by Alice Jolly
Then suddenly it’s easy to talk. Books, films, politics. I have the impression I’m fascinating. It’s as though an invisible string has pulled tight between us and there’s no slack. I remind myself to enjoy this time, to make the most of it. Because I’ve been in this situation often enough to know that this is the best bit. Before the excuses, the mute telephone, the tears and the pretending not to care.
We turn into a side street, towards the river, and walk past mansion blocks the colour of luncheon meat. Our footsteps echo in the empty streets and the black windows of houses watch as we pass. We stop so that I can get some gloves out of my bag. Adam holds the bag while I rummage in it. As I put on the gloves, he says, ‘You know, I didn’t know you were so young when your mother died.’
We walk on and our feet are out of time along the wet pavement. ‘She was twenty-three and I was two.’
‘I read the press cuttings.’
So my mother is just a column of newsprint in his mind. Does it matter? She’s not much more in mine. Just a figure falling, suspended in liquid light, wearing a long coat, as she drops through the grey air, her coat flapping in the wind like the wings of a bird. The rain falls straight, but she falls crooked through it, turning, her ankles and legs straight but apart, a graceful cartwheel fall. Her hair is long like mine and spirals around her. Sometimes the branches of trees stretch out to catch her and I pray each one will hold her but each one bends then gives and she carries on down through the breaking branches.
‘An accident like that wouldn’t happen now,’ Adam says. ‘They’d check a building like that more carefully.’ He wants a reason, as people always do, because if there’s a reason then you can stop it happening again, but people had been standing on that ledge for a thousand years – soldiers, and Welsh noblemen, and Japanese tourists with cameras – and in all of those thousand years it was that moment when it broke.
‘Do you still have family in Spain?’ Adam asks.
‘No. I’ve seen the house where my mother lived but there’s no family there now. Once I thought about going there, after I left university. I thought I’d teach English but this job came up in Poland instead. I don’t regret it much because what would have been the point?’
When he peels off my glove and folds my hand up in his, it feels like putting down anchor. We reach the bridge, empty, except for occasional cars. Lights stretch for miles down the river and, below, a boat with a light disappears beneath us. It feels like the blood is flowing down his arm, into mine, and back again. There’s a pulse in my palm and I can’t work out whether it’s his or mine.
‘People don’t usually ask about my mother,’ I say. ‘Death is the modern taboo, isn’t it? In Victorian times it was sex – putting fig leaves on statues and covering up the curvaceous legs of pianos. Now it’s different – you can say what you want about buggery and oral sex and hysterectomies, but talking about death is in poor taste.’
We stand in an alcove and look out down the river.
‘Death would be all right if people would actually die,’ I say. ‘But instead they hang around and you feel a responsibility to them. Because you’ve got it. Life, that is, and they haven’t and so you mustn’t be caught complaining and you must do worthwhile things and have a good time. Because every day is reclaimed from … well, whatever the other thing is. The reverse of life.’
I feel the wool of his coat against my hand as I stand close to him, with the metal rail pressed against me, staring down into darkness.
‘She had no wings to fly.’
When we get to Moulding Mansions, it’s one o’clock.
‘Is it safe to walk down here?’ Adam asks, as we pass a burnt-out car.
‘It’s where I live.’
At the archway I hesitate, hoping Adam might decide to turn back, but he follows me across the courtyard. I’m hoping that no one will be home, but a light shines through the open front door and in the hall Dougie, in pyjamas and an Australian hat with swinging corks, is standing on a stepladder holding an electric drill. ‘Mags,’ he says. ‘Mags, good to see you. You look amazing. Your hair looks amazing.’
‘Well thanks, Dougs.’
‘Yeah, I mean it’s got all purple and orange snakes in it.’
‘Thanks, Dougs, that’s great.’
I stand with Adam on the doorstep because it’s a bit hard to get any further with Dougie swinging around on the ceiling. Adam is looking a bit shocked. Probably he thought – rich bitch daughter of a millionaire politician with a Chelsea flat and no mortgage. Tyger appears wearing a short skirt and a sheepskin waistcoat with a small T-shirt underneath. She runs pink painted nails through her blonde hair and stands with one leg wrapped around the other. For someone who isn’t a mindless bimbo, she does a good act. In the cramped space of the hall I introduce her to Adam. She runs a practised eye over him and I feel as though it’s her tongue which is touching him.
Sam comes down to the hall and I introduce him as well and there are far too many of us in too little space and Dougie swinging overhead on the ladder, whistling. Sam looks at me and a light inside him goes on, then off, like the turning of a lighthouse. ‘Dougs,’ he says. ‘Get down off that ladder and come upstairs because I want to say something to you.’ He looks at Tyger, who starts to pull Dougie down and suddenly they’ve all gone upstairs.
After that we stand around awkwardly, glancing around us, holding on to our hands, while we listen to the sound of Sam, Tyger and Dougie trying to be quiet. They’re all up for a stabbing. Blood is thumping in tight veins in my head and I’m tired and I want a warm bed and a cup of tea. But at the same time I don’t want Adam to go. We don’t have anything to say any more. I’ve ceased to fascinate him so I’m no longer fascinating. The invisible string that ran between us is slack. The silence is as thick as treacle.
‘I better get going,’ he says.
I walk with him back towards the road, under the archway that smells of piss, and he stops and I stand beside him, the light from a streetlamp wrapped in a circle around us. I should leave him here and walk back inside but I stand beside him, looking at the pavement. The night is holding its breath. I’m too far away from him and too close. I shrug and stand on one leg.
‘So what are you doing tomorrow?’ he asks.
I consider what would be the right answer, then realise that Adam is going to be pleased whatever I say. How liberating it is to be liked. ‘Nothing,’ I say.
‘Nothing?’
‘Well, just waiting for someone to take me away from all this.’
He laughs and leans towards me. ‘Well, perhaps I could come round here after lunch? Two o’clock? We could go for a walk in the park and have some tea.’
‘Sounds good.’
A doctor’s-surgery shiver passes through me. Adam starts to chat about alternative parks and alternative teas and he’s not looking at me. I know he’s going to kiss me, it’s just a question of logistics, of managing it without too much embarrassment, and I wish he’d get on with it, because I’m getting cold, and I want to go to bed.
‘I enjoyed the party,’ I say, so that silence can’t get a grip.
It’s hard to think about this and do it. I’d like to kill the chess player that’s planning the moves in my head. I want to be overwhelmed but part of me is still sniggering in the back row.
‘No matter how grown-up we feel we’re all still holding hands behind the bike shed really, aren’t we?’ I say.
He laughs at me and then leans down, without any embarrassment, and kisses my neck just above my scarf. ‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘I enjoyed myself. One more day reclaimed from whatever.’
Inside, Sam is lying in my bed watching TV and Tyger is sitting on a stack of boxes. My room has been stripped naked. My cardboard life has been packed up. There is no mirror, let alone a mark on it. Blue light from the television flickers over bare walls. I pull off my shoes and get under the duvet, next to Sam, who wraps his arm around me.
‘I’d say six out of ten, seven
at a push,’ Tyger says.
‘I shouldn’t bother with all this courtship rubbish if I were you,’ Sam says, leaning across me to stub out a fag. ‘Just drive out to IKEA, buy a flatpack wardrobe, bring it home and assemble it together. If you’re on speaking terms after that, book the marquee.’
‘So didn’t you want to show him your collection of etchings?’ Tyger asks.
‘Oh, shut up.’
‘He did look as though he might have a trouser press,’ Sam says. ‘But I’m sure you could see it off.’
‘It’s not like that,’ I say. ‘I found him really interesting.’
Tyger and Sam exchange mock-serious nods. When I try to think about what Adam and I talked about, I can’t remember. It’s as though words were just filling up space while some more important communication was taking place.
‘Is he a journalist?’ Tyger asks.
‘Yes. How do you know that?’
‘I recognised the name.’ It turns out that Tyger knows one of Adam’s colleagues. She would do, of course, because she’s like Nanda, she knows everyone. So now Adam fits in somewhere and I have to take account of what other people think of him. He’s part of the crowd.
‘Marcia had a fling with him,’ Tyger says. ‘Apparently he’s a very good journalist. He won some award. But she got a bit bored with him looking down at her from the barricades the whole time and talking about work and politics. And then he wanted to go on a walking holiday in the Lake District so she binned him.’ It occurs to me that, for the first time, Tyger is jealous. Normally if a man’s interested in me she’s oh-so-encouraging but only because he’s never the kind of man she might be interested in herself.
‘Wait a minute, he’s not the journalist who’s writing this book about your dad, is he?’ Tyger asks.
‘Yes, he is actually.’
‘Oh, I see.’
All is now explained. Of course, he doesn’t actually like me. Clearly not. What he’s after is information. That’s what he is about – work and politics. I want to slap Tyger. But the point is – she’s right, she’s right. And it’s dangerous for me to know him, more dangerous than Tyger can possibly understand. This has got to stop. But I want one more day. One more day can’t harm. Just tomorrow. Then this stops – definitely.
Nanda
A diamond-edged day, the first day of spring, the last spring I will see, and the sun breaks in waves of pale yellow over the hills, its oblique light touching the edges of dry-stone walls and all the grey of the landscape suddenly made golden. The daffodils are out, growing on the bank, their faces turned towards the sun. I want to die outside in the fresh air, on a morning like this, but I don’t know if I will have the choice, and in this matter one cannot learn from the experience of others – how to die well, the final test?
In Burrington there are two undertakers and a few days ago I went into the one which is known to be cheaper and less respectable because I wanted to try out the idea, almost as a joke against myself, and to check that I could do it. Of course, I’ve dealt with undertakers before, and I’m familiar with the patina of charm that they spread over death. The gentleman there – if I can call him that – explained that there are three different packages called the Worcester, the Wellington and the Windsor, the latter being, as one would suppose, the most expensive. This he said wearing a camel coat, as the front office was cold, and his hands were large and he wore a ring with a stone.
I think perhaps he guessed my situation and that unnerved him, for although familiar with the dead, and the living, he is perhaps not comfortable with those stranded somewhere in between. For myself, I rather liked the idea of those three different packages, as they seem to add some variety and choice. Defeat I am prepared to accept, but I at least wanted there to be some heroism in it and I thought, privately, in terms of Wolfe at Quebec, or Gordon at Khartoum, or Latimer burnt at the stake, and I imagined it on black and white film, played to clapping hands and rows of open mouths.
But now I have come to suspect that death is a grey gabardine business, and that courage will finally be shown in bending, not breaking – in going quietly, yielding as a green stick does, making no fuss. At least it must be possible for me to stay here and die outside, for under no circumstances will I let them take me away. I think I can rely on Theodora for that, but perhaps not for too much else. Seasons may come and go but her egotism will endure.
I sit on a bench outside my cottage, my head turned up to the weak sunlight, and I think of the day when Max went away to Spain, a day very like this, early morning, with the mists still on the fields, and he was standing at the front gate and Freddy had the car out to drive him to the station, and he had a hat, a battered old trilby of Freddy’s, and his clothes and books in one bag. A good-looking young man, tall and strong with thick hair, a handkerchief tied round his throat and boots which were already old and dusty, and he had his guitar with him as well, we had wrapped it carefully in an old piece of eiderdown. From the front gate he waved to me, and turned to go, adjusting the bag hanging on his shoulder, and his shirt blowing in the wind …
They tell me now that some young man is writing a book about him but by what right does he do that, I wonder? What can he possibly know? I suspect his book will contain very little of the truth, for truths are uncovered in unexpected places, and cannot be fitted neatly into the structures which we make and I am the only one who was there from the very beginning.
The past has patterns now and can be organised in my mind. The turnips, I suppose, were really the beginning, at the Medlocks’ farm, during wartime, and a young man was there, only the one, the rest having gone away to war, and he was tall and thin with silver hair. His fingers were too white and thin for farm work, and as he passed the turnips over, wrapped in newspaper, we both stopped to look at the lists printed – dead, dead, dead – such brief words, black on white, to express the ending of lives. I was new to Burrington then and, having arrived there from Berlin and before that Prague, I was already worn out with death.
This young man was Arthur Briston, and his family lived in one of the farm cottages and he could not fight, he told me, as his lungs were damaged, and he asked me if I’d like to see a newborn calf and we went to the barn, and the bloody afterbirth was still lying in the straw, and the calf struggled on shivering legs, and as we stood and watched it, he took my hand. It was a wet summer, with the continual smell of rot, and the war so far away he and I struggled to believe in it. We walked often across the Edge, and he was a young man of few words and he could understand nothing about me, but we became very good friends. For him I was a woman, not an intellect. One afternoon a bomber came over, as we lay on a blanket, high on the Edge, picking shells off boiled eggs, and the shadow of it, shaped like a jagged cross, passed across the clear, white skin of his back, and seemed to hover there a moment. Nothing more than a few afternoons of pleasure.
Marriage, children, family life – Theodora, Freddy and I considered ourselves to be destined for higher purposes, the pursuit of wisdom was not to be interrupted by the merely physical, so that when I fell pregnant we did not know what to do. Hot baths, gin and the potions Freddy mixed, made of bark and herbs, had no effect, for Max was stubborn even then, and I should have married Arthur perhaps for he pleaded with me again and again, but I would not even consider it, for I could not face the burden of his love.
You might suppose that an unmarried woman, living with two friends and having a baby, would have caused a great scandal, and doubtless people did disapprove, but they said nothing. The conventional wisdom is that rural areas are narrow and prejudiced and cities are open and liberal but I have rather found the opposite to be true because in the country people see the natural pattern, they know the value of privacy. Nowadays I read all these newspaper reports about pickle-jar babies, homosexuals and three in a bed and ignorant journalists tell us that this is evidence of a changed moral climate, but to me it seems that nothing has really changed except people’s willingness to lay bare the d
etails of their lives. There’s nothing new, only a sordid desire to share what should be kept private, as I have seen in all those terrible newspaper reports about Max, which I now take care not to read.
*
During all of my pregnancy I was terribly sick and my face was as green as a spring leaf, and I couldn’t eat or sleep, and so I walked all day on the Edge, alone with my mind. I knew from an early stage that the child was a boy and, as he grew inside me, he sucked all my strength for he and I could not share such close quarters. I felt myself invaded and driven back within my own body and as he swelled my skin was stretched tight over his thrashing body and at night I lay awake, sweating, staring into the darkness, alive with anger.
When he started to come, it was earlier than expected and I was far out on the Edge, and it happened as I was bending down to tug at my skirt, which was caught in the gorse, and I felt a shudder which loosened every inch of my flesh. There were clouds rushing low across the sky and patches of sunlight mottled the cropped grass and I kept on walking, my eyes fixed on the black horizon of the Edge, as though this was seasickness, which might shortly abate. Then when I did turn back I found myself in the midst of nothing, trapped between heaven and earth and above me the sky grew narrow …
It was Old Mr Medlock from the farm – dead many years ago now – who found me and he came with Arthur Briston, their boots flattening the grass, their voices blowing in the wind as soft as the sheep’s wool caught in the gorse, and their hands enclosed my struggling limbs and the sky rolled and swayed above the fencing hurdle which they used to carry me home. It was thirty hours before Max was born and Old Mrs Medlock was there, and I remember the smell of blood, and antiseptic, and the candles burning lower and lower, and the sound of water being poured into a bowl. Sometimes I was conscious and sometimes not, and the night lasted for months, and, oh, how my flesh was shaved from my bones, until I no longer knew whether the bed was beneath me or above and when I finally felt Max slipping from me I would have reached down to push him away if I’d had the strength, and there was no cradle for him, so he was wrapped in a blanket and put in a box on the floor.
