before it occurred. Still wearing the hat, she went back through the house, and up the stairs, and into the glory hole. She pulled the skirt from its new position on a hanger, and still in her gardening T-shirt, jeans and socks, stepped into its soft folds. She went into the bedroom and made a tentative turn in front of the mirror. She liked the effect: there was something raffish about this outfit. It turned her into a kind of stranger to herself, a new visitor in her own life, and the encounter was not unpleasant.
Back in the shed, she went on thumbing in seedlings, then, using the secateurs, cut up into knubby lengths a good section of iris root she’d sliced from a friend’s choked clump. As the night drew in, she began to set it carefully into the flowerbed on what would be the sunniest patch of the garden in the spring.
When Sean came back from work later, she found she enjoyed the sex better than the time before or the time before that. Such satisfaction it delivered, to watch Sylvie hovering there, on the landing outside the bedroom door, in her jacket and tights and boots, but without her skirt.
When a nightdress turned up with the Chinese dressing gown again on the back of the bathroom door a few days later, Judith took a shrewd look at the fabric and the workmanship and appreciated the fine blue lawn with cotton lace trim.
She was humming the theme from one of her favourite pieces of Bach while she let her clothes fall on to the bathroom floor and put on the nightie. When she walked down the stairs and saw Daisy sitting reading in a chair by the fire in the sitting room, she started, of course. But this time, Judith hardly quailed; almost without pause, she turned back on her heel and went upstairs, and standing in the bedroom, pushed her fists into her eyes until the snowflakes needling into her burst into flowers of colour and light, and then she turned on the electric blanket in anticipation, waiting for Sean to come back so that they could do what they liked to do and have sex before supper
.
Ladybird, Ladybird
IMOGEN LIKED CHARITY shops, house clearance sales and junk yards: her very first flat was furnished with Sixties formica and tubular steel, but she’d given away the twiggy hat rack with the bobbles, the beige moleskin beanbag, and the moiré pink kitchen cabinet with sliding glass panels, now that every style slave had to have them. But she still loved the clothes, though these days they’d usually already been spotted as vintage and were no longer a bargain. So she was surprised by the dress in the window of her local PDSA – For Pets Who Need Vets. It was a frock, a real frock with a sweetheart neckline and a full, gathered skirt in a light cotton with a scatter of a pattern in different colours on a lovely flamey crimson background. She went in, almost breathless when she asked – thinking it might not be for sale, or already sold to someone else – if she could try it on.
Even better, it had a soft lawn petticoat in a paler lemony-pink underneath, as she glimpsed when the old woman serving in the shop began pulling it over the head of the dummy.
‘We keep some pieces to bring in the collectors’ – she spoke confidingly – ‘and this one has a certain je ne sais quoi, don’t you think?’
Behind the curtain in the back room surrounded by the tat and the knick-knacks that weren’t yet priced, Imogen held the dress against her body and looked at herself in a mirror propped up against the wall. The pattern repeated, it sprang around the frock to a lively rhythm, and she could see herself in ballet pumps with a new belt to replace the one that looked worn, especially at the holes where the wearer’s waistline had strained a bit. When she put it on, the fabric danced against her thighs, and the narrow bodice fitted miraculously to her own small breasts, and she could see how it once spun and whirled on a dance floor; it made her want to – well, twist and shout. Not that she did much singing or dancing with Greg, now that they’d been together for fifteen years. Besides, they had to stay in and eat healthily and keep regular hours so that they’d never miss the exact right moment when her hormones were peaking perfectly for that magic outcome, a baby.
They’d been trying. First they hadn’t admitted they were trying, but then, when it didn’t happen, they started – tests and treatments and thermometers and charts – and now it was like being in training, every moment monitored, controlled, regulated. When a kiss was just a kiss was a world ago and time.
‘It’s £20 to you,’ said the woman serving, when Imogen came out in it. Imogen saw that this old charity volunteer was very thin and silvery all over, with silvery peach fuzz on her face and pale blue eyes when she turned to the light coming from the street outside. She looked like a rare breed of cat and, Imogen realised, must have once been beautiful. ‘Our top price and a snip at that. And it has your name on it, love, I can tell.’
When Imogen nodded, she started bundling it up in discarded Xmas wrapping, then stopped. ‘What’s this? Something in the pocket.’ She felt around for the lump inside the fabric, concealed in the folds. ‘In an inside pocket – ah, a comb! But we shan’t grudge you the extra item, shall we? Let’s say it’s the free gift you get with purchases of £20 or over!’ She laughed quaveringly; she almost mewed.
The comb was blue plastic with a tooled gilt clasp; the teeth were bent and none too clean.
‘Yes, I’ll take that, too,’ said Imogen, not knowing why.
She came home light-footed and light-headed; ran a basin of lukewarm water, stirred the soft flakes to a lather, and slowly squished down first the dress and then the petticoat. They gave off a smell of old deodorant and dust. She soaped them tenderly, lifted them out, and added the comb to the now dingy suds. Her mobile began to tweet.
She listened, once she’d hung up the dress to dry. A voice message. Someone was giggling through a snatch of sing-song:
‘You look so pretty when you go out
Oh mother mine, oh mother mine.’
It must be someone misdialling – a kid phoning a friend? Funny way to talk, though.
She pressed Reply. It whined unobtainable.
Then the landline rang in the kitchen.
It would be Greg, she thought, saying he was on his way home, his voice full of apology at running late – she was ovulating by her chart, and he knew they had plans. But when she answered, there was a gurgle, as if someone was covering their mouth not to crow with laughter. No word, nothing more.
She’d scrubbed the comb with her nailbrush, and it was drying on a hand towel by the basin. She picked it up, squinted to see if she’d extracted all the old gunge, and seeing it was clean ran it through her hair. Strands lifted off her head, clinging to the tines and crackling with sparks. She cried out, and laughing, smoothed down her wild hair.
Her mobile bleeped: a text.
U look sweet in yr nu frock
Come back 2 me, 0 come back 2 me.
It was signed with a and two !!
As she was gazing at it dumbly, there was another bleep. Imogen’s fingers were so shaky by this time she had trouble pressing the buttons right. This text was a photograph: a blurry, faded, colour snapshot of a baby with a cotton cap on its head.
This time, she switched off her mobile, and turned her attention to the dress it could be damp ironed, it might even benefit. She was spreading it on the ironing board when the phone in the kitchen rang:
The flames are close, the fire is hot
Come back to me, oh come back to me
Before they dance around my cot.
She wanted to press 2 and hear the message again, but it had been a real voice this time, and her caller had rung off. She held the receiver to her ear; looked at it; the photograph superimposed itself on the earpiece. She tried 1471: ‘The caller withheld the number.’
Running back to the bedroom, she stepped into the dress; it was slightly damp, and leapt and settled around her, aswirl. She began to feel rushes – fear? Horror? Neither. She wanted to explode, that was it, crow aloud, like that child gurgling, but louder. She was feeling gorgeous; this something was coming from somewhere she didn’t understand, but she didn’t need to.
When Greg came through the front door, she whispered into her mobile, ‘Wait, just wait, this time you will be safe, I promise.’
She turned it off. Then, as an afterthought, she shut off the ring tone on the landline too.
Greg said, edging himself out of the straps of his office backpack, and looking at her with a finger to his temple, ‘Let’s see, you’re Cybill Shepherd in The Last Picture Show?’
She shook her head; she suppressed a gale of laughter; she was ablaze, a divinity who could shoot white lightning from quivering fingertips.
‘No? Then you’re – let’s see. Who’s the girl, not Divine of course, but the other one, the actress in Shampoo?’
‘You mean Hairspray, silly, and I’m not Debbie Harry.’
They had videos and DVDs and watched them often; it was part of the treatment, to enjoy things together. But Greg often fell asleep, on account of the strenuousness of his new duties.
‘This could just about be her, couldn’t it?’ Imogen pointed down to her frock, then up to her neckline, put her hands on her waist. ‘But do you think it’s me?’
‘It’s certainly a frock and a half,’ said Greg.
When Imogen wasn’t all anxious and business-like and bossy before they had to have sex, it made it easier to – well – do it, and he liked her fizzing and bobbing about like a girl on a night out, sitting on the sofa with the full skirts spread out, shaking out sparks from her hair as she combed it, smiling at him with intent. He started to move towards her. The phone in the kitchen began ringing again. She started; he turned to go to answer it.
‘Oh, leave it,’ she said. ‘I know who it is. It’s someone who keeps calling, wants to see me. For some reason.’ She tilted herself back on the sofa, plucked at the panels of the skirt to beckon Greg towards her. ‘I’m going to keep the
frock on. I don’t care if you do muss it all up. I want you to. It feels right, somehow.’
It was spring now: nine months to Christmas. Noel, or Noelle – that would be a pretty name for the laughing child who had chosen to come home.
Item, One Tortoiseshell Bag
… rectangular, with deep lid, chrome clasp, two curved handles and four internal compartments. Parisian manufacture, c.1954
THE GLOWING, MOTTLED panes of my mother’s evening bag were puzzling; my pet tortoise was dry and dusty all over, its dark shell grooved and grainy as old timber on a breakwater above the waterline, where the waves never splash to make it gleam in the sun. The pattern on the animal’s carapace was squared off, the sections bulging more towards the dome, but neither this mottling nor the shell’s lustreless texture looked in the least like the honey-and-toffee translucent dapple of Beata’s prize possession.
The animals were cheap at the pet shop in the bazaar; they weren’t protected yet. The shell, by contrast, was a luxury material – like ivory, crocodile, or shagreen. But when I say ‘my pet tortoise’, it’s misleading because I had a series of the creatures, each one disappearing in turn. ‘It’s gone into hibernation,’ Beata would reassure me, ‘it’ll show itself again when the weather warms up.’ A tortoise never becomes a pet, not really: petting is limited to tickling it so it’ll poke out that troubling ancient head with its dinosaur eye, dull and mineral as a diamond before polishing, or coaxing that low-slung, narrow and lipless mouth to ruminate on leaves. But no tortoise I had ever uttered a sound. Could a tortoise bark? Could it squeal?
The tortoises of my childhood were baffling – perhaps they gave me my closest encounter with the state of bafflement.
Yet, from this gloomy, lumbering creature in its mute pathos, its almost unfathomable antiquity, came the translucent and luxurious material of the brushes that Francis kept on his dressing table and the combs Beata wore in her hair.
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