The Lives of Women (10 page)

‘I just need a little time.'

‘You need time – you take it. So call me next week – okay?'

‘I need more than a week, Diana.'

‘I know, hon, I know. Just call me anyway, okay?'

 

The river route was a simple rectangle – down one side, over a bridge, back on the opposite side. Yet there were times when I lost my bearings and hardly knew which country I was in, never mind what side of the river I should be on. I would find myself becoming afraid and unable to grasp how I got to be there or how I was ever going to find my way back. I could only think of the night as a place then – a solid destination with a roof and walls. On the way out I was walking into it; on the way back I was walking out of it again.

The stone bridge – the last one before the first of the city bridges took over – was where we stopped for a rest. I bought a packet of cigarettes and planned on smoking one a night while I leaned on the wall of the bridge. I felt it gave me an excuse to be standing there.

The dog looking at me head cocked – what the hell is she doing now?

‘I'm smoking and, yes, it tastes vile.'

It made me feel sick but worse, it made me think of my mother,
her late conversion to smoking, and so I soon knocked it on the head.

Standing there, I had often looked down and noticed things I'd missed moments before when I'd walked right by them, like the swans asleep on the mooring ledge. And once, wedged into a rowing boat and swaddled in a quilt, a tramp caught in the milky light of the moon.

Suddenly it was early November and the dog reluctant to go any further. As I pulled him along the river path, I remembered the first night I'd brought him this way and how fit he'd seemed then, trotting beside and, indeed, often ahead of me. The blackberry bushes had been loaded with fruit then. Now the berries had gone and in the river lights the naked brambles were rolls of barbed wire. Across the way, the boat clubs had been closed up for the night, sleeping canoes spooned into each other, and I stood there counting back through the weeks and realised that my mother had been buried three months ago to the day. Three months and ten days since I'd left New York.

I could hear the muffled chattering of the nearby weir. Trapped noise in a hollow place. When I closed my eyes, the sound grew stronger and I was reminded of another time when I'd stood alone in the dark and thought about the death of someone I'd once been close to.

That was over thirty years ago and I had just turned eighteen, the first time I'd helped Serena out in one of those sleek Manhattan art galleries. I was standing in the wings, waiting for the supervisor's bell to ring out; the tray, loaded with hundreds of flimsy bits on sticks, was a strain on my arms and I had been worrying about
how to keep it all aligned when the lights theatrically cut. And even though I had been told this would happen – it still caught me off guard. For a few short seconds, I was listening to a great noise without being able to see where it was coming from. And a terrifying ache of grief rushed through me, jamming the breath inside my chest so that I almost dropped the tray. It was as if everything that had happened over the past year and more had honed into those few seconds of me standing there in the darkness, trying to hold onto the weight of a tray. The bell tinkled and tinkled again. The lights came back up and I looked down on a moving collage of cackling faces, while in one elegant, synchronised movement trays of canapés appeared out of every corner and began gliding down all the flights of steel stairs.

Someone behind me was shouting, ‘Go, go, go. Move it, move it, will ya, just move it!'

I remembered all this and then wiped it away and looked down at the dog. He was shivering hard. His weary, watery eyes looking back up at me. It was time to take him home.

The noise of the weir or the gallery, or both, stayed in my head then settled down into a low level tinnitus. There was the sound of calmer water now muttering alongside me. And other small nocturnal voices: squeaking, croaking, purring from trees and rushes. Behind all that the lonely sound of night trains being shunted in a nearby railway yard. I listened carefully to every note of this, knowing well this would be the last of these walks. Tomorrow I would take the dog to see the vet; tomorrow I knew what he was going to say.

*

The night walks had been more or less played out by then anyhow: the distance had been shrinking each time; the occasions had become less frequent. It was getting too cold. The dog was tired. I was tired. We were both too old for adventures. And it had started to become dangerous. The winter nights had brought an exodus of junkies and drunks out from the city. They were making little nests under the trees near to the river bank and in the carcass of a house that stood on the north bank.

I begrudged them the house. It was a house I used to see long ago from the top of the bus, when it still had a roof and windows and people. When I was a child I used to make a secret wish that I might live in it, as a grown woman. Because that's all I had wanted then: a house not joined at the hip to another house – nothing facing it but a straight road into the city. Nothing behind it but a cut of glistening river. When I was ten years old, it was the house of my future. A house filled with children I had no faces for; a man I couldn't begin to imagine except that he was talkative. I would have more than one person to rely on for company. I would have more than one friend – in fact, I would have to have a special room built to accommodate them. In my child's head I had it furnished from pictures I'd seen in my mother's magazines: long low sofas, a raised central fireplace, a basket chair that hung out of the ceiling. A double door would lead out to the back lawn, a short path to the river, where all my friends and all my children and my talkative, friendly husband and I could swim in the summer with the swans and the ducks and the salmon.

Now the smoke from the vagrants' bonfires was worming its way up through the trees by the house and from the house itself,
creeping through its broken crown, the cracks in its walls, the gouged out sockets of its former windows. There was the noxious smell of burning fodder: old tyres, broken furniture. The swaying sound of drunken voices. The stench of open-air, makeshift latrines.

 

On the way back I stopped in a phone kiosk in the neighbouring village.

Back to her old self, Diana came on the phone – ‘Where the fuck have you been?'

‘Did you talk to Patty?' I asked.

‘She'll sell, if you will.'

‘Right. Let me think about it.'

‘Don't you want to know how much first? Don't you want to know the offer they've made? The money, Elaine – don't you want to know the
money
?'

‘It's not about the money.'

‘Well, what the fuck is it about then?'

‘Just let me deal with the idea of it first.'

‘It seems pretty simple to me, Elaine. Do you want to stay there?'

‘No – I don't know.'

‘Okay then. So you want to come back?'

‘No – I mean, I don't know. Look, if I do sell, I want Patty to get the greater cut.'

‘What are you
saying
?'

‘I want her to take my half share. I'll take her quarter. I'll sign over.'

‘That's not how Serena wanted it—'

‘It's how I want it. Look, I'll call you.'

‘No. You're not disappearing on me again. I'll call
you
, day after tomorrow. You better have an answer then. What's your number?'

‘I don't have one.'

‘You don't have a phone in your house? Is that what you're saying? You don't have a—'

‘I
do
. I can't talk on it – I mean, I can't talk in privacy. I want this to be private.'

‘Well, get a cell phone then. Jesus, you can afford one!'

‘I don't want a cell phone. Look, I'll call you. Soon. I promise.'

On these night walks I often wondered about Mrs Donegan. If she'd taken this or that route. I brought us ways that I thought would feel safe to a woman her age: village to village, the smaller housing estates, the well-lit main road. I followed in what may well have been her footsteps, watched my dog cock his leg over old stains that may well have been left by her dog. Yet only once did I ever sense her. I was standing on the high road that looks down on the far side of Arlow's valley; everything that was usually behind me, spread out before me there: the outline of the upper pathways that run above Hoxton's bridge; the rooftops and chimney stacks from the frontline of our houses. The back view of the motorway flyover. Up there it was still the country, a faint smell of silage from the convent's farmlands, the joined hands of trees on the unlit road praying into a narrowing perspective. And as I looked
down, picking out landmarks, I could feel her there, standing behind me.

The nights can feel endless now. I listen to the symphony of snoring coming up through the ceiling of my father's room and try to remember if I ever heard him snore when I was a child. I get up and walk around the house. If my eyes aren't too tired, I might read. I get back into bed and count my breaths to a hundred. I get up and walk around again.

I give in and take a pill and then I sleep and then I dream. And when I wake it's morning and time to start over.

 

When I dream of a place, it's usually New York. The long, hard shadows above me, the side streets where a piece of light can occasionally fall like something lost out of a pocket. And the sky is a geometric pattern cut according to the rooftops of buildings. If they are buildings. They could be something else, of course –
I
could be something else. A mouse or a vole, maybe, zigzagging through the maze of trenches, sniffing for a familiar gap to squeeze through, never looking up because the cut-out sky is too far away to make any real difference to my tiny life.

 

When I dream about people, I dream about Agatha. I see her in all sorts of scenarios; I speak to her. Sometimes I can't see her at all,
but I know she's the one who is leading me. She takes me by the hand and tells me to watch my step. I hear her laugh; I smell grown-up perfume and ask her about it. ‘My mother,' she says, ‘sent it from London.'

I smell a heavy stench of tobacco on her hair: it smells of wood and nuts and dirty socks.

‘Maggie,' she tells me. ‘One of her French cigarettes.'

But I know the scent of Maggie's cigarettes. ‘Liar,' I say, ‘on both counts.'

She laughs, and then we both laugh.

In my dream, everything is dark but I feel the sun on my face so I know it can't be night-time. Around me, I hear the sound of bottles clinking in plastic bags. There are other voices. Giddy voices. Boys, girls. The path is rough and slopes down; ahead is the sound of a river. The smell of hash already burning. Behind us, a whinny from a horse. Nearly there, Agatha says and squeezes my hand, nearly there.

 

6

Summer Past

June

TWICE A WEEK AGATHA
is allowed to come on a visit; twice more she's allowed to call on the phone. The days in between won't go away. Time will not budge: time is a big fat hippo stuck in a mud wallow. On such days, not even her journal can console her. She flicks back over the pages and finds it hard to believe that since coming out of hospital, so many days could have come and already be gone.

Agatha stays for exactly one hour – the hour between Elaine's afternoon nap and her evening medication. Those are the rules, her mother says, like it or lump it. For the moment she likes it. Elaine knows that in another few days she will be allowed to cross the road to visit Agatha and that when Rachel Shillman comes home from school next week it will be just like old times, the three of them in their own private capsule, sealed against the rest of the
neighbourhood. Three girls, three houses, three back gardens until, without her mother really noticing, the restrictions will have gradually loosened into a general hanging around: the cul-de-sac, the wider neighbourhood, the riverbank, the valley. She feels a change coming on, a sense of something broadening, and wonders if it has to do with the new girl moving into the Osbornes' old house.