by Cusk, Rachel
Lottie is in the kitchen. Claudia comes in behind her.
‘How did it go?’ she says brightly.
Lottie looks startled.
‘It was just – normal,’ she says.
‘You forgot to take your coat. I found it hanging in the hall. I worried that you’d be cold.’
‘I wasn’t cold.’
‘You might not have felt cold,’ Claudia says. ‘But if you’re not properly dressed you’re more liable to catch things, and then everyone else in the house gets it as well.’
The kitchen is gloomy and untidy. Claudia switches the lights on. She begins putting everything away. She puts away all the pots and pans that stand on the drainer. She puts away everything lying on the counters. The aluminium pans clatter when she sets them on their shelves. She opens the cupboard doors and bangs them shut again. The glasses chatter against one another; the cups rattle in their saucers. She opens the fridge, sweeps a whole armful of things from inside, kicks it shut behind her. She stamps on the lever that opens the bin and the lid crashes like a pair of cymbals as it hits the wall behind. One after another Claudia flings in empty milk cartons, rotten bits of food, old plastic containers. Thud! thud! thud! they go, disappearing into its rustling depths. Claudia feels possessed by a mad kind of genius. She is filled with sound: she is a composer creating a crazy, dissonant symphony. She bangs the cupboard doors again. She takes out the cutlery drawer and spills its contents over the kitchen table in a bright shrieking cascade of steel. Ting! ting! ting! go the knives and forks and spoons as she drops them back in their proper compartments.
At each sound, Lottie flinches.
‘What’s that smell?’ she says finally.
Claudia stops what she is doing. She stands, alert, in the silence. A feeling of great weariness, almost of despondency, passes over her.
‘It’s a sort of burning smell,’ Lottie said.
It is the bonfire. Claudia can smell it too.
She says, ‘Daddy’s been having a bonfire out in the garden.’
Lottie’s expression brightens.
‘Really?’ she says.
The next time Claudia looks, she sees them all out in the garden in the gathering dusk. She stands at the kitchen window. Howard rakes up leaves and Lewis throws them on the fire in big armfuls. Lottie has a long stick in her hand. She is tending the smouldering heap, forcing the new leaves into its hot centre, compacting the top. With her stick she rounds up stray bits of paper and twigs and rams them back into the fire. Claudia can hear Lottie and Lewis and Howard talking. She can’t hear what they say, just the sound they make saying it. The smoke comes out in big grey rolling waves, one after another. Sometimes they roll towards the window where Claudia stands. Then, suddenly, the smoke changes direction and is drawn helplessly upwards into the sky.
*
In the evening, Howard and Claudia are going out.
Claudia stays upstairs getting ready while the children eat their supper. She puts on black trousers and a black jersey. She puts on the necklace Howard gave her. It is silver, a paper-thin silver leaf on a silver chain. She sits down in front of the mirror and draws her hair back from her face. She is surprised by how finished she looks, how completed. It is as though there is nothing more for her to do. It is as though the mirror has told her that she has come to the end of some long and complicated task, that all is done that needs to be done.
How funny it is not to want anything, not to need! She thinks of the banknotes she gave Lottie. When she imagined this money, it was as the material proof of a developmental stage, like the first spoonfuls of food she put into Lottie’s mouth as a baby. She always does these things a little too soon. She hurries her on. She has wanted to teach Lottie how to want, to need. She supposes it is her way of trying to simplify things between them, for if Lottie needs something, then Claudia has the task of providing it. Lottie would want something and she, Claudia, would be able to give it to her. That is how she has always imagined it, anyway. Lottie never asked for money. It was just that by giving her some, Claudia thought she would align Lottie with herself. They would both be facing the same way, side by side, looking out at the things they wanted. But now it seems that Claudia doesn’t want anything. She doesn’t need anything at all.
Howard comes in. He puts his face into the crook of her neck where she sprayed her perfume.
‘Do you think Lottie enjoyed herself today?’ Claudia asks him.
He raises his head and they look at themselves in the mirror.
‘I don’t suppose it matters one way or the other, does it?’ he says.
Downstairs, the two younger children are watching television. Claudia goes into the kitchen to see if Lottie is there, and then stands at the bottom of the stairs and calls her to come down. Lottie is babysitting. Claudia sits at the kitchen table and writes down the telephone number and address of the place they are going. She hears someone coming down the stairs.
‘I’m in here!’ she calls.
After a while, she goes out and looks in the hall. Then she looks in the sitting room. Lottie is sitting there with Lewis and Martha. The television feels her motionless face with its blue lights. Claudia sees she is wearing a new skirt.
‘Lottie!’ she says softly. ‘Can you just come out for a minute? I want to give you some numbers and things.’
She turns and goes back to the kitchen. There is a pause, and then Lottie comes in.
‘We’re only going to the Carters’,’ Claudia says. The Carters live on the other side of Laurier Drive.
She gives Lottie her instructions. Claudia can hear herself speaking, but she can barely concentrate on what she is saying. She tries to keep her eyes on Lottie’s face but they keep straying – magnetised, astonished – down to her skirt.
‘Did you get that today?’ she says finally.
Lottie looks down at herself, as though to check they are talking about the same thing.
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘Where did you get it?’
‘A shop.’
It is a pink skirt with a ruffle around the hem. It comes down to Lottie’s knees. The pink is a candyfloss pink. The ruffle has been badly stitched. It is both too big for Lottie and too small, sagging around the hips and straining at the stomach. The material is so cheap that Claudia can see Lottie’s underwear through it. It is a child’s skirt, the kind of skirt Claudia might have bought a version of for Martha, but on Lottie it is without doubt the least flattering item of clothing Claudia has ever seen. She wears it with her usual hooded sweatshirt.
‘It’s lovely,’ Claudia says. ‘Well done.’
Lottie seems pleased. ‘I thought you’d like it,’ she says.
*
Later, one Saturday, Claudia has to go into town. She leaves Howard and the children and goes on her own. The streets are thick with people. They roam the pavements like unquiet souls, like hundreds of homeless spirits come to find all the things they have lost. They carry bags, boxes, great plastic sacks wrapped around bulky objects. Some of them can barely hold the quantity of things they have bought. She sees a man carrying a pair of garden shears, a man carrying a plastic lounger, a woman with a child’s bicycle in a giant plastic bag. Its handlebars stick out, each one tied with a tinselly tassel that trembles like a little girl’s ponytails as the woman walks along.
The day is bright and windy. Overhead the sky streams blue. Claudia picks up speed. She strides along the littered pavement, glancing in the windows, glancing at the faces as they pass her. She begins to forget herself, to feel a kind of exhilaration. It is good, after all, to be away from what is yours: from home, where everything either belongs to you or speaks of you or reflects you, until it becomes a kind of consuming sickness, the need to exist, to dominate. Yet here she is, free! Why does she care what people buy, where they go, how they spend their time? What does it have to do with her? She isn’t responsible for them – they are free, like her. It is responsibility that sets its pins and screws in your nature,
that warps and gnarls you and makes you ugly to yourself. She strides along, the wind whipping in her hair. Ahead of her she sees a group of teenaged girls coming out of a shop. They come up the pavement, all clutching each other and laughing. They are like a laughing, many-tentacled creature, their arms and their legs and their smiles all jumbled together. They have bags and bangles and earrings, and hair that the wind blows all around them in ribbons, so that you can’t see which hair is connected to which head. One of them catches her attention. She looks at this girl for a long time before realising that it is Lottie.
XXIII
There is a woman Thomas sees in the school playground. She is often early, like him. She sits on a bench at the edge of the tarmac, reading a book.
He doesn’t really know why he has noticed her, but now that it’s happened he finds himself forming an ethereal kind of relationship with her. When he arrives he searches the playground for her brown-haired form, bent over its book. It comforts him to see her, as it comforts him to see lights on at the windows of strangers’ houses, knowing someone is there. Once he notices her in town, crossing the road towards him. She is with another woman, talking, and when she happens to glance his way he smiles. Momentarily her eyes widen, confused, and then she is gone. Occasionally she isn’t there in the playground and he feels irritable. He imagines himself leaving this place, taking action: he has the urge to do something that will rinse this passivity from his brain. He feels formless, like a lump of dough in which anyone who chooses can leave an impression. But then, the next day, there she is again, and the dent she has created is filled in.
One afternoon Alexa comes out clutching the hand of another girl. She is the brown-haired woman’s daughter. Thomas knows: he has seen them together.
‘This is my friend Clara,’ she says.
‘Hello, Clara.’ He smiles. He thinks of Clara Schumann. He wants to ask the child whether she is named after her. He considers how he could put the question. ‘That’s a lovely name,’ he says.
Suddenly the woman is there. Close up she is smaller than he expected. Everything about her is brown, her large eyes, her coat, the hair that falls in flossy-seeming wisps over her shoulders. He is embarrassed. He realises that he has carried this woman’s image around with him, as people used to carry around little painted miniatures. He feels as though he has stolen something from her without her knowing.
‘I was just saying what a lovely name your daughter has.’
She smiles, slightly surprised. ‘Thank you.’
‘I don’t think we’ve met before.’
She cocks her brown head, quizzical. ‘Haven’t we? I do know your – is she your wife?’
‘Yes. Yes, she is.’
‘I was thinking the other day that I hadn’t seen her for a while.’
He is already used to this discourse of the playground, with its strange elisions and old-world delicacies, its sudden, startling thrusts of frankness. This is not the first time he has had to explain Tonie’s disappearance to an imperative female audience. At least now he doesn’t mistake their curiosity for friendliness towards himself.
‘She’s working full-time now,’ he says.
She nods philosophically. ‘I thought it might be that,’ she says, as though it might equally well have been something else, death perhaps, or imprisonment.
‘Yes, they offered her a promotion and she just couldn’t turn it down.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ the woman says. She does, genuinely, seem to find it wonderful. She is smiling, her cheeks lifted, the skin crinkling beneath her large chocolate-coloured eyes. He notices that her lips have little fluting curves in the corners, like quavers.
‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ he says.
There is a silence. Thomas wants to go away. He wants to go home and play Bach. He is not enjoying this conversation after all.
‘Daddy, can Clara come back to our house?’ Alexa is still gripping the other child’s hand. ‘Please can she?’
‘Not today,’ he says. ‘Another time.’
Alexa persists. ‘Tomorrow?’
He glances at the woman. She smiles again and he grimaces awkwardly in return.
‘We’ll see,’ he says. ‘We’ll talk about it when we get home.’
He takes Alexa’s arm and leads her firmly out of the playground and into the street. All the way home he has a sour sense of disappointment, but in the evening, when Tonie is there, he finds himself thinking about the brown-haired woman again. Her image is once more in its frame. Tonie is moving around the kitchen, pale-faced, distracted. For a moment he forgets the nature of their bond: she has a kind of detailed neutrality about her, a compendiousness, as though he could ask her anything, this sturdy friend of his life.
‘Do you know the mother of a child named Clara?’ he says.
‘Who?’
‘Clara.’
She pauses beside the sink. He sees her mind ticking over, locating the details. She is wearing a mauve-coloured sweater that looks thick and itchy. Vaguely it appears to him as a symbol of affliction, this garment with its heavy knitted cables and constricting neck, its impenetrable fastnesses of wool. It is as though she has put it on as a warning to the world, to keep away from her.
‘I think the mother’s called Helen,’ she says presently.
‘I met her in the playground today. She said she knew you.’
‘Did she?’
‘Alexa seems pretty keen on the daughter.’
‘On Clara?’ Tonie turns on the taps. ‘That’s new. She and Clara have never had all that much to say to each other.’
She speaks with a certain finality. She is telling Thomas that whatever his impressions of the situation might be, her own knowledge is superior. She is reminding him that in the world he now inhabits there is nothing new for him to discover. There is nothing to know that she has not known already.
‘Well, they seemed pretty friendly today.’
‘Did they? These things come and go. Alexa probably fell out with Maisie and brought in Clara as a sop.’
Thomas laughs, though he finds her remark faintly irritating.
‘I wouldn’t have suspected her of that degree of cynicism,’ he says.
Tonie raises her eyebrows. She does not reply.
‘Actually,’ he persists, ‘I thought it was rather touching, the way they were holding hands together. It all seemed perfectly innocent to me.’
Her expression is inscrutable. ‘That’s fine,’ she says, as though he’d asked her permission for something. After a pause, she adds: ‘You should make friends with Helen. She’s nice. It would do you good to have a friend at the school.’
‘Thanks,’ he says flatly.
‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ she says. ‘I just think you’d get on well with her, that’s all. She’s a musician, you know.’
‘Is she?’
‘She plays the violin. You should ask her about it.’
Thomas goes upstairs to say goodnight to Alexa. He feels enveloped, vaguely suffocated, as though Tonie has spun another mauve-coloured sweater around him to match her own. Before he turns out the light, he says:
‘Shall we see if Clara wants to come round tomorrow?’
Alexa’s face is blank. She shrugs. ‘All right,’ she says.
He is vexed. ‘Don’t you want her to come?’
She thinks about it. ‘I don’t mind. I suppose so.’
But he doesn’t see her the next day, nor the next. Alexa says that Clara is ill.
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘I don’t know. She’s always ill,’ Alexa says, balefully.
Then, one day, the mother is there again, sitting on her bench. He realises that he has forgotten her. She was a habit his mind had formed, that’s all. He can’t remember now what the particulars of the habit were.
‘Hello,’ he says.
His shadow falls across her. She looks up. She seems pleased.
‘Oh, hello,’ she says.
‘I haven�
��t seen you here for a while.’
It becomes apparent that she is not going to stand, and nor does she make any accommodating gesture for him to sit. This is the adult physicality of the playground, this non-directive bodily stance. She can neither welcome him nor send him away. He sits anyway, beside her on the bench.
‘It’s spring,’ he says, for he has only in that moment realised it. It is March. The sun is lapping weakly at his white face and hands, and there are hard green buds on the naked branches of the trees that stand here and there in their concrete moorings. He wonders how it can possibly be enough, this timid force, to renew all that has to be renewed. He hums a few phrases from the ‘Spring’ Sonata.
‘I don’t know your name,’ she says.
His eyes are closed, feeling the sun. ‘Thomas,’ he says.
‘I’m Ellen.’
‘Ellen?’
He opens his eyes. She is offering her hand. He is coldly amused by Tonie’s mistake. It makes him like the woman better. After all, there is something for him to find out.
‘You’re a musician,’ he says.
She is surprised. ‘How did you know that?’
He considers tormenting her. ‘I thought everybody knew. You’re famous, aren’t you?’
‘No, not at all.’ She isn’t upset. She looks confused.
He closes his eyes again. ‘My wife told me that you played the violin.’
‘Actually,’ she says, ‘it’s the viola.’
He smiles to himself. He does not think that Tonie would care for the difference between a violin and a viola.
‘I’d like to have been a musician,’ he says.
The bell shrills; the children come out. The playground fills. Suddenly Clara is there, clambering on to her mother’s lap. The woman kisses the top of her head, and it is then that Thomas realises that she is beautiful, as though her daughter’s arrival has unveiled her. He thinks of the woman-shaped viola, tawny and glimmering, the child like a bow in her lap. He realises that he cannot look at something beautiful without wanting to comprehend it completely. He looks around for Alexa, suddenly embarrassed to be sitting so close to them, as though these thoughts were public acts he might be made to stand by for life. He remembers the way he used to look at her from far off, the sense of ownership he had over her form. He doesn’t understand himself. He rises, pushes forwards into the crowd.