Walking away, she hears her mother complain that this is what comes of wearing a see-through blouse. But Lizbie knows it is what comes with the shifts and swings of people’s lives, the swerving patterns you can never see. And it is, too, what comes when dumb fate leads you to turn right into a certain street on a certain morning, when you might as easily have turned left, or when you might have listened, and then walked away without applauding.
The Lives We Lost
The rooms Jeanie sleeps in now are all the same – crammed with the excess baggage of people’s lives, the belongings they can’t bring themselves to cull, and the remains of childhoods, abruptly abandoned. She never lets on how the clutter, with its sifting of dust, presses around her in the dark. Jeanie is grateful for a bed, and for the reticence of people who would rather she moved on.
The latest room is as cluttered and ugly as its predecessors. The second bedroom in a second-floor, two-bedroom flat; its window overlooks a side fence and a busy bus stop. The curtains, a dull rust that might have once been red, have shrunk in some long ago spring-cleaning wash so that they no longer touch the sill. At night, the exposing width of darkened glass troubles Jeanie more than the towers of plastic storage boxes. Before dressing or undressing she fills the gap with two rolled-up bath towels.
The flat belongs to a cousin she has scarcely seen since primary school. Sue Hawe is the daughter of Jeanie’s mother’s youngest brother. A rift between their families, which neither of them can remember or explain, means they share a few vivid early memories, and then nothing, until Jeanie called and asked if Sue could put her up.
“Oh, sure! I’d love to see you,” Sue said. “So what, a couple of days? A week?”
Jeanie has slept in Sue’s spare room for almost three months, to her host’s mounting antagonism.
Until her thirty-fifth year, Jeanie’s life had followed its expected curve, from childhood to marriage and motherhood, with a few years in between as a dental hygienist. At her wedding to Rob Tarrant, luminous in a pearl-white guipure lace gown, exhilarated beneath a mist of veil, Jeanie had felt an almost holy sense of purpose. Her life’s trajectory had been clear: she’d had no doubts. That certainty would last until their second child Madeleine was about to start school. By then Jeanie and Rob had settled into their house on the new estate, which when the gardens and street trees matured, would be as enviably leafy as the suburb where Jeanie had been raised. Their son and daughter had both been born healthy; they were bright. Jeanie had believed her cup of happiness was full.
And then in bed one night in the thin summer darkness, at a moment of unguarded emotion that owed something to a long, boozy dinner with friends, Rob blurted out that he hadn’t been in love on their wedding day.
“But I love you now, Jeanie,” he moaned. “I love you so much.”
Pressed into the mattress, Jeanie had become deathly still. Could what Rob had said be true? All these years, wouldn’t she have known if he had been pretending?
“What do you mean?” she breathed into his ear, softly, dangerously.
Rob peeled damply away from her and rolled onto his back. “I’m saying I love you,” he said. “That’s all.”
“What about when we were married?” she persisted.
In the dark he found her hand and squeezed it. “Well, I had always planned to settle down by the time I was twenty-eight. It felt like the right age, you know, to have kids. There was never anyone special, but you were the steadiest girl I knew; I was sure you’d make a good wife and mother. So after the courting, I proposed. I always knew in my head that it was right, but I had never felt it in my heart, until now.”
“What, you mean until tonight?”
“Not tonight – just lately. This past year. It’s been growing on me.”
Lying on her back in the stuffy bedroom, sticky with sweat and semen, Jeanie had said quietly, “I see.”
She wondered about this steadiness Rob had detected in her, and valued. It was true that she had not been as flighty as some of her teenage friends, had never gone in for hysterics, or fits of the giggles, or for acting out and upsetting her parents. She’d always had her homework done; her grades were good, though she was never top of the class. Jeanie had been a house captain, and a prefect. A dentist’s daughter, her teeth had been naturally straight without the need for bands. She was good-looking rather than pretty, which was much the best, her mother assured her, because good looks last.
In her final year of high school Jeanie had almost swerved off course. She’d had a serious crush on her art teacher, Mr Deverill. His dark hair curled over his collar; he rarely wore a tie, and somehow got away with this departure from school etiquette. Jeanie had once seen him coming out of a picture theatre wearing tight black jeans and a leather jacket, looking immensely cool. Mr Deverill had read into Jeanie’s constant presence a budding passion for art. He’d introduced her to Matisse and Bonnard, his personal favourites, and Jeanie made up her mind to go to art school. Her imagination had seized on the romance of the artistic life, and she pictured herself in a studio with high, uncurtained windows, wearing a paint-stained smock like Berthe Morisot, or Mary Cassatt.
“Artists are born with all the resources they need inside them,” Mr Deverill said. “They create out of their own personal light.”
Jeanie had felt a tremor of sadness for Mr Deverill, that his inner light had been dimmed, or even extinguished, by the need to teach. She had felt her own light shining clear and strong. But her mother had sat with her all one long summer afternoon and patiently pointed out that art school would take her far from home. There was no certainty in the artistic life, whereas she could study right here to become a dental assistant; she could gain work experience in her father’s practice. When she married and had children she would always be able to find paid, part-time employment, whereas as an artist, who knew if she would ever earn anything? Resistant at first, Jeanie had at last caved in to parental pressure. But there were times, staring over the edge of her mask at a bleeding gum, when she had wanted to hurl the probe or the suction tube across the room.
In the aftermath of Rob’s revelation there was no noticeable change in their lives, but below the surface tectonic plates were shifting. Jeanie bought a box of watercolour paints and a selection of sable brushes; she bought sheets of Arches paper, and a French watercolour easel. They were expensive, especially the easel and the numbers 12 and 14 sable brushes. Jeanie had worked part-time after Ben was born but then quit after Madeleine. The money for the art materials came from their joint account, but Jeanie wrote the cheque with a steady hand, as she would not have done even six months earlier.
When Maddy started school, instead of going back to work, Jeanie bought a second-hand bicycle. In the mornings, as soon as Rob left and she had walked the children to school, she packed her painting equipment and cycled away from the house, away from the suburbs.
The first time she approached Bailey’s Wood Jeanie had burst out laughing: she was wearing a bright red jacket with a little hood. A council information board informed her that she was entering one of the few remaining semi-natural ancient woodlands, the habitat of various butterfly species, of birds such as the greater spotted woodpecker, the tree-creeper, and the nuthatch. The access tracks were in fair condition, though there were places where Jeanie had to dismount and haul the bike over rocks, or broken ground, or the roots of trees. If the wind was in a certain direction there was the distant roar of the motorway, but otherwise it was quiet. Bailey’s Wood was a cool, green, private, and largely silent world, a place of dappled light and dissolving shadows that Jeanie felt had been waiting for her.
She went to the wood to paint nearly every weekday, packing a sandwich and staying until it was time to ride back and meet the children. When autumn came she went whenever the weather was dry, for rain muddied the paths and made cycling, or even walking, difficult. When she was unable to sketch and paint out of doors Jeanie felt listless and agitated; in the end she bought wate
rproofs and braved the weather.
When Jeanie first met Julian Holt she had been working her way around the western edge of the wood, avoiding the mud stirred by recent rains. He was walking ahead of her along a track between clumps of faded bracken, a lean old man, she first thought, and she would later learn that he would soon turn sixty. He walked with a slight stoop, as if he were searching for something. She watched him stop to catch his breath, and when they became friends he would explain that he was allergic to some of the plants he collected, that there were one or two that affected his breathing. When he heard her bicycle bell, he turned – eyes bright and inquisitive, mouth a generous curve under a close-cut beard; his once-dark hair was liberally streaked with grey, but it was still plentiful. He made room for her to pass, but it was impossible not to stop and speak to him, though Jeanie couldn’t have said why.
She dismounted, and as they fell into conversation Jeanie caught herself thinking that Mr Deverill might look like this now, that they must be of a similar age. Julian showed her the different mosses he’d gathered in the hessian bag he carried.
“I’ve painted all of these,” she said, “but I don’t know their names.”
So he laid the mosses across his palm one by one, and told her their Latin and common names: as with most plants, the common names were the most beautiful.
“Swan’s-neck thyme moss, glittering wood moss, common haircap …”
Julian was writing a research paper on the historical uses of moss, everything from thatching and insulating houses to bandaging wounds. As they walked on together, he asked Jeanie about her painting.
The path they were following led to a lane, and eventually to a small wooden gate. Julian pointed to a squat stone hut – two windows, a red front door, a pitched slate roof topped by a chimney. All that was missing was a curl of smoke. This was where he was living while he completed his research.
“My daughter draws houses that look like this,” Jeanie said.
After that she would skirt the wood, hoping to bump into him. Often she did, for in the mornings Julian wrote, and after lunch he went foraging. Once, when a heavy rain caught them in the open, he invited Jeanie to shelter in the cottage. Inside, the brick-floored main room had been arranged around an open fireplace; wire baskets of drying mosses hung from the beams, and there were worn Persian rugs to soften the bricks. A scrubbed pine dining table and two comfortable chairs drawn up beside the hearth, a divan that doubled as a couch, were the only furniture. To Jeanie’s eyes, the bare, whitewashed walls were not stark, but serene.
In its simplicity, its confident use of natural materials, the woodcutter’s cottage, for that was what it had once been, Julian said, could not have been more different to Jeanie’s and Rob’s house. Crouching in front of the fire in her scarlet jacket, Jeanie wanted to rush home and strip away all the bric-a-brac and knickknacks that cluttered their rooms; she thought with a surge of resentment that if she had held out for art school she might, by now, have been capable of designing an interior like this one.
Jeanie’s woodland watercolours and drawings were delicate, Julian said, they were enchanting. He encouraged her to have them framed.
“You must put them where they can be seen.”
Bolstered by his approval, Jeanie ordered double mounts, acid-free board, conservation glass. She stripped their house of ornaments, and when her first pictures came back from the framer she hung them on the walls. Rob had never complained when she bought art materials, though he sucked in a long breath when he saw the framer’s bill. But he lamented loudly the disappearance of the china dogs and shepherdesses that had been bequeathed to them by his mother; he was infuriated by the sudden absence of his collection of beer steins and football memorabilia, and he demanded that all of it be returned, likewise the souvenirs of family holidays. Jeanie did not restore a single ornament; in fact she could not, for she had delivered them to a charity store.
When Rob said, “Well, I don’t know whether I want to live in a bloody art gallery,” Jeanie heard in her husband’s voice a new belligerence.
That night, when he ran a hand along her hip as she lay curled away from him, Jeanie pretended to be asleep.
To Jeanie, the tone of their marriage had altered; it was taking place now in a different register. Yet they carried on as before, entertaining other couples most weekends, or being entertained. At one of these gatherings Jeanie emerged from her kitchen balancing a tray of drinks, to hear Barry Darkley mutter to Erris Cleary’s husband that he supposed her paintings were a pretty good effort, but they didn’t cut the mustard as Art. The two men were standing in front of the most recent of Jeanie’s woodland studies. Sensing her approach, they had turned towards her and raised their glasses. Barry’s smile was a little embarrassed: he must have suspected that she had overheard.
Jeanie did not allow what Barry had said to fully sink in, not then and there. And this would be the way she would always deal with rejection and criticism: she would put it aside to examine later, in private, when there was no one to see if she cried. Barry Darkley couldn’t have known that his casual remark would touch Jeanie’s rawest nerve, the one that feared the work she cared about was simply self-taught illustration, that in spite of Julian’s cautious praise it was mediocre.
Winter light is the most beautiful of all – silvery, pure, vacillating. In the wood, hunched over her easel and shivering a little inside her coat, Jeanie would look up into a slant of cloud-filtered light and long to stand naked under its piercing shower. If clarity was a reward for the season’s austerity, poor weather meant there were days at a time when she was unable to ride to the wood. Either it rained steadily, there were gales, or it threatened to snow. Trapped at home, she thought of Julian, snug in his cottage, a wisp of smoke rising from the chimney. Soon he would finish writing up his research and leave. One day she would pedal up the lane and find the cottage empty.
Since the first time she sheltered there from the rain, Jeanie had often sat by Julian’s fire. They had been drinking hot chocolate together when he had asked about her children. She had talked about Ben and Maddie, and how sometimes she looked at them as they slept and wondered how she could have produced such perfect little creatures. Julian had busied himself with the fire, but before he turned away Jeanie had read in his eyes that he thought she was beautiful, and that naturally her children would be beautiful, too, and this flash of naked admiration warmed her. Rob had never looked at her in that way, not even now, when he claimed to finally be in love.
Julian’s wife was named Diana. They had been married for more than thirty years.
“Ovarian cancer put an end to the dream of children,” he said. “Diana survived the cancer but not the childlessness.” Julian’s voice was heavy. “She changed so much,” he said. “It was like being married to a different person.”
“I’m so sorry,” Jeanie said, instantly regretting having boasted of the perfection of her children. “I was one of the lucky ones.”
Julian shrugged. “Diana was hospitalised with an eating disorder. It comes and goes even now. She may never be cured.”
“You stuck together through all of that,” Jeanie said.
“We did, though we are each in our own ways quite solitary.”
It was why he could spend three months collecting mosses, and writing. Diana, too, spent long periods away from home. Currently, she was in Ethiopia. Julian had catalogued mosses on Dartmoor, and on the Burren. Jeanie learned that he had written a history of the moss gatherers of Dartmoor in the First World War, and of the moss factory, privately financed by the Prince of Wales, that had turned sphagnum moss into wound dressings for the Red Cross.
“They were cranked into service again during the Second World War,” he told her.
The more time Jeanie spent with Julian, the harder it was to be with Rob. What did they ever talk about, other than the children? Entering a room, Rob’s once reassuring bulk now seemed to absorb most of the oxygen, most of the light. Yet Jeani
e recognised that her husband was the same as he had always been – it was she who was different. Just how different, she could not have articulated, but if pushed she would have said that the disenchantment with her marriage had begun with Rob’s confession that he had not been in love with her on their wedding day. That knowledge had ignited a slow-burning resentment, a feeling that she had been taken in, acquired as a brood mare, not valued for who she was. If she had known at the time, it might have been grounds for an annulment.
Jeanie saw herself floating up the aisle, sacrificial under the mist of her veil. As she had stood beside Rob at the altar she had felt as if the two of them were lifted up together into a high place, ‘a sacred mountain’, she had said to herself at the time. Now she saw that she had been as alone on the mountain as under the veil, and she felt a vengeful desire to punish Rob.
Once it becomes clear that you are not a guest but something less transitory, camping in someone else’s home is like the Chinese water torture. Drip drip drip. Jeanie and Sue have exhausted the conversations about places and people they knew as children. Drip drip drip. Jeanie has emptied her sympathy over Sue’s acrimonious divorce, and the rejecting behaviour of her ungrateful children. Sue has listened to Jeanie explain how a life that once seemed so solid has mysteriously evaporated.
Neither cousin understands what the other is saying. Though they speak the same language, words, sentences, turn opaque when they attempt to describe their lives. Jeanie strains to imagine Sue’s ex-husband impregnating the eighteen-year-old daughter of a couple he and Sue have known and socialised with since they were first married; she tries to see it as a lapse of judgement, or as a straight betrayal, but in the end all she sees is the abuse of a young and emotionally fragile young woman by a man Jeanie recalls unflatteringly as flashy, superficially attractive, a predatory alpha male. Understandably, the children want nothing to do with their father. Meanwhile, Sue purses her lips over Jeanie’s artistic ambition.
Murmurations Page 6