Perfect Lives

by Polly Samson

  In the Jewish cemetery Aurelia’s red rose now lay on a thick pillow of snow. Her grandfather’s grave had a number. Bobo had once written it down for her. In case she should ever go to Hamburg, she said. ‘No reason why you should.’

  The iron gates to the Jewish cemetery had been locked. Aurelia had waded through the snow, which was up to her knees, but the spiked bars of the fence were too high for her to climb.

  She considered attaching a piece of paper with the number of the grave, and her grandfather’s name, to the stem of the rose but in the end she simply threw it over the fence. It would be a rare bloom: there wouldn’t be many in there to go round. She remembered Bobo once saying that it was a miracle that the graves had survived, especially Georg’s, having been so late on. The last she’d seen of it, just before she left Hamburg, it was still bare earth. As Bobo left the cemetery that final time she was jeered at.

  Bobo had been almost eighty when she broke her arm running down the hill for a bus to the Opera House. Aurelia could picture her afterwards in that plain white flat in Muswell Hill with her arm in plaster. Calling herself a fool. Upright high-backed armchair. Passing a magnifying glass with a mother-of-pearl handle over the Guardian crossword. A bun and pearly combs as translucent as the hair they held, the tender pink glow of her scalp and her head moving over the paper like the moon over water.

  A small glass of Dubonnet by her side. ‘Ach, try not to worry about me’, taking a tiny sip, while the swearing and spitting reached its peak outside in the dark.

  Her smile to Aurelia was sweet and wistful, almost far-away, or maybe she was still thinking about the crossword clue. ‘I have nothing to steal.’ She put down the magnifying glass and patted the moonstone pinned to her silk scarf. ‘Apart, meine kleine sonne, from this …’

  The moonstone drew light from the lamp. ‘Your parents bought this so that I would have something to leave you.’ The lovely milk lustre within the smooth cabochon gleamed as she moved, the same blue adularescence as her failing eyes. Aurelia could see the slight curve of her widow’s hump.

  ‘Kleine sonne.’ How lovely it had been to be her grand-mother’s little sun.

  The only newspaper on the flight was in German. Aurelia took one anyway and stared at the front-page picture of an old man and a younger woman stepping out of a limousine beneath a headline: RAUB VON BILLIONAR’S SARG. The woman was an upswept blonde in royal-blue satin and jewels, a fixed smile that made Aurelia think of a leopard she’d once seen pacing the bars at the Berlin Zoo. Around her neck a collar of pearls the size of eyeballs. Beside her the grey-haired man didn’t look quite so pleased to be having his picture taken, pale lips tightly pressed together like strips of Velcro.

  The German man in the window seat beside her leaned over and pointed to the story.

  ‘Stolen from his mausoleum in the middle of the night,’ he said. He spoke perfect English, despite his accent, and had thick cropped hair in various shades of grey that leapt from his crown in a single whirl like a Viennese Fancy.

  ‘How awful,’ said Aurelia. The man had good clean hands, with square-ended fingertips. ‘Why would anyone do that?’

  ‘His father funded the Nazis. That’s how the family got so rich.’

  He prodded the photograph of the couple, so resplendent on their night out. ‘Maybe his coffin was full of gold,’ he said. ‘Like a pharaoh.’

  An air hostess bustled by to collect half-drunk cups of complimentary orange juice, checking that seatbelts had been fastened, suspicious as a store detective: ‘Could you lift your cardigan so that I can check your belt, please, madam?’ – which made the man in the window seat snort, and when Aurelia looked up she saw that his smile made the corners of his eyes crinkle like a cat’s whiskers. ‘They always refused to pay reparation, someone has probably taken him as a protest,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ Aurelia replied, folding the couple in on themselves and stuffing the newspaper into the seat pocket in front of her. ‘I hope they never give the body back’, and as the blood rushed to her cheeks she wondered why the Valium hadn’t taken effect.

  She took Claudine’s photograph from her wallet and immediately regretted that it made her think about that vile tattoo, stuck for ever, like a big blot on her ankle. She settled the badly shaped cushion into the small of her back. Some stains never wash out. She thought of Bobo’s upstairs neighbour Bela with her eyes always hidden behind large dark glasses, even at night, and a number inked to her wrist: that number was all you could think about when you met her, even when she was wearing long sleeves and gloves. The man next to her had returned unperturbed to looking out of his window at the fading light. The plane rumbled along the runway and she wondered if she had left it too late to take another half-Valium.

  They were accelerating and she could feel every jolt. Everything rattling. She wished she hadn’t called Claudine such a horrible name before she left. Stains that don’t wash out, scars that never fade. She thought about Bobo waving her sons off on the train, labels around their necks, trying her best to appear jaunty. An adventure! Leaving Hamburg. What a long five months it must have been between the Kindertransport and her own passage out.

  As the plane took off Aurelia realised what a fool she’d been to have never got around to making her will. It was the same as not watching the safety demonstration: an inability to think about the unthinkable. She regretted that she’d never tried to contact Leszek, despite the passing of the years. She regretted that she would die intestate.

  As they roared into the sky, she thought of the jewellery box on her dressing table at home and Claudine like a little magpie as a child, raiding it and running around the house, sparkling and jingling. Lovely little voice, a song from school assemblies: ‘Sing Hosanna! Sing Hosanna!’

  These days Claudine wore thick silver rings, even one on her thumb, and lots of bracelets, metal ones and grubby ones made from string. Aurelia couldn’t imagine Claudine with any of her jewellery: not her ruby earrings, nor her lapis lazuli beads. Claudine would never know that it had been Leszek who had given Aurelia the amber bracelet that she wore for good luck every birthday. She wouldn’t know the significance of the moonstone either, wouldn’t know about Bobo because Aurelia had failed to write an addendum of wishes, and would probably lose it or swap it with a friend for tickets to a band. Bobo’s simple brooch wouldn’t fit with the ripped jeans and racy underwear. There was a new cranking noise as the plane gathered height. She’d left it too late to read the safety instructions. It sounded like teeth and hammers. Aurelia gripped her head in her hands.

  ‘It’s just the undercarriage coming up,’ the German man explained. ‘Try not to worry.’ And she wished that he would hold her hand.

  As they reached altitude, the noise subsided. The German man patted her arm and asked in his good English if she would join him in a glass of wine and, wiping her eyes, Aurelia agreed.

  She sipped her wine and the fist around her heart loosened its grip. Aurelia could see her daughter, quite clearly, in the future, but not too soon: she’d be wearing a black beret, a macintosh tied at her waist with a wide belt. The beret would be just right, pulled down jauntily over one side of her face, leaving one eye peeping out through the unmistakably extravagant lashes that Claudine had inherited from her father. Aurelia’s eyes were watering again: airplanes often made her tearful. She wiped them with her fingertips, brushing everything away. Claudine with the moonstone pinned to her beret: the girl had style, and she found herself turning to the man beside her and clinking her glass to his.

  THE BIRTHDAY PRESENT

  It wasn’t a great start to his birthday: me in my shabby dressing gown, hair a bit frazzly, in need of a cut. ‘I didn’t get you a present.’

  He looked at me, blinking, a little myopic without his glasses, as though I might be a magician about to release a flock of doves from my sleeve.

  ‘Really, I didn’t …’

  His soft brown eyes suddenly downcast. He looked away but I’d already se
en the boy in him. For a moment I thought he might cry. I glanced quickly to where the real boys were making birthday cards with the bits of paper I’d hastily folded in half.

  ‘I couldn’t think of the right thing,’ I lied, unable to tell him the truth. ‘I’m sorry.’ There was really nothing else I could say: I wasn’t ill and as far as he knew there was money in my account. I was twisting my wedding ring around my finger just to give myself something to look at. The truth was I’d forgotten to give his birthday any thought at all.

  ‘It’s OK, I think I’ll survive.’ He laughed then, even planted a kiss on my unworthy cheek, while Ivan and Angus, up on stools, kicked the cupboards, coloured pencils in their fists.

  Simon rinsed his coffee mug at the sink, using his thumb to remove the ring from last night’s last cup. As a consequence of that last cup he was probably awake for hours after I’d flaked out. He usually is.

  Simon ruffled my hair with both hands, vigorously, in the way that a rugby player might express kinship after a try.

  ‘I told you, it doesn’t matter at all,’ he said, and the slight flush in his cheeks made him look ridiculously healthy, like the sort of person who might run a marathon. It suited him living out here.

  I took the coffee cup from him and wished I didn’t feel quite so like the bad fairy at the feast. Simon deserved better. If only the postman would come there’d be cards from other people, a parcel from his mother. But the postman always comes so late; it’s not like London around here. I made Simon his coffee and frothed up the milk a little so it looked like a cappuccino. At least it was a beautiful morning. A golden light from the garden poured over the table, yesterday’s buttercups glimmered in their jar. Simon sat down and rested his head on his forearms in front of him and I put the coffee down and hugged him because I really did feel sorry, and laid my cheek across the back of his nubbly jumper.

  Ivan slid on to his knee and held his paper card to his face, too close for him to focus.

  ‘It’s you in a space rocket, Daddy,’ he said.

  Nearly every one of Ivan’s pictures is of one of these rather phallic space rockets. On the occasion of his birthday, Ivan had drawn Simon with lots of curly grey hair, which was a little unfair because he still has plenty of brown, and glasses. The effect was rather elderly for an astronaut but the rocket was magnificent. Simon snorted. Angus laid his card on top of his brother’s, everything always a fratricidal fight to the death: ‘Thirty-seven candles, Daddy. Count them’, and Simon did his best to look equally pleased with both of his sons’ drawings.

  He and the boys started splashing milk on to their cereal. I was feeling restless already, buttering my toast and trying not to think about you. I was testing myself to see if today might be the day that I would find the will power not to run to you as soon as the coast was clear. Simon sipped his coffee and picked up a yellow and green polythene wallet of Snappy Snaps from the table where I’d left it. He started flicking through, unhurried, though I was sure he ought to get going. Usually, I tried not to leave photos lying around but as this lot was mostly of Ivan I hadn’t bothered to hide them.

  ‘Some of these are quite good,’ he said, swilling his mouth like a man tasting wine, and I felt myself blush.

  He took another leisurely sip from his mug as he reached the last photograph; this was one that I’d allowed Ivan to snap of me. Rather harried by the window.

  ‘It was only fair to let him have a go after he’d agreed to look so lovingly at the flowers,’ I explained.

  Simon was tapping Ivan’s snap before him like a playing card.

  ‘Now, this I like,’ he said.

  I couldn’t imagine why he would. I was wearing a polo neck that looked almost fuzzy, it was so pilled, and jeans and old plimsolls with my knees bent up and legs akimbo along the arm of the chair to fit into Ivan’s shot. I didn’t look especially comfortable and my hair was a mess.

  ‘Though, I’d like it even more,’ he said, quite poker-faced, ‘… without clothes on.’

  ‘Shhhh.’ I glanced from Simon to the boys, who were busy flicking crumbs at each other, and wondered if I’d heard him right.

  ‘Come on, chaps, get your blazers,’ he said, and left for the car with the boys tugging his hands like fairground balloons on the end of their strings.

  I knew, as soon as he’d driven off, that I should get myself into town and sort out a present: better late than never and, as I’ve said, Simon deserved better.

  I started hunting for my car keys. I used to keep them on the peg by the back door but recently I’ve started to throw them down in the strangest places. I half hoped that I wouldn’t find them, and then I’d be able to spend another day with you, just the two of us; worry about Simon’s present who knew when. At the very least I should bake him a cake for later. I would definitely manage that, I thought. Although he had no way of knowing, money for a proper present most certainly was a problem. I wondered if he’d like a goldfish. Perhaps he’d see it as an ironic present. I doubted it.

  Out of the kitchen window a blackbird in the upper branches of the crab apple exalted the glories of the golden morning. Beyond, the long grass was a froth of cow parsley. Angelica flowered in the lane. The leaves of the tree shimmered. I imagined what I’d be doing with this dewy sunlit morning if you were here with me and shivered pleasantly at the thought. Simon’s present faded from view. Even through the heavy veil of guilt I only had eyes for the damp and glistening garden lit all the brighter by my burning desire to share it with you. The keys to the little Peugeot stayed wherever I’d left them. Without so much as clearing up the mess of the breakfast table I found myself striding across the soaking grass and the blackbird carried on singing.

  It was just after sundown one night in April that a picture of you first slipped into my inbox attached to an email from my friend, Tilda. ‘Something for the weekend?’ was the subject line. Life had led Tilda down a rural path even further removed from sophistication than mine so to honour our more fabulous pasts we sometimes sent each other tantalising pictures. Our pornography, we called it: a long-running joke.

  I didn’t have much time to indulge myself that night, though I could see immediately that you were gorgeous, but I was already late to meet Simon and the others to celebrate the first year of the Agency. I remember he was a bit squiffy by the time we got home. We had a desultory attempt at making love but as usual he wanted the light on and I wanted it off, we tussled over the dimmer and after that sort of lost heart.

  Downstairs in my dressing gown. Simon snoring the snores of a drunkard upstairs. I can remember the moment: the pulsating dome of the mouse, the blue light of the screen, the buzz of the dimmer and the hum of the fridge through the wall, and then, without knowing what I was setting in motion, I was clicking to the photograph of you that Tilda had sent. The attachment opened and my eyes locked on. It was instant and soaring, like a hot air balloon taking to the skies; it even affected my breathing. I didn’t know what to do because I’d never encountered such elation before. I’d never believed in love at first sight. I was almost giddy with it. I stared at your photograph for a very long time, a fire burning within me. The next day I rekindled the same visceral heat with a second look. I was supposed to be proofreading a cookery book but I kept returning to the computer, clicking to that picture. I even Googled you. In Google Images I found some more photographs: in one you were with an Italian countess, in another a leggy blonde at the polo. I stumbled upon a whole site dedicated to your pictures. I was in good company. People had left flattering messages. They referred to your elegance, your style, and I found myself sitting up straighter, imagining my face pressed to yours. I had never felt desire like it.

  The dew saturated my canvas shoes as I crossed beneath the apple trees. I would have the nuisance of having to dress up later, but for now I was free. Simon liked the usual things: dresses, high heels, underwear of the sort that comes wrapped in layers of tissue paper as though it might break. Sometimes he buys it for me, an
d sometimes he buys me shoes made of satin with long thin heels that say ‘Manolo Blahnik’ on a little name tape sewn on the instep, or even more precariously ‘Jimmy Choo’, cunningly pronounced ‘shoe’.

  Leaves glistened. The Lady’s Mantle offered dewdrops. Simon always surprised me with something special – birthdays, Christmas, even our anniversary. What did I think I was doing? I stopped myself at the orchard gate. My own pleasure would have to wait. I almost turned around. Simon’s present. But then the blackbird sang and my path was lit by the haze of morning sunshine. Convolvulus clung to a ruined wall, its pale green hearts hanging in strings, and my adulterously quiet, sopping wet sneakers took me closer to where you were waiting.

  There had been such a heavy dewfall that the frayed hems of my jeans soon grew damp so I hoicked them up and kicked my wet shoes off into the grass. It couldn’t matter to me less what I look like these days. You’ve opened my eyes: I’m happy to go as I please. I looked down. I could even see beauty in my bare toes, wet and streaked with brown beneath the sopping roll of my jeans. I was wearing one of Simon’s old shirts, tatty at the collar from his stubble. I admit that I’ve become scruffier since we’ve been hanging around together. Simon probably despairs. Some mornings I go to put on a skirt and then my old jeans call to me from the floor where they lie discarded like an old skin with their comfortable creases, and I think how you and I will have our fun and it doesn’t matter what I wear when we do.

  As I crossed the orchard, I noticed that one of the top windows was latched open and a swallow flew out, so close that I could feel the breath of its wings. I felt lucky. The young swallows squeaked from their nest in the rafters where you and I once stood on tiptoe and glimpsed inside the ravenous yellow diamonds of their beaks. One morning I sneaked out here early, before the boys had even woken up, to see you. The webs that grace the windows and the door were sparkling tiaras, laced with diamonds of dew. And to think I used to let spiders go up the hoover. There’s nothing like spending time in the countryside with you to make me see things in a new light.