by Simon Mawer
‘Wish I could live in a place like this.’
‘It’d be a long drag into college.’
She looks at him. This is a moment of strange freedom, each assessing the other, neither knowing what the other is thinking, each trying to work it out. It occurs to him that this is the first time they have ever been truly alone together, unless you count his office in college. Every other encounter has been in a public place.
Kale takes her denim jacket off – GLAMOUR, it announces in glittering imitation diamonds across the shoulder panel – and hesitates a moment before tossing it on to one of the armchairs. Her shoulders seem fragile; on her right arm, just visible below the sleeve of her T-shirt, there is a smoky blue tattoo of a butterfly. ‘That’s her, isn’t it?’ she says, taking the wedding photo from the mantelpiece. ‘I recognize her from that slide you showed us. So this is your dad.’
It is, indeed, Thomas’ father. Was. Was Thomas’ father: Flight Lieutenant Edward Denham, DFC, AFC, as he was then, young, hopeful, uncertain of what he should do after the end of the war, finding nothing else but to continue flying. He has stepped down a rank in the post-war reduction in forces, but at least it’s a job.
‘What happened to him? You never talk about him. Always your mother.’
‘He died in a plane crash, shortly after his retirement. A lifetime flying and he gets killed in a private aircraft.’
‘How terrible.’
‘The contingent event again, like being hit by a bus. As though someone suddenly tore up the script and cancelled the performance.’
She looks at the photograph thoughtfully. ‘I could have fancied him.’
‘What about his son?’
There is a smile somewhere behind the curve of her mouth; but she doesn’t say anything, doesn’t rise to the bait, just puts the picture back where it belongs and picks up something else, the shepherd and shepherdess that his mother always thought might be Meissen, original Meissen, whatever that means. She turns the piece over in her hands. The shepherdess’ expression makes it clear what she is after: she may be laughing and pulling away from the shepherd, but it is plain enough that she’s expecting him to follow. ‘This what you offered to that woman?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Pretty.’ Carefully she replaces the figurine where she found it. ‘You know, there’s something weird about all this? As though it’s still her house? And she’s just gone out for a while?’
‘It’s not hers any longer, it’s mine. Ours. Paula’s and mine.’
‘But that’s not what it feels. She’s all around, isn’t she? Don’t you feel that? You know, once when I was a kid I went into a neighbour’s house when they’d all gone out. Me and my boyfriend. I mean, we were fifteen or something, not a big deal. We got in round the back and through the kitchen door. This feels a bit like that. Somehow you could sense that they were still there, even though we’d seen them leave.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing really. It was doing it rather than anything else. The excitement. We looked round a bit, and then we were, you know, fooling around—’
‘Fooling around?’
She makes a face, lips pinched. ‘You know what I mean. And we heard their car stopping out the front so we had to get out the back door quick. It was a laugh. No harm done.’
Does this visit feel like that to her? he wonders – are they like children on a dare, evading the adults, fooling around? She is looking at the portrait of his mother hanging on the wall above the fireplace. ‘What was she like, your mum? Nice old lady? Kind to kittens?’
‘She didn’t like animals, and she was never old. And she could be quite cutting when she wanted.’
‘You’re a bit obsessed, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t think so. Just honest. When you lose your mother …’ He is at a loss for words. Unusual for him who lives by words, lives by explanation and exposition, by lies. ‘It does something,’ he says finally. ‘Something inside breaks.’
‘Your heart?’
‘Not that. Some much more fundamental part of the machinery.’
She crosses the room and peers out of the window on to the street, as though looking to see if the owners are coming back unexpectedly. When she turns and leans against the windowsill all he can see is her silhouette against the daylight, the shape of her. ‘What would she have thought of me, then?’
Now there’s a question. He has practised it over and over: What do you think of her, Mother? he asks. She says ‘nice’ and ‘toilet’ and ‘Gran’ and all those words that you despised. She’s got an illegitimate child, which isn’t a term we use any more but one that you wouldn’t give up, would you? That fact alone would condemn her in your eyes. And yet … she’s sharp, isn’t she? And disturbingly honest. In yer face; up front; characteristics that you used to claim for your Yorkshire background. No flannel. What do you think?
‘She’d have thought me a common little tart, wouldn’t she?’ Kale says.
He can’t really see her expression against the light. Is there some quality of anxiety that he hasn’t seen before? Does she look vulnerable for the first time? ‘Don’t be bloody silly. You mustn’t think anything like that.’
‘But would she have thought it?’
‘She’d have found you … interesting. She’d have liked your style, your guts.’
‘And how do you feel about me, Professor Denham?’
‘Doctor. Professors are even older. I feel a bit as though I’ve been hit by a bus.’
‘A contingent event?’
‘Something like that.’
She laughs. That’s something. Laughter is not bad, he thinks, although the innocent laughter of amusement and anticipation would be preferable to this laughter with its cynical edge. Nevertheless, this must be the right moment. Right moments have featured much in his life, the instant of weakness, the second of vulnerability. He goes over to her and puts his hands on her shoulders and at least she doesn’t resist when he draws her gently towards him. In fact she even complies, turning her face slightly to look at him. He examines the small details of her features: the edge of her lips where the glossy membrane merges into downy skin; the eyes that are wide in the diffuse light, with the irises reduced to mere circles of blue around her obsidian pupils. How do you get pupils that large? Has she been taking something? Belladonna, that’s what they used in Victorian times. Deadly nightshade. Atropine, after one of the Fates. Nowadays it’s probably ecstasy or GHB. She has attempted to pluck her eyebrows into something resembling Hogarth’s curve of beauty, but it’s the failure to achieve any theoretical beauty that moves him, the imperfections and blemishes that stir him. She has a small, angry spot beside her nose, covered with a dab of cream. Her mouth is half open and there is the faint bitterness of cigarettes on her breath. He touches his lips on to hers and feels, for an instant, the wetness of her tongue and the sourness of her saliva, the unfamiliarity of taste and touch.
‘What do you want to do?’ he asks.
She shrugs. ‘Don’t mind.’
Is that compliance? What would the Committee on Staff– Student Relations say? ‘Shall we go upstairs?’
‘OK.’ She follows him into the hall. At the foot of the stairs he stands aside to let her go first. She pauses for an instant, and then, accepting the challenge, goes ahead up the narrow stairs to the landing. The floorboards flex beneath her feet, as though making small mutterings of protest.
‘Where’s the toilet?’ she asks at the top. He shows her. The door is thin and he can hear her moving about beyond it, sliding the lock across, lifting the lid of the lavatory. It is impossible not to imagine her dropping her jeans and squatting with her knickers round her ankles, impossible not to give an image to the sound of the rivulet running out of her and splashing into the bowl. Looking for distraction, he opens the door opposite. The curtains are drawn, the whole room perfused by a watery light. There is just the bare mattress on the bed now, but all the other things are still there
– the photos, the ornaments, the pictures, a small collection of shells that she must have picked up on one of her walks along the foreshore, a photograph of his father, a watercolour of a village nestled in the moors above Sheffield. Hope village, that was the name. He remembers her telling him. She went there with a boyfriend, long ago, in the days before she knew his father, impossibly distant. They’d climbed one of the hills behind the village, Win Hill, and the next day he’d gone away to sea and never come back. Charteris, that was what she called him. Charteris.
On a whim, he opens one of the wardrobes. The door releases a faint exhalation of perfume. Dresses hang there in the shadows. He leafs through them as one might turn the pages of a book: the ones she wore recently, but also the relics, the leftovers from the past, kept through some kind of nostalgia. She never wanted to let go, of her past any more than her life. Behind him he can hear the lavatory flush and the bathroom door open and close. Floorboards creak. He doesn’t turn, but he senses Kale there behind him. ‘These are hers,’ he tells her. ‘My sister must come and do something about them or I’ll throw the whole lot out, give them to Oxfam, whatever it is that you do.’
‘That’d be a shame.’ She reaches past him and takes one of the dresses off the rail, one of the old ones, a summer frock that he actually remembers his mother wearing. It has narrow blue and white stripes. He can’t link it to any specific moment in the past, but simply with her presence – her smell, her touch.
Kale holds the dress against herself to show him. ‘How’s that? It’s real fifties stuff, isn’t it? What do you think?’
‘It looks all right.’
‘Did she look good in it?’
There is a sudden quickening of the memory. ‘Wait there.’
‘Where’re you going?’
‘You can see for yourself,’ he calls. He finds it immediately among the slides that he discovered. There’s an old slide viewer that he found as well. Equipped with new batteries, it still works. He slips the slide into the slot and holds the viewer out to her.
It is indeed the same dress. There is the past, glowing inside its plastic box as though somehow it is preserved there in miniature; and there is the real thing in Kale’s hands. Paradoxically, the photo seems imbued with life and significance, while the relic – the dress itself – is limp and dead and devoid of context, like a costume left in the dressing room of a theatre after the production has closed. Just a length of cotton.
‘How fifties is that?’ Kale exclaims. ‘And look at those flowers. Where is it?’
‘Cyprus. That must be, I don’t know, nineteen-fifty-seven.’
‘And the little girl?’
‘My sister, Paula.’
Kale holds the dress up and looks from it to the photo and back again. ‘It’s sort of creepy, really, to have it in your hands.’ She is about to return the dress to the wardrobe when Thomas stops her.
‘Put it on,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Try it on.’ He laughs, to encourage her. ‘You’d look good in it.’
She cocks her head on one side. ‘Like your mother?’
‘We’ll see.’
‘You serious?’
‘Why not?’
She’s biting the inside of her cheek, as she does when she is puzzled. ‘You’ll have to turn round. I’m not having you watching.’
This manifestation of prudery amuses him, but he turns away just the same, and listens to the movements behind him, the sweep of denim against skin as she drops her jeans round her feet. He’s alert to every whisper. He can hear her easing the dress up over her hips, straightening it where it clings round the waist, shrugging her way into the bodice. He knows the moment when she reaches awkwardly round the back for the zip. There is the insect sound of the zipper being pulled up. Like a cicada.
‘OK, you can look now.’
He turns.
Kale has been snatched back into the past. Her own clothes lie like a shadow on the floor, and from forty years ago her heart-shaped face looks back at him. ‘How’s that?’ She turns her hips, letting the skirt swing. With one hand she pushes her hair up at the back.
‘Wonderful.’
She pirouettes. The skirt billows out and the whole room seems to turn with her, the walls shifting, the floor tilting and swirling as though it were a cabin in a ship. ‘Is that like her, then? Mrs Denham, at your service?’
Thomas watches with a mixture of wonder and delight. ‘Your shoes.’ He goes down on his knees.
‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘Anachronistic.’
She sits down on the edge of the bed while Thomas unlaces her shoes with fumbling fingers. There is the scent of hot leather as he pulls them off. Her toes are narrow, the second longer than the big toe and slightly webbed with its smaller neighbour, so that the two form a V. There is something infinitely endearing about this anatomical quirk. He lifts one foot and bends to kiss the forked toes while Kale laughs uncertainly, as though this is some kind of game the rules of which she has not quite understood. ‘You got a foot fetish or something?’
‘They’re lovely,’ he assures her, resting her foot back down on the floor.
‘They’re deformed.’
‘Beautiful.’
‘I used to be shy about it when I was a kid. Used to get teased.’
‘On the beach at Frinton?’
‘At the local pool.’
He is still kneeling before her, like a swain before his love. ‘There’s a mend here.’ He takes up a piece of the skirt to show her. ‘It must have been torn.’ Gently he lifts the fabric to bare her knees. She makes a vague attempt to push the skirt back down but he holds her hand to stop her. Her legs are pale and narrow. A ghost’s legs. He leans forward to kiss the hourglass of her right kneecap where the skin is rough and the hairs have been rubbed into a stubble by wearing trousers.
‘Hey!’ she cries uncertainly, as though kissing knees were some kind of mild aberration; which perhaps it is. He pushes the skirt further, up over her thighs.
‘Hey, what are you up to?’ But she doesn’t resist, just lies back, propping herself on her elbows and looking down at him with those wide, black pupils. How far, he wonders, will he be allowed? The skirt slides up over the top of her thighs, until it unmasks a sudden, sharp triangle of white nylon. Tendrils of hair are visible through the thin mist of the material. The skin of her belly is white and smooth, brushed with down.
She bites at her lower lip – a row of pearls are just visible against the soft red pulp. ‘What are you up to, Thomas?’
‘Do you mind?’
‘You make me shy.’
He reaches out to take the waistband of her briefs. Still she doesn’t stop him, and when he pulls she even lifts her hips slightly to let the scrap of material pass; but at the vital moment she twists, bringing her left leg over her right and shutting herself off from his gaze. He manoeuvres the briefs over her knees and down to her ankles. The gusset bears a brush-stroke of yellow, like the reflection of a buttercup beneath a child’s chin. ‘You’re lovely,’ he whispers.
‘No different from anyone else.’
‘You’re you.’
It’s a tautologous proposition, and thus incontrovertible. But still she argues the point. ‘Am I me? Or’ – she twists her mouth, nibbles her lip – ‘am I your mum?’
He takes hold of her left knee and tries to straighten her. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he says, and she laughs, half struggling against his grip – ‘Hey!’ – and then the struggle ceases and her muscles slacken, and quite gently he can open her, like a book.
Thomas looks. Kale shifts nervously, telling him again that he is making her shy; but still he looks – at the contours of her stomach and hips, at the hillock with its scrub of hair and its secretive, half-hidden curl of inner lip. He imagines that mouth parting to admit her various lovers, or gaping in a scream in order to expel the wet head and slippery shoulders of her child.
‘Thomas,’ she says, but wh
at she intends isn’t clear. He moves closer and her secret smell rises to meet him, a warm amalgam of perfumes – sharp citrus, a hint of ammonia, a suggestion of musk, the scents of life and decay, of the cradle and the grave. Damp strands of hair brush against his nose. ‘Thomas,’ she repeats. Her hand is on his head, as though in benediction. Her lips open to the pressure of his tongue. Somewhere far away a child screams. From a great distance a woman calls his name: ‘Tom,’ she cries. ‘Tom.’
Janet Burford’s house seems to have been furnished from a car boot sale. There are worn carpets on the floor and old and damaged furniture in the rooms – a broken-backed sofa, chairs whose raffia seats need repairing, a dining table with marks and cigarette burns on its top. Many of the horizontal surfaces are taken up with her pottery. The colours are ochre and blue, aquamarine and sand. Abstract paintings on the walls betray the same hand. Somehow the place manages to combine an air of impermanence with the sense that it has been like this for decades.
A dog barks. ‘That’s Barbara,’ Janet explains. ‘I’ve shut her in her kennel so she won’t bother you, but she’s quite all right.’ She is wearing baggy trousers that would look fine on a rapper, and a woollen sweater that would look good on a fisherman, and shoes that must have come from an army-surplus store. She blinks and smiles and shows her visitors through into the kitchen, where the smells of cats and mould merge seamlessly one into the other. It’s difficult to imagine Thomas’ mother here, exchanging confidences over the bin bags.
‘I’m so glad you came. What can I get you? Wine, would you like wine? I’ve got a bottle in the fridge.’
The bottle is already open. It’s clear that little else is on offer. ‘Wine will do fine.’
She hands Thomas a glass just as he holds out the hastily wrapped package that he has brought for her. There’s a moment of awkward laughter as they almost spill the wine, almost drop the package, and finally make the exchange safely.
‘Just like Christmas,’ she says, unwrapping the figurine. With a small cry of delight, she holds it out to see. Among her modernist stuff the Meissen piece looks absurdly delicate and fragile – a small, intricate thing of light and laughter. She turns it round and over in competent potter’s hands. ‘Oh, it’s wonderful.’ And there are tears in her eyes, so much so that Kale puts out a hand and touches her on the forearm, and evokes a self-deprecating smile. ‘It means so much,’ Janet explains. ‘So much.’ She puts the piece down and gives Thomas a quick, clumsy kiss on the cheek, and then she turns to Kale and does the same. She is blinking away tears and apologizing, and using the back of her wrist to wipe her eyes – the gesture of someone who is used to working with grimy hands. ‘Look.’ She turns the piece over to show them the base. ‘Look.’ There, blurred in the glaze, are the crossed swords of Meissen. ‘See the dot? That’s about seventeen-sixty. If it’s genuine.’ Her eyes are glistening. ‘Always supposing it’s genuine. There were many fakes, many of them very fine. Like this one, if it is a fake.’