And, finally, Mr Slater.
Even though he’s retired, he goes out every morning Monday to Friday, walking all the way into the city in long jaunty strides, grey coat billowing behind him. She often wonders if he has a turning point, something to touch before allowing himself to return – say a spear on the college railing or maybe he crosses the bridge to the far side of town to touch the feet on one of the statues of angels.
Because he’s retired, she sees Slater more than the other men and, for some reason, likes him a lot. She likes his gangster hat and long coat. His garden of flowers where, from her bathroom window, and even better with the help of her father’s binoculars, she sometimes sees him working. She likes the way he pretends not to hear his hump-backed wife when she raps her angry knuckles on the window at him. She likes to look out the landing window in the dead of night and see that the lights in his garage are on, and know that he’s in there playing with his model train sets, and to know, too, that she isn’t the only one to be awake in the neighbourhood. And mostly she likes the way he never says hello to anyone, not even in reply.
She waits for him to lunge past her window, cross the road in a few diagonal strides, coast the side of Townsends’ house and disappear around the corner. All gone.
A lull like a broad sigh over the estate. A window cracks open. Milk bottles jangle. A front door gives a wary creak. The squeaky sound of a baby’s pram as Mrs Ryan eases it over the top step.
Other prams soon follow, nuzzling out of other front doors and lumbering down porch steps. One or two are pushed straight down to the shops, others parked in the garden while a start is made on the housework.
She opens her journal and reads over yesterday’s page:
The suburb is like a ship, a big ship permanently anchored. A different group of passengers inside each cabin. Some -times they come out, stroll along the deck, nod to each other, maybe even stop and chat. But in the end all return to their own little cabin, to huddle and whisper with their own little group, to look out on the same stagnant ocean.
‘It doesn’t matter what you write,’ the doctor has told her, ‘it doesn’t even have to make sense.’
But it has to make sense to her Doctor, and so she turns the pen in her hand and, stirring it like a spoon, buries her observation under a bed of scribbles.
The suburb is not like a ship. It’s the opposite to a ship. On a ship babies and women always come first, in the suburbs, they always, always, come last.
Her bed by the window. If she pulls herself up and looks through the slit at the side of the curtain what does she see?
She sees a fat sleeping toddler stuffed into his pram, soother dangling from the side of his mouth. She sees an old pair of tights tying the Ryan gates together for when he wakes up and starts running amok around the front garden. She sees her mother’s forgotten shears under a rose bush where she left them down to gossip with Mrs Caudwell. And a child’s knee sock picked up from the pavement and strewn across the – by now unruly – hedge of the Osbornes’ old house.
There’s the identical faces of the three houses opposite, the profiles of the house to each side. On the right, the corners that turn onto the main road; to the left, the corners leading into the cul-de-sac. And all the jigsaw pieces from that cluster of houses: a poke of chimney, a brow of dormer, an edge of window frame. White bird-shit splashes on slate.
Little to tell one house from another. At least not on the outside. Some detached, some semi-detached. Redbrick to steep roof. Some gardens bigger than others. Apron of lawn front and back; elbows of lawn at the sides of a detached house. A driveway. Square pillars, double gate. A hedge to the front: not so high that the house could hide behind it, but not so low that a child could climb over and hurt itself – or, worse, ruin the line of the hedge. The house with no number has no hedge. Almost all have a garage – although she’s noticed since coming out of hospital that garage conversions are really starting to catch on. In which case the garage has been duly renamed: playroom, television room, utility room. Den.
The Hanley house, designed by Monsieur La Cravat himself, is by far the grandest. At the back of the house is a large extension made out of glass that is used for entertaining. The Hanleys call this the Garden Room. (A sign on the door, with a silhouette of a man swinging a golf club, also calls it ‘Ted’s Den’.)
At the bottom of the back garden is a wooden prefab shed lined with books that Mrs Hanley calls her ‘little haven’. At the west side of the house is a further extension – again mostly glass – with clever curved walls and a special bathroom attached. The Hanleys call this the Guest Room. Agatha calls it the Glass Prison.
Outside each house, a patch of grass from which a caged tree grows. In the middle of the road, a pond-shaped green, trimmed with white plastic frill. Bins are left out on Tuesday morning. On Saturdays cars are given their sponge baths. Saturday nights are for occasional house parties. On Sundays, lawnmowers rumble.
3
Winter Present
November
WE ARE A HOUSE of no names – I am thinking this as I come back up from the shop with my father’s newspaper, eyes to the ground so they don’t feel the need to meet the eyes of a neighbour – we were always that way: a house of no names. If my father wants me he lifts his little handbell or passes a message through his day nurse, Yin-lu, who goes by the name of Lynette. Otherwise he waits for me to come into his room.
I used to think her name was Wynette. For the first couple of weeks that’s what I called her. One day she took a pencil out of her pocket and wrote on a piece of paper – Lynette with a heavy double line under the Lyn part.
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘it sounds like Wynette.’
‘You no listen, is all.’
*
I sometimes wonder how he refers to me when asking Lynette to give me a message. Does he say ‘my daughter’ or ‘the woman in the kitchen’ or simply ‘her’. I can’t imagine him using my name.
And I never use his – except in my mind where I can sometimes catch myself off guard still calling him Daddy.
I can’t remember my parents addressing each other by first names either. In fact, I can barely remember them addressing each other at all. I know my mother used my father’s name, but only in his absence, when on the phone maybe, or if she wanted to be part of a general husband-themed conversation – Bob says. It depends on Bob. Bob likes. Bob doesn’t like. Bobbedy, Bob. Bob-bob.
They left notes for each other on the kitchen table, business-like notes initialled at the bottom:
If you could oblige by leaving navy
pin-stripe into dry cleaners. B
Please leave cheque for E’s visit to dentist. S
At Cheltenham for the next few days. B
E needs a new coat. S
And of course, they had me to act as messenger. ‘Tell your mother I’ll be away on circuit until Friday.’ Or, ‘Ask your father if he’s going racing this evening and if he’ll be eating out.’
And one time when I was small – at a funeral I suppose it must have been, what with everyone dressed in black – I heard my father respond to a woman’s question with, ‘Oh, you’d have to ask Sara that.’
I had looked around at all these women clumped together on sofas and armchairs, or moving across the frame of an opened kitchen door with plates of sandwiches and cakes in their hands – Who’s Sara, I had thought. Which one is Sara?
Sar-ah Sar-ah ah ah ah.
She called me about six weeks after I arrived in New York: our first conversation since I’d left here. The last time I’d seen her she’d been shoving me into a taxi cab in the middle of the night, Patty beside me, her mother, Serena, up front. Patty and I bawling our brains out. My mother’s face pale in the dim light of the cab’s interior, not crying – not that, but with a tear in each eye like two silver studs. ‘It’s for your own good,’ she said. ‘You’ll see that in time.’
She nearly had to break my fingers to unclamp them from her arm.
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A glimpse that has stayed in my mind to this day: my mother, head lowered, arms ledged under her weighty bosom, crossing the road in a pair of slippers, the budge of her rounded backside like a horse’s in the tight skirt of her very best suit which she’d worn to the meeting earlier that day and not yet taken off. And the light in the window of our sitting room, where only a moment before my father had been standing, now switched off.
He may have been still standing there in the dark. He may have grown bored already and gone up to bed.
When I’d turned back into the car, there was Serena kneeling up on the seat, arms stretched over the back of it, holding Patty by both hands. ‘Oh, sweetie, don’t cry. Mom is here with you. It’s all gonna be fine. Everything’s gonna be… Oh, sweetie.’
Then she settled back down into the passenger seat, face turned to the window. ‘How could it have come to this?’ she asked her black glassed shadow. ‘How could such a thing even happen?’
But my mother’s first phone call – it was still a big ordeal back then, involving operators, and time checks, and worry about the second by second cost of it all. She must have said hello first. She must have at least asked how I was. But no matter how many times I went over it later – and even now when I replay it in my head – her first words remain: ‘We have a dog now.’
‘A what?’
‘A dog. We have him nearly a month. You know, I think I’m going to have to get a kennel built out in the garden for him – he’s small enough now but apparently they can grow to a size that—’
‘Is that why you phoned me? To tell me about your dog?’
‘No. No, of course not. I’m just saying.’
‘It’s weeks since I left – I haven’t heard a word from you. How could you not even—’
‘I knew you were all right.’
‘How? How could you know?’
‘Serena told me.’
‘Serena? You spoke to Serena? When?’
‘When we were making arrangements to send money.’
‘Money? What money?’
‘Well you don’t think she’s keeping you for nothing, do you? Anyway, I brought him to the vet today for his vaccination. He’s a right handful, I don’t mind telling you.’
‘Is that all you can talk about – your bloody dog?’
‘Please don’t raise your voice to me.’
‘Aren’t you going to say anything about what happened? Aren’t you going to tell me how—?’
‘Everything is fine here.’
‘Well, what about—?’
‘That’s all you need to know. There’s no need to discuss anything. It’s all in the past now. It’s all sorted.’
‘Can’t you just tell me at least—?’
‘I’m telling you, everything is all right. Don’t ask me about anyone. I don’t want to hear mention of anyone’s name. And if you keep asking I’m hanging up the phone.’
‘I only, I only—’
‘I mean it! If you don’t stop, I’m hanging up. Actually, I’m hanging up anyway because I’ve just about had enough of—’
‘No, no, no, wait. Please, I didn’t mean. Wait. I just want to ask. About. About the dog. I want to ask about the dog.’
‘The dog?’
‘Yes. What sort of a dog is it?’
‘Oh. Well, it’s a – what do you call it? – German shepherd. A German shepherd, that’s right.’
‘Do you mean like an Alsatian?’
‘I suppose. A pup, you know – into everything of course, driving me up the… I don’t mind telling you. He’s made mincemeat out of my good shoes. Worse than a— Worse than a— Well, you know.’
‘Yes.’
‘What? What? I can’t hear you now.’
‘I said yessss. Yessss.’
‘Anyway, I suppose I better be… I’ll give you a ring again.’
‘What do you mean – again?’
‘Another time.’
‘No wait! Hold on…’
‘What? I have to go. I really have to go now.’
‘What – what did you name him?’
‘Who?’
‘The dog. Yes, what’s his name?’
‘Oh. He doesn’t really have one.’
‘How do you call him then?’
‘I whistle. Sometimes I click my tongue.’
The dog was to replace me. Something to feed, clean up after, do duty by, endure. And it didn’t even have a name. On the few occasions she called after that, she talked about ‘the dog’. After that dog died, she talked about another nameless one. And a few years later, that time she came to meet me in Paris, she said, ‘When this one dies, I don’t think I’ll bother with another one.’ But she did get another – she must have done – because in a later conversation there was yet another Alsatian pup chewing up her shoes.
There’s a photograph of a young Alsatian on my father’s piano but I don’t know which one it is. It was taken on the lawn out in the back garden on the far side of the shed where the rose-beds begin. The dog’s head is raised; it has a thick healthy coat, a waggedy tongue, hard, bright amber eyes. It looks like a poster for a Hollywood dog.
Not this dog, though, not this old soldier beside me. The markings are different for a start; so is the expression in the eyes. The present incumbent has much softer eyes: eyes like melting caramels. Or maybe that’s just the cataracts.
I wonder if it’s too late to give him a name. I could call him Boy. I often call him Boy anyway. ‘Here, Boy’ or ‘Down, Boy’.
I think he deserves that much – a name, even something as stupid as Boy.
‘Come on, Boy,’ I say. ‘Come on, you can do it.’
I can feel the weight of him on the end of the lead as I pull him along, the vibration of his legs, as if the bones inside them are beginning to dissolve. We are almost at the dip in Arlows’ wall; I pull him along until we are beside it. Then I sit into it and let him rest for a while. It was here Maggie used to perch in the evening to smoke a cigarette, after she was done working in the stable yard, thrilling us with her outrageous talk and feeding us French fags that she bought by the carton.
‘Now, girls, you should know this – a man will say anything to get his way.’
Or, ‘Never mistake the pleading eye and trembling limb for love – that’s just the erection talking.’
And once when Agatha was going on about older men being more romantic: ‘Romance! Don’t make me laugh. Take a look at the women around here – where did romance ever get them? Into a twelve-by-twenty kitchen is where, hoping for head-pats and hand-outs from their lords and masters.’
Across the road, a pair of school uniforms trundle past, two cherry noses sticking out from gabardine hoods. The afternoon must be getting on. I feel the cold air cling to my face like a cellophane wrapper.
‘Poor Boy,’ I say. ‘Poor old Boy. Better get you home before you catch a chill.’
We leave Maggie’s perch and cross over the main road, then turn the corner onto the straight. Only one house to go before home – I point this fact out to encourage him. ‘Look, nearly there now. Only one house, then ours. A few more steps, that’s all, that’s all.’
But he’s dragging his paws. Just before the gate he digs them in completely, twisting his head backwards as if he’s trying to get away. I’m worried that maybe his hind legs have finally given up: it’s the first question the vet always asks, and I know it will be the last one. ‘How are the old hind legs doing?’
I consider attempting to lift him into the house or at least calling Lynette to help lift him in. But then I see what he has already sensed – a figure at the door.
This dog is mute. The vet has told me that some five years ago his bark completely disappeared. Apart from the occasional plaintive howl at a distant ambulance, or maybe a bit of half-hearted whimpering when his teeth are giving him pain, this dog has nothing to say for himself. He’s deaf in one ear. He views the world through the holes in his cataracts. He’d prefer a bar of chocol
ate to a meaty bone. And now, to top it all off, he’s become afraid of strangers.
‘Some bloody Alsatian you are,’ I say to him, and drag him whimpering through the gate.
The figure – familiar and yet not – is standing with her back to us. At first I think she’s her mother – the rounded shoulders, the stiff little hairdo, even the way the coat hangs off-kilter. It’s on the tip of my tongue to say, Mrs Caudwell? But of course it’s not Miriam Caudwell. It’s her daughter, Brenda. Jesus. A middle-aged Brendie Caudwell.
We stand looking at each other and then do that skittery laugh that people who haven’t seen each other in years tend to do. We become minstrels: goggling our eyes, widening our mouths and lifting our hands in amazement.
I forget sometimes that I’m nearly fifty. I forget that while I’m trying not to look appalled at the state of Brendie Caudwell, bloodless and beige and slightly humped on my doorstep, Brenda is trying not to gawp at the state of me – bedraggled and scrawny or how -ever the hell I must look – dragging a geriatric Alsatian behind me.
When we finish laughing, we tell each other how little each other has changed, and a few more lies besides. Then, because I feel I ought to, I ask her into the house. She looks freezing: beneath the mask of brown make-up lies a face that is brindled with cold.
‘Have you been waiting long?’ I ask. ‘Why didn’t you ring the bell?’
‘I gave the door a little knock but didn’t like to disturb your dad – I know he’s not been well…’
‘Oh, he is well. Very well. He’s in a wheelchair, that’s all.’
I push a cement block out of the way with my toe and reach down for the key.
‘Well, I didn’t want to drag him out to the door, you know.’
‘His nurse would have answered if you rang the bell.’
The Lives of Women Page 4