When the World Was Steady (6 page)

When they came to the end of the river bed, she thought the car-park could not be far. But the path through the bottle-green woods went on forever, and the gentle slope was more difficult for Emmy’s exhausted body to negotiate than the sheer drops had been. Her knees buckled at every step. Her trousers caked to her legs with drying mud and sweat. And back in the sunlight, it was hot.

As they neared the car-park, Buddy picked a small, velvet blue flower. ‘Your reward,’ he said, pressing it on Emmy.

Instead of the agitation his attentions had provoked on the mountaintop, Emmy now felt like slapping him. When he turned away, she crushed the flower underfoot.

Max was in the car-park before them, gulping Fanta. He was talking to K’tut the driver, who blew smoke rings into the noon air.

‘Emmy, you’ll have lunch, yeah?’ Max asked.

‘I don’t know. I guess.’

‘You don’t have anywhere to be this arvo?’

‘Not unless I want to.’

‘Great. Buddy, Emmy’s coming with.’

His overtures to Emmy clearly at an end, Buddy twitched in barely perceptible assent, and climbed on to the bus without a word.

On the road, everyone slept. K’tut steered the rolling, lumbering bus like a glass ship, careful not to disrupt slumber. Emmy dreamed she was still climbing, but not afraid; the lake, instead of far below her, was all around. She was climbing through a silent azure sea and she was at peace.

Only K’tut and Wayan were awake when she opened her eyes. Even Gdé was dozing, bolt upright, his head snapping with the bumps in the road. She did not know how long she had been asleep but she could see clearly that they were no longer near Penelokan or Kintamani. Everything was different; richer, greener. The dirt was black. There were paddies in the distance, and sometimes right next to the road. She made her way to the front of the bus.

‘Excuse me, K’tut, but where are we?’

He chewed on an unlit cigarette. ‘Almost home. Almost at the Monkey Forest. We stop for lunch in the Monkey Forest, Buddy says.’

Ubud, then. She could have smacked Max: he must have known. Spoilt child. Spoilt children, father and son both. Even as Pod, her daughter wouldn’t have behaved this way. Or maybe she would; Emmy couldn’t be sure any more.

She sat back down and watched the forest grow up around the bus and heard the screaming, chattering of the monkeys’ assault coming from all sides, and then the thud of one landing on the roof. It wasn’t, perhaps, so bad. It wasn’t, perhaps, wrong just to let things happen.

The sun was already casting long shadows: it was well into the afternoon. All her muscles tingled and some twitched of their own accord. She was famished. She shut her eyes and imagined all the things she would like to eat for lunch, starting with
saté
.

W
HEN
V
IRGINIA ROUNDED
the corner on to her street, she saw her mother hoisting the evening paper up to their second-floor window in a basket on a rope. A young man stood on the pavement, awaiting payment, or thanks, or something; but as soon as Mrs Simpson had the basket in hand, she flipped it inside, withdrew her grey head and slammed the sash.

Virginia didn’t like it when her mother imposed on neighbours, but foisting errands on to unsuspecting strangers was beyond the pale. And then not paying for her paper! Besides, Virginia had a copy of the
Evening Standard
in her bag, a little oily, perhaps, with the remains of her lunch, but perfectly readable.

By the time Virginia got upstairs, Mrs Simpson was settled at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and the tabloid spread in front of her. She didn’t look up as she said, ‘You’re late tonight.’

‘I walked.’

‘Your ankles will swell, with this heat.’

Virginia looked down at her thin stovepipe calves. She didn’t really
have
ankles. Never had. Couldn’t matter if they swelled.

‘Busy day, Mum?’

‘Are they ever?’

‘I bought some haddock.’

‘I’ve been in all day, you know. And I had biscuits for tea just now.’

‘Mother, you’re not
supposed
to.’

‘Supposed to, supposed to! Virginia, I could die tomorrow. Aren’t you out this evening?’

‘The meeting’s not till nine, because Angelica’s working late this week. She’s on holiday from next Monday.’

‘Speaking of holiday?’

‘I’ve told you. I just don’t know. Simon’s off starting next week, Selina the week after, which has the office almost empty …’

Mrs Simpson sucked her dentures loudly and rustled the newspaper pages in exasperation. Virginia noticed that her mother’s bosom was uneven.

‘Mum,’ she said, reaching out to adjust the prostheses through her mother’s silky blouse, ‘they’re lopsided.’

Mrs Simpson slapped her daughter’s hands away. ‘I’m not going out, thank you very much. And I don’t believe we’re expecting company. So if I choose to have one breast rakishly higher than the other I would thank you to leave me alone. Now go and water the plants.’

Virginia took the key to the downstairs flat and left her mother rocking slightly in the fading light, glasses slipped to the end of her nose, arms crossed protectively over her chest.

It was Mrs Simpson who had volunteered to water their neighbour’s flowers while the woman and her boy were visiting family in Sweden, but of course it was Virginia who had to do the work. In the unusually hot summer, Mrs Simpson—Melody to her friends, an oddly soft name for so hard a woman—barely moved from her chair. She had even given up on the shopping. All the neighbours were asking after her. She had taken to accosting passing acquaintances and even strangers, from the window, and sending them on errands, the proceeds of which she hauled up in the basket. She had even set up a little winch on the
window-ledge to facilitate ups and downs.

Mrs Reece from two doors down had told Virginia that her mother was now lowering Bella, the tabby, in the basket, and then lowering the keys to stunned pedestrians in order that they might let Bella in again. It was only a matter of time, Mrs Reece pointed out, till Melody let the keys into the hands of hooligans who would take advantage.

Was it the heat that was making her mother so eccentric? Virginia’s mother had rarely made scenes in public, a fact for which Virginia had always been grateful. She wasn’t sure how she felt about living with a local oddity.

She considered these things as she doused the houseplants. So many worries clamoured for her attention. Her mother’s sudden insanity wasn’t the only thing. There was this issue of the summer holiday. Mrs Simpson had always been content with a week of having Virginia at home and possibly a couple of days with cousins in East Anglia, or at the most a weekend in Hastings or Brighton—and once, in a time of great daring, Cornwall. Now she had taken it into her head that she wanted to go to Scotland for a week. And, not one for half measures, she insisted that Edinburgh was very nice but barely Scotland: she meant the Hebrides. She wanted to go to Skye.

Her people—Virginia’s people too—were from Skye on her mother’s side, and Melody wanted to see the place again after more than forty years. Virginia didn’t know how to respond. She thought at first the whim would pass, but it didn’t. Like the other strangenesses, it grew in her mother over the weeks, and hardened. Whenever the subject came up, Mrs Simpson’s eyes got a glitter to them and her chin set itself tight.

And then there was the office: everything there was in a state of disarray, initiated in part by Virginia’s half-formed decision—taken after three halves of cider in the pub around the corner on the occasion, two months previously, of Martin, the assistant’s
birthday—that she was infatuated with Simon Ramsbottom, her colleague for over seven years, her direct superior for six months, and a married man.

How or why she had allowed this to happen she could not now recall. Love—or its shadow—had been excised long ago from the range of her emotions, after the trouble, the bad time in her youth. She had, for all of a decade now, settled her substantial share of love on God, to whom it rightly belonged. That a smidgen of it, however tiny, should have slipped from her control and latched on to Simon was bewildering and regrettable, and not simply as a point of principle. She knew that Simon could sense her growing confusion, and she knew also that her behaviour was distinctly unprofessional. Sometimes she would be discussing forthcoming interviews with him, or the progress of new staff, when suddenly she would picture him naked in his chair and imagine that she heard him crooning softly to her to climb over the desk. Whereupon she would lose track of the conversation and blush violently, whether more from the titillation or the horror of the fantasy she was never sure. Truth be told, she had never found Simon in the least
physically
attractive: he was squat and runcible and slightly foolish. Which made it all the more upsetting that she couldn’t get him off her mind.

She had not sinned in anything but thought, and had been praying hard for the restitution of her reason. Everyone—or at least all the women—in her Bible study meetings had been praying too. She had contemplated talking to her minister about it, but felt there would be something odd about a woman of her age and prominence in the church discussing love with the timid Reverend, whose fire was only for God and only in the pulpit, as it should be. Her mother, if she told her, would only hiss and roll her eyes and say ‘poppycock’ to the lot of it, torments and all, the way she said ‘poppycock’ and ‘balderdash’ to God.

‘If there was a God,’ Mrs Simpson would say when asked and
only then, ‘You, Virginia, would be married, and Emmy would still be married, and your father would still be living, and the world wouldn’t be warring and starving to death.’ She always said this with a certain amount of satisfaction and sucking of her teeth, as though to imply that she was perfectly content that all these things were so and that she would rather have them that way than contend with her Maker.

As things stood, Virginia confided very little in her mother. Summer always prompted irritation and distance between them, but this month of June, so hot and anxious, was particularly bad. And not half over yet.

The television was, as every night, audible on the landing when Virginia got back upstairs. Her mother now sat bathed in the set’s blue light with a tumbler of whisky against her knee.

‘You’re not
supposed
to,’ Virginia almost said, but what was the point? Mother was right, she might die tomorrow, and what would the comment do but cause friction? She was resigned to her mother dying unsaved, as resigned, that is, as a good Christian can be, but she did not like the thought that her mother might die while she and Virginia were in the midst of a tiff. For this reason bad terms were to be avoided as often as possible. This said, Mrs Simpson had not shown any signs of ill health, not a day of it, since her double mastectomy many, many years before, for what had proved to be benign tumours anyway.

As she fried the haddock, Virginia alternated between anticipation and despondency: anticipation at the prospect of her meeting, and a feeling akin to despair over her mother’s silence, a despair she knew to be unreasonable—her mother had always been and would always be moody—but couldn’t help.

‘It’s not a fish I much like, haddock,’ was the first thing Mrs Simpson said. ‘Fish does make the flat smell.’

This was too much. ‘If you would do some shopping, Mother, which you are perfectly capable of, you might find—’

‘I was going to say, if you had let me finish, that for all that you’ve cooked it very nicely. I’m quite enjoying it.’

‘Thank you.’

‘It’s odd about smells,’ Mrs Simpson said. ‘They’re so strong in the heat. I’ve never thought of old Bella smelling, but lately there’s a real animal smell around. Have you noticed?’

Virginia waited. It was bound to be a complaint about something.

‘No? It’s mostly in the daytime of course, so you wouldn’t. When the sun streams in. I thought maybe there was a dead mouse somewhere.’

‘Don’t be absurd! We’ve lived in this building ten years and we’ve never had a mouse. In south London, after the war, we had mice. But not here. Unless you think they’re crawling out of Regent’s Park or down from the Heath and climbing up our stairwell? Maybe cadging a ride in the basket?’

This was Virginia’s first real remark about the basket, and her mother chose to ignore it. After a pause she said, ‘The other thing I thought, Virginia, is that maybe the smell is
me
. I don’t know whether suddenly, with all this heat, I haven’t begun to smell
old
. The whiff of death on me, you know? Like old people’s homes or flats where old ladies live alone. Old ladies like me.’

‘If that’s what you think, maybe you’d better start bathing more often.’ Virginia said this as lightly as she could. But her mother’s comment seemed a breach of the decorum that kept them both going. Mortality was not an open subject, or certainly Virginia had always assumed it was not. ‘I’ll believe in the dead mouse before I can accept that kind of nonsense. I’ve got to go, Mum, or I’ll be late.’

‘Your book’s by the front door,’ Mrs Simpson said. She never called it a Bible, always ‘a book’, or ‘the book’, with no hint of a capital letter. ‘I’ll do the washing-up.’

The Bible study group to which Virginia belonged met once a
week on Wednesdays in the flat of a secretary named Angelica Trumbull, just up the road from Chalk Farm tube station and only a few minutes’ walk from the Simpsons’ in Primrose Hill. Although it was ostensibly an ecumenical meeting, everyone who attended regularly was affiliated with the Church of England, and, more than that, with St Luke’s church in Belsize Park. The exception was a young Hindu student who had arrived in Britain less than a year before; he lived downstairs from Angelica and occasionally sat in on the meetings just for company. In his mid-twenties—like Angelica—he was subject to some scrutiny by the others in the group, several of whom were convinced he was paying court to his hostess.

Virginia, who had actually taken a little time to talk to Nikhil, was not of this contingent. She found in him a sensitive and lonely soul and she entertained hopes of awakening him to the miracle of Christian fellowship, although she did concede that to date he was more interested in the general conversation and the cakes and coffee than in any discussion of the gospel.