“How could you give up your home, your family, over wall art?” Her face is a study of incomprehension and dismay.
Jeanie shrugs. “I know it must seem strange.”
But Sue isn’t listening. Drip drip drip. She asks whether Jeanie can pitch in some cash for the weekly food shop.
Julian had begun to appear uneasy when Jeanie came to the cottage. She wondered whether he was preparing to leave, and couldn’t bring herself to ask. What she craved was more time in the wood, longer conversation with Julian, so she arranged for a child minder to pick up Ben and Maddy from school on Wednesday afternoons. Of course it all depended on the weather, and there would be days of pelting rain when leaving home was not even an option. So the arrangement was kept fluid: Jeanie would ring the child minder on a Wednesday morning if she wanted her to collect Ben and Maddy.
The first two Wednesdays had been sunny, though cold. For the first time, there was no pressure to return before the home-time bell. On the third Tuesday, Rob went to a work mate’s boozy farewell, and when he stumbled in close to midnight and climbed into bed beside her, Jeanie had felt the heat of his intention to have sex, and was repelled. Curled against her resisting back, he slipped an arm around her waist and pulled her close; his hand found the opening in the top of her nightdress and fumbled its way inside.
“Please, it’s late.” Jeanie feigned sleepiness.
He pinched her nipple. “Come on, it’s not as late as all that.”
She flinched and pulled away, but he had lifted the hem of her nightdress and slid his hand between her thighs.
Jeanie propelled herself up and off the bed, and flicked on the light. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m not feeling that great.”
Rob, his face flushed, hurled a pillow at her. “Frigid bitch!”
Jeanie switched off the light, and went next door to creep in beside Maddy. She feared Rob would follow and drag her back to bed, but he must have rolled over and fallen asleep.
In the morning, Jeanie’s hands shook as she buttered toast, made coffee, filled bowls with cereal for the children. Rob left for work without speaking, and when Jeanie had walked the children to school she jumped on her bicycle and pedalled madly towards Bailey’s Wood.
Stray snowflakes fluttered around her as she sped along the path to the cottage. In the milk-pale light the shapes of evergreens stood out, dark and sombre, alongside pockets of deciduous larch. She threw down the bicycle in the lane and knocked at the red door. When Julian opened it she gasped with relief, for there had been no smoke, and the place looked deserted.
“Am I interrupting?” she said. “I’m sorry …”
He held the door open for her, his forehead creased with surprise. “I haven’t got the fire going yet,” he said. “But there’s coffee.”
The table was covered in his papers and notebooks. Beside one of the chairs, a stack of text books, an empty wine glass. Jeanie imagined him sitting beside the fire last night, reading, sipping wine, while she had been lying in bed listening for Rob to come home.
“I’ll bring in some kindling,” he said.
The room was filled with the blue-white light of the unshed snow. Through the window the flank of the wood reared up, ancient, implacable; it would exist when she and Julian and Rob, when all of them, even Maddy and Ben, were gone. All the way to the cottage the memory of Rob calling her frigid had filled her with a swelling rage, but his voice was muted now, her anger less urgent than her need to see again the expression she had once surprised on Julian’s face. She could hear him outside snapping small branches as she peeled off her coat, as she bent to unlace her boots; she pulled her jumper and shirt over her head in one movement, and dropped them on the floor. When he appeared in the doorway, she was naked.
Slowly, Julian lowered the kindling onto the hearth. Jeanie didn’t move as he crossed to her and laid his hand on her arm.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“Yes.”
The expression she sought was there in his eyes – desire, tinged with reverence.
He brushed the blade of her collarbone with a fingertip. “My God,” he said, “you really are a most beautiful woman.”
Jeanie closed her eyes. She wanted to give freely to this man what she had withheld from Rob. She would have laid down on the rug with Julian, or on the divan that was still unmade from where he had slept.
She began to cry, and he put his arms around her. “You’re cold,” he said.
Jeanie shook her head. “No.”
She felt his warmth against her breasts, against the small white mound of her belly. Now that she had started crying, Jeanie found she could not stop. Julian pulled the cover from the divan and wrapped it around her; he held her close, and they stood there beside the unlit fire for what felt like a long, long time.
Sue becomes beady-eyed when Jeanie says she can’t contribute towards the electricity bill.
“But I’ll have a cheque next week. I’ll be able to make it up to you then.”
Her cousin’s lips are two thin lines.
“I don’t know about next week,” Sue says. “Look, it’s time to speak plainly. I mean, we were related as kids, but I hardly know you now. You could be anyone.”
On the Wednesday when it had threatened to snow, Jeanie went to the wood without calling the child minder. After school, Maddy and Ben waited at the school gates but there was no one to meet them or to see them home safe. It came to Jeanie in a flood of horror that turned her limbs to water, as she cycled up the drive and saw Rob’s car.
All their downstairs lights were blazing. In their kitchen, their neighbour with the too-tight perm and inquisitive eyes stood stirring scrambled eggs in a pan. Seated at the table, Maddy and Ben looked limp from crying. When Jeanie loomed in the doorway Rob glared, then jerked his head towards the study.
Jeanie describes the destruction of her marriage, but Sue does not see that it only takes the slightest shift in purpose to spin a life off course.
“You make a defensive turning, or you swerve towards some perceived excitement,” Jeanie says.
Sue stares at her like she is crazy, and Jeanie makes up her mind to leave.
The cottage was empty when she went back. Afterwards, because of Ben and Maddy, she tried to re-enter her own life, but it was closed. Rob moved out. Eventually, the children grew up and left home. For a while Jeanie struggled to maintain the mortgage. Her parents developed dementia, and their house was sold to pay the nursing home. Rob married again, and he and his new wife had two more children. Maddy settled in London, Ben in Prague. Jeanie started to sleep in people’s guest rooms.
“Once the curve of a life is altered it will never again be as it was, even though you throw your whole self into restoring it,” says Jeanie.
Sue rolls her eyes. They are out of coffee; it’s Jeanie’s turn to walk to the shop.
“And when one life loses direction, those closest are nudged into new orbits; some constellations appear, and others vanish.”
When Jeanie learned to use a computer, and the Internet, she found Julian’s obituary. Julian Barrington Holt had died at sixty-five of pancreatic cancer; a notable bryologist and lichenologist, he was survived by his wife Diana.
When Jeanie’s life lost its direction, those closest to her were thrown into new orbits. Since then she has watched countless lives soar and plunge amid trails of sparks and burning debris. Witnessing their destruction gives her no pleasure.
This Moment Is Your Life
Delia makes her first serious public slip at a family christening. The ceremony is held outdoors in a sunny garden, among old apple trees just coming into blossom and twenty or thirty rose bushes frantic with their first flush of blooms. The roses are yellow, red, and a coral shade Delia particularly dislikes. A few are even multi-coloured – yellow streaked with scarlet – altogether a cacophony of colour that grates on Delia’s nerves. She is frowning over this, when a young woman walks towards her holding a baby in christening robes.
The woman pauses in front of Delia and raises the sleeping infant a little higher to show them his face, for Malcolm is hovering at Delia’s shoulder.
“He’s sweet,” Delia says, a frown puckering her forehead. “Where did you get him?”
The young woman’s broad smile falters. “Well, he’s ours,” she says, “mine and Carl’s. This is Theo!”
Malcolm’s hand comes swiftly to rest in the small of Delia’s back, as if to support her if she should topple. Theo? The name rings in her head, but it has a meaningless echo in connection with this young woman and her child. The girl’s open, freckled face is familiar, but Delia cannot at that moment summon her name. Who is this person holding baby Theo, and staring at her with an almost terrified expression?
Malcolm glides to her rescue. “Pauline and Carl chose the name Theo for their son in memory of your father, Delia. You told me you were very touched that they’d done that.”
“Oh, yes,” she says gratefully. “Theo is a beautiful name.”
And it really is a beautiful name, one Delia associates with patience, and tenderness, and old-fashioned courtesy. It’s just that this Pauline, who has taken for her tiny son the name of Delia’s father, is a mystery to her. They must be related, surely. Or why make a point about the name? But related in what way? When she poses the question her mind comes up blank.
“I’m so glad you approve.” Pauline’s smile has faded. She glances around the garden. “There are some seats under the apple trees,” she says. “Would you like me to send Carl over with a drink?”
People are strolling past them with champagne flutes, and Delia thinks it might be pleasant to sit in the dappled light under the trees and fill her mouth with cold bubbles, to let them glide down her throat until the sense of calm and well-being alcohol always brings erases this moment of awkwardness and confusion.
“Two sparkling waters, please,” Malcolm says. “We have a long drive to get home.”
“Sure. I’ll tell Carl.”
Pauline backs away from them, while Delia stares into the golden curves of a rose, resentful at being denied champagne, grateful to Malcolm for covering for her.
Malcolm’s voice is pitched so only Delia can hear, as he seeks to ease her confusion. “Your niece, Pauline, she’s lovely.”
Delia dares not speak, or even look at Malcolm.
Five years before the afternoon of Theo’s christening, Delia and Malcolm were married. In the interval between those two events, Malcolm, a retired lecturer in structural engineering, has been designing, and then building, the eco-house where he and Delia now live. Constructed using materials and technology that reduces its carbon footprint, their corner house is surrounded on two sides by high gabion walls. Delia has learned that the word ‘gabion’ comes from the Italian gabbione, or ‘big cage’, and that Leonardo da Vinci designed a gabion for the foundations of the San Marco Castle in Milan.
“It was called a corbeille Leonard, or ‘Leonardo basket’.” Malcolm has never lost his zeal for teaching.
The small weatherboard house that had previously stood on the site had been surrounded by old fruit trees, and by carefully managed plantings of pale roses, and medicinal herbs, kept just tidy enough not to look untended. It must have belonged to a good witch, Delia thought the first time she saw it; a wise woman who would have turned the herbs into healing salves, into life-saving remedies, perhaps even into love potions. Malcolm had stamped up and down the brick-paved paths, crushing violets, and lady’s mantle growing between the cracks. He pointed out to Delia the building’s lack of insulation, its woeful plumbing, the water-hungry orange and lemons trees.
“But we can keep the peach trees, surely,” Delia said. “Peaches and quinces thrive in a Mediterranean climate.”
Malcolm shook his head. “They’ll look out of place alongside succulents and natives.”
So the block was ruthlessly cleared, and slowly Malcolm’s dream house emerged out of the raw scraped soil, a house with an air of being barricaded against attack, plain-faced behind its gabion walls. Malcolm explained to passers-by who had stopped to watch the fencers at work that the life expectancy of gabions relies on the lifespan of the wire, not on the contents of the basket.
“The structure will fail when the wire fails,” he said.
At the end, a team of landscape gardeners had moved in and planted tough native shrubs and wild grasses to Malcolm’s design. In time these developed messy growth habits, until Delia had trouble telling which were the plants and which were weeds. The wire cages packed with rocks, too, were something of an eyesore. She felt like apologising to their neighbours, and to the woman with the picket fence across the street whose front windows faced their gabion wall, with its stepped-back pockets of spiky, weed-like grasses. But Malcolm was so clearly pleased with the whole effect, and Delia, who was secretly a little frightened by the relentless creep of her memory loss, kept her opinions to herself.
A couple of years before Delia and Malcolm married, they had abandoned their separate living arrangements – a rundown but convivial share house for Delia, and a one-bedroom flat close to the university for Malcolm – and moved into a two-storey town house Malcolm had inherited from his mother: it was the eventual sale of this place that would finance their eco-house. Delia was both excited and nervous at the commitment this move implied. It wasn’t that she didn’t love Malcolm, but she had been so long on her own, and while she had shared domestic spaces with other people it had always felt somewhat temporary; housemates came and went as their circumstances changed, so that Delia could have moved on at any time without tears or ill feeling.
Moving in with Malcolm was different. Delia found herself thinking back to the misery of living with, and leaving, her first husband, of how Roger had cowed her, physically and mentally, until she had agreed to let him take Josh and be satisfied with keeping Katie. If she forced him to go to court he would take both children, Roger had said. Delia had believed him, for although her husband had failed his law exams and gone into insurance, his father was a senior partner in a law firm. The court would hear of her depraved behaviour, Roger threatened. Delia had no idea what he meant, but she had known when she was beaten.
Women in Roger’s family did not go out to work, and after their honeymoon Roger had suggested that Delia quit her job. She was receptionist to an accountant and the work was dull, so she hadn’t minded; once they had children she wouldn’t be able to, anyway. But then when she’d wanted to leave Roger, she saw the trap. With no money, beyond what little she could borrow from friends, Delia had signed the papers her husband had drawn up, and watched him drive off with Josh’s face a pale blur in the car’s rear window. It was years before she saw her son again, and when she did he was angry with her. By then Delia had concluded that those papers Rob had pressed her to sign might not have held up in a court, that most likely he had been bluffing, but it was too late for her and Josh.
While she was packing to move into Malcolm’s place, Delia considered keeping her books in storage for a while, in case things didn’t work out. There were boxes and boxes of them, the spoils of having worked in a bookshop for almost twenty years, too many to shift by herself. Aside from the books, she lived lightly, and could have packed up and moved all her belongings in the boot of her small hatchback. But even to be thinking this way seemed half-hearted, a betrayal; it was tempting fate to bring her relationship with Malcolm crashing down at the first hurdle. How could they form a lasting partnership if she wasn’t prepared to bring her whole self to it? Hadn’t this always been her trouble?
When she dithered for too long over the move, Malcolm had come and helped her pack. Delia took the books. Eventually, when she’d seemed reluctant to deal with the boxes of belongings piled up in the garage at the townhouse, he had helped her to open them, and that was how he came upon the shoe box full of old photographs.
Delia had forgotten its existence, but the moment she saw it in Malcolm’s hands she felt a rush of recognition, a twist of
anxiety in her gut. Once he’d realised what the box contained, Malcolm was jubilant.
“At last,” he said, “a clue as to who this woman I’m planning on spending the rest of my life with really is!”
Delia had smiled weakly, wondering what was in the box, hoping she’d disposed of anything that would make her feel tacky or ridiculous. There were times when she, too, would have welcomed a clue to who she was, and who she had once been, though she didn’t fancy receiving these revelations in Malcolm’s presence.
Together they inspected snapshots of a younger Delia pushing Katie on a swing, feeding ducks on a pond, blowing out three candles on a cake for Josh, whose solemn little face looked so much like Delia’s. There was a photograph of Delia and Roger and the children standing in the driveway of the last house they had lived in together. That suburb where the smell of barbequed meat hung in the air on fine weekends, and where the magpies had sung in the early mornings as Delia stumbled from bed after a night of broken sleep, to change nappies, to set out the breakfast dishes, to make coffee for Roger before he left for work.
“What’s going on in this one?”
Malcolm passed it to Delia, a Polaroid photograph, milky with age. It showed a brick-paved suburban patio at night; adults in fancy dress, drinking and dancing. They had been partying for some time judging by the sweaty faces of the drinkers, the abandon of the dancers.
Delia held the picture gingerly by its white borders and peered into it, at first with a look of wonder and then with a secretive narrowing of her eyes. There she was, flame-haired, with a high, choppy fringe that exposed her eyebrows, red-lipstick mouth caught half open, like the mouth of a goldfish, or a porn star. What astonished her was her own raw beauty; at the time, she had judged herself awkward looking, even plain. She had sewn the flapper dress herself out of a pair of old lace curtains. To her relief the figure she was dancing with was a blur, except for one pinstriped sleeve and an inch of white shirt-cuff.
Murmurations Page 7