Polly Samson

by Polly Samson

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  About Polly Samson

  A Rose for Paul

  The Morning After

  The Itch

  Low Tide

  Love at First Sight

  Other Work by Polly Samson

  Copyright

  This digital edition copyright 2013 by Hearst Magazines UK

  The expression GOOD HOUSEKEEPING as used in the title of this book is the registered trademark of the National Magazine Company Ltd and the Hearst Corporation INC. The use of this trademark other than with the express permission of the National Magazine Company or the Hearst Corporation is strictly prohibited.

  ‘A Rose for Paul’, copyright © 2011 Polly Samson

  ‘The Morning After’, copyright © 2010 Polly Samson

  ‘The Itch’, copyright © 2001 Polly Samson

  ‘Low Tide’, copyright © 2003 Polly Samson

  ‘Love at First Sight’, copyright © 2001 Polly Samson

  ISBN: 978-1-909748-08-8

  The right of Polly Samson to be identified as the author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act of 1988.

  Published by Hearst Magazines UK (The National Magazine Company Limited), 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  About Polly Samson

  Polly Samson was born in London and grew up in the West Country. She has worked in publishing and as a journalist, including two years as a weekly columnist for The Sunday Times.

  Her first novel, Out of the Picture, was shortlisted for the Author’s Club Award and many of her stories have been read on Radio 4. Her second collection of short stories, Perfect Lives, was a Book at Bedtime. She has recently written an introduction to a collection of Daphne du Maurier’s earliest stories and has been a judge for the Costa Prize.

  Polly has also written lyrics for two number one albums: Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell and David Gilmour’s On An Island.

  http://www.pollysamson.com/index.htm

  A Rose for Paul

  I watched the widow as they lowered Vincent into the earth. Doesn’t everyone do that at a funeral? We watch, the widow weeps, and if we’re honest we find ourselves longing for something a little more dramatic like suttee. She might wail, or beat her chest, or faint and fall into the grave. No-one likes a merry widow. I once saw a woman kiss her second husband beside the grave of her first: it was just a brush of the lips, but I knew. Just as I knew I wasn’t the only soul ready to condemn Analise Edmonds for the merest flicker of a smile that morning.We shivered around the grave pulling collars to the wind. It was perfect: bare and dark, bare trees, bare earth, a sky the colour of wet newspaper and Analise, to her credit, properly pale and thinner than ever; eyes streaming behind the modest veil of an upright black hat. Analise in a long black coat that I might once have bothered to envy and supported by her boy who was ushering her towards the Astroturf that framed Vincent’s final resting place; a nervous horse coaxed by its groom.

  From where I was standing I could only see the back of the boy. His stance. Rory was his name: solid as oak, an arm around his mother who had her face pressed to his shoulder. I heard her gasp just once, as the coffin straps delivered Vincent to his underworld with a little whisper of webbing on wood. The priest intoned and a few cold wet drops plopped from the branches above my head and trickled inside my collar. I watched Rory bow his head with its black beanie and red hair fringing over the collar of his coat.

  He turned from his mother as a slender girl stepped forward craning her neck to the hole. This girl was swathed in folds of black lace and fishnet so you’d think she’d come dressed for the opera. I watched Rory hold himself erect, a barrel full of grief in his chest while she clung to him, her hat of black feathers fluttering and curling in the trouble-making breeze.

  Other people approached the grave, sprinkling mud, their lips moving in silent incantation; three old ladies - Vincent’s aunts, I realised, but grown terribly old, tied polythene rain hats beneath their chins; I lip-read a man in a mac, probably a colleague of Vincent’s: “Goodbye you old bastard,” I swear that’s what he said.

  There was a rose bush in a black bucket beside the grave and I found myself watching Analise and thinking how strange it would be to snip a rose that had been nourished by your loved one’s old bones. A couple of years ago a friend of mine had her father incinerated and when she went to scatter his ashes found herself suddenly unable to resist dabbing just a little bit of it on her tongue to see how it tasted. Ashes to ashes. A sob escaped from the barrel of Rory’s chest. Ashes to ashes, bonemeal for roses and thorns from my heart. He brought his sleeve to cover his eyes and Analise reached her hands to him. A rose for a dandy’s buttonhole or a stem cut off in its prime, to stand alone on a bedside table. Umbrellas started to go up. I watched frail Analise flanked by Rory and the floozy in the feathered hat whose inexperience of funerals now showed in the sinking heels of her footwear. Glued to Analise’s side she was, stroking and patting with a black lace-gloved hand; no gooseberry would she be. I stifled a smirk as Analise leant away from her feathery tormentor, every cell in her body keening towards her son.

  Something made Analise whimper and turn her face into Rory’s coat and then my own eyes started to swim as I thought about how much Vincent loved his dog, hairy mutt that it was, and a particular green sweatshirt that he used to wear. Vincent in the sunshine by a river, the day he found the hairy mutt, the way he untangled it from the bushes and briars - shivering, it was only a pup - and held it wrapped in his sweatshirt with a look on his face so tender that remembering it made me cry out. People I barely recognised stared at me. And then realising who I was stared again. I might have been an apparition come back to haunt them.

  Analise turned to me. There was nothing I could do but kiss her, I felt the powder from her cheek on my lips and had to surreptitiously wipe them with a tissue. The perfume she wore, the same one, something like hyacinths but yeastier. Then the girlfriend: “Amelia,” introducing herself. “Rory’s fiancée.” I was glad to see this Amelia was not the sort of girl my boy Paul would have gone for; all panda-eyes she was, from the wrong mascara, though she’d learn, all too soon, to wear waterproof to funerals. There was altogether too much bother about her: feathers drooping from the rain, an ivory cameo on a black velvet choker at her throat, even a little hairnet. “And you are?” She asked, head cocked to one side and one eye on Rory walking away with his arm around his mother. She managed: “Vincent will like being right next to the football ground,” before bolting in pursuit of her beau and Analise. My favourite of Vincent’s polythene-hatted aunts squeezed my hand: “No he won’t” she whispered and told me where to go for the wake.

  I waited there in the rain for the men to get their shovels and watched them for a while. Vincent’s rosebush was wintering, nothing more than twigs, it would look like the hand of famine reaching from his grave.

  I wasn’t planning on going to the wake. I took the long way out of the churchyard and wouldn’t you know it, my path took me winding along the avenue where the children’s graves are, the cherished angels departed too soon, God’s little raindrops, plump moss over a baby’s grave like a coverlet of green velvet.

  The wake was in a room above a pub. There was the usual veiled nastiness about the will, smoked
salmon on squares of buttered brown bread with disdainfully curling edges. I grabbed at toothpick kebabs of cheese and silver skin onions but was unable to stop myself from seeing those pearly onions as Vincent’s eyes in his fatal last bath so had to put them down again. I came face to face with a woman I used to know and commended her reading from The Wasteland, though I’d have happily thrown a handful of dust down her throat to stop the garbled torture. I kept an eye on Analise sweeping like a wraith between people. I heard her say: “Vincent was a good man, you know…” And someone else butting in with a memory: “Vincent drank them all under the table,” “And another thing…” And an old man with a bit of a tremor claiming to be the only surviving male in the family: “It’s the hearts gets us all you know.”

  I thought about my Paul, the heart in his chest as sweet and pure as a lily. It had been good for my spirits seeing him in Kensal Rise.

  I’d gone straight to Kensal Rise from the sleeper. Three hours to kill before the funeral and hardly daring to hope as I rattled around the flat making a cup of tea, talking out loud so that if he was there he’d know it was me. I peered around the corner into the alcove and the sight of him made me catch my breath. Quietly at the table, with his chin resting in his hands, deep in thought. My Paul. He smiled his long, lazy smile as he reached to touch my face with gentle fingers and my heart swelled to see his eyes glinting like opals. It was always the first thing I noticed about Paul: the brightness of his blind eyes. I cradled his dear head and stroked his still baby soft hair.

  My first memory of Paul: a bubble, a hot August night with a full moon burning through our thin curtains. I woke after midnight, a tickling trail all the way up to my chest, like a trickle of sweat but stickier. It was hot in our bedroom, and stuffy: we couldn’t open the window because we didn’t have the bars fitted and an intruder might’ve just stepped in. Vincent: “I’ll get the windows done while you’re at the hospital. It’ll take my mind off it.” Well, I was home from doing his bidding and he hadn’t even stayed home, let alone fitted the security bars. The night was stifling. All Vincent said when I heaved myself back through the door was: “There’s blood on your skirt.” Eventually we’d got ourselves to sleep. Vincent didn’t dare reach for my hand and I didn’t know if I wanted him to anyway; I wished for the world to stop spinning. That’s how I thought it would be forever until I woke with that trickling sensation, thinking maybe I was dreaming until I looked down and saw a pulse, as he burrowed his raw little body, this tiny marsupial, smaller than a thumb, snuggling himself right into the folds of me, and instinct took over as I closed myself around him.

  “She was married to my father for twenty years!” Rory’s voice broke into my thoughts. He was discussing me with the girlfriend and jerking his thumb in my direction. Whatever her name was giggled as Rory twisted round to face me. There was practically a flounce to his coat tails as he strode forward, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention. The belligerent lips were an exact copy. The bouncing Caravaggio curls. It could’ve been Vincent himself with that peacock stance, gawping so rudely into my face. Flaming Rory. I’d been expecting it: it might have been a thrill if only it didn’t make me feel so sad. He came right up to me, sort of swaggering, and practically bumped me into a corner behind a potted fern. My heart began to thump. Six months younger than my Paul. I could hear the beat of it in my ears. It was enough to make me distrust flame-haired Rory before he even opened his over-ripe mouth.

  “So you’re my father’s other wife.” Too close, his breath stinking of grief and drinking.

  “Well,” I say. Not technically true. “I divorced him before he married your mother.”

  “Yeah,” he says and there’s a curl to his lip that I know all too well. “Eventually you did.” He holds out his hand for me to shake, but when I reach for it puts his thumb to his nose and waggles his fingers. The likeness to Vincent is astonishing. Any minute now this puerile youth, with his reddened wattles and over-polished shoes, might start bragging about the novel he’d not yet written.

  That was the thing: there’d been a magnum opus lodged inside of Vincent the whole time; it had been troubling that he couldn’t get it out. Our flat at Kensal Rise was kept quiet as a temple to the god of its gestation. The purity of Vincent’s thought was not to be interrupted by the ticks and tocks of conventional clocks. No pram in the hall was supposed to run its wheels back and forth over the fragile embryo of Vincent’s magnum opus, oh no. And yet here it was, in the flesh: hot-headed Rory, so alive he almost vibrated. “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah” he said grabbing me by the arm, then turning to dismiss the girlfriend. “No-one ever spoke your name in our house.”

  “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah…raise your hand if you can hear me.” There’d been trouble with my blood pressure in the hospital recovery room. I could hear what I thought was the hiss of a Bunsen burner, the smell of gas. I floated in and out of consciousness. I was back in the school science lab, looking down the broad brown stripe of the bench as Mr Godwin came into dreamy focus handing me an egg. Mr Godwin, the Josef Mengele of biology teachers, had declared me the winner of that day’s luckless lucky dip. I took the egg. For twenty-one days this Godwin had reached his mortician’s fingers into an incubator, making us all sick with dread at its electric ticking. We’d all had to write our names on an egg before he started the incubation. Tick tick tick behind our backs in the classroom. He was pushing his glasses up his greasy nose to repeat the name on the egg and beckoning. “Sarah,” I cringed my way to where he stood holding the egg between thumb and finger and demanding that I peel it to reveal to the rest of the class the embryo inside.

  We’d already seen things we wished we hadn’t: hearts beating in jelly, cold cuts in aspic, things that when cut instead of blood had runny egg yolk dribbling out. I wasn’t as unlucky as some, though we were all made to witness the later travesties in the name of O-level biology. I prodded and snipped with the instruments inside the gory sac with its bloodshot membranes and detached a thing twitching like a large peeled prawn, and just for a moment I thought I saw its tiny blue heart beating within its transparent chest. I carried it bobbing in a jar into school dinner after the lesson and set it beside me on the table. It floated in its sea of formaldehyde. “Ugh,” the others said, putting down their forks. “Why do you have to do that?”

  My chickadee only had aniseed sized specks where his eyes should have been. I shook the jar and the pink thing bounced up and down making my friends squeal. That’s what I was thinking about when I finally came round in the hospital.

  “So Sarah, I’ve wondered about you all my life.” Rory’s talking at me as I try to free myself but he clutches my arm tighter and swipes a glass of white wine from a tray, tipping it to me in mock salutation then taking a gulp. He has the nerve to look me up and down. “All the photographs of you were burned,” he says.

  “Charming,” I say as I try to pull away. Rory moves his grip to my shoulders, pulling me forwards. For one unnerving moment I think he’s going to try to kiss me but then he pulls me closer, so close I can smell the wool of his coat and he hisses in my ear: “You know you shouldn’t be here. I don’t think you were invited.”

  “Rory stop it,” Analise appears grabbing the glass from his hand. “Come and sit down.” She doesn’t speak to me at all. I am in little doubt that the kiss at the cemetery was nothing but an aberration but am pleased to confirm from up close that she has the face she deserves with jowls of discontent and pockets of bad temper. “Come away Rory.” And a voice that still has the power to chill me to the marrow.

  “I’ve told you already. He’s in a meeting.” Cold and clinical as I begged her from the hospital phone to fetch him. And now she says, as though trying to convince herself: “He was a good father to Rory,” and the ice cracks beneath the surface: “Oh Sarah, if only you hadn’t told those lies.” And she starts to cry.

  Lies! Flames start curling at the base of my throat. Lies? Had I lied about the damage that was done to my Paul to m
ake way for the drunken creature who still has my arm in his grip? “You’ve got the family chin,” I tell him and laugh in his face.

  I try to push past them but Rory blocks my way. He ignores Analise pleading for him to come with her; he ignores his girlfriend’s flapping hands. “My mother doesn’t need to see you. Why don’t you go now?” He looks slyly back to Analise. “Not that I mean to be rude or anything…” He lets me go. His lips hang in just the way that I knew they would.

  At the hospital I’d been placed in a ward full of women who were having trouble holding on to their babies. They were all clasping their tummies as though that might help keep them in and asking me about mine. “How many weeks dear?” they said gesturing at my still almost flat stomach. I called home with trembling fingers but there was no reply though he’d promised not to go out while this thing was done. In a meeting, Analise coolly informed me when I called the office. He could not be disturbed, she said, and I was raw, flayed grief, turning myself inside out.

  As I walked from the wake through the rain I tried to shake the thought of revolting Rory from my head. He was no more than a peacock rattling its feathers at me. How horrible the men in that family were. Vincent had been with a woman who was not Analise on the night that he died. No-one was talking about that.

  By the time I got back to Kensal Rise I was soaked through, rinsed by the rain of almost all my indignation. I put the key in the lock of our old flat but by then I was already thinking about the moors and my dogs waiting for me on the sofas at home. The thump of their tails on the cushions whenever I passed, the idiocy of their adoring eyes: it was like being a filmstar in my own sitting room as I paced up and down with my notebook and pencil doing the thing I love to do more than anything else in the world.