by Sarah Moss
I’d been up in the early hours talking to Miriam again and then been unable to go back to sleep again and so done some more work on the Coventry project, thinking that at least for once I’d be up before Emma, would be the one able to score points with a passive-aggressive cup of tea brought to the bedside, although usually when I attempt this she’s in the shower before the kettle’s boiled and I find the tea cold on her dressing table hours later. Mugs, tea-bags, the small arms of marital war. Had you already bought Christmas presents for me, Mimi had asked. What would you have done with them if I’d died? What do you think about life after death, honestly, deep down, because I didn’t see even the light they say is the last flicker of a dying brain, there was nothing at all, which is what I always thought, the mind is produced by the body, just electricity in the blood, same as the beating of the heart, and when it stops there is nothing.
And we were left darkling, I thought, nothing will come of nothing, and later, when Miriam, unburdened, slept, I had crept down in the cold to my laptop, set the electricity in my head in communion with the electricity behind the screen, and made a story about music silent these fifty years, and after that I had after all returned to my bed and slid into wordless oblivion, and now it was nearly eight o’clock and Emma must have been up for two hours, would have already packed up the clothes from the bottom of the laundry basket to take to the dry-cleaner, washed the pan I’d left to soak the night before and probably cleared the gutters and weeded the gaps between the paving slabs as well. I sat up, my mouth sour. I could hear Rose talking over the Today programme downstairs, a descant to John Humphrys’ catalogue of the morning’s new injustices and terrors. Emma was emptying the dishwasher, which she didn’t need to do, which I would have done without noticing if she’d left it.
I stood up and went to check on Mimi, whose door I’d deliberately left open four hours earlier. Breathing, warm. All right.
Downstairs, Rose was sitting at the table eating porridge with apple compote.
‘Is that nice?’ I asked Rose.
‘It’s all right. Not as nice as Coco Pops.’
‘High praise.’
Emma passed me a cup of tea. ‘Did you have another bad night?’
‘Mimi was awake. Then I did a bit of work.’
She put the cutlery basket on the counter and started to empty it. ‘You know they made the psych referral in hospital. We can follow up any time.’
‘I know. You keep reminding me.’
Rose looked up. ‘More hospital?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not more hospital.’
‘So can we get a cat?’
‘No.’ A rare moment of unison.
‘Maddie’s mum says pets can help people when something bad has happened to them.’
‘Rose’s mum says that cat food stinks, she deals with enough body fluids at work and parasites make it worse when something bad has happened. Rose’s mum adds that Maddie lives in a house about twice as big as ours where you could have a dozen cats and not see them from one day to the next.’
‘Is a dozen ten?’
‘Rose,’ I said. ‘We’re not getting a cat, or ten cats, or a dozen cats, which is twelve. No cats. Em, I made her packed lunch yesterday, it’s in the fridge.’
‘Have I got crisps?’
‘No. Just like all the other days, you don’t have crisps. Pitta, hummus, cucumber, a cut-up apple and a flapjack.’
‘Everyone else has crisps.’
‘Well then everyone else is breaking the rules about healthy lunches.’
‘Everyone else in my class has a cat.’
Emma put her own breakfast bowl in the dishwasher. ‘Rose, go up and brush your teeth, please, we need to go in five minutes.’
Rose looked me up and down. ‘Are you taking me to school in your pyjamas?’
‘I’m taking you to school,’ said Emma. ‘And I don’t like being late. Teeth!’
‘My tummy hurts.’
‘Try going to the loo. But be quick.’
Emma turned to me. ‘What’s your plan for the day?’
Exactly what I would have done if you hadn’t been watching, I thought. ‘I’ll try to get Mimi to come for a walk this morning. I thought I’d bribe her with coffee and cake in a café. Clean sheets all round, load of laundry, do the bathrooms, maybe try to get her out again to the library before we collect Rose. And you?’
‘I’m going to chase the Schools Health Service until they do their job. It’s the only Essential for today.’
The toilet flushed upstairs.
‘Jolly good,’ I said. ‘Good luck. If that’s Rose out of the bathroom, I’m going to have a shower.’
I had chased the Schools Health Service and they had receded, slipped away from one bush to the next. I’m afraid we’ll have to ask someone to call you back, Mr – sorry – Goldsmith, was it? She’s not at her desk just now, could I take a message at all? Right, and what was it you were hoping we might be able to do for you? Oh, you know. Just arrange it so that my daughter, my brave and clever daughter, doesn’t lose her education along with her health and the end of her childhood. Just maybe do your job, which is, as I understand it, to make sure that the council is fulfilling this country’s legal obligation to educate children. I had also chased the Allergy Clinic and the ward where Miriam was supposed to be having one last test for a rare condition that she almost certainly didn’t have but would be very bad news if she did, and each time I had shortened our waiting time by making a fuss, by offering to drive to other hospitals in the region, by asking about short-notice cancellations. Unfair. Abuse of middle-class pushiness, of learning the system, of not being afraid of doctors and their customs. Yes, I do worry about what happens to kids whose parents don’t argue and nag and yes, I do feel responsible for pushing them even further down the list and no, I’m not going to stop doing it for my daughter, leave her in frightened uncertainty one day longer than I have to. Middle-class socialists, we won’t pay for private schools or private healthcare but we will storm anyone’s office and insist on our rights. Bring on the revolution. Meanwhile, my daughter had missed too much school and my posh bossy wife was onto it.
I felt better when I’d showered and shaved, the tiredness subdued somewhere under my ribs. The washing machine was running. The boiler grumbled. I dressed. I combed my hair and looked at myself in the mirror: I do not think I am physically changed by this. By Miriam’s event. Emma is thinner, Mimi older and still chubbier than she was. There should be something behind my eyes that is different but I couldn’t see it in the mirror, only my hair receding no faster than before and the scattering of grey no thicker than it had been. I have hit, I think, that stage in man’s life where as long as he stays in shape, nothing changes much, the long plateau between thirty and fifty which for women is marked by childbearing and the menopause. I should start running again, before it was too late. I could see my father in the set of my eyes and the angle of my chin, and it was one of those days when I craned for a glimpse of my mother too, before I went to wake Miriam, to keep her in our timezone.
suddenly the scent of citrus
I made her go to the park. I expended more energy, more force, than the occasion could conceivably have justified. I took away her pocket money for one week, two, three, and then opened my laptop and logged into online banking then and there when she said that I was always threatening her allowance but never actually got round to stopping it. I unplugged the router and locked it in the car to get her off the internet, and it was only when I not only threatened to take away her laptop but actually picked it up and began to walk away that she relented. OK, fine, I’ll put my fucking shoes on and walk with you to the fucking park, but you’re fucking nuts if you think this is any way of having a nice time. Don’t speak to me like that, I said, it’s not OK. Now come downstairs, please. Emma looked up as I went past: have fun, she said, I hope you know what you’re doing. I’m getting her out of the house, I thought. I’m making her look at trees.
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nbsp; It was one of those winter days when a low grey sky brightens all the colours, as if the rain held in the air saturates the last few peach-coloured leaves and the slate-grey bark of old trees and the red of Victorian bricks, their clay dug a hundred and fifty years ago from a pit where now herons fish between the floating leaves. Look at that sky, I said to Mimi, it’s almost purple, almost as if there might be thunder later. Can you imagine, I said, how this park must have seemed to the people coming from south of the river, where the houses are crammed up against the old factory yards with the railway running past at eye-level, shaking the beds and panting coal smoke into rattling windows? And then to walk a few streets and be here, under the beech trees, looking for the first snowdrops, it’s the horticultural incarnation of Victorian benevolence, a pleasure garden then as now for people who would never own their own backyard. And now it belongs to all of us, socialist gardening, the people’s horticulture, the antithesis of the garden fence. Dad, she said, will you for God’s sake shut up, the way you witter on is so fucking annoying I’m actually like embarrassed for you even when there’s no-one listening. The people’s horticulture for fuck’s sake, has no-one ever told you you’re not Che Guevara? Don’t speak to me like that, I said, but I could feel myself reddening. Shut up, Adam. Let people be angry when they’re angry, stop trying to propitiate with talk.
She pulled her hood forward over her face and pushed her hands deeper into her pockets. Oh hell, the epipen, I’d been so intent on getting her out of the house that I’d forgotten the fucking epipen.
‘Mim, your pen, we have to go back. Now, come on, hurry. I mean, don’t hurry, don’t run—’
‘It’s in my pocket.’
I looked at her. Well, at the shell of her coat and the hair over her face. ‘Oh. Sorry.’
‘Yeah.’
I took a breath. ‘Sorry, Mim.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I just – I just don’t want you to turn away from everything. You can’t stay in your room day and night, it’s not healthy, I just want you to go out and see the world.’
She didn’t reply. We kept walking. We came to the park. There was new planting in the flowerbed by the gate, and three gardeners at work around the clock-tower. Isn’t it great, I said, isn’t it remarkable, that the council has gone on investing in the parks even now the library’s open less and they ended the music in primary schools. Look at the shapes of those trees against the sky, look how they’ve thought to plant those white star-flowers, what are they called, against the dark tree trunk. Look at the buds on that magnolia, not even yet Christmas and you can see that the year’s about to turn. Let’s go along the river, shall we. I’m cold, she said, my hands are cold.
Cold, you may recall, can be one of the triggers for exercise-induced anaphylaxis, although only in combination with at least one of exertion and whatever the problematic food may be. Let’s go into the glasshouse, I said, let’s see what’s flowered since we last looked. The glasshouse is a small – OK, very small – version of the Palm House at Kew, by the same architect but allowed to disintegrate in the 1960s to the point where it became justifiable to restore it to use modern glass and solar power. We stepped through the doors from pale and leafless December into a rainforest of greens and damp warmth. Something with red flowers the size of table napkins cascaded over the entrance and the air was spiced. There is a curvy bench and I sometimes wonder if I could bring my laptop and write here, but I suspect the humidity would be bad for it and usually I need too many books to work away from home. I led Miriam under the banana tree to the bridge over the fishpond. There, I said, do you remember we used to bring Rose here to watch the fish, that winter she learnt to walk? Do you remember how much you loved the swings, and we used to come in here to warm up? I leant on the rail and watched the fish flickering through their plants, disappearing under the reflections of the bridge and the glass roof and reappearing.
‘I still like the black ones best,’ I said. ‘I don’t like the way you can almost see the pink ones’ innards, they’re not quite decent.’
Miriam pushed her hood back. ‘You don’t like the pink ones because they remind you of your own skin.’
No, I thought, I don’t dislike my own skin. Do I?
‘I like the way the black ones are hard to see,’ I said. ‘And the gold ones are just vulgar. Overblown.’
‘And in fact orange.’
‘I suppose “gold” sounds better. Or maybe they used to be more yellow or, actually, maybe they were introduced here before the word “orange”. Do you know that English didn’t have a word for “orange” until the appearance of oranges? That’s why we say people with orange hair are red-heads.’
‘And carrots used to be purple, and several European languages don’t have a word for “purple”. Yes, Dad. You tell us about once a month.’
I remembered telling them once before, when Rose, reading historical fiction, asked what the House of Orange had to do with oranges. For centuries we were a country in green and grey and brown, and then suddenly the scent of citrus, the flicker of gold through water. If I had dared, I would have reached out to put my arm around my cold, sad daughter.
represent our generation
He had been thinking about the glass from the beginning. He had been an architect for long enough, and had worked with public institutions for long enough, to know that sooner or later there would be a problem with the budget, and he was determined to commission the glass first. No-one would suggest that he should leave off the roof if it was unfinished when the money ran out, but someone, some committee, might well require an interim solution in place of the stained glass. Just for a few years, just while we raise some more funds.
During the war, he’d been part of a British unit supporting the American liberation of Chartres, and as soon as de Gaulle’s speech was over, he’d marched his superiors off to see the cathedral. ‘Although they were none too keen,’ he writes, ‘I insisted it was a matter of duty … especially as we had helped to save it for posterity.’ He’d seen too many burnt-out churches, their wooden beams bared and upturned like ribcages under the sun, and now he was going to see a living one and they were going to come too. But when he got there, it wasn’t living. The glass, like the glass of York Minster, which spent the war in sea-caves outside Whitby, had been removed and stored for safe keeping; in fact General Patton had ordered the destruction of the whole cathedral in case the Nazis were using it as a base, and had reluctantly rescinded the order only after one Welborn Barton Griffith, may he rest in peace, volunteered to go behind enemy lines to see what was happening in the cathedral before they started shelling it. (Nothing.) So Chartres Cathedral was a shell, muffled and empty, ‘like a head without eyes’, he recalled, and he learnt that the alchemy of colour and light is necessary for a holy place, that without it, a church is only wood and stone.
He’d already had his vision of the West Screen – I’m saving that for later – which left the baptistry window and the windows hidden in the angles of the nave, the ones you don’t see until you’ve walked past them but which light the entire east end.
The artists whose work excited him most were two students at the Royal College of Art, untried and untested. He wanted the Reconstruction Committee to commit thirty thousand pounds to them for the nave windows, approximately eight hundred and fifty thousand pounds in today’s terms. You don’t get great art without taking risks, he said. If this project is to represent our generation for the next five centuries, we need artists without inhibitions, not people already gagged by gold medals and letters after their names. The head of the Committee had to go to the Minister of Education to authorise a contract with the RCA nominating two students and a lecturer as employees, but they got there in the end. Make it modern, he said. Make it rich and strong.
a work of natural history
Of course Emma got Miriam back to school, but even she couldn’t do it by the end of the week. You’re going to have to come with me, I said, I’m sorry
but you know what it’s like trying to get to campus and back, I have no idea how long I’m going to be and I’m just not willing to leave you home alone for what might be four or five hours, I’m sorry and I’ll get less anxious as time goes by but not now, we’ll start gently, I’ll go running again or something, leave you for a shorter time that’s more under my control, but you have to come with me today, sorry. She looked up from her bed, peered from under her hair like some shaggy dark-eyed animal, a Highland cow.
‘’S’all right. I like campus. As long as you give me your card so I can go to the library.’