Talking to the Dead

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘It’s only a mile and a bit into the village as the bee flies,’ says Isabel.

  ‘Not as the pram pushes,’ I point out.

  ‘He won’t be in a pram. I’ve got a sling.’

  ‘But you’ve got a pram, haven’t you?’ That was one of my plans, that I’d take the baby for long walks in his pram while Isabel slept. I’ve never pushed a pram, and I quite liked the idea of it.

  ‘I haven’t bothered. Where would Susan push it, down the track and back again? We’ll sort out something once Richard gets back.’

  But she has piles of clothes, collected here and there, plain white nightgowns and hand-knitted cardigans. She has even embroidered tiny ducks and apples on them herself. When I was here last I watched her embroidering, a new skill for her long quick fingers.

  Isabel leans back suddenly. ‘I’m so tired,’ she says suddenly, in a voice wrenched from some place she refuses to show me.

  ‘I’ll go. I’ll let you sleep.’

  ‘Don’t go yet’ She shuts her eyes. They shut tight, the lids sealed over the globes of her eyes. Her face is thinner, but her breasts are round and hard as stones under the thin lawn of her nightdress. The pen she’s dropped is staining the bed cover. Without saying anything I pick it up, and the sheets of paper. Richard feels… I read. I put the papers on her bedside table.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’

  Her head moves on the pillow, side to side, slowly. No. One of her hands creeps towards me, an inch or two, palm upturned. I take it and fold it in mine.

  ‘I’ll just sit here, then,’ I say quietly, and I think she smiles. I sit still, holding Isabel’s hand. Her bed is placed so that someone sitting up in bed looks straight out over the garden, and then beyond the garden wall to the meadows and the line of the Downs. I can see a tree with red fruit on it that seems to drip down the stone of the wall. There are cattle moving into one of the meadows, a long line of them, seeming to go by themselves at this distance. But then I hear a faint cry through the window, a man’s voice, driving the cattle. And another cry, not faint at all, answering it from inside the house. The baby. Even on me it acts like sandpaper jagging over my skin. I feel Isabel tense. I look down and see two rings rise like jumping fish, one over each nipple. Her milk. She turns and opens her eyes, begins to raise herself awkwardly on one elbow.

  ‘Tell Susan to bring him in. I don’t want him to cry.’

  Next to Isabel Susan looks indecently healthy. Her short fair curls brush Isabel’s cheek as she leans down with the baby, putting him with what looks like exaggerated care into Isabel’s arms. He is purple all over, arms and legs wagging feebly as he feels himself let down through the air. He butts into Isabel and screams.

  ‘He can smell the milk,’ says Susan in a loud voice. A fight breaks out between Isabel’s breast and the baby, who doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. ‘He’s not latched on! He’s not latched on!’ shouts Susan.

  ‘All right,’ says Isabel in a low, furious voice. The baby dives towards her navel, his head wobbling. The struggle begins again, the baby screaming louder than ever, Susan forcing his head up, a film of sweat appearing on Isabel’s forehead. Suddenly there is silence.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ says Isabel. The baby sucks noisily, his purple colour draining to pink. Susan stands back, and slowly Isabel’s free hand comes around the baby, and her two middle fingers begin to tap his back.

  ‘Ooh, we’ve started him off on the wrong side, I never realized,’ says Susan.

  ‘Well he’s not bloody coming off now,’ says Isabel, with her eyes shut.

  ‘Shall I make you a cup of tea?’ I suggest. I catch a glint of a glance from Isabel. ‘Susan’ll make it. She knows where everything is,’ she says firmly, and Susan goes off with a crisp, bright tread which somehow manages-to be reproachful, too.

  ‘It’s not like that when she’s not here,’ says Isabel.

  ‘It looked…’ I fumble for the right words, ‘extraordinary’

  Isabel laughs. ‘Have a proper look at him now she’s gone. Do you like him?’

  I look at him. Now he is calm I can see he’s fair. He even has a light lick of hair. His eyes are screwed shut.

  ‘He’s such a big baby. I thought he’d be tiny and dark,’ says Isabel.

  Tiny and dark, like I was. Isabel can remember that.

  ‘He doesn’t look much like Richard,’ I say.

  ‘No,’ says Isabel, but she’s only half listening now. One finger touches the sole of a dangling purple foot, which kicks convulsively. She looks inward, and remote. I remember suddenly how she would turf my baby out of the doll’s pram we shared, in order to lay hers there.

  ‘I want you to take pictures of him,’ she says.

  Chapter Five

  I’m under the fig tree, with its big leaves all round me like hands to keep off the sun. There are plenty of figs this year, and for once they’re going to ripen. Their warm, spicy smell fills the shade where I sit. It’s half-past two, and the sky’s white with heat. In this weather you sit out the glare, waiting for the long light of evening. But I don’t mind, not here, not miles from London where the only sound of traffic is the distant hoot of a train as it gets to the level crossing, and there’s no one crowding into my shade. The shadow of the fig leaves is extraordinarily sharp, almost more distinct than the thing itself. I put out my foot, let the edge of shadow cut it, draw it back again.

  From here you can’t see the house, and the house can’t see you. Or rather, no one in the house can see me now. I count them up. Susan, in her glory this afternoon because the health visitor’s coming at three. Isabel, who must be there too. Edward, who lay in bed most of the morning, recovering, and has probably gone back there again after eating a good lunch. Recovering from what? Too much sex between the wrong people, that’s all it comes down to, though he and Isabel have turned it into something else which puts out its feelers all over the house. Every time I come into a room there he is, Edward, moody on a footstool, his chin on his hands, explaining to Isabel the enigma which is himself. He stops when he sees me. Edward has an actor’s instinct for a good audience.

  Susan’s scented danger. Edward is a serious distraction from the business of baby. She tried sending him off on a mission to get a particular type of nappy-rash cream yesterday, and even had a small list made out for him of things he might as well get while he was there. Edward doesn’t drive, either, so this involved two changes of bus. It would have kept him out of the house for several hours. Edward didn’t say no. He never says no. He smiled at Susan, and waited until she went away again.

  The baby sleeps. That baby sleeps with his whole heart. I’m getting to like watching him, the patterns he makes across his white flannelette sheets, the way he flings himself down the current of sleep, his lips pursed, his face so smooth there seem to be no features in it at all. Or perhaps just the perfect dab of his nose, at some angles. I look at him for a long time, but I haven’t taken any pictures yet, or tried to draw him. It’s hard to get in to see him alone. He is Isabel’s. I don’t want to draw the curve of her arm around him, or the way her neck bends, or his legs curling to her breast. He’s often naked while she feeds him, because it’s so hot. Isabel’s offering me these things all the time, but I don’t want them. I know them already.

  And of course there’s more to it than that. Of course I’m jealous. But of whom?

  I’ve brought out a sketchbook. Just a little one, the paper the size of a postcard. That’s the kind of drawing I want to do, drawings done as if through a keyhole, so that the way the image is framed becomes as important as the image itself. But my eye’s out. I don’t draw enough. You have to draw every day, every single day, if you want to keep your eye in. And your hand, and all the other things. My mother was the first person who taught me to draw. When I got angry with myself and crumpled things up she’d say, ‘It doesn’t matter. Better to do a drawing than not do one, even if it’s no good. Because of that bad drawing you’ll be able to do a be
tter one tomorrow.’ She had no time for people who wanted everything they did to be perfect. I can remember it now, sitting in her studio facing the tumble of roofs above the beach. Only it wasn’t a tumble once you looked at it. Every roof related precisely to space and the tilt of the land. I can hear her say, ‘You have to look at it, Nina.’ And then her hand came over my shoulder, took a piece of paper, drew quickly.

  ‘That’s only the way I see it,’ she said. Her hands were long like Isabel’s, but much rougher. You could see she worked with her hands. ‘In fact I think you’ll draw better than I do, in the end, if you keep at it.’

  I’m going to draw that cabbage, there, that fat, loose one squatting in a bed of big poppies. I’m going to do it quickly, without thinking about it too much. I flip to a new page, hold my pencil like a cutting tool, and begin.

  He doesn’t surprise me. When you’re looking so hard, you notice every change of light, and his shadow is big, like him. He’s still in a suit.

  ‘I thought I’d find some shade here,’ he says. ‘You don’t mind if I join you?’

  I move along the wooden bench, closing the sketchbook. ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘I’ve stopped you working,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want to do that.’

  I glance up, pleased and surprised. ‘I’ll go back to it,’ I say. ‘Is the health visitor still there?’

  ‘I haven’t been in yet,’ says Richard.

  He looks tired, his dark skin sallow. ‘There was a crowd of them in the bedroom,’ he says. ‘I’ll go into Isabel once she’s alone. I rang from the airport.’

  ‘Edward’s here.’

  ‘Yes, I thought he very probably would be.’

  ‘Alex might be coming down at the weekend, too.’

  Richard doesn’t answer. He stares out over the garden, his eyes narrowed against the glare.

  ‘And here you are drawing a cabbage,’ he says.

  ‘I’m perfectly happy,’ I say, and it’s true. He turns and looks at me, then says, ‘I’ve never seen it before, but you do look like your mother, don’t you? There’s a photo of her working which looks just like you did just then.’

  ‘You never saw my father, either.’

  ‘No. I’d like to have met him. Isabel was very fond of him.’

  ‘He was very selfish,’ I say suddenly, without meaning to. ‘I didn’t realize it until he was dead. It was impossible to think that while you were with him.’

  ‘Isabel says your mother was selfish. Before she had the baby she said all she’d have to do was think of what your mother did with you two, and then do the opposite.’

  He looks at me closely. I wonder if we are talking about my parents still, or about me and Isabel. ‘I know she thinks that,’ I say, ‘but it would have been different if she’d been interested in what my mother did.’

  ‘You say “my mother”, so does Isabel. Not “our mother”.’

  ‘We see her differently’

  Part of me itches for him to go, so that I can pick up the pencil again. I can see another, better way of drawing the cabbage now. But on the other hand, this is the least awkward conversation I’ve ever had with Richard.

  ‘The baby looks a bit like him,’ I say abruptly.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My father. Our father. His grandfather,’ I say, discovering this fact suddenly. The baby is not just Isabel’s. It is knitted into a chain of resemblances.

  ‘It amazes me how people find resemblances in babies,’ says Richard.

  ‘I suppose it’s what you look for.’

  He frowns, as if impatient He wants to be with Isabel, not here. He’s counting the moments until he hears the health visitor’s car go down the track, until he can see Isabel on his own.

  ‘I’m starving,’ he says. ‘The food on the plane was inedible.’

  ‘There’s some gooseberry pie in the fridge.’

  ‘You couldn’t get me some, could you, Nina? I don’t want to bump into that woman.’

  ‘Well…’ I say, my hand reaching for the sketchbook which I am not going to leave with him, ‘all right.’

  He smiles, his eyes going into their creases. Richard is forty-six, older, heavier, weightier than us. ‘Good,’ he says. I stand up and walk out of the shade into the glare of the sun, up one of Isabel’s little paths. She has planted low box hedges to contain the profusion that loops through trees, over trellises, up walls and around doorways. I like that dark, firm green. I like the way these hedges pinch the sense that there is too much of everything here. It’s very like Isabel, who is beautiful enough to wear reading glasses which most women would throw away.

  I find the pie under a plate. Edward has been at it since lunch, digging out the fruit, which he prefers to the crust. I cut a straight line across the spoiled part, and then a thick wedge, the right size for Richard. There’s some cream in a jug, thick and yellow. Susan’s mother sent the pie over, and it has a spray of elderflower in it to bring out the taste of the gooseberries. She has patterned the crust with pastry leaves. The inside of the crust is white and glutinous now the pastry has cooled, and cooking has thinned the skin of the berries so the seeds show through it. I pick one out, fragile but still whole, and eat it. I am hungry too. I cut another piece of the pie, for myself, and pour cream over them both, take two spoons and shake some sugar from a caster over the cream. I can hear voices, but the baby has stopped crying. A door opens and the voices grow louder. They must be coming out. I pick up the plates and hurry out into the light, round the corner by the pond and into the garden.

  Richard hasn’t moved, except to take off his shoes and socks. He lies back with his feet in the sun, eyes shut. His feet are pale, naked-looking, city feet.

  ‘Here you are.’

  We dig into the crust, the cream, the fruit. The edges of the cream are just beginning to swim in the heat already. I’ve always liked eating with Richard, because he is greedy, as I am. You can always tell. He leaves the plumpest gooseberry until last, to duck it in its own pond of cream. The sugar grits pleasantly on my teeth.

  ‘I should have brought the rest of it,’ I say. ‘Edward’ll only eat it otherwise.’

  Wasps are on the empty plates already. ‘Better go in,’ says Richard, weighing, picking up his shoes.

  ‘I didn’t hear the car.’

  ‘Didn’t you? I did. You were lost in that pie.’

  ‘I’ll come later,’ I say. The cabbage has changed slightly, wilted a little in the afternoon heat.

  ‘If she stood at the window, and I stood on the path, just by those sweet williams, I could see her,’ says Richard. ‘She often looks at the garden from there.’

  ‘She hasn’t been out. It’s too hot for the baby.’

  ‘He’ll have to get used to it,’ says Richard, ‘Isabel lives in this garden.’

  But she hasn’t been in it since I got here. Edward doesn’t like the sun, either, and their long talks go on indoors, in Isabel’s room, or in the shaded, stuffy, downstairs sitting-room. I couldn’t have imagined the garden without Isabel before this summer. She knew it, she planted it, she was always moving in it somewhere, or else she’d have left a trowel, a tray of cuttings, a ball of string to show that she’d be back soon. But the garden goes on without her, though I know it’s an illusion. It’ll rot from the inside, like pears left too long in a bowl.

  But it’s perfect now, and this afternoon it feels as much mine as anyone’s. I move back deeper into the shade of the fig tree. I think that I’ll draw a fig next, the bare knob of it stuck to its silvery branch. Everything around me seems to have grown on its own, flaring into colour or fading like those delphiniums which are bleached ghosts of themselves now. Drawing is easier when I can’t see Isabel’s long hands everywhere, in the soil, among the leaves, parting clumps of flowers, cutting, nicking, grafting, taking away.

  Chapter Six

  ‘You don’t look very alike,’ Susan said yesterday. ‘I wouldn’t have guessed you were sisters.’

  She had the ba
by in her arms. He’d been miserable all day after crying half the night, and Isabel was exhausted. The wound wasn’t healing where the drain had been, Susan said. She was going to phone the doctor later. Isabel was resting while Richard sat with her in the big armchair, going through papers. I had cooked a chicken to eat cold for supper, and dug up new potatoes. They’d been white as eggs when they came out of the earth but they were skinning over now, already brown. Later, just before we ate, I’d pull some lettuce.

  ‘I like those shorts,’ said Susan. ‘I think it’s nice, the way everyone wears shorts now.’

  I looked down at my legs, and laughed. They were far from perfect but I liked them.

  ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ said Susan, staring at me intently as if she really didn’t know the answer.

  ‘Yes, she is,’ I answered, and Susan sighed.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘we don’t all have to look like that.’

  She grinned back. For the first time we were nearly liking one another. ‘I haven’t got a sister,’ she said, ‘just brothers. Great lumps playing at cricket the whole time. Everyone’s mad about cricket round here.’

  ‘There were just the two of us,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but you were the artistic one, weren’t you?’ she went on, following a train of thought that led from Isabel’s beauty.

  ‘I take photographs, and I draw. I don’t call myself an artist.’

  ‘You do lovely drawings. I’ve always wanted to be able to draw.’ As she said it I saw her as a little girl, leaning breathily over the shoulder of a school friend. ‘Ooh, yours is brilliant! Mine’s rubbish.’ But I couldn’t be bothered to give Susan the contradictions she wanted. I smiled vaguely and wiped my earthy hands on my shorts.

  I keep thinking about Isabel. Being in the same house for so long is working strangely, making me think of her more rather than less. I think of us being sisters. She’s like me, more like me than Susan sees, and yet not like. All those genes thrown up into the air as casually as dice have come down quite differently each time. Once I used to think Isabel had had all the sixes, but now I’m not so sure. She’s three years older than me, so the family she grew up in was never quite the same as the one I knew. She remembers – or says she remembers – the time before I was born, when she walked between our parents holding a hand of each, linking them. When she talked to our parents about that time in front of me, I seemed to vanish. My not existing was as real to them as my existing. Isabel remembers our mother being pregnant. She was the big one, the sensible one, and I was the toddler who could scream and bite. For years I accepted Isabel’s lists of the things I had done to her, not even beginning to think that there might be other lists, other things, done to me. She told her stories with an air of adult patience, for adult ears.