I met Karen on the maternity ward, after giving birth to Sylvie. It was a strange time. You’re opened up, your body breached, all your defenses down. I scarcely slept at all, the ward was so noisy at night. Instead I’d lie and stare at Sylvie through the transparent walls of her cot, just stare and stare. I couldn’t believe that such a perfect creature existed. Or in the day I’d hold her for hours, feeding her or just rocking her in my arms. Thinking, She is mine. My daughter. And when she startled when a door banged and I felt the fear go through her, I thought, She only has me. She only has me to keep her safe. I knew that I would do anything to protect her, that I’d die for her if I had to, I wouldn’t have to choose, I’d just do it. There’s a kind of exultant freedom in that knowledge—to love someone more than you love yourself. Not by any effort of will, but just because you do.
Sometimes I thought of Dominic, imagined that maybe he’d come. It was just a little bright flicker of hope that wouldn’t be extinguished—like those novelty birthday candles that keep relighting however often you blow on them, that simply won’t be put out. In my half-hallucinatory state after the nights of insomnia, I’d think I could hear his voice, which is rather loud and authoritative when he isn’t being intimate, or his firm step coming down the ward. I’d picture it all, too vividly: how he’d come to my bedside and scoop Sylvie up in his arms and hold her against him, staring at her like I did, loving her like I did. I couldn’t stop thinking these things. Though the rational part of me knew it was just a crazy fantasy. It was spring half-term, he was probably skiing at Val d’Isère with his family.
I was aware of a woman watching me from the opposite side of the ward: dark hair trimly pulled back, a serious, sensible look. She had an older boy and a constant stream of visitors. I knew that her baby was called Lennie, that she’d been born a little early and had lots of bright black hair that would fall out in a day or two. This woman noticed things, I could tell that. I knew she’d have seen I hardly had any visitors. Just Lavinia, my boss, who came dripping beads and bracelets, with a worn, exquisite silk scarf that she’d found in a Delhi market looped around her head, and bearing greetings and gifts. Some woolly things she’d knitted, and some Greenham Common wire that she’d kept since the 1970s, when she’d gone on an Embrace the Base demonstration with thousands of other women and had cut off a bit of the boundary fence with wire cutters, and a tape of whale sounds that she promised would help Sylvie sleep. Flowers too, of course, a lavish bunch of them, the yellow daylilies I love. My life was far from perfect, but at least I knew my flowers were the loveliest on the ward.
Lavinia peered down at Sylvie.
“She’s so beautiful,” she said. “Little bud.” Touching her with one finger, on her brow, like a blessing. “Little perfect thing.” And then, hugging me close, “You’re so clever, Gracie!”
I was happy with Lavinia there: it was almost like having my mother back. But after she’d gone, I cried, I couldn’t stop crying, holding Sylvie to me, pushing the tears away so they wouldn’t fall on her face.
Karen came over then, Lennie in one hand, box of Milk Tray in the other. She sat beside me and put the chocolates down on my bed.
“It can all feel a bit much, can’t it?” she said. “Last night I had to sit in the bath for hours before I could pee. And that bloody woman who came round this morning to talk about contraception. I told her that intercourse wasn’t exactly top of my to-do list at the moment . . .” She pushed the chocolates toward me. “Come on, get scoffing. You need to keep your strength up.”
Watching me, her clear, steady gaze. She knew it wasn’t the pains of birth that made me cry. But we bonded over these things, the scars and injuries of labor. She lent me a rubber ring to sit on, which helped with the pain from the stitches; she was a great advocate of salt baths; she fed me on her chocolates. And I told her about Dominic, and she listened quietly. Knowing her as I do now, I can see how generous she was to me. Karen is a traditional wife—there’s a deep conservatism in her. She reads newspapers that are full of adultery stories and photos of once-glamorous women who dress too tartily for their age. She buys whole books about how to bake cakes. She might well have judged me—that would have been her instinct. Yet she was so accepting: she welcomed me into her life. And I’ve always been grateful for that, the way she reached out to me then.
“Look at our two,” she’d say. “Astrological twins. We must meet up when we’re home. They could grow up together . . .”
I go to the kitchen to ring.
“Karen. I’m so sorry. It was such a great party. Your Halloween parties are always so brilliant,” I say. “She loved it. Really. The magician and everything . . .”
I can hear Mozart playing in her living room.
“I shouldn’t have forgotten about the water thing.” Her voice has an anxious edge. “It’s not like you hadn’t told me. I was stupid, I should have warned him.”
“No, it’s my fault,” I tell her. “I should have kept an eye on her. I hope we didn’t spoil anything.”
“For God’s sake,” says Karen. “It’s just a shame you had to leave.”
“Yes,” I say.
There’s a little silence between us. The music spools out, the balanced phrases, perfect, poised. I don’t want to hear what I know she is going to say.
“Grace, I hope you don’t mind me mentioning this.” There’s caution in her voice. She’s choosing her words with care. “But we think you really need to get help.”
I feel a kind of shame.
“All kids have tantrums, don’t they?” I say. “I just try not to get too worked up about it.”
“Of course all kids freak out sometimes,” she says. “But not like this, Grace. Not like Sylvie. She just sounds so—well—desperate.” And, when I don’t say anything, “Basically, Grace, we think you need to see someone. A psychologist. Someone professional.”
I hate the “we.” I hate to think of them sitting there in Karen’s opulent kitchen discussing me and Sylvie.
2
WHEN I GET to Jonah and the Whale on Monday morning, Lavinia is already busy. She’s taken down the pumpkins from the Halloween display, and she’s potting up autumn gentians on a table of curled wrought iron. The table is rusting but elegant, one of her flea-market finds. She has lots of bracelets on her wrists, and she’s fixed back her hair with a sweep of magenta muslin, a tie-dyed scarf from Gujarat, which has a long, silky fringe and a gold thread woven through. The thick, sweet smells of the flower shop wrap themselves around me—wet earth and mingled pollens.
Lavinia is a widow. Her husband was an orthopedic surgeon, and I always feel he was a difficult man, though she only ever speaks of him with affection. He died ten years ago, of cirrhosis of the liver. She’d been a physiotherapist: she opened the flower shop after his death with the insurance money, wanting to make a fresh start. “Why Jonah and the Whale?” I asked once, expecting something deep about loss and new beginnings, but she smiled in that way she has—enigmatic, a little self-mocking—and said that she just liked the way it sounds. She lives alone, but she never seems lonely. She knows so many people—Buddhists, artists, performance poets, from her hippie days. On Sunday, she tells me, she had three rather decrepit musicians around for a paella, and they played Cole Porter in her living room.
I tell her about the party, about what happened with Sylvie. She turns to me and listens till I’ve finished, her quiet eyes taking me in.
“Poor kid,” she says then. “Poor you.”
Her eyes linger on me. There’s a little crease penciled between her brows. She never gives me advice, and I’m grateful for that.
I put flowers out on the pavement at the front of the shop—buckets of lilies with reddish pollen that stains your skin like turmeric; hydrangeas of the richest, densest blue. I’ve planted the hydrangeas in azure metal pots, choosing the containers with care. I love the way the clashing colors seem to shimmer and sing. There’s a winter rawness in the air, the cold scrapes at my ski
n. My hands are always chapped, working here. I own numerous pairs of fingerless gloves that I dry out on the hot-water pipes in the back room near the boiler, and I change them during the day, yet whatever I do, in winter I’m never quite warm.
It’s a slow morning, as Mondays usually are, and Lavinia sends me off in my car to do the deliveries. First a big traditional bouquet, roses and carnations, for a silver wedding. The woman who answers the doorbell has stiff curled hair and a ready smile, and behind her an orderly house that smells of lavender polish and detergent. This fascinates me always, the glimpses of people’s houses, these slivers of other lives. Next, there’s a planted arrangement, some winter cyclamens, for a nervous young woman whose hair falls over her face. The cyclamens seem so right for her—these fragile, pale, self-deprecating flowers. She stands on her doorstep and looks at me with an uncertain, surprised air—as though this is all a mistake, as though she feels she’s not the kind of woman people would buy flowers for. As she talks, she keeps touching the side of her face in a little self-comforting gesture. I drive away, feeling a loneliness that might be hers or mine.
The last call is to one of those modern estates where the numbering doesn’t make sense. I need number 43, but 37 seems to lead straight to 51. I stop the car and get out, walk down the road and peer into all the alleyways, trying to find the right house.
It’s how I met Dominic, delivering flowers. I was eighteen. I’d only just begun working for Lavinia. I was thrilled with the job, after temping in tedious offices ever since I’d left school.
It was a planted arrangement—the most expensive we do—in a wicker basket. I’d written out the card myself. I’d been the one to take the call. An older woman, a privileged voice, with cool, immaculate vowels: “Happy Birthday, dearest Claudia, with all my love, Mama.” A spiky bit of wicker from the basket had worked loose, and as I took the flowers out of the car, I snagged my finger. The cut was surprisingly deep. I wrapped a tissue around it. The blood soaked rapidly through, but I noticed only after I’d rung the bell.
He was a big man, forty-something, and wearing a linen shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He looked at me as though I amused him. I was wearing my usual kind of outfit—a little cord skirt and stripy tights and boots with high, spindly heels, too high to drive in, really. I was suddenly very aware how short my skirt was.
“Flowers for Claudia Runcie,” I said.
He was looking at me, he didn’t look at the flowers. He still had that pleased, amused air.
“Well,” he said.
He took the basket from me and noticed my hand.
“Whatever happened?” he said.
“I cut it,” I said.
“Okay. Stupid question,” he said. “You’d better come in. You’re dripping on my doorstep.”
He thrust a huge handkerchief at me. I wrapped it around my hand.
It was a large, airy kitchen, with that pale, distressed kitchen furniture that looks as though it’s been sourced from some Provençal street market. I thought, If I had a proper kitchen, this is exactly how I’d like it to look. There were photos on the mantelpiece, of a boy and a girl, black-and-white, in silver frames. The photos were rather beautiful, soft focus, cleverly lit. There were masses of birthday cards and a silver helium balloon, for Claudia presumably.
“I’m Dominic,” he said.
I told him my name.
He hunted in the drawers of the cabinets for a Band-Aid.
“Where the hell does she keep them?” he said.
I had an immediate sense of his wife, of Claudia, as the center of things, the heart of the home, the one who held it together, who knew the best photographers and where to find exquisite kitchen units, and whose Band-Aids had their allotted place in her drawer. I sensed his absolute dependency on her. What I didn’t know then, but was soon to learn, was that they never made love. It was a comfortable, prosperous marriage but with no sex or closeness. At least, that’s how he told it.
He found the packet. I put out my hand for the Band-Aid, but he’d taken one out and was peeling off the backing.
“Give me your finger,” he told me.
Right from the beginning I did just what he said.
He stuck the plaster in place with rather excessive thoroughness, but I wasn’t going to move away. He had a faint scent of leather and cigars, a very male scent. His closeness felt extraordinary, thrilling with a shiver of sex, yet somehow safe too, as though he were familiar to me, as though I knew him already. I felt how much bigger he was than me. I liked that.
“Better now?” he said.
“Yes. Thank you.”
He stood back a pace and smiled at me. A sudden smile of startling candor, with a little crease on one side of his mouth. It’s weird thinking about this now. It’s Sylvie’s smile exactly. Where his hair was starting to recede, the skin had a vulnerable look. I wanted to reach up and touch it. The thought sent a clear, bright line of sensation through me.
“So. Grace. I think you should have a coffee. After losing all that blood.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You do drink coffee, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“That’s a relief. Claudia’s into this foul herbal stuff. Chamomile. It’s like hay. Why would anyone drink hay?”
I felt he was telling me too much, giving too much away—that he shouldn’t be criticizing her like this to me, a stranger, even about such a very trivial thing.
While the kettle was boiling, he found a place for the flowers on the mantelpiece.
“Good flowers. Did you do them?”
“Yes.”
“They’re rather lovely,” he said. “Well, you look the arty type. I can tell from the stripes.” He gave my legs an appraising look.
We drank our coffee. Somehow he learned a lot about me.
When I left, he asked would I be okay to drive, and I said I was fine, I didn’t feel faint in the least—though that wasn’t true exactly. Two days later he rang the shop and asked me out to the Alouette for a meal; where he effortlessly seduced me.
Eventually I find number 43, down an alleyway. The man who opens the door is unshaven and in his pajamas. Hot air from a sickroom brushes against me, with a smell of camphor and stale sheets. He’s embarrassed, seeing me there. It must all have been going on for a while; the house is rearranged to accommodate his illness. I can see the living room behind him, with the sofa made up as a bed. There’s opera on the stereo, a vigorous soprano, her voice pulsating with passion. The contrast is saddening—the music with its fabulous energy and emotion, and his wasted, restricted life.
For lunch I buy baguettes from Just A Crust. On the way back, as always, I linger outside the patisserie on the corner. They sell the most wonderful cakes there, all decorated with jeweled marzipan fruit, and with names that sound like the names of beautiful women. We eat our baguettes in turn in the back room.
The afternoon passes slowly. At three Lavinia goes out for a walk and a smoke.
Just after she’s gone, I see a woman approaching the shop. She’s in her seventies perhaps. She’s wearing a crisply cut jacket, her hair is a lacquered gray helmet, her eyebrows are plucked and thinly penciled in. Everything about her is polished and exact. Seeing her, it enters my mind that this grooming has a defensive purpose for her, as though this slick, varnished surface will somehow keep her safe. I watch as she draws nearer, tapping along the pavement on her pointy, shiny shoes. At the door she hesitates just for a heartbeat, then clears her throat, walks determinedly in. I know what she’s come for. I feel a brief apprehension. I wish Lavinia were here.
The flowers are for her husband, she says.
“The funeral director said he’d take care of it all, but I wanted to choose them myself. It seemed important somehow.”
Her hands are clasped tight in front of her. I can feel the tension in her, her fear that she might come undone.
I bring her a chair and show her our catalog. But she can’t choose. The decision has too
much importance. It’s as though she believes that if only she can choose with absolute precision, everything will be mended and she’ll somehow bring him back. I understand. I’ve felt that.
I turn a page of the catalog. A photo catches her eye.
“Maybe something with cornflowers,” she says. “They were his favorites. He always loved that blue.”
She looks away then, her eyes fill up, the tears spill down her face. The massive grief washes through her, there’s nothing she can do. She’s embarrassed but can’t stop it happening. Tears make glossy streaks in her thick cake makeup. I’m relieved for her that the shop is empty. She’s a private person, I know how she hates this extravagant public display.
“I’m going to bring you a drink,” I tell her. “You just sit there till you’re ready. We’ve got all the time in the world.”
I go to the back room and make her a coffee. Her grief has got inside me. My hand shakes holding the spoonful of coffee; the soft brown powder sifts down.
She’s grateful. She wraps both her hands around the mug, as though needing something to cling to, as though the world seems insubstantial to her. She tells me about her husband. He was diabetic, he’d been taken into this nursing home—it was just for a week, she’d felt she needed a rest. How could she have been so selfish? They didn’t do his blood sugars properly, not as she’d have done. It’s all her fault he died . . .
I listen, feeling helpless. Not saying much, not comforting her or telling her that everything’s okay. I know that wouldn’t help her. And when we’ve chosen the wreath, I take her to the back room so she can tidy her face, because I can feel that matters to her.
Yes, My Darling Daughter Page 2