Authors: Polly Samson
She should never have shown her that picture at the Tate, tragic heroines are right up Mira’s street. Julia throws her shadow between the light and the water, holding out the towel: ‘Come on, Ophelia.’ Mira emerges with a great squeak of skin on enamel, water streaming, wiping her eyes on the edge of the towel and taking exaggerated breaths of air.
‘I thought I told you not to get your hair wet.’ Julia stems a wave of irritation and exhaustion. ‘It’s already past your bedtime and Heino won’t have a hairdryer . . .’ Mira smiles and dunks herself back beneath the water. She’d stay in the bath all night if Julia would let her.
A siren rises above the rumble of traffic. It screams along the street and, though Julia covers her ears with the towel, shoots straight through to her marrow. Blue lights flash from the mirror, blue pulses race across the bathwater and scatter from the taps. She pulls at Mira’s arm, forcing her to surface.
She snaps more than she means to, probably the jet-lag to blame: ‘Irritating child! You might as well give it a wash now it’s wet.’ She squirts shampoo into Mira’s upturned hands.
Julia is jumpy at every ambulance. Soon she will stop noticing, but right now the proximity to the hospital is giving her the jitters. Karl’s absence isn’t helping: she could do with his steadying arm and feels a flash of frustration that he didn’t manage to finish at the lab in time for his flight.
Mira is working up a crazy lather and pulling faces at herself in the mirror, craning to admire her foamy pagoda of hair.
Julia tries not to think about Karl: he’ll be back at work, maybe on a lunchbreak. He’ll have to get away from whatever it is he’s up to if he’s to call before bedtime. She checks the time, pictures him at the Clamshack in town, a favourite of his, frothing bunches of sea-lavender hanging from white rafters, cold white wine in cloudy glasses. There he is with the keys to his Dodge on the table, leaning across to say something to his companion . . .
‘Mommy, Mommy . . .’ The bathroom door bursts open and Ruth skips in, a plump putto on dainty feet who’s sweetly got herself ready for bed. Julia can’t help but kiss her. Ruth is wearing a faded cotton nightie of Mira’s that ends in a frill at her ankles, her hair is a rumpled mass of wild-child curls.
‘Tell her to get out!’ Mira grasps furious knees to her chest. ‘I said go away.’ She splashes an armful of water at Ruth.
‘Mira, don’t get her wet!’ Julia feels a pang for the days when she could bathe them together, the bubbles and the squirty ducks. Ruth buries her face in Julia’s lap and Julia tries threading her fingers through her younger daughter’s frizzy ringlets without pulling. Ruth’s hair is as wilful as her own. Mira’s had a lucky escape. Hers pours in thick wet ribbons all the way down the hostile curve of back that she now turns to them.
Ruth braves looking up. ‘My baby hedgehog’ Julia calls her. ‘Grandfather says he’ll read us a story if we don’t take too long,’ says Ruth as Mira splashes more water at her. ‘Tell her, Mommy, tell her to get out.’
Julia gives Ruth a squeeze, if she squeezed her as hard as she’d like to it would hurt her. She could bite the very flesh of this child. Ruth’s eyes are round as chocolate buttons, her eyebrows set at an angle, comically, just like her father’s. ‘You and Heino have your story downstairs,’ Julia says, nuzzling Ruth’s cheek and shooting a look at Mira. ‘Madam’s going to be stuck up here while I try to find a way to dry her hair.’
‘Shut the door, stupid,’ Mira yells after her.
The phone is ringing. Julia hands Mira the towel: ‘Come on you, out,’ and runs to her bedroom to answer it. Catches it in time. On the other end of the line Karl keeps clearing his throat. A gruff apology: ‘I know it’s letting you down. I’m sorry,’ and Julia sinks to the bed.
‘Letting me down? That’s putting it mildly.’
She tries to insist that he change his mind, her fist clenched around the bone-handled receiver. ‘It’s my father’s funeral, for Christ’s sake,’ she says. Tears spring to her eyes. She can see their clothes hanging ready in the wardrobe. His suit, her wool dress with the pleats, the girls’ black dresses and cardigans bought especially. He was supposed to be solidly, unimpeachably, at her side, completing the picture in the Borsalino hat she’d put on the hall table for him.
He’s talking about his team, something to do with FDA trials, three years’ work reaching fruition. She hates the way he says ‘my team’; she’d like to hear him say ‘my family’ like that. ‘It’s a critical moment for my team . . .’
‘Oh, when isn’t it?’
‘I can’t just up and leave,’ he says.
There’s something enraging about the thought of them there all together in their crisp white coats: eager young Peter, Merlin – yes, really – and of course Sofie van doo-dah with the long slim limbs and bleached smile.
‘Just another few days and I’ll be with you. I promise.’
‘But you promised already.’ She hates herself for wheedling. She pictures him in his beloved lab, now he’s back from whatever he did about lunch, his white coat open and his tie loose and crooked. She hears a voice calling his name in the background, then say: ‘Oops, sorry.’ A woman’s voice, oh, of course, that would be Sofie, who else? She imagines his eyes following Sofie’s slim calves towards a microscope, the phone clamped between his shoulder and ear. ‘I doubt I’ll manage a flight until after the weekend.’ He’s probably already looking into his blasted microscope he’s so keen to get her off the line. ‘Vernow’s a long way for you to drive alone. Maybe Freda could give you a lift?’ As though a driver was all that was missing.
She imagines him gesturing to Sofie that he won’t be long, doing that winding-motion thing with his finger. ‘It’s not as though I really knew your father,’ he says and that feels better, to be full of fury: she’s about to smash the receiver down, can already see herself doing it, but Ruth runs in, eyes shining.
‘I heard the phone downstairs. Is it Daddy?’
She thrusts the receiver at Ruth, hears Mira’s splashing in the bathroom and shouts: ‘Are you still in there? Get out now!’
Ruth is telling Karl about the story Heino was reading her, about the tiger who drank all the water in the taps. ‘Mommy’s gonna take us to the zoo tomorrow,’ she says.
She pulls Ruth close, and loudly so she hopes Karl will hear: ‘It was at the zoo that Daddy first kissed Mummy, you know.’ Ruth raises her eyebrows and makes kissing noises at him down the line, chatters on.
Something like heat had swept her into Karl’s arms for that kiss. One moment the tiger, pacing up and down, forlorn and humiliated, the next there she was, sandwiched between him and the glass, letting him kiss her, kissing him right back.
Now Ruth is complaining about her sister: ‘She took my Annie doll and said it was hers and now she won’t give it back.’ Julia sits cuddling her with one ear close enough to the receiver to hear the buzz of Karl’s platitudes. It’s a shame the girls don’t get on so well now. She thinks of Ruth in her hand-me-down OshKoshes and Mira with neat plaits standing on the school steps in her too-big uniform, about to cross the threshold for the first time. She used to have to prise them apart – their arms held fast like a pair of cuddle bears with velcroed paws. But Mira’s been in a foul mood since they got to London and poor little Ruthie is bearing the brunt.
Outside another siren anxiously screams, a busy night at the hospital. It’s gone alarmingly quiet in the bathroom. She hopes Mira isn’t doing an Ophelia again.
She cuts through a cloud of steam towards the bath. Mira bursts up through the surface, water cascading down her skinny front. ‘Thirty Mississippi.’ She stands panting, triumphant, the lovely S-shaped torso of a girl gymnast, holding out her arms for a towel. She is a lithe little thing, with bony knees and a neat peachy bum, still a little tanned from their holiday, at her waist the pale deckle-edged line of her scar.
Mira catches her looking and Julia quells a shiver. How much
does
she remember? She reaches a finger to the scar.
Julia knows it’s not good to dwell, but still she wonders. When they talk about the hospital is it really Karl Mira sees beside her bed and not Julian? It would appear that Julian has been removed as efficiently as her kidney. Mira’s in the clear now. Just a routine annual check-up around her birthday.
But what of Julian?
It’s easier not to think about Julian when they’re all at home in Old Mystic, an ocean between them.
She sees him when their love was new. His jumper through at the elbow, hair flopping across his eyes so he has to keep combing it back with his fingers, crouched in his socks before the put-put of the gas heater, his blue china coffee cup, his big-knuckled wrists and hands.
She’d felt dirty on the train going back to him after her encounter with Karl at the zoo. Her lips felt bruised by his kiss, the dung smells seemed to cling to her clothing and hair. When she reached Julian’s digs she managed to jump the rota and was so intent on scrubbing herself that she almost forgot to tell him that she’d been offered the horticultural job which had been the purpose of her trip. He had good news too, he told her. His stepfather had offered him a position at Abraham and Leitch. It was a boring enough job so he’d have plenty of head space for his own book in the evenings, especially now he’d dropped his dissertation.
The wool of Julian’s dressing gown was a homecoming embrace. She put it on straight after the hot bath, had a thing about wearing his clothes. His jumpers seemed the softest. She liked his shirts freshly ironed against her skin and still smelling faintly of him, their collars frayed by his good strong jaw, the scrape of his stubble. He called her to where he crouched by the fire and pulled open the folds of his dressing gown to lay his cheek against her belly. She cradled his head, soothing her conscience by stroking his hair as he crooned to the baby who was not yet lost. Sometimes just the thought of Julian can make her eyes well. She’s noticed it happens most when Karl has made her angry.
She holds out the towel: ‘Jump to it!’ He’s made her angry tonight, no doubt about it, and she shakes it impatiently as Mira steps from the bath.
Julia wakes early to the sounds of the yard below, someone slamming the lid on a bin, whistling. It takes a moment to remember where she is. The face that chastises her from the bathroom mirror is never pleasant and especially not after a restless night and a regrettable 4am call to Karl. She looks extra gaunt with shadows beneath her eyes and at the corners of her mouth that even the Touche Éclat (bought in a fit of boredom on the plane from JFK) would do nothing to disguise.
She dresses quietly, grey jeans turned up at the ankle, a clean white shirt. It’s the height of summer but the English weather is in its usual turmoil so she ties a cardigan round her waist and slips her feet into old suede loafers that won’t give her blisters. All she has to do is run her hands through her hair now it’s so short. Karl and the girls were appalled when she first came home with it lopped. Sometimes she still misses having something to hide behind but forty had been a good cut-off point.
She slips down the stairs on the balls of her feet hoping the girls will sleep on so she’ll have a little time to herself before the onslaught. In two days she must make the long journey to Vernow with them squabbling and no Karl there to share the driving and broker peace. The funeral will be straddled by a night either side with her mother at her flat in Vernow’s only tower block. Confined between the furiously bare walls, Gwen will have her nerves wound tight as cheese wire within minutes.
Karl had spluttered out his tea when she told him the cremation would be in Vernow. ‘Inferno?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, handing him a piece from the kitchen roll. Karl had never been to Vernow, had not seen the smoke from the chimney on the way out of town. He only met her parents in London, just once before their wedding. Gwen flew out to Connecticut after Ruth was born, but not Geoffrey. She can’t remember if she’d even invited him. Well, too late now. She was strangely blank about his death, didn’t really mind Karl snickering about the circles of hell of her hometown.
She managed to make herself think about her dad on the plane over, forced herself to pick through the rubble for a nugget or two, almost succeeding – a distant memory of him pushing her on a swing, the closest she came to crying. In the end she was sadder about the relationship she’d never had with him than the one they had. Nothing worse than a drinker being given charge of a pub. Always the booze to blame, never him.
The girls arrive in the kitchen together, sleepy and bad-tempered. Mira fusses about her breakfast. Julia offers her everything in the cupboard but still she whines and says all she wants is juice. Julia’s own mother would have slapped her if she’d behaved like that. Or starved her as punishment.
‘Do I hear the voices of angels?’ Heino’s walking has deteriorated now, especially first thing; he’s bent right over his stick and it takes him a while to reach the table, his head nodding where it emerges from his shirt and tie. Mira ignores him, she’s too busy sulking about the tiny triangle of toast she’s been told to eat before she gets down. Julia gestures at Ruth bent over her second bowl of Sugar Puffs, sighs at Heino as she says: ‘It’s so much easier with a child who loves her food.’ Ruth grins at him over her spoon.
He lowers himself into his place at the head of the table. She feels comforted by him in a way she never was by her own father. ‘Ah, Mira’s being picky again? You mustn’t worry,’ he says. ‘Children will eat when they’re hungry.’