by Sarah Moss
‘Fuck it, Mim—’
‘Da-ad! You said it!’
‘Sh, Rose. Mimi, have you any idea – Christ almighty.’
There was someone at the door. No, they can’t be that fast. Surely. It’s not as if she’d bought a fucking ticket.
Emma. Home early. Again?
I went into the hall. ‘Em? Everything OK?’
Three years ago, a patient made a personal complaint against her and she came home early and sat at the bottom of the stairs weeping in front of the girls.
‘Yes, fine, why wouldn’t it be?’
Let me count the ways.
‘No reason. You’re early.’
She took off her shoes. ‘No, just not late.’
‘For the second night in a row. I haven’t even finished cooking.’
She kissed me. A proper kiss.
I responded, put my oniony hands up her top.
‘Mm. Later.’
‘Yeah. Em, Mimi’s been looking up flights to Syria.’
‘What?’
‘For her Geography project. Try telling that to the police.’
Mimi came to the door. ‘Dad’s totally freaked out. I can show the police my homework, can’t I? If they come knocking, which they won’t.’
‘Just like those poor bloody MA students showed the police their homework. Yeah, great.’
‘So Dad’s turning himself into an arm of MI5, which is exactly how it’s meant to work, isn’t it? Make everyone so scared of the police that they start acting like the bloody police. Might as well close down the universities now.’
‘Excellent,’ said Emma. ‘Just an ordinary evening in homes up and down the land. I’m going to change my clothes.’
I stood in the hall for a moment, breathing.
In the kitchen, Mimi had opened tins of tomatoes and chickpeas and added them to the pan.
‘Dad, if I finish cooking this will you make another of those soufflés?’
I had made two soufflés the week she came out of hospital, when I was bending all the magic I could raise to her enchantment. Look, is not life worth living when four eggs in their brown shells can rise to such a substance?
‘They don’t always work,’ I said. ‘It was a bit of a fluke to pull it off twice.’
‘Try again.’
‘OK. If there are enough eggs. Have a look in the fridge for me?’
‘Imagine the fridge says no.’
Rose looked up from her drawing of a lovely old wooden ship chartered by brave men in funny hats. ‘Yuck. Squishy eggs out of hens’ bottoms.’
‘Vaginas,’ said Mimi. ‘Actually I think they might be cloaca, in hens. You came all squishy out of Mum’s vagina.’
‘So did you.’
We did have enough eggs, and a lemon that needed using. ‘Stop it, both of you. That’s a feeble insult, we all came out of our mums’ vaginas, you could say it of any mammal.’
‘Including cats,’ said Rose. ‘Why can’t we—’
‘Mimi, I’ll make the soufflé if you’ll help with the washing up.’
‘I’m cooking,’ she said. ‘I’ve got homework. You don’t make Rose help with the washing up.’
‘That’s because I’m younger than you and I get very tired after dinner and need to go in my bed. Also, I can’t reach the tap.’
I started to crack eggs. Emma came and put her arms around me from behind and Rose said ewww and Mimi said awww.
waters of the River Creuse
They had trouble with the tapestry. As William Morris could have told them, an artist who doesn’t do his own weaving is giving hostages to fortune, but William Morris never made a tapestry twelve metres wide. Graham Sutherland had worked with the Edinburgh Tapestry Company before, for the famous Wading Birds tapestry, and he wanted the same people for Christ in Glory. Spence asked them to weave the Calf, one of the Four Beasts of Revelation, as a test piece, and they failed. The colours were wrong, he said, the drawing bad, and when Sutherland came from London he agreed. ‘Disappointment and friction all around,’ Spence says.
They went to France, first to Paris, to consult Madame Cuttoli, who had commissioned all the tapestries they’d seen in Antibes years earlier. Her apartment was full of Picassos, bought for a few francs to help the artist before the war, and also commissioned work from Braque, Matisse and Léger. She sent her visitors to a company called Pinton Frères, near Aubusson, where they set their dyes in the alkaline-free waters of the River Creuse as the Aubusson weavers had been doing for centuries. The Pinton family had a loom large enough for the whole work, five hundred years old, made of the trunks of two trees that were already full grown when the band of brothers fought upon St Crispin’s Day.
Christ in Glory took as long to weave as the Cathedral to build. Sutherland kept going to ground, not responding to Monsieur Pinton’s letters, and when Spence and his wife stopped at Aubusson on their way to Lake Maggiore in 1958, Spence had to tell Pinton to go ahead and do his best on a trial without Sutherland’s supervision. Sutherland appeared in Paris, expressed himself satisfied, and the weaving of the whole piece began in June 1959. Only the future, Spence writes, holds the results of this great adventure.
the massed ghosts of England
Emma took a week off work and we rented the same cottage as the previous year and went to Cornwall for half-term. Dad does invite us to stay with him, and I’m sure would make every effort to contain his need for solitude and quiet, but his idea of a simple life is Emma’s idea of a primitive one, and she’s right that washing clothes and dishes by hand is an easier proposition for a single adult than for a family. It is my holiday, she says, and I want the arrangements to be at least as comfortable and convenient as they are at home. She loves grand hotels, and before the girls came would save for months for a few days in the kind of place where they leave chocolates on the pillow while you’re having dinner and change the flowers on the dressing table daily. I do not point out that the washing of clothes and dishes invariably falls to me.
I enjoy the fact that the road the Romans built to connect Lincoln and Exeter is still the fastest route from our house to Dad’s. It’s not safe for running or cycling, but I never drive it without thinking of the hands that built it and the feet that walked it two thousand years ago. Roman legions, I say, imagine them shivering and swearing here in their sandals, although in reality it seems unlikely that with four hundred years to get used to the weather, they were still wearing sandals in February. Yes, Dad, say the girls, we know, you told us last time. And the time before. But the Romans never made it into Cornwall, I say, mostly to myself. Too wild. We’ll overtake them at Exeter.
I drive on the way to Cornwall. That’s just how it is. I settled into the swoops of the road, which tackles any gradient rather than bend, felt my spirits rise as we crossed the border between the red-brick Midlands and the honey stone Cotswolds. Most of these towns – Moreton-in-Marsh, Stow-on-the-Wold – stink of money and smugness now, full of shops selling bits of wrought iron and old cake tins painted matt grey by women called Persephone, or cheese made from the unpasteurised milk of endangered goats belonging to retired pop stars. But a hundred years ago, the little double-barrelled villages were dying on their feet, the young fleeing childhoods of hunger and barely paid field-labour for something nearer a living wage in the cities, and there were alternative communities of artists and makers taking over the once-glorious houses of wool merchants, spinners and dyers. William Morris at Kelmscott, the Ashbees at Chipping Campden, Charles Wade at Snowshill, all remaking Englishness in bearable form. They are still there, somewhere, behind the Range Rovers and the Agas and the silly cheese. Still bathing naked in the lakes and walking the fields in hand-dyed smocks, undermining the local clergy and upsetting the ladies of the manor, paying living wages and treating their craftsmen as human beings.
I flicked a glance over my shoulder at Miriam. Reading. She reads until she is about to be sick and we have to stop, and as soon as we set off again she opens the book
again. She prefers, she says, nausea to boredom, and no, our conversation does not constitute a third way, not for six hours. I couldn’t see or hear Rose, directly behind me.
‘Rose? You OK?’
‘Yes.’ She sounded surprised, although it wasn’t the first time I’d asked her. Are you breathing well, do you feel at all wheezy, do you want an inhaler? Do you have a sense of impending doom? Stop it. Contain the fear in your own head, don’t let it seep like fumes through the car. Miriam would have noticed, wouldn’t she, if her sister had collapsed back there? (No, not if she liked what she was reading, in which case a cloud of purple-frosted cupcakes could flit around the car on sparkling silver wings and she wouldn’t look up.)
Yes, I thought, we had inhalers for both girls, Mimi had her epipen, she was wearing her medical ID bracelet, and if she lost the pen Emma could always write a private prescription for another. (No, Em would say, no, I can’t, we get into trouble for that kind of thing, there are other ways, but she could and would rather than leave Mim in jeopardy.) There isn’t a chemist in the village, not any more, but the big supermarket on the main road probably has one and if not there’s Helston. Chalcott had, after all, not only allowed but encouraged us to go on holiday. Just carry the pen, he’d said, and don’t let her exercise alone, not until we have some idea what the trigger food might be. Though we might never know. At the cottage and along the coast, all the places I wanted to go, the ambulance response time would be more than ten minutes, more than enough time for a person in respiratory arrest to die, but that was why we had the pen and they’d send the helicopter if we needed a blue-light transfer. We were in the jurisdiction of the John Radcliffe in Oxford now, I thought, though there’s a community hospital at Moreton where they could probably stabilise her, and the next tertiary ones would be Bristol, probably, and then Exeter? The layers of geography: Romans, wool merchants, intentional communities, paediatric respiratory medicine wards. In each new place, I could make a new emergency plan and then push it out of sight, but the problem with travelling was that the plan was unstable. It will be better, I thought, when we get there. Our future holidays will have to consist of going and staying somewhere. No Orient Express. No Great American Road Trips. Not that we will ever now be able to get travel insurance for a Great American Road Trip. We were coming down the hill into Bourton-on-the-Water, known to the Oxfordshire Tourist Board as the ‘Venice of the Cotswolds’ and to us as Bring-on-the-Revolution.
There is a traffic light controlling the flow of cars over a fifteenth-century stone bridge with gargoyles and carved foliage; I stopped with a shiny burgundy Range Rover behind me and a shiny scarlet sports car in front. At least, I thought, if she can’t go to America she won’t get shot. Not that they usually shoot white women. At least she won’t be on a transatlantic flight when someone blows it up.
Emma was biting off the skin around her fingernails. Sometimes she makes them bleed.
‘This would have been normal,’ I said. ‘This fear.’
‘What?’
I glanced back. Miriam was still reading. Rose doesn’t listen much. ‘Everyone would have been used to it. You know. Adverse outcomes in paediatric medicine.’
Miriam looked up, meeting my eyes in the mirror. ‘Dead children.’
‘Where?’ asked Rose, as if they might be at the roadside.
‘What the parents are talking about. Adverse outcomes. It means dead people.’
We fell silent. The Range Rover and the sports car and we made our cautious way between the parked cars, past shops selling objects of neither use nor beauty. Miriam returned to her book.
I glanced at Emma, who was intent on the road ahead. ‘I don’t mean it would have been any easier to bear, that theory was exploded pretty soon after it was advanced and anyway you can tell from reading almost any literary text before antibiotics and modern plumbing that every time it was devastating, however often it happened. But the idea wasn’t shocking. The principle of – of an adverse outcome in paediatric medicine wasn’t a surprise. John Donne. Wordsworth. All those Brontë siblings. Pearl.’
‘Pearl?’
‘There’s a new girl in Year Two called Pearl,’ Rose said.
I stopped at the lights at the top of the hill. Even in February, the pavements were solid with breathless old people who didn’t like the slope. ‘It’s also the title of a medieval poem. A father writing about his daughter.’
His dead daughter.
‘All I mean,’ I said quietly, to Emma. ‘All I mean is that the way things are for us now is the normal one, globally and historically. It’s everyone else who’s anomalous. Everyone who doesn’t think it could happen to them.’
She put her hands in her lap. ‘And this comforts you? All this – this academic stuff?’
‘Yes,’ said Mim. ‘He tried to tell me about it too.’
It comforts me to think that most parents in most of time and most of the world have lived with this fear as a matter of course. It comforts me to think that while I have little fellowship in my fear with the parents at the school gate, the massed ghosts of England and the majority of parents living in the world now are with me. Although it turns out, of course, once people have a reason to tell you, that more of the school-gate parents than you used to imagine live in the overlap between ordinary life and tragedy. You know, they murmur, we had another child, before Matt. My sister’s son, they say, he spent a long time in that hospital. Before we moved here, there was a family in that school, completely unexpected.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A little. I think it does.’
But I didn’t know what might comfort her.
We set off again, down towards the fast road to the motorway.
you don’t want to leave
Rose had stopped reading somewhere around Plymouth and taken to kicking my seat and asking if we were nearly there yet.
She kicked again. ‘Why does it always rain here?’
‘It’s not really rain, Rosie-pose. Just mizzle. Because it’s a narrow peninsula sticking out into the North Atlantic.’
‘Phoebe’s grandma lives in France. In a house with a swimming pool.’
‘Your grandpa lives in a house with a beach.’
‘A cold, wet beach.’
Miriam put down her book. ‘All beaches are wet. Otherwise it would be a desert.’
‘Wet from the sky, stupid.’
Emma looked back. ‘We don’t say stupid, Rose. That’s not nice.’
‘But she was being stupid.’
‘You’re stupid.’
‘No, you are.’
‘Stop it. I know it’s a long time in the car but fighting won’t make it easier for anyone, will it?
‘She called me stupid.’
‘She said I didn’t even know that a beach had sea.’
Emma opened the glove compartment. ‘Would anyone like a chocolate biscuit?’
The usual joke places: Indian Queens, London Apprentice, the Chair Museum (if you’re all that bored we’ll stop and then you’ll be sorry), Polyphant. The usual discussion about where to do the shopping, stop at Launceston where there’s the good butcher and the bakery or push on to the supermarket right on the road at Helston. Or both. Rose needs to pee again, there’s a Little Chef in a couple of miles and no, we’re not stopping for tea.
Mizzle, but behind it, even through the car’s vents, sea, the air hardly the same element as what we breathe in the West Midlands. Here we are, I thought, all those days on the ward, all that fear, and here we are. Nearly there.
The road from Helston to Porthleven, known the way I know the roads I run. Dad taught me to drive here, in the community’s rusty minivan with the sticky second gear. My body leant into the curves before they came and my feet knew when to stay off the brake to get the car up the next hill without changing down. Look, the sea, I said. My, it’s a big on-shore wind, look at that!
Porthleven harbour exaggerates the effects of Atlantic gales because harbours aren’t usually built facing out
to the prevailing winds, so we’re not used to seeing waves break over harbour walls and bounce off the church above, but as long as there’s no-one standing on the harbour wall at the time, it’s a trick. The port was built in the mid-nineteenth century because this coastline was notorious for wrecks and there was nowhere to run for shelter this side of Penzance. They had to remove a sandbar and generally rearrange the geography a bit to build the harbour, and it’s still wholly inaccessible during a west wind and the boats in it trapped. But at the harbour entrance there are ‘baulks’, great slabs of tree that slot into grooves and keep out the Atlantic swell, and ‘sluices’ that let the tides in and out while excluding the waves. Sanctuary, refuge, as long as you don’t want to leave. I looked down at the mizzle crowding the stone houses on the hill, the flashes of green in their terraced gardens, at the well-meant Victorian grandeur of the old workhouse and the church and the school, at the bright boats tranquil in their pen and the roofless stone mine-tower set high on the cliff above the town. I didn’t want to leave.
Along the back road behind the town, towards the old miners’ cottages at the foot of the cliff path, Rose and Miriam bickering about whose turn it was for the top bunk. It would be harder, I thought, to check for breathing at night in the top bunk. Dad was sitting on the doorstep in the coat he’d had since before Miriam was born, whittling something and waiting for us. Beside him sat the orange casserole I remembered at Bryher Farm thirty years ago, because he had brought dinner for us.
whatever he was looking for
I’d been out at first light, running in the mud along the coast path while Emma got the girls up and made them pancakes, so when Dad arrived I’d just had a shower, was addressing my own pancakes and wasn’t particularly keen when he said Emma and I should go out for a walk. He’d brought his new paediatric first aid certificate in a plastic wallet to show Emma, as if she wouldn’t believe him without it. I know she would, he said, of course I do, but I thought that if she starts worrying once you’re out she might feel better if she’s actually seen it. You’ve got it wrong, Dad, I thought. I’m the one who worries. Or maybe I’m just the one who talks about worrying.