What I Cannot Say to You : Stories [1 ed.] 9780826214638

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What I Cannot Say to You

What I Cannot Say to You S t o r i e s b y Va n e s s a F u r s e J a c k s o n

University of Missouri Press COLUMBIA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2003 by Vanessa Furse Jackson University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 07 06 05 04 03 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jackson, Vanessa Furse. What I cannot say to you : stories / by Vanessa Furse Jackson. p. cm. ISBN 0-8262-1463-0 (alk. paper) I. Title. PS3610.A3555 W48 2003 813'.54--dc21 2002153274 This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Liz Young Compositor: Foley Design Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Coronet and Simoncini Garamond “Darrell’s Garage” first appeared in The Marlboro Review; “A Small Independence” in the Palo Alto Review; and “Grandmother’s Footsteps” in the Red Cedar Review. Many thanks to the following for time and suggestions generously given: Robin Carstensen, Catherine Cox, Jane and Nicolas Furse, Janis Haswell, Dodie Hummell, Vickie Machen, Wendell Mayo, Elisabeth Mermann-Joswiak, and Kim Withers.

For Robb

Contents Darrell’s Garage

1

On the Road to Greater Bishop

22

Breaking Faith

37

Living Alone

44

A Small Independence

64

Grandmother’s Footsteps

73

Victoria and Albert I: Running Away to Sea

90

Victoria and Albert II: Day-Trippers

94

Telling Stories

98

Imagining Friends

112

A Little Kingdom

120

The Outing

136

White Sandals

151

What I Cannot Say to You

161

What I Cannot Say to You

Darrell’s Garage M

r. Darrell had only one arm. He’d lost the other in Burma, so we knew he’d been a soldier like Daddy, but less said soonest mended was all he’d tell us, so we talked to him about his car instead. Quite unlike the sedate Morris Oxford that we were used to, Mr. Darrell’s turquoise and chrome-winged car came straight out of the future, which in our case meant America. The steering wheel was on the left-hand side, and the car changed gear by itself with little clicks and surges that never failed to give me butterflies of pleasure. The front seat was so wide it could fit the three of us on it and still have room for another, and it was covered with leopard skin, soft and furry. Mr. Darrell had a glowing red lighter in the dashboard to light his cigarette, which he did while steering with his knee, and then he would whistle with the cigarette alight in his mouth. There were mysterious dials on the dashboard and switches that we weren’t allowed to touch, and our endless questions and his brief, incomprehensible answers would form our conversation with him. We listened to the purr of the car, we listened to his slow, masculine voice, and when we reached the little lane that climbed up to our house, we listened to the hedgerow grass slap like hair against the wing mirrors on both sides of the car. “How’s your ma today, then?” was the only question he’d ask us, and the faint smell of motor oil that came from his overalls would mingle with the smell of his cigarette smoke in the car. Mackenna and I would look at each other quickly to see who should answer, then one of us, usually me, would say, “she’s all right, thanks,” and the ritual would be over. He’d grunt, shift in his seat a little, and settle his stump along the edge of the window. He wore an oil-flecked white shirt under his overalls, and the left sleeve was folded into a neat cylindrical package that was held fast with an expandable metal bracelet. It was odd to see this package lift and move by itself. Mum still drove us to the bus stop every morning to catch the

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scarlet double-decker Thames Valley bus into Reading, where we’d change onto a maroon city bus that took us to school. But in the evenings, we’d get off at the stop outside the pub, The Cunning Man, go next door to Darrell’s Garage (Frank Darrell, Sole Prop.), and sit in the car on the furry leopard-skin seat until Mr. Darrell could get away from Old Ernie, his assistant, or from whichever customer it was who was engaging him in head-shaking, cigarettedragging conversation. Mackenna and I would watch him impatiently in the rearview mirror. When at last he walked over to the car and sank into his seat so that the car rocked over to the left, he would shut his door with that deep hollow thunk, start up the low growl of motor, readjust the rearview mirror with a sideways glance at us, then push in the choke halfway and back slowly down the forecourt and onto the road. It was the best moment of my day. We didn’t fully understand why Mum could take us in the morning but was always too tired to come for us in the evening, but I don’t remember asking her about it. We never asked her much about herself. We just assumed it was something to do with her being pregnant, an event we knew would bring us another brother or sister in September, though we had no idea exactly how. We vaguely disapproved, having believed for years that she loved the two of us exclusively, and anyway considering thirty-four too old for babies, so we talked about it as little as possible. I didn’t mind that her tiredness meant us riding home in Mr. Darrell’s car, though, even if somewhere in a cloudy unformed thought I inextricably linked the baby’s coming (a gift, Mum said) to the joy of riding in his leopard and turquoise monster. As we climbed the hill to the house, he would allow the car to slow until he could swing it smoothly and with one-handed ease through the shaggy gap in the privet hedge where there’d once been a gate. Then he would roll her carefully up the chunky gravel and sand of the driveway and onto the turnaround at the back of the house, so we could get out right beside the backdoor. “Your Highnesses,” he’d say, leaning across us to open our door with a strong hand that was black in the lines over his knuckles and behind his fingernails and that smelled so beautifully of garage. And we’d

Darrell’s Garage ❥ 3 slide out, Mackenna first, then me from the middle, trying to hold on to my satchel and my panama hat and keep my cotton uniform dress decent across the furry cling of the leopard skin, trying at the same time to say thank you very much before I scrambled to overtake Mackenna round the side of the car, reach Mum first, get kissed first, get into the house first, run upstairs to our bedroom, tear off the wrinkled school dress, and scramble into the airy lightness of shorts. Sometimes Mr. Darrell stayed for tea, but we took very little notice of him once our journey was over and we were safely delivered. We left him to Mum to entertain, while without time or breath to respond to questions about what we’d done in school that day we ate raspberry jam or meat-paste sandwiches, homemade ginger cake or Victoria sponge, digestive biscuits, and on a good day chocolate bourbons or pink wafer biscuits. We drank milk, wiped off our mustaches on the backs of our hands, mumbled pleasemayigetdown rather as the nuns had taught us to mumble the Hail Mary at school, and fled for the garden, which was where, in the early summer of 1959, we preferred to live. Our favorite place was a secluded spot as far away from kitchen eyes as we could get, a patch of rarely mown grass between the shed and the privet hedge, which had an old apple tree growing in it and a low wall at its end. We could lie in the grass with our noses at lady-bird level and create whole grass kingdoms to reign over, sweet grass kingdoms with beckoning earthen tracks running away through rain forests of grass stalks, and us the same size as the ants and beetles that scurried along them. Or we could sit cross-legged, with our faces in the peppery poison smell of the privet hedge, and spy through at passersby: the milkman with his rattling crates of milk bottles; the baker in his scarlet-and-gold van and the meatfaced butcher in his white van; people from the nearby village cycling home up the hill, delightfully red and out of breath; people walking with fat white legs in Wellington boots or brown lace-ups or Clark’s sandals and short socks, maybe pushing a pram, and all unaware of our disparaging whispers. Only if other children passed did we retreat—they always knew that we were there. Often, we

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just leaned back against the little wall and talked, told stories, read books, smoked a cigarette stolen from the box in the sitting room. We’re twins, Mackenna and I, and back then before Francis was born, we would have thought it odd to do anything separately from each other. My little dark-haired, blue-eyed brother, who competed from the start for our love and attention, radically altered our small family. But something else had begun to change that summer of our eleventh year, and it’s no good now wishing I’d been quicker to see it. We’re not identical. Far from it. Mackenna’s hair was thick and fair and straight, like Daddy’s had been, while I had Mum’s floaty mouse hair that curled in the rain and the kind of skin that went pink if someone looked straight at me. But Mum made us both black velvet Alice-bands that pulled our hair off our faces, and our eyes were the same brown with green bits in them, so that people did muddle us up sometimes, to our pleasure. “Do you like Mr. Darrell?” Mackenna asked me one afternoon, as we were leaning back against the low wall, letting school soak out of us through the soporific heat of the sun. I took a careful puff of my cigarette. I wasn’t as good as Mackenna at getting just the right amount of smoke into my mouth, then blowing it out down my nose without getting any into my eyes. Blinking a little, I said, “Why?” “Oh, I just wondered,” she said, and blew a perfect smoke ring. It was the best one she’d ever made, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. I thought for a moment, and through our cigarette smoke I could faintly smell that perfumed motor oil. “Yes, I do,” I said. “He’s nice to us. He doesn’t fuss us. And I like his voice.” I knew my answer sounded a bit lame, but I couldn’t find any other words to explain to her why I liked him so much. It was something to do with his soft Berkshire accent, something to do with the expert care with which he drove us, something to do with the sad package resting against his window. And it wasn’t quite any of that. “I’m not sure,” Mackenna said. “About what?” I asked. I was annoyed, but I didn’t want her to know I was.

Darrell’s Garage ❥ 5 “He looks at me funnily,” was all she said. “He does not,” I said. “What d’you mean, looks at you?” “When he gets in the car,” she said. “And sometimes when you don’t notice.” “What d’you mean?” I said again. “And when he leans over to open the door,” she added. “You’re nutty,” I said. “He’s looking over to see the door handle. He’s not looking at you.” My skin felt hot and sticky in the sun, and I stubbed my cigarette out carefully in the little Blackcurrant Pastilles tin we kept hidden in the shed for the purpose. Then I wiped my hands in the grass. “I like him,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Look,” Mackenna said, holding out her arm. “Look what?” I said. I couldn’t see anything on it. “Here,” she said, pointing to a faint dirty mark on the white skin above her elbow. “He touched me today when he opened the door.” “Bosh,” I said. “You’re making it up. And anyway, so what?” “Smell,” she said, sticking her arm across into my face. I caught just the faintest whiff of the oil on her skin, and it smelled good. “He brushed against you,” I said. “He couldn’t help it if you were in the way. Now stop being so dopey, and let’s go to London. Come on.” We had never been to the real London, but we’d given its name to our make-believe land because that’s where Daddy had died, in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine when we were three and a half. London was inhabited by a mix of imaginary characters and real people in our lives whom we either admired or hated. Those we hated (most of the village children, the butcher, and all of the nuns at school) were relegated to the Nip Side, where they experienced terrible catastrophes, while we ruled over the Allies Side with benevolence and profit. I was twenty-four minutes older than Mackenna, so I was Lord Lieutenant and the King’s favorite, and she was my trusted Helmsman. She picked that title. We had always been able to enter London at will, whispering our way in after we were supposed to be asleep at night, sitting upstairs at the back of the bus, or lying on our magic patch of grass beneath

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the apple tree. On our rambles in the countryside between our house and the village, every piece of which we had named, we were invariably engaged upon London business. “Okay,” Mackenna said, scrambling up. “I won’t talk about it any more. But I’m glad I don’t have to sit next to him, that’s all. Mr. Greasy Darrell.” And she took the tin and went into the shed to hide it in the spidery saddlebag of Daddy’s old bicycle, which was one place we were sure Mum would never think of looking. I knew that if I tried to defend him, I would start to cry. I’d been certain that she looked forward to the ride home every day the same as I did. It hadn’t occurred to me that we would ever differ over anything. How could she not like him? She was my twin. When she came out of the shed and stood in front of me waiting for me to get up, I said, “I don’t want to go. Let’s stay here,” but I didn’t look up at her face. “You just don’t want to see it,” she said, and walked away without another word. I sat on the warm grass after she had gone and remembered the last time I had waited here without her, though shivering that time with cold. It was on a Saturday afternoon last January, when we had found a bonfire burning at the edge of the Wild Wood with not a grown-up in sight. It was a large bonfire, whose smoke rose so thinly and reluctantly into the gray air that we might not have realized it was still going had it not been for the magnetic scent of wet oak burning as we headed for the dark mouth of the woods. In fact, the fire had an almost white-hot heart. Someone had expertly packed a thick pile of branches and rotting leaves to burn on its own for days. To us, it was one of those open gateways to London that we never turned down, and as we began to circle the live pungency of fire on a cold afternoon, poking the sluggish middle with sticks that immediately glowed, we became irresistibly caught in the ancient seduction of fire. When it was over, I couldn’t remember exactly how I got us into it. I started acting the part of some sacrificial volunteer about to save my people through immolation, but became so quickly mesmerized by my own heat that the Helmsman left Mackenna and she

Darrell’s Garage ❥ 7 began to plead with me not to do it. As I listened to her start to get genuinely frightened, I found my determination rising in me like a physical force until I wanted to jump into the fire so badly that I think I nearly did. Mackenna was sobbing and pulling at me, and I could hear the ring of certainty in my voice as if it were coming from someone else. There was real exhilaration in the power I felt, and it must have been exhaustion that finally brought me to my senses, rather than sense itself, for Mackenna’s distress merely egged me on to ever greater heights of conviction. At last, reluctantly, I came to a stop, and she disappeared into the Wild Wood while I was still blinking at the misty, unfamiliar landscape. I walked home alone and hid in the shed to wait for her, so that we could go in for tea together as normal, though as it turned out Mum was back late herself that day and wouldn’t have noticed our separation anyway. Crouching in the almost-dark by the barrel that held our winter potatoes and carrots, I had to inhale deeply the sandalwood smell of the peat they were packed in to try and slow down the beating of my heart. And now she’d walked away from me again, and this time I wasn’t sure why. I felt my world become as strange and misted as it had on that darkening January day, and the hot sunshine still beating down on me felt odd, as if an electric fire had been switched on in the garden. Eventually, I went back into the house without Mackenna and found Mum in the kitchen making us a salad for supper. I lolled against the sink watching her chop mint and snip chives and felt comforted by her busy, familiar hands, though part of me was still traveling after Mackenna, trying to get her to come back and tilt my world onto its axis again. “What have you done with Mackenna?” Mum asked after a while. “What d’you mean, done?” I said. She looked at me and smiled, but she didn’t say anything else. I knew she assumed that whatever had happened between us was my fault, and I suddenly felt better because this time I hadn’t done anything.

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“Mum,” I said, “do you like Mr. Darrell?” She stopped snipping and looked at me. “Do I like him?” she said. “Yes,” I said. “Do you?” “He’s a good man,” she said. “And he’s very good to you girls.” She put a hand to her back and straightened herself, and the bulge of the baby stuck out behind her apron. I tried not to look. “He’s a good man,” she said again. “Better than most around here.” “But do you like him?” I insisted. She took the bowl of salad and plunked it down on the table, next to a little vase of clover and ragged robin. “Of course I like him,” she said. “Don’t be silly. Now move.” I shifted away from the sink and went outside to wait for Mackenna. I wasn’t quite sure what Mum meant by “better than most around here,” but I thought it had something to do with the fact that she was a widow and that we didn’t have a lot of money. We didn’t mix much with people in the village, and though that never bothered Mackenna and me, I knew that Mum felt lonely sometimes because she told us. We tried to feel sorry for her, but although we often fantasized about what it would be like to have Daddy alive, I’m not sure we really wanted a fourth person in our lives. Poor Mum. She tried so hard to bring us up right in a world that was less sorry for than suspicious of widows living on small incomes and keeping to themselves, and it can’t have been easy. When I defied her, she sometimes boxed my ears and said the dreaded, “If your father were alive, you’d never have dared to do this”; worse, she sometimes cried, but she also allowed us a sensible balance of freedom. We knew exactly which lanes and fields around the house we were allowed to roam over and which we weren’t, and we rarely crossed the line. We knew we weren’t allowed to talk to strange men, and I hadn’t done so since the summer when Mum took my bicycle away for six weeks because I persisted in talking to the stubbled old hedge cutter who intermittently worked in the local lanes. Mackenna was terrified of him and wouldn’t go near him, but I felt sorry for him always being alone. He had a strange pudding-basin hat, stiff with grease, incomprehensible

Darrell’s Garage ❥ 9 speech, and a very unsavory reputation, though Mum found it hard to explain exactly what this was. But along with her encouragement to put on Wellington boots and go out in any kind of weather came her unflagging desire to bring us up as young ladies. That was why we went to the convent in Reading instead of to one of the other local schools. We weren’t Catholics, but she felt that the nuns would continue to uphold her standards when we were out of her sight. If that meant eating up everything on your plate because of the starving children in Africa, not wearing patent-leather shoes because men could look down and see your knickers reflected in them, always wearing a hat and gloves (brown wool in winter, white cotton in summer) out-of-doors, and never, ever eating in the street, even if your bus stop was right outside the best ice-cream shop in Reading, then I suppose they were doing a good job. They certainly insulated us from much in the world of which they felt young ladies shouldn’t know or of which they knew little themselves: science, prejudice, poetry, history (other than the history of Reading), athletics, music, sex, were all things we had to find out for ourselves. On the Sunday afternoon after Mackenna had walked away from me, she and I were reluctantly doing homework in our bedroom, shut upstairs by Mum until we could honestly promise we had done everything we were supposed to. I worked faster than Mackenna and cared less about what Sister Mary Magdalene thought, so I was trying to help her finish her report on our recent school trip to the Huntley and Palmers biscuit factory, hurrying her along so we could escape into the hot sunshine outside our window. All that summer term, it seems to me now, the sun shone in a pure blue sky, and day followed day so long and hot that I think we even stopped turning on the big wireless in the kitchen each morning for the weather forecast. “What does it matter how the machine got the swirls to come out evenly onto each Iced Gem?” I asked her in exasperation. “They just did, and we saw them do it. That’s all you need to say.” “Ssssh,” Mackenna said. “I’m thinking.” I hated it when she said that. Shutting me out as if her thinking

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moments were sacred and I was the despoiler of her temple. “You’re keeping me locked up here,” I said, “when we could be outside doing something fun. Why don’t you let me finish it for you, and then we’d be free?” “You go ahead without me,” she said. “I won’t be long.” I didn’t say anything but walked over to the open window, my bare feet sticking to the polished green linoleum at each step. I stood and traced the willow-leaf pattern on the curtains over and over with my finger to clear the blur of tears. Why did she keep doing that? I could feel my pulse beating uncomfortably over my left eye. I didn’t say any more, but I knew she would know how I was feeling, and I hoped she would feel bad enough to finish her stupid composition and let us out of this stuffy room and into the grass scents outside. But she didn’t say any more either, and I could hear her pencil slowly begin to travel across the scratchy paper of her exercise book. I hated her. So I didn’t tell her what I saw. Our bedroom window was at the side of the house and overlooked the fields beside it that furrowed their way up to the village, which was just over the horizon. But if you stood in the shadow of the curtains and squinted out sideways, you could also see the shed and our patch of grass and a little bit of the lane through the privet hedge at the front of the house. For a moment, as I looked out that way, I was confused, as if Mackenna’s remark had affected my ability to perceive familiarity. The privet hedge was still its untidy green self, but through it I saw blue, as if it now bordered on water of some kind, or on a sheer drop-off that left only the sky beyond. I put my hand over my left eye and tried looking again. Not sky color. Turquoise. Then, though I couldn’t see her, I heard Mum come round from the backdoor and scrunch her way down the drive. I was slow to connect the sound with the color through the hedge because I was used to Mum’s afternoon walks. She always lay on her bed for an hour after lunch, and then she went out for a walk up the lane. We knew she liked to be by herself during those times, and that was all right by us as it allowed us free and untrammeled access to

Darrell’s Garage ❥ 11 London, and also to the cigarette box in the sitting room. While she was out walking she’d pick flowers that grew beside the lane, snowdrops, primroses, and violets, and at this time of year campion, ragged robin, herb Robert, and Queen Anne’s lace, and she’d snip bits out of the hedges too, hawthorn and honeysuckle, or bright green furry beech leaves, out of which she’d make haphazard flower arrangements for the middle of the kitchen table. In autumn she’d fill her pockets with conkers, at Christmas she’d take a sack and stuff it with holly and ivy, and in the early spring she’d come home clutching armfuls of catkins and pussy willow. She was just that kind of walker. I heard the scrunching cease as she reached the end of the drive and turned into the lane. Then I heard the familiar hollow thunk of the car door closing, followed by a second thunk, and then the blue moved away from behind the privet hedge with a low growl and disappeared up the lane where she usually walked. Where on earth was she going? I thought. And why did she need Mr. Darrell to take her? I turned to see if Mackenna had heard anything, but the tip of her tongue was out, and her head was practically down on her exercise book as she followed the laborious loops of her pencil from left to right. I don’t think she was even aware I was still in the room, and after a moment I remembered that we didn’t talk about Mr. Darrell any more, so I said nothing. Mackenna finished her report eventually, and we went for a walk across the fields to the Wild Wood, but we didn’t try to go to London, and I remember feeling as if I was walking on my own. When we got back for tea, there was a bunch of lupines in the middle of the kitchen table, but I wasn’t quite brave enough to ask Mum if lupines grew wild along the lane to the village. That night I had a strange dream about Daddy that seemed to go on and on, and I kept trying to escape from it, but I couldn’t wake myself up. I dreamed about him quite a bit, though he rarely looked like the photograph of him by Mum’s bed. Mostly he looked like other people I knew, or like a picture in one of our books, or sometimes like Mackenna, but I always knew it was him, and I was glad every time he appeared. This time was different. There was a

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pervasive feeling of menace, and while Daddy looked almost uncannily like his photograph, his left arm was cut off and the stump wrapped up into a neat package held with a metal bracelet. Something was pursuing me that kept following me from scene to scene, but I wasn’t sure if it was him or not because he was also at my side. I wanted him to rescue me, but I couldn’t tell him why in case he was, in fact, after me. When I finally woke up, I was sweating, and the white package kept lifting itself up into my mind’s eye, and I kept saying No! and Mum was in the room with Mackenna standing by her and I didn’t know where I was for a moment and that was the scariest thing of all. Mum gave me a long hug and a couple of soluble aspirin, and she was still sitting on my bed when I went back to sleep, though I never told her what the dream had been about. I just said I’d forgotten, which was a big lie, as it was one of those dreams that I never forgot. In the morning, I was still hot, and yesterday’s headache was beating over my left eye, so I was allowed to stay at home while Mackenna had to go off to school without me. “You shouldn’t do this to me,” she said, when she came upstairs after breakfast to get her panama and gloves. I was listening to the comforting buzz of aspirin in my head and wishing she would go away and just let me sleep in the deep quiet of the morning. “You’ll be sorry,” she said. “For what?” I asked drowsily. “For making me go by myself when you know it’s not safe,” she said. “What’s not safe?” I asked. “Motor oil,” she said, and clattered off down the stairs. For a moment the white package surfaced again in my mind, and I stuffed it back hurriedly. Nonsense, I said to myself. Complete nonsense. Over and over to myself that day, I said the word nonsense as I woke and slept and woke again, but as five o’clock approached, I realized that I was straining to hear the sound of the car coming up the lane, and that I wanted very much to have Mackenna here with

Darrell’s Garage ❥ 13 me in the room, her usual Helmsman self and nothing between us at all. I listened to the sounds as she arrived, acutely conscious of what each one signified. The car approaching, the hoarse squeaking of its brakes (he must have been going faster than usual), the sound of its tires on the driveway; her door opening (did his hand brush her arm?) then closing; his door opening then closing as she ran round the car and into the house; her footsteps on the stairs as his followed my mother’s into the kitchen; the faint sound of the kettle being filled with water as Mackenna banged the bedroom door open and then slammed it shut again. “Well?” I said, sitting up in bed. “Well what?” she said, from between muffling folds of dress. “You know,” I said. “Motor oil. Him.” “Oh, that,” she said, and after a pause, “you weren’t worrying about that, were you?” “You said it wasn’t safe,” I said. “Well, it was,” she said, dragging on her shorts. “It was boring, and I don’t want to talk about it.” “About what?” I asked. I was quite sure she was hiding something. “You think I can’t cope with him?” she said, and she sounded quite cross. “We had nothing to talk about worth mentioning, and I stared out of the window at cows. It’s so stupid Mum not coming to pick us up any more. And now I suppose I have to go and have tea with him.” “You’re sure you’re okay?” I said. “He’s common, that’s the problem,” she said, and disappeared downstairs again. Mum had always been adamant that we shouldn’t associate with, or talk like, anyone who was “common,” and we had always accepted this without question, so Mackenna’s remark had the ring of final judgment about it. I’d never thought of Mr. Darrell as being common. He’d been in Burma like Daddy. A soldier. By Wednesday, I was well enough to go back to school, and everything seemed to have returned to normal. I’d had no more

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bad dreams, my headache was gone, and we began to study the Roman history of Reading. After school, we sneaked into the icecream shop before our bus came and each bought a ninepenny cornet with a chocolate flake in it, so that our gloves were a slimy brown and white by the time we got to the garage. Mr. Darrell seemed glad that I was back, though he didn’t say much. “How’s your ma today, then?” he asked. Mackenna dug me in the ribs. “Motor oil,” she whispered. I cleared my throat to cover up the sound of her voice. “She’s all right, thanks,” I said. “And you’re all right?” he said. I looked up at him, surprised, and he smiled down at me briefly. “I’m all right,” I said. “I’m much better.” “That’s good, then,” he said, and lapsed into silence as he drove on up the lane and through the gap in the privet hedge. “Hello, Frank,” my mother said, watching us all get out of the car, and Mackenna turned and looked at me with her eyes crossed and her tongue out. He smiled at Mum as he’d smiled at me, and when we got upstairs and Mackenna had firmly shut the bedroom door, she swung round to me and said triumphantly, “There! You see?” “See what?” I said, though I suppose I knew what she was going to say. “He’s a creep,” she said fiercely. “A stupid, common creep. And I’m never going to ride in his stupid car again.” “You’ll have to. Don’t be so daft. Mum’ll make you,” I said. I kept seeing the turquoise color of the car through the privet hedge. The lupines on the kitchen table. “If we refuse to ride in his car any more, then he won’t be able to come to tea any more,” Mackenna said, stubbornly. “How would you get home?” I asked, but I was arguing without heat or conviction. I felt as if time was speeding past me, leaving me no quiet place in which to think. Lupines on the kitchen table. The white package. Daddy. “Frank!” she said, angrily. “Oh, Frank, do come in and have

Darrell’s Garage ❥ 15 some tea. Dear Frank, so kind to the girls. If she only knew.” “Sssh,” I said. “They’ll hear.” “Let’s just get some milk and sandwiches and go outside to London,” Mackenna said. “I’m not having tea with that creep.” So we did, and I must say that Mum didn’t seem to take much notice of us collecting our picnic and disappearing out into the garden, which was unusual, as she was a stickler for sitting down at the table and eating like Christians as a rule. But it was a curious thing. We never did get to London that afternoon. We tried, but we just couldn’t get there. It refused to become real for us, and the more we tried, the less it would come into focus. As it turned out, that was the beginning of the end of London. During the summer, we did sometimes manage to go back to it, but it began to fade for us on that Wednesday afternoon, and it got progressively less and less bright, until by the winter it had disappeared for good. The next day, Mackenna woke up with a temperature and a headache over her left eye, so I went reluctantly to school by myself. It felt odd, and I spent the whole day looking around to tell her something and feeling disturbed when she wasn’t there. “Be careful,” she’d said sleepily, as I was collecting my hat and gloves from our room. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be okay.” “Just be careful,” she said. “I know.” “You know what?” I asked. “Good-bye,” she said, and shut her eyes. As I clambered down the steep stairs of the bus that afternoon, hanging on tight to the slippery metal rail as the bus slowed and lurched round the final bend to the garage, I was looking forward intensely to getting home and seeing if Mackenna was all right. “Cunning Man,” shouted the bus conductor, up the well of the stairs. “Anyone for The Cunning Man?” But there was only me. I walked along to the garage and up the forecourt to the car, thinking about the end-of-term trip to Reading Cemetery that had been announced today, imagining Mackenna’s delight at the prospect. We both loved history, particularly real history like you could read on gravestones. I opened the heavy, wide door of the car and slid onto

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the leopard-skin seat. It was another boiling day, and inside the car it was almost unbearably hot, the air stale and the chrome around the windscreen winking and dazzling my eyes. I was grateful that Mr. Darrell came over and got into the car almost the moment I’d shut the door. There must have been no other customer there that day, so we set off for home without the usual wait, and the green smell of June came in through my open window, smelling fresh and good. I could also smell Mr. Darrell’s motor oil quite strongly, and another smell that it took me several moments to realize was his sweat. There were beads of it along his upper lip and round the edge of his dark, curling hair, and the white shirt underneath his overalls had wet patches below his collar and underneath his right arm. It was very hot, but I was hardly sweating at all, and I felt sorry for him, soaked and oily like that. I wondered if his left armpit was also wet, and if the stump minded feeling the sweat trickling down inside the white package. Then he caught me looking at him, and I had to turn and stare out the front at the long bonnet of the car jigging up and down as it slowly ate up the lane, and at the black-and-white cows grazing like toys in the fields on either side of us. I could feel my whole face going pink, and then all of a sudden he put his foot on the brake and made an unexpected right-hand turn into the lane that led to Thelford, so that, holding on to nothing but my satchel, I fell sideways along the furry seat into his hard right arm. He straightened the car up, put his left knee up to steer, and put his hand over my arm to place me upright again. I sat there and looked down at the faint oil mark on my skin, feeling flushed and a bit confused. “Hang on,” he said. “I need to get some cigarettes, all right?” There was a shop that sold cigarettes across the road from the garage, right by the stop where we caught the bus into Reading in the morning, and there was The Cunning Man next door to the garage. I wondered why he had to go to Thelford, but of course I didn’t say so. It was nothing to do with me, and besides, I was beginning to feel shy being alone in the car with him, and I wished with all my heart that Mackenna had been sitting beside me. I rubbed the smudge of oil into my skin and didn’t say anything.

Darrell’s Garage ❥ 17 Thelford was about three-quarters of a mile off the lane that led home, an ugly village of unpainted council houses and uncared-for gardens that we hardly ever went near. Not a nice place, my mother said. Common, I supposed. Mr. Darrell stopped at the Post Office and General Stores, a tiny dark shop with enamel signs for Ovaltine and Players Navy Cut and Camp Coffee stuck on the front wall of the building. I sat alone in the car while he disappeared, trying to slide down in my seat as passing children on bicycles slowed down to get a closer look at the car, all of them, it seemed to me, staring directly at my convent uniform as they did so. After a thankfully short period of time, he came out of the jangling doorway, opening a packet of ten Woodbine with his right hand as he got into the car. He started her up, and we drove on through the village while the cigarette lighter heated up in the dashboard. I was feeling peculiar, as if my world had tilted off its axis again, but I don’t think I was seriously disturbed by any of this. It was a kind of dream that I could watch unfolding but that wasn’t really happening to me, any more than my dream about Daddy had really happened to me. I found that we were driving along a lane I didn’t recognize, and I was quite interested to see where it came out. Mr. Darrell was whistling softly, but today the smell of oil and cigarette smoke sank heavily down through the stifling air in the car, and I shifted surreptitiously over to my right to try and catch the June green out of my window again. When he turned sharply to the right for the second time, I was hanging onto the door strap, and I didn’t fall into his arm. He had turned onto a little track about five hundred feet long that had a field on one side of it, a dark little copse on the other, and a gate at its far end that I assumed led into another field. I had no idea where I was. The car rolled to a stop, and he switched off the engine. I could hear its tick in the hot, still air, and somewhere a bird started singing the same song, over and over again. The tick, tick, and the sweet, frail song made the silence almost unbearable. “Smoke?” he said, holding out the Woodbines.

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I took off my white gloves and stuffed them into the top of my satchel. “Thank you very much,” I said politely, taking a cigarette and pushing in the lighter as if I had been doing this all my life. He lit my cigarette and said, “Your ma’ll kill me.” “She won’t know,” I said instinctively. I was still convinced she didn’t know we smoked. “That wasn’t . . .” he said, and took a long drag of his cigarette. I puffed mine carefully and blew smoke out cautiously through my nose. The silence thickened again. I felt a bit dizzy, and my stomach growled. It was getting to be teatime. I took another puff, blew the smoke out of the window, and listened to the bird singing. I felt wriggly with shyness. I took another puff, and finally I said, “Mr. Darrell?” “Frank,” he said quietly. “Frank,” I said, blushing uncomfortably. “Shouldn’t we go home now?” The springs twanged under him as he turned in his seat to face me, but I just went on looking out of the window at the spindly clusters of young hazel in the copse. I thought perhaps he was waiting for me to finish my cigarette, so I took another puff that I didn’t really want and blew out an almost perfect smoke ring. I wished Mackenna was here. “Jilly,” he said in his soft voice. I put the cigarette out in his crowded ashtray. “Jilly, do you know how pretty you are?” My heart started beating very hard suddenly, and I knew I was afraid, but it still seemed impossible to be afraid of Mr. Darrell. Frank. He cupped his hand round my chin and turned my head towards him, so that I had to look at him. His eyes were very blue, and sweat was running down the sides of his face and round his ears. “Come over here,” he said, and I slowly slid across the leopard-skin seat. He took off my panama and laid it on the seat beside my window, then he put his arm gently around me and pulled me over until my head was resting against his shoulder. We sat like that for a moment, me stiff and unable to move, the shoulder button of his overalls digging

Darrell’s Garage ❥ 19 into my ear, him stroking my right arm and the hands that were clasped in my lap. The black lines across his knuckles made his hand look old, yet it felt warm and strong against my bare skin. “I won’t hurt you, Jilly,” he said, and his voice sounded shaky. “Do you understand that I won’t hurt you?” “Yes,” I whispered, my heart beating so fast I felt sick. Yet I still wasn’t truly afraid of him, just afraid that my world was tilting so far from its center that I might soon get dizzy enough to tip off from it altogether. He was so gentle that I had no defense against him. Of course there was a part of me that wanted to scream and thrash and beat him aside and wrench myself out of the suffocating oil and sweat of his embrace and throw myself through the open window and run and run and run until the fields became familiar and I was running up the drive and up the stairs at home and into the bedroom where Mackenna was waiting and everything was just as it always had been. But another part of me could see out of my half-shut eyes the white package of his stump on his other side, his empty side, could see it move in sympathy as he stroked me with his right hand, and that part of me couldn’t bear to leave him sitting here in the car alone. And after all nothing really bad happened. He made me roll up my dress to my waist so he wouldn’t get oil on it, and then he stroked me between my legs till I wanted to wee, and I shifted under his hand because my knickers were wet, and then he kissed me on the mouth, which felt so strange and made it so hard to breathe that I really forgot where I was for a while. I forgot to be afraid, too, until suddenly he let go of me, put his hand inside his overalls, and doubled over, groaning, as if he was about to be sick, and then I was suddenly very afraid indeed. Wondering if I was going to be sick too, I put out a tentative hand and touched him for the first time. “Frank,” I said. “Frank, are you all right?” “Oh God,” he said, still groaning, and then he lay back against his seat with his eyes shut and was still, sweat pouring down his face. I pulled my dress down over my knees, hoping Mum wouldn’t notice the motor oil on my knickers and trying stupidly to think of

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excuses for its presence. We sat there for what seemed like ages, and I remember noting carefully in some lucid recess of my mind that the car’s engine was no longer ticking, nor was the bird singing its thready repetition. I knew something had happened that was very wrong, and I thought it must be my fault, but I wasn’t even sure what it was yet, so I put it away like a film to be developed later and stared out of my window at the little sunless hazels in the copse. He started up the car, and we drove home. I didn’t kiss Mum as I went into the house, and Frank didn’t stay to tea. I went upstairs to our bedroom and started ripping off my dress and socks and sandals, and Mackenna knew straight away that something had happened. I had never been as good at hiding things as she had. She sat bolt upright in bed, hugging her knees, her face flushed and her voice conspiratorial. “Where were you?” she said. “What do you mean?” I asked, and was surprised at how difficult it was to get my voice to come out right. “You came home from the wrong direction,” she said. “He bought some cigarettes,” I said, hoping she’d assume he’d bought them in our village. “What happened?” she said. “Nothing,” I said. “What did you expect to happen?” The lino felt cold under my feet, and I put my socks back on. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “Just because you don’t like him,” I began, but then I didn’t know how to go on. She lay down again and looked up at the ceiling. “I bet you’ll never ride in his car again,” she said. “Silly,” I said, but of course she was right. I didn’t tell her what happened, either then or later, because I knew she wouldn’t understand why I hadn’t struggled, hadn’t said no, hadn’t screamed, hadn’t done anything. I knew she’d always hate Frank, and I didn’t want to be the one to betray him. So however much she asked, I kept quiet, and I think that was another reason we couldn’t go to London any more. But I did tell Mum. I didn’t mean to, but when I went down-

Darrell’s Garage ❥ 21 stairs for tea, I started crying, and I couldn’t stop, and the dark film came spooling out in a tumble of distress. She asked me once if he’d put anything in me, and I didn’t know what she meant, but I said no, he hadn’t, just the oil stains on my knickers. She didn’t say anything else, but went on hugging me over the curve of the baby until I’d told her everything and was leaning into her, drowsy with crying. There was a long silence then, and finally I took the hanky from her apron pocket and looked up at her. “Are you very cross?” I asked. “Not with you,” she said, and I saw that she was crying too, which I hated. “Don’t cry, Mum,” I said. “I’m all right. Here, have your hanky.” “I hope you two girls get married, have lots of lovely children, and live happily ever after,” she said fiercely. “What do you mean?” I asked, upset by her voice and her shaking hands. “I hope you never have to face being alone,” she said, and after a moment she added through her teeth, “the bastard.” I’d never heard her say anything as strong before, and I was rather shocked, though I wished I could follow her train of thought better. Poor Mum. It was only much later that I realized what I’d done to her. For the rest of the summer term, we used the bus stop beyond The Cunning Man, which meant a longer drive for Mum in the old black Morris Oxford, but she never complained of feeling tired. From the top of the bus, I occasionally caught sight of him on his garage forecourt, peering into a sick engine with Old Ernie, chatting to a customer, filling a car up with petrol, or rolling a big tire along with his right hand, the stump as neatly secured as ever in the white package with the metal bracelet. I missed him, but I didn’t tell Mackenna that. We never talked about him again.

On the Road to Greater Bishop B

arbara turned her head sideways and inhaled the sweet tang of the grass as if to draw power from its nostalgic scent of childhood summers. She was lying on her back at the edge of a field thick with rich grass and lit with buttercups and red campion near the hedge. A bee buzzed somewhere over her head, and she half opened her eyes to the dazzle of the sky but then shut them again, trapping for an instant iridescent wires of blue and green and sun-gold inside her eyelids. She did not want to move. She did not want ever to leave this vibrant tranquillity, this fragrance, this soporific, Edenic, suspended moment of profound happiness. She breathed deeply, in and out, in time and harmony with the world she had pulled around her like a comforter, feeling sleep gliding quietly towards her. She sighed gratefully. “Where’d you put the nut bars, Barb?” Sound of zips and determined scrabblings. Rustlings. Grunts. “Back left pocket of your right front pannier,” she said drunkenly, without opening her eyes. High in the sky was the sound of a small plane, and somewhere closer a cock pheasant chinked for a moment, then fell silent. “All these dashed panniers—I can’t find a thing,” said her fiancé, adding more plaintively, “I think I ought to eat a nut bar, don’t you, Barb? Start the afternoon with a good boost of energy?” “Mmmm,” said his beloved, spreading her arms out wide on either side of her and burrowing her fingers sensually into the grass. “You eat a nut bar, Simon, while I just take a little nap, all right?” “Very funny, Barb. You’ve got almost thirty miles to go before you can think of sleeping. Come on, my girl. Lunch is over. You’ll get stiff if you go on lying there much longer.” “What d’you mean, get stiff?” Barbara asked, rolling up painful-

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On the Road to Greater Bishop ❥ 23 ly into a sitting position. She looked over at Simon, who was chewing his nut bar with great concentration as he smeared sunscreen in uneven white patches on his face and neck. “What are you in such a hurry for?” she asked. “It doesn’t matter where we stop for the night. If we don’t get to wherever it was you meant to stop, we’ll stop somewhere else.” “Barbie,” he said, “we’re on a cycling holiday, remember?” He began tightening the chin strap of his helmet and trying to pull on his gloves at the same time. “Honeymoon,” she said. “And don’t call me Barbie.” “Well, whatever, darling. When you’re on a cycling holiday, you cycle. We should just about make Greater Bishop by five if we get a good pace going. Are you coming?” There was a short silence. “There’s a wonderful church there,” he added in wheedling tones. “Perpendicular tower. Fine rood screen.” Barbara sighed and looked down the long slope of the field into the shimmering valley below. She knew that by rising to her feet she would shatter the peace she had been given as a personal gift from God. She stood up. “I’m coming,” she said. “I’ll catch you up.” “Good for you,” said Simon, refolding his map and carefully pushing it into the clear plastic folder clipped to his handlebars so that he could see his route at a glance. “I’ll stop and wait for you in, mmm, let’s see, exactly one hour from now, okay? And don’t forget to sunscreen. It’s not good for you to get burned. Ages the skin.” Barbara had an identical map, their day’s journey plotted on it by Simon the night before, chosen with meticulous care to wind through a network of tiny back roads, thus avoiding the danger of more major routes, and highlighted for her in thin yellow marker. Barbara was notoriously bad at finding her own way. “Fine,” she said. “But go on if you get bored waiting. I’ll catch up with you eventually.” They’d had the same conversation each day of the holiday. Honeymoon. Sometimes more than once in a day. Simon thrust the last chunk of energy into his mouth. “Rightyho,” he said through a muffle of nuts, and flicking stray crumbs

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from his gleaming black Lycra chest, he began pushing his bike briskly over the grass to the gate. Barbara watched him go with a sudden tug of regret. She looked over at the gleaming, multigeared bicycle he had given her as a wedding present. At the bulging Gore-Tex panniers that hung from it. The water bottles. The milometer. The altimeter. The pink aerodynamic helmet dangling obscenely from the handlebars like some great Valkyrie’s breast. Her shins ached and the insides of her thighs ached and the back of her neck ached. Barbara stretched mightily, and the sun slid over her upturned face in benison as if to remind her of the beauty she had understood only a moment ago. “Yes, yes,” she said sharply to the empty field. “Count my blessings. It’s a wonderful day. This is breathtaking country. Not a cloud in the sky. Not a care in the world.” She turned from the shimmering view, walked over to her bicycle, and propped it more firmly upright against the hedge. She looked briefly at her map, then thrust it down into a front pocket of her frayed denim shorts. She dutifully put sunscreen on her nose and polaroid glasses over her eyes. But then she balked. She picked up the pink breast and fastened it behind her saddle with a stretchy cord. She took a squashed St. Louis Cardinals ball cap out of her other shorts pocket, rammed it on her head, pulled her hair through the back of it, and wheeled the bicycle to the gate. As she stood in the lane, postponing for a final moment the physical effort before her, she could see the tiny figure of Simon in his skintight cyclist’s uniform, pedaling up the other side of the valley like a manic beetle. Hills were his forte. Barbara and Simon had lived together in the platonic sense for three years and then in the carnal sense for one, and at length marriage had seemed not merely inevitable—“At last,” said their friends— but practical. “One mortgage, one tax return, one bank account, one insurance policy,” Simon had said. “We’d save money, I know we would. And I’ll never get my own parish if we’re not legally married.” “And besides that, you love me madly,” Barbara had responded. “Well, of course, darling,” said Simon, and so the matter was settled. Simon was her best friend, had been her best friend for so

On the Road to Greater Bishop ❥ 25 long now that it seemed ridiculous to argue with him. They never argued. So she hadn’t, even when he thought up this quasi honeymoon on wheels. They could only get both sets of parents together for the wedding on a weekend after which it was impossible for her to be away from the soft-tech design company she co-owned and ran. “So why not a prewedding honeymoon?” suggested Simon, quite daringly for him, she had thought. And that was her undoing. She couldn’t bear to say no to a proposal that had secretly shocked its instigator, and of which the parents would so clearly disapprove. So here she was. Entirely her own fault. Resolutely but gingerly, Barbara got on her bicycle and allowed the aches to settle into their familiar places before she pushed off with her usual inexpert lurch, the weight of the loaded machine swinging her first to one side then the other. Equilibrium achieved, she felt the first pull of the downhill start to take the burden from her, and suddenly marriage didn’t seem such a bad idea after all. She braked gently in order to savor the freewheeling ease of the warm wind flowing into her, the green hedges blurring on either side of her, the blue arch racing overhead. There was nothing quite like this winged sensation of a strong hand behind the saddle sweeping you along as if you had the hollow bones of a bird. Barbara, whose bones were of the sturdy kind, sang rejoicing all the way down the hill, round the curve at the bottom, and for twenty feet up the other side. As the bicycle dragged to a halt, she braked, slid off, and began to push it, the heaviness of gravity all the more leaden for having been so lightly defied just a moment ago. Barbara did not do hills. Not even with her gleaming new gift. No matter how much Simon urged her to move through the gears and let the bike do the work (“Come on, Barb, that’s what a derailleur’s for”), to Barbara it didn’t feel as if the bike was doing the work—it felt as if every heavy, unyielding muscle in her body was doing the work. She preferred to walk, looking at the view or peering into the hedgerow beside her at the secret homes within. Sometimes stopping and talking to other cyclists or walkers who might be on the same road. Thinking, dawdling. On their many previous

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day trips cycling together, this had suited her and Simon perfectly. He’d pound ahead, getting his exercise, testing his stamina up hills, sometimes coming back down a hill to see if he could beat his previous time up it again. He’d enjoy himself like a child, and she’d enjoy his gleeful pleasure. She would enjoy, too, her escape from the hot purr and eye-aching concentration of computers, enjoy her day of relaxation in the country, enjoy basking in the beauty of a solitude that also promised, at intervals, Simon’s happy and undemanding company. She loved her twelfth-birthday bicycle with its Sturmey-Archer three-speed and old canvas saddlebag in which to stash a waterproof jacket and lunch—didn’t mind its weight or its reluctance to be pedaled up the slightest incline. “I don’t need anything more,” she’d said to Simon. “This suits me just the way it is.” But he hadn’t listened to her, had bought her this shining piece of technology whose gears she didn’t understand, had planned to the last detail a cycling marathon whose every day seemed to her to be a race to clock up more miles, rather than the celebration of their union that Barbara had imagined. Falling into bed each night in a different B&B and a physical stupor, they had hardly even made love, an irony that had not escaped her. Lost in self, it was a while before Barbara realized she was staring fixedly down at the gravel and tar of the road, watching it inch its way past her trudging feet and down the hill behind her, monotonous, unending. A hard mental shake, and she forced her head up, staring resolutely towards the top of the hill. Good God, this was no time to start getting depressed, she chided herself. Think positively. “Caught you up at last,” said a bright voice. “For a while there, I thought I must have missed you.” “Oh, I’m so glad to see you,” said Barbara, feeling energy surge back into her like a nut bar. “I’d just convinced myself that you must have chosen a different route and I was going to be cycling alone again this afternoon.” “Are you kidding?” said the girl. “You don’t lose me that easily.” A girl on an old three-speed bicycle. No hat. Sunburned nose and cheekbones. For a couple of days now, she and Barbara had

On the Road to Greater Bishop ❥ 27 found themselves following the same approximate route, meeting up like this on the road, cycling some distance together, talking easily and openly as travelers often will. Companionship of the best kind, Barbara was beginning to think. “So where is he today?” the girl asked, getting off her bike. That was her. Always going without guile or hesitation to what concerned Barbara the most deeply. “Oh, the usual,” Barbara replied. “About three hills ahead. Or . . .” She looked at her watch. “Thirty-five minutes from the first stopping point. If he really stops.” “What’s he in such a hurry for?” “He loves this,” Barbara said. “This is meat and drink to Simon. I don’t think I understood to what extent till now, which was remarkably blind of me, considering how often I’ve seen him on his bike and heard him extol the joys of the open road.” She shifted her aching grip on the handlebars and sighed. “But then it was just one day at a time.” “And now?” the girl said. “Right now?” said Barbara, “I think he’s glorying in being able to live very close to the center of himself.” She laughed, as if to lighten what she was saying. “Acting out his own metaphor, if you like.” “That’s the real him?” the girl said, with a wondering tinge of horror in her voice. Barbara laughed, then dodged. “He’s not a very articulate person normally,” she said. They reached the top of the hill, where the ground leveled out enough for them to mount the bicycles again. Barbara, however, had long ago realized that there was no such thing as truly level ground. She grunted with effort as she forced the pedals round until she had picked up enough speed to feel aided at least minimally by her own forward momentum. The girl wove lightly ahead in the middle of the road, then circled back to ride alongside her. “Show me your engagement ring again,” she said. Barbara held her left hand out into the sunlight, admiring the slight gold band with its half-hoop of turquoise for a moment, confounded anew by the fact, the evidence, that she was to be married.

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“I never thought I would,” she said. “Ever. Marriage was for other people.” “But now?” “Simon tends to hurry,” Barbara said, returning to the earlier question. She bent down to the water bottle on her handlebars and took a long tug from the bendy plastic straw. “So? Go on.” “He’s a very competitive person.” “What are you saying?” “I think I knew he was,” said Barbara slowly, feeling her way. “And I think I found it part of his attraction. It counteracted his extreme goodness, which could become a bit lowering to live with at times. All that tolerance.” “But?” the girl said, almost impatiently, Barbara thought. “But—I think it was attractive to me because he wasn’t in competition with me. Or if he was, I didn’t notice.” “Until now.” “Well, I’m not sure that he consciously is, even now,” Barbara said. “But I suppose I think he might be, yes. All that showing.” “What d’you mean, showing? Showing off?” “No, not exactly,” Barbara said. She rubbed at the stiffness on her forehead, where she’d been frowning into the sun. “Just showing. Showing me. His map-reading skills, his physical prowess, his knowledge of architecture, his . . . his damned optimism all the time.” “Ha!” said the girl. “Not ha, exactly,” said Barbara. “But I just wish he wasn’t doing so much of it right now. Is that it? Yes, I think that’s it. I’m not sure. How can one ever be sure?” How traitorous, she thought. How can I think this but also love him like I do? Yet I do think it. “Go on, go on,” the girl said. “Why’s now different?” In her urgent concentration, she was cycling so close to Barbara that Barbara could have rested her arm on the girl’s shoulder. “Well, because we’re getting married, I suppose,” Barbara said. “One indivisible and all that.” There was a pause, and Barbara could hear the pop of tar bub-

On the Road to Greater Bishop ❥ 29 bles and the sibilance of the gravel beneath her tires. “Look at all the pink in the hedge,” she said. “Isn’t it pretty?” “Dog roses,” the girl said. “As you very well know. You’re avoiding the issue.” Barbara sighed. “I own the house, right? When Simon was still at the seminary and paying me rent, I was earning good money, so I paid most of the bills. That’s the issue.” “You were in charge.” “I was in charge. Of that side of our lives. For other things, I followed his lead.” “What Simon Says,” offered the girl. “This isn’t a game,” said Barbara sharply. She looked over the hedge beside which she was moving and wondered if cows ever worried—if they just looked placid because of the deliberate way they moved but secretly agonized over life. Poor cows. “And now you’ve agreed to sell your house and buy something bigger,” the voice insisted. “We need something bigger,” said Barbara defensively, “if we’re to be properly married.” “One mortgage, one tax return, one bank account, one insurance policy,” the girl said. “Exactly,” said Barbara. “Bullshit!” “I beg your pardon?” “You love your little house, you know you do,” said the girl. “Don’t you see?” said Barbara. “It wouldn’t be fair to Simon to keep things the way they were, with him constantly feeling beholden to me. It wouldn’t be right.” “But marriage is all about being beholden,” said the girl emphatically. “Him to you. You to him. Your choice. What you’re doing is serving him the upper hand on a plate.” The image was too much for both of them. They laughed so hard they had to stop and get off their bicycles. Barbara stood in the lane, leaning over her saddle in the hot green afternoon, silly as a child. “I know, I know. I shouldn’t laugh,” she said. “This is serious. Oh, God.” She wiped her eyes and took out her map. She

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could sense the girl looking at her, still smiling but still intense. “We have about half a mile to the end of this ridge,” Barbara said. “Then a lovely swoop down to the river. Then another slog up. Let me think about it till we’re walking up again, okay? If you’re still going my way, that is.” “I bet he’ll be waiting at the top of the hill,” the girl said, as they prepared to ride on. “He’s determined to show you he can stay ahead. I’m warning you.” As Barbara got back on her bicycle and began slowly to force her loaded wheels up the gentle slope to the top of the ridge, the girl stood up on her pedals and, seemingly without effort, pushed them up and down so fast that she shot ahead of Barbara as if her bicycle weighed nothing at all. The hill down to the river curved in a series of tight bends, and Barbara lost sight of her companion as the pleasure of being carried down overtook her again. She stuck her feet straight out from the pedals, held on to her brakes, and watched the loveliness stream effortlessly by her in a fragrant drift: dog roses, honeysuckle, foxgloves, cow parsley, campion, self-heal, yellow archangel, the old names glinting in the furred green banks, reaching up into the sun, out into the bright light of the lane, brushing her with their sweetness. At the bottom of the hill, she stopped on a little stone bridge to watch the river, becharmed by the remote quietude of the valley, happy to be lulled by the silver shards of waterlight as they broke over the stones beneath the surface. As she had at lunchtime, she experienced a sudden feeling of purest happiness, of being out of time or care, an exhilarating, fragile happiness that held for a moment, then broke at once against the image of Simon standing patiently waiting for her at the top of the hill, aching to be moving on, but scrupulous in his concern for her. Dear Simon. Barbara sighed, took a tug of water from her bottle, and began to push the bicycle off the bridge and up the hill on the other side. Round the first bend, the girl was standing in the shadow of an overhanging oak. “Wasn’t the river beautiful?” Barbara asked her. “I realize I shouldn’t say this,” said the girl, “but I have to tell you I think you’ve made the wrong choice. I can’t see you as a

On the Road to Greater Bishop ❥ 31 churchman’s wife. Or him as a computer-system designer’s husband, come to that.” Barbara stared down at the heavy road as she pushed. “Why do I find hills so difficult?” she said. “Why aren’t they the exciting challenge they are to Simon?” “He’s a natural hill climber,” said the girl. “I’ll bet he enjoys overcoming pain.” “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Barbara said, momentarily irritated by the easy diagnosis. “You’re not like that, are you?” the girl said. “You like to stop and smell the dog roses. You like gentle slopes. Better for dreaming down.” She laughed. “Romantic!” “‘Frailty, thy name is woman’?” Barbara protested. “Simon’s eyes will always be drawn to the ever higher tops of hills, aren’t I right?” the girl said. “Stay with him by all means. But you won’t be happy. Trust me.” So sure, Barbara thought. Was I ever that free from doubt? “The problem is,” she said, “I love Simon. I care for and about him.” “Love without wings,” the girl replied. “What?” “‘Friendship is Love without his wings!’ It’s from a poem, I think. Anyhow, it sounds like you and Simon. Friends.” “And lovers,” said Barbara quickly. The girl just laughed, put a leg across her saddle, and vanished up the hill. Barbara tipped back her ball cap and rubbed her sweating forehead on the sleeve of her T-shirt. She plodded on, pushing the bicycle with increasingly torpid limbs as the hill steepened. But she was breathless from creeping realization, not mere physical effort. What have I done? The girl swooped back down to her again with a hiss and spit of tires, made a sliding turn, and began to cycle slowly beside her. “Byron,” she said. “What?” said Barbara distractedly, feeling something that had been a mere nebulous uncertainty rise up from mud-deep within her to break against the surface in a bubble of probability.

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“The quote. It’s from a poem by Byron. And he’s waiting for you. I told you. Look.” Barbara lifted her eyes to the top of the hill and caught a metallic flash in the sunlight. “You’re saying,” she said, “that I’m marrying Simon because he’s my best friend, and that that’s not enough.” The girl dismounted and began to walk beside Barbara. “You’re marrying him because he wants you to,” she said. “I want it, too,” Barbara said, resisting. “You want to be married. That’s different.” “Because I’m getting older, and Simon loves me and is kind and better than nothing,” Barbara said flatly. “That’s not very fair to Simon.” “To hell with Simon!” the girl exploded. “It’s totally unfair to you. Don’t you see? You’re going to be really unhappy. Trust me.” Barbara looked across at the clear, fervent face of youth and had a sudden vision of her own older face nodding and smiling up at Simon from a pew in the front row of some marbled Victorian church in a laburnum suburb, week after week, year after year. Or worse, perhaps, at the front of a cathedral nave surrounded by a sea of nodding and smiling episcopal wives. Simon was very ambitious. “I’m going to have to talk to him, aren’t I?” Barbara asked, but she already knew the answer, and when she looked around a moment later, although a wren was singing loudly from a holly in the hedge, the steep lane was quite empty. “Gosh, Barb, I was about to give up on you,” Simon said, as Barbara arrived at the bank where he was perched beside his bike. “And why aren’t you wearing your helmet? You know it’s not safe to ride without a helmet.” “Oh, Simon,” Barbara said. “It’s too hot. Stop fussing. I’m not a child.” “Well, I worry about you, Barbie,” he said. “I worry about what might happen to you when I’m not there. And I’ve been thinking that when we’re actually married”—he blushed—“we’ll jolly well do everything together. I shan’t let you out of my sight. So there.” A vision of herself attached like a flaccid doll to Simon’s lycra back as he furiously cycled uphill swam past Barbara’s horrified

On the Road to Greater Bishop ❥ 33 vision. She swallowed, dry-throated. “I was really beginning to wonder where you were, you know,” Simon continued. “I got here forty-five minutes ago. Forty-three, to be more accurate. Went off down this little byway for a while.” He pointed to an even smaller lane, branching off from the top of the hill down towards the east. “Rather an interesting farmhouse about two miles along there. Oak mullioned windows, of all things. You’d enjoy it, I thought.” “Simon, it’s no good,” Barbara said, leaning her bicycle against the bank and collapsing tiredly. “You’d like it if I showed it to you,” he said, the brightness fading from his face. “It’s only a couple of miles out of your way.” “Four,” she said. “No, I mean I think I’ve come to the end. Of . . . what we’re doing.” She couldn’t form the words, willing him to understand what she was trying to say. “I’m not cut out for all this. I shouldn’t be doing it. Or saying I can do it. I’m no good at hills,” she ended, rather lamely. “You do tend to make heavy weather of them, I must say,” Simon said in a jocular voice, but Barbara noticed he wasn’t looking at her. “D’you know, I climbed this one in four minutes, thirtytwo seconds from the river. Rather good, I thought.” He waited for a moment, as if for applause, then cleared his throat. “Poor old Barb,” he said. “But it probably doesn’t help when you stop and talk to people on the way, even though I know you enjoy doing it. Distracts you from forward progress. Slows you down.” “Talking?” Barbara said. “I could hear you,” said Simon. “Chattering away up the hill like starlings.” “Hear me?” she said faintly. “Well, not what you were saying.” Oh, thank you, God. “Just the chattering, you know. Who was it, Barb?” Still not meeting her eye, he looked around, rather, Barbara thought, as if expecting her to produce a friend from out of her pocket with a flourish of handkerchiefs. “I was talking to myself, okay?” she said shortly. “Talking to yourself?” Simon repeated. “It’s the first sign, you

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know, the first sign.” He shook his head in mock gloom, but Barbara sensed that his heart wasn’t in the cliché. She sighed. “There’s no one else I can talk to. Is there?” There was a rather loaded pause, during which Barbara found herself wishing she had never started this. The very idea of confrontation suddenly seemed exhausting. “Cycling holidays are for cycling, surely?” said Simon, in a carefully level tone. “We have the rest of our lives to talk in.” “I’m sorry, Simon,” she said. “But I have to tell you now that it isn’t working for me. That I’m thinking of quitting while we’re both still in one piece.” She looked away from him, tears pricking behind her eyelids. “I just don’t think I’m cut out to be one indivisible, and all that.” “Look, Barb,” said Simon after a moment, and she knew he’d understood exactly what she was trying to tell him. “There’s only about twenty miles to go, and it’ll be much easier than the first bit. There’s a real treat near the end, a road that runs right down a valley for 4.75 miles. Then just one small hill, and you’ll be in Greater Bishop in time for a cold dry sherry before supper. What d’you say?” “I am still talking to myself,” Barbara said. “I wouldn’t do any more of that if I were you, darling,” Simon said. “Just put your head down, your best foot forward, and you’ll be there in no time.” He pulled his bike upright and cleared his throat again with a little cough. “All right for sunscreen?” he asked. “Water? Okay, then. I’ll sit and wait for you outside The White Hart in Greater Bishop. No point my stopping before then if you’re sure. There’s a farmhouse with a fifteenth-century entrance arch that I rather want to take a look at. Not far off the route, but I ought to be moving if I’m to make it before I lose the best of the day. You’ll be okay if I just move on now, will you?” “I’ll be okay,” Barbara said. “But please, dear Simon, don’t sit and wait for me. I couldn’t bear that.” Simon buckled up his helmet, swung a leg resolutely over his saddle, and started off. “Bye, darling,” he waved, his eyes on the downward slope before him. “Good-bye, Simon,” Barbara called after him.

On the Road to Greater Bishop ❥ 35 She watched him as, crouched over his handlebars, he cycled expertly down the hill in the highest possible gear, took the dip at the bottom in flying style, then shifted down through the gears again as he met the next steep incline until his legs were pumping like the pistons of a steam train. He looked very intent and very small against the mass of the hill. That was how she would always picture him, Barbara thought, blowing her nose on the bottom of her T-shirt. Walking slowly up that same hill some ten minutes later, she kept her eyes firmly on the bank and hedge beside her, stopping to peer into one particularly inviting hole, imagining what it would be like to be that size, to run into the dim, earth-scented tunnel, to be safely hidden among the mysterious tangle of hawthorn within. How strange that such other worlds exist alongside ours, she thought. How strange to be a rabbit or a fox. How strange to feel so light while I’m pushing a laden bicycle uphill. At the head of the promised valley, she began pedaling very slowly, waiting for her traveling companion to reappear for the last time. And sure enough, there she was, coming up beside Barbara and touching her on the shoulder as if designating her “it,” not speaking, but keeping to Barbara’s pace as the gentle downward slope began moving her along with its unseen hand. They cruised together in a peaceful silence for a couple of miles, idly pushing the pedals every so often, just enough to keep wheeling along and no more. Eventually, with a deep intake of breath, Barbara broke the silence. “He knew what I was trying to say,” she said. “Even though I was too much of a coward to come right out and tell him properly. He’s not waiting for me any more. He knows.” She sensed the girl smiling beside her. Without looking round, she saw the relief on the clear young face still flushed with sun, saw the old three-speed bike, the battered saddlebag, the unwavering belief in an unmapped future. “I can see now,” she went on, “that for Simon and me to get married would be a mistake that would ruin our friendship. But what I’m doing to him will devastate him. And our friendship will be ruined anyway. Why can’t we just go on pretending?”

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There was no answer, but the question “Will you be all right alone?” seemed to her to be hanging in the heavy air. She was about to respond when she saw that the downward slope of the road was ending as it curved to the left and began to climb up over a hill. Another road branched to the right, crossing the valley down which she’d just come before it vanished round a sharp bend. At the fork was a signpost, and she stopped to consult it. Greater Bishop, 2 miles, read the left-pointing arm, while the right said, Station, 1/2 mile; Lesser Bishop, 1 mile. Barbara was suddenly stabbed by an intense awareness of her own solitary state, of the quiet, the emptiness of the late afternoon. She leaned forward over the saddle and shut her eyes for a moment. I’ll phone the White Hart from the station, she found herself thinking. Tell him it’s okay to keep going without me. Better that way, really. And I could be home tonight. Yes, I will be all right. She straightened up, looked around her briefly at the road Simon had marked on her map, then turned her bike the other way and began slowly to pedal across the valley. She thought of Simon flying up the hill to Greater Bishop, borne aloft by his determined and admirable belief. “But without wings,” she said to herself, as slowly and painfully she achieved equilibrium.

Breaking Faith “W

ell, do we have to pay or not, then, me and the wife?” the man asked, in a voice that rang out into the fanvaulted echoes of the south porch. His T-shirt was strained across the swell of his body, and his belligerence smelled perceptibly of sweat. His wife, standing at his back, had rounded, apologetic shoulders. “We just ask for a donation,” said the woman in the glass cubicle, her smile a little stiff from repetition. “A voluntary donation?” “Conservation of a cathedral is very costly,” the woman said. “Or a compulsory donation?” the man continued, pressing a plump thigh into the bar of the turnstile and breathing heavily on the glass. Waiting behind the couple, Mary sighed and shifted her weight. Her legs felt leaden with tiredness already. “We only ask for four pounds,” the woman said stoutly. “Just to help with upkeep. We have almost a million visitors a year. That’s a lot of wear and tear, as I’m sure you can imagine.” “A four-pound admission charge.” The man turned to his wife, drooping mutely at his shoulder. “That’s eight pounds for the two of us. Did you hear that?” “It’s just a donation we ask for,” said the woman in the cubicle, unwilling to admit defeat. The man looked back at the line of visitors fidgeting behind him. “I thought this was a place of worship,” he said loudly, as if encouraging a mutiny. “Suppose I’ve come here to pray, then?” He raised a shoulder and wiped his face on his T-shirt sleeve. Looking at her watch, Mary shifted again, thinking how much better an argument Peter would have crafted to bypass the expectation of giving. “There’s a small chapel in the north transept set aside for silent prayer,” said the woman, with the smallest of emphases on the word silent. “The Gertrude of Gerent Chapel.”

❥

37

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Donation. A gift or contribution freely given, usually to a charity. From the Latin donare, give, donum, gift. I may choose to contribute to the continuing worship of the Christian God or I may choose to enter this beautiful museum without acceding to the imposition of a fee, isn’t that right? And he would have been smiling. “You’re telling me it’s not a real church, then?” the man said. “This place?” The woman handed him a brochure through the slit above her counter. “Holy Communion is at twelve o’clock daily in the Martyrs Chapel and Evensong at five-thirty in the choir,” she said. “I’m a pagan myself,” the man said. “So I shouldn’t have to contribute, should I?” There was an echoing pause. Then two clicks as the turnstile released the man and his wife into the cathedral. Mary put a fivepound note down on the counter and glanced at the woman apologetically. “Just one,” she said. “And who does he think should pay for all of this, pray?” the woman asked, her color high. She smacked a pound coin and a brochure down on the counter. “The government? God, perhaps?” I always resented the collection plate as a child, Mary thought. It felt wrong to be clinking money in a church. It still does. “Enough to destroy your faith in human nature,” the woman said, clicking the button to release the turnstile. “Have a nice visit, dear. Next?” Mary walked slowly along the back of the cathedral to the west end of the nave and looked down the immense flagged highway, fringed with its stone-pillar trees, to the tiny altar in the distance. I can’t imagine walking that far, she thought, feeling suddenly dizzy, and sat down to collect herself. She looked down at her wedding ring, for so long her most beloved possession, turning the worn gold around and around. With an effort, she opened the brochure as if this were the first time she had been here. “The magnificent Perpendicular nave,” she read carefully, “is considered the most beautiful in England, the clerestory and triforium together giving a unique yet delicate spaciousness.”

Breaking Faith ❥ 39 What am I doing here? asked the panicked voice inside her, as it had asked so many times since she had lost Peter. She leaned forward over the whimper and closed her eyes for a moment. “All this splendor, all this temporal beauty,” he had said on an early visit here, opening his arms wide to the great choir screen— to the blunt-nosed kings, the saints, the angels with shields, the vines, sheep, green men rampant and rioting in intricate stone relief. “All this misplaced ingenuity, this astonishing investment, this labor.” Peter collected churches and cathedrals as other people might collect silver, with passion and a sensuous appreciation. “Misplaced?” she had asked, wishing he would put his arms down. People always looked at her as well as at him at moments like this, a fact it would have astonished him to know she hated. “You can’t tell me this place was built to the greater glory of God, my darling.” The smile and the wildly cocked eyebrow drove into Mary like swords. “This miraculous, glorious, soaring miscellany of Norman, Early English, Decorated, Perpendicular, Tudor and, hush, Victorian architecture was built to the greater glory of Man and Mammon, trust me. ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’ and all that, if you remember your Browning.” Mary had never read Browning. She moved along the screen, tracing angels with her finger, hoping he would follow her. “People have come here for hundreds of years to worship. To worship God,” she said. Peter so often caused her to fumble for words, thoughts half-formed, breathless to catch up with his buoyant certainties. She turned back to him. “This is a holy place. A focus for faith. A symbol of the living church.” “You read that in the guide book,” he said. “God’s here,” she said, mulish as a child. “This is a spiritual place. Don’t mock it.” Peter had grabbed both her arms, suddenly intense, and talked straight into her eyes. “God is in the earth and the sky and in the green of beech trees in the spring,” he said fiercely. “He’s in the Bach Magnificat and Keats’s odes and in blue jays’ wings. In the view from our bedroom window and in the thermals over the downs on a June morning. God is in all creation, but this”—he let go of her and swept

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an arm—“this was built by man to magnify the first fat archbishop and all the subsequent rows of fat archbishops. And the bishops and the deans and the canons and the vergers and the mayors and the aldermen and the lords and the ladies and the squires and their little squiresses. Hell, why would God need all this stuff?” Mary had wanted to argue that if God was in all creation, then He was here too, but she said only, “We need it. Worshipers need it. It shows love. Reverence.” “And you not even a believer,” he had taunted. Mary sat up straight again and tried to focus on the far altar. Was she a believer? Peter had always been the spiritual one in their relationship, she had felt, scorning material possessions, alert to a language in the air, in music, in old houses or dark nights that she was never quite able to catch. Sensitive to ancient holy sites, to changes in mood and atmosphere. Always hunting to feed some inner need, some soul part of himself that she wasn’t able to reach. She was the prosaic, down-to-earth, rational one, happy to follow along in his mercurial footsteps, wasn’t she? And now he was gone. Mary stood up, steadying herself on the back of the pew, and began to make her way slowly over to the north aisle. Why could you not put grief behind you as you could temptation? Why was the human will not programmed to reject sorrow? As she looked up towards the transept, Mary glimpsed the back of a man’s head that with a clammy stab of adrenalin she thought for a moment was Peter’s. The world tilted. Reappeared. She spread her palm against the cold massy wall until she found her balance again. It was always happening. In places she couldn’t possibly have seen him. Would never have seen him. On the tops of buses. In McDonald’s. In the doctor’s waiting room. In Safeway’s. Always the back of his head. So sure for a moment it was him. She looked at her watch and began walking again. Not him. She went past the regimental colors, the clustered stalks of organ pipes, the Earl of Marlock’s memorial, the Bishop’s throne, the Baroque theatre of the Honeyman tomb. She stopped, read labels dutifully, looked interested, moved on, still breathless, still leaden-legged.

Breaking Faith ❥ 41 When she reached the north transept, she went into Gertrude of Gerent’s Chapel and sat down thankfully. She leaned forward and thought about praying. Please God, bring him back. Make it like it used to be. Amen. St. Andrew’s, wasn’t that the name of the church she had attended as a child? An ugly, bare, unadorned church in the suburb where she’d been brought up. She had not questioned her belief then. Obediently, she’d gone to church on Sunday, sung hymns, spoken the familiar prayers by heart, returned home to a hot lunch and a walk with her father in the afternoon. It was a comforting ritual, written into her being, protected, cherished. We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. I’m sure I am still a believer, she thought. Despite Peter. But she was not comforted as she wanted to be. She sat up, becoming aware as she did so of another figure at the end of her row of chairs. It was the sweating man’s wife, alone at this moment and intent upon a carrier bag of purchases she had made from the Cathedral Gift Shop. Mary watched in a tired trance as the woman dipped into the bag and laid out each item on the chair beside her, touching, rearranging, petting. A tea towel. A rugby shirt with the cathedral embroidered on its front. A picture book of Roman Britain. A jar of whiskey marmalade. A teddy bear in a yellow raincoat and hat. Some postcards. A Celtic cross key ring. Mary could hear her faintly crooning to herself, engrossed, sequestered in her own absorption. “You in here, then? Where are you?” His voice, loudly seeking attention, shattered the rapt contemplation in the little chapel. The woman started. “I wondered where you’d got to. Ready to go, then? We’ve seen about enough, if you ask me. Come on, my girl, let’s be off. This isn’t for you and me.” The woman tipped everything back into the bag, rose hastily, and with an apologetic glance at Mary followed her husband out into the transept. Did I always walk two steps behind Peter like that? Mary wondered. She looked down at her watch again. At her ring.

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She went back out to the Honeyman tomb and looked at the stone effigies of Thomas Honeyman and his wife, lying with a long sword between them, as they been lying for nearly four hundred years. “Thomas Honeyman and his wife,” she read, remembering her unanswered question to Peter. “Why just ‘and his wife’?” she had asked him the last time they were there. “Didn’t she have a name?” “Look at little Fidele at his feet,” Peter had said, patting the recumbent dog. “And don’t you love the way Tom’s head is half raised and his eyes wide open? He’s determined to be ready for the Judgment Day, aren’t you, mate?” “While hers are closed with exhaustion,” Mary had said, brooding over the still, acquiescent figure of the unnamed wife. “She probably bore him twenty children, poor wife.” “Oh, for heaven’s sake, lighten up,” Peter had said, in one of his sudden flashes of anger, and he strode off towards the high altar without looking back at her. Mary had followed him, heartsick and resentful, and found him sitting in the Lady Chapel behind the altar, staring up at the small rose window there. He’d glanced over at her as she sat down beside him, and the blankness in his eyes had petrified her. On that day, she remembered now, she had longed to be alone. To be released from apology and explanation alike. To be unencumbered by marriage, by constancy, by the fragile, tortuous psyche of another human being. She put her hand out to Mrs. Thomas Honeyman and touched the pale cold fingers, waiting for the blurring tears to clear. Then, with a final look at the time, she moved slowly off, up the aisle to the arched entrance into the choir, and through the choir to the high altar. She stood for a moment in front of the altar table gazing rather blindly at the ornate brass cross, the beeswax candles, the brilliant clashing colors of the altar cloth, and then she turned and looked back through the choir at the west door far off down the nave. And she saw in a strange moment of awareness her own self sitting in the last row of pews, too weary to travel to the place she had now reached. She took off her ring and held it in her right hand. Turning

Breaking Faith ❥ 43 back, she walked slowly around the high altar, past the Tombs of the Seven Bishops, the Light Infantry Chapel, the entrance to the Treasury, and into the Lady Chapel. “Hullo, Mary,” said Peter, cocking an eyebrow. “You’re right on time.” She sat down beside him, unable to reply, intensely aware of him looking at her. She fixed her gaze on the fragmented pieces of glass in the small rose window, trying to make sense of what they depicted. There was a difficult silence. “Good idea to be on neutral ground, don’t you think?” he said at last. “And without our rapacious solicitors sniffing each other like dogs. Better like this. Trust me.” His tone was coaxing, light, achingly familiar. I will acquiesce to nothing, nothing, Mary vowed to herself. She cleared her throat, trying to will the muscles to loosen into speech. She felt cumbrous and icy as stone. “Where should we start?” she asked. “Let’s talk about how to divide our possessions,” Peter said. “I’ve made a list of the things I want.”

Living Alone W

illiam’s room was at the center of the house, was, indeed, with its ever-open door, the focus of the house, yet it was as if William wished your eyes to pass unseeing over the space of his living without having imprinted upon them any image of its existence. There was nothing visible that one could imagine representing a personal belonging. No treasure. No photograph or picture. Nothing to stimulate memory or question. The effect of such self-effacement was, of course, to tempt a most minute scrutiny of every concealing surface in an attempt to penetrate the secrets that should certainly have lain beneath. The room was high, narrow, and brown, shade upon shade of brown, unrelieved except, when he was present, by the iron gray of William’s rather startling hair—mown back and sides but a bristlebrush top standing straight up, and cut as if by a blindfolded man wielding nail clippers. The walls of the room were the color of frying sausages and coated with a thick inanimate glaze like doll’s food is. Below were huddled pieces of lusterless furniture that had been placed without regard to convention, but with a deft logic that had herded them into a space you’d have sworn was too small to hold them. The wardrobe door bore an oval shadow, faintly streaked with glue, where a mirror must once have been fixed. The hand basin in the corner was covered with a stained and ringed plywood board, the taps poking dull heads through hacked slits. Between the wardrobe and the basin was a gas ring and grill like the one in my room, which had a lid you could pull down to hide it when you weren’t cooking. William’s was always open, as there was invariably a frying pan sitting there with real sausages in it, browning over a heat so low that the sausages never made a sound but just seemed to age into doneness. A sideboard shape down one wall of the room had its identity obscured by a heavy dun blanket, while next to the head

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Living Alone ❥ 45 of the single bed stood a bare metal locker of institutional quality. Pushed against the middle of the bed was a solid square table with a gingery chenille cover, at which William sat, spine erect, on a bentwood chair and carefully signed your rent book once a week. When I came in, he would usher me with some ceremony to the end of the bed, which was covered by a tartan traveling rug so faded it was clanless, where I sat and sipped cheap sherry from a clouded little glass. This sherry he would pluck from behind the dun blanket so swiftly I was unable to discern anything else there, and then place on the table between us as if to suggest unlimited convivial possibilities. Neither of us would have dreamed of taking more than the one ritual glass, however. William’s pleasures were as carefully controlled as his courtesies. “I trust you have had a good day, Madam?” “Yes, I have, thank you, William. How about you?” “We mustn’t grumble, Madam, must we?” This with a glint in the small gray eyes that I came to learn meant more disclosure was available if I would care to engage in the conversational dance. William’s habit of calling all women Madam was the reason I was living in this house of small flats and bed-sits. When, the summer before I started at university, my mother had insisted on accompanying me as I worked my way down the rather out-of-date list of accommodations supplied by the college’s housing office, my heart had sunk. I knew we would never find anything that I liked and she thought a suitable place in which to abandon her only child in the wicked city of London. She had wanted me to live in college, or to share a cozy flat with some nice girls, while I was adamant that I wanted to live by myself. To my mother, newly divorced from my silent, withdrawn father, living alone was a state at once bravely defended and much dreaded; to me at eighteen, it was the epitome of freedom. We looked at room after room that was underfurnished, overfurnished, suspiciously cheap, too expensive, next door to Strange Men, too dark, too dirty, too squalid, darling. There were Drugs. Gangs. Pimps. White Slave Traders. And tears from my mother, which made me long to be far, far away from her.

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William answered the bell we rang at the big, ugly, late-Victorian, red-brick, and gothic-windowed house halfway up the long hill from Swiss Cottage to Hampstead by slowly opening the stained-glass-paneled front door, inclining his head civilly to my mother, and saying, “Good afternoon, Madam. And how may I help you?” My mother, still clutching her handkerchief, was instantly won over. And I was enchanted not just that he called her Madam and thus ended the quest for a suitable room, but that he called me Madam, too. Only on film and stage had I ever heard this deferential title used with such aplomb, and I had certainly never thought to hear it applied to my jeans-and-T-shirted self. When I first lived in the house, it embarrassed me. But then I got used to it, and later I began to realize that while William addressed all women the same way, he didn’t by any means infuse the word with the same connotation each time he used it. To Miss Weaver, whose shrine to the holy Virgin glowed bordello-red day and night in the corner of her crowded, overcrucifixed room, the word Madam somehow managed, though not unkindly, to draw attention to the fact that she was actually a Miss, and almost certain to remain so. To old Mrs. Vi on the middle floor, it was said with the same caress as another man might have said Darling or Love. Mrs. Vi was lonely and arthritic and cried in her room with the door half open so William would come to make sure she was all right. To Hasrami on the ground floor, it acknowledged her haughty exoticism while also seeming to commiserate with her that she hadn’t been born English. To Sue-who-lived-with-Mike it acquired a tone of clucking disapproval, while to Joan-who-loved-anyone it was a synonym for trollop. To me, it seemed to say, Your mother is a grand lady and I promised her I’d take care of you. And, You’re a good class of girl who will improve this misbegotten house. And also (or so I hoped), I like you, Madam. Used in William’s dealings with the owner of the house, though, the word could acquire layers of unctuous rage that I found deeply impressive but that Mrs. Silverman herself either never perceived or never allowed herself to acknowledge. Mrs. Silverman had been left the house by her husband. She lived in the basement flat, or the garden flat as she preferred to call

Living Alone ❥ 47 it, a whole floor of large rooms sealed off from the teeming warren of mismatched humanity above it. They were entirely sealed off from daylight, too, as I discovered on the one occasion I was ever invited into this velvet sanctum. Alone and afraid of being robbed, she grilled William about each new tenant and then peeked at them from behind her heavy curtains until she could establish whether or not they were safe to invite in for coffee and poppy-seed cake. Most were not deemed safe because of connections, however remote, to the male sex. No man ever crossed her threshold. No divorced woman. No unmarried woman who had been seen with a man. No young girl who dressed as if for a man. “And no Sapphic women,” she informed me from the depths of a plum suede sofa. “Sapphic women are not to be trusted.” “They aren’t?” I ventured vaguely, not a hundred percent sure what Sapphic meant. “Genes will out,” said Mrs. Silverman, darkly. “Over and over I have seen this. The masculine will come from the closet and always take what is not his, is that not so?” I nodded in the half-light of a grudging chandelier and wondered what on earth Mr. Silverman had done to leave her with such paranoiac mistrust. (“Probably tried to live a normal married life, Madam,” said William later, adding bitterly, “frigid old bat.”) I never found out about the erstwhile Mr. Silverman as I was not invited back after my first visit. I have no idea why. It might have been because I forgot to put the loo seat down after using her bathroom (apricot marble, gold-plated taps). Or maybe it was because she caught me running my fingers over her hall wallpaper to make sure it really was raised gold flock over crimson felt. Perhaps, having satisfied her curiosity, Mrs. Silverman simply dismissed me as neither threat nor companion. I was relieved on the whole. I found her combination of tasteless opulence and fearful suspicion quite unsettling. Not to mention the way she treated William. William may not have been allowed to cross her threshold, but he certainly spent a good deal of time standing at it receiving orders from behind the half-closed door. In return for his rent-free

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room, he was as bound to her bidding as any laborer in a tied cottage might be to the local squire’s, and she took full advantage of her benevolence. William’s duties included collecting the rents each week (“like getting blood from a headless corpse, sometimes, Madam”); cleaning the stairs and hallways and shared bathrooms on the three floors of the house; emptying the money from the gas and electricity meters in every room and paying the bills when they came in; dealing with new, outgoing, and moonlight-flitting tenants; collecting bags of rubbish from outside each room on Thursdays and putting out the dustbins on Fridays; polishing the bell and the brass knocker on the front door; doing myriad small repairs; listening patiently to the garrulous and the lonely; and fielding a constant string of complaints from the tenants about noisy neighbors, nosy neighbors, bathroom-hogging neighbors, smelly neighbors, bedspring-squeaking neighbors, and Mr. Polaczech. Mr. Polaczech lived across the hallway from me on the top floor. For the first week I lived there, he would come over to my room every evening, knock on the door, and then proceed to lean against the jamb for at least thirty minutes telling me improbable stories about the other tenants, while slyly undressing me with his loony blue eyes. He told me he was a refugee, a fighter pilot, a great lover, a physicist, a violinist, and a wanted man. MI6 had him under constant surveillance. Such surveillance would certainly not have posed any difficulties, as he was clockwork manic about always parking his old gunmetal Rover in exactly the same place outside the house at exactly the same time when he got back from wherever it was that he disappeared to each day. I stood and watched him from the top landing window once, as he stopped beside a space between two cars that was possibly big enough for a wheelbarrow. First, he got out of the Rover and shook his fist at the two cars. Then, he shook it up at the house. Finally, he got back in his car and proceeded to force his way into the space by the simple expedient of pushing the two offending cars farther apart with his bumpers. Bang! The car in front lurched on locked wheels into the car in front of it. Bang! The car behind thudded into the car behind it. Bang! And so on until Mr. Polaczech was in the wheelbarrow space, and several cars

Living Alone ❥ 49 on either side of him were parked as if on an overbooked ferry. I quickly learned to recognize his knock and stay still as a mouse until eventually he gave me up as a bad job. “His wife died of cancer just as he retired, and he’s been a bit cracked ever since,” William told me. “But then, Madam, which of us isn’t?” he added, raising a wild eyebrow. As if his duties in and around the house were not onerous enough, William was also bidden to do an unceasing series of little jobs for the widow. Could he just clean her windows (outside only, of course)? Could he water the tubs of flowers outside her front door? Would he just run down to the post office, to the corner shop, to the chemist’s, to Safeway’s? Would he trim the lilac by the fence, which was looking so, tsk! neglected? Would he take this electric kettle away and mend it? Would he mow her lawn this afternoon? William loathed mowing her lawn more than anything else he had to do, I think, and his revenge upon the sordid task was sweet to watch. I don’t think Mrs. Silverman ever actually went out into her garden, and as she lived slightly below lawn level, she was presumably unaware of the quality of her man’s work upon it. For a start, the mower was old, as cantankerous as William, and with blades that hadn’t been sharpened since Mr. Polaczech was a fighter pilot. So if, after long periods of yanking the unresponsive starter, kicking the machine, adjusting the throttle, cursing, pouring liquids in various orifices, sputtering to a halt, yanking the starter rope, and so on, William was reluctantly successful in his bid to cut the grass, he would do it in his own inimitable way. Looking down from my window, I could see what Mrs. Silverman could not: the lawn cut as if by a mad barber into crooked swooshes, curves, Celtic runes, the grass hacked and bent into submission, except for some strange upstanding fringes that had been missed completely. Not unlike William’s own haircut, actually. I thought the price for his free room was too high, and being, at eighteen, quite unafraid of poverty, I told him so on one of my weekly rent visits to the brown room. “She exploits you, William,” I said, sipping his sherry and watching him tuck my week’s money

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into his large, cracked, leather wallet. “Why don’t you move into another room, pay rent, and tell her to go and stuff herself?” “What a pleasure that would be, Madam,” he said, ruminatively. “But alas.” “The rooms here are cheap, William,” I persisted. “The old-age pension this country deems fit to pay its citizens,” he said with resigned contempt, “is a scandalous spit in the eye.” “Oh, William,” I sighed. “And you have nothing from anywhere else?” “Military Police,” he said dismissively, as if that explained everything. It explained quite a lot about his bearing, his carefully nuanced use of the rank “Madam,” and his haircut, but it didn’t quite explain his possessionless and reliant state. Unless, I thought at the time, he had grown so used to serving a despised superior that he could contemplate no other life. Or perhaps, and I blushed for my insensitive probing, he had once been in prison or homeless or in some other trouble that had brought him into Mrs. Silverman’s employ. I changed the topic of conversation. The truth was quite different, though it took many more visits before I got to what even now I am not sure is the bottom of things. One week, after I had lived in the house for about a year, I came down to his room to confess, not for the first time, that I’d made a mess of my finances and would not be able to catch up with my rent till the beginning of next month, and please, dear William, could Mrs. S. possibly wait for the money or could we tell her something to keep her quiet for a couple of weeks because right now I don’t even have money to buy food with? William calmly opened my rent book, entered the weekly amount, and dated and signed his name beside it as usual. I breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t quite true that I didn’t have the cash to buy food with, but it was true that if I had to find the rent as well, I’d be sunk. I’d have to try borrowing off a friend less strapped than I was (hard to find), or worse, phone my mother and confess that yet again I’d mismanaged my money and needed bailing out, a state of affairs that entailed dreadfully guilt-inducing lectures and tears about my improvidence surely not having come from her side

Living Alone ❥ 51 of the family and did I realize that this would mean she would have to scrimp for the rest of the month whereas she had been intending to buy a new coat she knew she was going to need because they were predicting a hard winter and, what with the rising cost of fuel and Your Father’s idea of a fair divorce settlement, she wasn’t at all sure she should turn the heating on until November . . . and the conversation would spiral off for ten minutes while I built up the courage to bring it back to my underfunded self, at which point the recriminations would start all over again. “Just leave it to me, Madam,” William said. “A small glass of sherry?” “Oh thank you, William. I promise I’ll pay you on the dot.” Which I faithfully would, as I always did, though it took me far too long to work out that he must have paid my rent himself during my impecunious periods, as Mrs. Silverman would never have accepted less than the expected amount each week. Pouring the sherry, William led us on to further conversation with his usual impervious ease. “I trust you have had a good day, Madam?” “Yes, I have, thank you, William. How about you?” “We mustn’t grumble, Madam, must we?” “No, but we’re allowed a moan or two, I think. Did anything happen while I was slaving over a hot professor?” William permitted himself a short bark of laughter but almost immediately covered his unreliable band of gray teeth with one hand. “Miss Weaver, Madam, had another delivery.” “No,” I breathed. “The second in a month. I may have to have a quiet word. Silly old hen.” Miss Weaver had recently joined a Support Catholic Missions club, whose lavish catalogs she had proved unable to resist, despite her sole means of support being her old-age pension, as she often tremulously reminded us. I knew William would worry. He didn’t believe she ate enough and was always trying to press sausages upon her, though without success, I gathered.

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“Poor Miss Weaver. Did you see what it was this time?” I asked him, taking a tiny inhalation of sherry. I always tried to make my ritual last as long as possible. “See?” William said, shortly. “Madam, I was up a ladder for over ten minutes affixing it to the wall in precisely the right spot. Precisely the right spot.” “Not another crucifix?” “A tableau, Madam. With the two thieves on either side and a nun prostrate at His feet.” “A nun?” “Prostrate, Madam. In plaster of Paris.” “Good Lord!” “Precisely, Madam.” “And that was all?” “There may have been a rosary. A medal or two. The pope’s head, that sort of thing. But as I told Mrs. Robin, that crucifixion scene was enough to keep you awake at night. And I know for a fact there’s no milk in the fridge.” William ran a hand over the gray stubble around his chin and sighed. Mrs. Robin? “You told . . . ?” “Mrs. Robin. My wife.” I felt as if I had been abandoned in the middle of the dance floor with the music abruptly stopped between one note and the next. William looked over at me as if I was being particularly dense. “In a letter, Madam.” “Oh, in a letter,” I said, though I knew he had never so much as mentioned a wife before, and certainly not one to whom he wrote letters. I’d forgotten his name was Robin, it was true. William Robin. Except to Mrs. Silverman, who addressed him as Mr. Robin with a heavy politeness he reviled, he was simply William to everyone. But I wouldn’t have forgotten a wife. “I write to her weekly and tell her everything that happens here,” William said. “She likes to be kept informed.” He took a prim sip from his glass of sherry and then looked sideways at me, waiting for me to make the next move.

Living Alone ❥ 53 I wasn’t at all sure what I was supposed to ask, so I said rather at random, “Oh. And where is she, then, William?” “Honiton, Madam,” he said. “A serious illness. I cannot give her the twenty-four-hour nursing care that she needs at the moment.” He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to say.” “I’m sorry, too, William,” I said, and steered the conversation clumsily onto firmer ground. “Honiton. That’s near us. A nice town, famous for lace, or it used to be.” And nothing more was said about what to me had fallen like a bombshell into the indiscreet, inoffensive gossip in which William delighted. He never subsequently mentioned the circumstances of his wife’s illness nor anything about his past married life nor, naturally, anything that might pertain to his feelings on the matter. And I never asked him anything, not even what her prognosis was or what would happen if (when?) she recovered enough to leave the nursing home, which is where I presumed she was. I understood just enough not to repay William’s confidence with curiosity. But now that he knew I knew, as it were, he would sometimes add during our conversations, “Oh, that’s a good one, Madam. I must remember to tell Mrs. Robin.” Or “As I put it to Mrs. Robin . . .” and it was my job to allow such additions to pass without comment, as if to validate his trust in me and also to insist that what had been revealed was in no way extraordinary. It was extraordinary, of course, if only because it increased the mystery of William’s obscuring his past in the brown room’s determined anonymity. But it did explain, I thought, the monkish abstemiousness with which he lived. For presumably he was paying hefty fees for Mrs. Robin’s prolonged care, and this alone, not to mention his periodic bailing out of impoverished tenants, must have eaten up the pension money of whose size he was anyway so scornful. He certainly never spent a penny more on himself than he could help. While he was always soberly dressed and never without a jacket and tie when he was working, however unsavory the job, his clothes were not always either matching or of the right size, and I suspected they were mostly obtained secondhand. Or rescued.

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One January night, not long after the revelation, I locked myself out of the house. Each tenant had two keys, one for the front door and one for his or her room. I had left late for a friend’s party in Clapham at which I’d promised to arrive early, flying down the two flights of stairs, slamming the front door, running down the hill all the way to the tube station, sweating feverishly on the platform while I waited the usual interminable time for a train to come. The thought, the image, the lack of keys didn’t occur to me until almost midnight, as I was racing back to Clapham North for the last train home, and it was almost a quarter to one before I stood again on the doorstep of the house, cold, disheveled, a bit drunk, and scared as hell. What on earth was I going to do? Phone the police? My mother? I shrank from pressing the front doorbell, whose banshee ring it seemed unthinkable to provoke at one in the morning. Thoughts of drug dealers and white slave traders lurched fuzzily through my mind. Passing drunks. Mr. Famous Lover Polaczech. It was too cold to sleep in the porch. Impossible to break in unless I put my fist through the stained glass, and even then I wasn’t sure I could maneuver the lock. I could feel tears of frustration and panic very close. I rang the front doorbell. I rang it for as brief a period as I could, listening anxiously to its muffled shriek, and then I waited until my straining hope began to leach away to despair. I couldn’t ring it again. I leaned forward and peered through a daisy-shaped piece of glass that was stained only the palest of yellows and, glory be, there was a figure in what looked like a red dress coming down the last of the stairs and heading for the front door. Miss Weaver, I thought, or Joan waiting up for a “friend.” Thank God. “Good evening, Madam,” said William. “I trust you haven’t met with an accident?” Neither his courtesy nor his dignity was affected by the fact that he was without his band of teeth and was wearing a pink furry dressing-gown that came down to just above the knee. It had pink furry buttons and a pink furry sash, too, and when I had first owned it at the age of twelve, I’d thought it the most glamorous

Living Alone ❥ 55 garment in my possession. It was only comparatively recently that its patchily fading color, along with its lack of sophistication, had prompted me to replace it with an Indian caftan from the top of Tottenham Court Road and to leave it with just a faint twinge of remorse in a carrier bag with the rubbish outside my room. But if William remembered it was mine, he didn’t intimate this by so much as a word. And as I followed him upstairs, watching with the care of the not-quite-sober his skinny white legs in the cracked patent leather pumps that had clearly also been rescued from somewhere, I didn’t even find the picture he presented funny. I was glad that he liked my old dressing gown. Grateful that he would come downstairs in it to rescue me from Strange Men. Infinitely relieved to be in my own room at last. “Thanks a million and I’m so sorry, William,” I said, as he opened my door with his master key. “What would I do without you?” “Goodnight, Madam,” was all he said, and I hoped very much that his lack of conversation was due to nothing more than the lateness of the hour and the hush of sleeping tenants and perhaps his lack of teeth. I hated to think that the disturbance I’d caused and my obviously postparty state might in any way earn his disapproval. In fact, I think our relationship was strengthened by the episode, as if we had passed through some undercover mission together, and again I think that my never mentioning what had been revealed to me must have acted as proof that I could be trusted. For that summer (the summer of my second year there), as I was preparing to go home at the end of term, William made a request that I could neither refuse nor quite believe he had asked. I was leaving only for a couple of weeks before I took up a holiday job in a bookshop in Hampstead, much to my mother’s dismay (“I had so many plans for the two of us, darling”), and William was full of apologies for intruding on my visit. “I know you will wish to be with your dear mother as much as possible, Madam,” he said, whipping out the bottle of sherry from behind the dun blanket, setting it on the chenille tablecloth, and pouring two glasses with his usual methodical care. “But I have been wondering if I might impose upon you to the tune of perhaps

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one afternoon?” His voice ended on a note of query, but he kept his eyes on the last drip he was coaxing from the bottle. “Well, yes, of course,” I said politely, without an inkling of what he might mean. “Your mother must miss you very much,” William said, a bit absently. There was a slight pause, which I filled, not entirely tactfully as I realized some moments later, by saying, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and all that.” William cleared his throat. “If I may be permitted, Madam.” He rose, pushing back the bentwood chair, went stiffly over to the door, and closed it. I had rarely seen his door closed since I’d lived in the house—had certainly never been in his room with it closed. My castoff dressing gown hung on a hook there, fast fading now but still pink enough to seem incongruous in that room of brown shades. “Mrs. Robin,” he began, coming back around and sitting down again, his large knotted hands clasped on the table in front of him. “Yes?” I said, encouragingly, I hoped. “I can’t leave this house, as I think you are aware, Madam.” He left it, as far as I knew, one Sunday afternoon every month to go and visit an old sister-in-law in Dollis Hill. But that was all. “I think we’d fall apart if you weren’t here, William,” I said. “I have this room on condition that my caretaking is constant,” he said, and took a very small sip of sherry. There was a long pause. What he wanted to ask me was coming into my mind in a series of disjointed fragments, as if denial was preventing my deciphering what he was trying to say, which was crystal clear when I thought back on it. “Mrs. Robin,” I said. “In Honiton.” William looked up at me at last. “Would you visit her, Madam?” he asked. It was the most glorious Sunday afternoon when I borrowed my mother’s car (“Of course I’ll be all right on my own, darling—I’m on my own most of the time, remember?”) and went over to Sunset House. High white cotton-heads of cloud gave a particular loveliness to the sky without ever, it seemed, masking the sun, and the

Living Alone ❥ 57 green of the rolling hills through which I drove seemed Aprilbright, though it was now July. Perhaps it was because I had become accustomed to the gradations of London asphalt and brick that this huge clean breath of countryside struck me so vividly. Or perhaps it was because of my uneasiness about where I was going. I had always avoided anything to do with nursing homes. The sick. The elderly. Scary stuff. I had cut an extravagantly large bunch of mixed roses to take to Mrs. Robin, their stems carefully dethorned and wrapped in newspaper, and the car was fragrant with their summer garden scent. I had no idea what I was going to do or say. No idea of what William wanted my visit to accomplish. “I should rest easier, Madam,” he had said when I willingly agreed to go, but when I asked him if I could take a message, he said no, that he conveyed everything he needed to in his weekly letters. And when I wondered if he wanted me to ask the staff any questions for him, or to report on the place or the health of his wife, he said only, “I should rest easier in my mind if you saw her, Madam. That’s all.” So I had called the place to tell them I was coming and to find out about convenient visiting hours, but I had no idea what I was going to do when I arrived, and to be honest I felt intimidated by my task. What did one say to ill people in nursing homes? To dying people, for all I knew? To people whose husbands lived in little brown rooms in London that gave away not an inkling of the existence of a life—a love, one presumed—that had once been shared? I drove through the vital beauty of a landscape made strange to me by my journey and wished I was on my familiar way home again. Sunset House was on the outskirts of Honiton and was similar in period, size, and ugliness to Mrs. Silverman’s house. It had probably once been a large family home with a sizable garden, but the garden had mostly been covered with car parking now, and several one-story additions with picture windows poked out from the house at uncomfortable angles. An abundance of signs adorned each addition and entrance, so I had no trouble finding Main Reception and was being led down a wide corridor to G Ward before I felt at all ready to face my ordeal. The cheery woman in flowered cotton and white shoes

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who was leading me apologized the whole way for hurrying (“another little emergency, dear, ten a penny in this place”), so I didn’t ask any of the questions about Mrs. Robin that I had meant to before I met her—her illness, her progress, her prospects, nothing. I needn’t have worried. The residents of G Ward were mostly watching television, a semicircle of wheelchairs and high vinyl armchairs clustered close to the big screen in a large sunny room. I should have been warned by the number of them whose eyes were either shut or not quite looking at the screen, but I still felt a surge of panic when I was left at the doorway of a smaller room with a cheerful “visitor for you, dearie,” and realized that the unresponsive doll figure in the bed was Mrs. Robin. There she was. The recipient of the weekly letters with all the news about Miss Weaver’s deliveries and Mrs. Vi’s little upsets and Mr. Polaczech’s latest disturbance and the enormity of the gas bill and Mrs. Silverman’s demands and even sometimes, I used to hope, approving remarks about me. I went hesitantly into the room, clutching a bunch of roses that suddenly seemed as embarrassingly out of place as if, in my ignorance, I’d brought a book to a blind patient. Mrs. Robin’s eyes, her face, her mind, were shuttered against the world, leaving only that mysterious vacancy that is impenetrable to stranger or lover alike. A tiny old woman with pink cheeks, she lay in her pillows like a sleeping child, only she wasn’t asleep in body. I tried the mental label vegetable, but that wasn’t right. She looked more like a little bird than a vegetable. She just . . . wasn’t there. I went closer to the high hospital bed and said in a voice that sounded to me both breathless and extremely silly, “Hello, Mrs. Robin. I’ve come to visit you.” Nothing. “I’ve come from London. From your husband. From William. To see how you are.” I turned round, half afraid someone might have overheard my inanities, half hoping someone would be there to rescue me, but I was on my own. I put the flowers down on a chair by the door and looked around, wondering what I should do next. And I start-

Living Alone ❥ 59 ed noticing that the room had things in it. A framed photograph propped up on the little polished bedside table with the glass top. Ornaments on a rather nice square oak table pushed against one wall and on a narrow dressing table pushed against another. I went over to the table and looked at what lay there—a bird with a large bill made out of some heavy dark wood, a paper knife of lacy polished bone, a brass elephant, an intricately carved box inlaid with ivory. On the wall opposite the bed, where Mrs. Robin could have gazed upon it if she hadn’t already left, was a watercolor of a low white house, indefinably remote and suffused with tropical light. (“Oh yes,” said the cheery nurse later, as she stood and looked fondly down at the little figure in the bed. “They can have their own things here if they pay for a private room. We have lots of volunteers. They like cleaning and polishing, and the patients like a bit of home from home. Don’t you, dearie?” patting Mrs. Robin’s inert hand.) I looked at the painting and at the furniture and ornaments in the room, and then I looked again at Mrs. Robin. I thought of William’s brown, unblinking room. I felt a bit numb, shocked almost by what I saw, but I realized immediately that William had not told me what to expect because this was not what he saw when he thought of his wife. It could not be. She was unwell. She needed twenty-four-hour care. He would provide the best he could, and one day things might be different. It took a much longer time before I began to sense the anguish that had led to his absenting himself from the truth—before I could understand his need to live as if the present were a limbo that might one day be miraculously transformed. I went over to the bed and picked up the framed picture on the bedside table. It wasn’t a photograph. It was a small oil painting of William. A much younger William, but recognizably his upright, earnest, kindly self. Dark hair shaved at the sides but standing brush-stiff on top. A uniform of some kind. A slight smile. Rather crooked white teeth. It was unsigned, but when I turned it over I found written in faint pencil, “William Robin: A Portrait. Painted by Mary Elizabeth Robin. April 1937.” I put it back, feeling as if

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I’d been caught stealing, angling it carefully so that if she turned her head she would be able to see him. As he had once angled it carefully, I felt. Just in case. I needn’t have been embarrassed about bringing the flowers, nor indeed about anything else I might have said or done in that room. A cheerful fiction seemed to pervade the running of the place, rising above the senility and despair like the scent of roses above disinfectant. “This’ll really cheer her up,” said the nurse on coming back into the room with a vase of water. “It always cheers them up having visitors, doesn’t it, dearie?” She put the vase on a mat on the dressing table, fetched the flowers, and began expertly to arrange them. “Any little thing out of the ordinary. They do love it so. Mmmm, don’t these smell gorgeous?” “It was her husband who asked me to come,” I said, feeling as if I ought to explain my presence here. Or my previous absence. “William. Mr. Robin.” “What a dear man,” said the nurse. “Writes regular as clockwork, which is more than most of them do. Lovely letters. We do enjoy them.” “We do?” I said, a bit feebly. “She’s normally wheeled into the main room,” she said, with a nod to the figure in the bed. “She’s still here this afternoon because we knew you were coming.” I silently apologized to Mrs. Robin. “When a letter arrives, usually Fridays, I read it aloud to my old ducks. Not the love bits at the end, of course, just the stories. It’s a real treat for them, something to break the routine, you might say. He’s a card, that Mr. Robin.” I thought I wouldn’t tell William that his careful hoard of anecdotes was so lavishly shared among the lonely and nodding inmates of G Ward, but I was glad that they weren’t written for no one to hear. I looked over at Mrs. Robin. “She won’t ever . . . ?” I wasn’t sure how to put it. “You never really know how much they notice. More than you think, I often say. Isn’t that so, my dearie? But no. Arteriosclerosis. Dementia. No turning that back.” “So sad,” I said.

Living Alone ❥ 61 “She’s quite tranquil, dear. Quite peaceful. Doesn’t know if it’s Friday or Christmas. She’s one of the lucky ones.” She pushed a last rose firmly down into the vase. “Come along, then, Mrs. R., say good-bye to your visitor. Nearly time for tea, isn’t it, dearie?” I followed the nurse out but then hesitated in the corridor for a moment. Quickly, I turned and went back to the bed and the still figure with the faded faraway eyes. I could see now that they had been beautiful eyes once. I bent down and kissed a pink, soft cheek, wondering what Mary Elizabeth had looked liked in April 1937. I thought about her a lot in the days after my visit, especially as the time came to return to London and William. I thought about the inmates of the London house, too. About growing old. Being lonely and afraid. “I’ll work in the bookshop for a month,” I said to my mother the day before I left. “But then I think I’ll plan on coming back here to stay till the term begins. If you don’t mind, that is.” She cried, which no longer made me feel like running away. When I arrived back at the London house, it was with a sense of coming home. Or perhaps more accurately, with a sense of having traveled from my childhood home to a place where I now belonged. I paid off the taxi and began lugging up to the front door my two suitcases full of clean, ironed, and folded clothes, my denim shoulder sack weighted down with a bottle of sherry, my raffia basket full of roses and raspberries and lettuces and carrots, and two carrier bags of my children’s books, which I’d rescued from annihilation by jumble sale. I was about to get my keys out when I saw that Mrs. Silverman was watching me by the door to her flat. I hesitated. She didn’t deserve William. But as I looked down at her standing there unsmiling, she seemed more pathetic than monstrous. In her two tubs on either side of the door were some rather clenched roses, so I bent down and extracted from my basket the box of raspberries I’d picked from the garden that morning. “Here,” I said awkwardly, going down to the flat and holding out the box as one might to a shy horse. “I brought you back some raspberries. I thought you might like them.”

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I sensed her surprise, but she took the box readily enough. “Well, thank you,” she said. There was a pause, in which neither of us quite looked at the other. “Please thank your good mother.” And she backed into the darkness of her flat and quietly shut the door. William showed considerably more enthusiasm about his bottle of Bristol Cream, which he slid reverently behind the dun blanket before extracting the more familiar Safeway’s bottle for us to drink. I had come down to his room the moment I’d finished hauling my things up to my room and was sitting on the brown tartan rug, ready to tell him about my visit to Mary Elizabeth. “I went to see your wife,” I said, and then stopped, realizing that I didn’t really know what I should tell him. Didn’t know what he needed to hear. He got up and went over to the basin to look for glasses. “That was very good of you, Madam. I trust you found her well?” “She was fine, William,” I said to his back. “She seemed comfortable.” I thought of the cheery nurse. “She was quite tranquil.” “I am most relieved to hear it,” William said, wiping two glasses with a piece of old gray T-shirt, and despite his carefully flattened tone I could see that this was true. “Your letters are very popular,” I said, feeling my way. “You know,” he said, brightening, “I was just writing in my letter this morning about the fact that you would be returning to us this evening, and it occurred to me that you wouldn’t yet have heard about Miss Wallis.” “Miss Wallis?” I said, not quite grasping that the conversation had already turned. “Who?” “I think this calls for a little celebration, don’t you, Madam?” he said, coming back to the table and reaching for the bottle of sherry. “Miss Wallis,” he said, neatly pouring the liquid and handing me a glass, “is our new tenant. A pleasant lady of mature years, perhaps of my own age, Madam. And all alone in the world.” “How sad,” I said, and thought how much older I felt than when I first came to London. “Yes, indeed, Madam,” said William, gravely sipping. “But?” I said, the prompt slipping out with the ease of long

Living Alone ❥ 63 practice. “There’s something else, isn’t there, William?” “You will never guess what she has put up all around her room.” “What? Not more crucifixes, surely?” He paused for effect. Took a sip of sherry. “Photographs!” he said triumphantly. “Photographs?” I echoed. “Of what?” He lowered his voice to a confidential whisper. “She was a dancer, Madam,” he breathed. “In—you know—clubs.” “Topless?” I hazarded, entranced by visions of rows and rows of black-and-white figures dancing naked above the gas ring and grill. “Nothing but sequins and feathers, I assure you.” “Oh, William!” I said. William put his hand up to the gray band of teeth and gave his sudden bark of laughter. “What will Mrs. Robin say when she hears, Madam?”

A Small Independence A

narrow terrace house. Red brick. Lace curtains. Stainedglass panel in the front door. Tiny patch of concrete for a front garden. A low brick wall with an unkempt privet hedge growing above it. You’ve walked past hundreds like it. Maybe even lived in one yourself.

❥

Carefully pressing out rounds of pastry with a wineglass, Marissa asked, “Do you suppose we should tell Father about it?” Muriel stopped knitting her sock for a moment and looked over at Marissa. “Tell Father?” she whispered. Then, in a surer voice, “No,” she said. “No, I’m nearly sure we shouldn’t. What would he say?” “That’s just what I was thinking. What would he say?” Muriel started slowly knitting again. “We promised not to bother him too much,” she said. “But,” her sister said, gently twisting another round loose from the fragile gray dough on the table before her, “this is not precisely a small matter.” “Not precisely, I suppose,” said Muriel. “But still.” “This is the last of the flour,” Marissa said. “I suppose you know that.” The sisters concentrated on their separate tasks for a few minutes, reluctant to voice the matter into tangible, or indeed into more precise, form. “Raspberry?” asked Muriel. “Strawberry this time, I thought,” replied Marissa. “Strawberry tarts. Mmmm,” said Muriel. “It would be too much to suppose that we might indulge in a little cream?” “And sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam? Muriel!” “All this rationing,” said Muriel quietly. “Never mind,” said Marissa. “At least we have our own jam.” She looked over to the slanting door of the cupboard underneath the stairs and frowned. “At least . . .” she repeated, putting the wineglass 64

A Small Independence ❥ 65 down and walking slowly over to the cupboard. Wiping her floury hands on her apron, she opened the slanting door and looked inside. “I can’t see a thing in here,” she said, her voice sounding muffled, as if coming out of the radio. “Turn on the light, dufflehead,” said Muriel. “No, I mean I literally can’t see anything in here,” Marissa said. “There is nothing to see. Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard. That sort of nothing.” “Nothing?” repeated Muriel. “In the cupboard?” “Not a sausage.” “Not a jar of jam?” “Not raspberry, nor strawberry, nor rhubarb and ginger, nor blackberry and apple, nor apricot, nor Victoria plum . . .” “Not one jar left,” said Muriel sadly. “No more jam.” “I put in my thumb,” said Marissa, shutting the door of the empty cupboard, “and pulled out a plum, and said ‘What a good boy am I.’” “Except that you didn’t,” said Muriel. “What are we going to do?” “What are we going to do with all this pastry?” said Marissa, returning to her table. “Not much use having tarts without jam. All right without cream. But not without jam.” She picked up the smeary wineglass and thrust its rim into a virgin corner of raw pastry. “I do see that we might have to tell Father after all,” said Muriel. “We could always buy some jam,” said Marissa, screwing down the wineglass, then lifting it up decisively. “Buy jam?” said Muriel, in her best Lady Bracknell voice. A thin oval of dispirited dough drooped from the wineglass down onto the table again. “Well, what am I to do?” Marissa asked. “I can’t make tarts without jam. And I can’t make jam without fruit.” “Or sugar,” reminded her sister. “Or sugar,” Marissa said. “And where do you suppose that’s going to come from?” “We couldn’t”—Muriel paused—“procure some?” Marissa shook her head. “The cupboard is bare,” she said. There was a long silence. Marissa began to gather all her little rounds of pastry and to put

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them back into the empty holes from which she had removed them. Muriel snipped off the end of her wool, put down her needles, and stretched the sock over her right hand. “It’s not very regular,” she said. Marissa cleared her throat. “I don’t suppose soldiers mind regularity,” she said. “It’s staying warm in all that nasty mud that matters.” “It doesn’t matter anyway,” said Muriel. “There’s no more wool to make the other one with.” “No more twist,” said Marissa, in a very small voice. She went over and sat in the chair opposite her sister’s, and they looked at each other for a moment. “We could just wait and see,” said Muriel. “Something may yet turn up.” “It’s time to go to Father,” Marissa said gently. “I know,” Muriel said. She gave a small sigh. “But do you think we can manage to reach Saint Peter’s?” If you happened to come up behind such a pair, you might pass them without a second glance. Just two old ladies out for a walk. Or you might notice with what care they move and slow your own pace for a moment of sympathy—or curiosity. It is January. One wears carpet slippers and socks over her swollen feet, the other black lace-ups with wrinkled stockings. One holds a stick in her right hand, the other holds one in her left. Their inner arms are linked together for support, and they both wear knitted hats with a bobble on the top. Marissa’s is mauve. Muriel’s is brown. They each have on a shapeless black overcoat and cheap gloves. They stop for a moment, and one of them coughs, the sound reverberating in the cold air as if in the nave of a cathedral. They both wait patiently for breath to return, and then they start up again, lurching to one side before the craft that is the two of them recovers its rhythm. It is after four in the afternoon, and the light is beginning to fade. You’re looking forward to getting home and drawing the curtains against the raw city evening, but you linger behind the old ladies for just a little longer, indulging the whimsy of fiction. ❥❥

A Small Independence ❥ 67 They are going home from a visit to an invalid friend. It was an effort to go and see her, and they are both now thinking of death. They are going up to the row of shops on the High Street to buy some sugar. They are out for their regular afternoon stroll because exercise keeps the stiffness away. They were once eminent physicists, but they withdrew from the scientific world after the first Aldermaston march. They were famous garden designers. Professors of mathematics. They were married, but both their husbands died long ago. They are spinsters who still dream of what it would have been like to bear children. Each is afraid the other will die first. In their youth they were both lovely, with slim waists and perfectly curled hair swept back with combs. The war had not yet begun. They played tennis with some sweet boys and danced all night on the lawn to music from a windup gramophone. Their middle-aged parents were dear old duffers. They were best friends. Cousins. Sisters. Watching their feet push tiredly over the paving stones, lifted only infinitesimally off the ground at each step, you feel the pain of their journey. Old age fights the pull of gravity where the young have air in their bones. You know their feet hurt unbearably, their knees threaten to give, their backs and hips ache. You know it is time to pass them, and as you run up the road to the bus stop in the High Street, your steps are buoyant and powerful, as if the hard surface beneath you were a sprung dance floor. It was past five o’clock when Marissa and Muriel reached Saint Peter’s, and it was now quite dark outside. They went in to the weak light of the church and sat in their usual pew near the back. They moved along to its wall end, where an old radiator gave off heat and a smell of hot iron. They placed their sticks between their knees and leaned forward over them until they felt better. “We are here,” said Muriel, thankfully. “Even though we could not take the bus, we are here.” “If I’d as much money as I could spend, I never would cry old chairs to mend,” crooned Marissa quietly, and sat back in the pew.

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“Well, there you have it,” Muriel said. “Have what?” “Or not, as the case may be.” “Oh, money,” Marissa said, and closed her eyes. Punctually at five-thirty, Father Derek came out of the sacristy and made his way to the small confessional in the south aisle. The two sisters were disappointed that it was not dear Father Donovan, but they did not voice complaint. They waited patiently until the young priest realized they were the only people in the church, and then they watched him as he came over to speak to them. He sat down in the pew in front of them and swung round boyishly to greet them, one foot up on the seat. He rearranged the black robe over his raised knee and smiled engagingly. “You wish me to hear your confession?” he asked. “Puppy dogs’ tails,” said Marissa, and smiled at him. “No, thank you,” said Muriel, politely. “We’ve come to say goodbye. And to receive your blessing, if you would be so kind.” “Good-bye?” asked the priest. “Only au revoir, I trust.” “We’re going away,” Marissa said. “So you will miss us at mass,” Muriel added. “We wished you to know.” “We wished someone to know,” said Marissa. “How far are you going?” asked Father Derek. “Do you have help on your journey?” “We are used to helping each other,” Muriel replied. “We shall manage.” “Forgive me.” Father Derek stopped and cleared his throat. “Your pensions. Will you have enough to pay for your needs?” “We don’t accept charity,” said Muriel firmly. “We never have. We couldn’t.” “I didn’t mean . . . ,” Father Derek began. “Father taught us to be independent, you see,” said Marissa. “Left us an independence,” said Muriel. “And there’s an end to it,” said Marissa, offering him her gloved hand over the top of the pew. He shook hands with them both, careful not to squeeze too hard

A Small Independence ❥ 69 the fragile bones inside the nylon gloves with his big warm paw. “Before you go,” he said, “let us pray to Our Heavenly Father for a moment.” He swung his leg down from the seat of the pew, slid to his knees, and crossed himself. Marissa and Muriel crossed themselves in turn and leaned forward obediently in their pew. Their joints were too painful to allow kneeling, and they both felt the awkwardness of the situation. They crouched over their laps, their eyes closed, trying to follow Father Derek’s words, yet unable to hear anything very clearly through the muffling width of his shoulders. They did manage to catch a swift “power and the glory, Amen,” however, as he sat back and turned around to them once more, so they were able to raise their own faces with a mouthed Amen still shaping their lips. “Our Heavenly Father will have heard your prayers,” he said. “Father will not let us down,” Muriel responded. “But you will be careful, won’t you?” he said. “I shall worry about you both.” “Please do not worry on our account,” said Marissa. “God is very good,” said Father Derek, with an earnest smile. “But it is my prerogative to worry.” As they watched him walk back up the aisle, his skirts swinging in time with his long stride, Marissa said, “All very well to talk about it, but he forgot to bless us, after all.” “Perhaps we just didn’t hear him,” Muriel said. “He’s too young,” said Marissa. “But we did at least tell him we were no longer going to be here. And he will tell Father Donovan. And Father Donovan will pray for us properly.” With some difficulty, they began to make their way to the door of the church, stiff from resting after the long walk. Father Derek, dressed now in jeans and a thick Aran-knit sweater, gallantly opened the door for them and then locked it behind them with a large key. “No sanctuary here now,” he said cheerfully. “Not with all the crime around here. Can I give you good ladies a lift anywhere?” “I do not think,” said Muriel, “that you have quite understood the nature of our journey.”

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Father Derek’s smile became a little vacant, and he jingled his car keys in his hand. “Good night, Father,” said Muriel. “And thank you,” she added. “With a rowley-powley, gammon and spinach,” said Marissa, crisply. They watched him go out to the road, get in his car, and drive away, then they linked arms and began to maneuver around the church and over to the far corner of the graveyard. In the chilling darkness, they were just able to follow the pale gravel of the path, so long as they took their time. At the grave, they stopped and looked down. “Here lies Mabel Gentle, 1891-1927,” said Marissa. “United at last with her loving husband, George Gentle, 1888– 1967,” continued Muriel. “They shall not labor in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of the Lord, and their offspring with them,” Marissa intoned. “Amen,” said Muriel. “Shall we sit down?” With the aid of their sticks, they lowered themselves onto the raised stone slab that lay over the grave, where they sat side by side, looking out into the gloom. “I still have my apron on,” Marissa said, after a while. “You’ll get flour on your coat,” said Muriel. Beyond the bulk of the church, the city lights burned an unhealthy orange, but the darkness around them was as complete as if they had been deep in the countryside. “Well,” said Marissa, eventually. “Aren’t you going to ask him?” “This was your idea,” said Muriel. “You’re the eldest,” Marissa said. “Ask him what?” said Muriel. “I never know what to say.” There was another pause, and each sister could feel the cold of the other. Marissa coughed a hollow cough. “Who’ll sing a psalm?” she said, in a thin voice. “I, said the Thrush, as he sat on a bush, I’ll sing a psalm.” Muriel put her hands together in prayer. “Dear Father,” she

A Small Independence ❥ 71 began. “We are here tonight because we wished you to know that we have come to the end.” “Because we wished to be with you at the end,” Marissa corrected. “We wished to be with you,” Muriel repeated. “Please let us stay here with you until we can all be together again. Amen.” “Amen,” said Marissa. “I suppose that’s enough?” said Muriel. “I’m not very good at this.” Marissa could feel her sister shivering against her arm, and she moved nearer to her. “He was always good at listening to us,” she said. “I feel sure that’s enough.” “And it isn’t a sin?” Muriel asked, still fretful. “He will understand,” Marissa said. “He will understand that we depend upon him now and forever. We must have faith.” They sat on the grave together until they grew dizzy with the cold, and then they lay down beside it, close to each other for comfort, and fell asleep. And Father Donovan prayed for them in front of his small congregation in Saint Peter’s Church, as they had trusted he would, his heart tired and heavy with sorrow. Father Derek, subdued by police questioning and trying to recall clearly the faces of the two sisters, wondered what action he should take to atone for his misunderstanding of their visit. He was horrified to realize that his chief emotion was one of anger. Why hadn’t they told him they were in trouble? GENTLE SISTERS FOUND FROZEN TO DEATH IN GRAVEYARD. “It’s disgraceful that the Local Authorities were unaware of their plight,” Father Derek, 33, said angrily. “But rest assured, the Church will step in to ensure nothing similar ever happens again to the old people of this parish.” But Father Derek, though a good man, still has air in his bones. He does not yet understand that these sisters were not just two old people of the parish, two retirees, two old folk, two pensioners,

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two senior citizens, two old bags, two old dears, two old trout. They were Marissa and Muriel, and they knew exactly what to do at all moments throughout this story. The end came more suddenly than they had expected, that’s all, and they were caught in clothes and occupations and circumstances that they might not otherwise have chosen. But, as they had trusted he would, Death kindly stopped for them anyway. And surely Father understood.

Grandmother’s Footsteps ❥

I

was twelve the summer Grin’s boots finally fitted me. For years, I had been going to the cupboard under the stairs with its dirty black-and-white floor and feet-worn smell of ancient gumboots and pressing my feet down onto the imprint of hers. Not gumboots, these, but brown leather ankle boots with sturdy, flat heels, round toecaps, and a big metal zip right up the front. Winter boots with sheepskin inside, only the sheepskin was worn to lumps around the shape of her feet at the bottom and fluctuated in thin yellow curls around the ankles. I think I had memories of her gardening in them, but I’m not sure if I really saw her wear them, or if I just knew that she once had. Not like her beloved black coolie hat with the pointed crown and long raffia plaits that hung down on either side of your face like real hair. I had short hair that never seemed to want to grow much, and I loved wearing that hat and tossing the plaits with a rustle over my shoulder just as if I had long hair myself. Grin let me borrow the hat if I was careful with it, but she wore it quite often herself in the summer when she went into the walled garden to weed or prune or deadhead. She looked like a little Chinese doll from a distance, specially when Johnno was with her, panting up and down somewhere close to her, or sitting on a nearby bench as if he were on a mantelpiece. He was a Pekinese with a silky coat of wheat and a snarffly nose, and ever since he was a puppy Grin kept all the hair she brushed out of him to have woven into knitting wool someday. After he died two years ago, she burnt it, though, and I was secretly rather relieved. I had a feeling it was me she was thinking of making something for, and I don’t think I could have worn Johnno’s fur, however nicely she knitted it. She was a wonderful gardener, who could coax any plant up from the heavy black soil as if it were springing through the most airy of peats. Her snowdrops hung heavier heads than any in the surrounding woods, lavender grew for her into great silvery cloudpuffs, 73

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and fuchsia tangled into the jasmine and honeysuckle climbing the wall behind it. Irises and columbines, lilies-of-the-valley, musk roses and forget-me-nots, marigolds, mallows, mimosas and pinks— the walled garden where I spent so much of my time rioted with her green power. She wore plastic sandals now, with ankle socks, because she said they were soft and really quite cheap, so that she could buy several pairs at a time and store them in the larder, in a dark corner beneath the great slate shelf. She told me that sun was bad for them. The plastic was transparent, and it was odd to see my grandmother’s socked feet through them, smoothly shaped like hot-dog buns, but I had never thought much about it. Until that summer, I took most things in my life pretty much for granted. When my parents went off on one of their many trips abroad, I went to stay with grandparents, and that was the way the world was. No questions. Sitting in my shorts on the muddy black-and-white floor, I zipped and unzipped the boots several times, a most satisfying sound and a most satisfying tingle up the middle of each foot as I did so. I pushed away my black Reeboks and stood up into the heavy hanging mackintoshes and tweed jackets, clumping the boots solidly up and down for a moment. A perfect fit. I could remember the disappointment when, so many times before, my feet had slid right out of the boots even when they were zipped up, and I had been able to move the boots only by dragging their heels along the floor. I pushed my way out of the cupboard and walked slowly down the long wooden floor of the passage to the kitchen, listening with a hugging delight to each step’s hard clop and feeling the alien weight at the end of my legs like extra years. Grin was making pastry. There seemed to be yards and yards of it spread like a blanket over the old kitchen table. “Pies for an army, Grin?” I asked. “What army?” she said, and broke off her smooth motions with the rolling pin. “What army are you talking about, Child?” I had always thought her eyes were the blue of bright sky, but they looked dull this morning, and wisps of white hair were sticking like feathers through the net that was supposed to keep her tidy.

Grandmother’s Footsteps ❥ 75 “You’re making lots of pastry, Grin. I just wondered.” For a moment I really did wonder. “I mean, a lot.” She looked at it. “I added some more flour, and then I think I needed more margarine. And more flour. And water. I had to get the balance right. Did I remember salt, now?” “It looks good,” I said, hoping she might offer me a little raw handful of it. “You can never have too much,” she said. “You never know when you’re going to need it. Quite suddenly.” She looked down at her blanket with a certain air of puzzlement. “Grin,” I said. “Would you mind awfully if I wore your boots?” “Boots?” she said vaguely. I stuck a foot out. “These boots. I fit into them. They’re really nice.” “Stand next to me,” she said, “shoulder to shoulder.” I shuffled alongside her, till my shoulder touched hers and we could just squint round at each other. She smelled a bit like the cupboard under the stairs and was just as familiar and dear to me. “You’re as tall as I am,” she said. “Look how you’ve grown. Another year and you’ll have grown past me.” I’d always liked the fact that she wasn’t so very much taller than I was, didn’t tower and lean like so many grown-ups. But I hated the fact that she might soon be smaller than me. “We’re equals, Grin. We’re twins. Peas in a pod.” “Sisters,” she said unexpectedly. “Ellie and Ursula.” My Great Aunt Ursula had died in a hotel fire in Marrakech twenty years before I had been born. I used to have nightmares about it and wake sweating and suffocating into my pillow with the smell of smoke tangibly in my room. “Little Ursula,” said Grin, and she swung round and looked at me with her eyes full of tears. I felt myself blushing. “Of course you may wear my boots,” she said fiercely, and her feathers of hair shook for a moment. “Of course. Now go and leave me in peace. I should never have made so much if you hadn’t distracted me.” The morning seemed suddenly light and long. I clopped back down the wooden passage again, past the dining room that was

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completely shut up now, and ran across the wide hallway covered in prickly brown matting that muffled my boots. I walked through the open front door onto the stone slabs outside, and into the lovely green-scented air. My footsteps on the slabs sounded like my father’s when he was dressed for the office: firm, authoritative, click, click, click on the hard pavement, in a hurry, earning money, going to meetings, man to man. I strode round the small stone square, wondering, as I had most of my life, what it would be like to be a boy. Then I thought of what it would be like to have a sister, but without the sense of loss I used to feel. I was glad to be here, alive this morning and on my own. I decided to walk down the long driveway, whose hardened gravelly-with-bald-bits surface made a lovely scrunching sort of sound, like chewing on dry cornflakes. I still felt unlike myself, or rather like myself extended into someone else, someone in charge, a soldier or a nurse or a John Buchan hero. Richard Hannay with a spare shirt and a toothbrush and a book in his pocket, and nothing else for a ten-day hike among the hills. Halfway down the drive, I turned off into the best of the rhododendron caves that flanked it. I sat on my favorite branch and spread my boots out before me so that I could admire them. I stretched out first one leg and then the other to see how they looked. The surface of the leather was crisscrossed all over with tiny lines, rather like those on Grin’s face, especially after she had taken her afternoon nap, only Grin’s face was soft and warm, and the boots were hard and sassy. There were deeper scratches here and there, and almost no proper brown left on the toecaps, which were a kind of wounded yellow color. I leaned forward and stroked them gently. “I’ll get you some polish tonight, I promise,” I said. As I looked down at them, I felt a protective, lurching-in-the-stomach kind of love for them. I drew my feet up and clutched my arms right round the soles, feeling the thick worn leather of them and the little nails and the square ridge of the heels, hugging them as if, painfully, I was about to lose them. I was very afraid of death that summer. I thought about Grin and her pastry, and the pairs of plastic sandals in the larder, and the scraps of paper covered in sums, and

Grandmother’s Footsteps ❥ 77 the box of used electric light bulbs in the big kitchen cupboard, and the notes that she left to herself all over the house so she wouldn’t forget things. I realized that the years I had longed for to make me grow tall and free from childhood had made Grin old. I thought of her here alone with Granpa after I’d gone home, and it made me want to cry. I hugged my boots tighter and took a long breath of rhododendron air. I wondered when she had bought the boots, and what they looked like new in the shop, and where the shop was, and what Grin was wearing that day, and why she had decided on that particular pair, and whether she could ever have imagined that one day I would wear them too. And I felt a bit better, though when fear pushes inside you, it’s as hard to ignore as pain. I got up out of the silence and pushed my way out through the smooth clacking leaves. As I walked on down the drive, I listened only to the hard, responsible sound of the boots tramping until I had reached the wide and rather dirty white gate that led out into the lane. I stood on the bottom rung of the gate and leaned my arms over the top, and the thickness of the boots under my feet was comforting. I could hear, somewhere far off down the lane, the familiar grumble of Granpa’s car, so I waited to open the gate for him and maybe to cadge a ride up the drive if he was in a good mood and if he would talk to me properly. Granpa was one of my favorite people, but talking to him was sometimes difficult, as if we didn’t quite use words the same way, or as if we had only just met for the first time and weren’t sure how to get acquainted. When Grin would ask me to go upstairs to his study and tell him lunch was ready, I never knew if he was going to treat me as a Shakespearean serving wench and ask me questions about the food that I couldn’t understand, or if he was going to growl about damnfool women and their everlasting meals, or even if he was going to ignore me altogether, coming downstairs ten minutes later to complain about cold food. I swung the gate back, and he stuck his head out of the car window. “Want a ride?” he asked. I moved the two Tesco’s bags full of groceries to the backseat, got in beside him, and shut the car door

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carefully. It was a rather old Toyota. We sat there for a minute in silence, and then he said, “Playing Grandmother’s Footsteps, I see.” It was so often like that. I didn’t have a clue what to say. “If the boot fits, wear it, eh?” “Oh, boots,” I said finally. “Yes, I’m wearing Grin’s boots. She said I may. And yes, they do fit. My feet have grown.” Granpa said in a grave voice, “Showed him his room where he must lodge that night. Pulled off his boots, and took away the light.” He put the car into first gear, and as its tires began to roll, they sounded as if they were popping the little pieces of gravel beneath them. “Milton,” he said. I kept quiet as we drove slowly up the drive until he said unexpectedly, “Bought those boots for her myself. Might almost be yesterday. Good lord.” “You did, Granpa?” I couldn’t help it. I was astonished. “Marshall and Snelgrove, 1948. January sales. Icy weather. Lot of damnfool women and Ellie’s feet were cold. She liked the zips.” “So do I, Granpa,” I said. “I really like the zips.” “Good lord,” he said again. “1948.” He parked the car under the corrugated-iron roof of the lean-to that sagged out from the end of the walled garden, and we sat there in silence for a moment, staring out at the shadowy wall in front of us. I waited for him to tell me more about the boots, but he just sighed. “Anno domini,” he said finally, and got out of the car. I didn’t ask him what it meant. I sat and watched him in the mirror as, without another look at me, he began walking off slowly towards the house, a plastic Tesco’s bag hanging heavily at the end of each arm. He looked very small. I glanced down at my boots as I opened the car door. In 1948, my father hadn’t even been born yet. I went into the walled garden and began to walk up and down its paths, testing the boots first on a cobbled path, then on a cinder one, then on the concrete one by the little shed. My feet were getting a bit hot, but the satisfying authority with which my heels met the ground was giving me back my still center that fear and Granpa had unsteadied. I could feel the hollow inside me begin to close its edges together.

Grandmother’s Footsteps ❥ 79 A long time ago, the garden had been laid out in three parallel segments: a vegetable garden at one end, a flower garden at the other, and a narrow lawn set between two yew hedges in the middle. The vegetable garden still had a few vegetables in it and a strawberry bed in one corner, but most of it was just weedy earth now. The yew hedges needed cutting, and the lawn was more like rough grass, though Granpa did occasionally come out and impatiently push a mower through it. In the flower section, you could no longer tell it had ever been a rectangle or see it had ever had a pattern to it. It was a wonderful jungle of lush bushes, pergolas draped with trailing roses, little winding paths, benches almost too overgrown to sit on, and everywhere unexpected bright spaces glowing with brilliant clusters of flowers. There was a pond and a sundial and a herb corner and a stone summerhouse that I think must have had an open space in front of it once and a view of the little pond, but had green leaf-blinds pulled down around it now. All of this was the work of Grin, who spent long hours there, planting and dividing, grafting and feeding, labeling and watering and planning. I knew because I had spent so much time there in the past working with her, one or the other of us always wearing the coolie’s hat with the long plaits, me asking question after question, and her always trying to answer everything properly. I was on a gravel path now that ran round the pond and then led to the one bench I knew was still usable because it was on a little bit of paving in front of the fig tree. Grin used to sit there when her legs started aching. I sat and breathed in the heady scents of roses and nicotiana and, somewhere faintly, rosemary. I wondered how many of the flowers I could still name, and whether Grin had added any new ones this year. I wondered if she was going to come out this afternoon, and whether she’d mind if I wore her boots and her hat. I wanted to toss those plaits over my shoulder as I had for so many summers, and I wanted Grin to be talking to me about which plants lived most happily together, and about the science of pruning an Albertine, about balancing soil acidity, and how bees found their way back to the hive. I thought perhaps in this blue and fragrant sunshine that this

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afternoon she might be persuadable, especially if I had something to show her. Ground elder is also known as goutweed, which always used to make Grin and me laugh, as we couldn’t quite imagine some old curmudgeon with a bandaged foot yanking up difficult handfuls of the stuff and then boiling it or crushing the root or whatever you’d do with it. “It probably gave him the gout in the first place,” she’d say, puffing as she pulled and dug with her trowel and tugged at the noxious weed. She would talk to it in quite a cross voice. “Come on, you stupid thing. No, you may not go running under the jasmine. You really have no business in my garden at all. You are not welcome, do you understand?” It’s no good just pulling up ground elder, breaking off the bits you can see. You have to dig down, gently if it’s close to a precious plant, and trace the tough white roots, and get every last one of them out if you’re really going to do the job properly. I went to the little shed, and found a trowel and a small fork and the wheelbarrow with the dippy wheel, and I got to work. Almost every bed in the flower garden seemed to have ground elder creeping across it, as well as other easier weeds like groundsel, and it was quite hard to know where to start, so I just went back to the bench by the fig tree and began there, working my way backwards from the wall, concentrating on a small bit of earth at a time, so I wouldn’t get discouraged. Sometimes I had to stand up and dig. Sometimes I had to kneel down and scoop with the trowel, then I had to half get up again and pull. It was hard work. Hard work brings its own reward. Granny always used to tell me that, though I often wondered how she knew, as she never seemed to me to do any real work at all. Granny was my mother’s mother, and she died just before I came to stay with Grin the summer I wore the boots. Granny was eight years younger than Grin, and they had been great friends a long time ago when Granny was nineteen and about to marry Grandfather. I still couldn’t believe that she was dead. I’d known her all my life and suddenly she had vanished from it. A heart attack. It frightened me very much.

Grandmother’s Footsteps ❥ 81 Granny had lived in a tall London house in a square that had a communal railed garden in the middle that was hard to get to because of all the traffic that constantly streamed round and round the square. It looked nice from my high bedroom window, though, when I could look down through its tall trees to its green grass and its formal rose beds and lots of scarlet and yellow tulips in the spring. She lived alone in the tall house, except for the Jephsons, who looked after her, and Freddie, who was a rather beautiful corgi with a head like a regal fox and legs like a clockwork mouse. I liked Freddie. I wasn’t allowed to take him for walks on my own when I stayed there because of the traffic, but I used to take him out into Granny’s long, narrow garden behind the house and play decorous games of ball with him there. I don’t suppose I’ll ever see Freddie again. He lives with the Jephsons now in a flat in Ealing. Mr. Jephson did the garden, and he kept it very tidy indeed. Nothing rioted in Mr. Jephson’s garden. Everything grew symmetrically and neatly, with no weeds and no intertwining, but a lot of pink and lilac and white and green, and a miniature croquet set pressed into the lawn if it was warm enough. I thought it was a lovely garden to grow in a town. It was still and clean in an otherwise noisy and dirty place that I wasn’t sure I liked, and I enjoyed its crisp, delicate lines just as I enjoyed Granny herself, with her lovely fingernails and ankles, her beautiful clothes and her heady scent. I had stayed with her in the tall house only last Easter, not dreaming, of course, that this was the last time I’d see her. I had played with Freddie, and gone with Mrs. Jephson to Marks and Sparks to buy hot-cross buns, and watched TV in my bedroom in the daytime, a treat not allowed at home. Granny was busy, as she always was, rushing out to visit people or talking on the phone or writing letters in the little green room she called her haven, into which I never saw anyone go but her and Mrs. Jephson. But on Saturday morning, she took me with her to the Brompton Road to help her choose a pair of evening shoes. At least, that’s what she said. I certainly wouldn’t have chosen the green suede pair with silver leaves on them that she did. I’m not sure I could have walked in them. But then she said she was feeling

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generous, and she bought me a pair of high-top Reeboks just like that. Black, too, which I knew my mother would disapprove of. Oh, I do miss her. Later that Saturday, after I’d exhausted Freddie in the garden and nearly gone to sleep on my bed in front of an old TV film called Easter Parade, we had tea together in the sitting room. When we’d finished eating, she got out her wedding album, which I’d never seen before. She knew I loved looking at old photographs, and I must have seen most of her other albums but never that one, though I’d looked many times at the big photo in the silver frame that was always on the piano. Her and Grandfather kissing each other, her veil almost obscuring his face, though you could see how young and thin he looked. I vaguely remember him as being almost totally bald, with a huge belly that caved you right in when you had to kiss him, and odd, sweet breath. He died when I was seven, and I can’t remember him very clearly. I’d once overheard my father telling someone on the phone that his death was a blessing in disguise, but I had never been sure if it was a blessing because his liver was so bad, or because Granny didn’t like him very much. I watched her place the album on the small table in front of her, and I stopped poking down the back of my new shoes at the blisters there and moved up beside her on the sofa as she slowly turned the pages. After she’d dropped me home earlier, she’d gone out to get her hair done, and I could smell the hair spray as I bent down to look at the photographs. “What a day,” she said. “Was it very exciting?” I asked her, looking at her five little bridesmaids with some envy. I had never been a bridesmaid. “My parents made sure it should seem the most wonderful day of my life,” she said, and I wasn’t certain exactly what she meant. “They made it magic for you?” I prompted her. “They made sure,” she said, “that it happened, and that every moment of it should appear part of the fairy tale.” “You looked lovely,” I said. It was true. She looked just like a princess in a fairy tale should look, and so totally unlike the stiff-

Grandmother’s Footsteps ❥ 83 haired Granny I was sitting next to that it was hard to connect the two people, though of course I wouldn’t have said so. “There was still rationing then,” she said. “Goodness knows what my mother had to do to get the material for that dress. It was very uncomfortable,” she added, tracing the dress’s outline on the open page with one finger, “but it rustled beautifully. I can still hear the rustle.” She gazed for a moment more, then sighed and turned over the page to a group of guests standing on the church porch. All the women wore fur coats. I was rather shocked. “I would much rather have had a summer wedding,” she said. “It was so cold that day. Sunny, but cold. Icy weather.” “Look,” I said, pointing, “There’s Grin. Doesn’t she look young? And elegant. I’ve never seen her look like that.” Standing at the end of the second row, there she was, small and straight, with a little fur hat to match her coat and lipstick on her smiling mouth. “Oh, Ellie,” Granny said. “Impossible Ellie. How angry I was with her that day.” “With Grin?” I said. “Why?” Granny paused for a moment, looking at the photograph, and then turned her head away from me. She moved her hands absently across the open book, so that I couldn’t see the photos any more. She didn’t answer for a while. Eventually she said, “She was the only person there who didn’t tell me how lucky I was. She said to me after the service, ‘It’s going to be hard work, I’m afraid, but you’re strong. You can do it. Good luck, my dear.’ And she kissed me, with that asinine husband of hers just smiling beside her. I was so angry with her. We were never such friends again after that, though I think we were both glad when our children married each other.” She turned and gave me her pleased-I-was-here smile, but I could see she wasn’t really looking at me. “Hard work being married?” I asked, not until much later connecting the asinine husband with Granpa. She shut the album with a hollow thud and pushed herself up from the sofa. “I don’t know why I started looking at all this stuff,” she said. “So maudlin. Let’s play a quick game of Scrabble togeth-

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er, my darling, and then I shall have to run. My dear friend will be picking me up at seven o’clock, and I must have a bath.” Hard work brings its own reward. As I dug and pulled, I thought about how often she had said that to me over the years, and it occurred to me for the first time that she didn’t just mean working hard at school or at a job or at playing the piano, even though she would say it when I told her I hated practicing. Had Grin been right? Had she had to work very hard for happiness? I yearned to be able to ask her if a reward had ever come. Blinking back tears, I straightened up. I had nearly a whole wheelbarrow full of ground elder, and I surveyed the clean, dark earth of my labors. The clumps of flowers and the bushes that I’d cleared around already seemed to be expanding into their new spaces. I made a vow that if Grin was still busy and tired, I would go on coming out until the whole garden was free from weeds. I wanted to show her that I was no longer the little girl with all the questions, but someone who could be a help to her so she wouldn’t have to worry so much. And, of course, I also wanted to be the little girl again, with Grin beside me telling me what to do and answering all my puzzles, and that made me want to cry again, so I concentrated on the sound of my boots clomping onto the cobbled path at the bottom of the garden, growing harder-edged as they shed the earth that was stuck to them, the little nails clicking and sliding on the stones. Thin high clouds had begun to film the sky, and the garden had a still, end-of-morning feel to it all of a sudden. As I pushed the wheelbarrow along to the weed heap at the corner of the vegetable garden, into my mind came what Granpa had said about playing Grandmother’s Footsteps. Such a silly game, but it always made your heart beat fast, specially if you were the one in front being pursued by everybody else, the one in charge who could freeze them all by turning round, yet the most scared in a way because there were so many of them creeping up behind you, just dying to catch you and touch you so that you lost. Like walking through a field of bullocks. You can hear their legs swishing in the grass behind you and their long breathy sighs in your ears, but you have no idea if they’re about to get dangerous and butt and jostle past you. It’s

Grandmother’s Footsteps ❥ 85 really quite frightening. Was he just being clever because I was wearing her boots, or did he mean something else? You never knew with Granpa. She and I were the same height, and I knew I hadn’t stopped growing yet, and so in that way I was catching her up and would even overtake her, but wouldn’t she always be in front? Grandparent, parent, child was how I had always thought it went, yet at this moment, with Granny gone so fast and so finally from my life, I had the feeling of being right next to Grin, as close as I imagined sisters to be, and I felt passionately protective. When I got back to the front door, I scraped as much dirt off as I could on the scraper, then I sat down on the stone slabs and unzipped the boots. My socks were quite hot. I carried the boots across the prickly brown matting that dug into my feet and went into the cupboard under the stairs to change back into my soft black Reeboks again. I left Grin’s boots directly under the black coolie hat, one of whose plaits, I could see, needed sewing up again at the bottom. I vowed I would come back and do it later when I returned to polish the boots. As I walked down the passage to the kitchen, I felt as if my feet didn’t belong to me, while my legs seemed heavy and unresponsive, as if I’d just jumped off a trampoline. Grin was standing at the sideboard beside a row of pies, some round, some oval, some square, one looking suspiciously as if it had been baked in Johnno’s old enamel dog dish. One or two were a little burnt, and there seemed to be a lot of different smells coming from them, but overriding these was a warm, rich pastry smell that hung comfortingly over everything and with a rush brought back so many summer mornings like this one. “Grin,” I said. “Guess what I’ve been doing?” Grin didn’t react to me, and I realized she was counting. “Six, seven, eight,” she murmured, and stood still for a moment before turning round, her face flushed and slightly bewildered and her hairfeathers more ruffled than ever. “Oh good, you’re here,” she said. “One of these is for lunch, but how can I possibly tell which one? So stupid. I should have put pastry leaves on top, or L for lunch, or something, but I didn’t, and now I’m going to have to cut them all open to find the right one. What a nuisance this all is.” She turned .

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back to the pies but made no move to carry out her plan. “Why am I so stupid?” I heard her mutter, though I don’t think she meant me to hear. “Grin,” I said. “I’ve got an idea. What did you put in the pie for lunch?” “Put in?” she asked vaguely, still looking at the anonymous row before her. “Yes, in the pie,” I said. “The lunch pie. What was it?” She turned back to me. “Some had apple and raisins, and some had stewing steak,” she said. “And kidney, though the price is fast becoming quite outrageous. And one had bacon from last night with some potato added. And I think there was another.” “Was the bacon-and-potato one for lunch?” I suggested. “Your grandfather likes bacon-and-potato pie,” she said. “But I can’t find it. This food is all such a nuisance, you can’t imagine, Child.” I went over to Grin, and I kissed her. I think I surprised both of us. Then I bent over the pies, and it really wasn’t difficult to pick out the bacon-and-potato one. Some of it had come out from under one side of the crust, and you could smell it. “This is it, Grin,” I said. “Shall I put it on the table for you?” I wiped the table, which was still a little floury, unearthed a mat, then I carried the pie over and set it down. I laid the table, and Grin watched me, wiping her hands on her apron as if it had been a towel. “I put the rest of the pastry in the fridge,” she said. “I didn’t want to waste it, but there was so much of it. I have no idea where it all came from.” “I do love you,” I said. “I can’t think why,” she said quite sharply. “Now, let’s bring your grandfather down here and get it over with. I’m much too busy to be wasting time standing around like this. Go on, Child. Go upstairs and tell him lunch is ready.” But I didn’t. I went to the bottom of the stairs and yelled that lunch was ready, and I didn’t wait for his reply. “He’ll come when he’s ready,” I said to Grin, and I sat down at the table.

Grandmother’s Footsteps ❥ 87 She looked at me, and her blue eyes were very bright. “He always went his own way,” she said. “Always did exactly as he pleased. But he never amazed me as he amazed other people. Poor Arthur.” She placidly began to cut open the pie and was spooning a third portion out when Granpa came into the room and sat down in his chair with arms at the head of the table and shook out his napkin as he always did, with the same force he used when sneezing. “Pie, Arthur,” she said, passing him his plate. “And do try not to make so much noise, if that’s possible.” Granpa sighed. “Little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour,” he said, looking at me from under his bushy brows, and I wondered if I was in trouble. “Edmund Burke,” said Grin. “Such a loquacious man.” “What’s this?” asked Granpa, forking a piece of pie into his mouth. “Slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails?” Neither Grin nor I answered him, though for once I could have. But his voice was cheerful and in a funny way gentle, and besides, the pie was quite good and I was hungry. “Cat got your tongue?” he said, and this time he was looking at Grin. She went on cutting up the tiny portion of pie she’d cut for herself and eating bird mouthfuls without raising her eyes from her plate. “Stepped out of her shoes, then, have you?” he asked after several moments of silence, and I guessed he must be talking to me. “I’ve taken off the boots, yes,” I replied. “I put them back in the cupboard.” “Like those boots, do you?” he asked, but he was still looking at Grin. “I cleaned a patch of the flower garden this morning,” I said, and now I wasn’t sure who I was talking to. “I pulled up a whole wheelbarrow full of ground elder, but there’s an awful lot more to go.” “I must go back there sometime,” Grin said, half to herself, I thought. “But there’s always so much to do.” “Have you forgotten those boots, Ellie?” Granpa said. “Young Ursula reminded me of them this morning. Bitterly cold, do you remember? And some damnfool wedding—whose was it now?”

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Grin chewed on her last mouthful of pie without answering, but I knew she knew whose wedding he was talking about just as well as I did. “Your grandmother’s, that’s it,” said Granpa, smacking his napkin against the edge of the table with a whipping sound. “Your other grandmother’s, that is, may she rest in peace. And what a funny little thing she was, wasn’t she, Ellie?” “Funny?” said Grin, sounding as if she was thinking of something else. “You know what I mean, Ell. Always up in a snit about something or other. Always Miss Perfect. Felt sorry for that poor bugger she married even as she swept up the aisle towards him.” “Sorry for him?” Grin said, dabbing her finger onto her plate to collect the pastry crumbs there and eating them very slowly. “Goddammit, Ellie, stop repeating what I say.” Granpa frowned at her, but his voice sounded more coaxing than angry. Grin just went on eating her crumbs, and finally he sighed. He looked at me, then he chuckled and looked hopefully over at her again. “Remember how livid she was with you that day? Remember that, Ellie? Lord, she was ratty. Don’t think she ever got over it, did she?” “Got over what, Granpa?” I asked after a pause, though I could hear Granny’s voice in my head more clearly than I think I had at Easter. “It was those boots, wasn’t it, Ell?” Granpa said, and he gave a short laugh that almost sounded like Ha! “It was those boots. There you were in sable fur and zip-up boots. Zip-up boots.” He wiped his eyes. “She must have thought you were deliberately insulting her and that family of hers, all in their little crocodile flimflams, just because your feet were cold and there happened to be a sale. I don’t know what you said to her after the service, but I remember her ice-queen look all right. Almost made me laugh. Lord, lord, and all for zip-up boots.” Granpa was still chuckling to himself as he began scooping up the remains of his pie. I looked over at Grin, and suddenly she looked up at me, and her eyes were a bright blue, twinkling at me just as I remembered. For a moment, united against such blind

Grandmother’s Footsteps ❥ 89 misunderstanding, we were so close we could have touched souls. I began to smile back at her, but even as I did so, it was as if a haze appeared and quietly filtered out the bright sky until she wasn’t looking at me any more, and loss crept under my skin like cold. Granpa put down his knife and fork noisily and wiped his mouth several times with his napkin, but even when he took a loud drink of water and then banged the glass down again on the table, she said nothing to him. When I turned round after carrying the dirty plates over to the sink, I saw that she had gone back to the remaining pies on the sideboard and was writing a note on an old envelope she had pulled from her apron pocket.

Victoria and Albert I: Running Away to Sea ❥

a

nd I told ’er, you wait and see, I told ’er, I knew I’d find you sitting right where I’d left you because never in all your born days have you ever been known to do anything, and if you’ve stirred from that chair once, Albert Pollock, if you’ve so much as twitched a muscle, an organ, an eyelid, if you’ve so much as uncrossed a leg since I’ve been gone, then I’m a Frenchman, which Saint George and the Blessed Virgin be thanked I’m not, and what they wanted to build a tunnel for in the first place I’ll never understand, and you know as well as I do (are you listening to me?) that what I’m telling you is the ’ole truth and nothing but the truth because you know I’ve never lied to you, not even about my inheritage, which I might have done, seeing as my dad was introduced to Ma by ’is local fishmonger, or maybe it was ’ers, it’s not important, at the 1937 Victoria Hall Christmas Fundraising Dance for Disabled Seamen, not that ’e’d ever been to sea ’imself, of course, not with ’is eyes, bleedin’ shame really, couldn’t tell red from green, they said and wouldn’t take ’im, well, you can see it would have been a ’andicap, nearly broke ’is heart, and ’im a Catholic, as if you didn’t know that, and Ma said it was just like a fairy tale and ’im the prince that come, God bless her, as if she could tell chips from cherries, and both of them only seventeen, and never mind Cinderella, it was all so ’ighly romantic that I come along the very next September, which you already know, for I must of told you a ’undred times if I’ve told you once, only a coupla months after the priest had said in sickness and in ’elf (with a very funny look on his face, Ma always said, though ’e never once looked down at me inside the bump, as it were, not all through the service, so she called me Victoria to spite ’im, or so she always said, because of course the dance was on Saturday night and my dad went to confession the next day, the softhead), and you know all what I’m telling you the same as if it were your own par90

Victoria and Albert I: Running Away to Sea ❥ 91 ents, which it quite certainly is not, your parents sucking their teeth so ’ard at the very idea of dancing that I’ve always wondered ’ow you came to be born at all, Albert Pollock, but that’s quite a different kettle of fish, and one I am not going to fry just at this minute, though it’s lucky for you I’m not a venging person, so if you’re suggesting there’s anything untoward in my background, you’ve got another think coming, if watching them soaps till your eyes turn to jelly and your brain to dog mess has left you with anything to think with, which I find ’ighly doubtful, and further Oh, Albert sighs. To himself, of course. Oh, he sighs. To run away to sea hearing gulls thin cries through the turning tide the beating wind then I’m a Frenchman cries (are you listening to me?) through the rigging flying up to the sky blue from port to starboard prow to stern slap of water against slap of feet on white decks singing in the anchor setting sail away into the howl of the storm still singing the ship

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dancing running away to sea Oh, Albert, you poet. You dreamer. Breathe it in. Stretch it out now. Further, Albert. Go on, further more, if I come ’ome again this week, tomorrow, let’s say tomorrow, and find you still glazed to that couch without so much as a stir, a twitch, a move, a step, a skip, and without, by the look of things, ’aving fed the budgie, my poor little Maggie, there pet, which I seem to remember you promised to do while I was out working my fingers to the skin and bone, degrading myself, I might add, and so would Ma if she were ’ere to see me stoop so low, which, the Blessed Virgin keep her, I’m glad to say she’s not, and you can go on telling me till pigs can fly that you was laid off at work through no fault of your own, and I may believe you and I may not, but it’s not going to butter no parsnips you just staying here day in day out and telling me there ain’t no work because let me tell you, Albert Pollock, your attempts to give it a try, to ’ave a shot at it, take the cow by the ’orns, chance your arm, get to grips, or to speak plain, Albert, in rude words, to find work, have been about as determined as rice pudding, while here I am, running round like a fly up a curtain-rail trying to make ends meet, and I’m warning you, if I come ’ome again to find you lolling there like you was some kind of Prince Charles, then all I can say is that you’re going to find out sooner than you think just how far did you go, Albert? Did you find your strange land? Catch the warm green smell from a horizon still holding the sky down to the sea? The birds come first. Then the wind. Wood smoke faint in the rigging. Hollow suck of tide. Quayside. Skin. Land-sweat, that is, Albert. Foreign, seductive, a dangerous fire on the senses not that ’e’d ever been to sea ’imself, of course, not with ’is eyes, bleedin’ shame really, couldn’t tell red from green, they said

Victoria and Albert I: Running Away to Sea ❥ 93 and wouldn’t take ’im, well, you can see it would have been a ’andicap, nearly broke ’is heart, and ’im a Catholic, as if you didn’t you know that I could have gone. Once. Seven seas. Seven. And a girl in every port. Like a fly up a curtain-rail and no house to come home to no wife oh no I couldn’t go now, I don’t suppose it’s possible, but then when Raleigh sailed lolling like some kind of Prince Charles a painted ship upon a painted ocean I could have gone then all I can say is singing in the anchor of Discovery setting sail all I can say away into the howl all I can say thin cries through the beating wind Albert Pollock, are you listening to me? I hear you, he says. (And this is the truth.) I hear every word, he says.

Victoria and Albert II: Day-Trippers “W

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henever I come to the seaside,” says Albert sadly, “the tide is always in.” Victoria wedges her folding chair in among the rocks and sits down. “Sandwich?” she says. “Four hours before it’s out far enough. At least.” “Tuna, egg, or jam? I do like to have the opportunity of choice. Or tongue.” She rummages in her basket, and several gulls swoop closer. “And then there will be a quarter mile of sand between us and the sea. I read it on a notice.” Albert sighs and sits down on a pile of rocks. The rocks are stiff with barnacles and hard as ice. “Knitting isn’t much, I know,” says his wife. “But it’s nice to have your efforts appreciated.” He looks over. The wool is pale blue this time. “For my great niece?” he asks fondly. “For a girl? Silly!” Albert takes out a cigarette and lights it with the seventh match. He hugs his knees. “It’s none too warm,” he says. Victoria looks across at him from her chair. “That won’t worry you,” she says, and he hears the edge of sarcasm in her voice. “That’s what you say,” he says. Albert is a very worried man. “I know you,” she says. Oh, I don’t think so, he thinks. No. He gazes out at the rough gray swell of the sea and inhales its sharp stink into his nostrils. He feels slightly sick. “You always wanted to go to sea,” his wife says. “Even before you was made redundant.” Her shoulders shake, and he hears the wheeze of her brief laughter. She puts her knitting down in her lap and takes a thermos out from her basket. She pours tea into its plastic cup and hands this to Albert. “Drink it while it’s hot,” she

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Victoria and Albert II: Day-Trippers ❥ 95 says, putting away the thermos and picking up her knitting again. Albert looks up at the gulls, still screaming and swooping above them. The tea is lukewarm and tastes of plastic, but he drinks it anyway. Uneasily, he senses the gain in his wife’s stature. “Why four hours?” Victoria asks. “Too much trouble to do the extra little bit?” “The tide’s in. I can’t start while the tide’s in. You can’t swim against the tide.” “I suppose I shall just have to sit and wait for you, then,” she says, beginning to cast off the little blue mitten. Albert drops the end of his cigarette into a rock pool. “Not if you don’t want to,” he says. “Oh, I think I should just see you off, don’t you?” she says. “I’d like to see you go.” She wipes her eyes. “Very funny,” he says. They wait. “I can see a lot of sand now,” says Victoria. “Can’t you see a lot of sand, Albert?” The second mitten is growing, and she pulls out more wool and turns her needles with satisfaction. “I’ll take a tongue, if I may,” says Albert. He has been trying to avoid looking at the sand. “You ate the tongue,” she says. “And the tuna. It’s down to egg and jam.” He sighs, takes out a cigarette, and lights it with the sixth match. The rock pool is getting rather full. “You wanted me to,” he says. “It was you who said it was a good idea.” “Pull the other one, Albert Pollock,” she says. “You were sitting right there on the couch. I heard you. Swim the Channel, you said. With my own ears.” “I wouldn’t have done it. Not really.” Albert listens to himself. Fights for belief. “I don’t suppose I would.” “You wouldn’t do anything without me,” she says. “You wouldn’t breathe air if I wasn’t there to help you sniff.” “I could do a lot alone,” he says, and holds his breath experimentally. He cups his hand round the cigarette, but the wind is burning it down with spirited efficiency. He sighs, takes a last drag,

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and drops the end into the rock pool. “Most of your ideas are so much pie-in-the-sky,” Victoria says. “But this one’s different. This is a real dream, isn’t it, Albert?” “Why’s that?” he asks, watching the shoreline tiptoe stealthily backwards into the sea. She looks across at him, and finally the silence forces him to look her in the eye. It is small. Rather like an elephant’s, he thinks. “You wanted it,” she says. “I’ve told you I’m heart and soul behind it. Hook, line, and sinker. What more do you want? The tide’s out. What’s keeping you?” Albert stands up precariously among the rocks and begins to undress. He has trouble getting out of his trousers. When he has nothing on but his underwear, he wraps a striped towel around his flanks, hunches his jacket round his shoulders, and sits down again. He is very cold. “Aren’t you going to fold your clothes?” his wife asks. “Why bother?” he says. Victoria is casting off the second mitten. “You’ve got a long walk ahead of you,” she says. “Jam? It’s the last one.” With some difficulty, Albert extracts the last cigarette from the crumpled packet in his jacket pocket. He has three matches left. They all blow out in the wind. “Time you were going,” she says. “How will I know,” he asks, “which direction to take?” “You go straight, silly,” she says. “When you get to the horizon, you’ll see France. It’s only just over there. A day-trip.” “I could miss it,” he says, hearing with alarm the note of panic in his voice. “I’m really not sure where I’m going.” “France is bigger than England,” Victoria says evenly. “How could you miss it?” “Do you know how far it is from here?” he asks. “Too close for comfort, that’s all I know,” she says, and she’s casting on another mitten. Pink wool this time. “Specially now with that tunnel. Perhaps if you listen carefully you’ll hear the trains rumbling beneath you.” He thinks he hears her wheeze over the distant hungry roar of

Victoria and Albert II: Day-Trippers ❥ 97 the surf. “How many people have done it?” he asks. “I bet you don’t know that either.” “Lots,” she says. “Lots of people. It’s so common they’re thinking of charging for it.” “I think you might have told me that sooner,” he says, with a certain staccato dignity. His teeth are chattering like a skeleton’s. She is counting her stitches and doesn’t answer his question. Albert wishes that one of the screaming gulls would swoop down and peck her little eyes right out. “Never make wishes,” she says. “You didn’t want a job. You wanted to do this, you said. And now you are.” She wraps up the embryo mitten and puts it away in the basket. “I’ll watch you go,” she says, “and then it’s back to the hotel for a nice cup of tea. You will phone me when you get there, won’t you?” She looks at him and is suddenly taken again by a soft wheeze of laughter. “You’ll know,” he says, avoiding her gaze. He shrugs off his jacket, unwraps his towel, and drops both onto the pile of crumpled clothes beside him. His skin is blue. “Don’t be too long, now,” she says. “It’s getting quite nippy out here.” Albert begins to clamber stiffly down the rocks onto the sand. “Don’t wait for me,” he says. “I may be gone some time.” “Au revoy, then,” she says, and twirls her hand in a little wave. She picks up her chair and her basket and heads for the cliff path. Albert reaches the sand. He looks back once, then starts a clumsy run towards the thin blue line of the sea. He grows smaller and smaller.

Telling Stories M

y dad died in a car accident, as my mother used to tell me in a sad voice each time I asked for the story, six months before I was born and only two weeks before they were going to get married. Not married in church, under the circumstances, but in a civil ceremony and a whirl of romance that shone all the brighter because of my presence, me, their child, the proof of their love, their love child. I was so proud of that. A love child. Her dress would have been the palest flush of pink with a high waist and floating ruffles down the front, and she would have carried a posy of tiny rosebuds tied with silver ribbons. So it would all have been binding and legal, she said, and we’d have lived happily ever after. But it was not to be. And we would both sigh deeply. And there were other stories, too, of his kindness and gentleness, of boat trips on the river and bouquets of flowers, and of their hopes for the future, the cottage they would fill with treasures and with children . . . I remember every story, every detail that she told me as she sat on the chair by my bed in the evening light before I went to sleep, but my favorite was the one about the wedding that never happened. I sometimes wonder how much she remembers of what she told me back then, before she started saying, “you’re too old for stories,” and leaving me to read books on my own until it was time to turn out the light. I shall be eighteen this year—legally an adult—but I have not yet become that old. Last summer, when I was spending so much time upstairs, I used to go into my mother’s room almost every day to look at the photograph of my father that she keeps in the drawer beside her bed. Dark hair beneath a cap like a yachtsman’s or a chauffeur’s pushed to the back of his head, hands on his hips, a sardonic grin like a wannabe Elvis. Weird. I used to dream about him quite a lot, and there he always was—hands on hips, cap pushed back, grinning. That’s the only photo I’ve ever seen of him. All I have of him, in fact. When I was born, my mother entered her own name on the birth certificate,

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Telling Stories ❥ 99 so all I am is Sara Brown, which is about as plain a name as you can get, and I still have no clue as to what it might have been. I don’t want to know either, believe me, though I fantasized enough about all of that when I was younger—the usual Little Lord Fauntleroy, Brat Farrar stuff. She wouldn’t give me any information, but she made me believe so deeply in the magical island of their love that I rarely tried to explore beyond it. “They wanted nothing to do with us,” was all she’d say about his family, “and that’s fine by me. We’re a unit, you and I. We’ll survive.” As I suppose we have, though being so completely without a father left this funny space inside me that used to make me feel almost physically off-balance. It isn’t as if I’m weighed down by all that much on the other side either. My maternal grandparents, my mother’s two older sisters, and my mother. That’s all. No brothers or sisters of my own, and both of the aunts unmarried. I always assumed I was destined to remain single all my life, as though through some kind of genetic programming, and I accepted this inheritance with my mother’s pangs of regret for the pink ruffled dress, but with a burning determination to make it alone, to be my own hero and no regrets. And I don’t regret anything, even now. One thing I have vowed is that I’ll never live where I had to grow up. I detest these nasty little suburbs that provide neither urban nor rural living but a kind of overplanned limbo of fresh air, ornamental trees, and bus stops. We have no pets, as my mother says she couldn’t cope with shit on the lawn. Only she calls it feces. Thirtyone Bellevue Crescent. Just the address makes me gag. For years, my mother has cooked and cleaned the house in the mornings, sighing about it, always sighing, and then in the afternoons gone up to the computer in her room to write about moody, dark-haired men and small-boned, repressed orphans—escapist garbage that I increasingly dislike, though I don’t tell her so. Her stories sell as fast as she can write them. Maryanne Browning, Queen of Hearts, Romance writer extraordinaire. Must have been all the practice you put in on me, I said to her jokingly once, to which she snapped back, “That was different,” though I only meant she was good at telling stories, which she is. Successful, anyhow. She goes so far into

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whatever world it is she’s creating that I’ve always felt shut out when she’s writing, but it took me till last summer to understand that her continual creation of heroines whose lives were so wildly different from ours was an indication that things hadn’t quite panned out as great as she always told me they had. I lived in my own world, too. When I was younger, and she wasn’t always depressed or in my face, we got on well enough, me and Mum, even after she no longer told her stories to me. I didn’t have a lot of friends, and she was good about doing things with me. We often did my homework together, and we shopped in the town on Saturday mornings. She didn’t make me wear dresses, and she bought me things that I really wanted— a penknife and a fountain pen, a short-wave radio, even some rollerblades one year. She took me to the library once a week to feed my addiction to books. We played cards, canasta of all things, and watched stupid TV together. We made bread and cakes. Caught buses from the end of the road, and walked in the flat countryside beyond the houses. She even taught me the names of wildflowers. She didn’t kiss me much—she was never a huggy-kissy kind of person—but she didn’t hit me either, even when I deserved it. Okay, so it wasn’t a very exciting life, but it was all right. Pocket money. Music lessons. Birthday treat and Easter egg type of things. One of my aunts staying with us every Christmas, never both of them together because they didn’t get on. School term, school holidays, school term again, ad nauseam. The usual. My summers, though. Those summers when we went to stay with my grandparents every August were different. Grandma and Grandpa teased each other and kissed in front of people, even though they were old. And there was no one else there, no aunts, just my mother and me, in that fragile old house where your sheets tore down the middle as you slept and the windows seemed to bend in the wind. A house where I didn’t have to be quiet because there my mother laughed and pipes clanked and the dog Rory barked and Grandma was on the move, on the move, every minute of the day. I watched with awe my mother become someone’s child, and I squirmed with embarrassment when my grandmother called her

Telling Stories ❥ 101 Little Mary. Grandma’s name was Mary, too, but hearing her call my mother Little Mary when she was my mother, for God’s sake, upset my idea of how things should be. So I determinedly became Grandpa’s child. I left Grandma and my mother to spend all their time together in the house, and I spent all my time out-of-doors, either with Grandpa or looking or waiting for him. They had farmed here once, in this country of steep fields and too many banks and hedgerows that was so different from Bellevue banality, but now I can hardly remember when the tractor still worked. I do just remember Grandpa taking all his meals in another room by himself the summer the land was sold, but I don’t remember him changing like Mum says he did. They kept the farmhouse and the small farmyard with its clutter of outbuildings where he found things to do in one dark corner or another, and it was there I hunted him down every day of the holiday. Sometimes it took me a long time to find him. Sometimes he went off alone with the dog Rory, striding over his former land like the giant in his seven-league boots, and then I’d find a sheltered place in the farmyard to wait for his return. But mostly he wanted to be found, and then he’d let me watch him splitting logs, or weeding between the rows of vegetables in the strip behind the house, or mending the pig-shed skylight, or stirring strange-smelling paint with a screwdriver before patching up another window frame or door or gate. When he’d finished the job he was on, he’d take his pipe and tobacco out of his jacket pocket, fill the pipe and light it with slow deliberation and enjoyment, and then he’d put his arm round my shoulder. He would walk me all round the yard, Rory pacing patiently at his heel, pointing out where each animal had lived, each piece of machinery been stored, each small triumph or disaster taken place. “You see that, do you, Sara?” he’d say. “D’you see how it was?” He was a good talker, Grandpa, and I loved to listen. He’d talk about how beautiful Grandma was when she was a girl, and I’d try to imagine them that long, long time ago. He’d talk about the early days at the farm when he had old Jimmie working for him (old, long-dead Jimmie). He’d talk about whistling his pigs home from the woods at sunset, and about when the milk was still put outside

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in the lane in big metal churns for collection. About snow years and drought years and how generous neighbors were in those days. About how everything had changed. And he’d talk a lot about the three little girls, who were never my mother and the aunts to me, but always three quite different kids, who’d once shouted and run between these same buildings and thrown sticks for another Rory and learned to wash cows’ bottoms and wring chickens’ necks. Not my mother, I thought. Not my clean, no-feces-on-the-lawn mother. Besides, she spent all her time with Grandma in the kitchen, cooking and cleaning and talking, talking, those two, always talking. Only very occasionally would he mention the fourth girl, the youngest one, the one who followed him around all the time and who had died of leukemia just before her eleventh birthday. Sally. I knew I looked like her, and when he got tears in his eyes I’d have to pretend I had to go and pee because then it was like being with a stranger and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with this not-Grandpa. I thought a lot about her, the little girl like me who died. Who would never grow up, never start her periods or have a baby. Who made me think of how scarily fragile all of us were, our lives fueled only by that pumping fluid whose cells could turn treacherous so fast, abandoning us to death. I used to cry for Sally, but I used to talk to her, too, tell her what I was doing, and what it felt like to be growing up now, to be me. When I was at the farm, I carried her around within me like a sister, glad she was there. But I wanted her to myself, and I wanted Grandpa to myself, strong and sure. Mine. I am always about nine when I think of those summers. I am still sure I can be a boy, delighting in the man-company of Grandpa, the smell of his corduroy jacket, his big hand stroking my hair, his pipe tobacco, the soap he used for shaving. I am third in my class at school, I read children’s classics, I watch football on TV, I am writing a novel, I am learning to cook, I can climb any tree that exists, I am going to be famous. All through the summer, I am without fears. My mother, Mary the namesake, was the closest to her mother of all her sisters, or so she told me, and certainly they were as thick as thieves when we stayed there, shooing me out of the kitchen,

Telling Stories ❥ 103 laughing together in the long evenings as I lay upstairs, awake in the twilight heat. I loved listening to my mother laughing like that. It made me happy, as I was so often happy in that house. And Grandma would laugh with me, too, and, like Grandpa, hug me as my mother never could. I loved her, and I’m sure she loved me, though I knew it bothered her that I looked so like Sally. Once, when Grandpa was out and I was sitting in the kitchen with my mother, Grandma came in from the bright sun outside and stood quite still for a moment with her hand up to her eyes. Then she shouted, really shouted at me, get out, get out of my sight, get out of here at once, d’you hear me? And I went outside and pressed my face against the warm stone of the house beside the kitchen window and listened to my grandmother’s silence as my mother talked to her in a low voice. So then I wondered if Grandpa, too, would rather have had Sally with him than me, though he never made me feel as if he did. I never dared to ask him. There were other times, beneath open windows or from the top of the stairs when I’d given up trying to sleep, that I’d overhear the two of them, Grandma and Mum, talking about when I was older, when I was at university, when I was married, when so many things had happened, only it wasn’t me, I knew it wasn’t really me they were talking about. I’m not you, I’d say silently to the Sally inside me. This is me and my life, and nobody else can know how it will turn out. I would creep away from the voices, uneasy at eavesdropping on a life I hadn’t yet lived, scared I would let them down. But although my mother, like me, was a different person during those three weeks in August, it never helped us get back to the closeness I remembered when I was little, as I always hoped it would. I think it might have been different if we could have shared things there more. But it was she and my grandmother, me and my grandfather, and that’s just how it was. When we went home again to Bellevue Crescent, it was as if she’d never laughed like a girl with her mother, and I never laughed much with her, not that I remember anyway. I don’t want you growing up like me, she said, when I compared my suburban boredom to the sweet freedom of the farm. What d’you mean, like you? I asked, inevitably. Just like, she said.

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So I didn’t grow up in the house that she and her sisters and her father and her grandfather had grown up in, nor did I grow up to be an innocent country girl seduced by the whirl of romance. I am not at all like my mother. The only thing we have in common is that we both have children who will never know their fathers, but in my case that’s entirely by my own choice and no looking back. I don’t regret keeping my baby, even though my mother told me he’ll ruin my life. Children, she said. They are never worth it. And even though she thought she was smiling, I sensed her regret. I knew she meant me and what I’ve done, and I only kept quiet by visualizing hard in my head the small blonde compliance of her next repressed orphan. But she doesn’t begin to understand how much I love my baby. My beautiful baby. My baby who I tell my stories to. And I want so much to see childhood again before I lose it, particularly that magical summer stretch before everything changes, before the suffocation of adolescence. Before the light fades. I want to make the magic I had with Grandpa happen for my son, only for him it’ll happen with me, mother to child, as it should. I can’t take him back to the farmhouse, which was sold a couple of years after Grandma died, but there’s a cottage in the village that’s rented to visitors in the summer, and I’ll take him there. It’ll hurt to go back, but I have to make restoration before my memories can be his, too. I owe him that. It was the last summer we went down there that everything changed. Or perhaps it was just that I kept noticing change, as if I had someone else’s eyes whether I wanted them or not. When I kissed Grandma, I noticed how the skin hung down under her chin. The dog Rory had died and not been replaced. I saw the decrepit state of the farm buildings as I hadn’t before. And Sally was not there within me any more—I’d lost her somehow, and I really mourned her. I wanted to push time back to when I was younger and she was still with me—and at the same time I yearned for things to move forward faster. I was bored, truth to tell. I was thirteen, and I had periods now, which of course makes you see things differently, but I didn’t know that yet, and I was still fighting all the changes, still tagging along behind Grandpa like his right-hand boy.

Telling Stories ❥ 105 I was standing with him beside the barn one morning, watching as he mended one of the racks that he would use to store that year’s crop of apples on. There were two old apple trees beside the house that bore quantities of little, flush-pink apples whose skins became soft and wrinkled but whose flesh made the juices in your mouth run all around your teeth. Grandpa sent us a box of them for Christmas each year, and I always managed to store a few behind the books in my bedroom that would still be sweet weeks later if my mother hadn’t smelled the familiar scent first and made me take them downstairs where they belonged. I had noticed that Grandpa was working more slowly now, his fingers slipping, less sure and strong than they had been, and he said it was arthritis when I asked him. Don’t ever get old, he said, and I promised him I wouldn’t. He told me a story I’d heard many times before about how he collected ivy as a treat for his little flock of sheep in the winter of deep snow, and then he started in on another familiar yarn of how he nearly died of tetanus after one of his pigs had bitten him, and I found myself filled with impatience at his age and the slow, deliberate telling. Didn’t he know I had heard these stories before, over and over? He stopped working after a while and, as if he sensed my inattention, fell silent and turned to lean on the old gate there behind the barn. He stared out into the field that had once been his, and he looked so sad that I was sorry I had felt impatient at him. Sorry I hadn’t wanted his stories. I came and stood next to him, and I put my hand on his. He turned round to look at me, and I saw that there were tears forming in his eyes. “You are so like Mary,” he said. “So like her.” Like my mother? Or did he mean my grandmother? I wasn’t like either of them. “Like Sally, don’t you mean?” I asked, embarrassed not by his emotion this time but by his confusion. He didn’t answer, just kept looking at me with his wet eyes. Then he put his hands on my shoulders, leaned forward quite gently, and kissed me. But he kissed me on the mouth. I could feel the saliva on his lips and his teeth bony against mine. “You’re so precious to me, Sara,” he said. “I want you to be happy so much, my dear, and sometimes I become afraid.”

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Believe me, I’ve remembered those words ever since, like he branded me with them. I know now that they came right from his heart and that he meant me anything but harm, but at the time I felt as if he had changed into another being, and without giving him any excuses, I backed away and ran from him. Later that year, my grandmother died unexpectedly. She fell over in the kitchen while she was peeling potatoes, dead of a massive stroke. Just like that. Scary. Ten years younger than Grandpa, and my mother always saying that it was him who wouldn’t make old bones, what with Sally’s death and the farm and everything. But it was her after all. I thought that if she had to go, she was lucky to go so quick, but my mother called me a coldhearted little bitch and dumped me on a family down the road whose daughter went to my school and who I despised, while she went down to the farm and coped with the funeral and her squabbling sisters. And her father. When she came back, she pretended that nothing was different, but it was. She wouldn’t talk, just kept going as if nothing had happened, but we both knew it had. I worked out eventually that she was grieving for her mother’s death and her father’s imminent disintegration, that this was called depression, but at the time it just seemed to me that I was living with an alien who didn’t speak my language and didn’t care for humanoids, and it didn’t get much better over time. I was sad that Grandma was dead, though I don’t think that ever occurred to my mother, but mostly I was worried to death about whether or not we’d be going down to the farm the following August, and if we did how I could make it go back to what it used to be. I could still feel his stranger’s mouth against mine. Always thinking about yourself, my mother said, and wouldn’t give me an answer either way. Christmas that year was the pits. Her and whichever of her sisters it was talking, talking, behind this closed door or that, stopping abruptly if I came into the room, looking at me, sighing. She gave me a black velvet dress and I gave her a calendar full of cute cats. And I’ve never seen the farm again. So I have a lot of restoring to do. Grandpa came to live in our spare room four years after Grandma died, having spent time first with one aunt, then with the other, and

Telling Stories ❥ 107 it was like having a stranger come to the house. I had never known this shrunken old man with the misshapen hands, whose face was very still and whose eyes were cloudy and small. I had dreaded his coming and had fought with my mother about it, but I needn’t have worried. My antagonism confirmed her belief that I was a heartless iceberg, but everything worked out fine. I stayed upstairs away from my mother’s busy unhappiness. I learned to go into his room and talk to him and to watch that he didn’t set the house on fire as he smoked his pipe, so that although everything was different it felt enough the same to be comforting. When I first found out I was pregnant, after having totally not believed the do-it-yourself kit that said I was but having gone to that unplanned parenthood joint anyway just to make absolutely sure I wasn’t, I thought I’d better kill myself right then and there in the clinic. I was desperately afraid. I cried so hard they had to give me a couple of pills and a bed to lie down on for an hour. I let them phone my mother, and though she didn’t act mad, she didn’t once look at me all the time she was driving me home, all that evening, or all the following day. She punished me instead with the depth of her sighs and the obvious effort required not to question me about the baby’s father. It wasn’t until the following evening when she came upstairs to the bathroom and found me clutching a glass of water and a bottle of her depression pills that she broke down and yelled at me. “How dare you?” she said, yanking the bottle from my hand, flushing the pills down the toilet, and then slapping my face for the first time in my life. “How dare you even think of throwing away two lives because you’re too much of a coward to live with what you’ve done? If I faced up to it, and to everything else, so can you. You’re my child, damnit. Now come downstairs, and let’s have no more of that crap.” She was so burningly angry that I didn’t recognize her for a moment and stared at her as if she was talking to someone else. “Downstairs, my girl. Two minutes,” she said. “It’s time.” I cried a little into the bathroom mirror, my cheek hot from her hand, and then followed her downstairs into the kitchen as I had

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so many times before when she had bidden me to. I don’t know if I really would have gone ahead and killed myself that evening. It was one of those times when you’re so afraid that you seem to have bumped into the very end of everything, and you can’t see that there is anything beyond, so you stop. That’s all I can think. She was sitting on one side of the kitchen table and at the end of it she had propped the photograph from her bedroom. Him. I sat down opposite her, and we both stared at him for a while. She had herself back under her familiar tense control again, but she didn’t seem to know how to begin. “I’m sorry, Mum,” I said, eventually. “I didn’t mean to let you down. Or—you know—him.” Impossible to say the word dad. He still looked like Elvis to me. When she didn’t say anything, I added, as if to comfort us both, “I only did it twice, honest. I’m not a slut or anything, I promise.” “There never was a wedding planned,” she said at last. “I suppose you guessed that a long time ago.” As I hadn’t, I kept an acquiescent silence. “Your generation is so much more pragmatic than mine. I stopped trying to paint a pretty picture for you a long time ago.” The end of the stories. “He was an actor, hence the glossy photo,” she went on quietly. I don’t think she was aware of the little adrenal thrills of shock that were going through me. She was finally telling me. Dissolving the magical island. “Gorgeous, totally sexy, the most amazing fun to be with, an amoral bastard.” I cleared my throat. “Who ran off when you got pregnant.” “Who ran off when I got pregnant, yes.” “Poor Mum,” I said, feeling so glad that my situation was different. “I was twenty-eight. I should have known better,” she said. “He wasn’t even using his own name, only I didn’t know that until I tried to find him when you were born. Just a stage name, and I was too naive to know how to find his agent.” “Did you ever?” I asked, not at all sure I wanted my fatherspace filled like this. “Did you ever find him?”

Telling Stories ❥ 109 My mother carefully turned the photograph facedown on the table and looked at me for the first time. “He did die in a car crash. That turned out to be true. When you were about six. Some little two-inch column in the Evening Standard. I read about it.” And began to write best-selling romances, I thought, but knew better than to say it aloud. “Poor Mum,” I said again. Truth was, I didn’t quite know what to say. I found myself thinking giddily of flowers and boat trips, the carousel whirl of a wedding, Mum sitting in the chair by my bed, night after night. Until I was about six. And then Sally barged into my thoughts, Grandpa’s Sally who’d come between him and me, and I knew I didn’t want to hear any more about my mother’s lover, the totally sexy actor who couldn’t, couldn’t also be my father. Whose photo she’d kept like a ghost in the house. Who, if he became too real, might come between us. “Well, you were probably best rid of him,” I said, trying to match her emotionless tone. “Fancy having a guy like that for a husband.” She picked up the photograph and got up from the table. “I see a lot of him in you, sometimes, Sara,” she said, and I really don’t think she meant it to sound nasty. “Now go upstairs, run a nice hot bath, and let’s have no more self-flagellation.” So that was that. And I know I should have been upset by what she told me, but what I actually felt was liberated, in a way I only slowly understood. After the next couple of weeks, even though I was still throwing up instead of eating breakfast, I began to feel the fear transforming itself, like the fetus inside me, into something quite else. Okay, so I hadn’t meant to get pregnant. I’d chosen Danny, the school’s chemistry lab technician, because I didn’t take chemistry so I thought no one would suspect anything, and because he was older and really quite good looking. And, as it turned out, he was kind and gentle, and I’m glad I found out what it was like with him and not some oik in my class. But I’d planned it so that I could try it with someone who had a bit more experience with, you know, precautions and that, not so that I’d get pregnant after only two goes, for goodness’ sake. He obviously didn’t know anything. But here I

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was, inescapably pregnant yet free to be me in some way that it took a while to figure out. I was free of my mother’s (and my grandmother’s) plans and expectations because I’d just ruined all of them. I was free of decisions about where my priorities should lie, and free forever of my friends’ gibes about frigid virgins and who’dwant-to-do-it-with-you-in-the-first-place jokes. And I was free of any runaway Elvis because I wasn’t going to tell Danny. Ever. Hearing about my dad clinched that for me. I felt both fiercely single and not single any more, joined forever to this being inside me that was mine and only mine. Mine to make and to love and to keep. Mine to shock the aunts with. I was six months pregnant when my grandfather came to live with us, but I don’t think he noticed, however much I wished that he could. There was one evening when he said, “Mary?” as I came into his room, but he didn’t respond when I automatically said, “It’s Sara,” so I told him about the baby again and about all my plans, stroking my stomach where the kicks were jogging my hand, and trying not to mind about the flecks of spit round his mouth. I wanted so much to show him his great-grandson, to see his loose, gnarly hands close around the baby’s fist, but in the end he died in the middle of August, four days before Rory was born. My mother did her duty by me, as she always does. She got me into a clinic nearer home, came with me to all the dreary prenatal classes, collected me from school when the bus made me sick, spent my saving-for-college money on stuff for the baby, and made me drink a lot of greasy milk. She nagged me about not getting a job to help out, but she never nagged me about getting pregnant. Not directly. “My mother thought you the image of Sally,” she said to me once. “She was always picturing what you’d be like, what you’d do when you were grown up. She had such great plans.” I thought about telling her I’d listened to them, knowing even back then that those plans were not for me, but I didn’t want her reminiscing about what she and Grandma had imagined in the farm kitchen in those long, twilit summer evenings of my childhood. I thought about telling her of my own closeness to Sally, of my fear that leukemia might be hereditary. But in the end I said nothing.

Telling Stories ❥ 111 I didn’t want to be identified with old griefs. I had my own life, and that would be enough. I watched my mother become more tight-lipped the bigger I got, and after her father moved in she behaved like she was burdened with these two enormous children who were out to ruin her health and happiness. She cooked and cleaned and wrote and sighed, while I stayed upstairs, spending more and more time with the senile old man in the bedroom next to mine. I told him I was sorry, so sorry I had run from his love. I told him how he was threaded through me to the baby I was carrying, just as now I tell Rory. I told and retold my stories until all their edges were rounded just the way I wanted them. I told them over and over, as if the telling would ward off his death, as if eventually he would be able to hear me. On the evening before he died, I was talking to him about the farm, watching as he slowly began to fill his pipe, when into my mind came such a vivid picture of Grandma that I stopped. Grandma on the move, on the move, with four little girls to care for, and him running the farm with only Jimmie to help, with eggs to be collected and cows to be milked and pigs to be fetched in and the dog barking, and all of them to be cared for and fed. I looked over at Grandpa to see if he saw her too, and the little girls, and Sally, and there were tears running silently down his face, and I knew that he did. I wanted so much to comfort him, as I sat in my straight-backed chair and watched him fumbling with his pipe, the long strings of tobacco falling through his painful, inept fingers, but what could I have said to him?

Imagining Friends W

hen my little brother, Amias, was born, my father was on the road a lot and my mother was often crying, which made me cold and sick as a stone inside. Later, she made friends with Mr. Blythe and became much happier, though I think she will always cry about things, but back then, when I was at home all day, I wanted someone else to play with. Someone to love who was the same all the time, who didn’t suddenly shout at me or look at me with eyes that glittered like plastic when she had had just a little tonic of gin, as she said, only I knew when it was a lot and Daddy wouldn’t have let her anyway. If he’d been there. Anyway. Amias. I always loved the name. Always wanted a little brother called Amias so that my friends with brothers called John and Kevin and Bobby would envy me. No, it wasn’t out of Westward Ho! That’s Amyas, in any case. It’s from Simon by Rosemary Sutcliffe. Amias Hannaford, the Royalist one. The interesting one. I worshiped that baby. He became my whole life. I bathed him and changed him and fed him his bottle. I read fairy tales to him when I put him to bed in his cot with the jingly bells stretched across it. I pushed him around the lanes in his little chariot with the squeaky wheels. I sang to him when he was colicky and picked him up and rocked him when he cried. I bundled him up in his blue furry suit with the rabbits on it when it was cold, and laid him in the sun to get brown as an egg when it was warm. I talked and talked to him, and he’d always listen to me with his head on one side and his mouth half open. Wherever I was, he was there too, watching what I did, following me around after he learned to walk, quiet and undemanding as a dog. He didn’t come to school with me, of course. But when I was dropped off at home by whichever classmate’s mother was charged with looking after me that day, there he was waiting for me, ready for a hug, ready to play whatever I suggested. I took him with me to all my hiding places around where we lived, shared all my secrets

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Imagining Friends ❥ 113 with him. I knew he would never tell. I took him to the woods beyond the church, where I was forbidden to go because some children from the village had seen Old Potter’s loopy son, Mick, standing behind a tree waggling his thing at them. I never saw anything like that. I showed him the cave there, in the bank under the holly tree where you could keep quite dry on the rainiest of days, and where I kept my old teddy bear that my parents thought I had lost, but that Amias and I played with together. We went into the village, Amias and I, and ventured into the little dim shop with the door that went ping! when you came in, and we bought bubblegum pink as baby’s skin and Milky Ways and Kit Kats and long coils of licorice for Amias, and the growly man with spit on his lips would lean over his counter and tell me I’d rot my teeth and that he ought to tell my mother, didn’t I think? And he’d wink at me and I’d show him my white teeth politely and run out, ping! vowing I’d never go back there ever again. But somehow Amias always pleaded with me and I always did. Eventually, we even went into town on the bus, something I’d never have dared to do on my own. I remember how brave I thought I was the first time we went, walking very softly down the noisy High Street, as if stealth could make us invisible. We peered into shop windows that looked as exotic as France without my mother beside us, and when Amias said he was hungry I went into the Bread ’n’ Bakery and quite easily slid a piece of shortbread and a chocolate cupcake into my jacket pocket while pretending to be attached to the large family in front of me. It was exhilarating. As we got older, the adventures became more brightly colored. Having Amias with me made me bold, as if his sturdy boy-courage soothed the fears that could make a demon of my own shadow. He was braver than I was, though, and sometimes persuaded me to go beyond the bounds of where I knew I was safe. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I sobbed to my mother when she discovered the cache of lipsticks and eye makeup in my old satchel at the back of my wardrobe. “Please. I’m so, so sorry.” I had just turned ten. Double digits. A big step. “Where the hell did you get all this stuff?” she asked, picking up

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first one gaudy little case and sniffing it, then another. She smacked my wet cheek casually. Hard. “Where? Tell me the truth, Jane.” I’d got them, egged on by Amias, one by one from the department store in town, which to me was the most heavenly place imaginable. The cosmetic displays there beckoned with a scented seduction that never failed to thump my heart into my throat or slip a shiny tube of mysterious beauty into my pocket. I wore glasses and I hated them. “From the village, Mum,” I said, between sobs as breath-choking as vomit. “From that stupid little man with the wet mouth and the lecherous eyes?” she said with incredulity in her voice. I’d never been able to think of him as either little or stupid before, and I felt a degree less despairing. “I just liked them, Mum,” I wailed. “I wanted to see—see what I looked like. Just see what I looked like. If I was pretty.” And suddenly, confusingly, she wasn’t angry at me any more. She grabbed me to her in a bear hug and squeezed all the sobs out of me, then rocked me, rocked me, as if I had been Amias. “Oh, my baby, my baby,” she said, and her breath smelled comfortingly of cigarettes and just a little gin, not too much, and it was all right, she loved me after all, she still loved me. “I’m sorry, Mum, I’m sorry,” I said again, but no longer with the terrible, urgent need to convince. “You’re my baby, my little girl,” she said. “Of course you’re pretty. You’re beautiful, you hear me? You don’t need that stuff, baby. You’re my little girl, my little Janie.” “Mumma,” I said, burrowing for warmth. “Mumma.” “Don’t ever grow up, you hear me?” she said. “Don’t you ever, ever grow up, baby.” “Only Amias said I should try it. He said I’d be pretty in makeup like you,” I said. “Oh, Amias,” she said, and sighed into my hair. “That Amias. What do boys know anyway?” My two best friends then were Ginny Danforth and Petra Blythe, and they used to like coming over to my house because my mother

Imagining Friends ❥ 115 never bothered us much and they got to play games with Amias. When I went visiting their houses, we might play the same kinds of games for a short while, but somehow it would always end in arguments or get interrupted by mothers, and not one of them had as good a companion as I did. “What I like about Amias,” Ginny said to me once, “is that you always have him with you. He’s like a real brother to you. I think you’re lucky.” I knew I was lucky. And then everything changed. I don’t know how it happened, but it was like a wind that you didn’t sense coming till it had already made you cold. I turned twelve, and Ginny and Petra turned twelve, and it was as if I woke up and found myself living on an island all by myself. Cut off. Floating away. Part of the problem was that they had both “started,” as it was known at our school, and I hadn’t. I knew what starting meant because we’d been shown slides at school, but I wasn’t quite sure what to expect because my mother always said she’d tell me everything when I needed to know and not sooner. So when Ginny and Petra and other girls whispered about blood and sighed together over that time of the month, I felt embarrassed by the subject and by my own ignorance of it. I wanted to start, too, and I was afraid that something was wrong with me because I hadn’t. And there were other ways in which they removed themselves from me. “You don’t still play with Amias?” they chorused to me one lunchtime behind the school’s greenhouse, where we’d always gone to be together. “You don’t really?” I had made some casual reference to him, and that was it. I froze. “Why shouldn’t I play with him?” I said. “Oh, come on,” Petra said. “With Andy Burford just itching to get his hands inside your dress.” “To those itsy-bitsy titsies of yours,” added Ginny, erupting into giggles. I hated smelly Andy Burford. “You think I’d want to play with him?” I asked, as scornfully as I could through the wobble of trying not to cry. “You’re nuts.”

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They laughed till they swore they’d peed themselves and then reeled away from me, hands clutched between their legs, howling with mirth. My best friends. When I got home that night, I told my mother I had homework to do, shut my bedroom door firmly, and spent a long time in front of my wardrobe mirror. I didn’t wear a bra yet because my mother said I didn’t need one, and maybe that was true, but I thought I should have one anyway. So I made a pact with myself that I would get one somehow. But after that, what could I do to improve things? I supposed I could dye my hair blonde, but I had no idea how to go about it, and I no longer saw the point of makeup if I had to put those dreadful glasses back on top. I’d been promised contact lenses for my sixteenth birthday, but I could be dead by then. Yesterday, I would have asked Ginny and Petra to help, but then yesterday I wouldn’t have known I needed their help because they hadn’t yet made it clear that they had somehow run ahead of me and left me on my island. Pigs. Traitors. I hated them. I cried long streams of tears in front of the mirror, watching with interest the channels they took down the face of this sad, lost girl who should never have been me. I cried till I couldn’t bear to look any more, and then I lay on my bed and fought through the tangles in my mind for a way out. That’s when I knew I would have to do something about Amias, though at first I had no idea how to set about severing the ties I had made so strong. I dreaded the idea of a life without him in it. Yet I passionately wanted a life that was shared with others as mine had been when everything was still simple. I ached not just for acceptance but for the dominance I used to have when I led and my friends followed—when mine was the world they wanted to enter. I found myself lying awake at night staring into the hot dark with stretched-apart eyes. Ginny and Petra had taken up with Marcy Dakers, and my mother was asking me why Mr. Blythe was telling her that Petra said I was being weird. I wasn’t being weird. God, that was so stupid. Petra was so stupid. They were all a bunch of morons. But still I couldn’t sleep.

Imagining Friends ❥ 117 “What’s the matter, baby?” my mother asked. “What’s the matter with my little girl?” But I didn’t want to be her little girl any more. I wasn’t a baby to be rocked and comforted like a doll. “Kid looks like a pink-eyed mouse. What’s up?” I overheard Daddy say one rare Sunday when he was at home. “You let her alone,” my mother retorted furiously. “What use are you anyway?” You can’t just wish someone out of your life, I discovered. You have to deliberately cut them out. Finally. Forever. So I began to plan how to rid myself of Amias. I had to do it in a way that was peaceful and calm and wouldn’t leave pictures to come out of the walls of my room at night and stab me with remorse. I had to create a ceremony like when Amias and I would bury dead birds in the garden in a shoe box lined with grass and flowers and recite our own prayer over the grave. Not sad. Just solemnly beautiful. Eventually, I did it on a lovely May afternoon, a Saturday when my mother had gone out with Mr. Blythe. (“Just to look at some plants for the garden, Janie—we won’t be long.” As if I ever believed what she told me. “You and Amias look after each other, you hear me?” And she turned to her companion, laughing up at him, but he turned to me and stared at me with what I thought was a very funny look as they drove off. Pig.) I took Amias to our favorite spot under the big holly tree in the bank in the woods, and I gave him the old teddy bear to play with while I dug a large hole in the soft leafy earth with the garden fork I’d hidden there the evening before. There were some roots that got in the way, and I had to adjust the place I’d chosen a little, but it was surprisingly easy to dig a small-boy-sized hole. This is for you, I told Amias as I dug. But don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you, I promise. This is where I am going to keep you forever and ever, and I’ll always know you’re here, and this will be a sacred spot for me. I solemnly swear that I’ll never forget you as long as I live, but it’s time you were gone now. You understand, don’t you? It was very hard to think that all I would have in the future

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would be the memory of what he had once meant to me, and there were moments that afternoon when I nearly kicked all the earth back into the hole again and just went home, but I found the courage to keep going until I knew it was finished. I tipped a pile of soft old leaves into the bottom of it and sprinkled some grass I’d brought with me in my pocket. It wasn’t quite enough, but it would have to do. Then I came back over to Amias and sat down beside him. I took him into my arms and began to rock him gently. I sang lullabies to him as I had all his life, and he fell asleep just as I’d imagined he would. I carried him over to the grave and laid him in it with the teddy bear, and he didn’t even stir. When he had totally vanished, and all that was left was a filledin hole, I felt myself wanting to cry, but I didn’t. I smoothed over the top of his grave and covered it with more leaves till no one but me could possibly have known it was there. Then I looked down at the secret ground, and all of a sudden I felt extraordinarily at peace. It was done. Dear Amias, I commend you to the ground, and may God be with you and with me and with all of us and please don’t ever forget me and I won’t ever forget you, Amen. When I got back to the house, my mother was already home, which I hadn’t expected, and she was lying on the couch with a glass of what could have been water, but I knew wasn’t, in her hand. A bad sign. She looked at me with her plastic eyes as I came in. “Do you know what he said, Ronnie Blythe?” she asked me, waving the glass vaguely in my direction. “He said he thought we were harming you. You! Ha! What about me?” “Are you all right?” I asked her warily. “Oh, sure, I’m all right,” she said. “He says that’s the last time. We’re not seeing each other any more. For the sake of the children.” “What children?” I said, my head still full of what I had just done. “He’s ditched me, you stupid little cow,” she shouted, and burst into tears. “He’s fucking ditched me. Now what am I going to do?” I went over to her and patted her hand, not quite sure whether

Imagining Friends ❥ 119 she wanted me to answer her or not. “It’s okay, Mum,” I said. “We’ll be okay. I’ll look after you, I promise.” “You?” she said, and hiccuped, but she stopped crying for a moment. “What use are you, always off with your beloved little brother, always leaving me alone? You and Amias, the two of you. What use are you?” “It’s okay, Mum,” I said again. “I got rid of Amias this afternoon. I buried him in the woods. He’s gone. You won’t ever have to worry about him again. I’m older than you think, you know.” She looked at me for a moment with wide eyes. “You did what?” she said. “I killed him off, Mum. It was time to let him go, you know it was.” “My baby?” she said in a kind of wondering whisper, and all her words began to blur together. “My baby. Oh, my little girl, my baby, no it isn’t true please God bring him back bring him back to me please don’t leave me please God no.” And her voice tailed off, and she was crying and crying as if her heart would break. I sat on the floor beside the couch and tucked her hand in mine, thinking about how I would break the news to Ginny and Petra. Maybe I could tell them he died of natural causes. Which in a way he had. But would they still laugh at me? The need to cry and be comforted gathered as an ache in my throat. I picked up Mum’s glass from the carpet beside me, rubbing my finger in the wet patch it had left as I did so. Gin. She was making soft moaning wails now, one hand over her face, the other clutching at me so hard it hurt. “Don’t cry, Mum,” I said. “Don’t. He wasn’t real anyway, you know that.” The tears were starting, warm, liquid, impossible to hold back. “He was just—just an imaginary friend, that’s all.”

A Little Kingdom Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma or a hideous dream. The genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection. Julius Caesar 2.1.63–69.

“P

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eople like to think they go to the moon,” she said, “but they don’t really get there.” She had come out of the rhododendron bushes so suddenly that Paul’s heart was still thumping up into his throat. You didn’t hit your best friend’s sister, he knew that, but sometimes she provoked in him an almost uncontrollable urge to grab hold and shake her. To hurt her for how she made him feel. “What?” he said, in a voice that came out in an infuriating squeak. “It’s a hole in the sky punched by God,” she said, clutching at his sweater with one hand. “Sometimes He puts only the tip of His finger through and rips it down quite delicately. Sometimes He’s more impatient and tears enough away to put His whole hand through. Then He can look at you. And sometimes He gets really angry and punches a great hole with His fist. You wait and see.” “Wait and see what?” he said, pushing his voice down again to where it was meant to belong. “Behind the sky, the whole world looks like that. The sky’s only there so you won’t be blinded by such a brilliant light. Behind the sky, it’s all moon. People have never been there.” “What about the sun?” he asked. “Don’t be silly,” she said, and let go of him. 120

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A Little Kingdom ❥ 121 For almost a year, Paul had been dreaming of this place, listening as his best friend wove tales about his longed-for home deep in the Devon countryside, the stories illumined into magic by the homesick mundaneness of their restricted life at school. In a cramped, chill study room, he had sat on long after the other boys had got bored and left, as Marcus talked of wide, sunlit rooms full of queer treasures, of the sounds of owls and hissing trees coming in through his open bedroom window at night, of raspberries and figs picked fresh from the garden, of two black labradors who would go everywhere with him, of picnics by the river under a sun that always shone, of salmon and honeysuckle and oak and kingfishers and foxes, each piece dazzling as it was strung on the thread of promise. “Of course, you wouldn’t understand, Paul,” he’d say, “living in a poky little flat in London and everything. I can’t explain what it’s like living in a house that’s been in the family for four hundred years.” “It must be wonderful. I can’t imagine it,” Paul would say truthfully. “You’ll just have to come down one day, that’s all,” his best friend said. “You’ll be impressed, I can tell you.” Slowly, as their mothers discussed dates and train timetables, the visit assumed tangibility, but it also remained fabulous to Paul, as if he had been granted entry into a mythic kingdom whose very air would somehow transform him into a different, less ordinary person. His mother seemed pleased for him; she had always wanted him to have a special friend like this, and for the first three days of the summer holidays, she washed and ironed and packed for him in the small, familiar Bayswater flat. But even in his sudden gladness to be with her again, Paul’s thoughts were thrown continually forward, and Marcus’s voice came to him as clearly as it had done all year: wait till I show you, wait till you see, you won’t believe it, you just wait. “He didn’t ask anyone else, you know,” Paul told her, the evening before he left. “Just me because he said I’d be the only one who would appreciate it.” “I’ve always worried about you being an only child,” she said. “What with your father . . .” She stopped.

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“They have their own croquet lawn,” he said quickly. “It’s a really wicked game, Marcus says.” “How many brothers and sisters does he have?” his mother asked, and Paul was surprised to find he didn’t know. His mother worried about him having the right clothes for strange family dinners and rainy days and packed a box of chocolate almonds into his suitcase for him to give Marcus’s mother when he arrived. But Paul, boarding the train the next day at Paddington Station, said good-bye to his mother with a quick, cheerful hug and no trace of the trepidation that always accompanied him physically on his journeys back to school. He watched out of the window as London slowly unpacked itself, lengthening into suburbs with underwear flapping on zigzag clotheslines and sudden splashes of bright flowers, then stretching out again into breezily painted warehouses and out-of-city office blocks, which in turn flattened into suburbs with raw angles and green spaces around them. There was a horse in a field, then more houses, and then just fields that rolled on beside him until the city dwindled to a speck in his mind. He was very content in his traveling. When he arrived at the local station in the Taw Valley, late in the afternoon, he looked instinctively around for Marcus, but he was greeted instead by a tall smiling man, who turned out, after a brief flurry of misunderstanding, to be his friend’s uncle, together with his wife, two small children, and a baby dribbling into its big white shawl. Paul sat in the back of a muddy car, grateful to be spared polite conversation by the noise of the children quarreling, but disquieted by his own blank face reflected in the car window beside him. When they arrived at the house, Paul discovered that Marcus was out in the woods somewhere with the two black labradors and also with two more cousins (“not mine, thank God,” said the smiling uncle jovially), who had arrived the day before to spend, as they usually did, a large part of their summer in the family home. He learned of this, and of a jumble of other relatives who either were or would be visiting, from the woman who had greeted them at the door, and after whom he trailed upstairs to be shown his bedroom. As he hauled his suitcase along a warren of hallways and unex-

A Little Kingdom ❥ 123 pected turnings, up different flights of stairs, and even down others to his increasing confusion, he tried anxiously to catch each fragment of fact as it came unevenly at him from her constantly turning head. “He didn’t tell me about . . .” he said to her at one point, unsure how to continue. “Didn’t tell you there would be so many of us?” she asked, pausing for a moment at the top of some stairs, and looking back down at him. “It probably wouldn’t have occurred to him that it was unusual,” she said. “It’s been happening every summer since before he was born. Don’t be overwhelmed by all of us. We’re really quite tame.” And she laughed. But he was overwhelmed. Flustered by being hustled from the uncle’s car into the high, shadowy hall of a house whose size seemed to him quite unreal, he wasn’t even sure if this was Marcus’s mother. Too shy to ask, he followed her without saying anything else, until finally she led him into a small room not unlike his own at home, except for its pink-and-brown wallpaper and its high view across a blurred green landscape. “Come down whenever you’re ready,” she said. “There’s a bathroom two doors down from you, and we’ll eat around eight. Don’t worry. You’ll soon get used to being here.” She smiled at him kindly, and he smiled back. But when she had gone, it was a long time before he was able to move over to his suitcase and begin, for lack of any other occupation, to unpack. He put the carefully ironed and folded clothes into a chest of drawers very quietly, straining all the time to hear his best friend clattering up to look for him. Without cousins. Finally, he took out the box of chocolate almonds and hid them carefully at the back of a bottom drawer, where he hoped they wouldn’t be discovered until long after he had gone. He was late for the evening meal because he got lost on his way down from the small bedroom. Windows were shuttered, stairways and hallways were lit faintly if at all, and no light switches were where he expected them to be. Shamed by his fear of the half-dark, he made his way downstairs with acute caution, until finally he stood in the dim church-light of the front hall. He could hear a hum of human voices, but he wasn’t sure from where. He stared over at

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three lines of light lying like white-hot pokers under three identical doors to the side of the hall. He hated guessing games. Only one of the doors would open into the right room, and he stiffened with panic at the thought of first choosing the right one and then facing the unknown people who might be within. He shut his eyes. Then he heard a sudden swell and ebb of voices and knew a door had been opened and closed. He stood waiting for humiliation. “Here you are,” said his best friend. “Where have you been?” There was a cousin so like him that they could have been twins standing at his shoulder. “We’ve just been sent out of the dining room to look for you.” “I was just coming. Sorry.” The sorry broke into a reedy squawk. “Just coming?” Marcus said, exasperatedly. “Who d’you think you are? The Emperor of Japan? We already ate the first course.” Between the two of them, this could have been dueled into a joke, a shared code of contact for the future, but the cousin rendered such intimacy impossible. Nudging Marcus in the ribs, he said: “Look at him. He’s scared. He’s standing out here cuz he’s scared to come in. What a wussie.” “I am not.” “He’s scared. He’s scared of us.” The two of them stood, shoulder to shoulder, looking at him out of their same-shaped eyes, and Paul looked away, powerless against their alliance. He went into the dining room with them, replied to questions from the smiling uncle’s wife, and even found he could eat what was left of the meal, but he longed to be safely back in his bedroom in the flat in London. Only once did he look up to find family eyes upon him that did not seem alien. A girl of about his own age or maybe a little younger, as silent and removed as he from the engulfing chatter round the table. He half grinned at her before looking down again. He didn’t think she had noticed, but when he next looked up she gave him a faint smile, and he felt slightly less alone. When the meal was over and the loud confusion of clearing away had begun, he looked around for her, but she had vanished, as had Marcus. He slid out of the room and retraced with animal instinct the route to his bedroom, his bolt-hole in a house that felt more hazardous to him than school.

A Little Kingdom ❥ 125 It did not occur to him then to simply go home. He had come, so he stayed, and did the best he could after that first night to look occupied and appreciative. Marcus was never actively antagonistic; he just gravitated naturally towards his cousins, who as naturally distanced themselves from any outsiders. The three of them began by including Paul in their expeditions, but when, on his first morning, he joined them for a trek down through the woods to the river, with the two labradors bounding ahead, they were so full of laughter at old jokes that he felt forced into a silence that was inevitably interpreted as a sullen dumbness. He knew they thought he was boring, and he saw that Marcus reveled in the brotherhood provided by the cousins, a brotherhood, Paul realized, for which he had never been a satisfactory substitute. Occasionally after that first morning, he went on bicycle rides with them, aware that they plotted the sudden spurts up hills that left him behind but relatively content in his own cocoon of balance, slicing the resistant force of the wind, gladly freed from the role of guest for a brief spell. Sometimes, he was reluctantly drawn in to playing croquet with them and other family members on the bumpy lawn beyond the rose garden. He envied Marcus’s ability to send an opponent’s ball (often his) satisfyingly deep into the fringing rhododendrons and wished he could cheat as skillfully as the smiling uncle did whenever he was behind. Gradually, though, he spent more and more time by himself. “I’m fine,” he said to Marcus’s mother, when she discovered him one dank morning wandering around the walled kitchen garden, trying to identify the vegetables that grew among their strange sheltering leaves. He had rarely seen vegetables growing before and was intrigued by their natural exoticism. “Can I find Marcus for you?” she persisted. “I expect I know where he is.” “It’s hard to get away at school. I like being by myself,” he said, resenting the concern in her voice. He was beginning to convince himself that this was true, that it was by his own choice that he remained an outsider. On solitary walks through the woods to the river, this apartness even achieved a heroic status, which allowed

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for reassuring visions of himself as exiled quester-for-truth, roaming the earth in various guises, carrying no baggage and forming no attachments. Sorry, Ma’am, but I have to be moving on now—the sunset flaming and dying as the music swelled behind him. Only Marcus’s younger sister ever came close to him, and although she made him uncomfortable, he was grateful for her company and tried hard to hold on to her quicksilver conversations. She liked to hide in the rhododendrons and in the willows that lined the park, looking out on, but not joining in, the activities of the family. He tried not to jump at her sudden appearances by his side, but he wished they didn’t cause him to blush and wished, too, that he could pluck the right words from out of the unresponsive air and speak them in a firm voice that didn’t strain into a hoarse treble if she turned her head to look at him. “Have you really never imagined what lies behind the black skin of the sky?” she asked him. “Well, I didn’t think it was all moon, anyway,” he said. “Moon Kingdom,” she breathed, and took a piece of his sweater in her sharp grip again, just above his elbow. He felt his arm tingling. “I go out quite often at night,” she told him. “I saw you once,” he said. “From my bedroom window. It was late.” “I like going out in the light of the moon. The whole world smells different. Moon-smell. Fragrant. Beautiful.” “The moon smells?” he said. She looked at him. “Roses smell quite different at night than they do in the daytime,” she said. “Didn’t you know that?” “No, I didn’t,” he confessed. She pulled him closer to her. “Everything is quite different at night,” she said in a low voice. “Nothing is just as you thought it was, and you learn, oh, all sorts of things that you never even imagined. Night is fresh, and its edges are sharp. I like it.” Her eyes, with their strange likeness to her brother and cousins, shone brightly at him.

A Little Kingdom ❥ 127 “You don’t get afraid out there?” he asked tentatively, sensing her contempt for the question even as he spoke. “Afraid? What’s there to be afraid of? Ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties? Don’t be silly,” she said, and let go of his sleeve. He thought of his own more formless fears and was silent. “In the daytime, there are always too many people about,” she said. “I go out at night to get away from my family. There are too many of them, and they are all alike.” “Yes, I know what you mean,” he replied, before he remembered that one of them was supposed to be his best friend. Quick as a flash, she snipped him off the bunch. “Soon,” she said, “you shall come with me to the Wild Woods and see my badgers.” “Your badgers?” he said, not sure he’d understood her. “We’ll wait till the moon is full,” she said. “Badgers only come out at night—don’t you know that? And I know where there are some. And I’ll take you to see them.” A million reasons why he couldn’t go out into the dark country night to see her badgers entered his head, but he understood the honor that was being conferred on him even as he revolted against it. “We’re friends, then?” he asked, as if that was the issue being debated. “Do you want to or not?” she retorted. He hesitated and then nodded. “Good,” she said. “It’s a pact.” “Have you ever taken anyone else to see them?” he asked. She looked at him with a faint smile. “No, you’re the first,” she said, and he hugged his triumph to himself as she slipped away into the rhododendrons again. Paul began staring out of his window at night before he went to sleep, but when he did catch sight of the moon among a persistence of clouds, he couldn’t tell if it was waxing or waning. And Marcus’s sister remained elusive in the days that followed, convincing him she regretted the intimacy of their conversation. He caught her glancing at him, even smiling once or twice from far down the table at mealtimes, but although he thought about her

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much of the time, and always looked for her in his endless, circular walks, he could never come on her unawares. Only once, from his bedroom window, did he catch a rare glimpse of her in the daylight hours, apparently unaware that she could be seen. A small figure at the far end of the garden, she was dancing by herself, turning delicate circles, her arms outstretched and her head tipped back up to the sun. He watched her, his skin tingling, until she stopped, and the picture of her stayed with him all through the afternoon, turning and turning in his head. Before long, the house was no longer strange to him, no longer the Dracula’s Castle of his first night, and he knew every inch of it, but as he lost his awe and curiosity, he also lost his acceptance of what he felt to be its careless hostility towards him. Finally, he wrote to his mother and confessed that he wanted to cut short the visit. “It’s not that I’m not enjoying it here,” he wrote carefully, sitting on his bed in the pink-and-brown bedroom. “I just think it’s time I came home.” He found it hard to lie yet simultaneously to convey his need, and after rejecting in his head several reasons he could give for an early return home, he got up and went over to the open window. It was the first really sunny day since he had arrived, and even as high up as he was, the air outside smelled faintly of roses. Far below him, he could see the smiling uncle in a chair on the lawn, reading a magazine that he shut as Marcus’s mother approached, carrying a drink in a tall glass out to him. The ice tinkled in the still of the garden. She kissed him on the lips, and the uncle put one arm around her bottom as he took the drink with the other. Up in the pink-and-brown bedroom, it was almost eerily quiet, except for a fly buzzing and bumping against the ceiling. Paul went back across to his bed and stared down at his letter. Earlier in the day, one of the cousins, the same one who had seen his fear on the first evening, had come up to him as he was leaving the house and stopped so aggressively close that he was forced to pause and look at him. “Keep away from her, you understand?” the cousin had said very softly, and although he was smiling as he said it, the threat was sharp in his voice.

A Little Kingdom ❥ 129 “Keep away from who?” Paul asked, but he knew. “Everyone knows you’re after her meat, Chicken-Face. Just keep it in your pants, okay? If you’ve even got one in there, that is.” After the cousin had gone, the contrail of words hung on in the air, and although she was nowhere to be seen, Paul felt the blood rush to his face. He had climbed back up to his stifling retreat under the roof and lain on his bed, rigid with an unrecognized rage, for a long time before he finally reached for the paper and pen that his mother had packed for him. And it was still too hard to explain. “Could you invent some excuse why I need to come home urgently?” he wrote to her at last. “I don’t want to overstay my welcome, and it would be good to see you again. I find I rather miss London.” He signed his name, crossed out “urgently,” and licked the envelope before he could change his mind. Some hours later, after the long and noisy evening meal, the whole family went outside into the warm almost-dark and seated themselves in chairs and on rugs and cushions to watch her dance. As if this were quite commonplace. To him it was almost fantastic that she would perform for the people from whom she so often hid, and he wasn’t sure whether he should mind for her or for himself that she was exposed to so many critical eyes. For it wasn’t hard to see that some of the family were secretly amused by her performance, or even, in a couple of cases, disapproving. He stood at the edge of their circle, away from their sidelong glances and huddled whispers, and as far as possible from Marcus and the cousins, and he watched her anxiously. He had been to the ballet several times with his mother, and he knew that it was a tutu she was wearing, white, shimmering in flickers, its ruffed stiffness accentuating for him her boneless fluidity of movement. She had come to them from the rose garden, had stood poised in front of them for a moment as the player clicked on and the music stole thin into the twilight, and then she had risen up on her pointes and begun her dance. Paul could see the smiling uncle lean forward, his eyes gleaming faintly out from the shadows. He could see, too, that nervousness or maybe the grass surface was causing her to wobble, but audience and imperfection faded with

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the light, and gradually he ceased to be aware of anything but the spell of the dance, as her hands wove curve after curve around her, and her body arced into patterns against the deep blue dusk, and one leg went delicately higher and higher until it was stretching up into the sky. The roses’ fragrance moved in the air with her, and when the music stopped and the family clapped, it was as if he awoke from another country. She stood in front of them all, composed and unsmiling in the little spangled tutu, her arms and legs slim and pale in the indistinct light, and he thought she caught his eye across the beginnings of a general move to return indoors. Later that night, when the full moon had risen, she took him to see her badgers. In the dark, soft air, the rose garden seemed to him to be still resonant with her dancing, but she moved through it with prosaic, everyday steps, skirted the croquet lawn at a speed he found hard to keep up with, and only stopped when they reached the low wall at the end of the garden. They stood at the gate that led out onto the road beyond, and shivering slightly he turned to look at her. He wanted to go with her very much, to prove to her their essential kinship, but he had been horribly afraid that one of the cousins would find out somehow and expose this midnight venture. He was afraid now. She had changed into shorts and a sweater, and her legs gleamed white in the moonlight. Her eyes were shining bright as a cat’s. “If you don’t follow me quietly, and do everything I tell you, I shall kill you,” she said, tugging sharply at him. “And you will be no better than they are.” He pulled away so she wouldn’t feel the thudding of his heart. “Shouldn’t we take a light?” he whispered. She peered at him intently. “God is really angry tonight,” she said, and disappeared across the road and into the park. He stood for a moment at the garden gate and stared up at the moon. Its vast brilliance swelled and pulsed and filled his eyes to their widest stretch, until the thin fabric of the sky began to give way and the ground quaked beneath his feet. He ran, and the road tipped him into its ditch on the other side, and the moon fell down into the dark.

A Little Kingdom ❥ 131 Something hissed at him. “Come on. What are you doing?” “Where are you?” “I’m here. Come on.” He crawled up into the moon again, and into the waxy slap of leaves whose cold hands pushed and tugged at him, seeming to draw him further into their midst. When he felt her hand there also, he automatically, almost with horror, pulled away. “You’re going the wrong way. Come round the rhododendrons, you idiot.” Very slowly, he made his way to where she stood. “And stop making so much noise or I won’t take you. You’ll frighten everything.” “Sorry.” “You’re hopeless.” His teeth chattered as he followed her across the park, and he felt each step that he took as a rigid jar along his cheekbones. “Through this gate.” He crashed into an invisible post and stood shocked by the yawn of blackness beyond him. “I can’t see.” “Sssh!” “I can’t see anything.” “My brother said you were pathetic. He said you were the most pathetic boy he ever knew. He said he didn’t know why he’d asked you here. Come on.” She seized a cuff of his sweater and moved off with him into the woods so that, as he was dragged along just behind her, he found himself her shadow, shambling and awkward in her wake. Slowly and miserably, he began to see a little. He saw the trunks of trees moving past him, and above them he saw a density of high leaves, shaken and shriveled by the dangerous rush of stars. He yearned to turn and run back to the house, but the darkness kept pace beside him, like a gamekeeper to his poacher, and he knew he had no choice but to go on. “Here. Now get down and keep quiet.” She pushed him to his knees, and he felt his nose begin to run with the effort of keeping

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his tears back. She crept forward and lay down on her front, looking over what he presumed was a bank, as he could see nothing beyond but the darkest dark. He looked at her legs, thin and soft as serpents, white against the deep floor of the wood, and he blew his nose into his sleeve. Pathetic. “Sssh!” She wriggled back to him. “I can’t see them, but they’re around somewhere,” she whispered. “There are fresh marks round the sett and more scratches on that tree over there.” Her eyes hunted him across the shadows, and he felt her warmth as a strangeness in the air. “Isn’t it beautiful?” “What?” “This. The woods at night. The quiet. The badgers. Everything.” He mumbled something that meant nothing. “Well? Isn’t it?” He didn’t answer but crawled forward to the edge of the bank and lay down. She joined him. “I’ve never been out on a night like this before,” he said eventually. “Never? Never ever?” “I live in London,” he said, “where there are lights.” He listened to his confession being assimilated on her quickened breaths. He waited for her whisper. “Are you afraid?” “Of course I’m not.” “Well, don’t you think it’s beautiful?” He couldn’t answer. He wanted desperately to be lying in his own bed at home in noisy, dirty Bayswater, with the street lamp outside the window throwing its familiar ballerina’s leg across his ceiling. Shamefully, he wanted his mother. “Towns are awful,” came the angry accusation from out of the darkness. “I can’t think why any normal person would want to live in one.” He felt the inexorable hand twist itself into his sweater, and her breath stirred warm in the hair above his ears. “Don’t you know that these woods are hundreds and hundreds of years old? All around us are the spirits of people who lived here

A Little Kingdom ❥ 133 and died here before you and I were dreams. Men hunted here. They hunted other men. When people die, they don’t just lie there in their graves forever, you know. They come back into the trees and the animals and the birds, and at night they hunt again to find their souls in other bodies. The dead have to hunt for their souls. Didn’t you know that?” He lay still, appalled by the feeling of dread that was swelling within him like the moon. He concentrated on breathing in the comforting, acrid smell of the leaves on which he was lying. He clutched handfuls of them, squeezing their damp ordinariness in his palms. Hundreds of years of dead leaves. Just leaves. My family has been here for over four hundred years. Just imagine. Her whisper fell to a low, confiding chant. “And badgers are the most magic, most mysterious spirits of all. They carry secrets that are older than the gods themselves, and that no man will ever discover, yet men still come to wait and watch in the dark of the woods in the dark of the night. And they do say, those that believe, that badgers hunt the souls of the living as well as the souls of the dead.” He had kneaded the leaf mold in his hands to a pulp. She let go of him, and there was a long silence. He knew that she had turned to look at him, and he shut his eyes and breathed as evenly as he could. She spoke in a normal voice, slow and genuinely curious. “Don’t boys feel anything?” He was afraid that she would hear his shivering rattle the leaves beneath him. He concentrated harder and harder on the scent of the ground and on the darkness behind his eyelids. “I have brought you through magic woods to a secret place of the spirits, where badgers hunt for souls under the fist of God’s moon, and all you can do is to lie there with your eyes shut, saying nothing. I bet this is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to a person like you. Don’t you know that even the air you are breathing is old? You are sharing every breath you take with the dead, with the spirits of the woods. You are breathing in magic. Can’t you feel it?” She grabbed him suddenly by the shoulder and shook him. “Can’t you feel anything?”

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He opened his eyes in shock and saw that the moon had tunneled through the high trees and spilt its light coldly onto her soft white legs and onto her white claws and her white face, and he saw that her eyes had been burned out by the light into pits of the darkest dark. With a sharp cry, he flung himself onto her and pinned her to the ground, shaking her, fighting her flailing arms and legs gladly, filled with a fierce, hot delight at his own strength as she gradually stopped trying to struggle beneath him. He felt this strength surge through him as if it were power from the gods themselves, and, as it exploded through him into release, he called it anger, wonderful, potent, all-consuming anger that held him triumphant for a time outside time, until he had squeezed out the last dregs of everything that had been inside him, and there was nothing left at all. Then, very slowly, he stood up. He stared over the bank at the deserted arena outside the badgers’ sett. “Go home,” he said. He heard her crying as she got up and heard the crying diminish as she left, and finally he heard a distant shout of hate from far away in the woods, but he didn’t turn around. The moon disappeared into the dark, and he was no longer afraid. Eventually, stiffly, he sat down on the bank and listened to the calls of the hunters and the screams of the hunted. He waited there for the rest of the short summer night until, just before dawn, as a gray air began to creep down the trunks of the trees, he saw that there were badgers on the floor of the woods below. He watched without surprise or wonder as they rustled and snuffled through the leaves, ponderous and unconcerned. “Here!” he shouted suddenly, “You can have mine!” and as they turned towards his sound, he stood up, yelled again, “My soul, you stupid animals!” and ran as fast as he could through the woods as if daring them to pursue him. But when he reached the gate into the park, he felt only the weight of a great silence at his back, devoid even of echo. Later that day, the uncle drove him to the station, his suitcase full of dirty clothes, the unsent letter to his mother in his pocket. There

A Little Kingdom ❥ 135 had been no fuss about his going. Arrangements had been made without questions being asked, made so smoothly, in fact, that he felt expelled from the place with about as much interest as he had been accepted into it. Only she knew that he had left his mark, and she would never tell. When Marcus and the cousins were brought in to say good-bye to him, his best friend grinned at him shyly and didn’t seem to know what to do, so Paul said, “See you next term, then,” and Marcus nodded. All three of them stood on the front steps outside the great hall and watched without waving as the car drove away. Paul smiled at his reflection in the car window as he was driven in silence to the station, and her voice in his head, he told himself, was no more than the buzz of a fly. At the edge of the woods, he’d looked across the dim expanse of the park, and she was there, as he had known she would be, shadowy and unformed in the early light, sitting waiting for him on the low wall of the garden. When he reached her, he saw that she was shivering, and that bruises were rising in great marks on that thin, white skin. “Did you see any badgers?” she asked him. Evading her distress, he lied. “No,” he said in a calm, deep voice. “Good,” she said, and a strange satisfaction burned out of her bright cat’s eyes at him. He stared over her head. “I shan’t ever tell,” she said. “But I’ll never forget. And neither will you. You wait and see.” The dawn was very quiet. “You’re just like them after all,” she said. He looked down suddenly, straight into her eyes, and with a sob, she fled away towards the house.

The Outing ❥

W

hen Mr. Wapping quietly died one rainy Monday morning, he left his wife the little house in Windsor Crescent, the Ford Fiesta, a surprising £25,000, and a desire to fly from her own rooftop, which was an odd legacy from so dour a man. At first, Elsie felt angry with him for leaving so suddenly, and then guilty that she had not prevented his departure in some way, so for a while she did nothing but sit and stare at the urn on the mantelpiece. Then, slowly, she began to stretch a little, not too much at first, just a tentative testing of what didn’t yet feel like freedom. She applied color to the gray in her hair and passed her driving test at the first attempt, revealing to no one her pleasure at sitting in his sacred seat. But still she felt vaguely oppressed, especially at night when the orange streetlight outside her window shone onto the empty bed beside hers, emphasizing the absence of the tidy shape that for thirty-four years had lain there with its back turned to her. And sometimes, in the ghostly quiet of the little house, her heart would grow heavy again, and she would feel trapped as if by bars. Eventually, when spring came, Elsie felt that it was time for a real treat, the kind she remembered from childhood that could be stored up in memory for wet days later. On the first Saturday in May, she decided, she would take Vera Maggs and the Ford Fiesta into the country for an outing. Get right away. She chose Vera because, although Vera might chatter like a mouse, she was a faithful and uncomplaining friend. Many times in the past, Elsie had come away from cozy, inconsequential gossips with her quite cheered up. She made Elsie feel confident and brave because Elsie had married and Vera was afraid of men. She also made her feel intelligent, which Mr. Wapping had not, and besides, Vera had never been to a Stately Home either. To issue her invitation, she went round to Palace Towers, where Vera lived with her mother on the twelfth floor, and rode up in the

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The Outing ❥ 137 lift that smelled of urine, whose underlit walls chilled her with their scribbled, encoded threats. As she walked along the outside passageway to Vera’s flat, she wished that she had managed to bump into her in the High Street, as she usually did when she wanted to see her. Vera had no phone because her mother was frightened that the government used them to spy on people in the bathroom. “I’m going to visit a Stately Home, dear,” she said to Vera, as Vera fumbled excitedly with the three safety chains on her side of the door, “and I’d very much enjoy your company.” “We’re invited to a Stately Home?” Vera squealed, struggling to free a last recalcitrant chain from behind the door. Elsie waited patiently, very conscious of the waist-high parapet behind her and the twelve-story drop to the concrete below, until Vera was finally able to open the door. “No, dear, just visiting,” she said, as Vera backed delightedly away and stood irradiating welcome in her tiny hallway. Elsie moved forward into the comforting shadow of the front door. “Saturday at nine suit you?” She lowered her voice. “Can you get away by then?” Vera glanced around at a shut door behind her, from which the gabble of a television could be heard, words without sense, like those in the lift, thought Elsie for a moment. “Annie, you know Annie, of course,” said Vera in eager but hushed tones. “Such a good friend. Well, she usually comes over Saturday morning early, so I can go shopping and get the laundry done. We’ll just have to go without clean sheets and cornflakes next week.” She laughed gaily for a moment, then smothered the sound with her hand. “Oh, Elsie, what a lark!” Elsie got away without having to go in and say a word to Vera’s mother, whose tyrannical senility terrified her, but shame at her own cowardice seemed to pursue her all the way home to Windsor Crescent. I am very lucky to be alone, she said to herself, refusing to acknowledge the bars, or the fact that she did not yet feel alone, her own person. On Saturday morning, well before nine o’clock, Vera was waiting outside Palace Towers, peering down the road for her first sight of the Ford Fiesta, and nervously pulling at her clothes. Since Elsie’s

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invitation, she had bought an extravagant number of glossy magazines, until eventually she had found an impressive article that chastised the sloppiness of dress affected by young people during weekends in the country and reminded its readers that if tweeds and brogues were still au fait with Her Royal Majesty, then tweeds and brogues were de rigueur for the truly discriminating. The authority implicit in those italics won Vera over. Tweeds and brogues it should be, even if she wasn’t entirely sure what brogues were and had never quite understood why it should be tweeds in the plural. Hers was singular, and it was a skirt. It was a little seated out with age now, but if she wore her favorite lacy jumper over it, with the cardigan she had knitted to match, it would be just the thing. She unearthed a forgotten pair of brown lace-up shoes from the back of her mother’s wardrobe, which she polished until they shone like cracked conkers, and now, standing waiting for Elsie, she felt proud of the effect she had achieved. When, to her relief, the Ford Fiesta pulled up on the dot of nine o’clock and she caught her first glimpse of Elsie’s outfit, she did feel, for a treacherous moment, unsure about the country weekend taste of the dear queen. Elsie was wearing a perfectly dazzling blouse that poured its lacy ruffles like carefully spilled cream over the front of an apricot suit with a shining satin collar, and on her feet was a pair of bronze shoes with graceful, wicked heels. With a silk scarf to match the suit, and a handbag to match the shoes, Elsie Wapping looked like, well, she looked better than a queen, thought Vera, intensely happy to be her consort. In a tizzy of excitement, Vera sat bolt upright all the way there, her pink pointed nose shining brightly and her heart singing. Every time a new sight caught her eye, she squeaked very softly, but she did not make the mistake of distracting Elsie, whose whole being, she could see, was concentrated on the road before her. Elsie was grateful for Vera’s unusual quietness. She had spent three days and quite a bit of Mr. Wapping’s money in acquiring her new outfit, but although it masked, it did not fool her sense of uncertainty. She had never driven so far before, and she was afraid that the dazzling blouse would be stained with the strain of it all by

The Outing ❥ 139 the time they arrived. As they rolled regally up the long, graveled drive, she surreptitiously wriggled free of the seat back, and when she got out of the car, she anxiously studied the creases in her wing mirror. Any dishevelment, however, was safely hidden beneath the apricot armor, and she crunched towards the imposing stone steps of the main entrance as if she were going up to her own front door. She would not feel oppressed, not today. As Vera stood in quivering reverence, overcome by the high magnificence around her, Elsie bought the tickets and an illustrated guidebook at a total cost that would have rendered Mr. Wapping speechless. “Here you are, Vera. You take charge of the guide, dear, and then you can tell me what everything is.” “Oh Elsie, it’s just wonderful. It’s like church.” Elsie looked around the Great Hall, with its warm tapestries and glowing oak furniture, and said curiously, “Church, dear?” “Well, Elsie, look. It’s got a black-and-white floor—you can see it has. Like St. Kilda’s. The vicar says it’s difficult to heat, but I’ve always thought it was really lovely.” Elsie went over to the tapestries, the summons of her bronze heels bringing Vera alertly to her side to assume her guide duties. “It says here,” Vera began, “that the house was built by a man called Edward Smythe.” “Smith, dear, surely?” “Smythe, it says here.” “I think that’s just how it’s written, Vera,” Elsie said absently, as she gazed at the rich scenes set so meticulously into the tapestries and wondered whether she was too old to start going to embroidery classes. It would be nice to have something in the lounge that she had worked herself. Mr. Wapping had collected seascape prints. “He was Master of the Rolls.” “Who was, dear?” “Edward Smythe.” “Smith.” “You’d have thought he’d have had a chauffeur, wouldn’t you?” “I don’t think it’s the car they mean, Vera. Not back then. Car-

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riages and four, perhaps, but not cars. Come on, dear, let’s move on.” And abandoning shaky ground, she moved ahead of Vera into a long, high room with an ornate plasterwork ceiling and a large coat of arms over the fireplace. “Where are we now, then?” Vera squinted round vaguely and consulted the guidebook. “Coat of arms over the fireplace. We’re in the library, I think, Elsie.” Elsie found a large and beautiful Bible, open at the Twenty-third Psalm, but untouchable behind a glass case, and she bowed her head before the rich age of its lettering and the familiarity of its words. She hadn’t been to church for years, not counting Mr. Wapping’s funeral, and you couldn’t really, seeing as he’d been burned in the Chapel of Heavenly Rest. She had missed going to church, she realized now. She would start again. Tomorrow? She might even go to St. Kilda’s, with its hard black-and-white floor and Vera’s vicar. There was a flutter of excitement inside her. “He built Oxford College.” Vera paused. “Or a college in Oxford.” “Who, dear?” “Smythe.” “Smith? Fancy now.” “I’ve never been to Oxford,” said Vera, “but I had an aunt who lived in Cambridge. Somewhere near Jesus, if I remember correctly.” Elsie stepped carefully through the thick pile of the carpet and stood before another glass case, this one containing two rows of crumbling books and a seventeenth-century plan of the house and its grounds. She ought to read a book again. There had been nothing but newspapers and magazines in the house all the time she had been married. “It hasn’t got many books for a library, has it, Elsie?” “Not so many people read then, dear.” “I wonder if it was just for the family, or if outside people could use it as well,” pondered Vera. “I think they must have been mostly for decoration,” said Elsie. “These old books, I mean.” Vera nodded. “Like Mr. Willard’s set of Sherlock Holmes that

The Outing ❥ 141 he keeps his sherry in. You can’t read them.” Yes, decided Elsie, she must join the local library. It was somewhere down near the Towne and Country Shoppe, where her conscience had lost and she’d succumbed to the apricot suit, and it couldn’t be all that difficult to apply. Mr. Wapping always said that books were for idle minds, but then it didn’t matter very much what he said any more, did it? She drew in her breath sharply at the thought. “He won it in the St. Kilda’s Church Roof Jamboree Raffle.” “What, dear?” “The set of hollow books. Mr. Willard.” “I won a box of soap in a raffle once,” said Elsie, with a sudden vivid memory of its sweet violet scent, and of Mr. Wapping’s incredulity at finding it in the bathroom. “Amazing chap, the man who built this, you know,” said a confident masculine voice behind her, and she turned to see a fair young man in a red sweater wander slowly past the Bible, hand-inhand with a girl of glowing beauty. “Rose from being a small country lawyer to one of the richest men at court.” “He maketh me down to lie. How delicious. Who, darling?” asked the beautiful girl. “The chap who built all this. Smythe.” Vera’s triumph got no further than an opening of the mouth and a drawing in of air. “Well, we’ll move on and leave you in peace, then,” Elsie said firmly to the young couple. “Quite a fine library, I believe you’ll find.” And she swept out of the room with immense dignity and a ridiculous, prickling desire to cry for the baby that had never come and, somehow more painful, for the wedding she would never cry at. Vera, distracted immediately by the change of venue, stood in the middle of the room in which they now found themselves with her nose contentedly in the guidebook, while Elsie stared in wonder at more books than she had ever considered it possible for one human being to own. Shelves and shelves of them. Floor to ceiling all around the walls, the windows, the doors—a room papered

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with her own ignorance, she felt, with all the books and writers she had never read and probably never heard of. She found the thought lowering, and the room seemed suddenly airless. “We are in,” Vera said confidently, “the Lobbie without ye Dininge Room.” She looked up from her book for a moment, puzzled. “Well, you can see it hasn’t got a dining room. I don’t know why it has to say.” It did occur to Elsie for a fleeting moment that Vera might not be in the same room as she was, but the disloyal thought was snatched and lost almost at once by the rich smells of old leather and unfamiliar polish and by the choking weight of so much knowledge, all of it shelved beyond her reach. “Seems silly to keep this amount of books in the lobby, doesn’t it?” she said at random, and found that her throat was tight. She stood very still in front of a great flight of books and tried to read the titles, but although the letters, even the occasional word, appeared to be familiar, none of them made any sense, and she had a sudden moment of panic, wondering if after all these years she had forgotten how to read. Vera was not having the same trouble. “Though slightly foxed, the Bible is a fine Baskerville. There now,” she said in a gratified tone, “and we were just speaking of Sherlock Holmes. Oh, and listen to this, Elsie. It says here that the pair of tables between the south windows are console tables. I do think that’s nice, don’t you? You could sit there when you were sad and look out of the windows, and then you’d feel better, I expect.” She looked over at Elsie quickly, in case she had tactlessly reminded her friend of her grief, but Elsie’s expression did not change, so she gave a little cough and hurried on. “This book is just wonderful, Elsie. You really should read it. I’m learning so much. What do you suppose a Closett in ye Chamber is?” “A toilet in ye bedroom, I should think, dear,” said Elsie, finding that she had to take a deep breath and stamp resolutely on the pungent memory of that never-mentioned receptacle under his bed that she had emptied every morning for thirty-four years. To have and to hold till death us do part. She had promised, and from a

The Outing ❥ 143 source within herself that she had sometimes been very afraid would one day dry up she had found the strength to keep the promise. “The gentleman in the portrait above the fireplace was married three times and had twenty-two children.” Elsie looked doubtfully at the scholarly old face over the chimney. “He looks very frail,” she said. “He was not molested by the Commonwealth.” “Well, that’s a mercy anyway.” “Uncle Arthur had one of those,” Vera said, after a pause. “One of what, dear?” “A toilet in his bedroom. After his stomach was taken out. Maggie never knew what to do with it when he passed on. The coat of arms over the fireplace, below his portrait, Elsie, is that of the Penmore family, and the cornice is enriched solely with dentils. Fancy.” “Fancy, dear,” said Elsie, remembering with vivid clarity the cloudy glass of water in which Mr. Wapping’s teeth had spent their nights and her fear at the Chapel of Heavenly Rest that perhaps they would be heat-resistant. She had hardly dared to look in the urn when she got it home, but it must have been all right, for they had vanished as completely as the rest of him. Dust to dust. She smiled at the memory, then found herself growing hot, guilt warring with annoyance. Why had he never been able to take a joke? Suddenly aware that she was alone, she went out into the Great Hall again, where she found Vera peering at the guidebook as intently, thought Elsie, as if it had been lying on velvet in a glass case. “There’s the Square Drawing Room through there, Elsie. Come on—it’s got a coved ceiling.” “A what, dear?” “Covered, perhaps they mean.” “Or caved,” suggested Elsie, moving ahead to see for herself. “That picture,” said Vera, pointing vaguely to her left as she entered the room, and speaking in hushed tones, “is of Our Lord.” Elsie walked over and looked at the scantily clad youth pouring wine onto a coy and equally undressed maiden, and said uncertainly, “Who did you say, dear?” “Christ!” said Vera, with sudden splendid articulation.

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“Good Heavens!” said the young man in the red sweater, and his beautiful companion pulled him past the doorway in a smother of laughter. They were still hand in hand. Like children, Elsie thought. “How rude of them,” she said. “They were laughing.” But suddenly she wanted to laugh, too. Mr. Wapping would have died of mortification. Swearing was a wickedness almost as great as promiscuity to him, and even a casual drat! from Elsie had been enough to send him into tight-lipped retreat for the rest of the day. “Bloody hell,” said Elsie experimentally under her breath. She looked guiltily over at Vera, who, distracted for a moment from her guidebook, was standing flushed before a small cabinet of china. “Oh look, Elsie, my mother used to have a tea set exactly like that when we lived in Croydon.” Elsie came over and read the label on the cabinet: “Part of a unique dinner service of 250 pieces, made in Vienna in 1794 for Henry, 8th Earl of Penmore.” “Well, nearly like that,” said Vera, turning away with dignity and reclaiming her role as purveyor of information. “On the east wall,” she said briskly, pointing somewhere behind her, “is the famous portrait of Lord Carne, after Reynolds.” Vera’s enthusiastic intonation was confusing. “There’s only one person in that picture,” Elsie said. “Are you sure you’ve got the right one, dear?” “It says quite clearly that he’s after Reynolds.” Vera dropped her voice, and Elsie caught a quick glint of tears. “It was an odd thing, you know, but she’d never let anyone touch that china but me because she said I had light hands.” “Pardon, dear?” “Mother. Though she made ever such weak tea, so as not to spoil the cups, I suppose.” Vera blew her nose. “She doesn’t know how to make tea any more,” she added, and lapsed back gently into her guidebook. “I’m so sorry, dear,” said Elsie, but Vera was reading again steadily, so Elsie left her and began to look around the room at the other pictures there. She went from painting to painting, scarcely able to

The Outing ❥ 145 believe that they were genuine, that they had really been stroked with a brush, that they would not be as paper-smooth to the touch as Mr. Wapping’s prints. How wonderful to have the gift to create something like that. Perhaps she could learn. Perhaps she could take painting classes, instead of embroidery, and fill the lounge with glowing, vibrant pictures like these. She passed a group of Rubens women, basking like satiated seal pups, and crossed her arms over her bosom. Maybe watercolors would be better in so small a room. She could take herself into the country on sunny afternoons in the Ford Fiesta and fill her sketchbook with delicate landscapes that would be the envy of her neighbors. They would be exhibited (for sale) on the walls of the Copper Tea Kettle in the High Street and perhaps even, daringly, by the Duke of Buckingham, the doors of which drinking establishment, Mr. Wapping had always said, you will enter over my dead body. Well, perhaps she would. Filled with the glow of achievement, it was with goose bumps of shock that Elsie looked up and recognized a familiar old painting on the wall in front of her. “Vera, look!” she said sharply. “We’ve got that seascape hanging in the lounge at home.” “It’s a scene of a Venice canal,” said Vera, from the depths of the guidebook. “Mr. Wapping bought it in Southend. He said it reminded him of Brighton.” “Unless it’s the one of Ladies Bathing with Cornflowers. You can never be quite sure.” “I’ve always hated it, anyway,” said Elsie, really quite upset, and she left the Square Drawing Room without a backwards look. What distressed her was less the violence of her reaction to the picture than the insistence of the question that was jabbing at her mind like a headache. Why didn’t you leave him, then? A familiar, taunting question, but one that was curiously more destructive now for being posed in the past tense. She strode across the Great Hall, her teeth clenched against tears that fractured what was before her into kaleidoscopic shapes, and climbed straight up the middle of the marble staircase. Vera scurried after her up the side, clinging to the mahogany rail with one

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hand and waving the guidebook like a distress signal with the other. “Elsie, Elsie, wait for me. It’s black Irish marble, and the wrought-iron scrollwork is particularly fine.” Elsie stopped on the landing and waited for Vera, Mr. Wapping’s taste lingering like ashes in her mouth. “I beg your pardon?” she said, keeping her back to Vera and, she hoped, the tremor out of her voice. “Black Irish marble,” Vera began, breathlessly. “Not marble in Ireland, Vera. Ireland is covered in peat, which is very soft. I expect they mean Italian. Italy is quite hard.” She tilted her head up, blinked and sniffed, and was able to turn around as Vera reached her and say gently, “That guidebook seems fond of making mistakes, doesn’t it? It’s not your fault, dear.” And to Vera’s delight, she linked her arm in hers and allowed Vera to draw her slowly along the high passage in a most companionable way. But she still felt shaken. With mutual nods of goodwill, they passed the beautiful girl and the man in the red sweater, also now arm in arm, and both Elsie and Vera found themselves oddly comforted by being similarly linked together. They passed several statues of gravely muscular Greek gods, and soothed by their white calm Elsie finally stopped in front of one of them. She studied his perfect smoothness, knowing she was defeated here and that no amount of evening classes would produce such a masterpiece for the lounge, but it did start her thinking about the possibility of pottery, or even of clay modeling. And then she began thinking about what she would model. Whom. And for the first time for a long while, she began to think of the male form with real interest, with anticipation and a quick sense of the future. Vera’s voice broke into her reverie. “He’s awfully small, isn’t he, Elsie?” Elsie looked at Vera in half-shocked surprise—how would Vera know?—and then blushingly considered. “Well, dear,” she said slowly, “I’m not an expert at these things, of course. Mr. Wapping was the only man I knew, in the biblical sense. But he seems average to me, quite average. Normal, I’d say.”

The Outing ❥ 147 “He’s smaller than I am, and I’m wearing my brogues today,” said Vera decisively, and detaching her arm from Elsie’s, she moved off with a firm tread and disappeared round a massive pillar. Elsie blushed deeply and raised her eyes to the bland marble face. It’s not wrong to think about it, though, she mouthed to the dead eyes. Whatever he used to say. Vera’s disembodied but persistent voice, beginning to sound just a little hoarse, came echoing down the passage. “The pillar on the right,” it declaimed, “contains a small head of Augustus Caesar, flanked with trophies. Well, that can’t be the right pillar. There are no trophies here, unless, of course, they’ve taken them away for cleaning, which is always possible, I suppose, though I’m glad I haven’t got the job of cleaning this place, and very clean it is, too, I must say, if you’ve noticed, Elsie. Look, there’s a room here called Men’s Closett top of the House. I wonder what that was.” “Very inconvenient, I should imagine,” said Elsie, surprising a giggle out of Vera before she rounded the pillar in a sudden flurry of apricot and clacked past her into a small room dominated by a great four-poster bed. The bed looked very high and very short, and Elsie tried to imagine what it would feel like to draw the curtains round and lie with her dreams trapped in its hot, dark cave. Just dreams at the moment, of course. What with Mr. Wapping’s little difficulty, it had been years since it had been anything else, and she had been thankful in a way. He’d always sweated so much, poor man, even in the very early days. But she had minded, too, and mourned that there had been no child to care for, not unless you counted Mr. Wapping himself, which sometimes, to comfort herself, she had done. Couldn’t even boil a kettle on his own without scalding his thumb, and now he was gone. Till death us do part. She decided she would move his flat bed out of the bedroom the moment she got home. “‘The patterned wallpaper is en suite with the chintz curtains and pellets.’” Startled, Elsie took a step back and bumped into Vera, who squeaked then apologized profusely. “Pellets?” Elsie said. “That’s what it says.”

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“I think you mean pelmets, dear.” “What’s the difference anyway?” said Vera, recklessly. “They match the curtains and wallpaper, don’t they?” “No, they don’t, Vera.” “They do. Look.” “The walls are white and the curtains are blue, dear.” “Well, they match in the guidebook,” said Vera, with a brief, dismissive look around the room. “And another thing,” she added defiantly, “the bed is an early Victorian child’s bed, covered with a fine American quilt.” Elsie glanced again at the four-poster, and at Vera’s hectic cheeks, and thought it best not to disagree, and besides, a daring thought was beginning to rise inside her, as warm and insistent as dough. Move. Get away. Go somewhere far from Windsor Crescent, somewhere in the country with chintz pelmets and glowing wood floors and shelves and shelves of books. Why not? Get rid of his bed altogether, and his seascape prints, and his simulated leather recliner. Sell everything. Well, keep the glass-fronted cabinet, perhaps, with her collection of little dolls that he’d mocked so often, and maybe her mother’s embroidered screen. Oh, and the black plaster dog she’d bought in Southend the year it never stopped raining, because after she’d brought him home and set him on the kitchen windowsill, his kind glass eyes had made it bearable so many times when it really wasn’t. And she’d keep the urn. Maybe not on the mantelpiece, but she’d find a little niche for it somewhere. She wouldn’t deny her husband a place in her new life, for he had, after all, needed her. That was it. Elsie let out a long, slow breath. She turned around, but Vera had vanished, and the young man in the red sweater was saying something about the four-poster to his beautiful companion that made her punch his arm and kiss him. They both smiled warmly at Elsie as they stood back and made room for her to pass, and she felt as if they had become her friends. She was aware of the prickling sadness again, even as she smiled back, but she also knew she was alone at last, and the bars of the little house in Windsor Crescent fell like matchsticks to the ground.

The Outing ❥ 149 “Thank you,” she said, as she left the room. “Thank you very much.” She found Vera in another room farther down the passage, which had in it a small bed with a lovely quilted cover and wallpaper that matched the curtains. “Vera, I’ve decided,” she said. “I know what I’m going to do.” “‘The huge oak bed, dated 1612, has an ornate tester supported by energetically carved posts,’” read Vera, with heroic resolution. “I’m going to move. Get right away.” “Oh no, not yet, Elsie, we can’t leave now,” said Vera feverishly. “We haven’t nearly seen everything yet. Look, this is the Blue Chamber; the hangings were stitched by the Sixth Earl of Penmore’s fifth wife, and George the First once slept in that bed. Elsie . . .” Elsie took the guidebook gently out of Vera’s hot clutch and shut it. “Come on, dear, we’ll get addled if we look at any more, and besides, my feet are killing me.” The tense pinkness at the tip of Vera’s nose faded a little, and her blind mouse eyes slowly came back into focus. She looked down at Elsie’s gleaming bronze toes and nodded. “You should have worn brogues like Balmoral,” she said sadly, and followed Elsie out, her eyes half on the disappearing guidebook and half on the surroundings she hadn’t yet had time to notice. But it was too late. Slowly but inexorably, she was being guided down to the Great Hall with its Great Doors, which, when passed through, would shut her out of here forever. She did her best. “Elsie, Elsie, stop! Look, they’ve got wallpaper just like that in the Taj Mahal, you know, in Mountbatten Avenue, though I never could fancy that tandoori chicken somehow, such an odd color, don’t you think, Elsie? Oh, just look at that picture over there, will you? I do like a man in armor. Something comforting, don’t you think? Perhaps I could buy a postcard. Elsie, wait!” But Elsie, gazing rapt into a golden future, crossed the hard black-and-white floor of the Great Hall with a steady tap of heels, went straight through the Great Doors, and stood breathing deeply at the top of the wide stone steps outside. Her own home. Rooms that were hers alone. Vera followed her out obediently and burst into tears.

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Elsie looked round at her with compassion. “Don’t cry, Vera,” she said. “It’ll make your nose pink. Here, dear, you can keep the guidebook. It’s yours. Then you’ll only have to look at the pictures, and you’ll be back here again. You wait and see.” Vera dried her eyes shakily and clutched the glossy book to her cardigan. “Oh Elsie,” she said. “Elsie.” Staring at the Stately Home’s grand and sunlit image on the cover, she stumbled precariously down the steps and began to steer a wavering course across the gravel. Elsie turned for one last look through the Great Doors behind her. She was a little dazzled by the brightness outside, and the Hall seemed huge and dim, full of immense shadows that stretched back far beyond her vision. She turned again and walked down the steps, keeping an eye on Vera, who she could see in the distance standing patiently beside the wrong car. Inside her was a soaring sensation that she hadn’t felt since she was a child, and a determination to take Vera to a pub in the nearest village and treat her to a large glass of sherry. They could drink to the dear departed before setting off on the journey home.

White Sandals I

was born in a more innocent age than that of the wicked postmillennium. Of course, we all like to believe that, I suppose. The days of our infancy must necessarily have been more innocent, surely, a period of adjustment before we slipped into this horned, corrupt maelstrom of narcissism and greed that we appear to be leaving as our legacy. I read David’s obituary last week in the Telegraph. A lifetime of achievements in the academic arena, dead in his fifties of a heart attack. Such sudden ends, more shocking, somehow, if blazoned in the indifference of print, so often lead us to examine our own mortality. That unwilling journey from the shores of the world through the murk of earthly existence. Or so I have found. He leaves behind a wife, two daughters, and a son. My, my, quite the family man, wasn’t he? I was born (as was David) in 1950, exactly, you will have noticed, halfway through the last century. Thus, as the new age struggles from the sticky shell of the old, I am entering the unpleasant tunnel of physical jokes at which I shall no longer be able to laugh. The tunnel of Death, ha, ha. My mother, who was only seventy-six when she died last year, indomitable even when stooped and aching from rheumatoid arthritis, used to say, “Dennis, how can you be so cynical?” and I would tell her she should have waited and had me in the knowing self-consciousness of the swinging sixties, not in the austere innocence of a still shocked and fragile England. But she was always braver by far than I. When I was born, there was still rationing. Precious bottles of National Health orange juice and National Health cod-liver oil were stored on high shelves and doled out daily in careful doses to those precious children of postwar romance who were going to save the world from the twin barbarities of nuclear bombs and nationalism. My parents continued to view bananas as special treats for years after they had become commonplace, and anything consid-

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ered a luxury was rationed by my joyless father for most of my childhood. Chocolate, holidays, new shoes, television, Christmas presents, roast chicken, upstairs heating, pets. We lived in a small, ugly brick house at the edge of a small, ugly village in Berkshire, which I accepted as Utopia because my mother said it was, and because the rationing never extended to my explorations of the surrounding countryside. This was neither the lush, bourgeois Thames Valley nor the chalk and lark-song sweep of downs for which Berkshire is best known, but an undistinguished hodgepodge of small fields, thin, overgrown patches of woodland, gravel pits, illegal rubbish dumps, and steadily encroaching bungalows. From an early age, I knew every lane, gate, hedge, path, pond, haystack, and hiding place within the radius of approximately a mile around our house. I knew how to avoid where the other children in the village went (yes, I was solitary, even then). I knew exactly where my mother could see me from the kitchen window, and I could judge to a nicety when it was politic to show myself and when it was permissible to disappear from view. Dressed in the summer in a gray Aertex shirt and gray shorts held up with an elastic snake belt, and in the winter in brown corduroy trousers, hand-knitted socks, jersey, gloves, hat and scarf, a duffle coat, and Wellington boots, I was entirely happy to be sent outside into what seemed to me then a beautiful countryside, from which I could venture into the infinite worlds of my mind. Later, as the bungalows crept nearer, and as the space around me shrank in relation to the increased distances I could cover, I found my other worlds in books, most often those that could transport me to a past I longed to inhabit. First, predictably, Henty, Buchan, and Forester, then Stevenson, Scott, and Froissart, and eventually Wordsworth, who haunted me like a passion when I was a young man, but whose tortured probing of his own past I thought I had long since discarded. Once my father realized that I disliked carpentry and all forms of organized games and shared my mother’s passion for literature and order, he had very little to do with my life. He commuted to London every day in a suit that smelled of the steam trains by

White Sandals ❥ 153 which he traveled, a smell curiously akin to that of hard-boiled eggs (I believe sulfur to be the common denominator), and spent weekends in his workshop at the bottom of the garden or asleep in his chair in the sitting room. My mother, on the other hand, was so central a figure in my life that I often felt she was not one person but many. She peopled my personal drama with familiar characters by whom I knew I was cherished: Mummy, the Nurse, the Bedtime Reader, the Cook (hot and busy), the Gracious Hostess (rare), Father’s Servant, the Gardener, the Cleaning Lady, the Playmate. The Protector. “What’s the Boy doing?” my father would ask. He always referred to me that way, rarely addressing me directly, hoping, I am sure, that his disapproval, or perhaps I should term it his disappointment, should eventually infect my mother as well as myself. “Why isn’t the Boy outside?” This, if I was reading in my bedroom. “Why isn’t the Boy doing his homework?” This, if I was outside. But he rarely summoned the interest to oversee my activities personally. That was Mummy’s job. One weekday morning in those far distant summer holidays, always cloudless and hot in childhood, of course, I stole ten shillings from my mother’s purse and went into Reading on the bus. It was the day after my eleventh birthday, for which my mother had baked me a sponge cake smothered in whipped cream and topped with raspberries from the garden. I had finished the last piece for breakfast that morning and was aware of an unaccustomed sense of deflation, of ennui at the prospect of a day that held not the remotest possibility of excitement. Mummy was topping and tailing black currants, as I recall, surrounded by newly scalded glass jars and with a vast cauldron of jam already starting to bubble with viscous intent on the stove, pouring its aromatic steam into the stuffy little kitchen. Hot and busy. The bus conductor was not best pleased at having to change a ten-shilling note, and he looked at me suspiciously, as if about to ask me whence I had obtained it, which overcast the journey for me to such an extent that my guilt nearly forced me to get off the bus and begin walking home. Self-consciousness kept me in my seat,

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however, until we reached the town, where I was legitimately able to leave the bus and merge into the crowd swirling from St. Mary’s Butts up to Broad Street and the brightness of the shops. At first I just walked along looking at the window displays and at the people looking at the window displays. I was relishing the airy surge that freedom gives, the heady lure of self-indulgence. But after a while I began to crave entrance to those deep caves beyond the dark open doorways, and finally I followed a motherly woman into Clark’s Shoe Shop. I stayed close enough to her that the sales assistants would assume I was with her, but not so close that she would notice my presence. She was on the same quest as myself, though, and I doubt she saw anything other than the goods upon which her desire focused. There was a summer sale in progress, and shoes were stacked on high, narrow racks all down the inside of the place. Everywhere, people were hungrily rooting for bargains, leaving shoes lying at inebriated angles on the shelves, tumbled on the floor, abandoned on chairs, and I began to realize that I was as good as invisible to customers and assistants alike. I relaxed. I watched the mother-woman try on one pair of sandals after another, walk up and down a bit, squint into the oddly angled shoe mirror, abandon another pair, try again. She chose one pair of wedge-heeled, slip-on sandals that I particularly liked. The wide band across the foot was of a white, openweave material with little colored flowers sown onto it, out of which her toes peeped, and when she walked up and down on the wooden floor of the shop, the heels clacked down deliciously and then smacked up softly to the sole of her foot for a moment’s suction against the skin. I knew instinctively that Mummy would like them and my father disapprove. I watched the woman as she grunted with dissatisfaction, removed the shoes, one, two, and flung them down on a row of chairs already strewn with rejects. I waited until she had gone back to the shelves again, then I picked up the sandals and looked underneath at the price. Seven shillings and sixpence. I carried them up to the counter, stood in line, and paid for them with the exact change. “For my mother,” I said to the girl, but she never even glanced at me. Clutching the green box to my

White Sandals ❥ 155 chest, I left the shop triumphant, my prize heavy in my arms. I got off the bus at the stop before the village and carried the shoes by a circuitous route to my hideout, which was in the thin strip of woodland that bordered the lane behind the house, and there I hid them in an old foxhole. For the rest of that summer, I would go to the hideout almost every day, take off my scuffed brown sandals and my short gray socks, take the white sandals back out to the lane again, and slip them on, cool and forbidden against my bare feet. Straining to hear the least sound that might denote human approach, I walked up and down the hard surface of the road, glorying in the intimate clutch of the stretchy, open-weave material, the feel of high heels, the firm clack of them, the slap of the wedge coming back up to meet my foot. I was grown-up in my white sandals. I was my mother. I was happy. My only sorrow was that I could never bring myself to tell my mother about my purchase. I knew instinctively that while she would forgive me for stealing her money, she would worry (needlessly, I thought) about that upon which I had spent it. It was the first real secret I had ever kept from her, and I was slowly to become aware that it heralded a long line of facts from which I deemed it best to shield her if she was to continue to love me. When I arrived home that day, the jam was safely in its jars, the kitchen was clean, lunch was laid at the table, and my mother was sitting peacefully at her place smoking a cigarette and reading her old Everyman’s edition of Wuthering Heights. How strange. I had forgotten that detail until just now. But yes, she read and reread that novel for years. “You’ve been very quiet all morning,” she said. “Not up to mischief, I hope?” I think she sometimes hoped that I would get up to mischief. Have a small adventure, at any rate, her unadventurous son. “I’ve been in my hideout,” I said, reluctantly but half truthfully. “I’m sorry if I’m late.” “It’s a good thing your father’s at work,” she said. “It’s one fifteen, and you know what he’s like if we eat even one minute after one o’clock.”

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I did know. So angry and upset, he could hardly bring himself to swallow the food. “Sorry, Mummy,” I said. I washed my hands and sat down to shepherd’s pie and the lingering smell of black currants. I did not hate my father when I was a child. On the contrary, I felt that his lack of direct contact, his splenetic remoteness, constituted entirely correct behavior for the character that he represented in my life: Your Father. Authority, I learned early on from my mother, must never be questioned, always placated. I was embarrassed for any boy I saw whose father joked with him, or rumpled his hair in public, or punted a ball around with him as if he were his equal. Such a loss of dignity would have made me hot with shame if it had happened to my father. Which it never did. Only much later did it occur to me that my father suspected he had a poofter for a son (I can still hear his voice in my head), but by then the channels between us had long since silted up. I had picked my way across the treacherous marsh of dependency, and it was too late for any undoing. By the time I became fully aware of the damage his pompous and pathetic frigidity had inflicted on me, he was safely dead of a heart attack, suffered on the London Underground between Baker Street and Paddington Station. A gloriously undignified way to go. I laughed when I heard the news. Where was David, I wonder, when his heart was attacked? When he suddenly stumbled upon the darkness of the grave? I’m getting to David. When I was thirteen years old, my father decided I should attend his old school in Birmingham, not because it was a good school, but, I see now, because he believed its austere and spartan discipline would make a man of me as it had done of him. Indeed, it did all too good a job of turning me into my father’s son, and for that alone I have never forgiven him. I learned there how fearsome and how forming are those unforgettable spots of time that lodge as tumors in the psyche. You already dislike me, I imagine, dear reader—have already begun to wonder what makes an unattractive character like myself the protagonist of this story? I am right, am I not? Yet you will read

White Sandals ❥ 157 on, I expect. Confession, like no other genre, seduces its listener, its reader. And its writer. How strange. I, too, am seduced by this— what is the word I am looking for?—this postlude. I do not know if you can imagine what it was like to be pulled up out of the soft ground of childhood and flung against the sootstained bricks of an urban existence so alien and so harsh that the mind still sickens at the memory. I doubt it. I thought many times while I was there, and quite seriously, that I might die. Blake Boys Grammar School. Housed in a Victorian gothic pile of almost indescribable ugliness, chilly and dank in winter, fetid as gym shoes in summer, smelling pervasively of industrial bleach, sweat, and cabbage, Blake Boys was the stuff of nightmare. Or so it was to me. I made one friend in my first term there—David—and considered myself fortunate indeed to have found such a kindred spirit. David, too, was an only child bewildered by his incarceration in the city, homesick not only for the familiarity of family but also for the privacy and freedom of that beloved land that surrounds every country child’s home. I see now that we were easy targets for the bullies who exist in all closed communities: both of us shortsighted, conscientious about homework, physically awkward, sexually naive. We walked to and from classes together and sat next to each other in the Junior Study to write our weekly compositions for English, prepare for Latin and French, struggle with algebra, read long chapters on the English Reformation. When we were forced out-of-doors at Break, we found a far corner of the large asphalt yard in which to huddle against the Birmingham damp and pretend we were somewhere else. We told each other all there was to know about ourselves, pouring out stories and secrets and dreams and half-digested philosophies in a fervid stream whose spring was the desire to be interesting, to be wanted, to be worthy, as our favorite knights were worthy, of the coveted title of companion. Eventually, I told him about the white sandals, not without trepidation, but with the belief that he was the one person who would understand without needing justification or apology. I told him the tale of their purchase. I described the feel, the sound, the transporting effect the shoes had on me the moment I stepped into their oth-

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erness, and his reaction more than vindicated my confession. He thought I was daring. He responded to my story with awe in his voice, as if I had quested beyond his own vision or strength and had returned wreathed in laurels. I, of course, was immediately covered in the glory of his admiration and felt closer to him than I had ever felt to anyone, including my mother, though I would have died rather than have called the feeling love. I went home that first Christmas able to tell my mother that I thought I could survive the place, even come to like it as David and I grew out of being new boys and progressed together up the strange hierarchy of the institution. My father was evidently encouraged by my survival, even addressing me directly in an uncharacteristically bonhomous mood on Christmas Eve to let me know that adversity breeds strength, Boy, and we’ll make a man of you yet, or some such clichéd claptrap. They gave us three weeks of the spring term before they came for us. Six boys from the Upper Fifth, strong, fit, with down on their upper lips and crusading zeal in their eyes. They came to the far corner of the asphalt yard and stood over us at the start of Break one morning, waiting until we looked up at them, scornful, imposing, and utterly terrifying. I should warn you, though, that if you’re salivating at the thought of the savage beating, the head down the toilet, the sodomy to come, you’re going to be sadly disappointed. The punishment for our friendship was surprisingly mild in its form, if exquisitely brutal in its consequences. Without speaking directly to us, the six boys led us across the yard and into the main hallway of the school, through which everyone would pass on their way back into classes, and tied us together with fishing line to the banisters at the bottom of the stairs. When I say they tied us together, I mean that they literally tied us together—in a close embrace—with my arms wrapped around David, and his arms wrapped around me. A lovers’ embrace. Then they propped a placard at our feet, which I later learned read “David and Dennis Suck Dicks for Pennies,” and departed. A good joke, do you not think? Left alone, we both stood rigidly to attention, staring straight

White Sandals ❥ 159 ahead, hearts beating against the drum of the chest as if knocking urgently for entry into the other’s body. I never once put my head back to look at David, and he never looked at me, nor did we speak one word to each other through the fifteen minutes or so that we remained together. I felt the heat of his body creep into mine, even through our two shirts and blazers, and it was curiously comforting. I could see only the edge of his right ear, the hook of his glasses, and his rough brown hair cut short and ragged above the curve of his neck. When I think of him now, that is always how I see him, imprinted on my memory without eyes, nose, mouth—just those fleeting curves of ear and neck. Below the waist, we kept as far apart from each other as possible, both of us, I think, more horrified of touching each other there than of anything else. I had wet myself. I suspected he had, too, but that wasn’t the reason. Wrapped in our heated embrace, we were mentally straining away from each other, pulled apart by our stifling closeness, the feel of the other’s arms round our backs, the sound of our rushed breathing. When the bell rang for the end of Break and the mass of boys poured back in, they either stood around us and laughed or slunk by us in a covertly sympathetic embarrassment. It was almost a relief to be so surrounded. We weren’t alone any more. I hardly heard what was said, was unaware of who cut us apart, could think only of being freed from my friend, my demon lover, of being alone with the grief that was swelling as sickness inside me. Later, David found me and tried awkwardly to reach out into what had become forbidden territory. “Sorry,” he kept saying, as if it had been his fault. And, God forgive me, I wondered then and have wondered ever since if it had indeed been his fault. If he had betrayed my confidences to gain admiration for himself. “Sorry,” he kept saying. But I could find no words to tell him how I felt. To ask him to defend himself. None at all. So after that, we carefully avoided any form of contact for the rest of the spring, and at the start of the summer term I learned that his parents had withdrawn him from the school. The friendship was irrecoverable, dead, as was any chance I would risk such another. And that is what I meant when I said I became my father’s son. The child is father to the man, as

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Wordsworth realized. He forms and informs the man. But the man stands little chance if the child’s malleable form is pulled and pummeled by such harsh, implacable forces as mine was. You don’t agree? That is your right as reader, of course, but it is also the limitation of being mere audience. You may have empathy for me or compassion or disgust. But you cannot be me, be in my skin, feel as I feel. Only David might once have sensed the wastes of anger that have driven me thus far in my life. And David is dead.

What I Cannot Say toYou I

t is because I inhabit my own skin that I cannot see what you see. From the inside looking out, much of the external layer that protects me from light and cold is hidden from me. If I look at it through silvered glass, it is only a stranger’s shell I see—a shade, a visitor, a half image, the other half of which lurks at my back, my heels, forever out of reach. Stop talking like a novel, Rose. How fearful, you think, to be such a grotesque. “You must have been so beautiful when you were young,” you whisper to me on one of your visits, and I know you are lying. You do not believe that anyone of such deflated flesh and unsafe bone can ever have been beautiful or young or brave. Dear child, your compassion is genuine, but it springs from a sublime disbelief in mortality. You are not yet equipped to imagine that you can ever grow old and ugly, ever lose the vibrant loveliness that is yours, now, now. You are blessed. And you are right. You will, of course, never lose it. For within this old skin lie layers deeper and more intricately fused than anyone could see from the outside looking in. Inside, I run and shout and turn my face to the sun, as I have always done. Inside, I sit and contemplate that which is beyond me, as I have always done. And the runner and the sitter are one and the same. The girl and the grotesque. Together we live a life far richer than you can comprehend. And far more full of pain, despite your sanguine assumption that I no longer feel the hope, the regret, and the loss that raise and lower your heart’s temperature. Bringing in my lunch, you are eternally cheerful over the mashed vegetables, the milk, the medication. And I am grateful, as I must be.

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Lunch eaten, talk and laughter, wine drunk, a long afternoon uncoiling without responsibility before us. The window open, sun reaching in, fragrant, golden, soporific. A wide window seat with fitted cushions covered in William Morris’s strawberry thief pattern. 161

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My friend Linda in the next room with her Mike, and me alone with a man I knew only for that afternoon and never saw again. He was a writer, I think, a friend of Mike’s, but if I can remember that, why can’t I remember his name or what he wrote? A gentle man, dark haired, sitting down beside me, leaning his white-shirted shoulders against the end wall, then swinging long legs up onto the cushion, drawing me back to lie drowsily against his chest, my legs between his, my back to his intentions. And the sweetness of it hasn’t left me in over sixty years. The sweetness and the guilt. I suppose I resisted him at first—I always resisted, from morality, fear, my mother—but I wasn’t going to let anything happen, here, by the open window— and in the warmth, the golden sleepiness of the afternoon, I lay and basked in his care, closing my eyes to everything but the split second of each sun-fragmented moment. Oh, he was gentle, he was so gentle, he was so attuned to my body, so extraordinarily sure in every slow stroke, light touch, so patient. I had never understood that a man could know so much about a woman, and the revelation was astonishing. I lost time, lost mind, lost thought, until I felt myself center vast and dark under his hand, and he leaned over me and said “ssssh,” very gently, and I tried to stop it far, far too late as it surged up the nerves and veins of my thighs like a drug, imploded in the high cathedral places he’d created, and spread in aching waves beneath the flat and secret skin of my stomach. I couldn’t have stopped the long, deep cry of release if I’d been in peril of my life, and I heard Linda laugh in the next room, and then he was laughing, too, and saying, “you’ve never had one before?” and I was laughing and crying and saying, “no, no, never, oh my God, never, it was amazing, amazing,” and he said gently, “come on, let’s go into the other bedroom,” and I pulled my skirt down and got up and picked up my jacket and ran from the house, ran down the road, the hill, ran and ran until there was a bus, and all the way home I was singing inside, singing at the sweetness of it, the glory, I had done it, I’d done it, I was normal after all. How selfish we are in our ignorance, in our fears and triumphs. And I never saw him again to say sorry, I’m so sorry, never talked to anyone about what had happened, but I carry forever within me

What I Cannot Say to You ❥ 163 the sweetness of that golden afternoon and the unease of guilt long past assuaging. When I lost my virginity some three years later, it was to a sophisticated friend of my cousin’s, a man whose raffish good looks turned me weak at the knees, and who deflowered me with hard dry thrusts that hurt for a mercifully short time before he ejaculated across my stomach and fell asleep with his arm across my breast, while I lay in the sticky dark and cried for what I had lost. What do you expect the elderly to think about? Crocheting? You are a dear child, but you accept too easily the common dictum that when the physical frame fails, the intelligence must necessarily fail also. Age and illness have crippled my speech, not my thought— my body, not my mind. Not my memory. To be old is not always to be mentally deranged, though I understand that, from the outside looking in, it is sometimes hard to get past the silent clouded gaze, that gatekeeper of the soul. I remember my mother’s imprisonment in the carapace of old age, her fearsome absence before she died, the vacancy beyond which I could not see. I think much about forgiveness, redemption. There is not much time. My mother always said when we were young that marriage was an admission of a woman’s failure. Such an unforgiving Edwardian, she was. Did I always disappoint you, Mummy? You are still there in everything I do, watching over me, looking down at me. Sitting beside you on the drawing-room sofa, with Edie on your other side, I hear your deep clear voice above us, your breath ruffling the hair on the top of my head if you turn towards me, and I watch your long hands turn the pages, your rings sparkling in the yellow light. Mr. McGregor, Kay and Gerda and the terrifying Snow Queen, Heidi and the Alm-uncle, Lorna Doone, Scrooge dancing on Christmas morning, Davie Balfour waking in the dark hold of the Covenant, all of them your creations, your vivid gifts to our dreams. Edie and I used to hold our breaths to hear the rustle of your shimmering green frock as you came to kiss us good night before you went out, bending over each of us in turn, dark red lipsticked mouth—“don’t be silly, Rose, of course I’m coming back”—hair tight and shining, soft

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powdery cheek, a mist of Chanel left drifting through our bedroom dark. And we would creep to the window to watch Father hand you into the long black car as if he were your chauffeur, bowing at the waist, closing your door, walking stiffly around to his side, easing you gently off down the drive. Your own most fabulous creation, my beautiful, adored mother. And Nanny would know we were out of bed as if she had sensors attached to our sheets and would be in the room scolding and comforting almost before the taillights of the car had turned through the gate and into the lane. I was twenty-nine years old when I met Richard, thirty when I married him in gratitude and disbelief. I had stayed at home in unhappy indecision for almost three years after leaving school, hoping somehow to be transported magically into another life before Mummy finally persuaded me to go to university—to meet some suitable friends, as she put it. I had her approval for my degree in history, for my small bachelor girl’s flat, for my job at St. Peter’s Girls School, and I had her unvoiced contempt for my unbrilliant, unsought-after, unmarried self. Marriage may have been a failure, but to have an unmarried daughter was a greater failure, apparently, a flaw in oneself not to be accepted, and Edie, a year older than I, had already been safely married for three years. “Such a shame,” Mummy said once, walking restlessly round my tiny sitting room, “that you should have inherited your father’s mouth and chin, while Edith got all my family’s fine bones.” I held the picture in my mind: Edie, the beautiful firstborn, myself, a hopelessly blurred copy. Hunched on a small stool, I watched Mummy sweeping round and round above me like a radiant cat with her black fur coat and little elegant feet. Richard Piper, whose book on Cromwell’s legacy I’d read at university and whose lectures had stunned me with their dazzling flights, thought my bones were just fine. But I don’t think I understood how to love without worshiping also. Richard was always telling me to let go, let go, Rose. But memory is such a treacherous hoarder—how is it possible to simply let go? ❥❥

What I Cannot Say to You ❥ 165 Father coughed for years, a frail, stooped figure who patted Edie and I kindly on the shoulders whenever he saw us and brought us sweets that Nanny disapproved of, but who seemed ever elsewhere in our lives. He was a figure of mythic authority (“I’ll have to tell your father”), inarticulate, remote, and romantic, and we loved him dearly, despite the fact that he took Mummy away from us for weeks, eventually months, in the winter, to Kenya, Morocco, Tripoli, Barbados, fairy tale places of sun and strange trees, far from the long gray winters we spent alone with Nanny. At his funeral, Edie and I stood shoulder to shoulder in the icy graveyard, looking down at our thick stockings and clumping school shoes in the snow. Together we gazed down into the horrible wound in the earth, dark and waterlogged and cold, where Father lay sealed in his coffin, remote, remote. And all her fine-boned family clustered around Mummy, dim behind her black hat and veil, as Edie and I pressed close together until the warmth of my sister’s arm came through my sleeve, and I shut my eyes and wished us to stay like that forever. Dear child, I am grateful for your anxious presence, your tentative ministrations. It was so good of you to offer to write to Tom for me, but if he does not choose . . . well there. I wish I could tell you how much your visits mean to me. To volunteer to help with birth, with young life, I can understand, but to help with dying, that is rare indeed. I would like you to know how much I enjoy listening to you read items from the local newspaper, that unintelligent rag. I always adored being read to, so forgive me if sometimes I do not follow everything you say. I travel more and more often these days, finding myself in far, familiar places where there is always, it seems, either snow or sunshine. There is no time for the indeterminate, the inconsequential, any more. Today it is golden with June sun, and Edie and I have taken our dolls out of the garden and down the lane to the big pond at the end of the village where the ducks swim and where we are going to learn to skate one winter when we are big enough. We are sitting on the warm green grass watching the glitter and purl of the water

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where the little brook flows into the pond, and Gwendolyn and Clarice are sitting stiff-legged beside us, sharing the feast of strawberries purloined from the garden and a sausage from breakfast that I hid in my handkerchief. Nanny does not know where we are. Edie holds a strawberry to Gwendolyn’s rosy lips, then eats it herself with relish. “You can’t imagine it ever being snow and ice, can you?” she says, dipping her sticky hand into the water. She lies back on the grass with her arms spread wide, and the sun makes rainbows in the flung wings of her dark, shining hair. “I wish it could always be like this,” I say, “the same forever and ever,” and a bird begins to cascade trills in the golden light, and leaves ruffle and spin, and everything comes together and rushes into me with an urgent sweetness that almost hurts, and Edie says with her eyes shut, “you are silly, Rose,” and the green and gold shatter and everything is lost. I want to cry “don’t say that, don’t!” but Edie says “whatever’s the matter now?” and I hate her and I can’t make the words to tell her. So Edie takes Gwendolyn, settles her fussily into her arms, picks up the last of the strawberries, and walks away up the lane eating them, and I am left with Clarice, stiff-legged on the grass. And nothing does stay the same, I know that now, nothing of consequence. I wrote my novel in snatches in those few pre-kindergarten years that I was at home with Tom before I went back to teaching again. Memory and Truth, written in longhand at the end of the kitchen table, while Tom slept in his pram by the little apple tree I’d planted at the end of the garden, or burbled in his playpen with his teddy bear and Richard’s old set of wooden bricks. Tom, our precious child, for whom we waited so long, eight years of trying to make love without mentioning any reason beyond our lovers’ needs, without counting the days of the month, without expressing hope, without speaking of guilt, of fault. All washed away by the absolution of success. Suddenly, out of the blue I’d done it, I was pregnant (“far too old, what are you thinking of?” said Mummy), and Richard’s delight sustained me through it all, even through a labor whose agony I was so unprepared for that I never told anyone about it, oddly ashamed at carrying memories of pain out into the light

What I Cannot Say to You ❥ 167 where all eyes were on my beautiful, golden child. My mind half on the carrots I still had to purée for Tom’s lunch, the lamb chop for Richard’s supper, the clothes on the line, I wrote at extraordinary, released speed, page after page of plain white foolscap, page after page of so much that I didn’t know I knew about myself. It was fiction, of course, but my heroine was already fully formed inside me, and the bright beads of her life were strung on the thread of my own. I wrote and wrote, and Tom banged his bricks on the side of the playpen and burbled his shining laugh at me. Sunny days of certainty and power, commanding the words to come, lapped in love’s security, so sure, so strong, so green. I gloried in my book, knowing it would be published, knowing it would receive good reviews, coming fully into my own skin at last. And when I held its heavy, creamy, bound self in my hands for the first time, I cried and Richard laughed at me. I read it over and over so many times that I could recite great flights of it to myself, I still can, and its scenes have become as real to me as photographs. Memory and Truth. My God, what did I know? You might even have read it. Some people remember the title, though they have usually forgotten the name of the author, and they are always amazed that it could have been me. Sometimes they don’t believe me. Memory and Truth, they say, I read that book at school, I took it on holiday, I have it in some bookshelf still, my husband gave it to me for Christmas the year before he was posted to Germany, my sister liked that book, you were never the author, really? “Poor Richard”—Mummy’s usual sigh of exasperation at my stupidity—“Really, darling, did it never occur to you to use a pseudonym?” It sold more than fifty thousand copies. Richard. When I walked into the party the night I met him, I was half hoping, as I always did, that this time it would be different, and half wishing I hadn’t come. A familiar state of clumsy, eager self-consciousness that I hated. After Linda had kissed me at the door and taken my coat, I sidled into a room full of strangers who all seemed to be looking at my unsuitable dress, my large feet, and with whom I would have to hold conversations that jerked along a

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track strewn with inanities and pauses and, eventually, the awkward silence of disinterest. I made for the drinks table, where Mike was mixing large gin and tonics, secured my tinkling glass, turned around nervously, and poured it all down the front of a man who wasn’t quite a stranger to me. His blue eyes gleaming down at me, his smile, the small smudges of gray in his bright dark hair. His warm hand. My breath gone, the room of strangers gone, my heart thudding, you’ve gone and done it now. (Richard always liked that passage. “Quite the shining knight,” he’d say gently, with a quizzical lift of his right eyebrow. A splinter deep in the skin of memory.) We spent the rest of the evening sitting on the stairs talking, and I was in love with him before his jacket had finished drying. The cliché of it unnerves me, even now. When we discovered he was only eight years older than I was, Richard said, “goodness, I thought you were much younger,” which, overly conscious of being almost thirty, I took to be a compliment. I just had sense enough not to say that to me he seemed as far removed as a god, a story prince, the first I’d met who had taken the slightest bit of notice of me. I was as enchanted and frightened as Cinderella must have been that it would all be whisked away. At the stroke of midnight, he took me back to his house and gave me the second orgasm of my life before plunging into me with a fierce intimacy that bound him to me in a burst of golden illumination. So this was what it should feel like, the coming together, the two of us, the coupling of souls, the hot pain of possessiveness, jealous hungry aching love. And no running away this time. Oh Richard, Richard, yes, and my mother’s unholy delight, “yes, the Richard Piper, you know,” and Edie’s smoothing her lovely pregnant belly at our wedding and saying, “you just wait for a year or two, then you’ll understand what it’s all about.” And Richard and I, hands twined, smiling at them all in the certain knowledge that we were secure in our own paradisal garden, that we were protected from sorrow, that we were different. As all lovers must be. Edie named her daughter after me, though the child was always known as Rosie, a diminutive my mother had refused to countenance

What I Cannot Say to You ❥ 169 when I was small. Edie watched Richard’s and my early-married euphoria with a mocking but sympathetic eye, her need of our shared sisters’ bond greater than mine at the moment of Rosie’s birth. But in the end, her marriage lasted until she died, when was it, ten, fifteen years ago? I forget so much. Little Rosie didn’t take after Edie, about which my mother was rather sour. She looked more like her father, everyone said, but Edie said that Rosie had a lot of me in her, and I was glad to be so connected. I wasn’t sure I saw the resemblance, but which of us can see ourselves? Rosie was a sweet child who longed for the brothers and sisters that Edie refused to supply for reasons she never divulged, but which I knew instinctively had to do with her fear of being unable to compete, for another nine months, with the other women on whom her husband’s eyes gazed with easily aroused, unself-conscious pleasure. Edie worked hard to keep his eyes upon herself, sometimes, I think, to the exclusion of Rosie. When Tom was born, Rosie was eight—just the right age to feel like a mother, entranced by the whole process of caring for a baby, clamoring to stay with us and help. So many pictures I still have, small and creased, black and white, unfaded. Rosie frowning earnestly as she tests his bottle on her arm. Rosie holding him in her arms with maternal competence, smiling down at him with pride. Rosie standing on a stool to see into the enameled bath on the kitchen table, soaping Tom’s soft, tight belly with loving gusto, while I cradle his head as if afraid the water might bruise it, asking me in her serious womanto-woman voice, “Aunt Rose, do you think his little thing should be sticking up like that?” Rosie and Tom on a rug in the garden, he naked and brown as an egg, she singing as he wriggles and waves fat arms, laughing up at her in the hot and dappled-green sun. Tom, he was a piper’s son, / He learned to play when he was young. Richard swinging Rosie up into his arms as if she was the baby, kissing her neck, running with her out into the garden to her sudden, shrieking delight. Rosie in bed with her arms round my neck hugging me as if she’ll never let go, crying “I want it to stay like this forever and ever.” Richard’s voice, gentle and tender, “I love you, too, little Rosie.” And all the tune that he could play / Was “Over the hills and far away.” ❥❥

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Are you still there? Dear child, I’m sorry I cannot remember your name. You’re a good person. I wish I could tell you so. Faithful and dogged in your care for dying strangers, in your giving of yourself to a world in which you are, gratefully, an outsider. But, inside your own skin as you are, you cannot see the relief in your shoulders that I can see when you walk away from me at the end of a visit. The lift of the chin, the breath taken in anticipation of the cool, fresh air outside. Icy sunshine, figures shining and shadows black, the world as clear and mysterious as a Japanese print. “I must say,” Edie says idly, her breath smoking out into the blue air, “Tom and Rosie would make a perfect couple, don’t you think?” We are all spending Christmas with Mummy, and Edie and I and Richard are sitting on a bench by the frozen pond, huddled in boots and scarves, Edie and I leaning into each other for warmth. “First cousins—they couldn’t,” I say immediately, though I feel myself flushing because the same impossible thought has floated through my mind, too. “I know they couldn’t,” she says, a certain exasperation in her voice that I sometimes think is especially reserved for me. “But imagine if they weren’t cousins. They’re so beautiful, the gypsy and the changeling. Look at them.” “Rosie’s going to fall any moment,” says Richard. “Too big an age gap, anyway,” I say, watching as Tom puts a steadying arm around Rosie, encouraging her to venture further out on the ice. They have found our old skates and are delightedly teaching themselves to stay upright on the probably treacherous, tussocky surface of the frozen pond. Tom is naturally good at it, delighting in his new ability to glide and skim, protective of Rosie’s wavering jabs forward. He is nine, tall and serious, beautiful and golden still, while Rosie at seventeen is as quick and dark as her mother, but with a childlike uncertainty, a clumsy eagerness to please. “Rosie and Tom?” Richard murmurs, sounding amused. “Never.”

What I Cannot Say to You ❥ 171 “Too big an age gap?” Edie says. “You two are eight years apart, and it’s made no difference at all.” I’m not altogether sure about that, but I can’t argue with Edie because I want so much to agree with her. I veer back into her imaginary world. “They’d certainly have beautiful children,” I say, as lightly as I can. “They’d probably have deformed monsters,” Edie says, breaking the spell, and Richard laughs. Edie stands up stiffly, stomping her feet on the ground to restore circulation, and the dark and the fair heads turn together and regard us from across the ice, squinting into the sun, flushed faces smiling at us, at each other, at this sharp, caught, crystalline moment. I wrote a second novel eventually, in those long days when I was alone again, looking after Mummy before she died, but there was too much I was unable to bring out from memory and view with either the passion or dispassion necessary to discern truth. Tom, Rosie, Richard, played over and over in my mind. Over the hills and far away. There was no tranquillity in which to recollect emotion, only a gray blankness that I mistook for acceptance. When I looked in the mirror, I saw the mask of the grotesque already disfiguring the girl’s face, and I hadn’t the energy or the courage to remove it and look at what lay underneath. I called the novel What I Cannot Say to You, which was as close as I could get to the truth. I never published it. I couldn’t write about Richard, do you see? Yet if these increasingly frequent gasps of memory are often painful—entering the mind in sharply focused fragments—it is in the traveling back that I am most alive. When I travel, I must look again at all I have not understood, but I can also run and shout and turn my face to the sun again. If I make myself very small, I can even lie in the big double pram at the far end of the garden on a green and golden afternoon that I carry in shards of time as if of a womb memory. Edie ill, I think. The parents away. Nanny, attention all on

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the sick child, giving in to my pleas in order to get me safely out of the way. Edie’s and my old black pram wheeled under the big apple tree where we had always taken our naps as babies, the smell of the slightly mildewed mattress, having to curl up tight to lie down in it now. I am five, I think, but I can’t be sure. The big sprung pram rocks when I shift, and I imagine I am swaying on an elephant’s back through The Jungle Book or sailing to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat. Inside my head, rhymes croon and sing to me. Over the hills and a great way off, / The winds shall blow my top-knot off. The air smells of mown grass, and blue air puffs around my little world in warm waves. I see the padded sides of the pram, a clear sky, a comfort of apple leaves bending over me, and I want to stay here forever and ever. I am a baby still. I am safe. Dear child, I shall not come back again, I don’t think. There is only one more journey, the most difficult of all, and I shall have reached the end of the story, the end of all stories. One of those glorious summer days that memory strings together to form the childhood, the youth, that we are sure must have been ours. But I was not a child. I was fifty years old. A weekend afternoon, long, golden, and lazy, all the windows of the house open to catch any stirrings of the fragrant air. Tom, turned thirteen now, had gone out somewhere, probably with the two boys who were his particular friends that year. I had told Richard I was going to sleep under the apple tree at the top of the garden, but I had only got as far as the little lawn outside the sitting-room window before laziness conquered intention and I lay down in abandoned pleasure, arms spread wide, eyes shut, conscious only of the green smell of the grass and the heat of the sun on my eyelids. A deep silence enfolded the afternoon. I lost all sense of conscious thought or time. Inside my skin, I felt peacefully at one with my younger self, the girl still vibrantly alive, carelessly innocent, wholly aware. Inside my head I could see rainbows of imagined light flickering, could feel treacherous memory start to uncoil. Suddenly, without warning, I was aware of danger in the silence. Neither asleep now nor quite awake, I lay there on the warm

What I Cannot Say to You ❥ 173 grass, unable to move or to prevent it from happening. Shackled by the lax limbs of nightmare yet conscious this was no mere memory, I found myself listening to them helplessly through the open window. As if from much farther away than I actually was, I heard her breathing become audible, heard it deepen and slow, shudder in exhalation. I tried to will it to stop, but I had no will over this. I heard his gentle, laughing “ssssh,” followed by her long, groaning cry of release that went through me like a sword. My eyes sprang open, the day fractured and glittering with tears. The air was quite still, the world suspended, ended. “You’re so beautiful,” I heard him say softly. “Oh, Richard, I never dreamed . . . ,” she said, still breathless, shaken. “Come upstairs,” he said, and if she had run away the story might have ended differently, but I suppose she had never been as like me as I had imagined. “Oh, Richard, I do love you,” she said, and I heard him draw in his breath sharply. “I love you, too, little Rosie,” he said. A long silence that breathed as they breathed. I watched them in my mind leaning into one another, kissing, clinging tight. Let go, let go. “Come on, little Rosie,” he said huskily, and from somewhere far away, as I rolled over and curled up on the grass as small as a baby, I heard the faint click of the door to our bedroom closing, a sound I knew as well as I knew myself.

About the Author V

anessa Furse Jackson, a native of England, is Professor of English at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. She is the author of The Poetry of Henry Newbolt: Patriotism Is Not Enough.

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