Poppyland (22 page)

The warmth of my body is flowing out through my feet, into the pink- and grey-scalloped lino, then through into the concrete and then, I suppose, on into the earth as this bathroom is downstairs. My warmth vanishing into the ground. And chilliness coming up in its place. It is so early it almost counts as late last night, and I seem to be stuck on New York night time. I've been here a week now, I'm going back soon after the christening, and I have seen the dawn every morning. This gives plenty of time for cleaning, and Lucy says the house has never been so thoroughly scrubbed.

Today the bathroom is my project, and I gain deep satisfaction through squirting blue-liquid cleaner in a wavy line around the bath. Lucy and Mac are away, they left for London last night after putting the children to bed, so I am in charge.

‘Don't feel you have to do any more cleaning,' Lucy cautioned before they left. ‘Looking after the girls is more than enough, thank you so much.'

But as I wandered in here, wide awake and energetic, the bath seemed to me to be crying out for a scrub, and anyway, it's so therapeutic. And this whole trip to England is proving very therapeutic. I miss
Jerome. Even though I didn't love him and it needed to end, there's a big gap in my life, full of silence, and every so often I turn round to see he's there, or think of calling him to talk something through, and it takes a moment to comprehend that he's not there any more. I don't know how long it takes to accept this, but coming away from New York has helped shrink the sadness back into perspective. After all, it was and is the right thing to do. We could not go further together without mutual willingness, and I was suffocating. The truth is that I feel alive now, and most days I am thinking about work. I love the quicksilver state of inspiration and the rush and spark of ideas, and in time, everything heals and it isn't really a big deal, it's just life.

There is a painting by Brueghel I first saw on a slide in a lecture at art school more than fifteen years ago. The painting depicted Icarus falling to his death – his dramatic final moment unnoticed by various people, including a farmer and shepherd going about their normal business – his defining tragedy nothing to them. I met Dad for a drink after the lecture. We didn't meet often, and this occasion was memorable because we had a really good conversation. He told me that W.H. Auden had written a poem about the painting, and he said that humility comes when we can accept that human beings experience suffering and miracles in the midst of ordinary life. He was just as he always was when I saw him, quiet and thoughtful and contained. We sat in a pub by the river, at a table outside.
Willow hung low over the green-black water and a swan glided past on a surface so smooth her reflection was symmetrically clear beneath her, the whole pattern like folded origami. Her feathers plumed cool marble-white as she sailed on. I watched her disappear behind the willow and thought her beauty was a million miles from poor old Icarus and his overheated wings. Dad got up to go, and we hugged one another tight. His cheekbone bumped mine as we kissed goodbye and when I looked after him, the sun dazzled and the swan's image burned against my eyelids. I didn't know that Dad was ill, nor did I know that I would not see him again until he was in hospital; it was just as he said, an invisible tragedy no one knew was happening.

The bath is pristine now. It looks too good to pass up but the last thing I want right now is a bath. I get into it anyway without undressing. When I was first in New York I slept in the bath in Dorelia's room for two weeks until another room came up for rent. Mind you, a bed was not an urgent priority, I don't think Dorelia and Stephan and I ever slept much, we were always propping up the bar in the clubs that are open when everything else is closed. I loved the anonymity and the acceptance of everyone I met. I was just Grace, and no one asked where I came from, no one cared if I had parents or a past, all of us were high on the energy of the city and wanted to cram as much experience as we could into our waking hours.

Through the warped window panes, day is diluting the sky and the blue is tinged with pink-velvet softness. I should go back to bed but I am still not tired, and then the children will be up and I must give them breakfast. To fill in the time until then the only solution is more cleaning. ‘Turn crisis into virtue,' I pant to myself, letting the hot tap in the basin run. Doing the cleaning really helps, it always helps. I hope it's not all I am good for in this life, but if it is, it's not the end of the world.

Honeysuckle is bursting through the open window, only recently unsealed and seemingly a kind of motorway for nature to enter the house. I catch a spider on its thread and waft it back outside. Jerome pops into my head again, accompanying me through the early hours and saving me from being on my own, just as he did when I was with him. He will not be on his own now, he keeps his life very full. Sport and work are parallel obsessions and he plays a lot of squash, has a twenty-year-old personal best to beat of 3 hours 17 minutes for the New York marathon, and keeps abreast of his deals, his metabolism and his blood pressure through various bits of electronic technology more or less implanted on his hands or ears. When I was with him, the only time he was not on his mobile phone when he was awake was when we were having sex, although, as I told Lucy over a bottle of pink wine in the garden a couple of evenings ago, ‘It's only a matter of time before he finds some sex toy he can use on whoever he is sleeping with now that also communicates with his office.'

Lucy snorted and spilled her wine, Mac caught the glass as it rolled off the table, and raised his eyebrows.

‘I'm beginning to think sisters should come with ratings like films,' he said. ‘The combination of you two has got to be an 18.'

‘Or X-rated, but definitely adult,' said Lucy, satisfaction ringing in her voice, echoed in her flushed cheeks, her dishevelled hair. She was in the mood for letting off steam. As she said herself, most of her evenings are spent putting away small children's clothes, or endlessly putting and re-putting to bed the small children themselves. A couple of glasses of wine and a lot of laughter were unlocking memories for her of being a grown-up and having fun. I didn't see that we were acting like adults myself, I personally reckoned we were being as infantile as three-year-old Bella blowing raspberries on her arm in the bath. Mac stroked Lucy's shoulder as he replaced the glass on the table, his fingers brushing lazily across her skin. Lucy poured more wine and tilted her chair back, raising her glass in a toast. ‘Mmm. Sisters,' she murmured. ‘Actually, any relations apart from parents are welcome.'

‘But you haven't got any parents,' Mac pointed out, teasing, leaning his elbows on the back of his wife's chair and twisting a strand of her hair around his finger. Lucy rolled her head back towards him and she smiled up at him. Her look of love pierced my heart. Whatever it is Mac and Lucy have got looks good to me. I wonder if I am anywhere near getting it for myself? Suddenly, in the bathroom, I have a sword
of Damocles moment as I realise that the answer lies within me.

Something ticklish and damp brushes against my leg. I shriek and turn round. I may have learned to love spiders, but not every creature on God's earth.

‘Urgh, what is it?' England is not supposed to be full of large creepy crawlies. In America I am familiar with assaults from roaches and moths and beetles. I wouldn't say I accept them, but they are in films and often they are around the places I have lived. Fair enough in Brooklyn or Long Island, but there is no place for them in my sister's bathroom in Winterton-on-Sea.

‘It's me, not an it.' Bella's voice always surprises me as its huskiness suggests a cigarette habit a three year old cannot hope to achieve.

‘You're up. Great, I was getting lonely.' Bella grins, adorably rumpled in her pyjamas, her eyelids heavy with sleep, her hair a light nest with straws sticking out. She pats my bottom, which is at her own head height, then looks me up and down slowly.

‘Why are they orange?' she asks, squinting at me, and waving a hand towards me that encompasses my naked flesh and the orange knickers that are my pyjamas.

‘Oh. You know . . . some things are.' I don't have a good answer, I am preoccupied wondering whether Bella has noticed my rubber gloves. Is it disturbing for a small child to find their aunt vigorously cleaning the bathroom at four-thirty in the morning in her bra and knickers?

Far from it. Bella seems very happy with the status quo, and pushing up her sleeves she grabs a flannel and begins wiping the floor with it.

‘Your gloves match. That's why. It's work clothes. I'm doing it too.'

‘Oh yes.' The mood is much cheerier now in the bathroom. I give up on the wistful notion of removing the gloves and getting a dressing gown on. Suddenly Bella hurls down the flannel and with a deft twist, removes her pyjamas. ‘My pants are green,' she says. ‘I need green gloves. Do we have some?'

‘I doubt it,' I reply and, giving her my gloves, I perch on the side of the bath to talk to her. ‘Why are you up, Bella? It's practically still last night and we've got all day, haven't we?'

‘It's good to start now. You have.' She seems to have all the answers, and nimbly she climbs on to the corner of the bath, and begins squirting the mirror with the glass cleaner. Through the open bathroom door I look down the landing and have a sudden flash of being at home in Mac and Lucy's colourful messy house. When I arrived here I was on a high of excitement from a week in London, and I was in no mood to be daunted by the pouring rain, though the reality of being in Norfolk where so many demons of the past lurk for me was nerve-wracking. I told Lucy I was scared of the idea of all our ancestors sucking me back into a life here. She gave me a long, steady look then burst out laughing. ‘You are such a nut case,' she laughed, ‘the demons are here, all right, but no more than anywhere else, and they are only in your head. It
doesn't take long to see past them, babe.' The dimple in her grin was unchanged from our childhood. And Bella has inherited it.

‘Right, Aunt Grace, in the bath! You first.' God, she's bossy. And she pops up from under the veil of a towel hanging beside the basin, and climbs on to the side of the bath to boss me around.

‘More squeeze?' Bella proffers the glass-cleaning spray, both hands round the squirter, adorably careful and polite. In the goldfish bowl of life she has moved on from wanting me to have a bath, thank God. The soundtrack outside the window has intensified with clattering from some bird, mad chirruping from others, and a poignantly sweet song I didn't know I knew was a thrush until now. Hearing it takes me to a memory of being with Aunt Sophie in her garden when I was about seven. ‘There is never a true silence in a garden,' she told me, ‘or a stillness. Everything is growing and changing, it's just that you can't always see it or hear it. And one of the joys of being small, like you' – she poked me gently and smiled teasingly – ‘is that you can notice it all if you want to.' I certainly chose not to notice any of it for a long time by living in New York, but now, with the honeysuckle scent mingling with bath cleaner and the dawn chorus ringing in my ears, I have no choice. Bella gives me a calculating look and squirts herself with the purple glass-cleaner.

‘Just a bit dirty on my tummy,' she says, dabbing herself with the cloth. Stripping off her rubber gloves I twirl her into the bath.

‘Oops, let's wash this off and go and get Cat. She'll be awake soon.'

I am in charge of the girls until tomorrow when Lucy and Mac will be back with Mac's aunt who is staying for the christening. So far childcare is more of a joy than I ever imagined it could be. Mind you, it's now five-thirty in the morning, but I like being up early. I reckon the trick is to sleep when they do; is jet lag the perfect foil for toddlers? I follow Bella out of the bathroom, and we meander to the front door and out to inspect the day.

‘It's not raining,' she says, as if it has been, which it has not.

‘Good,' I take her hand, ‘we can have breakfast in the garden.'

‘I'd like olives,' says Bella. ‘Olive pie.'

‘Right.' I can't imagine what she means, I just hope it isn't what she says.

Breakfast in the garden is so much more difficult than I imagined it could be. The logistics are impossible. How do you hold down a baby, limber and slippery as a landed salmon, while trying to cut bread for olive pie which is actually going to be a sandwich?

Cat's belly is stretched into a curve, pale pink like the underside of a mushroom. She is so delicate, with her tiny fingers laced in my hair and her cheeks the most kissable curves, her existence is a miracle. I don't know how something so ethereal can live and breathe. I panic that she should have sun cream on her, that she might eat a worm, that I might put her down on something sharp and that I should hold her
all the time. Where is the sun cream and how is one supposed to apply it? She is slippery enough already. Cat has writhed out of her dress, out of the small wheeled trolley I tried to wedge her in while making the breakfast, and out of her tied-on sun hat, with the easy contempt of Houdini under-using his skills on a pair of shoelaces. Lubrication would render her lethal, and wholly unmanageable. The eggs have been boiling for ages, Bella has laid the table outside the back door with ketchup, multicoloured sprinkles and a tin of corned beef. I am suddenly hungry and exhaustion hits me, blanking the earlier joy, and my common sense. I wonder if they are as hungry as I am? They are certainly bearing it with more aplomb. It's not even seven o'clock in the morning and I have no idea what I should try to persuade the children to eat and what is just table decoration. Bella slides a plate full of olives on to the table and, sitting down with a teaspoon, begins to eat them. She knows what she wants. But is it good for her? Does it matter when you eat olives? After all, we eat loads of olives on holiday, who is to say that breakfast olives are less healthy? Not me. Cat is determined not to do anything that I want her to. She purses her lips and turns her head away from the spoonful of cereal as if she is Lady Macbeth and I am administering hemlock. She waves her small hand in protest and accidentally slaps me in the eye. Or is it an accident? It's awful to admit that, at this moment, I hate Cat.