I find it quite quickly, in the cupboard behind the TV. Cloth-bound, a navy blue album, each page masked in crisp yellow-tinted plastic. I know this is the right volume because I recognise some of the clothes: the tight green jeans with the zip at the ankle, the oversized grandpa shirt, collarless, in wafer-thin striped cotton. I sit on the floor flipping through the pages, the blood buzzing in my ears.
Here they are, all for me, the four of them, leading their busy interesting lives: in London, mostly, crowded around dining tables and lolling in deck chairs in narrow city gardens; and holidaying somewhere on the Mediterranean, to judge by the beaches and ruins and meals eaten overlooking the harbour. (Ah. Now I remember the legacy of that Greek holiday, taken at the start of that summer: the tan and the freckles, the blonde streaks she told me she had encouraged by combing lemon juice through her hair, the Stowe schoolboy who was sending her mix tapes.)
The Hall family archive, as artfully curated as these things always are: a painstaking construction of picnics and birthday cakes, white teeth and raised glasses, national landmarks and Christmas tinsel. No room here for insults hurled upstairs and slammed doors, the moments when people lie on their bed wishing everyone else was dead, though surely the Halls had their share of these too. Looking through Emma’s collection, I’m struck by how little these pictures have in common with the photographs people take now, the casual why-not off-the-cuff snaps of people yawning or laughing or mucking around. Emma’s parents saved their film for shots that stood a good chance and that mattered. The times when the light was right and people were still and formal, conscious of the moment, already colluding in its artifice.
There’s only one picture that I can confidently identify as coming from that August at Jassop: Emma and Lucy out in a field with Mrs Pugh’s dog, a wire-haired terrier (I can’t recall its name). Two tall healthy-looking girls in plimsolls, obediently maintaining their smiles. Tolerant of the attention, at ease with it.
Go on then, hurry up and take it before my face falls off.
Frustrated by the coarse grain of the print, I look closely at Emma’s expression. Was this at the beginning of the fortnight, or the end? How can I tell? But then I remember, and my eye goes to her wrist, and I see it isn’t there, and I know it must have been taken that final afternoon, before their father drove them back to their real lives in London. That’s how I can tell.
I lean over the photograph, summoning up the things I cannot see in it, the things it will not tell me, longing to steal it, to tear back the plastic film and rip the little square off the once-sticky ribs that held it in place all these years; and then I shut the pages and put the album back where I found it. Who will open it next? No one else will search for that picture. It will never mean as much to anyone else as it does to me.
I think of Christopher and Cecily as enormous sprawling adolescents, mockingly paging through the album:
God, Mum, look at your hair
. A joke, a comical fragment from the unimportant past, the time before them.
I wonder if Emma ever stalks her younger self as I stalk mine, full of rage and pity.
I have an appetite for it now, and I go through the room with new zeal, sorting and lifting and turning over, peering into the china bowls and wooden boxes, and finding buttons and memory sticks and the key to the small filing cabinet. The bank statements suggest things are a little bleaker than Emma had indicated, but then it’s just product warranties, utility bills, the wedding and birth certificates, the passports in their funky covers. Nothing more of interest there or in the hall cupboard or in the pile of recent post left out by the toaster.
Disconsolate, I stand in the hall, gazing into the badly lit aperture jumbled with the shadows of backpacks and trainers; and then, because there’s nothing else, I pick out the black shoebox, its lid discarded to one side. It’s from an expensive store, spilling layers of peony-pink tissue paper, proof that she’s really trying tonight. The receipt is tucked into the tissue: an online purchase from last week, full price.
It’s not much, this curl of paper, but it’ll have to do. I walk around the house with it, deciding where to leave it, struck by how little room there is here for Emma’s history: Ben, Christopher and Cecily demand her absolute commitment to the present, as if her past is somehow a threat to their future. All those busy, healthy, confident years, the Brownie badges and tennis coaching and swimming galas, the house captaincy, the university theatre productions and the column in the student rag, the work placements and rapid promotions. The boys and men, the dates and declarations. The sense that it all must be leading, inexorably, to something. And now this. Was it always leading here, I wonder: to teetering piles of laundry, to teaching yourself to joint a chicken, to never running out of milk? Was it?
When I’ve found a place to leave the receipt I go upstairs to check on the children, holding my breath as the door catches and drags on the carpet of Cecily’s room; but she’s deeply asleep, surrendered to it as only babies can be (a long-lost memory of switching on the light to put away Sophie’s clean vests and tights). I stand by the cot for a few moments, watching her chest rise and fall while I listen to her breathing. It’s a small but forceful and ancient sound, and it reminds me of what you hear when you press a conch to your ear, a noise that is partly your own heart beating, and partly the sound of the ocean, the pull of the moon. The rhythms beneath the surface, the mysterious rhythms that thread us all together.
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
Hate can do that, too.
She’s so very little. Her tiny fists like seashells.
Next door, Christopher’s flat on his back, one white foot poking out beyond the duvet. I retrieve the beaker – it’s empty, he must have finished it after I said goodnight – and take it downstairs and wash it up, and then I go back into the sitting room and set a few more marbles rolling,
click, click, click
, while I wait for Emma and Ben to come home.
I wasn’t going to mention it, but in the end she’s a little tipsy from the wine and the excitement of being back in the world – drunk with success and relief – so I think:
why not
. I suppose I’m testing her, sure she’ll fail, banking on it; and yet perhaps part of me (a small foolish part) hopes to be surprised.
Ben is helping me into my coat, and I flip my hair over the collar and pretend to be snagged by an afterthought, pointing at the framed photograph on the bookshelf: ‘Let me guess: your parents, Emma?’
How strongly Christopher resembles his grandfather, I say, as she picks up the frame and examines it, as if she hasn’t noticed it for a while.
‘Really?’ she says. So I appeal to Ben, who tells me he never knew them; they both died before he and Emma got together.
‘Ah, that’s a shame,’ I say, and I find the news takes me aback: those two pleasant-looking people, Andrew and Ginnie, glimpsed briefly through hedges and kitchen windows, or in the distance on the marsh, wearing hats against the sun and whistling for the grandmother’s terrier.
It wasn’t that Emma told me much about them; she didn’t. But they were there, behind the things she said. Mild, involved, interested. She took them for granted, and that fascinated me as much as anything else. I’m surprised by how the news affects me.
While we’re saying goodbye, she invites us for supper.
‘That would be fun,’ I say, and then I step out into the night. For some reason, as I walk, I find myself thinking about the marble run.
Click, click, click.
Now our evenings are a little more structured, now Cecily’s going down pretty heavily at seven, there’s absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t have some people over for dinner. Who would go with Nina and Charles? I spend a few days agonising over this, and then Ben gets tired of my indecision and says, ‘They’re not upholstery. They’re not
curtains
, for God’s sake,’ and I’m glad he’s making jokes, I’m glad he’s forgiven me for the shoes, so I invite Fran and Luke, and Patience (an ex-colleague, I haven’t seen her for ages) and her partner Rob. Everyone’s up for it, though I know they’ll all be doing the mental maths:
please let this be worth the expense of the babysitter
. No pressure, then.
‘Do you want to do your beef thing?’ I ask Ben one evening during the commercial break.
‘What beef thing?’
‘You know, the beef thing. Everyone likes that. I’m pretty sure Fran and Luke haven’t had it.’
He says OK, he’ll do the beef thing.
When Christopher is at playgroup and Cecily is napping or chewing toys, I hurriedly go through cookbooks and google recipes. I compile shopping lists, thinking about salads and soups and puddings. I ring the window cleaner. I iron the wedding-list tablecloth and napkins. I buy some Silvo and tear up an old shirt of Ben’s for rags.
Eat your heart out Mrs Dalloway
, I think, as I polish the candlesticks, rubbing and rubbing as the shine is revealed, as the tarnish transfers to the cloth.
Last Christmas, as part of our economy drive (the end of the Royal Academy membership and the organic veg-box scheme; the beginning of my obsession with BOGOFs and discount codes and ebay and ‘reduced’ stickers) we told our cleaner Magda that we had to let her go. Though Ben never quite articulated it, I know he expected me to take over on that front – after all, I’m at home all day, aren’t I? With nothing much to do? – but what with one thing and another, things have gone to pot. So now I attempt to be systematic about it, moving furniture and rugs around to reveal drifts of dust, running a cloth along the window sills, taking up the sofa cushions and shoving the Hoover nozzle deep into its recesses, listening to the subsequent rattles and clatters with a mixture of satisfaction and dread.
It’s a fairly superficial transformation, and it only lasts until Christopher gets home and upends his crate of cars – which also contains lolly sticks, crumbs and hard nuggets of Play-Doh – on the rug. I stand over him, my arms crossed, and I don’t say any of the things I want to say. I just say, ‘Time to wash your hands for tea.’
On the Saturday morning I leave the house quite early, just before nine, and I drive to the supermarket ahead of the rush, cutting down the bright empty aisles with my trolley and my list, scoring things off, efficiently charting my progress. Afterwards, when I’ve stashed the groceries in the boot, I dart through to the high street in search of a florist. It’s a shining blue morning, full of the racket of awnings being pulled down in readiness for the promised sun, the hiss of espresso machines, the chink and clamour as trays of steaming china are removed from industrial dishwashers. I step around a street-sweeper’s broom and the soapy spill left by a window cleaner’s bucket.
Outside the cafés, the tables are slowly filling up: people reading papers, admiring strangers’ spaniels, commenting on the weather. There’s something so optimistic about being out first thing on an early summer’s day: the air softening and the definite shadows shrinking as the sun soars up and up. I’m poised to cross the road towards the florist when something catches my eye: it’s a shop sign being flipped from ‘closed’ to ‘open’. In the window, a gilded merry-go-round horse is mid-canter, eyes rolling, hooves suspended over an artificial daisy lawn. For a moment, I’m transported: the wheeze and skirl of the calliope; the scent of frying onions and burning sugar; strings of coloured bulbs against a stormy sky. The cheapness of dreams back then.
The bell chimes as I push the door and step inside.
It’s one of those lifestyle emporiums, the point where brass neck meets hard currency: old street signs, vintage cash registers lined up on a ‘60s sideboard, a basket of knitted owls, a pharmacist’s cabinet, Parker Knoll chairs upholstered in a natty fabric. Candles poured into china cups picked up from the local hospice shop, now priced at £15. The smell of a reed diffuser (‘Nantucket’, perhaps, or ‘Provence’) and lavender soap.
A woman with a mug in her hand says good morning, dipping her head to turn on the iPod. Supper jazz, of course.
Oh, this is ludicrous
, I think, wandering around, picking up things – pop-guns, felt-cupcake key rings, funky Italian bottle openers – and pausing in front of the row of polished wooden lasts, the collection of glass jelly moulds.
Ridiculous
, I think, unable to stop myself picturing two or three of the moulds back at Carmody Street: displayed on a kitchen shelf, perhaps, or on the landing windowsill. I bend forward to flip over a price tag and then drop it, fast.
Seeing the movement, the shop assistant leans over the counter and says, ‘Can I help you with anything?’ For a moment, I hesitate, half-tempted by my shame, and then I remember what Ben said when he found the receipt for those shoes, and I say, ‘No thanks, I’m just browsing.’
In the end, because I’m out (and who is he to tell me not to?), I buy a pair of yellow socks with bumblebees on the toes for Cecily, and a pocket-sized kaleidoscope for Christopher.
‘That’s £22.98,’ says the woman behind the counter.
‘Thank you,’ I say, as she hands me my credit card and the paper bag patterned with Edwardian puddings: blancmanges, trifles, syllabubs in fluted dishes.
When I get home, Christopher is bug-eyed in front of cartoons, Cecily needs a change and Ben is laid out on the sofa reading the
Guardian
magazine. He glances up and says, ‘Ah, good, you’re back. I’ll jump in the bath.’
I go into the kitchen and clear a space on the table, between the cereal bowls and the butter, where I can drop the flowers, and then I start to make as much noise as I can, dragging in the bags from the hall, slamming plates into the dishwasher, banging cupboard doors and turning the taps on so that I’m drenched in spray. When the sink is full, I shut off the water and hear the sound of Ben hopping upstairs, and the bathroom door closing, and with that I feel some relief, even if it also feels like a cauterisation of sorts: give it up, there’s no point in hoping he’ll understand how you feel.