by Susan Green
The toast is warm and slightly soggy in a little paper bag. I get two butter pats with it, and a tiny serve of unidentified jam. None of this interests me. I do, however, drink the tea. It is lukewarm or scalding, depending. Depending on what, I don’t know. I’d prefer a long black, but tea seems less of a travesty, somehow, than instant.
Next, cleaning.
‘How are you, Merrilee?’
‘Fantastic, Mrs H. How about you?’
‘I’m fantastic, too.’
‘That’s the girl. Well, block your ears.’
She runs the vac around, then it’s out with the disinfectant spray and a bit of a chat.
‘I love your things, Mrs H,’ she says. She often says that. When I first came here, she asked me about each object on the bookshelf, the photographs of Alec and the children and me, and of course the portrait of Anne.
‘And you painted it?’ She was amazed. ‘You are soooo clever! Is it your daughter?’
I said yes, and I told her about the lovely but unfinished painting by Thomas Gainsborough of his two daughters Margaret and Mary, The Painter’s Daughters with a Cat.
‘It’s in that book,’ I said, pointing (the only books I have now are picture books), and I asked her to fetch it for me. I found the page and we looked at it together. The girls’ faces, vulnerable, grave and tender, are almost completed, but the cat is only a suggestion. One of the girls is pulling its tail.
‘I wonder why he didn’t finish it,’ said Merrilee. ‘After he’d gone to all that trouble.’
I remember my husband, in front of the original, telling me about Gainsborough’s technique. He diluted the paints with turpentine, and used a fine-grained canvas with a yellowish or pink primer to give luminosity to his flesh tones. He was very particular about his pigments. He used hog’s-hair brushes for the broad strokes, and camel’s hair for fine detailed work.
‘Look how relaxed they are,’ I said.
‘They look so trusting,’ said Merrilee. ‘They must have loved each other.’
‘And him.’
On he talked, my husband, about how Gainsborough made a special spirit-of-wine varnish to his own recipe in order to protect the elaborate scumbles and glazes, while Merrilee and I looked at the two sisters with their arms around each other. The Painter’s Daughters with a Cat. In the National Gallery. In a book.
‘. . . book.’
‘What book, Mrs H?’
I look up.
‘Do you want me to get a book for you?’
I realise that I’ve been away. Miles away; years, decades, centuries away.
‘Sorry. I was thinking of something else. No, dear; I don’t want a book.’
That’s because I don’t read. To tell you the truth, I much prefer the television. At first Paula used to borrow the latest novels for me from the library. Then she brought me large-print books, but it didn’t make much difference.
‘I’ve gone beyond, darling,’ I said.
‘What about talking books?’
I told Paula that the talking books were wonderful, and indeed they were, a kind of aural temazepam. I slept beautifully through a number of celebrated novels, some of which, Paula told me, had won important literary prizes. I would have preferred whodunits or even the odd historical romance, but it’s flattering to be thought so highbrow, don’t you think?
‘Now I’m going to tickle your toes,’ says Merrilee.
She always gets a giggle out of the foot. It sits next to the china ballerina and an early Victorian cup and saucer that Bridget and I found in a junk shop for a shilling when we first started the business. The foot was a present from my podiatrist, John Maygothling. If you prise the top off, you will find a skeleton, complete with all twenty-six bones. Seven tarsal, five metatarsal and fourteen phalanges. The tiny sesamoid bone in the big toe is not shown. It is very like John’s foot – long, ivory-coloured – and when I look at it I think of him. Memento mori. I always said to him he had the feet of crucified Christ in a Gothic pietà. Except with no holes.
John was a chemist as well as a podiatrist, and he was my last lover. He was elderly – as I suppose was I, at sixty-two, though that never occurred to me; a tall, rather stooped, silver-haired gentleman. He had a little curtained booth at the rear of the pharmacy, rather like a confessional box. It was always very warm for, as he told me, nothing chills faster than cold extremities. John would cradle each foot in his lap like a strange white fish while he scaled it with his knife, and once I got over the ticklishness, I rather enjoyed the feeling.
One day he said, ‘Have you a bad heart, Mrs Henderson?’
Not bad, surely? Just foolish, selfish, impulsive. Could he read soles as others read palms?
‘High blood pressure, perhaps?’
Silly me.
‘I’ll massage your feet. You’ll find it very relaxing.’
My toes wriggled in his hands, remembering tiny shells, the wet sinking tideline, the corrugated marks of waves on the sandbanks. Good, bad, broken, mended – my heart was still beating. John rang to invite me to a concert later that week. After a couple of months, we became lovers.
I hope you’re not going to be silly about that. Judgemental, I think, is the word. Alec was the love of my life, and I suppose you could see it as a betrayal of his memory or some such rot. The truth is, John and I were both lonely. The sex was done gently and gingerly and not all that often, but it was immensely comforting. I discovered how much I’d missed being touched.
It was John who had a stroke, not me. I used to visit him at the private hospital in Camberwell, but then the married daughter from Adelaide swooped down and moved him over there. It was so she could look after him once he was out of rehab. She said she would let me know how he was getting on. I suppose she just forgot.
‘There’s someone to see you, Bliss.’
Yes.
‘Bliss. You’ve got visitors, dear.’
I can hear you.
‘Bliss.’
Don’t shout. I can hear you.
‘You’ve got a visitor, darling.’
‘Bliss!’
‘Don’t wake her.’
But I want to wake. It just takes so long to surface. I went to Bermuda once, on business, to decorate the house of a famous American writer. He’s now out-of-print but back then he was it and a bit, a real old fruit, camp and bitchy and hell to work with. Before he fired me, I stayed in his pink palace carved out of fossilised shells and every morning when I woke, I swam, naked, in a pool that was full fathom five of azure seawater. As I rose up to the surface from my headlong dive I found myself brushed by seahorses and parrotfish and fringed anemones like little waving . . .
Good God. I nearly said a very rude word for the female pudenda, and where did that come from? From Edward, I suppose. He was a great talker in bed, and absolutely filthy. Theme and variations on ‘fuck’ and all the other four-letter words and his own odd endearments. ‘Beautiful bitch’ was one. ‘My very own whore’ was another. It doesn’t seem in the least attractive at this distance, but that was then. His handling of me was what they call in romance novels ‘masterful’ – often quick, almost violent, and he liked to have me on hotel landings, the hood of a car in the dark, or up against the wall in stairwells or spare rooms. I used to gloat that the Honourable Barbara only ever got missionary in bed with the lights out. Perhaps she was the lucky one.
‘Bliss, it’s Anne . . .’
Anne? I burst up through the blue brightness in a flurry of bubbles like a popped champagne cork, up into the sky between colonnades of Doric and Ionic and Corinthian and there on his plinth, stark naked and hung like a horse, is Apollo the sun god, so bright and white I’m dazzled.
Anne! The lost and longed for, smiling in the sunlight, looking for all the world like the little girl that she was, the Anne of my painting, my treasure. The Painter’s Daughter with a Cat. Chang, poor Chang! She squeezed him so, and can you see the kink in his tail? She slammed the door on it. By accident, of cour
se; she was trying to keep him in when all he wanted was to get away from her.
Look at that face. My beautiful Anne. Still beautiful. That little bit of weight she carries hasn’t hurt her looks; quite the contrary, for her skin seems remarkably good for a woman of her age. Beside her, Paula looks much too thin, and who’s that next to her with the hearing aid? I hope it’s not Sue. I can’t stand that woman.
They’re talking to me, the three of them, but it’s all a jangle. Their mouths open and shut but the eyes have it. Oh, Paula. Now your hand’s on mine. You look and see and understand at least some of it, don’t you? But Anne? I was always so distracted by beauty, by all things bright and beautiful. By you, Anne, my darling dear, and by the sun shining, as they say in the vernacular, right out of your –
‘Anne, there’s something I’ve always meant to ask you. How is it that you turned out to be so fucking boring?’
MINERVA TURNED HER SHINING FACE
Paula and Anne were here, and Maura too. Apparently that thing in her ear is not a hearing aid, it’s for music. Music thrums away in her head, with every step she takes, every move she makes. That was a song, wasn’t it? I remember Anne used to like it.
I said something nasty. It just popped out. They laughed, and I hope they thought it was the drugs. Maura cried a little. Paula took her outside, and Anne sat quietly for a while, not looking at me, texting.
‘Do you think she understood?’
Paula isn’t slow on the uptake and, lately, we can talk to each other honestly about our difficulties with Anne.
‘No, I don’t think she understood at all. It must be boring for you here, I said.’
‘How very clever of you, darling. For all I’m unendingly cross with her, I don’t want to hurt her.’
‘I know.’
‘I do love her.’
‘I know that too.’
‘It’s just she’s so . . . I don’t know what the word is. She’s not quite real, is she? So perfect, and so perfectly dull. It hurt, Paula, to be rejected so. I am still hurting, I suppose.’
‘She can’t help it. She envies you, Bliss – the life you’ve lived, the fun you’ve had.’
‘D’you think so? How very odd.’ I stop for a bit to consider that thought. ‘She’s so self-righteous. Sometimes, darling, it’s like being visited by a social worker. And she keeps on about Christmas. About Andy and Jake coming home, and how lovely that we’ll all be together and when I said, very gently of course, that I probably wouldn’t be here, she said she thought I was depressed.’ I can feel my heart flutter. I know I shouldn’t get upset, but I am. ‘She said she thought I needed to see a psychiatrist.’
Paula puts her hand on my arm. ‘She can’t bear the thought, Bliss. Of you . . .’ She meets my eyes. ‘See? I can’t say it. I can’t bear the thought either.’
‘But you’re not pretending it won’t happen. And sooner rather than later.’ I press my hand to my chest. ‘Did I spoil her, Paula? Did I push her? I thought that because she was so young when your mother had to go away, that she . . .’
Ah. What I thought was the stuff of fairy tales. I was to be that turn-up for the books, the rare exception, the good stepmother. I would help her cheat the wicked fairy’s curse. And so I chose, very deliberately, not to tell her – or the other children, but it was all for Anne – about myself. No sad songs for me, I thought. No past to drag us down. They were not to know that I’d lost my parents, lost my child, lost love after love after love. Was I wrong? Was it a terrible mistake?
When I married Alec in 1964, I was part-owner of the famous Victoria’s in the King’s Road. My business partner Bridget didn’t have the money to buy me out and – oh, for goodness’ sake! I was in love, I was getting married and I didn’t want to think about money – I simply let things slide. The legalities and tax implications became more and more complex over the years until I really had to act.
Alec had just retired.
‘Come on, it will be the trip of a lifetime,’ I urged him. ‘Anne can look after herself for a few weeks. You and me; let’s go, darling.’
But he wouldn’t budge and in what I can only describe as a fit of pique I decided to go anyway and take Anne with me.
I was thinking of myself at her age, of course. Of how in London the world cracked open for me like a wonderful Fabergé egg. I wanted that for her. I wanted to be the one to give it to her.
Anne was in the first year of her Diploma of Art and Design. Only three weeks in England, but she worried about missing classes.
‘You’ve got your mid-semester break,’ I said to her. ‘You won’t miss much. Surely it won’t matter.’
She was so concerned that, behind her back of course, I spoke to one of the lecturers. He just laughed.
‘Over-conscientious,’ he said. ‘Take her to the National Gallery, the Tate and the V&A.’
‘I intend to.’ Blossoming madly in my imagination, the two of us and a whirl of beloved paintings – the ravishing Turners, the Samuel Palmer of the girl in the garden, piratical Elizabethans in the National Portrait Gallery – oh, and all my favourite churches, gardens, squares, sculptures, galleries, cafes and, of course, the shops.
‘Tell her to fill a sketchbook, and half her luck.’
On our last weekend in England, we went to Bath. I remember it in minute, hypnotic detail, from eight o’clock when we woke in our room at Miller’s Hotel on Great Pulteney Street, to our evening walk back from the restaurant. This was the last happy day. The shadow of the axe was plain to see, but I didn’t have a clue.
Actually, there were many clues, if I’d known how to interpret them. Though she went with me to the shop, meeting Bridget and a few of my old friends, she seemed strangely passive and incurious. She was quiet, not eating much, sleeping badly, waking late. She accumulated page after page of insipid drawings in the sketchbook that we bought from Cornelissen’s in Great Russell Street. She was so agreeable that I longed for her to express a preference, no matter how cranky. I thought she was overwhelmed, or perhaps pre-menstrual. She didn’t confide.
We went to the Roman baths. While Anne sat and sketched, I wandered around looking at the exhibits, the shining head of Minerva, the sun-like face of an ancient British god. I was in a dangerous mood. England, after all these years, was irrevocably changed yet booby-trapped with memories. At first I found it exhausting, but by the time we got to Bath I was simply nostalgic. Elegiac, even. All passion spent, that sort of thing. I thought that at my age I knew something about life and love. I realised, for instance, that expecting Alec to leap at this overseas trip was unfair. He’d just retired, for God’s sake, after a lifetime of working. How’s that for a shock to the system? If I’d been more sensitive, I could have helped him through the period of adjustment – and then got my own way. In fact – I’ll admit it – I felt wise, and I should have known that is a very bad sign.
Anne was standing with her back to me in the moody half-light, her sketchbook closed, looking at a glass case full of objects – coins, jewellery, little figurines, lead scrolls – which had been found in the springs.
‘Offerings, vows and curses,’ I read, walking up behind her. I took out a couple of 20p coins. I threw mine into the water, wishing I’d always be as calm as I was now. I gave the other to her, but she shook her head.
‘No.’
‘Go on.’
‘No.’ And she put the coin back into my palm. She looked at the stone face of the god. ‘I might get my wish,’ she said.
We had dinner at a restaurant. Anne had lost her appetite.
‘Cream of celery soup? The terrine?’
‘I think I’ll just have a main.’
‘Trout? Lamb hotpot? Tarragon chicken?’
‘You order.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Just tired.’
When the food came Anne pushed hers around on her plate.
‘What’s wrong? Don’t you like it?’
‘It’s lovely. I’m just not
hungry.’
I had baked lemon pudding and Anne had a cup of coffee. The bill was twenty pounds. As we walked out of the restaurant together, I felt replete and contented. We’d had a wonderful holiday. Soon I’d be back with Alec.
It had rained while we were in the restaurant, and the dark streets were slick and shiny. A young man passed us on a motorbike. A hundred or so yards down the road, he cornered too sharply and came off. The accelerator must have stuck, because the bike bucked and writhed and twisted away from him, bashing into a row of parked cars before it died in the middle of the intersection. He stood up, threw down his gloves and swore as the revolving blue light of a police car came nosing down the side street.
Anne vomited abruptly into the gutter.
‘He’s all right, darling,’ I said, thinking the violence of the accident had upset her. ‘He’s not hurt.’
In the harsh light of the streetlamp her face looked green.
‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’ I said.
My mother once told me the Grimms’ tale in which a beautiful young girl goes to the well. An old crone asks her for a drink and, being kind-hearted, she gladly complies. When she returns to her stepmother and opens her mouth to speak, out tumble roses, diamonds and pearls. A passing prince falls passionately in love with her and, chagrined, the stepmother sends her own daughter, who is not only ugly but ill-natured, on the same errand. This girl tells the old woman to hop it in Old German and when, back home, she opens her potty mouth, out swarm insects and snakes.
‘It’s not fair. The mother should have told her what to do,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t she?’
‘It’s just a story,’ said Mother, but I knew it was deeper than that.
In the end, the mother sends her daughter weeping into the forest, where she wanders around, frightening even the boars and bears, until she dies.
‘What do you mean, “What are we going to do?” We? It’s me who’s pregnant.’