Perfect Lives

by Polly Samson

  The piano practically shook the wall of Anna’s miserable sitting room. Rose remembered sitting with the tea cooling in the cup, saucer on her knees, cushions crackling with resentment, the rain beetling down the windows while Anna played relentlessly on. She was certainly no Oscar Peterson, her daughter.

  When she finally stopped – it had taken her several attempts to play the piece right through – Rose had apparently failed to tell her well done.

  ‘Why didn’t you let me have piano lessons when I was little?’ Rose couldn’t for the life of her remember turning her down. Leo, yes, he’d played, so had Tilda; Anna, not really. Rose had held back a childish urge to mutter ‘Diddums’ as Anna went on about it. As far as Rose was concerned she held all the trump cards herself: being an orphan, clinging to poor Bernadette’s wasted body, that’s what they said; passed to and fro, the bad luck of ending up with an adoptive mother so self-righteously cruel. Then, oh Lord above, Jimmy. The full hand, the whole miserable deck. Piano lessons. What was Anna’s problem?

  ‘I’m seeing a shrink.’ Anna had said it as though that was perfectly all right and not a slight on her in the least. ‘Every Thursday.’ A shrink! Rose had felt it like a punch to the belly.

  ‘It’s not an insult! It’s not like the RSPCA being called in about your dog, really it isn’t!’ Anna had tried to make a joke of it, to call her back. But Rose was already stalking off to an earlier train.

  Evrika Street. Thank goodness, almost there. Rose was glad of her umbrella, a silky lime-green one, rather elegant, that Massimo had bought for her in Rome. Anna’s hair hung in rats’ tails because she had refused to come under it, said she didn’t care if she got wet.

  ‘I suppose you’re in touch with your brothers? You’ll know all their news. Leo’s not been well.’ Rain started to bounce from her umbrella. Anna shook water from her fringe as they stopped at her gate.

  ‘Carla emails me about him.’

  Rose didn’t like to be reminded of Carla, Leo’s wife, so possessive that Rose had to telephone her first to book it into her diary whenever she wanted to visit Leo in the hospital.

  ‘And Cassio, do you hear from him?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna over her shoulder as she rummaged in her bag for keys, ‘he calls me all the time.’

  Again, a stab like jealousy. She’d been hoping most of all for siblings of her own when she’d started poking around in Ireland.

  ‘By the way,’ said Anna as she found her keys, ‘there’s something I didn’t tell you in the restaurant.’ She took a momentously deep breath, put the key in the lock: ‘I’ve got a boyfriend.’ Who, in their right mind, would put up with Anna? The question fell unbidden into her head and Rose was immediately ashamed of herself. Anna threw open the door.

  ‘He’s a bit nervous about meeting you,’ she whispered over her shoulder and just for a moment Rose thought she was imagining the piano. But this wasn’t playing like Anna’s had been, it didn’t stall and start and bash; it was without anger, and stopped with a cheerful trill as the front door clattered shut.

  ‘Richard could have been a concert pianist,’ Anna said, her eyes crinkling as he came into the hall.

  A gangling man, as long in the limb as Anna: he was bending his fingers back at the knuckles, a couple of them cracked and then he held out his hand to her, blushing to the colour of a ripe pomegranate.

  ‘Mama, this is Richard.’ He was slightly stooped as though apologising for his height.

  ‘It’s good to meet you,’ he said, a voice that was unusually quiet. For a moment as she looked up at him she saw a flare of light from the bulb in the hall behind his head, like a heavenly aura, and was reminded of the time she’d seen a real halo: it had been shimmering around a neighbour, someone she’d been told to call Auntie Jean. Auntie Jean had forced open the door to the windowless room with the crucifix, found Rose there. She’d been more than a day and a night by that time without food or water, not even a bucket to pee in. Auntie Jean had come to get Rose out, she held her against her comfortable apron, patted her head, tried to keep her.

  Richard took Rose’s coat. He shook it a little to dry it, and then Anna’s. He had a rather elegant neck, long and tender like a stem and with a prominent Adam’s apple; he might have swallowed the parson’s nose. Or bitten off more than he could chew, Rose thought, then felt ashamed all over again.

  ‘You should have called and I would’ve collected you in the car.’ Richard looked at Anna, not quite admonishing. Rose noticed a smile pass between them as he hung their coats on a hook.

  Richard played so that her heart ached. ‘Don’t stop,’ she said when he reached a pause in the music. His expressive phrasing made Anna’s shoddy upright sound fit for a queen. Anna had put Rose to sit on the sofa while she went for brandy and glasses, a towel for her hair.

  ‘I like this one,’ Rose said, smiling and nodding a little, and Anna slotted in beside her among the cushions. They lifted the brandy to their lips while Richard played Chopin.

  Richard had lit all the candles ready for when they came in, he’d created a lovely dancing light. Even the ones in the piano’s candlelabrum were blazing so Rose feared that he might catch his dark curls alight as he played.

  The embers of a small fire warmed the grate and one of Anna’s rugs hung from the rail above. It seemed to glow, as though a breeze ruffled its colours, its russets and reds, oranges and ochres and earths, and Rose wasn’t sure if she was imagining it, but then Anna confirmed in a whisper: ‘Can you see what the colours are? In that rug? It’s Castagnola. Castagnola in autumn. I’ve been working on it all year.’

  Rose put her arm up and Anna let her head fall to her shoulder while Richard’s playing grew quieter and then reached back up towards a crescendo, phrases repeating themselves, melodies threading in and out of each other, calling, repeating. Anna scooped down into the cushions until her head lay in Rose’s lap.

  ‘I was thinking about the vineyard.’ Anna’s eyes were closed, her pale eyelids finely veined and mauve like rose petals.

  ‘I was thinking how much I used to like it there. There was a little hollow two thirds of the way down, it happened to be where two of the vines met so was completely obscured from view. I used to go there with a book.’ Anna slid her feet along the sofa while Rose stroked her hair.

  ‘I remember the rose bushes in the vineyard, so many different sorts. One bush planted at the end of each line. Why were they planted there? I don’t think I ever knew.’

  Rose could see the blue veins at Anna’s temples as she stroked her hair back. ‘It’s tradition,’ she said. ‘The rose before the vine. Some people say they were planted there because they were thorny and discouraged the plough horses from trampling the vines.’

  ‘Once when I was little I went out with scissors and cut a whole bunch of different roses for you,’ Anna said. ‘They were all very thorny. There were some dark red ones with prickles all along the stems like brambles, and lots of different pinks and oranges; my hands got cut.’ Anna was talking, her head still in her mother’s lap, knees curled up and the lovely music slurring and pattering. ‘Shsh,’ said Rose, gesturing at Richard playing a quiet passage where the notes seemed to grow misty.

  Rose thought she would cry; the tune was swooping around the room and Anna’s rug with its burnished colours seemed to blaze.

  She thought of Anna at little Cassio’s bath time, funny the things that slip into one’s head. Perhaps it was seeing Tilda bathe with her cherub that reminded her. Anna demanding to get into the bath too. Cassio’s little towel with the bunny ears, how cute he looked in it, such a ciccio, just as much a little fatty as Tilda’s boy. And there was Anna, out of the bath and dripping, all skinny, putting it on over her head, how hideous it looked, her front teeth grown big and too much like a rabbit’s for the bunny ears to look anything other than charmless, the whole thing too short to cover her pudenda, twiggy legs dancing around. Cassio crying and saying that she’d stolen his towel.

  Anna s
at up from her lap. ‘Anyway, you were saying. The rose was planted in front of the vine to deter clumsy horses.’

  ‘Maybe that was it,’ said Rose quietly. ‘Though other people believed that planting the rose there would act as an early warning system. The rose gets the same diseases as the grape but shows symptoms sooner.’ Rose couldn’t bear the poignancy of what she was saying. ‘It isn’t foolproof.’ Sometimes you’d get a hardy one, like herself, like the canary down the mine that goes on singing. It was becoming hard to speak. The pin was almost out; she was like a terrorist, biding her time there in Anna’s lovely room with the soft light and music.

  ‘Hopefully the rose got ill in time for the vine to be treated and saved,’ she said, her heart beating faster.

  Anna leapt up from the sofa and draped herself lightly over Richard at the piano. The Nocturne started fading towards its inevitable conclusion. Richard played on, still managing to kiss Anna with the side of his mouth, sliding his eyes away from the keys to meet hers sideways on, but only for a moment.

  REMOTE CONTROL

  ‘I wish we didn’t have a television,’ I said to Simon after a particular weekend of blaring cartoon, cheesy quiz show, soap and reality TV hell. All day Saturday while the rain hammered our forsaken garden Simon kept the TV loud enough to drown out the voices of our bored and bickering children. And yesterday, the sun tried its Sunday best to break through – at an annoying angle for the screen, so Simon drew the curtains.

  ‘It’s not what you watch that bothers me,’ I said when he returned home this evening, delayed by yet another disorder with the trains, and headed straight for his temple, dinner held before him like an offering to the Great God Prime Time. ‘It’s the time you waste doing it.’

  ‘What are you?’ said Simon, shooing Cato the cat, who had been curled like a warm croissant in the comfy armchair that just happened to have the best view of the television. ‘My mother?’

  ‘Anyway, you watch it enough yourself,’ he added, failing, as usual, to notice the little double flick that Cato gave with his tail before huffily stalking from the room.

  How I wish I had a nice long tail like Cato’s: flick, flick, I’d go. ‘Here’s your dinner, Simon. Kept nice and warm for you,’ flick, flick. That neat little gesture, as anyone who actually takes the time to talk to a cat will tell you, is the feline equivalent of the V-sign. Eff off! Flick flick, up yours! Flick flick, what, shoo me away? Flick flick, stuff you!

  Sighing in a way that only the sole breadwinner of a family can truly pull off, Simon lowered himself into what he liked to refer to as his chair, dinner plate balanced on his knees. The television had been left on standby, its red light bright with the promise of pleasures to come. By the way he stared straight ahead at the screen I could tell that food and conversation were not uppermost in his mind.

  ‘You’re home too late to even see the children,’ I said. ‘Again,’ I said.

  Come to think of it I hadn’t seen much of them since school myself and, judging by the spewing DVD boxes on the floor, it looked like Ivan and Angus had spent most of the afternoon in the company of the electronic faux-friend too. I knelt down to reunite the boxes with the discs.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like me to make little home movies of them in future?’ I said, feeling my spite rise. ‘You could sit there and watch them in the advertising breaks. That way you’d be able to recognise them should you ever be the one to pick them up from school.’

  ‘That would be helpful,’ Simon said with a small laugh, happily mixing his peas into the warmed-up mashed potato on his plate.

  ‘Now, shush,’ he said. ‘It’s time for Stars and Their Drawers.’ Or something like that, how on earth am I supposed to keep track of the names of all Simon’s programmes? The room, I noticed, had a flat-cola sort of stench to it and I wondered if Cato had been peeing in the fireplace again, because of the rain. Soggy paws have never been Cato’s thing.

  ‘Why don’t you just sit down for once?’ Simon sighed again, his hand scrabbling fruitlessly among the papers and sweet wrappers strewn on the table by his chair. He knocked a half-eaten honey sandwich to the floor, and then, because he didn’t find what he was looking for, Simon lost it, toddler-style. ‘Urrrmphhh.’ He flung himself back into his chair.

  ‘Where’s the cruddy troll?’ he hollered, paraphrasing Angus’s imitation from years ago of Simon in customary full TV-frenzy searching for the ‘bloody control’. ‘Cruddy troll’ had seemed quite funny back then.

  ‘Ivan! Angus!’ he bellowed through the ceiling, as though we had a brace of recalcitrant teenagers lolling around up there, and not two sleepy little children.

  Sometimes I think he comes home in the evening just to madden us.

  I found comfort with Cato in the kitchen. My lovely warm kitchen with its big family table and Ivan and Angus’s paintings on the walls and doors, Angus’s half-drunk milk still on the table, the comforting purr of the fridge.

  ‘What a hullabaloo,’ said Cato, yawning pinkly. ‘As for: “cruddy troll”, don’t you think it’s time to lay off the tragic malapropism or what?’ I could tell he was rather pleased with his own verbal dexterity; ‘malapropism’ being a word that not many cats use.

  ‘“Who’s hidden the cruddy troll?” is the worst,’ Cato added with a disdainful nod in the direction of the sitting room: ‘So paranoid.’

  Cato purred a little as I nubbled my biggest knuckle on the white hairs beneath his chin. Recently I’ve found that all my best conversations have been with Cato and this evening was no exception.

  ‘Television will do for modern man what lead pipes did for the Romans, you mark my words,’ he said as I scratched his little beard and felt my eyes well up. I would never dream of mentioning it to Cato but mortality being what it is there is an inherent sadness in our friendship (or anyone’s with their cat, I suppose, or dog, too, if that’s what you prefer). Wouldn’t it be easier if it weren’t seven of their years to one of ours? What will I do without him? Come to that, who will I talk to?

  Cato snapped me out of my mawkish mood. He arched his back, and bared his fangs in a tigerish fashion as the sound of the Stars and Their Drawers countdown came whooping through the wall. Simon had evidently located his Holy Grail without Angus or Ivan’s assistance.

  ‘Even people staring at a blank wall have more brain activity than people watching television,’ said Cato. ‘I calculate that Simon’s viewing habits probably mean his cerebellum barely quivers in its fug of alpha waves. Simon’s brain’s about as active as a blancmange,’ he said.

  It has always been soothing to find, in dear Cato, a true ally in the battlefield of the idiot box/electronic babysitter/mind-sucker/boob tube/goggle-box. Call it what you like.

  ‘“Simon’s plug-in drug” is what I call it,’ said Cato as Ivan shuffled into the kitchen, wearing his duvet as a cloak. Ivan headed for the fridge, as though having been woken then shooed away by his father gave him special dispensation to eat after teeth.

  ‘Ivan?’

  Ivan adopted his Oliver face at the fridge door. He’s such a tiny boy for his age it’s often hard to refuse him food, though at that moment he was yawning.

  ‘Dad woke me up,’ he said. ‘Can I have a chocolate mousse?’

  I could hear Simon zapping through channels in the next room: studio audience laughter cut to a booming bejingled assurance that ‘Nothing keeps a woman fresher’, and back to the same, or maybe a whole different set of lemmings laughing.

  ‘Dad said I could,’ said Ivan, sniffing.

  At that moment, quite unbidden, a vision exploded before my eyes: my steak mallet smashing the TV screen to smithereens. It was so bright, this flash, and so violent, that I almost shut the fridge door on Ivan’s fingers. ‘To bed,’ I hissed and Ivan burst into tears.

  ‘Fancy coming in this late, then waking the kids up,’ said Cato, licking the pink tip of his nose as I was pouring apologetic milk of human kindness into the pan for Ivan’s hot chocolate, following a penitant doub
le dose of chocolate mousse.

  ‘His father is perfectly capable of making hot chocolate, you know,’ commented Cato, sitting on the table huffily pulling at his dew claws. ‘Talk about remote control. I ask you …’

  ‘Do you know what I do sometimes?’ I said, deciding that I’d better divert Cato before he got too hissy. ‘Sometimes when Simon’s watching TV, I have a little game I play, you should come in and watch.’ I told him how occasionally I amused myself by placing the remote control on the arm of my chair, just out of his reach, and then counting the seconds before Simon found an excuse to reclaim it.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ said Cato, in a rather drawly mid-Atlantic impersonation of Simon. ‘Pass me the cruddy troll, would you, darling? I think the colour balance needs adjusting.’

  Cato stretched out on the table and looked me full in the eyes. ‘It’s the children I worry about,’ he said, returning to his normal voice. ‘All that television must take a terrible toll on their IQs.’

  A child can get away with anything if it learns to look an adult straight in the eyes. Angus and Ivan are both very good at direct eye contact. Not so Simon.

  Simon hadn’t managed to look at me once since our little fracas on Friday night when I informed him that I wanted to buy Cato something rather special for his birthday. The following may sound a little bonkers, but in my defence, Cato had been saying that he missed having someone of his own species to chat to. He kept mentioning some local Burmese kittens he’d heard about. Apparently they are lilac Burmese, a particularly attractive shade of pearly grey. (Cato says a Burmese would be best: there’d be a better chance of it turning out to be a Buddhist, like him.)

  ‘I can’t believe what I’m hearing,’ Simon said as the children ran in, wet from the garden and rowdy as kittens themselves. ‘Are you seriously telling me that you want to buy a kitten as a birthday present for the cat?’