There will be a tree, a small one, shining in the window of her flat, and presents to wrap and unwrap, and carol singing on the television. Visualising this unexpected scene, Claire experiences the weird shift in perception that sometimes comes over her when she stays with Tommy and Rosanna. It might begin with Penny leaning against her while she shows her how to hold her knitting needles, and then the cat might start to purr on the sofa beside them – the cat that is the image of her old cat, Sixpence, who is forever linked in Claire’s mind with the white-gabled house of her early marriage. Then, Claire might look up and see Tommy walking towards her with a drink, and she feels as if she has fallen into another version of their life, the life they might have lived.
They descend together in the lift. Tommy wants to put her into a taxi outside the Windsor, but Claire insists that she will walk.
“It’s late night shopping, still plenty of people about,” she says.
He pecks at her cheek. “I’ll tell Penny, then,” he says, “about Christmas.”
“Oh, absolutely! And Tommy,” she squeezes his hand, “I’m so sorry about Rosanna.”
He manages a tight smile. “Thank you. It will be fine, I know it will.”
And with any luck it will be fine, for Rosanna is still relatively young, and strong. Claire watches him walk to the corner, his shoulders hunched in a way that is new to her, and when he is out of sight she remembers that she didn’t give him the cufflinks.
Claire passes a row of brightly lit shops, a café, a smart boutique. In the next block, the greengrocer has boxes piled with fruit and vegetables on the pavement. The shop beside it, owned by a Pakistani family, sells everything from packets of incense to handwoven rugs, and knitwear from Nepal. Claire has bought cones of incense here for Rosanna and silk scarves for herself.
Now, peering into the crowded window, she sees a small brass Buddha. Inside, there are more Buddhas, of all shapes and sizes. She chooses an exquisite Medicine Buddha carved from smooth, dark wood; she will wrap this in beautiful paper and give it to Rosanna. Then she picks out the Laughing Buddha, the Sleeping Buddha, and Serenity Buddha, and others whose names she does not know. She will not arrange these in the room where Penny will sleep with her aged cat, but in the sitting room, tucked into the pine garland she plans to drape over the mantelpiece. Penny will tell her the names of these little Buddhas, as they protect and preserve her mother, as they preside over these precious days of unlooked-for pleasure that in another version of their lives belong to Claire.
Evening All Afternoon
Fiona was crumpling newspaper to set the fire when the doorbell shrilled. She glanced at the clock, and considered lying doggo. It was half-past two on one of those dark Sunday afternoons when the house smelled of chimneys and hidden damp, and for the past hour she had been trying not to give in to gloom. The mood that tugged at her was as familiar as breath; it was not the kind that welcomed company. She looked around the first-floor sitting room, which in the aftermath of the ringing felt unnaturally quiet. Its tall unshuttered windows framed lengths of bruise-coloured sky, its lamps were still unlit, and everything looked slightly insubstantial in the dimness. From the street it would appear as if no one was home; Fiona was prepared to sit it out. Then she heard Pippa’s footsteps hurrying down, and with a sigh she rose from where she had been crouching on the hearthrug.
Barry Darkley was standing in the open doorway. His two boys were with him, the youngest, Clem, peering under his father’s arm with that rabbit-in-the-headlights look Fiona so disliked, though to feel that way about a small child, she knew, was beyond shameful. The Darkleys lived in an old house surrounded by muddy, gorse-bound fields that petered out towards the coast, and Barry’s waxed jacket and tweed cap smelled of wet leaves and wood smoke when he stooped to kiss Fiona’s cheek.
She might have known it would be Barry. He was one of the few people who dropped in uninvited, usually when he’d been charged with getting the boys out of the house for a few hours to give Annie a break.
“We’re off for a trot around the lake,” he said. “Wondered if you and Pippa would like to come?”
“Dan’s not in,” Fiona said, “otherwise I’m sure he’d have been up for a walk.”
Barry’s high forehead wrinkled, and the smile he beamed at her seemed forced, while his eyes – small and very blue in his long pale face – appeared to be pleading with Fiona.
When she hesitated, Pippa took her hand and tugged.
“Oh, can we, Mum? Please!”
Fiona peered past Barry into the chilly street, at the clouds that looked to be resting on the hill behind the houses opposite. The winter afternoon was muted, the colour of everything like the colour of old pewter.
“I don’t think it’s going to rain.” Barry’s voice was hearty, and just a touch wheedling.
“No …” Fiona thought regretfully of the unlit fire upstairs, the book she had abandoned face down on the sofa. The last thing she wanted was to walk in the park with its stark leafless trees and the sullen expanse of the boating lake, which even in summer she found dank and unappealing. But Pippa was wriggling with excitement, so Fiona fetched their coats; she hunted for her keys, and money in case the kiosk in the park was open. They might get a paper cup of that bitter filter coffee, she supposed, and although it was cold, the children would demand ice cream.
Fiona shut the front door, and they walked to the turnoff to the park, she and Barry side by side on the narrow footpath and Pippa and the two boys galloping ahead.
“Thanks for coming,” Barry said, his voice thick with unexpected emotion. “I could see you didn’t really want to be out in the cold.”
Fiona glanced up at him in surprise. With the children out of earshot all the heartiness had drained from Barry’s demeanour, and he looked, well he looked as if he were about to cry.
“Is something wrong?” she said.
With the backs of his fingers he flicked nervously at his neck, and at the underneath of his chin, where a rash had spread upwards from his collar.
“Annie’s leaving me,” he said. “She’s going this afternoon.”
Fiona gaped at him. “What, for good?”
Barry’s forward movement ground to a halt, and they stood facing each other on the path.
“The thing is …” he raked his fingers once more over his reddened neck, “I haven’t told the boys.”
Fiona’s shocked gaze swung from Barry’s chaffed skin to the children, who had reached the little hump-backed bridge at the entrance to the walkway that circled the boating lake. Clem and Griff were leaning out over the railing, dropping sticks into the water; Pippa’s laughter drifted back to where Fiona stood with their father.
“But surely Annie has prepared them?” Fiona said.
Barry shook his head; he was rummaging in his coat pocket for a handkerchief. “Annie couldn’t bring herself to say anything,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s a complete shambles.”
Fiona hadn’t seen Annie for months, but she’d heard a rumour that she and Barry were going through a difficult time. There had been a dinner party where Annie had said provocative things, feminist things, apparently. Fiona and Dan hadn’t been able to find a babysitter that night, and later, when they’d heard about the fuss, Fiona had been glad to have missed it. People said Annie’d had too much to drink, which Fiona doubted: Annie was a green tea and juicing enthusiast.
“Annie’s organised someone with a trailer,” Barry said. “She’s taking some furniture that belonged to her grandmother. Griff and Clem have no idea …”
“The children are waiting for us to catch up,” Fiona murmured, “we’d better go on.”
They walked towards the bridge in silence, and Fiona thought of the last time she had seen Annie.
They had sat on a bench in the park watching their children scramble over the play equipment. It had been the tail end of the summer, with a breath of autumn in the late-afternoon air, and it was that smokiness of the season turning, the pros
pect of the winter to come, that had plunged Fiona into one of her blackest-ever bouts of homesickness.
Of the women they knew, she and Annie were the only ones who were living far from the places where they had been raised. In Fiona’s case, she had been forced to relocate because of Dan’s work; Annie had always accepted she would live wherever Barry decided. Fiona had fretted from the first, but Annie had seemed resigned, even pleased, to have settled in a place so distant from her family. Barry had once confided to Dan that it wasn’t up to much, the place Annie had come from. Dan and Fiona had agreed that Barry was a bit of a snob.
That afternoon at the park, Fiona had stared at the patch of scuffed grass at their feet and poured out how it broke her heart to watch Pippa growing up without family – at home there were grandparents, aunties and uncles, small cousins, the offspring of old school friends. Was it unrealistic to want these permanent ties for Pippa? Besides, if she did not grow up there, when she went back it would always be as a visitor. Annie had sat twiddling the long dark braid of hair that reached to her lap, while Fiona had plunged into a maudlin, self-indulgent attack of melancholy.
She had hated this place from the start, hated its weather, and the way people talked, hated its ugly houses, and the shapes of the trees; she hated the way locals stuck together, the way they were always reminding you that you didn’t belong, that you would never be one of them, however long you stayed; she hated when they banged on about the natural beauty of the place when honestly it was bleak, and much of it rundown, and all of it desperately behind the times. What she dreaded most, she’d said, was being stuck here until she was old, or dying and being buried here, trapped forever in its cold and hostile soil. Annie’s face had crumpled at that, and Fiona saw that she had never yet looked ahead to her own mortality, never envisaged dying and being buried among virtual strangers.
“If it makes you so unhappy, you should go,” Annie had said, her eyes blurred by tears.
And now it was Annie who was going – Annie with her torrent of hair and her home-baked biscuits, her belief in the benefits of yoga, and her interest in astrology.
“I’m almost sure there’s someone else,” Barry said. “Annie says there isn’t, but there has to be.”
He darted a quick assessing glance at Fiona, as if to catch her out in some guilty knowledge of his wife’s infidelity. But if Annie had been having an affair, she hadn’t taken Fiona into her confidence. Fiona shook her head, baffled. Already her mind had leapt ahead to the moment when Barry and the boys would arrive home, and the desolation of entering the dark empty house, with its spaces where, when they had left it, familiar pieces of furniture had stood. Their mother would not be there to tuck them into bed, perhaps for the first time in their lives.
“You’d better stay for tea,” Fiona said faintly.
Barry had found his handkerchief, and blew his nose. “The boys would love that,” he said.
For all the good it would do, thought Fiona, because they would have to go home at some point. But at least she could see to it that the children ate, that they wouldn’t have to confront their grief on empty stomachs.
Fiona and Dan had survived their own crisis. It had been the usual trouble: Fiona’s homesickness, Dan’s stubborn refusal to believe their lives would be different if they moved. Weren’t his parents good enough grandparents for Pippa? And then there was the question of making a living – Dan was deep into a business venture with his father. He was an only child. How was he to walk away from a family company he had helped establish? Fiona had felt beaten.
And then had come one of those moments where suddenly everything was in flux: they had sold their house and not yet bought a new one. Fiona said she would take Pippa and go back home. She had gambled on the strength of their marriage, and on Dan being so unhappy without them that he would follow. In her muddled mind she had thought that somehow it would all work out. Instead, she had ended up where she longed to be, but more miserable than she had ever thought possible.
The prospect of living alone, of raising Pippa alone, had been daunting. Their separation had become messy, with her family urging her to stay, and Dan remaining firm. Friends like Annie Darkley and Erris Cleary had assumed she’d gone back home for a break, that she was catching some winter sun. Erris had sent a postcard and signed it with a silly sketch of a group of them drinking coffee under a striped café awning in their overcoats; an empty chair bore Fiona’s name. P.S. Summer’s coming, hurry back!
Fiona had never told a soul about her loneliness, more piercing even than homesickness, or about the hours she’d spent crying on the phone to Dan before she’d finally returned. Now she wondered guiltily whether she had gone too far that afternoon in the park with Annie, and whether she had infected her with her own restlessness.
She and Barry walked halfway around the lake, Fiona keeping her eyes from its scum-flecked water, only to find the kiosk closed: Shut due to a family funeral. We regret any inconvenience to our customers. Fiona winced under her coat and wrapped her scarf more firmly. After all, they would not have to drink the stale filter coffee; the children would not eat ice cream, though once they saw that the kiosk wasn’t open they lost interest.
The clouds had settled into the dark mass of the pines behind the park. A breeze flicked little wavelets over the surface of the lake, and its shallow water slapped the concrete sides with a sad sloshing sound. Fiona thought of the fire she would light as soon as they got in, and of what to give the children for their tea. Her eyes followed the two boys, their small bodies hurtling on into the grey afternoon, and she imagined Annie with her grandmother’s chiffonier roped onto a trailer. Where on earth would she take it?
There was a shepherd’s pie in the freezer. For dessert, the remains of a carrot cake, and bowls of vanilla ice cream, and squares of milk chocolate. The Darkley boys ate everything; their faces in the lamp-light were relaxed, not yet shocked or contorted by grief. Fiona could hardly bear to look at them.
Barry kept up a stream of chatter, and Fiona was relieved when Dan rolled in.
“Well! What a gathering!” He poured himself and Barry a glass of wine from an already opened bottle, and sat at the end of the table.
Relieved of the responsibility of making conversation, Fiona retreated to the kitchen and slowly began to load the dishwasher.
When Dan came in for more wine he saw her face. “What’s up?” he said.
In a low-pitched voice, she told him.
“Jesus! Really?”
The children had finished eating and begun a boisterous game; their small socked feet thudded up and down the stairs. Barry, white-faced, announced that he would take them home before the game got out of hand.
“Wait, stay for coffee,” Fiona urged.
She found a packet of marshmallows and showed the children how to toast them on the fire using skewers. The three adults lingered over coffee. It had begun to rain, and the sound of it beating against the window glass made the room and everything in it seem snug and secure, as if everything would be all right for as long as they remained safe within its sheltered warmth. The flames cast a golden blush on the children’s hands, and on their faces that were sticky with melted marshmallow. It burnished the boys’ blonde heads, and Fiona saw that beneath the fine silky hair their skulls were as fragile as new-laid eggs, and perhaps as strong. She thought of the house that waited for them on the edge of the darkened fields, its front door locked, its windows unlit, its rooms muffling the squalling wind and rain. While somewhere, in a room she could not envisage, Annie’s grandmother’s chiffonier carried in its recesses dust gathered over the years of Annie’s and Barry’s marriage; in its diligently polished surfaces, dormant reflections of lighted birthday candles and strings of Christmas lights, of all the ordinary winter evenings when they had gathered around the fire as a family.
Barry put down his empty coffee cup, and turned to Fiona. “Well … it’s been a lovely afternoon.”
“Is there anything we can
do?” she said. In her mind rose the image of the three of them in the car, the approach to the house. When would Barry tell them? When would the knowledge of their mother’s absence finally penetrate those fragile skulls? Barry shook his head. His eyes were moist as he scratched at his neck.
“C’mon, boys,” he said, “it’s time.”
Glory Days
Lizbie had been out walking after a fight with her mother, plunging along unfamiliar streets, fizzing with fury, and adamant that she was never going home. And then music drifted from a house she was passing, an acoustic guitar, and two voices fused in a loosely phrased yet melting harmony: the beauty of it had brought her to a standstill. The house had a white front gate; Winterbourne was written on it in crisp black letters. She could see white gables, a black front door with a decorative fanlight, but the bulk of the house was concealed from the street by a severely clipped, ten-foot cypress hedge. She had stood listening, inhaling the cypress’s sharp, green, medicinal scent.
The voices were male – young men, by the sound of them; the guitar playing was understated and fluid. When they finished she had clapped, a little shower of applause to let them know that what they were doing was cool. She’d been about to walk on when the gate opened – they’d come out to see who was eavesdropping – and there she was, Lizbie Menick, in her ripped shorts and cowboy boots, and her semi-see-through cheesecloth blouse, with the hair her mother liked to call ‘bay red’ tumbling over her shoulders.
That was how she’d met Marty Delaney and Griff Darkley. Marty was the guitarist and songwriter; Griff’s high, angelic voice could make you weep, and he was handy on bass, and two or three other instruments. Lizbie’s tremulous contralto had found a space between them, and eventually they had let her sing with them at gigs, working up a few a capella pieces to show off the harmonies. Their repertoire was based around covers of popular songs, but when they really shone, in Lizbie’s opinion, was when they played Marty’s originals. For a while she believed she had stumbled into her perfect life.
Murmurations Page 4