Authors: Esther Freud
‘Actually, Dad, I think we might be going away on holiday,’ I cut in quickly, and he let the light white canvas fall back against the wall. ‘I’d like to try and get out of London, just for a while,’ and I smiled optimistically as he stood fidgeting away his mood.
‘Where might you go?’ I could see he was trying to be polite.
I told him I was arranging things with Natasha and Kate. ‘Somewhere in the country, we just can’t decide where.’ He nodded, wiping his hands against his trousers before wandering through to the kitchen to prepare something to eat.
‘Would the baby like anything?’ He was peeling sharp fins of haddock on to plates. ‘I’ve got . . .’ but although at four months I had started him on carrot and ground rice, there was nothing childish enough for him to taste.
‘He’s all right.’ And I kissed the soft top of his head.
‘Dad?’ He was making me a salad, rinsing leaves under the tap. ‘Why do you never leave London?’
‘I used to. When I was a child we used to spend summers in the country.’ He laid the salad on a sheet of linen to let the water soak into the cloth.
‘You mean Gaglow?’
‘No, no.’ I could see he meant his real life. ‘Norfolk. We went there in the holidays.’
There was something in the way he said it that made me want to laugh. ‘Did you hate it?’
‘I didn’t like it much.’ And he searched among the cups and bowls and papers on the table for the flask of olive oil. ‘Maybe it was because it was so flat. However far I went, wherever I hid, my mother always knew exactly how to find me.’
‘Sometimes I think Sonny’s first words will be “Mum, get off!”’ I nibbled his cheek while I was still allowed.
But my father’s eyes had cooled right over and I noticed the shooting line between his brows. I remembered him telling me how his mother didn’t ever let him alone. She settled her attention on him like a vice. ‘Once when I was about twelve,’ he’d told me, ‘I went to call for a friend. “I don’t know where he is,” his mother said, and I thought, the luxury of it. My mother never lost track of where I was. She knew more about me than I did myself.’ And I thought of his kiss, remote and tender on her dying hair.
Simply out of habit I kissed Sonny’s head again, glancing up guiltily with a shiver of defiance. But Sonny was cooing, low down, like a dove.
‘We rented the same house every summer,’ he went on, laying out a cardboard box of cake, ‘somewhere by the sea,’ and I realized it was the house I knew. The house I’d dreamed about. There were washing lines and hawthorn and I could see the garden now, the lawns all tufted up with seaside grass. My grandmother was there, leaning on the gate, listening to her summer neighbour telling her in detail about a girl that could be me.
‘I tried not to go there if I could help it.’ He cut me a thick wedge, slicing through the jellied tops of fruit.
‘I wish I’d been brought up in the country,’ I said, and I had a bright image of Sonny running off across the fens.
It was past midsummer and the evenings from my top-floor flat were long and light. Sonny was asleep, and I circled round the room, trying to adjust to the rare sensation of this time alone. I lay down on the floor, stretching out my arms and back and legs, trying to find a part of me that didn’t ache. I breathed in deeply and then right beside my ear the telephone quivered into life. Two fierce, demanding rings before I pounced. ‘Hello?’
There was a muffling and a choking and a broken gulping wheeze. ‘Pam.’ I held my heart out to her. ‘Pam, what is it?’
She had to let out three long sighs of pain before the words came through. ‘The bastard!’ she flailed eventually and I knew that she was going to be all right.
‘Where are you?’
She had folded up again with sobbing. ‘I’m on my way round.’ I heard a car somewhere behind her swerve away with a long loop of its horn.
Ten minutes later I saw her running towards me through the strained light of the evening, clutching cigarettes and a flat hard paper bag. She’d left her car half out in the street, and she looked more beautiful than ever, mascara streaked in dirty washes down her face. I ran downstairs to meet her. It was hard not to smile. ‘Oh, God, Sarah.’ She hugged me, and the ends of her hair, split white and smoky, smelt of vanilla essence.
‘Come up.’ Together we attempted to climb sideways, arm in arm, to the top floor.
Pam sank onto the sofa, kicking off her shoes, and I snuggled down opposite her, pushing my feet into the seams. Our knees knocked warm and brown against each other. ‘At least this time you can have a drink with me,’ she said, and broke the gold tin seal.
‘Oh, Pam,’ I cut in, as the woefully familiar tale of Bradly Teale swept on and on, ‘oh, Pam,’ and every now and then she broke off for another hot gulp of her drink and another cigarette. There was something inoffensive about the way Pam smoked. It curled and caught up in her hair, drifting over her like angel cloud, and even first thing in the morning she smelt like a sugary advert for Silk Cut.
Beguiled, I tried one and, as always, the bitter oil of it settled on my tongue so that I had to swill the taste of it around with brandy. ‘So that’s it, then, over?’ And a small disloyal gleam sprang up in me to think I’d have her, for a short while, all to myself.
‘I hope I never see the loathsome creature again.’ She leant out for the bottle and her furious gaze caught the long arrangement of postcards, tartan, heather and misty Highland skies spread out over the mantelpiece. She arched her eyebrows at me, ‘Excuse me?’ and, reinvigorated, she jumped up off the sofa and went over to inspect them. ‘There are two here the same,’ she said, ‘but then again I don’t suppose there’s a limitless amount of choice.’
I could tell that it was paining her to keep from flipping over to the other side. ‘They’re all to Sonny.’ She took that as licence to lift one down.
‘They’re love letters,’ she screamed, and even as I protested she snatched the others and spread them face up over the cushions. ‘“My dear sweet little boy, I hear you’re cooing like a dove and blowing bubbles.” You’ve been writing to him?’ And she kicked me hard with one bare foot. “‘So avocado is your favourite food? You lucky lad. All we get up here is haggis and jam tarts.”’ She turned over a pale pink sunset. “‘I’ve bought you a blue and purple tam-o’-shanter, big enough to fit you in the autumn when your daddy . . .”’ I knew that daddy had been crossed out. ‘“When I’ll be home.” Christ, what’s got into him?’
‘Distance makes the heart grow fonder, I can only assume.’ And I topped up both our glasses, wishing she hadn’t read out the secret, shameful word.
‘So when will he be back?’ There were thin grey tears still streaked across her face.
‘Not for ages. November, I think. And you know how these things run over. Pam,’ I bundled up the postcards, ‘you don’t fancy coming on holiday with me?’
Pam looked startled. ‘Where?’
‘I don’t know. Anywhere.’ I’d ruled out East Germany and Devon.
‘Maybe.’ I could tell she wasn’t keen. I’d probably mentioned too often how Sonny woke five times a night. ‘It’s just that I did tell Camilla I’d be in town if any work comes up.’
‘You bloody actors.’ I had my chance to kick her now. ‘You’re all the same. Just think how well you’ll feel when you get back. How much more employable you’ll be.’ It was strange not to include myself.
‘Yes.’ She sighed. ‘It might be good to have a holiday.’ But I could tell she was only thinking about Bradly Teale and how glorious it would be if he rang to find her gone.
‘My editing job has been brought forward,’ Kate told me. ‘I start in just over a week.’ She had come to look after Sonny while I took her bike and cycled up to Hampstead for a swim.
‘Oh, Kate.’ I realized I’d hardly see her now.
‘You should go somewhere with Natasha,’ she said, ‘even for a few days.’
‘Yes,’ I said, but I didn’t want to be alone just with Natasha. We needed her to smooth things through. I picked up one strand of her honey-coloured hair and let it fall again.
‘Go on, if you’re going,’ Kate urged. ‘We’ll talk when you get back.’ I could tell that she was nervous.
I took one last look at Sonny and kissed his fingers.
‘Go
on
,’ Kate hissed at me, ‘while he’s still asleep,’ and without looking back I fled downstairs. I pushed the bike out into the street and spun the pedals. It was the first time I’d left him. My throat felt heavy with alarm as I lurched out into the traffic.
The journey to the ladies’ pond on Hampstead Heath was subtly and gradually uphill. My thin dress stuck to my body, and occasionally I felt the tug of cotton as it twined up in the spokes. I wrenched it out and carried on. I had to get off and push the last hundred yards and then I was on the Heath, gliding past the men’s pond, with a field packed like a beach, and up past the ice-cream van. The lane here was gold and gritted over and I let the pedals fly as I sailed down towards the gate. The entrance to the lake was cool with shade. Back wheels of bikes overlapped along the fence and the grass behind the trees was thick with bodies, reading, eating, talking, bathing up the sun, and all stripped down to the waist. There were tattooed women with nipple rings and pale, long-legged Camden girls studying for school. There were old women and large women, some beautiful, some pocked and veined, and others you would never see naked in any other public pool. I ran into the changing room and pulled on my old costume. ‘I thought my life was over when my husband died,’ a woman, well over seventy, was chatting to a friend, ‘but since then I’ve taken a psychology degree and taught myself to swim.’ I followed her out of the changing room and watched as she dived into the lake.
There was a ladder and I lowered myself in one rung at a time. The water was breathtakingly cold, but then, steeling myself, I pushed away and ducked my head. The water closed silk brown above me and I thrashed and swam, arm over arm, until I came up warm. I ducked onto my back. A dragonfly buzzed beside my nose and three small birds skidded to a stop. It was impossible not to smile. The thick brown water slunk around my waist and as I stretched and turned, rolling over weightless, the warm smell of watermelon drifted towards me on the breeze. I hovered on my back and stared up at the sky. It’s like being reborn, I laughed, and I struck out and swam in strong, long breaststroke right up to the other end where beds of yellow and blue iris made a natural bank. There were sudden patches of cold water, mysterious swells shadowed from the sun and as my feet caught one I suddenly remembered Sonny. I hadn’t thought about him for nearly twenty minutes – for the first time in five months – and it amazed me that he was possible to forget. And then suddenly I was cold, and tired, and it seemed a long way back to land. Will he be all right, waking up to find that I’m not there? The whole strength of my body dragged behind each stroke.
There were beards of mud around my legs and chin and I had to stand under the one cold shower to smear them off. I dressed myself and then stood for a minute, tingling in the sun, calm again, and looking out over the lake where slow swimmers floated on their backs. I had intended to lie down beside the sea of women on the slope of grass but instead I turned the bicycle round and headed home.
Kate looked startled as I burst into the flat. ‘Are you back already?’ I could see that Sonny hadn’t even woken up. ‘You’ve been gone less than an hour.’
I threw myself into a chair and laughed out my relief.
‘Well, obviously, any time, it was no trouble.’ Kate folded shut her book, and it occurred to me that I should go straight out again while I had the chance.
‘It’s a shame that we couldn’t take him with us,’ she said. But the sign by the lake gate ruled against children, dogs and men. ‘All the annoying things in life,’ Kate laughed, ‘and all the fun ones.’
I took the opportunity to ask her about Patrick. ‘Fine.’ She shrugged and smiled and I knew I wasn’t likely to get more.
‘You know where you could go? If you do still intend to go away?’ She thought for a while before speaking.
‘Where?’
‘Well, you know Dad’s parents used to rent this house in Norfolk.’
‘Yes?’ I wondered how she knew.
‘Well, apparently it’s still there. Someone I know stayed there quite by chance. The family name was in the visitors’ book summer after summer.’
‘Really?’ I imagined him receiving this news, cool and uninspired. Asking how they’d ended up in such a flat and dreary place.
‘Apparently it’s really lovely.’
We sat in silence for a while.
‘D’you think he’d mind?’
‘Why should he?’
And I thought of all the trouble he’d taken to throw his family off.
‘Why do you think . . .?’I didn’t know how to say it. ‘Why . . .’
‘I suppose,’ she said, following my thought, ‘he didn’t want to be one of them. Refugees huddling together.’ And we smiled at the big wide gaps he’d made between us.
‘Oh, Papa.’ He came out into the hallway to welcome them. ‘Oh, Papa.’ They crowded round him. ‘Have you been working much too hard?’
Even Marianna was unable to pretend that he looked well.
‘Such important work,’ he said, ‘buying and selling, storing and rationing. And all for the highest price. No, no letters,’ he was forced to admit, and by mid-afternoon he had sunk into a seat in the drawing room and let his head fall forward into that day’s news.
Eva sat opposite him playing solitaire, glancing up occasionally at the unchanged expression of his eyebrows. She let the marbles drop into their cups, staring hard at the board and attempting to remember the trick for winning that Emanuel had taught her. It was a matter of order and routine. Clearing the game in triangles, jumping over one marble at a time and picking off small sections. It was vital to resist the trap of striking out too fast for the pure pleasure of seeing the defeated marbles swimming round the edge, clinking against each other as they mounted up. But however often Eva played, and in whatever order, there were always four obstinate glass balls glinting up at her, winking and stranded on the board. ‘Papa?’ she asked, picking up the game and holding it above his sheet of paper. ‘Do you remember the trick of this?’ But Wolf raised his eyes to hers with such a wearied expression that, after a second of dazed silence, she carried it carefully back across the room and set it down.