by Rosie Thomas
Harriet reached out, stiff-fingered, and took the bag from him.
‘Thank you,’ she said awkwardly. ‘I’ll take great care of it.’
‘Do whatever you want with it,’ he repeated. His voice was harsh.
He didn’t echo her final goodbye, but he stood with the door open until she had turned the corner.
Harriet walked back towards the station. This time she didn’t see the shops, or the people, or the relentless traffic. The carrier bag bumped rhythmically and aggressively against her legs. With each step she took, she heard the faint click of the wooden balls rolling together. It was as if the game had a life of its own.
Five
A collection of packing cases stood in the middle of the living room; pale rectangles framed with cobwebby dust showed where pictures had hung on the cream walls. Harriet and Leo were dismantling their four years.
Leo abruptly stopped packing books into a box and sat down on the sofa. He was listening to Harriet opening and closing drawers in the kitchen. Goaded by the sound he shouted at her, ‘Your mixer, my toaster, is this what everything’s come to between us?’
Harriet appeared in the doorway. She looked tired.
‘This is the nasty but inevitable aftermath of something that has already happened, don’t you understand? Who owns what isn’t significant. You can have the whole lot, if you want. But the flat has to be cleared because we’re selling it, and all this stuff has to go somewhere. Why don’t you help instead of sitting there?’
‘I don’t want to help. I don’t want us to do it. Can’t we stop, and forget about it?’
Wearily, because they had travelled this ground a dozen times already, Harriet said, ‘It isn’t forgettable. You know it, and I know it.’
They had fenced with each other, like this, for weeks. They had met only a handful of times but each time they had trodden the same exhausting paths.
Leo wanted to go back to where they had been, before Harriet had seen the play of light and shadow over the girl’s body in his studio. He wanted to pretend that nothing had happened, obliterating by denying, and he wanted to compound the deception by pretending that they had been happy except for his own insignificant lapse. He talked about babies, fantasising himself into fatherhood, reproaching Harriet for her refusal.
Yet Harriet knew that his insistence on all these things grew out of his need to oppose her, on any grounds. Bitterness had driven between them. If she had wanted to stay, she thought, to cling to the debris, it would have been Leo demanding brutal severance. There is no such thing, Harriet reminded herself, as an amicable separation. She clung to her decision with a steeliness that surprised her. She remembered, too, that her husband had accused her of coldness and rigidity. Well then, she was only behaving in character. And she was glad, with chilly relief, that there were no children to witness or to be hurt by this disengagement.
Leo looked up at her. She thought he was going to take her arm and pull her down beside him, and stepped instinctively backwards.
‘Don’t do that,’ Leo whispered. ‘Don’t act as if I’m going to hurt you.’
You have, Harriet answered silently. You won’t, any more.
‘Harriet.’ Leo had never had to beg for anything before. It was clear that he was making his last bid. ‘Stay with me.’
She knew his insistence was based on a false premise, because she didn’t love him any longer. Nor did she believe, although his obstinacy prevented him from seeing it for himself, that Leo loved her either. The finality of it was sad, the insignificance of what was left was pathetic.
‘I can’t.’
Leo scowled. He looked like a small boy who had unexpectedly been denied a treat. That was it, Harriet realised. She had spent four years of her life married to a twelve-year-old boy. A twelve-year-old, tricked out with broad shoulders, a rakishly tumbled mop of black hair, and a well-developed libido. Unbidden, but as sharp as one of his own photographs, her last sight of his most prominent feature came back to her. And the vision of her husband trying to hide it behind his shirt.
A tremor passed through Harriet. It rose from her chest and concentrated at the back of her throat, and then escaped as a short burst of guilty laughter. Her hands flew up to her cheeks as she tried to suppress it.
Leo stared at her, dislike clearly visible in his face. ‘I think you’ve gone mad.’
‘Just the opposite, I think,’ Harriet said. ‘If you really won’t help, I’ll have to divide things without you.’
She turned away from him and went back into the kitchen. Sabatier knives, maple chopping board, Le Creuset casserole dishes. Harriet felt faintly shocked herself as she laid them out. There was nothing to laugh at, Leo was right. In truth she found this dismemberment of their domestic life, the lifting of utensils from hooks and extraction of cutlery from snugly shaped trays, as painful and difficult as anything she had ever known.
As suddenly as the laughter had come, she felt the weight of tears in her eyes. To hold them back she stopped work and went across to stare out of the kitchen window. The view was familiar in every detail from married hours spent at the sink, filling kettles, washing dishes, preparing vegetables. The dingy curtains in the opposite windows would be taken down, and fresh ones put up by new owners. The flowering cherry on the corner would blossom and shed its leaves, but Leo and she would not be here to see it. She turned her back on the view. She hadn’t cried, and she wouldn’t cry now.
It would be easier to stay, of course.
She knew their life, and the patterns of it. Leo provided a husbandly shelter for her, for all his faults. She was used to being a couple, to parties and holidays and Christmases spent as one half of a whole. It would be simpler to stay in the shelter and look out on the world, believing her husband’s assurances.
Only it would be wrong.
It would be a capitulation, and Harriet in her controlled and decisive way hated capitulation.
She bent to the job again. She took up a melon baller that had been a Christmas present from Averil, never used, and hovered with it between Leo’s packing case and the one intended for herself. After a moment she put it with her own things. There came another irrational urge to laugh. She was sending back the son, but she didn’t want to give offence by rejecting the melon baller as well.
When she looked up again she saw that Leo was watching her from the doorway.
‘You’ve made a terrible mess.’
‘Completion of the sale is in ten days’ time. We have to empty the place by then. There isn’t any point in maintaining the House Beautiful, Leo. It’s all over.’
Seeing his face, she thought for a moment that he too might be going to cry. They faced each other awkwardly, and then Harriet picked her way through the coils of newspaper packing. They put their arms around each other and then stood still, looking in different directions, saying nothing.
At length Leo let her go. He picked up a coffee-pot, asking ‘Where’s this going?’
‘With you, if you like. If you’ve got room.’
Leo was partly living in his studio, partly still at the flat, and spending an occasioned regressive night at his parents’ house in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Harriet had rented a basement flat in Belsize Park. It wasn’t convenient for the shop, and north London felt like foreign territory after the west, but it belonged to a friend of hers who had gone to Paris for a year, and it was cheap because two cats came with it.
‘I don’t want it,’ Leo answered. ‘I’ve got one at the studio.’
He hovered beside her, getting in the way, taking out utensils that she had already packed and staring at them as if he had never seen them before. She worked on a few minutes, controlling her irritation, then gave up.
‘I’ve got to go soon. There must be a carload here anyway.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Home.’ She meant Belsize Park, said it defiantly. ‘To drop this off and change, then I’m going to Jane’s. She’s having a party.’
‘Yeah. Well, I might have a night out too.’
‘Good idea.’
They were defending themselves, and masking the defence with cheerfulness. Harriet wanted to get away.
Leo helped her to carry her plants and cardboard boxes down the stairs to the street. Harriet felt humiliated by this public admission of their mutual failure. She wished she could have removed herself in the middle of the night, and willed the door of each of the other flats to stay closed as they passed. Once safely outside they heaved the boxes into her hatchback, piling the things up almost to the roof. The last box was squeezed in and Harriet slammed the tailgate. Leo stood looking at the loaded car with an expression of baffled misery.
‘I’ve got to go,’ she repeated, wishing that this was over, that it had already subsided into history.
‘Shit,’ Leo said. He drew back his foot and gave the nearside rear tyre a vicious kick. ‘Oh, shit.’
Harriet scrambled into the driver’s seat. ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m sorry about it all.’ And then she drove away.
She reached her Belsize Park basement and staggered to and fro on her own with her arms full of possessions. She left her houseplants in a drooping thicket inside the front door and the other things stacked in the middle of the living room floor. She was already late, so she showered quickly in the bathroom that still smelt of another woman’s perfume, and wrapped herself in a bath towel to survey her limited choice of unpacked clothes. Without wasting any time on deliberations she pulled on a bright red shirt and a pair of tight black trousers with black suede ankle boots. She ran a comb through her short hair and rubbed gloss from the same tube on to her mouth and cheekbones. Then she picked up a bottle of red wine from Oddbins still wrapped in its paper, and a bunch of daisies she had bought from the florist’s on the corner. With her hands full and her pouch bag swinging from her shoulder, she stepped in front of the living room mantelpiece.
Leaning against the chimney breast, from which she had removed the owner’s Saul Steinberg print to make room for it, was Simon Archer’s game.
Harriet had spent hours sitting on the sofa opposite, knees drawn up to her chest, studying it. She knew the gates and their numbers, the faded markings, even the cracks in the wood.
All the time she looked at it, sitting on her own in the silent room, she was thinking and wondering. And each time she looked, she felt the same shiver travel the length of her spine.
The friendlier of the pair of cats, a black one with white paws, wound between her legs and rubbed itself against her ankles. Harriet glanced down. ‘That’s enough thinking, for now,’ she told it. ‘Time to do something. Definitely time.’
She left the flat once more, locking her stronghold carefully behind her.
Harriet liked driving in London. Today’s journeys, from the home she had given up with Leo to the party, would criss-cross it from west to east and back to the north again. Jane lived in Hackney, in a tiny house in a terrace pinned between tall warehouses and a rundown shopping street. But Harriet had barely noticed the first leg of her drive. Normally she enjoyed the stirring sweep of the Westway that carried her along level with the rooftops. She liked to drive a little too fast, with music playing. Today, with the unaccustomed weight dragging the tail of the car, there had been no music or display of speed. She had been oppressed by a sense of failure, by loneliness, and by a sudden desire to turn round, to capitulate after all, and go back to Leo. Yet she had driven doggedly onwards, in the press of taxis and delivery vans that she felt too miserable to try to overtake.
This evening, with her thoughts focussed on what lay ahead and on her germ of a plan, her spirits rose.
Instead of following the bold curves of the urban motorway, this second part of the route led her through a net of streets, now up the big road that had once been the old coaching route northwards from the City, now veering sharply to the right to short-cut through residential streets where the pavements shone under a film of drizzle. She passed corner pubs done up Victorian-style, lit up for Saturday night’s business, little late-opening mini-markets, and big, darker, windy spaces that opened around railway embankments or factory buildings. She knew the route well, but she watched it unfold with satisfaction, whistling softly as she drove.
When she reached Jane’s neighbourhood there were fewer people out on the streets, and those that she did pass were mostly groups of spindly black youths with huge knitted caps on their heads. The shops were nearly all barred with metal grilles, although their haphazard, neon-lit windows piled with dusty toys and bleached packets seemed to offer minimal temptation. It wasn’t a comfortable-looking landscape, but Harriet never felt threatened by it. She often came to see Jane and had spent part of the last three weeks staying in her house. Jane liked the area for its busy mixture of West Indians, Greeks and Turks, and Harriet shared her affection for it.
Harriet turned, at length, into Jane’s street. It was lined with parked cars and the first one she saw was the Thimbells’ battered Citröen. That was good. She was happy that Jenny had felt like a party; Charlie would not have come without her. And she wanted to talk to Charlie. She needed his advice.
The door was opened by a man Harriet didn’t know. He had thick hair pulled into a ponytail at the nape of his neck, and he was wearing a kind of artist’s smock.
‘Hi,’ he greeted her.
‘Hi,’ Harriet answered. She held up her Oddbins bottle and the daisies, as if to establish her credentials.
‘Come in, if you can.’ The hallway was so narrow that as she squeezed in Harriet found herself momentarily wedged against the man, hip to hip. Then they both laughed, and she broke free. There were more people further in the hall and sitting on the haircord carpet that ran up the stairs.
Seeing that the press of people was thicker still in the kitchen, Harriet left her offerings on the bevel mirrored and be-hooked piece of shiny brown Victoriana that Jane used as a hallstand, and pushed her way into the living room. It had been created by knocking two tiny rooms together to make one medium-sized one. The floorboards had been sanded and sealed, and Jane had prudently rolled her Flokati rugs back for the evening. The furniture consisted of a pair of Victorian plush-covered sofas, one at each end of the room, and intermediate heaps of outsize cushions covered in Indian cotton. The alcoves beside the chimney breasts were lined with books. The stripped pine shutters at the windows enclosed the conviviality of talk, laughter and music.
The party was clearly well under way, but there were fewer people in here. Harriet wondered why people always did cram themselves into the kitchen at parties. She looked around, and saw that she knew most of the faces.
‘Harriet! Have a drink, where have you been all evening?’
The man who greeted her was a teacher, one of Jane’s colleagues from the comprehensive school. Harriet smiled at him and accepted a glass of Bulgarian Cabernet.
‘I’ve only just arrived. Late, as usual.’
‘Where’s Leo?’
She had met this teacher at dinners and at parties, but she didn’t know him well.
‘Not here tonight.’
‘Watch out, then.’ He grinned at her.
She nodded back, as neutrally as she could. Over by the bookshelves she saw Jenny. Jenny’s madonna face had developed hollows and her hair was pulled tightly back as if to punish it for unruliness. But she welcomed Harriet with her smile.
‘I’m glad you’re here.’
Jenny. You look fine.’
Jenny nodded. ‘Everything back to normal. All over and forgotten about.’
Harriet hesitated. ‘Is that what you want to feel?’
‘It’s what my mother wants me to feel. Even Charlie, most of the time. But I can’t forget I had a baby. I shouldn’t, should I?’
‘No, I don’t think you should,’ Harriet said softly.
&n
bsp; ‘I want to remember him. We only had him for a few hours, but that doesn’t make him any less important, does it? It seems like another … yet another hurt to him, to go about as if he never existed.’
Harriet listened, believing that that was what was needed.
‘I like to talk about him. Charlie doesn’t, you know. Charlie believes in looking to the future, and being realistic. Losing James hurt him as much as it hurt me, but he can’t admit it. It hasn’t been very easy for us to live together, since I came home.’
Harriet put her arm around her. ‘It will be all right,’ she said, believing that it would be. For Jenny as well as for herself she wished that time would speed up.
Jenny sniffed. ‘Yes. Sorry, Harriet. Not very festive. This is supposed to be a party.’ They held on to each other.
‘That’s what parties are for. Seeing your friends. Talk all you like, and I’ll listen all evening.’
‘No, that’s enough. I haven’t asked how you are, even.’
Harriet acknowledged her concern. ‘I’m all right,’ she said briefly, knowing that she would be. ‘Here’s Jane.’
Jane drank hardly anything herself, claiming that it disagreed with her, but she poured out liberally for everyone else. She was carrying a bottle of wine in each hand. Tonight she had exchanged her combat trousers for an all-in-one made of some plum-coloured, silky material, with a wide belt that bunched the shimmery fabric over her hips and breasts. She was wearing a liberal amount of plum-coloured lipstick too, and eyeshadow in a slightly lighter tone, but the effect was not in the least voluptuous. She looked exactly what she was — matter-of-fact and uncompromising. Harriet was pleased to see her.
‘You know, I miss you, now you’ve moved out,’ Jane said. ‘I was beginning to get used to having you around. Perhaps I should stop looking for a husband, and hunt for a wife instead?’
‘I don’t think I’m your type,’ Harriet answered. ‘Get one who can cook.’