by Minnie Darke
Soon, a batch of apricots from the morning’s harvest lay pitted and quartered on a thick pine board. A glass bowl of sugar stood warming in the oven, and Arie knew that if he opened the freezer, he would find a saucer loaded with half a dozen teaspoons. Laid out on the bench were a set of scales, several paper sacks of sugar, a bowl of lemons, a selection of wooden spoons, and a tin that spent every other day of its life in the pantry and came out only on jam day.
The Clare family’s apricot jam was famous. It never caught, never burned, was never too runny and never too firm, and it kept in the jar both its jewel-bright colour and the fresh taste of summer fruit.
The secrets of making this jam were many, from the ideal size of each batch (small) to the shape of the pan (relatively shallow, with flaring sides), and from the precise ratio of fruit to sugar (it was complicated) to the best variety of lemon to provide the necessary squeeze of acid (Meyer). No apricot pips were added to the bubbling mixture; that was considered a heresy in Clare family lore. The only things that went into the jam – besides fruit, sugar, lemon juice and diligence – were the contents of the secret tin. Although if Diana had been there with them, she would have insisted on one other ingredient. Music.
‘What do you feel like listening to?’ Arie asked, when the first batch was on the hob.
‘You choose.’
The stereo was in the living room. Diana’s first piano was there, too – an upright with a mottled chestnut case and, on its front panel, a matching pair of tiny brass sconces filled with wax from another time and place. Arie opened the piano’s lid to reveal a set of stained yellow-grey keys that reminded him of old people’s teeth. On the floor-level corners of the piano, the timber was scarred where it had been chewed by a pet rabbit, but Arie noticed there was barely a trace of dust on or between the picture frames propped along the length of the top. Diana in white shorts at a school cross-country, holding a green ribbon; Diana with a home-administered haircut and oversized teeth; Diana with a huge rabbit in her arms, its ears half obscuring her face; Diana with a Dolly Varden birthday cake; Diana in a cap and gown.
Belinda’s CD collection mixed Midnight Oil with a recording of Diana playing with the London Philharmonic, the Indigo Girls with a recording of Diana playing with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Tori Amos with a recording of Diana and the Staatskapelle Dresden. Arie made his choice: Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor. Or, to be precise, Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor as played by Diana Clare and the Berliner Philharmoniker.
‘Schumann,’ Belinda observed, when Arie returned to the kitchen to the opening strains of the concerto. ‘Diana always said it was good jam-making music.’
‘Stirring,’ Arie said, and Belinda, in deference to the old joke, managed to produce a wry smile.
‘I think we’re ready,’ Belinda said, peering into the jam pan.
‘Are you going to do it?’
‘You do it,’ Belinda said, and handed Arie the tin. On its lid, in pastel colours, was a drawing room scene involving women with complicated Georgian hairdos and dresses in the shades of a washed-out rainbow.
‘This was always Diana’s favourite part,’ Arie said.
Inside were four silver forks, all exactly alike, each with a fleur-de-lis etched into the handle. In a moment they would go into the jam mixture, where it was their special task to prevent the jam from catching and burning on the bottom of the pan. According to Belinda, these particular utensils – which had belonged originally to her great-grandmother – were the only ones in the world that could be 100 per cent relied upon to do the job.
‘I was going to leave them to Diana. Now what will I do with them?’ Belinda asked, and in her tone Arie caught a hint of the kind of grief-related masochism that he sometimes gave in to himself.
‘I could pop them in your coffin,’ Arie offered, ‘so the secret of your jam goes with you to your grave.’
At this, Belinda jabbed him in the ribs with one of the forks, actually quite hard, drawing his attention to the anger that simmered in her, and not so very far beneath the surface either.
‘Ow,’ he said.
‘Sook,’ she said, and handed him the fork, which he dropped into the jam mixture along with the other three.
From this point onwards, it was Arie’s job to stir – not too little, not too much – and Belinda’s to supervise. Although in one sense Diana was gone from them, in another sense she was right there in the music that flowed around them, as sweet and strong as the apricot-scented vapour that rose from the pan.
After a while, Belinda fetched a teaspoon from the freezer and scooped up a small amount of jam. She tipped the spoon this way and that, gauging the speed at which the jam moved across the cold metal.
‘A bit longer,’ she announced.
So Arie kept stirring and the jam bubbled on.
When Diana on the CD brought the concerto to its rousing conclusion, Arie half watched as Belinda drew her fingertips beneath her eyelids, catching the smudges of her mascara. Those pale eyelashes. Like Diana’s.
‘You all right?’ he asked, carefully.
‘She should be here. This was always one of her favourite days of the year.’
‘It was,’ Arie affirmed.
Belinda pulled a crumpled tissue out of the pocket of her shorts and dabbed at her eyes. ‘You know, my hairdresser told me the other day that she thought I’d be out of the woods by now.’
Arie raised his eyebrows. ‘Out of the woods, hey? Well. Apparently, I should be over the worst.’ He signalled quote marks in the air with his fingers. ‘My GP said so.’
‘Oh, really? Mine said I should be about to turn the corner.’
‘My sister reckons I ought to be getting back on my feet by now,’ Arie countered.
‘Apparently, I should be ready to—’
‘Let me guess . . . move on with your life?’
Belinda scoffed. With vehemence, she said, ‘It’s all very well for other people to say. They don’t understand that Diana was my life. I had my turn, and that’s what I did with it. I had her.’
Arie knew how conversations like this were supposed to go. His part was to argue, to tell Belinda that there was still time, that she was young yet, that it was impossible to know what was out there on the horizon of her life. He knew he was supposed to say all of the things that people said to him. Instead, he said, ‘I know what you mean.’
‘No, you don’t,’ Belinda said, and if she’d been a cat, her hackles would have risen all the way down her spine. ‘You can, you can . . . just start again.’
‘How?’
‘It’s completely different for you. I can’t just go and have another daughter. But you’re, what? Thirty-five? You’ve got your—’
‘Whole life ahead of me. Yeah, yeah. Blah, blah.’
‘You’ll find someone else,’ she said, almost accusingly.
Now it was Arie’s turn to give a bitter laugh. He could no more magic up another Diana than Belinda could.
‘How?’ Arie asked, sounding a little angrier than he’d intended. ‘Where?’
But Belinda simply shrugged, and for a while the only sound in the kitchen was the glop, glop, glop of the thickening jam.
WHEN EVIE GREENLEES dreamed of publishing a book of her poems, which she did every day, she sometimes thought the title might be Dandelion Days. She felt such an affinity with dandelions, those little white afros of the plant world whose seeds travelled on the wind, landed wheresoever they happened to land, and grew wherever they could. In the poems Evie wrote about her own life, they seemed to sprout up everywhere.
There was a dandelion poem inside the envelope that she held in gloved hands as she stood, late in the afternoon of the year’s last day, beside an old, hexagonal postbox on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. Painted the quintessential shade of glossy red, the ornate postbox might have been Victorian, or maybe Edwardian. Evie didn’t know exactly, but she had come to this particular portal of the Royal Mail because it was unu
sual and rather beautiful, and she felt that these two things might bring her luck.
She had been standing before the postbox for much longer than was strictly necessary, trying to ignore the dead cold that was infiltrating the knitted hat she’d pulled low over the dark bob of her hair and seeping through the seams of the unlined coat she’d buttoned right up to her chin. She wished she’d worn more adequate shoes, and not the low-cut ballet slippers inside which her feet had gone numb.
The last two years, for Evie, had been a gradual drift in a northerly direction. When she’d had enough of London and the Thames-side pub with its crew of aged regulars, she found a job in a café in a medieval town on the Suffolk coast, where she landed a house-sitting gig in a tiny cottage on the edge of the village green. Then, when the owners of the cottage returned from abroad, Evie allowed the breeze to carry her to York, where she took a position as a barmaid in an old pub, lodgings included. There had been something poetic, to Evie, in the precipitous staircase that led to her attic room, in the steeply sloping walls that made her bend her neck when she sat up in bed at night, and also in the bare light bulb that hung from the ceiling, so dim that it might almost have been a candle.
Evie didn’t know precisely what it was that told her when it was time to leave one place and try another. Sometimes the desire to move on crept up on her over a period of weeks, and other times it arrived like someone jumping out from behind a sofa at a surprise party, and shouting, It’s ti-ime! That was how it was when she left York and crossed the Scottish border just as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival was getting underway. She bought a second-hand tent from a thrift shop and pitched it in a crowded campground for the duration. The festival had come to an end, then the summer, too, but Evie had stayed on as the days shortened and the temperature fell.
She stamped her cold feet on the pavement by the side of the postbox.
You don’t have to do it now, she told herself. You could wait until tomorrow.
The envelope was addressed to a venerable publishing house, one that had put out a call for poems to be considered for an anthology called Ten Lines. Every poem submitted had to be precisely that: ten lines long. The one Evie had chosen to send was called ‘Dandelion Clocks’ and she knew it by heart, of course, since she had agonised over every last syllable. She didn’t really know if it was good or not, but she did know the general consensus was that if you wanted to be a published poet you just had to keep flinging little parts of yourself out into the world until, at last, one of them caught someone’s attention.
She knew all the stories about writers papering the walls of their studies with rejection slips, but so far about three-quarters of all the refusals Evie had received had arrived electronically. An email folder full of ‘We regret to advise you . . .’ and ‘Thank you for your recent submission, but . . .’ didn’t seem nearly so noble, nor so graphic, as a wall covered in paper-and-ink correspondence, but the net effect was the same – as yet, none of the poems she had sent out into the ether had found itself a home.
This one, though . . . she had a feeling about it. Squeezing the envelope tightly, she silently recited the words.
Dandelion Clocks
Accurate.
Wound on the language
of wind
and the eager breath
of children counting hours
their own way,
launching fluff parachutes
into a future
that only aches
to be yellow again.
You could wait until tomorrow. New Year’s Day might be luckier.
Then, she told herself quite sternly, Stop procrastinating and just do it. Now!
Before she could change her mind, Evie pressed a kiss onto the back of the envelope and slid it into the slot. She exhaled audibly, nodded to the postbox in a gesture of farewell, put her hands in her pockets, and set off up the street.
Edinburgh, Evie thought, was the stoniest city she had ever known. There was stone underfoot, and stone walls to every side, and stone arches to pass beneath, and high above it all a stone castle that seemed to grow quite naturally out of some stony cliffs. It seemed to Evie as she strode up the Royal Mile and turned into North Bridge that something of the architecture was seeping into the air that she breathed, which was cold and mineral in her lungs. She was aware of her feet, too, which were aching from a full day of standing behind a Starbucks counter.
By working three days a week at the café and five nights a fortnight behind the bar at the Thorn and Thistle, Evie was managing to stitch together a living of sorts. She was rostered on at the pub tonight, of course – it was New Year’s Eve after all – but her shift didn’t start until nine o’clock. There was time enough to go home, grab a bite to eat and change one lot of black clothes (that didn’t show the coffee spills) for another (that didn’t show the beer).
Today, since before breakfast time, she’d been fixing cappuccinos and doling out cookies, splitting bills and squiggling runes with a white felt-tip pen on the black plastic lids of takeaway cups. She’d taken the job at Starbucks not because of any great love of making pumpkin spice cream Frappuccinos, but because this particular branch of the franchise was located on the Canongate, on the corner of Crichton’s Close . . . and Crichton’s Close was the address of the Scottish Poetry Library. So that was where Evie spent her lunchtimes. There, she would browse shelves tightly packed with slender volumes, every one of them a sliver of a poet’s heart. Sometimes she just stood and closed her eyes to see if she could hear them beating. Always lunchtimes flew by too quickly.
Nearing her bus stop, Evie was aware of the sounds and smells drifting her way from the midwinter markets, which had filled the East Princes Street Gardens with their fairground rides, brica-brac stands and food stalls. This night would be a big one for the traders, and in a few hours’ time the strains of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ would ring out through the city.
Evie threw 50p to a kilted piper who had likely been playing ‘Scotland the Brave’ and ‘Amazing Grace’ on rotation for several hours already, and dodged a young man who’d started work early on his New Year’s Day hangover, and as she walked, she mulled over something that had happened at work that day.
Just after lunch, she’d made a coffee for a customer. Nothing remarkable there, of course, except that the customer had been Slim Lorain, the poet. A few nights earlier, she’d seen him read at the poetry library. Slim had tanned skin and a white walrus moustache that obscured his entire mouth, and he wore his equally white hair in a low, thick ponytail. On the library’s mezzanine floor, sitting beside Dave, Evie had listened as Slim Lorain’s smooth accented voice had painted pictures of big skies and wild animals, broken hearts and the invisible touch of angels. Afterwards, Evie had quietly sipped wine and nibbled cheese and crackers, leaving it to Dave – who was also a real, actual poet – to introduce himself to Slim and say how good the reading had been.
Today, in the daylight of the café, Slim had looked a little older, a bit smaller, a touch more human. At the sight of him, Evie’s Starbucks smile had switched from autopilot to genuine.
‘What can I get for you?’
‘Caffé Misto if you please,’ he’d said in that raw silk voice of his.
‘What size?’
‘What do I have to choose from?’
‘Short, Tall, Grande, Venti.’ Evie had gestured to the model cups on the counter, and the poet had looked bemused.
‘Funny world, isn’t it, where “tall” is on the shorter side of things? What do you recommend?’
‘I guess you could choose by what you want to be,’ Evie had offered. Again, she tapped the lids of the cups as she went through the options. ‘You want to be Short? Tall? Grand? Or’ – she tapped the Venti – ‘twenty and Italian?’
The poet laughed. ‘Now you put it that way, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’
When Evie came back to the counter and fitted the lid over the poet’s takeaway Venti, he’d looked at her closely and put hi
s head on an inquisitive angle. ‘I think I know you.’
‘Oh, I doubt that.’
‘I do. I do know you,’ he’d said, nodding. ‘Aren’t you Dave Wright’s girlfriend?’
Evie had blinked.
Although Dandelion Days was the front-runner for the title of Evie’s as-yet imaginary book of poems, there were times when she thought a better title would be A Catalogue of Unhelpful Talents. Evie had so many of these, from a remarkably consistent tendency to dress badly for the weather to the ability to put a cherry stalk into her mouth and tie it in a knot using her teeth and tongue. Then there was this one: a complete inability to stop her face from revealing what she was thinking and feeling. She’d done the goldfish-face-of-surprise as she stared at Slim Lorain without a clue in the world how to answer his question.
Seconds had ticked by.
‘Sorry, I . . . that was presumptuous of me,’ the poet had said, alleviating the uncomfortable silence. ‘It’s just I saw you, the other night . . . and I thought . . . I apologise.’
‘No need,’ Evie had said, aware that she was blushing. ‘Do you want your receipt?’
Slim had shaken his head, taken his upsold coffee and gone out into the cold of the street looking confused.
Dave Wright’s girlfriend, she thought, arriving at her bus stop just in time to see a number seven pull away from the kerb. Shit. She was already so cold that she could imagine tendrils of ice snaking up her calves.
Dave Wright’s Girlfriend, she thought. Now there was another possible title for a collection of poetry. Just probably not hers.