But Grace stopped being angry with Andrew. Instead she looked at him like someone waking from a long sleep to find all that was left of the dream was an indefinable sense of loss. She tried to remember how it was that he had come to be her husband.
Louisa
Grace Shield has been up to see me again today. I enjoy her company. We tell each other things. ‘I don’t usually talk to people about things I care about,’ she says with a smile that is embarrassed and pleased both at once. ‘Maybe if you knew someone back when you were a child, you have that childish trust that they wish you well. Maybe when you’ve known someone when they were a child, you don’t feel the need to dissemble because children use information as stories not weapons. Maybe that’s it; us having known each other all those years ago.’
‘Or maybe you need to speak to someone and you know that I will probably have forgotten what you said as soon as you’ve said it.’ Grace looks up at me with such a shocked expression that I start to laugh. ‘My mind works differently these days. I know that I sometimes make connections where none should be. I know I remember as if it were yesterday what happened half a century ago, while what happened yesterday is covered in mist. But it’s quite normal, you know, when you’re as old as I am.’
I tell her about Georgie. About how my son died. The seeds of the tragedy were sown long before it happened, by his father and by me. One of the reasons that he settled in Canada was for the wilderness. He would go off for days on end and reappear, so his wife told me, with a new calm that would last a few months before the old restlessness took over and he disappeared once more. Even with a young wife and a new baby, he still felt the need to withdraw, to walk far beyond any human contact. He was found floating face down in a quiet bay of the great lake. It was assumed that the ice had broken beneath his feet. I had to find out every detail of his last long walk, every detail of his dying. No one understood my seemingly unquenchable thirst for information, anything to do with my son’s disappearance into the vast winter whiteness. At first even I didn’t quite understand but eventually I knew: while I was busying myself finding answers to the questions, I was busying myself with my son; and while I was busy with my son it was not yet over and he was not quite gone.
So I look at Grace Shield with compassion. She thinks I hold the answers to all her questions but soon enough she will realise, as I had to, that the one answer she needs she knows already: the one you loved is gone and will not return. But for now I let her have her head, although it isn’t easy. I tell her as much as I can bear to, although I have to take it slowly. It hurts, having grown tough skin over the wounds of the past, to tear them open again.
And downstairs Noah grunts and frets about his book. When he came to see me last night he told me a quote he had come across. Writing is easy; all you do is sit down at your desk and open a vein.
Remembering is a bit like that.
‘You mooch, child.’ How does she do it, Lydia, my mother-in-law; how does she, tiny birdwoman, make me feel small when I tower over her? ‘Can’t stand mooching. It’s high time you took over some of the running of the household. Responsibility, tradition, duty. Arthur needs everything to be just so or he won’t achieve the calm he needs, the peace to do his work. It’s our task to make sure he gets that peace. I won’t be around for ever.’
You don’t really believe that? I know you are quite incapable of imagining the world without you, of truly, in your heart of hearts, believing that there will be a time when there is no you. Women like Lydia Blackstaff are never truly gone. Their spirits live on in the anxious glance of a clumsy maid or the nervous laughter of a poor relation and in myriad rules designed to make life uncomfortable: no hot water in the mornings, jam with the bread for the children’s tea only on Sundays, no log fires after the first day of the fourth month no matter what the fickle April weather turned up. That same mean spirit reigns in the fruit-cages in the garden where nettles stand guard around the raspberry canes so that you are lucky to get half a punnet of berries before your hands start burning from the stings. Oh no, Lydia Blackstaff would never truly be gone from Northbourne House.
I am told to take over doing the flowers for the main rooms. ‘Find my trug and the secateurs, and you may take my gloves.’ Here she glances down at my hands that I hold folded across my middle like a schoolchild, and adds, ‘No, I think you had better ask Jenkins for a pair of his.’
I don’t know many of the plants by name, other than the obvious ones like dahlias and asters, but I know what will look pleasing and find more than enough for every main room of the house and a couple of the bedrooms too. I gather plenty of foliage. I’m especially taken with the shrub whose small leaves glow in the sun like old Madeira. I arrange those branches with the golden-orange asters and the deep-yellow and pink dahlias and some late-flowering dusky pink roses in a blue jug for the drawing room. The colours of a slow sunset, I think to myself, as I stand back admiring my handiwork.
‘No sense of colour.’ Lydia leans on her son’s arm and points an accusing finger at my arrangement. ‘And that jug, it’s a kitchen jug, child. Have you no idea?’
But soon I find myself useful even by my mother-in-law’s standards; I am expecting.
The baby appears, a bruised fruit prised from its shell, and I look down into his unfathomable eyes and swear I will not let him down.
Arthur glances at his son before kissing me tenderly on the forehead, saying I have made him the happiest, the proudest man in all the world. He does not stay long. There is a smell of blood around still and Arthur has an uncommonly sensitive stomach. But for months afterwards the villagers talked about how Mr Blackstaff had come running from the big house with no coat and only his sheepskin slippers on his feet, shouting out the news and standing everyone a drink at the Dog and Hound.
When he next comes to my room, two days later, he presents me with a prettily carved cameo pin before going over and inspecting his sleeping son. ‘Ugly little brutes, aren’t they, babies?’
I barely glance at the brooch and ask him instead why he has not been in to see us both, his son and I, since the birth.
Arthur looks displeased. He was a man who expected more thanks for his efforts. ‘Don’t you like your pin? It’s very fine.’
‘Yes, Arthur, I like it very much.’
‘I’ve been in my studio. This little fellow,’ Arthur nods towards the infant in its crib, ‘inspired me. I couldn’t bear to leave the canvas even for a moment.’ He bends down and pecks me on the cheek. ‘I’ll let you rest. I can see that you are still a little out of sorts.’
I watch him go and place the brooch back in its velvet-lined box. My son is awake now and looking at me with eyes the undecided colour of the newborn: a deep mysterious hue that is neither brown nor grey nor blue but a mix of all three and others too, like the water in the glass where Arthur rinsed his brushes. I smile at my son and then I cry from the sheer weight of all the love I feel.
Jane enters as quiet as a draught. She bends over the cot and coos, ‘Your grandmama is most pleased with you, little man.’
‘And is my son pleased with his grandmama?’
Jane perches at the foot of the bed. ‘I know it’s not my place to interfere …’ she pauses but although I say nothing to contradict her she continues ‘… but I feel that as an old friend of Arthur’s, and I hope a new friend to you …’ I still say nothing. Jane’s sallow cheeks colour but her pale eyes maintain their mild expression. ‘Arthur is a great man, a great artist; we all know that. And he must not be upset or worried with the trivia of everyday concerns. Aunt Lydia has been wonderful; she knows him so well. And …’ Jane puts her cool hand on my strong one, ‘Of course you try as well. It’s just that sometimes … maybe you don’t quite see. This morning, just as an example, he has been so distracted by your bad humour that he has not touched his brushes. He cannot understand what it was he had done to vex you. And he’s at a very delicate stage of his new painting. Of course you’ve only just delivered.
Don’t think I don’t understand that it must be an emotional time for you too, but Arthur is not like other men. And we … well, it’s up to us not to upset the careful equilibrium that makes him able to create. We have a duty, don’t you think, to smooth his path and leave him free to take flight on the wings of creation?’
‘Why should he need a smooth path if he has wings?’ I ask.
Grace Shield listens and then she says, ‘Men are precious, particularly artists; every little distraction puts them off their stride. Then, to be fair, I don’t know how good my work would have been if I had had children. Not being able to, sent me mad for a while, but it forced me to walk down a different road than I would otherwise have done.’ She pauses, smiles and shakes her head. ‘Of course that way too ended in a bit of a disaster, but a different kind. It’s the usual choice, isn’t it? Turn left for a little bit of love and happiness, some pain and certain death, or go right for … well, what do you know … a little love and happiness, some pain and certain death. But what I’m saying is: to do the really good work you need to be single-minded. Women are supposed to be good at multi-tasking; and maybe that is the true enemy of promise.’
Grace was pretending to be asleep, her face buried in the pillow. Andrew pretended to believe her as he tiptoed from the bedroom and down the stairs. She heard the front door close followed by his footsteps on the gravel. It was seven o’clock on a Sunday but he was off to help his father with some fencing.
She could not tell what kind of morning it was. She had fitted black-out blinds to shut out the light. She slept badly these days. The merest noise or movement would be enough to wake her: a rattling windowpane, Andrew turning, a bird taking flight from the shrubbery. Wide awake and nothing to be awake for, she would lie rigid on her back staring into the gloom, too exhausted to get up and read or listen to the night-time radio, too fretful to go back to sleep, wondering at the way time slowed at night, the hours dragging along like beasts in chains.
Yet when morning came her bed ceased to be a prison and turned into a refuge that she was loath to leave. This morning, like every morning, she had to prompt herself just to get up. ‘Sit up – one leg over the side of the bed … then the other. Now you rise. There you are: standing – upright! Ready to hit the shower?’ She liked that expression, hit the shower; it sounded confident and dynamic. Washed and dressed, she walked across to the windows and opened the blinds. The sunshine steamrolled its way inside, flattening everything with glaring light. Outside the apple tree blossomed, the branches strong and fresh enough to hold a hanging body. Next door’s roof was being tiled. A tractor with a clattering trailer rode across the field. The usual gang of ducks waddled towards the river, one leaping, two leaping, all of them leaping, quacking, flapping into the glittering snake of water. The day was happening all around her and she just wished it would stop so she could go back to bed. Another Sunday. Cunning days, Sundays; they took their time arriving for those who most yearned for them – those exhausted by work, commuters, mothers who longed for relief – but rushed towards those who dreaded them: those whose colleagues were their family or those, like Grace, who found their family the hardest work of all.
There was a knock on the front door. Grace had locked the side-gate into the garden so that there was no way to the back door. Having an accessible back door implied an acceptance of informal visits and people letting themselves into your kitchen and shouting a cheery hello, so she had barred the way. But there was still the front door and behind it, she could see from the landing window, stood Jenny, the smile ready on her long face where all the features crowded into the bottom half, leaving a high forehead perpetually lined with concern. Even when she smiled, Jenny looked doleful, as if really she knew better. She was married but she and her husband had no children, and now she had passed forty it was generally assumed that there would be none. This, it seemed, qualified her as the perfect person for Grace to spend time with. Jenny did everything Robina Abbot expected of her, including making regular visits to cheer up Robina’s difficult and, it had to be said, ungrateful daughter-in-law. Grace liked Jenny. She just did not want to see her, not today, not any day, not anyone. Truly, if it were an angel standing on her doorstep, Grace would have opened the door just a crack and said, in her tired, tired voice, ‘Thank you, but not today.’
So she got down on to the floor, out of sight from the windows, and crawled back to her bedroom. There she threw herself on to the bed as exhausted as if she had lived a whole full day. Ten minutes later the phone rang. Grace put the pillow over her head.
The windows were closed, the curtains were drawn and the phone was disconnected. She lay curled up beneath the bedclothes; no one could see her. She was not due at Hillside House until one.
At noon she dragged herself off the bed, and went downstairs. She would see to the household bills. Seated at her desk, she stared at the pile of unanswered letters, unpaid bills and unopened envelopes, before picking one at random. She read that unless she wanted her gas supply to be cut of she should have paid the bill last week. If she was able to make a case for genuine hardship she should call the number at the top of the letter – last week – and the gasboard would try to help. Was there genuine hardship? Did having to locate the chequebook and write the cheque, then find a stamp and go to the letterbox count as genuine hardship? Probably not. She paid that bill and the one for the phone too and wondered idly if these companies made a point of making their payee names as long as possible. Nothing snappy and quick to write like S.E.E. or S.G. or B.T. Oh no, for those boys the adage was always the longer the better: British Telecommunications Plc was Grace’s particular bugbear. The pile of ready-to-go envelopes was growing and a kind of calm crept over her. Slit tear open write lick write and lick again. Slit tear open write lick write and lick again.
A woman had written to ask if she could reproduce one of Grace’s photographs for a school magazine without paying. Sure. Go ahead. Feel free. Glad you like the picture. Write stamp lick: done. One foot in front of the other, do doing done, that’s the way. You feel like shit, like death, or worse, alive, but if you just get the job done that was something, was it not?
She looked around for whatever else might need doing urgently enough to allow her to be late for lunch. Her gaze fell on the pot plant on the sill of the west-facing window; Jenny had said it was the perfect spot for it. She had given the plant to Grace when it was just a cutting and, although by now Grace had forgotten its name, she had grown fond of it. It was a valiant little plant surviving days of neglect, of drought and of great floods, of cold draughts and dry heat, and lately it had begun to flower. Grace felt touched. Shy-looking little white flowers with a soft honey scent had appeared from amongst the plump shiny leaves overnight the week before. But now something was wrong. She walked over to the window. The leaves had gone slack and lost their shine and the flowers had begun to drop off and lay scattered across the windowsill like tiny white stars. She poked her finger into the soil to see if it was dry. No, it was moist. She lifted it from its outer pot but there was no stagnant water rotting its roots. Why was it sick? Robina had given her several gardening books but amongst them not one dealt with houseplants. Robina thought houseplants common unless they were azaleas or hydrangeas. Until she met her mother-in-law, Grace had not realised that there were social categories for plants. Mrs Shield kept aspidistras.
‘Don’t die, little plant,’ Grace said now, tears welling up. She wiped her eyes. This was ridiculous; she was not the crying kind and she most certainly was not the type to cry over a pot plant.
It was gone one already by the time she walked up the long rise to Hillside House, gazing through windows into the stage sets of other lives. It was a habit, that’s all, looking, staring. There was some kind of plant in most rooms she could see; plants of every shape, size and social class. In the kitchen window of Meadow Cottage was a potted rose. The buds were tight and tinged with brown, doomed to drop, never to open up and flower. It made Grace sad aga
in, all that early promise brought to nothing. Further on was a small 1930s house with a tumbledown lean-to with a glass roof. The lean-to was full of plants. In the corners were the sturdy taken-for-granted ones with sweaty leaves and blooms that just kept coming. Those plants grew in plastic containers whereas the highly strung orchid stood brightly lit centre-stage, its roots embedded in a fancy no-expense-spared Chinese pot. And Mrs Warner, in the house next door but two to the Abbots, had a plant in her kitchen window that spread further than it ought to, its leafy tentacles reaching far from its roots. It had a sly look about it as it crawled across the sill and up against the wall. Grace thought no one dared cut it back in case it took it badly and decided to die out of spite. It made her angry just looking at it. Had she had some shears, she would have gone in there and cut it back herself and damn the consequences.
Then the rain started. It was the kind that came suddenly from a darkening blue sky, surprising everyone including the sun that just kept on shining while the drops fell. It was a proper downpour and Grace, wearing only a sweater, sheltered beneath the spreading branches of an ash. A man walked by, an unremarkable-looking middle-aged man, and as he passed he lifted his head to the heavens and laughed. Grace wanted to throw something at him, or shout something vile; what business did the damn fool have laughing at the rain?
Something borrowed, nothing blue, something inherited, nothing new. When she first visited her in-laws’ home she had liked the slightly scruffy but cosy look of old pine and polished wood, watery landscapes and dog baskets, of heavy pottery and woven rugs. To Grace the mud on the carpets and the powdering of dust that covered the surfaces of occasional tables and the knick-knacks was a liberation after Mrs Shield’s constant polishing and dusting and checking of the soles of shoes. Mrs Shield, after an earlier visit, had declared Grace’s parents-in-law a health hazard and Robina an incompetent housekeeper. She had sworn that she had received nasty flea bites on her legs and, anyway, what was the point of those rugs in shades of beige that lay everywhere tripping a person up?
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