ONE
I had a few old ghosts in the evening, a solemn deposition in coats and scarves. I still thought of them as the girls – Christine, Sarah, Fran – we were a tight four at one point, taking the piss out of each other religiously, confiding at the bus stop in our Courtelle V-necks, high-spirited, insane for mascara, a bit valiant, desperate to trespass.
Christine reigned over us: glossy in her looks and personality. She was Snow White-ish in appearance, only more turbulent in character – sharp, smart, clever, quite clever – and you were a bit amazed when she liked you, alarmed even as you were buoyed by the flattery. I once used the word ‘traitorous’ in front of her, which isn’t much of a word and I regretted it for weeks although it is in the dictionary. She has softened slightly. The sarcasm’s gone out of her. Thirty years ago her husband Luke left her with two small children, surprising everyone, then nine years later he wrote a letter on blue paper asking to come home, just like that.
I hadn’t seen her for a long time, but she rang me and we met to discuss it. It was cold and windy but she wanted to walk, she felt the rhythm of walking would help things fall into place, that and the bracing light. I brought an exercise book and two sharp pencils and we sat on a broken-slatted bench in Finsbury Park, the edges of our knees lightly touching. Christine had dressed for the occasion: wine-coloured Spanish boots and a good-looking raincoat that flapped in the wind, and we made two columns, one for yes and one for no. I didn’t contribute much. I wasn’t sure how to frame myself. But I nodded loyally at intervals, took pains not to inflame any outrage. We had no trouble filling the no column – he put raw onion in the salad, undid his filthy bike onto the kitchen table, and that wasn’t the half of it – still, she took him back. A mistake, I thought, when the trust was gone. If he had done it once, she said, well, three times that she knew of. He was the kind of man for whom everyday life involved a series of evasions; secrets and hiding were second nature to him, subtle vanishing acts. He valued his privacy so much he didn’t even like being asked how he was.
‘D’you ever run into him, round and about?’ she said.
‘No.’ I shook my head.
He told me once he had a horror of unlived life, which I could only translate as a disdain for the ties of home. But he had this startling way of making you less uninteresting to yourself, at the end of the day, or in the morning. And he was moved by her generosity of spirit, felt lucky and grateful to be allowed back in and he settled himself, spent much of his free time plotting things to make her and the boys happy. She was a painter and now the children had left home she could paint all day long, all night sometimes, distrait in paint-spattered navy French overalls. Quite a good painter, also, although I worried her pictures had a forced intensity. That it wasn’t about anything. She had exhibitions every three years or so. Perhaps that’s spiteful of me. I could be spiteful at times.
Sarah and Fran were still best friends and lived in adjacent streets. Fran worked hard at a children’s publishers; she was a self-contained, conscientious and precise person. I’ve never known her not on her own. She was writing a novel herself now – about her parents’ sex life, apparently – but I can’t say more, she said, as though I wasn’t mature enough for the material. Sarah was softer, messy-looking, generous. She lived with Geoff these days – he was a bit booming and hearty for my taste, an amazing cook, although didn’t he go on about it – and she had recently left teaching. She wanted a second act, she said, and she had opened a tiny shop in the corner of an antiques market, eight foot by eight foot with a deadly metal spiral staircase and an even smaller upper floor. She sold old clothes there: Victorian white nighties, beaded cardigans, flower-strewn 1930s silk and crêpe dresses and lace curtains that she sometimes made up into Edwardian-style wedding attire. It was a romantic setting for her, she thought, casting a pale golden light over things compared to the grey shadows of the blackboard, which flattered no one at all. But she spent every second of her free time mending now, instead of marking, which was heroic and feminine yes, but was it progress? I was not convinced.
I was not sure what they would say about me. Tall, chestnut-haired, despairing? Would they claim in order to be brave I’ve had to coarsen myself?
We sat in my little sitting room, having portioned ourselves out on the sea-green armchairs and the old blue sofa, half whispering as Lily slept in the next room. When no one spoke you could catch her inward breaths. I loved to listen to her sleeping because it sounded as though she was inhaling life. They all wanted to know about Eleanor; at least they asked, but I never knew what to say. ‘She’s the same’, I tried that sometimes, or a wry ‘Oh, you know’, but it was hard to get the right tone. A few years back I made a mistake and told their eager ears, ‘She’s stable’, meaning I wasn’t aware of any recent deterioration, which isn’t quite what ‘stable’ means. At first they took it as a declaration of improvement, offering wide pleading smiles, misty-eyed congratulation, but no one picked me up on it when they realised. Sometimes I worried they would find my sadness insufficient or think my courage had failed me. I could always tell when there was something in the air: uneasiness, judgement, an odd sort of lawless pressure that made me harden.
There was an idea that having Lily compensated me in various ways for losing Eleanor. When I listened to her processing her day in comical murmurs through the baby monitor while I sat marking at the kitchen table, there was a sort of bright perfection to the two of us. I always smiled as the wearier she grew the more international her self-talk sounded. But if Lily thought it was her job to patch me up, I would have doubly failed.
‘Thank God you’ve got your teaching,’ Christine said, Sarah said, Fran. That well-known panacea! (It was word for word what they’d said to me when we last met a couple of years ago.) I passed round glasses of straw-coloured wine. My old school friends already had cushions for their backs and glasses of water and green olives stuffed with almond slivers or bright tongues of red pepper from a jar. The cornflower-blue cardigan I was knitting for Lily lay arms outstretched on the side of my chair. In their company, I noticed, I tried to be extra nurturing in my atmosphere. Perhaps I needed them to know that Eleanor was once in possession of valuable things she squandered, which she chose to squander. That is one of the difficult things about personality – in order to convey it effectively there is always that faint smell of acting that muddies things. I needed them to see me in a merciful light. Perhaps it was just that I was very tired.
‘I saw something, in the week, but I didn’t know whether to mention it,’ Christine was saying.
‘Oh?’
‘I mean it was nothing much, but – oh, I don’t know. Actually, forget it. I shouldn’t have said anything.’
That was the kind of thing I couldn’t stand.
‘You’ll have to tell her now,’ Sarah murmured.
‘Is it something bad?
‘No-oh. Not really, not bad, not really bad.’
‘Can you say?’
‘Well I was walking back from Sainsbury’s and I passed the Tube and you know the bit outside where there are often street people drinking, tramps and things, and there was a little group sitting bundled up by the entrance, with sleeping bags and stuff laid all around, bottles and packets, blankets, milk, cigarettes, there was a box of cereal I think and there was a little sign asking for money and one of them had a great big dog, and one of them had a guitar and one of them, one of them was Eleanor.’
‘Oh.’
‘I mean they looked quite merry. In their way.’
‘You make it sound almost – what’s the word – picaresque.’ I thought of a bag lady I often said hello to, who cuddled her wild possessions closely to her as though they were family.
‘It wasn’t quite like that.’
‘No, no. I was, it was, a joke.’
‘What was difficult was I hadn’t seen her for a few years, and the change in her, and when I saw her I just didn’t know how—’
‘You got a shock. Of course. It’s understandable.’ I tried to sound mild, but it was a strain.
‘I was rather shocked, yes. It seemed almost as though—’
I had a horror of people using figurative language at these junctures. ‘She had the look of a beautiful garment, half ruined by poor laundering.’ ‘Her face a map of ruined days’ or whatever. ‘Ruined choirs’, I couldn’t bear that. Something cobbled together from a reject Shakespeare sonnet. Eleanor had always been considered quite beautiful and it was a bit much the way people were thrilled it might no longer hold true. Had they held it against us in the past? (She did have that aloofness very good looks can bring.) Once, one of them said she looked ‘ripe for pneumonia’, as though it were a sort of reference. I knew I mustn’t mind these things.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said simply. ‘I do apologise. It must have been—’
‘No, no, no,’ she said, ‘I didn’t mean for a second that youshould have to—’
‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘It’s fine. It’s just something . . . ’ I rocked to and fro in my chair and I had tears, but they weren’t particularly hot. There was something sensible about them.
‘Oh Ruth! I’ve made you cry. Oh how awful!’
‘Please don’t worry – it’s just, it’s just chemistry.’ I blotted my eyes on my knuckles.
‘I don’t know if this was right or wrong,’ Christine was saying, ‘but I went over and gave her a kiss on the forehead, and she wasn’t smelly or dirty like the others or anything, but her hair is quite thin now, you know, stringy and rather sad-looking, and you could see the pink of her scalp, sort of raw pink, and forgive me if this was very bad, but I gave her a tenner. I just couldn’t not.’
That knocked me out a little bit. ‘Thank you,’ I said, sincerely grateful. I didn’t know I could still feel grateful, exactly; it felt so old-school, unnatural almost, lacking in stealth and belonging to a part of my life that was gone. When Eleanor had chickenpox, I dipped a cotton bud in the bottle of calamine lotion, painted small pink petals round the spots, joining up the dots with leaves and filigree vines across her feverish body, watching the flowers dry to chalky white. That was a sincere time. I closed my eyes for a second. I didn’t care about the money but I minded that her hair, which surely in its way was innocent, had been so roundly condemned.
There was a lot of pressure in the room suddenly. It was clear that no one wanted to say or feel anything without my tacit permission. My friends knew I could be critical. It was intimate almost to the point of suffocation, that little room throbbing with stretched feminine nerves and my old school friends sitting there bathing in fine fellow feeling or trying to, trying not to, it was so hard to tell. Sarah had a rogue tear on her cheek and she swiped it away with her thumbnail, leaving a brief crimson scratch. I didn’t want things like that.
It was a blank October day, uncertain. The sun was low and shapeless now. The light began to fail entirely and I noticed the lustre of the street lamps as they came on, one by one. Shame. Regret. Sorrow. The following day the clocks were going back. The bright sprint to Christmas. I didn’t know how I was going to keep buoyant. The exorbitant levels of pride my life seemed to demand. That, or absolutely none at all. In the street outside I watched two little girls loop and tie a length of rope round a lamp post and one of them skipped in and out as the other turned it rhythmically. ‘Rosy apple lemon tart, tell me the name of your sweetheart. A, B, C, D . . . ’ There was sudden shouting, the slam of a car door, and I watched a young woman in a short black dress running down the street, shrieking with laughter, her white shoulder bag flapping.
‘What can we do?’ Sarah pleaded. ‘What can we do for you, Ruth?’
I couldn’t see their needing to help me was my problem, quite. I had fantasies of wild insurrection, but I just smiled.
At that exact point Lily stumbled into the room, heroic in blue and white night clothes, eyelids pink and crusted yellow at the corners from sleep, curls flattened and crushed. She blinked and took in the women as though it were a dream almost, and she put her hand over her eyes – it was a faintly Garbo-like move, I thought, a stunning silent-movie gesture – and she bundled herself onto my lap, so many long limbs it seemed she had, six or nine, attaching herself to me as though she were a koala and I a tree, not that exactly, but there was a declaration in her movements that I was, my body was, her home, her natural habitat. If you had told me then she had come out of me, I would have believed you.
I sat for a second, completely still in the face of what struck me as tremendous loyalty. I was certain the women assembled were jealous of me suddenly, in a way that would not have been conceivable even two minutes before. For a moment my life hardly felt smashed up at all.
They let themselves out and I sat for a time in semi-darkness, Lily still laid out across me, the swell of gratitude solid in my body and I closed my eyes, peaceful in the hot calm coming from her arms and legs, and started to daydream. I felt traces of a Christmas from a few years ago that was very sharp-edged. The goals have changed, though, the hopes have adjusted themselves down realistically, and that strange day seemed like an old photograph discarded because you looked sour or plain or deranged but, of course, finding it again in a packet of old letters a few years later you’d give quite a bit to be like that now.
Eleanor hadn’t wanted to see me over the festive season – three years ago this was, near enough – but she agreed to meet for a walk on the afternoon of December 25th. I said, ‘How about a picnic?’ and she didn’t tell me to get lost so I suggested Regent’s Park, somewhere with a sense of occasion; sometimes you needed swans and a lake and a bandstand. ‘Pick you up at one-ish and we can zoom over there?’ but she told me to meet her instead at a modest strip of grass next to a main road, a few minutes from where she lived in Holloway.
It was a greyish day, stubbornly unremarkable, with a grey careless light hanging over everything. It was ordinary for me waking alone on Christmas morning, but in a small way, if I was truthful, it hurt my pride. The park had one or two sprawling dusty bushes and three wooden benches, one of which served the adjacent bus stop, but it was more of a glorified traffic island, treeless in the main and outlawed-looking. Certainly somewhere to avoid at night. When I arrived she was sitting on the bus stop bench with Ben, underdressed against the weather, her long bright hair splayed across her shoulders in the dreary light almost like thin tinsel strips, the pair looking about them with an air of expectation, as though no one had told them buses did not exist on Christmas Day. Ben smiled; he had a light, gruff optimism about him that felt close to festive. ...
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