Her (22 page)

Later, I’m lying on the cushions beneath the arbour as Christopher, not quite believing it’s permitted, picks the purple grapes and drops them into my mouth. The skins, warm and grainy against my teeth, give with a pop. To scandalise him, to make him giggle, I spit the bitter gritty pips into the bushes. ‘Mama,’ he says. ‘That’s not allowed.’

From time to time – in the hammock or on a lounger, as the sun plays on my eyelids: red and black paisley, a languorous psychedelic swirl – I find myself thinking about home, and it’s always a shock. I think of our house, silent and empty beneath fitful skies, its spaces still imprinted with signs of our hasty departure. The half-drawn curtains, the rumpled beds, the children’s nightclothes lying on the carpet where we dropped them. As if we had warning of some advancing catastrophe.

Dust falling through the rooms and hallways, falling on the stairs.

But of course life goes on without us. The daily snap of the letterbox, plastic-wrapped catalogues and library reminders and special offers on barbecue coals sliding over the hall floorboards. I open my eyes, and it’s a relief. The precise line of the poplars over the hill, the sea’s glitter, the boundless clarity of the sky.

In the heat, I feel myself growing, like a plant. I’m conscious that I’m reclaiming some of my old height. It strikes me that I spend so much of my life stooping. Bent double to pick things up, crouching to listen or inspect or rub or commiserate. I imagine my spine unfurling like a time-lapse fern, the spaces between the vertebrae widening and expanding.

The shortcomings that we identify in the house and garden say more about us than it. The pool may be safely gated, but the small shallow channels of water circulating so musically through the garden demand a certain vigilance. Christopher falls over and cuts his knee on the gravel. Later, we discover that he has been busy transporting great quantities of it from the path to the lawn beneath the hammock. The sets of children’s crockery are Finnish design classics, so we push them to the back of the kitchen cupboard and buy plastic plates and bowls from the hypermarket, along with ugly pool inflatables and a softball set with a sponge ball.

Ben says he thinks it’s odd how little personal stuff there is in the house.

‘Well, it’s a holiday home,’ I say.

‘Yeah, but it’s a
home
. It’s not as if they rent it out or anything. The only people who use it are Nina’s family, and their friends, right?’

‘I don’t really know,’ I say, not liking the way he’s making me feel: aware that I’m bristling slightly.

‘It’s strange, isn’t it? Not to have any photographs? No books or
objets
?’ He says the word with a laugh, gesturing around the living room.

He’s right. There’s the piano, and the abstract landscape with an arid feel (although the yellows and ochres and hard blues are not the colours I associate with Nina, I assume it’s one of hers) over the dining table, and four bone-coloured slipware vases set out with thoughtful irregularity on a shelf, and that’s pretty much it, apart from a carefully curated collection of guide books and maps; and the toy box, of course, with its rake and sieve, its bean-filled puppy and baby doll, lips puckered for the dummy, and, right at the bottom, neatly packed away in a wicker hamper, the immaculate china tea set.

Overall, all the spaces are painstakingly neutral: bare, pared-down. Hollow, almost.

I say that it’s the
lack
of stuff that makes the house feel so restful.

‘Yeah, it’s nice for a change,’ he says, a little doubtfully. ‘I can’t imagine living like this for any length of time, though.’

‘Oh, I can,’ I say, a little too forcefully. ‘I love it. It’s giving me all sorts of ideas. When I get home, I’m going to build a gigantic bonfire in the back garden, and chuck everything on it. All the crap, all the clutter. Douse it in petrol, light a match.
Ka-boom
.’

He laughs. ‘Yeah, right,’ he says. ‘Because I remember how good you are at donating things to Oxfam. Those little piles of junk which you leave out on the stairs, which we all fall over for a few days, and then the junk just goes back into general circulation. Osmosis.’

‘That’s not fair,’ I protest, but he’s right, I find it hard to let things go.

Still, I imagine building a pyre, piling up all the broken toys and picture books with torn or missing pages, the guitar Ben’ll never get around to re-stringing, the wonky-legged stool. Flipping the red beak on the tin and squirting lighter fluid over the blanket the moths got at. The rattle as I open the box of matches. I feel the sudden rush of bright heat on my face and neck, smell the bitter smoke.

As we help Christopher over the shingle or buy pistachio ice-creams in the little square, Ben and I have the nostalgic conversations about the summers of our childhood – Ben’s in the New Forest; mine at the farm in Kent owned by my grandparents – that we’ve had on other holidays. It’s a relief to be freed from the usual topics: money worries, the creeping stain on the ceiling of Christopher’s bedroom, who’s spiking a temperature.

Strange, how our children’s present summons up our pasts. The things I remember most clearly aren’t necessarily the things I put into words: afternoons up a tree with a book, sleeping out in a tent, cycling to the beach with Lucy and building a fire and boiling eggs over it in an enamel saucepan filched from Gamma’s cupboard.

Eventually we grew out of that sort of thing; we no longer yearned for the country, we started to make excuses not to go, and when we did visit we were restless, dissatisfied, conscious that we were missing out on what was happening elsewhere.

It’s late afternoon and we are in the little playground – shaded by pines, long needles underfoot – not far from the harbour. Cecily is in the swing while Christopher rides a squeaky spring-mounted cartoon motorbike. I look up, through the trees. Sunshine dances and flickers on my face, bursts of light and warmth. I’m telling Ben a story about my grandmother’s half-facetious pursuit of the top prizes in the annual Jassop produce show – how she wouldn’t let us in the kitchen when the cakes were in the oven, how we had to tiptoe around upstairs, remembering not to slam doors – when I’m struck by a stray memory. I’m remembering watching Gamma, in a dun kilt and forest-green jersey, loading her car with precious commodities (the jars of preserves with their neat muslin mobcaps, the tins containing fruit cake and Victoria sponge, the trays of butterfly cakes bound for the WI’s tea stall) while I hold still, barely breathing and yet bursting with suppressed laughter, my hand over my mouth, feeling Lucy shake beside me.

I haven’t thought of this for years: the hollow heart we discovered in the hedgerow behind the farmhouse, an ancient secret space enclosed by a living wall of leaves and briars, perfect for spying and secrets. When it rained, you stayed dry in there, the rain pattering around you, darkening the driveway and the slates on the roof, but the earth beneath your sandals remained sandy and friable. Did the grown-ups know about it? We assumed not, but perhaps they were only pretending.

It’s a sensation, not an anecdote. I can’t find a way of expressing it, I can’t see how I could make it into a story, so I fall silent, remembering the rustle and dimness of shouldering my way inside, the scratch of twigs on my arms, the twisted branch that served as a seat. The pleasure of staying hidden as the world carried on with its business, unaware that it was being observed: my grandmother pegging out the washing, the postman’s van and once a week the mobile library, my grandfather dragging bags of sheep nuts into the barn. My parents setting off for a walk, my father idly swinging a borrowed walking stick into the nettles and the foaming banks of cowparsley.

It was everything to us: cave, priesthole, crow’s nest. We believed it was probably as old as the farmhouse itself, or older. We saved sweets to eat in there, and every year we’d find a few of last summer’s wrappers caught under roots, the glitter eroded by the weather, little fluttering scraps of another August’s happiness.

Then one visit Lucy lost interest in it; and it wasn’t so much fun on my own. The years between the deaths of my grandparents we forgot about it altogether. Strange, how these things come at you out of the blue, a lifetime of summers later. I wonder if the hedgerow is still there; if shreds of purple and gold foil are still caught in the roots. I wonder what, if anything, Christopher will remember of this holiday.

The metal creaks and squeals as Christopher throws his weight around, lurching backward and forward on the motorbike, lost in the ferocity of his enjoyment. ‘You’re going awfully fast,’ Ben says, approvingly. The look on Christopher’s face says,
not fast enough.

It’s not that I’ve forgotten that Nina and Sophie will be arriving on the Thursday; more that I’ve willingly lost track of time. But if I’m honest, I will accept that at some point I stopped looking forward to their arrival. We’ve been happy here on our own, our schedule going to pot, the usual rules warping a little in the sun and saltwater. Against all expectations, we’ve been freed from something.

‘A proper lie-in tomorrow,’ I say as we sit at what’s now our regular table at our favourite restaurant, watching old men in shirtsleeves gathering to smoke and chat in the little dusty square. Between the trees the air is strung with coloured bulbs, red, yellow, green, blue: a carnival illumination against the oncoming dusk.

Christopher glances up quickly from his
frites
and says, ‘Are there
lions
here?’

We explain, and then Ben says, ‘We have to tidy the place up before they arrive. What time does their flight get in?’

You’re kidding, it can’t be Wednesday already.
There’s some truth to my pantomime shock; and beneath that is a sneaking resentment. I’m not looking forward to handing the house over to Nina and Sophie, witness to my bleakest English moments. But it’s unfair of me, I know that.

‘Not until the afternoon. There’s not much to do, anyway,’ I say, and it’s true. We’ve given in to the rigorous expectations of the house. Cereal boxes look silly left out. I find myself in the novel position of being unable to tolerate crumbs on the counters. In any case Thérèse (an industrious narrow-faced woman who leaves the house wrinkle-free and smelling of artificial lemon) appears every few days to mop and polish. ‘I hope it’ll be OK, I hope they won’t find us too annoying,’ I say.

‘We can keep out of their way,’ Ben says, spooning some avocado into Cecily’s mouth. ‘It’ll be fine, Em, don’t worry.’

But I do. In the run-up to Nina’s arrival, I’m aware of an air of finality and mourning, as if I’m preparing to say goodbye. The last easy breakfast beneath the grape arbour, the last noisy family swim, the last mindless wander around the garden with a coffee cup, pinching and sniffing thyme and rosemary while Christopher rakes the gravel into little piles and drives his cars around them. On the shady grass, Cecily is threatening to crawl: lunging off her bottom and dragging herself up on all fours, trembling a little with the effort. Ben’s foot dangles from the hammock, just keeping the thing in motion. He’s halfway through his second thriller, greedily losing himself in it whenever he can. In a minute, he’ll have to put it down and drive Christopher into town to buy baguettes and salad.

I go back into the house to make another pot of coffee and while I’m waiting for the water to boil I walk down the corridor and find myself again in the master bedroom, the room that belongs to Nina’s father and his wife, the room that Nina will sleep in tonight. Like the rest of the house, it’s a vaguely monastic space, and pleasantly dim in the mornings, the sun held in check by the wooden ribs of the louvres. The high ceiling, the low broad bed, a cane chair at a writing desk, a long marble-topped table against the far wall. A pair of plain wooden candlesticks and a shallow alabaster bowl containing a few pine cones and stones glinting unevenly with quartz. The pale flags are cold beneath my feet. I switch on the ceiling fan, clicking it to the lowest setting. Overhead, the blades in the air.
Wuh-wuh-wuh.

Thérèse has put out a pair of swimming towels and left a sprig of lavender on both pillows. New soaps by the basins and the big stone bath. I pick up one bar and press it to my nose, inhaling the scent through the thick waxy wrapper. It smells like the rosemary taint on my fingers: stingingly clean, needle-sharp.

The bedroom windows hold the slope of the pine wood, and beyond that the bright V of the sea. Perhaps I’m wondering if Nina’s view will be the same as mine, and that is why – without quite formulating the desire – I find myself sitting down on the bed, carefully lying back, placing my head on the pillow and lifting my bare feet to rest on the cotton. The pulse in my ears drowns out the quiet rotation of the fan overhead, while I’m straining to listen, straining to hear the sound of Ben’s footsteps in the corridor, appalled at the prospect of being caught here, doing this.
What exactly am I doing?

When I stand up, the bed is wrecked, in disarray, scored and marked by the messy imprint of my body, a body which is so much larger and more awkward than Nina’s. In a panic I tug the linen straight, running my palms over the sheet, trying to smooth and flatten it, and plump up the pillow, replacing the sprig of lavender which has fallen to the floor; but I lack Thérèse’s skill and naturally it all looks wrong, hopeless, a giveaway. I go to the door and hesitate, inspecting the bed from a new angle, then I have one last try, tweaking the pillow and the swimming towels.
Fuck’s sake, it’s fine, get a grip. It’ll do.

On the stove, the coffee pot is burning dry, and I scorch my fingers taking it off the hob.

After the ceremony in a drab little hall off the Euston Road, we congregate for Ursula and Hugh’s wedding reception in a Marylebone garden square. I always appreciate access to these hidden spaces: the black railings and thick banks of shrubs enclosing quiet gravel paths and striped green ovals. It’s a muggy afternoon, warm and overcast, the air hardly moving in the yellow and blue bunting that droops between the plane trees. Ursula’s daughters press through the crowd, offering scones and butterfly cakes. For those who want it, tea comes in mismatching junk-shop china. There’s a Punch and Judy tent near the climbing frame.