Sweet Fruit, Sour Land

by Rebecca Ley

  Which is why I chose the way I did.

  2

  I thought often about kissing George in the days after our meeting. I thought of the shape of his mouth, and tried to remember the exact order of conversation that we had, which I have now recounted but cannot claim is entirely accurate.

  My grandmother pulled me into the shop regularly, for some basic mending and working on simple patterns. But with every stitch I thought only of him and my body in turn, and the decisions I had to make. I wanted to enter his world and be rid of mine, desperately, but in my mind I also wanted to be rid of my body; I wanted to re-enter it as though it were an item of clothing I could slip into, for decoration, with nothing practical hidden underneath.

  I was afraid his intentions didn’t align with my own, but I knew that this mattered little. Whether I had to have a child or I had to get out of it, the answer always came back to him.

  That I attributed to him at this time my entire future existence never occurred to me. In reality, the seriousness of it didn’t settle down on me. I couldn’t imagine myself with a child, or without, I couldn’t imagine a future at all; I stitched and stitched to keep myself in quiet occupied solitude. Between my meetings with him there seemed to be only stitches, small and uniform and repetitive. It was a meditation on his mouth, one stitch upper lip, one stitch freckle. It was a meditation on the peaches, one stitch sugar, one stitch crumble. It was a meditation on myself around him, one stitch pull me in, one stitch let me go. When I finished all my stitches, the last being pulling together pieces of fabric to wear as a dress myself (which would be unpicked and returned to the shop later), I felt I had imagined him. But I wore it to the party he invited me to, and when he came to my door and noted it, I looked at his mouth and stroked the fabric of my dress. It felt exactly like his mouth, and his body, and even the transcendent feeling that I had imagined, completely, paled in comparison to the real thing; of him, of his people, of his world.

  George could have been anyone, in the sense that he could have done anything; whatever he put his mind to, in his singular way, he would have been compelling enough to achieve.

  He could not have been anyone in the way he captured my imagination, as others had now and again attempted, leaving me cold. It was the way he watched me as I turned my head away from him. His gaze would fix, examining my neck or whatever part of me I’d left exposed, so that when I returned I’d always meet his eyes again.

  It was an intoxicating thing to be noticed the way he purposefully noticed me. And at that second party of Gloria’s, amongst all that food, that room, amongst people like Gloria herself, it was my shoulder he squeezed and my tread he followed over the plum-coloured carpet. Even on our way there, over the pot-holed streets of Hampstead, he placed a hand on my back as we crossed the desolate four-lane Finchley Road, leading me on.

  George introduced me to Gloria again and she pretended to remember me. I was intimidated by her. She was a tall woman, taller than the men, and she held herself that way. Everything about her was tall: her graciousness and her openness, her frivolity and her seriousness. She was imposing and inclusive, and you always felt like you were in on a good secret when you were around her.

  ‘Your new squeeze, Georgey?’ she asked him, after introductions. She didn’t move her eyes away from him, waiting for his answer.

  ‘Quite,’ he said.

  She looped her arm in mine and pulled me up the stairs to the first floor. I could hear the piano as we approached the drawing room, and with each step that we took, I wondered if it was real. I looked at Gloria, to see if she had any sign of surprise in her face, but it was as if she didn’t hear the music at all.

  ‘You should be careful with him, you know,’ she said, holding my arm fiercely as he lagged behind. ‘A cad. Even when he brings the good champagne, we all know he’s a terror.’

  I couldn’t detect whether she was serious or not; even her tone of voice was unlike anything I’d heard before. For a moment I didn’t want to speak, so afraid her voice didn’t match my own.

  ‘Can you hear that?’ I said, and I think my arm was shaking just to hear it again. We approached the landing and she pushed open the drawing room door. The piano was at the back of the room, large and black, a beast with its lid propped open. The woman there was furiously pedalling and playing, and I stood, astonished at it, greater than any animal I had once seen, or any man-made thing. I wanted to touch it. I wanted to make a sound.

  ‘That?’ Gloria pointed to the piano. ‘That’s just Jaminder,’ she said. ‘We hired her to play. She’s become quite the fixture around here. She’s like wallpaper.’

  I looked at Jaminder, and I thought she was the most magnificent thing I’d ever seen. She was different from the others. Darker skin and longer hair and fixed with purpose. ‘Oh?’ I said. ‘I suppose she does decorate the room.’

  Gloria looked across to him with a smirk. ‘Oh, George, where do you find them? How droll.’

  He put a hand behind my back and we snaked in-between groups of people to a table laden with drinks. I’d never seen so many well-groomed people in all my life. Women with styled hair, men with scrubbed skin. And suits and gold rings and polished leather shoes. Everything looked so new.

  ‘Don’t mind Gloria,’ he said, passing me a drink that frothed at its edges. ‘She’s a drunk.’

  I raised it to my mouth to take a sip, and was greeted with a sweet and bitter assault on my tongue. It was clanging and fizzy. It slipped down my throat and I coughed; it was vile.

  ‘What is this?’ I asked.

  He laughed. ‘Champagne.’

  I looked to Gloria, holding her arms out to every person who entered the room, glass in one hand, cigarette in the other. I grimaced. ‘She gets drunk on this?’

  ‘Amongst other things,’ he said.

  I watched her floating about the room, with a deft, insistent way about her. She leaned forward with purpose to everyone she came across, and people felt at ease around her. You could tell because of the way they’d forget themselves, loosen their arms and not wonder about where to put them, touch her shoulder. She held everyone’s attention, and they welcomed it.

  I held my champagne glass at its top, rather than its stem – even though I could tell this wasn’t right – because I was afraid it would topple over. I took another sip and the liquid had warmed beneath my hand. I watched a man move between people, filling up their glasses. He stopped by one group of people and put a hand on Gloria’s waist and then through her hair, reaching towards her neck. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked George.

  ‘Frank,’ he said, ‘they’re practically one person. Always have been like that.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes, married for years.’

  ‘Children?’ I said.

  ‘No, not yet,’ he took a slug of his drink and shrugged.

  Gloria turned her face towards Frank and it was a look I didn’t recognise. Her attention from hosting was lost. The group of people around her smiled at each other, but crossed their arms awkwardly, waiting for her focus to return. The glance was brief, and she returned to her guests with an anecdote which made them laugh. Frank moved away and she watched him go, I thought, from the way she angled her head towards him. The couple’s movements towards each other reassured me, because they were intimate and kind.

  The levity in the room made the place feel timeless. It made me feel like a person who belonged to the real world again. Because wasn’t this the real world? Feeling present, letting yourself forget about your little vegetable patch and that thing your mother once said to you about mint leaves? I wished this was the real world, because the energy of it bore no resemblance to the rest of life. The way people held their glasses casually, and gestured to people in their group to collude their story. The fact that they even had stories to tell, stories that were so banal that they had a perfect place here; they neither interrupted the flow of conversation nor worried the guests. The talk was easy.

  A man bent d
own to tie his patent laced shoe; another clicked his fingers in the air at someone walking by to attract their attention. I saw Gwendolyn, Gloria’s friend, her hair waved perfectly again, checking her lipstick in a small gold mirror, after asking the man next to her to hold her black sequinned bag. She wiped the edges of her lips with her index finger and opened her mouth wide, examining its shape and swell. Then she pressed her lips back together at herself in the small mirror, and in that movement, with a frown, made a decision. She fished in the bag she’d given to her partner and twisted the lipstick up until the bright pink stem emerged from its metal casing, perfectly straight-edged and vibrant. She traced the arc of her lips with it, boldly, pressing it over, making the pout flush and rounded, like the plump of a strawberry. She smacked her lips together, still holding the mirror tall with the other hand, before rolling the bullet of the pink lipstick down again with one hand, snapping the lid back on top, and placing it back in the bag. The man next to her didn’t look up throughout this theatre.

  I’d never seen a woman do a thing like that. The routine of it warmed me. I watched as she looked up from her bag, ready to have her partner’s attention back, and him distracted, looking elsewhere. She smiled then, and reached around him, grabbing his behind with a full plump squeeze, which made him jump and shift in embarrassment.

  ‘Gwen,’ he said, harshly. ‘Not with people around.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t give a flying fig,’ she said, loudly, and laughed as she gave him another squeeze. She continued to laugh as Gloria passed by them, and she called over to her, ‘Gloria, have you got any figs tonight?’

  Gloria stopped, glass in hand, and called back, ‘What, those little pruney things from the East? The devil’s fruit aren’t they?’

  ‘Can’t say I’ve ever had one,’ Gwendolyn’s partner said, straightening his jacket to regain his composure.

  ‘Ghastly,’ Gloria said. ‘You’ll know if we have figs in our delivery that something awful has happened.’

  Gwendolyn laughed at this, looking greedily at her partner, and Gloria walked on. I tried to remember if I’d ever had a fig, and could only recall a certain false smell of a sweet, ripe fruit, which I wasn’t sure belonged to it.

  I turned back to George to tell him, to pat his arm and ask him if he’d ever had a fig, but he was lost in contemplation.

  At these parties, his attention was always focused on discovering my inner life, and getting to know every part of it. He asked me things people were always too afraid to ask. It was a luxury of his, to be unafraid to talk about things that devastated other people. I touched his arm and his attention returned.

  ‘Tell me about your mother,’ he said. ‘Did she ever leave the continent?’

  ‘Why do you want to know about all that?’ I said.

  ‘Tell me.’

  I tried to dismiss his morbid curiosity. ‘Well, no she didn’t, thank God.’ I laughed it off, champagne in hand, like a winning anecdote, an answer I’d prepared in my head many times. ‘She would’ve melted the moment she left France, so it’s a blessing she never did.’

  What was the true answer? She was severe, in her own way, which protected all of us against the rudeness of bank tellers and waiters and teachers who thought little of you. But her severity gave way to loveliness, the way her mouth would move in perfect amiable synchronicity with her eyes. The way she’d bite into a butter biscuit – langues de chat – with a snap and smile at you, like she’d tasted something new.

  It’s a devastation that she never had the chance to comment on the fall of France as we knew it. Whether we stayed in our blue apartment with the green shutters on Rue des Rosiers or not mattered little, because all the feeling of it left with her.

  I suppose he knew this, and wanted a chance to empathise with me. He wanted a chance to say: I’m sorry, how awful, and imagine in a voyeuristically pleasing way, the collapse of his own country to rebel forces and civil war. The collapse of his language and family and the whole narrative of his life. I tried to explain some of it to him, in-between the champagne bubbles going up my nose, and my awkward pulling at the skirt of my dress.

  ‘It’s unimaginable,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I said. I didn’t say: So we don’t ever bother to imagine it.

  He held my hand at the buffet table with a solid intimacy, where laid out were the appetisers of the day, along with the drinks. There were neatly sliced carrots and celery and pots of dips and bowls of thick substances.

  I wanted to place my hand in them and smear them around, like an infant, trying to identify taste with my hands. But instead, I picked up a small piece of peeled luminous carrot – what care had been taken over its appearance, what attention! – and bit into it.

  ‘Les carottes,’ he said, as a little joke.

  ‘Yes, well done,’ I said, and laughed, grateful that this was the extent of his knowledge.

  He reached for a carrot himself and held it in-between his fingers. ‘I learnt a little French once, at school. We used to complain about our test results, the way teenage boys do, adamant we’d done much better than our marks suggested, and our French teacher would always say: “Les carottes sont cuites.” It only fuelled our hysteria more, laughing about carrots and jumping about while she stamped her feet, telling us to be quiet.’

  My smile slipped then, as I realised, after a few seconds detangling his unrecognisable accent, what he had said. My mother had said it, as a joke to herself, when the treatment was done and she lay in her bed in our apartment, knowing she’d never get out of it again, not to walk to the window and look at the sky, or run with us anywhere.

  ‘What did it mean again? You’re all useless turds?’

  I looked down at the carrot in his hand and smiled briefly, before it left me. ‘The carrots are cooked.’ I said. ‘It means: It’s done.’ I searched for the proper translation in my mind, but what was more difficult was trying to remember my mother tongue and its true meaning, rather than the English I used every day that swirled about my head. ‘It means: The writing’s on the wall.’ I looked up at him and met his eyes. ‘You’re toast.’

  I circled around the piano for most of the night. I watched Jaminder’s face, her concentration. Also her distraction, when someone boomed something funny and the room laughed. She was not the wallpaper that Gloria had described. She was the only thing in the room. Even when George touched my hand and brought me more champagne, I kept turning back to the piano. He asked me if I liked the music, and I said yes. But I didn’t say I’d never heard a piano being played before that first dinner party. Not in real life. It was better than the sound on any radio or recording, better than any broken stringed instrument someone might bring out in the village. A breathing, vibrating thing like that piano stole the room, only no one seemed to notice. Except, of course, Jaminder herself. Who – after Gloria put an old straining record on in the corner of the room – came straight towards me.

  ‘I haven’t seen you here before,’ she said. ‘You’re drinking that champagne like it’s petrol.’

  ‘Not much of that about.’

  ‘Maybe because they started putting it in drinks.’

  I smiled at her. She looked at me warily. ‘You came with George?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She nodded. ‘I suppose he’s told you about his little bee project.’

  ‘His bees?’

  ‘Oh, well, I better not. You know about bees? You’ve seen them?’

  ‘We had honey sometimes.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Stick around.’ She downed her glass of champagne in one, spilling it down her throat, head tipped back. ‘Stay. There’ll be proper food later and you won’t want to miss that.’ She smacked her lips and twirled her glass, ‘You know this didn’t come from France. But better than all the tea in China.’

  ‘There are no children here,’ I said, carefully.

  Jaminder laughed. ‘Of course not, it’s a party.’ She tipped her glass towards figures across the room.
‘Theirs are tucked up in bed; they didn’t want any; she has four – ghastly – and me,’ she tipped the glass back at herself, towards her chest. ‘Had it all taken out, the whole factory.’

  ‘You did?’

  She nodded. ‘Health reasons, of course. None for me. But plenty of—’ she shook her glass at me and then eyed my own. ‘And for you, too, I see. George’s taken care of it?’

  ‘Oh, no, I probably…’ I stammered. I felt horrified, suddenly, to be drinking alcohol in front of people.

  ‘He’ll see to it, either way. Don’t worry.’ She nodded at me encouragingly, but I felt swamped without the noise of the piano. ‘Must get another,’ she said, and turned to go.

  I grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back, a little too forcefully.

  She looked at me, startled. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Mathilde.’

  ‘French?’

  ‘Probably.’ I shrugged my shoulders.

  She smiled. ‘Wonderful,’ she said, ‘wonderful.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, and winked at me. ‘Are we ever?’ She turned again to go.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. Jaminder turned back, smiled at me. ‘What about the bees? What bees?’

  ‘You’ll see when the food arrives. You’ll see the cake.’ She looked me up and down, and nodded her head. ‘This place is Versailles,’ she said, and smiled. ‘If I were you I wouldn’t come back.’ She said it so softly, I’m not sure if that’s what she did say, or if I imagined it. But that’s what I think she said, and what she’d say now, and what we’d conclude together. But if I’d never come back, I wouldn’t have her in my life, and she was my good thing then, and my good thing now, my Jaminder.

  It was imperceptible; no one heard, perhaps not even me. She raised her glass and skipped off, and shouted, into the boom of voices and the record swirling round, ‘Let them eat cake!’