‘Marian’s granddaughters are coming to stay,’ my mother said one day at the start of the summer holidays. ‘One of them is your age. I should invite them round for tea.’ My mother was still trying to engineer friendships for me, leaving me in rooms with the teenaged children of her new acquaintances, not understanding that this approach now guaranteed failure. I didn’t need any more friends. I had Della and Louise, serious girls I’d recently fallen in step with at school, girls who drank black coffee and read poetry during study breaks, and who took the train up to London with me on occasional Saturdays, to visit the National Gallery; but they were both going away over the summer, Della doing a French exchange near Orange, Louise visiting cousins in Dorset.
‘Oh, please don’t,’ I said, and for once she listened to me.
My mother came back from the village one hot quiet afternoon and said the Pugh granddaughters had arrived, she’d seen them buying ice-creams and magazines in the shop. Really, I said, turning the page of my book. Later, when she was safely indoors, when I could hear my father working on the piano – playing the same passage over and over, refining it in some imperceptible way, or maybe just enjoying the accumulating sound of it – I put down my novel and stood up, stretching and yawning a little in the shade of the apple tree, as if someone might be looking.
Into the green ‘o’ of the overgrown lane, dodging the stinging nettles and the long arms of brambles, and across the stile with its loose treacherous plank. The footpath was snarled and rutted with old dried mud; I watched where I placed my feet. My shadow a small dogged presence, dancing and bobbing as I lifted up the barbed wire and squeezed underneath and climbed into the field. Closer, but keeping out of sight of the low house and its dark little windows.
The hedgerow, healthily dense on the outside, but within – yes, just here – dry and hollow. I pressed my way in, twigs scraping my arms and neck and dragging at my hair, unsure of what I’d be able to see. Not much, it turned out: a partial view of the farmyard, Mrs Pugh’s boxy burgundy car (the doors left open for coolness), the water tank, some rubber doughnuts pitted with teethmarks scattered close to me on the grass verge. The burble of chickens, some pop on a distant radio, but otherwise nothing. I rubbed my arm, the burn of the graze, and then a girl stepped into the sun, very tall and straight. Gold all over.
Now I lie in the hammock, watching, and waiting quite patiently for the moment when Christopher realises it’s missing.
She comes out with two glasses of wine, worrying her way down the steps, raising an arm to shield her eyes from the spotlights hidden in the urns and behind the trees. Looking along the floodlit paths, checking by the deck chairs.
‘Christopher’s lost his bloody rabbit,’ she says, passing me a glass. ‘Don’t suppose you remember when you saw it last? He can’t sleep without it.’
‘He took it out in the car this morning, didn’t he?’ I say, efficiently reviving the disagreement and the surrender, the look on Ben’s face. ‘Did he have it when we stopped for lunch? At the market?’
She can’t remember. Perhaps he dropped it when he was looking at those toy cars. ‘Oh, bloody hell. Anyway – not your problem,’ although, as Christopher’s howls start to spill out of the house, I’m not so sure about that. ‘Poor little chap,’ I say. The sound builds and then fades, and then there’s a silence.
‘He’ll be OK, it’ll turn up,’ I say. Then I twist sideways and shimmy along, making space for her. ‘Hop in,’ I say.
She should be indoors, helping put everyone to bed; but she would so much rather be out here, with me. ‘Do you think it’ll take us both? I’m such a heffalump . . . Oh, what the hell,’ she says, and then the hammock lifts and strains and we’re locked together in its embarrassing, compelling intimacy, thigh against thigh, bare arm against bare arm. She giggles and pushes at the ground with a toe, setting up a gentle pendulum swing. She smells of sun lotion and, when she lifts the glass to her mouth, there’s raw garlic on her fingers. I’ve never been this close to her before. She coughs and says, ‘You’ll be glad to see the back of us.’
‘Not at all,’ I say. ‘It’s fun having you here. I do think Christopher’s a sweetie. He spooked himself during that game we were playing earlier, I should have realised that was going to happen.’
‘Everything spooks him,’ she says. ‘He’s at that age. It’s all extremes. The highs, the lows.’
‘And for you, too,’ I say. ‘I remember what it’s like. That stage . . . fantastic, of course, but it’s such hard work. God, I remember Sophie . . .’
‘Do you mind me asking,’ she says, very hesitantly, very delicately, so I know she has been longing to ask this, ‘what happened with you and Sophie’s dad?’ So – mindful that we may at any time be interrupted – I tell her a little about Arnold, the neat tailored narrative I trot out for acquaintances and the odd analyst, wondering if anyone will ever challenge me on it, make me dig a little deeper. How young I was, what he seemed to represent. How he and Sophie gave me an identity, I suppose, just when I needed a new one, and how I’ll always be grateful to them both for that. ‘My dad . . .’ I say. ‘He’s a charming man, too charming, probably. My mother was a casualty of all that. She never really got over it. Arnold showed me a way out.’
She listens very carefully, conscious that she’s going up a level. Every so often there’s a lurch as she stretches a toe to the grass, trying to keep the momentum going. I can feel her willing me on, willing Ben to contain whatever’s happening in the house.
‘By the end, my parents were pretty ill-suited,’ I say. ‘They did that thing, they grew apart. Although there was a bit more to it than that.’
She swings and sips. She’s feasting on this moment. Loving it.
‘He had a bit of an eye,’ I say, all understatement, all bravery. ‘For most of the time, he was fairly discreet. But right at the end, he made a bit of a fool of himself. There was this girl . . . someone I knew. That was enough.’
Her face. She’s appalled. ‘No. Seriously? He went off with a friend of yours?’
‘Oh, no. It wasn’t like that. Nothing happened. No one did anything, exactly. No one said anything. It was just the last straw.’
A light comes on in Sophie’s bedroom, and I watch the fluid shape on the fly screen as she moves towards the window and pulls the curtain across.
‘And she wasn’t a friend. I hardly knew her,’ I say with a little laugh. Emma doesn’t know whether to look at me or not; for now, she keeps her eyes fixed on the house, eager not to spoil the moment of delicious frankness, of confession. ‘My father . . . well, he was very taken with her. He made a bit of a fool of himself. I don’t think she was even aware of the effect she’d had on him. She was that sort of girl.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know. Beautiful . . . a bit careless.’
We think about these girls, how dangerous they can be.
She asks, ‘And you were how old?’
‘Oh, sixteen or seventeen. Around Sophie’s age. My mother – well, she’d had enough.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Christ.’
‘Well, it was a long time ago,’ I tell Emma, as if I’ve been wise enough to let it all go; or most of it, at any rate. As if I’ve made my peace with it. As if I have no memory of hearing her in the field late one afternoon, shouting for the little dog – whose name I cannot remember – and how I called to her and introduced myself and said I’d look out for him; of returning to the empty house and reading another chapter and then going round the back to the woodstore and unlatching the door, whispering for him to hush, and tying a piece of twine to his collar and walking him through the lanes to the Pugh farm. Staying for a glass of bitter lemon, not saying much, just watching and listening, absorbing it all, the offhand way she spoke, the ums and yeahs and kind ofs that showed she was sure her opinions were worth waiting for.
As if I have no memory of saying, ‘Well, if you haven’t got anything better to do . . .’
Of my
mother a day or so later, her hands glossy with oil as she tumbled the watercress in the shallow wooden bowl with the butter lettuce, the red-deckled alabaster slivers of radish, while Emma moved a pile of mail from the kitchen chair. Of my father lowering the piano lid and coming through from the sitting room in a bit of a mood, expecting just another lunch. Of Emma – the colour of her hair, her eyes, her skin – allowing herself to be drawn out, submitting to his attentions as if this sharp approving interest was nothing unusual for her; answering questions about A levels and Greece (where her family had recently holidayed) as if she was the one making a concession.
Noticing the blue glass eye on her bracelet, he told us that the Greeks believed you could bring a curse by praising with envy.
After lunch, she wandered around my yellow bedroom, looking at my pinboard and sketchbooks and the family of owls in a desultory fashion: a little bored, not quite knowing why she was here. I wasn’t sure what to do with her, or with myself, so I stood at the dresser and ran a comb through my hair, aware that it needed a wash. Furtively comparing myself with her in the mirror: the toothmarks left in my slightly greasy hair, the streaky fragrant tangle of hers.
And later, when she said thank you and see you soon and walked off into the hazy afternoon, into the clouds of golden pollen hanging in the lane, my father stood behind me at the door and watched her go, as if something was being taken from him. He said nothing, not then. But later he couldn’t help himself, the old fool. ‘I’ll drive you,’ he said the following afternoon, when I mentioned that I was planning to cycle into town to collect my photographs from Boot’s. ‘And then I’ll take you for tea somewhere.’
My father rarely had time for this sort of thing. I sat in the passenger seat holding my canvas bag in my lap, aware of the lit cigarette moving from steering wheel to his mouth and back again. The novelty of this quiet intimacy as the car bowled through the marshland (with its crooked trees and singing lengths of wire; the wind feathering the grasses and dimpling the dark water in the ditches) felt good, promising, as if he might be taking an interest; as if I might finally be learning to feel at ease in his company.
There was a sort of disappointment as the wharves and spires of the town loomed up ahead. The narrow streets were crammed with day-trippers so he dropped me near the station and accelerated away in a burst, furious at the lack of parking spaces. I collected the packet of photographs from the chemist’s, and made my way up Mermaid Street to the teashop, as arranged. I’d just claimed a table in the window (the waitress hastily clearing away the sundae glass and teacups, swiping the table with a cloth) and was opening the packet, anticipating the usual disappointments of red-eye and over-exposure and movement blur, when I saw my father coming out of the tobacconist with a newspaper under his arm. Under the canopy – striped like an Everton mint – he paused to pull the foil from a fresh packet of cigarettes; and then he looked up and something caught his eye, and he stepped forward and said something, and he smiled.
It shot through me like horror: a cold dull shock, almost deadening. Entirely new, yet somehow not a surprise. He never looks at me like that, I thought. Perhaps at this point I was also thinking, And he never looks at her like that, either.
Emma stood there in front of him, her back to me, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, pulling at her hair. Preening, I thought, but perhaps that was unfair. Perhaps it was only unease. They stood there beneath the striped canopy, talking for a moment or two; he offered her a cigarette; she refused, seemed to laugh, glanced at her wrist and then all of a sudden she was moving off, nodding, raising her hand, her palm flashing in farewell.
I saw him watching her.
When he found me at the table, he didn’t mention Emma at first, and then he couldn’t resist, he had to say her name; and it reminded me of my schoolfriend Della and her terrible, humiliating need to talk about Sam, Louise’s older brother (who thought we were all pretty awful and didn’t bother to hide the fact).
As the tea and cakes were set down in front of us, my father mentioned he’d just bumped into that friend of mine, the Pugh granddaughter, the girl who came for lunch – perhaps I’d seen her? Emma, that’s right. He’d asked her to join us, but she was late for her lift, her grandmother was waiting for her at the bottom of the hill. She and her sister were leaving tomorrow. He supposed I’d be staying in touch with her.
Perhaps, I said.
You should make sure of it, he said. Pretty girl. Clever too, he imagined. ‘Her whole life ahead of her,’ he said, dreamily; and I could tell then that her prospects were far better than my own. He seemed to expect something from me at this point; an anecdote, perhaps, or information, but I didn’t know anything about her, really. So we sat in silence as he drank his tea and looked out at the people passing in the street, and at his own dissatisfied expression in the glass. ‘You could take a leaf out of her book,’ he said eventually, almost absently.
While she was podding peas and waiting for The Archers, my mother remembered something. ‘Oh, Paul, I meant to say, someone from the studio rang for you.’ She couldn’t lay hands on the piece of paper, and she couldn’t remember the name, and suddenly I saw her through his eyes: the dress with the dirty hem, her face with its lines and pores, the mild chaos that always accompanied her, as clinging as yesterday’s woodsmoke. The room upstairs, all the ungainly equipment. I thought of the spinning wheel’s pedal noisily rising and falling, the stiff waxy handfuls of wool turning into stringy beaded yarn; the sound of the shuttle as another length of rough fabric emerged from the loom. The pointless stubborn activity of it all.
My father slipped away noncommittally. I wanted to hurt someone, and he was out of my reach. But I could hurt her. So I did. ‘We saw Mrs Pugh’s granddaughter again today,’ I said, as I laid the table for supper, catching my face in the flat blades of the knives. ‘In town. Doing some shopping.’
Emma. Such a nice girl.
I said yes, she seemed OK. I left a pause. I said, ‘I didn’t talk to her, actually. Dad did.’ I laughed. I said I’d happened to see them together, talking on the street, they hadn’t known I was watching. As I said it, I was thinking, don’t over-egg it, don’t embroider, keep it simple. It’ll be more powerful if it’s simple.
I put down the salt cellar and the pepper grinder. I said, reluctantly, ‘I think he’s a bit knocked out by her, if you know what I mean.’
She kept moving between the Raeburn and the sink, the refrigerator and the kitchen table, her face always turned away from me. ‘Really?’ she said, quite coolly. ‘Do you think so? How funny.’
‘I don’t know, he seems kind of moony about her. He looked . . . idiotic, if you want the truth,’ I said with a sigh. And then, ‘Oh watch out, the peas are boiling over.’
It was a little thing, but it was enough to make her think. Enough to make her check his pocket diary, his wallet, the phone bill. Enough to ensure she found some evidence of something.
I was unjust to my mother, of course. I see that now. It wasn’t her fault, not really. But my father, in his own absurd way, has acknowledged his culpability (and paid for it, and continues to pay, even in ways that infuriate me, like sending his rich ignorant friends, with all their many bare walls, in my direction). Emma, on the other hand, has never shouldered any responsibility for what happened. None at all.
A moment of quiet. The hammock ropes creak against the trunk. A dog howls mournfully on the other side of the valley. ‘It’s strange,’ I say, over the rim of my glass, as if I’m talking to myself. ‘I don’t often think about it. Perhaps it’s because of Sophie being the age she is . . . perhaps that’s why.’
It all sounds so tidy, so fake. The edited highlights. I almost want to laugh.
‘And you?’ I say. ‘Tell me your story. Everyone has a story.’
‘Nothing to report,’ she says, a little shamed.
‘Nothing?’ I say. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘It’s true,’ she says.
‘But
your parents. I mean . . .’
‘Oh, don’t get me wrong, it was hard losing them in the way I did, but I can’t reproach them for anything. I’ve been so lucky, sometimes I think I must have it coming to me, somewhere down the line.’
We sit together, thinking of her parents. Andrew, Ginnie. My memories are now caught up in the photograph I saw in the Carmody Street sitting room: Andrew’s fox-coloured summer beard, Ginnie’s smocked top and the big round sunglasses pushed up to hold back her hair. The shadow of the photographer falling towards them, Lucy or Emma herself, a child then, in a nightgown and wellingtons perhaps, or a sundress patterned with poppies, straps knotted into bows over bony fledgling shoulders. I think of the child lifting the black plastic camera, squinting through the viewfinder, fixing them and telling them to say cheese. ‘Stilton,’ they say. ‘Double Gloucester.’ And then they smile, and time stops and holds them like that forever.
I say, ‘What do you mean?’
She says she always felt lucky, a bit too lucky somehow. She goes on to count her blessings, almost feverishly. She was so fortunate with her parents, her education. Meeting Ben after a string of no-hopers; managing to get pregnant, quite far into her thirties and then again close to her fortieth birthday. Everyone’s healthy, touch wood. Money’s pretty tight, but then that’s hardly unusual. Of course, she misses her career, but perhaps once the kids are both at school she’ll be able to resurrect it or retrain – maybe as a primary-school teacher – or set up her own business. ‘I’ve always felt it, I’ve always felt I’m due for a bit of a kicking,’ she’s saying, as if it sounds like nonsense.
And then Ben’s on the terrace, calling to her, saying he’s sorry to break up the party, but Christopher’s in a right old state, could she lend a hand? And she sighs and leans forward, sliding out of the hammock.
When I go inside fifteen minutes later, the door to the room Cecily shares with her parents is shut, and I assume she’s safely down, but Christopher is glimpsed from the corridor: kneeling up in bed, his face blotchy and desperate, as if no one is listening to him. ‘He’s all alone!’ he’s whimpering as his parents move around the bed, picking up towels and pairing sandals. ‘He’s all alone, no one to take care of him.’
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