The cult of the Eggy Stone didn’t seem any stranger than all the other strangenesses, in a week away from home. Misery and wonder were flooded together: gargantuan preparations in the kitchen where we took our turn at helping cater for the children from seven schools; Madeleine and I trailing hand in hand, ankle-deep in tepid sea-foam; cocoa made with water and served in tin mugs; dread of the publicity of the toilets and consequent constipation. Some of the girls (Madeleine, but not me) crept out at night to kiss the boys in their tents. We learned new obscenities: ‘min’ and ‘omo’ among them (or at least that’s how I heard them), which mystifyingly were also the names of cleaning products. On the last night the teachers made a campfire and taught us songs with accompanying actions. Indians are high-minded, / Bless my soul they’re double-jointed, / They climb hills and don’t mind it, / All day long. Madeleine beside me touched toes and reached her arms in the air with a pretty equanimity, as if whatever she was doing at a given moment was the only graceful thing possible.
I asked her the next morning, on the beach, before we got on the coach to go home, what we were going to do with the Eggy Stone. She took the stone from her pocket, holding it out reflectively on her hand for a moment; her pretty face was quite clear of either malice or tenderness. I had a proposal ready, that we should keep the thing for a week each, changing over every Monday, dividing up the holidays. I was not foolish enough to imagine that the magical game was going to carry on between us, once school camp was over. But before I could speak, Madeleine turned and threw the Eggy Stone, hard and far, with a confidence that made it clear she would one day be captain of the netball team. I heard it land with a rattle among all the other pebbles and knew that even if I went to look I would never, ever be able to find exactly the same stone again.
MATRILINEAL
ONE NIGHT FORTY years ago Helen Cerruti left her husband. They were living together at the time with their two little girls on the top floor of a big Edwardian house, in a respectable street where the houses sat back behind well-tended gardens, and pollarded lime trees with blotchy bark surged up like life forces out of the civilised pavement. The Cerruti girls taking in the terrain at pushchair level saw how dogs left their small calcinous offerings among the tree roots (the dogs in those days were fed only on bones and scraps). This was just at the end of the time when women walked and pushed pushchairs in those streets in gloves, with matching handbags and shoes, suffused in that vanished elegance at once studied and nonchalant.
Helen and Phil Cerruti didn’t have much money – Phil was a jazz musician, who also gave lessons at the teacher-training college – but Helen had a gift for making herself elegant. She passed all her wisdom on to her girls, who later, in a different world, weren’t really ever able to make much use of it: that it was better to have two or three good things in your wardrobe than to have it stuffed full with inferior items; that cut and line were important above all; that instead of washing your clothes to rags you should valet them carefully, taking out stains with patent cleaner from a bottle, repairing with a needle and thread, pressing everything through a wet cloth before you wore it. They had an intimation – seeing their mother in her petticoat pressing and steaming, pinning up and letting down and taking in, grimacing at her make-up in the mirror, practising postures – of the hidden heavy labour that underlay the nonchalant surface. Helen was a dancer; that is, she had been a dancer before she had her children. She still had a dancer’s figure, driftwood washed to leanness. In 1965 she was wearing shirt dresses and pale pink lipstick; her dark hair was cut short, backcombed up behind a broad hair-band.
The access to their top-floor flat was up a metal staircase added on to the side of the house, which gave out a booming noise however quietly you tried to step. If the Cerrutis had too many visitors, or Phil ran back two at a time because he’d forgotten something, or Nia rapt in one of her daydreams came stomping up, a heavy stolid little thing, after playing out in the garden, then the retired Reverend Underwood who lived with his wife on the floor below would pull back the net curtains and rap on the windows at them. Helen made Phil climb up in his socks when he came in after playing late at night, with his shoes in his hand, unless it was raining. She also feared that if he’d been drinking he’d slip on those damn stairs and break his neck. And the stairs meant she had to keep Sophie’s pushchair down in the garage where Phil kept the car. Every expedition, even round the corner to the grocer’s, or to the clinic for Sophie’s orange juice, was a performance; when they got home she had to climb the stairs with Sophie struggling in her arms, laden with her shopping bags, clinging on to the metal handrail, desperate not to look down. Nia would go first and be entrusted with the keys. Straining on her stout legs she could just reach the keyhole. Solemn with her own importance, each time not quite believing that the trick would work, she would stagger forwards, hanging on to the keys, as the door swung in upon the familiar safe scene, extraordinarily unchanged since the moment they’d gone out, which would by now seem to Nia like hours and long ages ago.
Helen left Phil on an April evening, at about half past six. They had parted at breakfast on perfectly friendly terms; then one of Phil’s lessons had been cancelled in the afternoon, which meant less money, and she had heard him bounding up the stairs, pleased of course at the release, a couple of hours before she expected him. She wasn’t ready for him; she’d taken advantage of Sophie’s afternoon nap to wash the linoleum in the kitchen, and was on her hands and knees in her oldest slacks, with her hair tied up in a scarf. Nia was leading one of her dolls on an adventure round the lounge, instructing it confidingly: along the bookcases made of planks and bricks, behind the jazz records, among the hilly cushions on the low couch covered in olive green, through the forest of the goatskin rug whose skin peeled in scraps that looked like tissue paper. The weather was grey, the clouds had been suffused all day with a bright light that never quite broke through them. Helen had all the windows open up here in the flat, she hated stuffiness; they were so high at the top of the house that they looked out into the hearts of the garden trees almost as if they were birds nesting. It was that suspenseful moment in spring when the cold has loosened its grip, the tender leaves are bursting out everywhere, a bitter green smell tugs at the senses. The adults are all poised for something momentous to happen to fill out the meaning of this transformation, anxious already in case another year is slipping past without certainty, without anything becoming clear.
—That’s a very attractive proposition, said Phil when he came in and saw her scrubbing the floor intently with her back to him, her bottom stuck up in the air. He ran his hand suggestively around the curve of it under the tight cloth.
She looked over her shoulder at him, resting her weight on one arm, wiping her sweaty face on her shirtsleeve. — You’re early.
—Cancellation, he said jubilantly.—Freedom! I’ve come home to practise.
Usually, when she was ready for him, Helen made an effort to be welcoming when Phil came home: to have a meal ready, to freshen up her make-up and perfume, to take an interest in whatever he’d been doing. She had herself had a perfectly nice day. She had taken the girls to the park on the way back from the shops this morning; this evening when Phil went to play she was going to cut out the new chunky white cotton drill she had bought to make a suit to wear to his sister’s wedding. She didn’t even mind washing the floor. She was sorry for Phil, having to go out and teach when he hated it.
—But you can’t practise here, she said.
This was their oldest quarrel, ever since they’d moved from their first flat to this one, after Nia was born.
—They won’t be in, he said easily, as if they hadn’t been over all this so many times before. —They won’t mind.
—Why didn’t you stay and practise at the college?
—Because I hate the college. Because I can’t wait to shake the stinking dust of the college off my shoes.
—But at college they have soundproof rooms.
He
stood quietly then for a few moments without moving; Helen pretended not to notice his portentousness, swirling the scrubbing brush in her bucket of water.
—Do you really hate my music so much, Phil said: not as a question but in a sort of wondering cold calm.
Phil Cerruti was a very good alto player, something in the style of Art Pepper but of course not that good. Art Pepper was his hero; he played his records over and over, he learned his solos off by heart. He got a lot of work, in the city in the west of England where they lived and the area round about, but not enough work yet to give up teaching. Helen loved him to play. She had fallen in love with him watching him onstage: his small loose-jointed body, its movements delicate and finished as a cat’s, twitching to the off-beat. Moods passed visibly, like weather, over the transparent white skin of his face, blue under his eyes when he was tired. Men were drawn to Phil as well as women; his energy was a steady heat, a promise. He walked out of the kitchen without another word and went into the lounge. Helen went on scrubbing the floor for a while and then she got to her feet with her scrubbing brush still in her hand, and followed after him as if she had something more to say. Phil was sitting on the couch beside the open alto case, wetting the reed in his mouthpiece. He had let his thick black hair grow recently almost down to his shoulders (the teacher-training college had complained). Nia and her doll were paused en route around the room, looking at him; Helen knew she was surprised that her daddy hadn’t greeted her with his usual exuberance.
—All day, Helen said, —I have to stop the children running around, in case the Underwoods start banging on the ceiling.
—Let them bang. We pay our rent, we have a perfect right for our children to run around, for me to practise my music if I want to.
—Don’t raise your voice, she said. —They’ll hear you.
—What the hell do I care, if they hear me?
—I have to live here with them, all day every day.
—Then let’s move. This is insane. I need to play. We need to feel free, in our own home.
—We’ll never find a flat as nice as this, in such a nice area, for this rent.
—What do I care about nice?
—I care.
—I can’t live like this, Phil shouted. —You’re killing me.
He dropped the alto on the couch and rolled on to the floor, shouting at whoever might be listening in the flat below as loud as he could, with his face down against the carpet. —You’re bloody killing me! For Christ’s sake!
Helen threw the scrubbing brush hard at him. Dirty water sprayed around; the brush bounced against his temple, wooden side down, and he yelped in real pain and surprise. —Jesus Christ! Nia looked astonished and embarrassed. Helen went into the bedroom and closed the door behind her and lay down on the bed. Sophie was still asleep in her cot in the corner, her breathing weightless and tiny as a feather on the air. The rank smell of Phil’s hair on the pillow filled Helen’s nose and senses; her heart seemed to be leaping to escape out of her breast. They quite often quarrelled; what she said to herself usually was that Phil was like a child, emotional and volatile. But today she believed it when he said she was killing him. She had been washing the floor so contentedly, and then in the space of a few minutes her body had been seized and occupied by this violent tempest; she saw starkly that their two lives now were set against one another, that he was desperate for freedom and art and that she needed to stop him having them. She had heard the scrubbing brush crack against his skull; she couldn’t pretend that it wasn’t true, that she didn’t want to destroy him. It was horrible, that they were yoked together in this marriage. She thought that if they went on like this she might one day soon tear his saxophone out of his mouth and stamp on it and break its keys.
When Phil went out to play that evening Helen packed a suitcase and a bag and caught a bus with the children to go to where her mother lived about three miles away across the city. She could only carry enough for one night; she even left behind the pushchair, which was too heavy and too difficult to fold down. She didn’t mean, though, ever to go back to Phil. She had no idea of what lay ahead in the future, although she did think that if only she could get back her old job at the dance school, then perhaps her mother would look after the children while she worked. This wasn’t likely, however, as the management at the dance school had changed and she didn’t know the new people. She and Phil had eaten the tea she cooked in silence; they hadn’t said goodbye when he went out. Helen had thought, as she always thought when he left to play, that he might be killed that night and she might never see him again: he would be driving home when he was tired and had been drinking, on unknown roads in the dark. She always pictured these roads as twisting through forest or bleak moorland, shining and treacherous with wet. But even then she didn’t run after him. The clamour of his footsteps on the staircase died away. She heard him open the garage door and drive out the car, then stop and get out and close the garage door behind him. Then he drove off.
The clouds that had muffled the day like a fleece broke up in the evening and floated as pink wisps in a high sunny sky; a thrush was joyous in the garden as they left. Helen had Sophie on her leading rein, and could just manage the suitcase as long as she would walk. She didn’t care if the Underwoods saw her go. The little girls loved catching buses. They had to get one down to the centre and then change; Helen was only afraid that as it got past Sophie’s bedtime she would grumble and rub her eyes and want to be picked up. But the girls seemed to understand that this evening didn’t exist inside the envelope of ordinary time; they cast quick buoyant wary looks at their mother, as if they mustn’t make too much of anything. Nia, who had seen Helen throw the brush, practised an air of easy adaptation. Sophie held on to the chrome rail of the seat in front and bounced. When Helen clenched her fist on the rail, so that if the bus stopped suddenly and Sophie flew forwards she wouldn’t hit her face, she was surprised to see she was still wearing her engagement and wedding rings, distorting lumps under her glove. All that seemed left already far behind.
Helen’s father had died three years before; her mother had sold the big house where she had lived for thirty-five years and gone to live above a hairdresser’s. Socially, she had come down in the world. Her husband had been retail manager for one of the big department stores; she had used to come to this hairdresser’s as a customer, to have her hair washed and set, preserving a proper dignified distance from the staff. Now she even worked as a receptionist for them several afternoons a week, drawn deeply and happily into the world of their gossip and concerns. The only entrance to her flat was through the hairdresser’s; Helen had to ring the doorbell, then her mother peered down from between her sitting-room curtains to see whoever was calling at this time. She didn’t have a telephone, so Helen hadn’t been able to warn her. A few minutes later they could see her feeling her way along the row of dryers in the dim light from the stairs behind; she didn’t like to use the salon lights because they weren’t on her bill. No one knew that Nia’s dreams were visited by dryer-monsters with blank skin faces and huge bald egg-shaped skulls in powder blue. The glass door to the salon, hung inside with a rattling pink venetian blind, had ‘Jennifer’s’ stencilled across it in flowing cursive script, and underneath that a pink silhouette bust of a lady in an eighteenth-century wig.
Helen and her mother weren’t very alike. Everything about Helen had always been poised and quiveringly defiant; her mother seemed in contrast compliant and yielding. They didn’t look alike: Helen had her father’s stark cheekbones and strong colouring, her mother had been pinkly pretty and had faded and grown plump. But Helen was aware of a stubbornness deep down in her mother’s softness; when you pushed, she didn’t give way. When Helen was a teenager she and her mother had fought over every single thing – over dancing, over make-up, over Phil – as if one of them must destroy the other before it could end; Helen’s father, who had always appeared to be the stern parent, could only look on in perplexity. It was through the birth
of the babies that they had been reconciled; as if that blood sacrifice had satisfied both their honours. Now, as soon as she had undone the bolts and opened the salon door, Nana Allen seemed to know intuitively what had happened.
—You’ve left him, she said. —He didn’t hit you, did he? Has he been drinking?
Helen gave a little bleat of laughter and pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth. —I hit him. I threw something at him and hit him on the side of the head.
—A scrubbing brush, explained Nia solemnly.
Nana Allen laughed then too.
—Oh God, these children saw it, Helen said; and then for the first time tears spilled out from her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
—Sophie didn’t see it, Nia corrected.
—Get them inside, her Nana said. —Come on in, my little lambs. Come and get warm in Nana’s flat. Have you eaten anything? I’ve got some casserole.
Nia got past the egghead dryers by clinging on to her nana’s skirt and burying her eyes in the familiar comfortable-smelling cloth. Helen couldn’t believe these tears, now that they came; they hadn’t been part of how she had imagined her exit, or her austere altered life. She hadn’t even known she had inside her whatever deep reservoir of sorrow the tears poured from, flooding out of her, wave after wave, so that she was sodden, sobbing, helpless to speak. Her mother made her sit down in the corner of the sofa, wrapping her up in the old wartime quilt from home that she put over her knees in the evenings against the draughts (before Helen came she had been sitting reading her library book). She made cups of milky sweet tea for the children, made Nia a pickled-onion sandwich, gave them the biscuit barrel full of lemon creams; she had a special pronged fork for the pickled onions, with a pusher on a spring to press them off on to your plate. Helen eventually was able to drink a cup of tea too. The women together put the children to bed: Sophie in Nana’s bed because it was wider and she was less likely to fall out of it, Nia in the bed in the spare room, which they had to make up first. They left the doors just open, in case the children called out. Then they sat and talked together for hours. Helen’s mother held her hand while they talked, and stroked her hair, and brought a cool flannel for her to wipe her face. Nia could just hear their voices, although she couldn’t hear the words. She fell asleep and the voices became a kind of loose safety net into which she fell, drooping and stretching under her, bearing her up, letting her go.
Sunstroke and Other Stories Page 13