Ten Stories About Smoking (5 page)

The sun was going down, the amber light licking at the water in the swimming pool. From absolutely nowhere, Linda got a violently precise image of living there; of being a
functioning part of the family. Picking up Poppy from school, cooking dinner for Christina and Daniel, pouring them a glass of wine when they got home strafed and exhausted. Then leaving them to
eat as she got Poppy ready for bed, reading her a story before they kissed her goodnight, stories that would give her a love of books. There would be Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl,
The Wind in the
Willows
and
Alice in Wonderland.
And in the summer she and Poppy would swim together in the pool, splashing each other and screaming. She saw them both there, ghostlike and transparent
in the water, their faces alight with happiness. Yes. That’s the way it would be. She could see it so clearly.

Daniel obscured her view and put down a highball glass, three ice cubes and a wedge of lime floating in the clear, fizzing tonic. Christina sat down next to her husband, with a glass of white
wine. The look she shot at the cigarette was pure poison. Linda ignored it.

‘I said she could watch television for half an hour before you read her a story. I do hope that’s okay,’ she said.

‘I love reading stories,’ Linda said brightly. ‘I help out in the children’s department sometimes. They have this story time, and I just love to read out Maisy Mouse and
The Tiger Who Came to Tea
and all those. They love it, the kids, they really do.’ She stubbed out her cigarette and realized she sounded like she was in a job interview already. She
smiled at them both.

‘What books does Poppy like?’

‘I’m sure she’ll tell you that,’ Christina said. ‘She changes every day.’

‘They do, at that age, don’t they though?’ Linda said. Christina sipped her wine with obvious enjoyment.

‘Yes, I suppose they do.’

As the smell of marinaded meat drifted up from the barbecue, Linda lay down on Poppy’s bed and read her the opening chapter from
Flat Stanley
. ‘My favouritest
book in the whole world,’ Poppy had said as she placed it into her auntie’s hands as though, bomb like, it might explode. It was a title Linda recognized from the bookshop and she read
it with the same attention to character and voice that she would at work. Poppy giggled at the funny parts, and was quiet and attentive at all other times.

‘I wish you were here every night to read me a story,’ Poppy said.

Linda laughed. ‘Sure you do, poppet.’

‘I do,’ she said. ‘I wish you were here all the time.’

‘Well, I’m here now, aren’t I?’

Poppy thought about that as if it were a serious question then looked away.

‘Can we ride the ponies tomorrow?’

‘Of course,’ Linda said, ‘we’ll do whatever you want.’

‘And go swimming?’

‘If the weather’s nice, sure.’

‘And I’ll show you my play.’

‘That would be great. And if you’re very good, I might even give you a present. So time to get on the snuggle bus, okay?’

Poppy put her head down on the pillow, her crooked teeth visible as she smiled. Linda kissed her niece on the cheek and on the forehead.

‘Goodnight, princess,’ she said before turning off the lamp and walking to the door, wondering where she’d heard the words ‘snuggle bus’ before.

It had become chilly outside, so Christina had fired up the heaters; they smelled strongly of gas and gave off a specific, cloying heat. The table was laden with salads,
potatoes, ramekins full of dips and sauces, and a hotplate onto which Daniel was transferring the meat. Christina looked approvingly at her sister-in-law.

‘You’ve been up there ages,’ she said, pouring Linda a glass of wine.

‘I was
Flat Stanley
-ed into submission,’ Linda replied, taking the glass and sitting down. She was starving, the last thing she’d eaten – a cold can of soup
– had been lunchtime the day before. She would put on weight here, she realized. She would have to run in the fields, swim in the pool, to burn off the lunches and the hotplates full of
meat.

Daniel wanted to say that he hoped Linda was hungry but realized this might open onto an avenue of conversation he might later regret. It wasn’t so much Linda he worried
about, but his wife. Any chance Christina got to probe the emotional hinterlands of her sister-in-law was instinctively leapt upon. It made dinner a precarious business.

Christina’s interest always sounded clinical, as though she was studying Linda as part of a greater body of work. At idle moments, perhaps on holiday at their place in Sardinia or when
walking out in the woods, she would say to Daniel: ‘I wonder what your sister is up to right now . . .’ And he would have to endure hours of fevered supposition.

When the two women first met – Poppy had just turned three and Linda was back living with her parents – Christina could barely contain her curiosity. They circled each other:
Christina not wishing to scare away her prey; Linda not wanting to appear the unhinged, mad woman in the box room. When they drove home, Poppy full of talk of her new auntie, Christina looked
aggrieved, as though she had missed a great and fleeting opportunity.

On their subsequent meetings, Christina had managed to glean more from Linda. But it was never quite enough. Daniel knew this; it was why Christina always invited her to stay, and why Linda had
always refused: even in her most fractured state, Linda was a good judge of situation, if not always character.

So why she had accepted this invitation remained something of a mystery. It could, of course, have been that she just wanted to see Poppy for her birthday. Christina wasn’t convinced about
this, though. She believed that Linda had come because she needed a woman to talk to; as only a woman could understand the full implications of what the doctors had told her. When Christina relayed
this theory to Daniel, he sighed and told her she was probably right, even though he knew she was wrong. No one went to Christina for emotional advice. She was too practical, too logical to tackle
such complicated issues. To her everything had a solution, an action plan to put into effect. Sometimes his wife reminded him of those old war-time posters he remembered from school:
Make Do and
Mend says Mrs Sew and Sew
,
Dig for Victory, Loose Lips Sink Ships
; complex problem, easily solved.

Daniel watched the two women talking amiably about Poppy and as they laughed he caught glimpses of the people he had once loved: the sister who would tease him about his acne as she applied
make-up in the downstairs toilet before going out to meet her boyfriend at the Locomotive; and the woman who had walked naked across his room the first time they’d spent the night together,
paused by the door jamb and said, ‘I think I love you already.’

He placed the last steak onto the hotplate and sat down. There were charcoal motes on his jeans and ash in his hair. He told them to tuck in and they started heaping up their plates, the food
fresh: potatoes, broccoli, carrots from the garden, the meat sourced from a local farm, the wine brought back from the Sardinian vineyard where their farmhouse was located.

‘Isn’t the wine good?’ he said. ‘I think it’s the best one we’ve had.’

‘Is it from—’

‘Sardinia, yes,’ Christina said. ‘We went out there at the start of the summer, it’s just heavenly. Next time we go, you should come. There’s acres of
room.’

It was happening; she could feel it. They would ask her, the both of them, perhaps nervously at first but then more sure of their position. They needed a housekeeper, a nanny, a person to go out
to Sardinia and open up the house before they went for their week-long break. Someone for Poppy. She would live in that attic room with its hessian flooring and its claw-foot bath and teach Poppy
how to play guitar. And Poppy would look at her and say ‘I don’t ever want you to leave’, and she would be able to say, without fear of contradiction, ‘I’m not going
anywhere, poppet.’

She smiled at her family, her future employers. And though her steak was far too bloody, she ate it anyway, agreeing with Daniel that there really was no substitute for a proper,
charcoal-burning barbecue.

After they’d finished eating, Daniel took the plates through to the kitchen. The conversation had been gentle; about work, about family and mostly about Poppy. Did he have
any other topic of conversation these days? He remembered once talking with conviction on art and music, books and politics, science and religion, but these days he struggled to form a solid
opinion on almost anything. Every thought felt sludgy and careworn, and so he no longer put forward his own views, instead simply reported and rehashed what he read in the newspapers. It was not
Poppy’s fault, nor Christina’s; the blame, if there was any to be apportioned, was all his. Through the French windows he watched his sister smoke nervously. Clearly Christina had begun
her examination. Daniel swilled down the last of his wine and went to join them, the word ‘barren’ repeating in his ears.

‘Did you want children?’ Christina was saying. ‘I mean, not that it matters whether you did or not, I suspect. It’s one thing deciding on something, quite another having
it decided for you, isn’t it?’

Her sister-in-law shrugged and blew out a beam of smoke.

‘I’ve not thought about it much, to be honest, Chris. But when I do, I just think that it’s probably all for the best.’

Christina was frustrated that this seemed to end the conversation. She wanted at least a semblance of intimacy. She missed that. At university she’d had four close female friends. They
were arts students, drunk and stoned most of the time, crazy and broken and somehow more real than the Chrissie who worked hard and visited the sports hall for circuit training. They liked her, she
realized, because she was like a governess or a nanny; always there for practical advice and structure. When they needed emergency contraception, help filling out government forms or applying for
loans, it was to her that they turned. In exchange they offered brief insights into their lives.

She had not seen any of them in a decade. The last time, the five of them had met up at the Princess Louise in Holborn. Christina was late, still in the first flush of enthusiasm for her
respectably paid job in the city. Arriving into the smoky Victoriana of the pub, she saw them around a small table, talking and laughing, drinking pints of lager and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes.
This was, she understood, not a reunion; rather they met up with each other on a regular basis. Her suspicions were confirmed as they talked about shared acquaintances who lived in East End squats.
The stories they told were superficial; lightweight tales of money worries and unreliable boyfriends. As she paid for another round of drinks, Christina looked over and thought about how young they
all appeared.