by Sarah Moss
The wailing hiccups and stops. Jon’s coming through, Patrick in his arms reaching out to Claire with tears still on his red face. Sorry, says Jon, nothing’s working, he just doesn’t seem sleepy. Mummy, says Patrick, Mummy, and Claire rinses her hands and takes him. He clenches his legs on her hip and touches her face with a sad sticky finger; Jon’s right, if he were really tired he’d be lying on her shoulder and probably kneading her boob. It was just feeling mean, Jon says, keeping him in the cot when he didn’t want to be there. Lots of parenting, Claire thinks, feels mean, that’s why adults have to do it, prioritising long-term outcomes over the emotions of the moment. Prioritising long-term outcomes, there’s a phrase she hasn’t used in nearly five years. Does that woman still exist, the one who wore dry-clean-only clothes and put together presentations? The software will have changed since then, not to mention the clothes. Claire strokes Patrick’s hair. Come on then, she says, are you not a sleepy bunny? Shall we find the farm?
She brought a whole plastic storage box of toys from home, trying to choose those of interest to both children, which is an efficient use of space and/or a recipe for fights. If you really pay attention, you can build a farm on which Izzie can take the cows in for milking or – the new favourite – borrow the wolf from the zoo to run amok while Pat presses the buttons that make the brown cows moo in spectral tones. She’d thought they might see real Highland cows this week, maybe standing in the water the way they do in all those postcards and jigsaw puzzles, but if there are any they have sensibly been inside all week. Izzie, she says, shall we build a farm? She carries Pat over to the toybox and kneels down, tries not to let herself think that all they’ve achieved by spending so much money to be away from home for two weeks is to deprive themselves of the usual resources for passing the time: resources such as the swimming pool, which is hellish while you’re doing it but worth it afterwards when the kids are exhausted and most of the day has gone by the time you’ve reached it on the bus with the buggy and got both of them and yourself changed and put things in lockers and let Izzie have the key pinned on her costume and taken her to pee and inflated all the armbands and helped both of them into the water and played at mummy and baby seals or water pixies or whatever and praised Izzie’s doggy-paddle and applauded when Pat propels himself half a metre and remembered how you used to swim miles, up and down, tumble turns as you’d learnt at school, twice a week before work, just silent swimming with other silent swimmers, and lifted them both out of the water which is tricky, like that puzzle with the chicken and the fox in the boat, and gone back to the changing room and through the shower and put them into dry clothes and then sorted yourself, double quick, don’t really bother drying because it’s while you’re vulnerable without your knickers or your glasses that one of them’s going to go drown itself, and then persuaded or wrestled Pat back into the pushchair and swept the area for toys and stray hairbands and flaccid armbands and walked back towards the bus, both children now whiney, needing biscuits you packed earlier and patience and tact while you pray that there isn’t already a buggy on the bus, kept them occupied while you waited, nursery rhymes and good cheer, and more on the bus, singing very quietly the wheels on the bus go round and round, lurching through the same old streets, round and round, round and round. And here, she thinks, setting out the plastic fences, we must make our own fun. She must make their own fun.
Claire, says Jon, Claire, what if I take them out for a bit, he might sleep in the pushchair and if he doesn’t at least it’s some fresh air and a change of scene, and Izzie’s got her boots and puddle suit. She looks up at him. It’s pouring, she says. He shrugs. We’ve got coats. They can jump in the bath when we get back. It couldn’t be for long, anyway, but you’d like an hour to yourself, wouldn’t you? Have your own bath. Worse come to the worst I can take them to the pub for juice, it’s not the end of the world. No, she says, no, I know, but it’s meant to be a holiday for you too. Jon smiles at Izzie, who beams back. It is a holiday for me, he says, I don’t see much of them, during term. What do you say, Iz, shall we go jump in puddles? You can even paddle a bit, in your wellies. Yay, says Izzie, raising her arms, yay paddling. Pat, Claire knows, won’t like it, doesn’t have wellies, can’t balance on the stony beach, he’ll want out of the pushchair and then Jon will need two hands for him and two more to be able to catch Izzie or rescue her if she falls, but it’s not as if she hasn’t dealt with these things often enough this last year and Jon is, after all, a teacher, albeit teenagers not toddlers, has more training than she does in doing stuff with kids. I could get this place properly clean, she thinks, I could, indeed, have a bath, maybe we could have a nice dinner after the kids are in bed, or if not exactly nice at least different from theirs, didn’t I see a candle in that cupboard for all there are the signs about open flames and fire risk? A bath, she thinks, and later a candlelit dinner, and no marking for Jon to do, almost like a real holiday. We could talk, about something or other, not the children, and then maybe later— You sure, she says, and Jon says, yes, of course I’m sure, it’s an hour, babe, have a nap or a bath or paint your toenails, whatever you want. Go to the pub for the wifi, if you like. Have a drink. He grins. Have a cocktail with a sparkler in it.
She used to like cocktails, once, that woman in the dry-clean-only jackets and the high heels. She used to redo her make-up in the office loos and go straight on to a bar. Sometimes, on Fridays, several bars.
Come on, Izzie, Jon says, see if you can put on your puddle suit and wellies before I get Pat into the pushchair.
There’s a flurry of boots and waterproofs, a fresh nappy for Pat, a pot of breadsticks in case he needs distraction in the pushchair, Jon’s implausibly large waterproof trousers, a tussle with Izzie who wants to take her purple umbrella and is adamant that she doesn’t need to pee until she changes her mind after the puddle suit is zipped up, and then they are gone.
She closes the door.
* * *
It’s quiet.
* * *
It’s still quiet.
* * *
There’s wind, of course, and the rain on the roof, but she can hear her own breathing. She coughs, to make a sound. Right then, she thinks, Jon didn’t give her this hour to listen to her own lungs. She has sixty minutes, more or less, to do anything at all, to please herself. She remembers those oceans of time, in London before the children, the weekends and evenings she didn’t even notice, wasted messing around on the internet, watching shows that weren’t quite boring enough to turn off, looking at stuff she wasn’t going to buy and places she wasn’t going to visit. Not that she didn’t also cook for friends and go out dancing and to films and concerts. Which is not the point, because there’s no internet here as well as no friends, and the last thing she wants is to go to the pub, full of damp and depressed young foreign hikers and certainly without cocktail sparklers or probably even cocktail glasses, not that she wants to drink at this hour.
She could dance, she supposes, could be the kind of woman who dances when nobody’s watching, but with the French windows you can’t ever really be sure that nobody’s watching, she sometimes thinks everyone on the park is spending their entire holidays watching each other, and anyway if she wants to dance she can do it with Izzie, sometimes when she doesn’t want to dance she still does it with Izzie, for whom she should find a proper class in September. Ballet, she thinks, remembering her own pink silk shoes and a net skirt she pretended was a tutu, a pink ‘ballet wrap’ knitted by her grandmother who died while Claire was pregnant with Izzie. Gran wanted to hold out to see the first great-grandchild and failed by six weeks, Claire waddling at the funeral, trying not to let her grief seep through her bloodstream and into the baby’s unformed brain. She’s sure she read somewhere recently that they think sadness crosses the placenta, more or less, that a woman who is frightened or upset or depressed in pregnancy steeps her developing child in sorrow, setting up a lifetime of misery. Not that Izzie seems given to misery: irritation, perhaps. Impat
ience. And such an unfair thing to say, it’s not as if women go round being frightened and upset and depressed on purpose, what are you supposed to do if disarray and death come calling, what if things are, in fact, frightening? Anyway, Claire says out loud, come on, you’ve already spent about three minutes just standing about. If she’s just going to stand here she might as well get on with the cleaning, but that’s not what Jon meant, he’ll be disappointed, feel his gift rejected, if he gets back and finds that’s all she’s done. Have a bath, he said, seeming to forget that she doesn’t actually like baths all that much. Women’s magazines always say that, a long scented bath, as if everything from baby weight to infidelity will dissolve in enough hot water, as if you can spend enough on bath salts to cover the smell of self-loathing and repressed rage. Baths, in Claire’s opinion, are pretty boring, too hot until they’re too cold and there’s not much you can do in there, they’re not exactly comfortable for reading, your neck always at the wrong angle and your magazine going sticky in the steam. She’ll have a look for the candle, anyway, while she decides. She’d like that candlelit dinner.
But first she goes over to the window, leans against it to see as far as possible towards the shore. They’ve left the pushchair tilted disturbingly under the trees and there’s Jon with Pat on his hip – say what you like for feminism, men aren’t built to carry babies – and Izzie picking something up and showing it to him. Her breath is misting the glass and she swipes it with her sleeve. Stones, must be. Jon swaps Pat to his left arm and makes the tennis motion of someone skipping a stone across the water, and she can see from his shrug and the way he turns to Izzie that it didn’t fly; sank, in fact, like a stone, and Izzie squats down with a seriousness she will lose any day now, the seriousness accorded to the ground under our feet only by toddlers and botanists, and passes him another. That’s all right then, Claire thinks. Let’s find that candle, although it’s true that finding a candle is something she could do with all of them around, the kind of thing that might sometimes pass as a game for Izzie. Hunt the Candle. So it’s a waste of the hour Jon’s giving her, to look for a lost object, or possibly, in this case, an object that was never there in the first place, the memory of which may in fact come from some other holiday cottage because this is the only kind of holiday they’ve had since Izzie was born, she didn’t need friends to tell her that babies and hotels weren’t going to lead to relaxation and joy and hot sex, good heavens why is she thinking about sex again, she must tell Jon, it’s coming back, that’s at least twice already today which probably means her reproductive cycle is restarting at last and she doesn’t have any tampons, though as far as she can remember the days of wanting sex come around ten days before the bleeding, how it can take an egg ten days to travel about five centimetres she has never understood, but she knows from the babies that there’s somehow no gravity in there, or at least not until you stand up and find that your period started or your waters broke while you were sitting down. Buy tampons, she thinks, no great rush but next time we’re at the shops, must remember to ask Jon to remind me. At least they do have plenty of nappies if she needs to improvise a pad, and there must be scissors in the house. Look for scissors, she thinks, but she doesn’t need them now and that’s not what this hour is for, crafting your own sanitary towels. What else did Jon say, paint your toenails? She does, occasionally, in summer, she and Izzie together choosing which of their twenty toes should have which colour but she is unlikely to be wearing sandals any day soon, not least because she didn’t bring them here, and anyway it’s another thing that Izzie would enjoy too, and anyway she didn’t bring any nail polish either – well, why would you, really – so she’s just wasted about another two minutes of her hour.
Still, she thinks, still, if they are going to have sex later, there’s certainly a little titivating could be done. She puts her hand up her jumper – cold hand – to check her armpit, which she can’t have shaved for a few days, and then she remembers that hair on her areola, the big black one that comes back. She did deal with it religiously while breastfeeding, who would want that in his mouth with his milk, but lately – she goes into the bathroom where there’s a mirror and lifts the jumper and takes out her left boob, which goes all perky in the cold. Not so bad, she thinks, considering, considering it wasn’t that exciting to start with. She strokes her nipple and the breast’s round underside, feels the other one wake up too. Yes, she thinks, yes, they are hers again. She must tell Jon. But the hair is there, and alarmingly long. She tries to use her fingernails as tweezers although it almost never works, just bends the nails which are softer than they probably should be anyway, she needs more protein or calcium or B vitamins or whatever it is, doesn’t like supplements because they’re just an excuse for a poor diet which would be a reasonable position if she then took to eating kale or almonds or oily fish – horrible oily fish with bones and slime and a mess that has to go straight to the outside bin and a smell that lives under the stairs for days – but is mildly self-destructive when paired with a diet persistently based on tea and toast and the children’s leftovers. Buy a multivitamin supplement, she thinks, along with the tampons, either that or eat some kale, as if she doesn’t know perfectly well that the choice licenses inaction: it’s not that she’s deciding not to address the problem, just that at any given moment she is inclining towards one solution and therefore not obliged to act on the other. And meanwhile she really does need the tweezers, which she knows are in the First Aid kit because you need them for removing ticks and it is a foolish person who goes to the Scottish hills without a means of removing ticks. But the First Aid kit, she’s pretty sure, is in the car, and she doesn’t want Jon and Izzie to see her rummaging in the car, they’ll come and help and she’ll have to explain that she does not in fact require First Aid but only – no, she thinks, no, even she will have a moment to herself in the bathroom later, before any sex is at all possible, and she’ll deal with the hair then. Unless she can get it out with her fingernails. Or her teeth, can she reach the top of her areola with her teeth? She did once try to suck her own milk, when her breasts were engorged after Izzie was born and she was weeping with the pain and the only effect of the cabbage leaves in the bra recommended by the midwife was the discovery of three small caterpillars in a place where a person does not expect to find caterpillars: well, said Jon, of course I bought organic cabbage, you don’t want pesticides on your nipples for breastfeeding, do you? Very nearly, she can. She can stick her tongue out and touch the hair, which is as wiry and prickly as she thought.
Ow, her neck.
Right, Jon did not give her this hour for licking her own nipple hairs. She rubs her neck. She’s a bit hungry, she thinks, she could have some chocolate, while Izzie’s not here to want some and spoil her dinner and learn to associate sugar with treats. Or maybe she’s just thirsty, she read somewhere that people often eat when really all they need is a drink of water, though she can drink as much water as she likes when the children are around, she’s not wasting this hour drinking water. Oh, tea, she thinks, a lovely cup of tea drunk while still hot enough to scald a baby, that’s what she should do. And a biscuit with it, one of those posh chocolate ones bought as a holiday treat along with the good olives and the croissants, although she shouldn’t eat those on her own, they’re for sharing, even Pat could probably have half of one to smear across his face. Tea, anyway, and she fills the kettle and turns it on and while she’s waiting has another go at those taps and then wanders back to the window. They’re still there, on the beach, Pat standing now grasping both of Jon’s hands so that Jon has to stoop down in a way that hurts her back when she does it and must be agonising for him, a good six inches taller, and Izzie paddling in water closer to the top of her wellies than Claire would encourage, it would only take one bigger-than-most wave, not that it matters really, much, wet feet, Jon’s right, the kids can have an afternoon bath if they get too cold, maybe hot chocolate, not, probably, that there is any hot chocolate, not unless someone el
se left some in that cupboard and it is the sort of thing people do leave in the cupboards of holiday cottages, but no, there isn’t any and that handle really is sticky, how has she not noticed that before? She cleans the handle, and then while she’s about it, while she has the spray and the cloth in her hand, the other handles, and the oven door, and the kettle boiled a while ago and she’s not supposed to be cleaning.
Claire makes two cups of tea, in the biggest mugs she can find which are still annoyingly small and also tartan, not really what she’d call a proper cup of tea. She leaves them on the counter while she puts on her flowery waterproof mac-in-a-bag and the clashing flowery wellies that Izzie chose for her last birthday and then she goes out, sets the tea on the step where rain falls in it while she closes the front door, and carries the cups carefully over the gravel and grass and rocks down towards the shore. There’s no one else out and you can see why, only with small children is it more fun to be out in this weather than inside with a book and a cup of tea, but if all the neighbours are indoors there are watchers at every window. There’s that other English family, they’re saying, did I tell you now he’s a teacher in Edinburgh? Aye, it’s full of English these days, can’t stand their own country any more. You’d tell a mile off, wouldn’t you, him in that green jacket and all. Her feet slide around in her purple tulip wellies, need an extra pair of socks really, and she can feel the stones through the soles and the rain on her face, coming through her hair already. Three more days to go, she thinks, and they won’t come back here. The loch, maybe. Well, probably, it’s hard to avoid if you’re driving north of Glasgow and they’ve all Scotland to explore these coming years, but not here. They’ve seen it now, no need to come again, and bubbles of relief rise in her head. Home soon, back to the flat with its wooden floors and the lovely old plasterwork even if it does need repainting, and the high ceilings. She’s got used to living with all that airspace now, when they first moved in she felt exposed, dizzy, as if something might swoop down on her while she played on the floor with Izzie or lay in her own bed but now she’s hemmed in when there’s no headroom. The stones hurt her feet through the rubber soles. Rain mists her glasses. No, they won’t come back here.