Far below me, low in the ground, there’s the distant hum of the Northern Line, a vibration conducted through the layers of ancient compacted earth – layers of sand and mud and clay studded with bones, oyster shells and fragments of pottery, things that people once held precious – before it shivers up into the matchstick foundations of our house, its joists and floorboards, its window frames and door jambs. Feeling the vibration, I think of the illuminated metal cylinders speeding through the tunnels carved into the dirt, the travellers inside them, pushed up against each other, gently swaying together as the blind tracks curve.
Ben hates this, when he notices it. I love it. It reminds me we’re still part of something.
I could shout. I could call for him, and when he came, I could ask him to switch on the radio and turn off the light. I could say, ‘Any chance of that tea?’
She wriggles a little, flinging out her arm, brushing my jaw with her fingers. I feel the tiny laceration of her nails on my neck.
As the pumpkins and the glass baubles come and go in the shop windows, as we sink deeper into the dark wet winter, I see her in the distance from time to time: toiling behind the double buggy in the drizzle, hood pulled over her hair; being expelled from the park as the gates are locked at dusk. Sometimes I toy with the idea of catching up with her and saying hello, inspecting her at closer range, but I never do. Watching her is enough, for now. I can see how she’s feeling: the tiredness, the loneliness. I almost feel sorry for her.
Despite the plug-in heater and the fingerless gloves and the paint-spattered kettle, the studio is so cold by mid-afternoon that I’m not very productive. Bright mornings, when the sun falls on this side of the building, are better, more stimulating: dazzling air inside and out. I’m still working on the Jassop paintings. Charles, who comes to the studio every few weeks for a companionable inspection, is very struck by them. ‘So this is Kent, is it?’ he asks one Sunday morning, moving around in front of the canvases, examining them, one by one. ‘The place where you lived in your teens? How odd that you’ve started thinking about it now.’
‘Maybe it’s something to do with Sophie,’ I say, easily. ‘When we lived there, I was around the same age as she is now. Maybe that’s why. But it’s only an idea of Jassop, really. A fragment of a memory. I can’t really remember that much about it. We weren’t there for very long.’
‘Was that before or after Oxfordshire?’ he asks, and I say
after
, it was the house my father bought with the proceeds of
Crazy Paving
, when my mother was on her self-sufficiency jag, when she wanted a garden full of sweetpeas and redcurrant bushes, some space for her looms.
There was another reason why we moved away from Oxfordshire and though I’ve never felt any particular need to share this with Charles I doubt whether he’d be surprised by it. That was the house that my father began to leave. Before long, he was always away, in London and Los Angeles; sometimes when I asked where he was this week, my mother didn’t seem to be entirely sure; and then there were the times when I’d answer the phone in the hall and no one would speak, and the silence would build and accumulate, an avid sort of silence caught in the tight coils of cord. Someone listening quite patiently while I said again and again, ‘Hello? Hello, who’s there?’ And then after a few seconds, the connection would be cut. ‘Who was that?’ my mother would call, and – unsure of why I was lying, but knowing a lie was necessary – I’d call back, ‘Wrong number.’
Sometimes my mother must have taken these calls, though she never mentioned them to me. Standing in the hall, the receiver grasped like a duty, a punishment. ‘Hello? Who’s that? Is anyone there?’
When my father eventually came home, with carrier bags full of Duty Free scent and cigarettes, and packs of Hershey’s Kisses for me, there would be a few days’ grace, and then I would start to catch hold of the edge of arguments, arguments taking place behind closed doors when I was meant to be asleep or out or doing my homework. Mostly I would hear my mother’s wild emotional indiscipline, but if I listened for long enough I would hear the sore, sour sound of my father.
And then the house was put up for sale, and we moved to Jassop, and the phone calls stopped, for a while at least.
‘She kept her spinning wheel and her looms in the attic,’ I tell Charles, ‘and when he was at home he was always in the drawing room, on the piano, or the telephone – so it wasn’t exactly a surprise when they split up. It was a lovely house, though, the oldest bit of it was in the Domesday Book. Or at least, that’s what they told me.’
As I say it, I remember stepping from the hot garden into the little porch, its pegs hung with mildewy macs, and then passing down into the thankful chill of the kitchen, the soft cold flagstones underfoot, the striped roller-towel on the range rail, the china sink capillaried with pale blue, the paper bags of sugar and flour leaning into each other on the pantry shelves. One particularly deep cupboard had mesh panels in the door: the meat safe, where not so long before game birds and joints of beef and lamb were stored.
‘We could go and have a look around one weekend,’ he suggests. ‘Book a hotel. See the marsh churches. What do you think?’
‘Might be fun,’ I say, but I don’t want to go back. I never have. This is as close as I want to get: the thick streaks and smears and beads of paint, bands of colour, the sky, the light. Nothing too specific. I remember long afternoons – always hot, always indolent with heat – spent in the garden at Jassop, making the snapdragons snap while the pansies (‘kitten faces’, my mother called them) trembled in the breeze, and I remember that feeling of waiting for something to happen. Something exciting or marvellous. I knew it was on its way. I didn’t know what form it would take, but I knew it was coming.
My bedroom was under the eaves, with a low sloping ceiling. No door handle, just a wooden latch. Pale yellow walls, a blue coverlet on the bed. When I was little I’d made a family of clay owls which my mother had helped me to glaze and fire (five or six of them, in waistcoats and aprons and spectacles), and even as a teenager I liked to see them there on the windowsill, set out in order of size, looking out owlishly towards the sea.
I wonder what happened to the owl family. Probably my mother has them still, in a shoebox at the back of a cupboard. The arrowheads of their sculpted feathers. The sharp little nibs of their beaks.
‘Let’s walk over to Hampstead for a coffee,’ Charles is saying, so I tidy up, putting some sketches in the plan chest, and as I do so I pause for a moment as the manila envelope slides into view. My hand goes out to it, and then I put the papers on top of it and close the drawer.
We leave the studio, passing Casey – who runs an internet operation from a unit on the same floor, selling imported Japanese sports drinks and energy bars – in the dim concrete stairwell. The noise of our footsteps chases us down into the cold street. I do not think of the envelope, nor the white-bordered Instamatic snaps it contains; inexpertly and pretentiously composed, speckled with the leaky bleached stars of accidental exposure. The blacks bleeding into the reds.
Ben’s father Dirk comes out to greet us, his mustard corduroy trousers a beacon in the dusk, his mouth opening and shutting as the headlights sweep over him and the naked lady in the hostas before coming to rest on the double garage. There’s a moment of silence when Ben switches off the engine, and then the baby wakes up and I reach out for the handle.
‘Emma, splendid, how was the traffic?’ he’s saying, striding towards me, his hands flapping out to seize my waist. I intercept them just in time, grabbing his fingers, glad I remembered. Here’s Christopher, shyly stumbling up behind me, Blue Bunny dangling by one ear. Dirk greets him rather perfunctorily, then turns with more enthusiasm to Ben, wanting to know about the sat-nav and the bypass.
Ben brandishes the car seat containing Dirk’s granddaughter. This is their second meeting; Dirk and Peggy came to see me in hospital, bringing yellow flowers. But Dirk has other things on his mind. ‘Yes, it’s new,’ he says, gesturing expansively at the silver Audi estate parked in its own special spotlight on the gravel, as if we’ve all been clustering around, clamouring questions. ‘Trade-in. John Brethwick made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Miles to the gallon, it makes sense, had it a fortnight, haven’t had to fill it up once.’
Dirk was in shipping insurance and claims to be retained, in some capacity, as an ad-hoc consultant. Secretly I find it hard to believe that his firm is a willing participant in this arrangement: I imagine the smoke-signals from the front desk on the days when he drops in to the huge redbrick HQ off Holborn, the PAs on high alert, the bigwigs suddenly remembering critical meetings on the fifth floor. Dirk buttonholing clerks by the water-cooler, passing on the benefit of his wisdom and experience. He’s a man of infinite butterfly interests: opinions on everything, though they vary from day to day, and sometimes from hour to hour, depending on whether he has been absorbing data from the
Spectator
or the
Today
programme or a copy of Peggy’s
Daily Mail
. For Dirk, the important thing is having an opinion. Its particular flavour matters less.
‘You’ll see we’ve had a new alarm system put in,’ he says, indicating a box on the wall under the eaves, but at this Cecily starts to twist and whimper in her harness so I say, ‘I think I’d better—’ and almost reluctantly he says of course, come on into the warm, Peggy’s getting tea ready, there’s still some Christmas cake left.
I wouldn’t mind feeding Cecily in the sitting room, just to get up his nose, but when I say she’s hungry Peggy tells me she has popped us in the Blue Bedroom, it’s all set up, I should find everything I need up there. So I put Cecily over my shoulder and go upstairs, along an acre of olive carpet illuminated by dim glazed wall sconces in the shape of scallops, and lie down with her on the bed, on the slippery periwinkle bedspread, because the chair by the window has no armrests.
While Cecily feeds, I work through the pile of Christmas round robins that have been left out for us (although the pond-water illumination cast by the squat little ceramic bedside lamp, with its pleated shade, does not make this easy). For all the wrong reasons I love these letters. I love the ludicrous spectacle of strangers’ lives artlessly set out for my delectation: the foreign holidays, the house extensions (‘we finally got rid of the builders!’), the silver-wedding celebrations and theatre trips to Stratford-upon-Avon. Cynthia and Derek are learning Portuguese! Kathy and Malcolm have bought a camper van! Berenice has moved to Wales!
And yet, beneath it all, it’s clear that a displacement is taking place. Peggy and Dirk’s friends are now defining themselves through their grandchildren’s achievements: the art prizes and choral scholarships, the A-stars and Russell Group offers.
Something is pushing them to the side of their own lives
. I put down the letters and feel the chord reverberating, and I resolve to be kinder this visit. More patient, more understanding. Nicer.
Sated, Cecily rolls off me, her cheek flushed and shiny with milk.
I will be good
, I think.
Downstairs, Dirk is showing off his new electric curtains (gizmo was a special offer at the back of the
Telegraph
magazine, he couldn’t resist), zapping them with a remote control, revealing and then hiding the spotlit lawn, the bare trees and birdbath, the topiary hens – themselves an excuse, I’ve always suspected, for the chainsaw.
‘What do you make of that, eh, Christopher?’ he says, over the high-pitched whine of the motor, making the sprigged curtains dance and sway: open, shut, open. ‘Clever, isn’t it?’
Christopher, hypnotised, transfixed with longing, puts out his hand.
‘Better not, old chum,’ Dirk says breezily. ‘Delicate mechanism. Not a toy, I’m afraid.’ He zaps the curtains so the view vanishes, and pops the remote on the highest bookshelf, next to the row of military history.
That’s that.
Peggy hands me my tea and admires Cecily in a rudimentary fashion: all very arms’ length. ‘What an absolute dear she is,’ she calls as she returns to the kitchen. ‘Would you like some Christmas cake, Emma?’
I would, and I deserve it, but I can’t cope with Cecily, hot tea and tiny plate (nor, indeed, the uncontrollable look of disapproval that would cross her face if I accepted: Peggy does three spin classes a week, plus a Friday Zumba, and views sugar as the enemy, though she seems bent on giving her menfolk type-two diabetes), so I say I’ll pass. Christopher returns his attention to the dish of chocolate fingers on the ankle-high coffee table. He won’t eat any supper after this, I know; but fuck it, that’s not my problem tonight. ‘Dirty hands!’ cries Peggy, rushing in with a damp cloth as he lunges for the ornamental chess set.
I close my eyes, feeling the baby’s solid dampish weight against me, imprisoned by it. But I need do nothing here: it’s all out of my hands, beyond my control. My life is such that these visits, which I used to dread, which are still full of uncomfortable moments, are now beginning to qualify as relaxation. In the kitchen, Dirk is showing Ben the pop-up plug socket on the central island, and the special bin system under the sink for separating wet waste from dry. ‘We saw that programme of yours, that one on the GCSE marking scandal,’ Dirk says as they come through. ‘Very good. Shame you couldn’t get the Secretary of State to comment.’
This is typical Dirk: many things go over his head, but he is always able to identify his son’s disappointments or weaknesses, eager to bring these failures out into the light. I catch Ben’s eye, and he glances away, at the Nordic pine in the corner.
‘Lovely tree, Dirk,’ I say, and – as I knew he would – he gives me its full provenance: it’s a bit of a tradition, Mike Caxton rings him when the delivery comes in so he gets first pick; of course they need a bit of a monster with ceilings this high.
The fairy lights wink on the tree, threaded between the coordinated balls and birds and angels. This year, everything is either silver or white. ‘Shall we do presents now, or after we’ve eaten?’ says Peggy.