Poppyland (18 page)

‘Yup.' Lucy's voice is brimming with excitement. ‘I want it for you and me as much as for my girls, you know. We didn't get it before, but that doesn't mean we can't now.'

Gazing down the Hudson River past glinting glass buildings and block after block of apartments and
offices full of so many thousands of people, and on down the river out through the mouth to the sea, I am nodding at the mouthpiece of the phone. I can almost taste the freedom of being in Norfolk by the sea.

‘I think you're right, Lucy. I've been looking at England from a safe distance for long enough. We can see off all our old ghosts together, can't we?'

‘You bet,' says Lucy lightly. ‘I've got to go, Mac's been holding the baby and she's asleep but I need to go and get Bella in bed. Love you, Sis.'

‘I love you too.' I put down the phone, smiling. It is incredible that Lucy lives in this parallel universe of motherhood as if nothing else exists. I can't imagine it unless I equate it to a painting movement, but nothing, not vorticism, or any other obsession I have ever had, can match the absorption of the early years.

Ryder
Essex

Coming home is the problem. Of course, no one in their mid-thirties can reasonably expect their parents to run their household in the way that it was run when their children were growing up, nor, in truth, would they want it to be, but whoever said anything about being reasonable or speaking the truth? The train grinds to a halt. From the window the estuary with the tide out is the colour and texture of liver, and it almost feels as if the train is embedded in the mud. Ryder opens the small window in the stuffy carriage and the scents of salt and sea and thick cloying mud seep in and mingle with the dusty dry air of the heating system. The train judders into life for a moment then pulls up again before smoothly gliding on into green, open countryside. The smell of the estuary lingers, Ryder can taste mud in his throat. His sense of sinking down into subterranean layers of brown
must be to do with where he is going. It's not home, how can somewhere you have never lived be home? And how can you begin to have a home when you have never lived anywhere except in other people's lives?

Finishing the crossword is easier than answering the sort of questions Ryder finds floating into his mind these days – ‘17 Across: “Result of a laundry-room short”.' Tumble-dried? Probably not. He folds the newspaper and stows it in his bag. The train is pulling into Deepham and he waits for the doors to open, scanning the platform with mild curiosity.

Jean and Bill moved house nine years ago, and nine is about the number of nights Ryder has spent since then under the roof of their L-shaped bungalow overlooking the golf course. They seem happy enough there, it is half an hour away from Foxley, far enough to be a new beginning, but near enough to be familiar. To Ryder, the distance could have been one or a thousand miles; he couldn't bear the idea that they were leaving Bonnie behind. The difficulty of living anywhere, uneasy and unresolved, when Bonnie lives nowhere, has sent him around the world twice and kept him keen for change. Change for the sake of change, ceaseless motion to avoid the stark reality of being himself alone in the world. But in the end the self is unavoidable.

Ryder is alone on the platform. The train shunts away and the air is soft with the coo of pigeons calling in the spring evening. He walks across the level crossing and down towards the High Street. He could get
a taxi, but the walk is only a mile or two, it's a lovely time of day and Ryder is in no hurry. He lights a cigarette and swings his bag over one shoulder. His phone trills. It's his mother.

‘Hello?' She sounds surprised, although she is the one making the phone call.

‘Hello, Ma, it's me, Ryder.'

‘Yes, of course it is. I know, I rang you.'

‘So you did,' he agrees cordially, wondering if there is any reason for the call.

‘Your father would have driven to the station, but the car has been kept at the garage overnight.'

Ryder is absurdly touched. This is his mother at her most demonstrative. It is her way of showing she has been looking forward to seeing him. He flicks his cigarette away.

‘That's very kind of him, but in fact I'm walking; it's a lovely evening for it.' Christ, does he really have to sound as though he's speaking to someone to whom English is a second language?

‘Oh, that's such a relief,' says his mother. ‘I'll leave your letter in the hall.'

Ryder turns to walk across the golf course, frowning, wondering if he has heard her right.

‘My letter?' he says, mystified. Are they not talking? Is this the onset of senility?

‘Yes. For you to open,' his mother says very patiently. Ryder grins, realising that she, too, feels the need to speak as if he knows no English.

‘Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood,' he mutters to himself.

‘I won't be at home, you see,' his mother continues, ‘I'm doing the flowers this week.'

‘Splendid. Well, I'll see you when you get back. We'll have supper together tonight.'

‘Oh no. Your father and I have just had a boiled egg. I've left some ham for you.'

Ryder's heart sinks. It's not that his mother was such a great cook that missing supper cooked by her is the end of the world, but the depressing image of a small plate of ham and one place set at the dining-room table does not excite him much.

‘Oh well. I mean, that's great. Bye, Ma.' Ryder has had enough of the complete idiot role, yakking on a phone like a city slicker in his suit, stalking along the narrow margin of path past the fourteenth hole, where a pair of sprightly septuagenarians have alighted from their golf cart and are slowly creeping towards two nicely placed balls. The smaller of the two, curled like an autumn leaf in his zip-up jacket, pulls up his sleeves and grips the golf club. To Ryder it looks as if its weight is the only thing anchoring him to the earth, and if he takes a swing, he may well fly up and away. With slight regret not to be watching the rest of their game he walks on. Ryder has not been in the habit of wearing a suit, but that, like everything else, he has concluded, is changing. Last week a bag of his clothes arrived from Denmark, from Cara, whom he had not heard a word from since he sent her the flowers two months ago. In the case was a card with a picture of a cat asleep on a cloud, and on the back she had written:

Dear Ryder,

I hope you are happy. The flowers you sent were pretty, thank you. Jurgen and I are living together now. I didn't know how to tell you. No hard feelings, I hope, but I needed the space of your clothes! Come and visit us if you ever come to Denmark again, I would be glad to see you.

Love Cara

The clothes, in a plaid laundry bag, took up an unwarranted amount of space on Ryder's narrow boat. He sat on his bed, looking at them, Cara's letter in his hand, wondering how best to deal with the miserable sense of rejection that they had brought with them. And incidentally, who the hell was Jurgen? But the rejection was cured very nicely by getting Mike, his publisher friend, away from his twins and his work and begging him to come for an evening of Guinness and a pool tournament in Camden Town. Ryder and Mike won the tournament, and a stack of pints of Guinness to redeem at the bar. The healing process begun, Ryder began to find it possible to turn a negative into a positive. The next morning, slightly hungover, he got dressed in a suit and took the bag with all the clothes he hadn't missed while they had been sitting in Cara's wardrobe in Copenhagen to the charity shop. The reward for this was immediate

– the girl serving him in the coffee shop next to his office told him that he looked like her favourite soap
star in his grey pinstripe suit. That Ryder had no idea who the soap star was, or what he looked like didn't matter. In fact, maybe it was better not to know. If a girl liked the suit then he had pleased her, and she had noticed him – all that was good. Today he even has a proper shirt with it, though generally he interchanges three T-shirts. But his mother would like a shirt, wouldn't she?

Actually, Ryder realises, turning in at the end of the low brick wall, passing the tabby cat sitting smugly on the gate post, he has no real idea what his mother likes at all. And if a man with little interest in clothes starts trying to second-guess what a woman would or wouldn't like him to have in his wardrobe his life could become very frustrating. Anyway, on balance, he thinks, most mothers like suits. It makes a man look purposeful. And, since throwing out everything from Copenhagen, Ryder doesn't have a whole lot else to wear. As it turns out, it is his father who notices, opening the door of the bungalow with a caution that any Neighbourhood Watch scheme would find exemplary, but which maddens Ryder, who has already said, ‘It's me, Ryder,' three times through the frosted-glass panes. Bill finally opens the door a few inches and looks cautiously at his son, then gathers his thoughts.

‘Yes, so it is. Goodness, I haven't seen you in a suit since—' Bill breaks off with a stricken look that only makes Ryder more irritated. Jesus, are they ever going to get over it? he thinks. Can we not live a single day after eighteen years without the grief mountain in our
midst? And if it's coming up in conversation, then for God's sake, bring it in fully, don't just break off leaving everything unsaid, nothing resolved.

‘Hi, Dad,' Ryder says mildly.

Bill has slightly slumped over the door handle, and his body language suggests that he would really like to shut the door now and not deal with Ryder. Letting him in looks like the last thing on earth he wants to do, but with practised weariness he gathers himself up, and continues, ‘Hmm. Well, any way, you'd better come in.' With a snail as his role model, he undoes the chain and opens the door. Ryder embraces the air close to his father's cheek, and breathes in the familiar whiff of pipe tobacco and shaving soap that is Bill's aura.

‘Dad, it's great to see you.'

His father has got out his large handkerchief and is wiping his glasses. ‘Ye-es,' he says vaguely, as though he can't remember if he agrees or not. Actually, he probably can't, Ryder thinks.

The hall is narrow; a spindly table sticks out into the plank-shaped space, the glow of much-polished mahogany incongruous on the pale blue carpet, against the peach walls. Furniture so much older than the house it inhabits, furniture with memories in a house with none. It's hard to work out what you are attached to, sometimes, Ryder considers, and whether belongings have any meaning at all. He has certainly made a virtue out of not attaching value to them, and has now got himself so few that life anywhere larger than a boat would be a challenge. But maybe it's a
challenge he should be facing now. A net curtain hides the window above the table. Ryder pulls back the curtain, drinking in the prettiness of the apple tree in blossom beyond the window. He finds himself, as he always does when he gets here, looking around hopefully for the stairs. Not that he wants to go up them to any destination on another floor, it's just that he wishes they were there. A house without stairs and therefore without an upstairs, feels incomplete.

His father ambles past him. ‘You've got a letter.'

‘Oh, yes. So I have. Mum mentioned it when she rang me earlier.'

Propped against a silver hand bell in the shape of a lady in a crinoline, is a cream envelope, loopy pale green writing giving his name a pleasing edge of whimsicality. Ryder picks it up, and his heartbeat changes when he reads the postmark. Winterton-on-Sea. The name fits like Kiss Me Quick around the life belt-shaped red post office stamp. It can only be from Mac. Ryder holds it for a moment, mesmerised, then he rubs his eyes. How can time do this? It just telescoped through all the intervening years and took him back to the numb ache of the last time he saw Mac. It was winter. Ryder's first term at university. They had gone to a football match together, an attempt to keep the connection open between them and to put it on to an everyday footing. But there was too much sadness. Ryder could not see Mac as anything but diminished without Bonnie at his side, and conversations floundered uneasily as they both shrank from mentioning her. The wrong team won the match, and in the pub
afterwards they played darts and became increasingly consumed by the difficulty of sustaining any small talk. Finally, Mac, having missed the board with all three of his darts, turned to Ryder with an empty smile. ‘I miss her every day,' he said.

After that they got drunk, and Mac came back and slept on the floor of Ryder's room in the hall of residence. He left before Ryder woke up and though they talked a few times on the phone, they gradually lost touch over the next year or two.

Bill shuffles back into the twilit zone of the sitting room, and laughter like gunshot pings around the door frame from the old black-and-white movie he is watching on television. The trepidation Ryder feels is almost unbearable; he can't work out if he needs to gather his thoughts and strength before opening the letter, or if he needs to get on with it and face the nameless fear. While wondering, he opens it, remembering as he does so that it's always the best way to distract oneself from the fear and do whatever it is anyway. This, at any rate, is Ryder's philosophy. Inside the envelope is a folded card. Ryder opens it slowly, enjoying the unusual, sensuous experience of receiving a letter. Most post he gets these days is at best pedestrian. This is not a letter, however, it's an invitation, and written in the same fluid green as the envelope:

Please come and celebrate with us the joint christenings of Bella Bonnie Perrone and Catherine May Perrone at 3 o'clock on 25 May
at All Saints Church and afterwards for tea at Chapel Farm Cottages, Love from Mac and Lucy.

Idyllic. Mac is married to someone called Lucy and they have a baby called Bonnie. For a moment he doubts it can be the same Mac, the impossibility of such life-affirming ordinary blessings being available to any of them has calcified in Ryder's thoughts. He realises that he has not given Mac a chance in his head, has not imagined him picking up the pieces and making his life whole. Ryder now really misses the stairs. And his parents' old house, his home. He really wants to go upstairs, he wants to take the steps three at a time and throw himself on the bed in his bedroom. He would like to be in his childhood bedroom, which he can conjure into being in his head in a flash and bring Bonnie back there as well, replaying the last time they sat there together. It was unbearable and uncomfortable for him to admit how often he had done that.